CARGO COLLECTIVE
THE BRIAN JONESTOWN MASSACRE
FU MANCHU
WIRE
THE WEDDING PRESENT
NO ONE RIDES FOR FREE
NOT ABOUT TO DIE
FIRE DOESN’T GROW ON TREES
AT THE DOJO LP / CD
PINK FLAG CD
LOCKED DOWN AND STRIPPED BACK VOLUME TWO
Recorded in Berlin between 2020 & 2021, Anton Newcombe’s BJM returns their 19th full-length studio album..
The fourth release in Fu Manchu’s 30th Anniversary vinyl reissue series is a new vinyl specific remaster of the band’s debut remastered by Carl Saff for optimum fidelity.
Released on vinyl for RSD 2022 and now available on CD, originally an early 80’s illegal bootleg of selections from demos recorded by the group for their 1970’s albums Chairs Missing and 154.
Volume Two features home recordings of Wedding Present classics along with a previously unreleased song: ‘That Would Only Happen In A Movie’.
µ-ZIQ
VLADISLAV DELAY
HOLLIE COOK
THE NIGHTINGALES
LUNATIC HARNESS (25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
ISOVIHA
HAPPY HOUR
IN THE GOOD OLD COUNTRY WAY
‘A’ RECORDINGS LP / CD
PLANET MU 4LP / 2CD µ-Ziq’s rare and sought-after fourth album, is generally considered to be Mike Paradinas’s best work of the nineties. Special 25th anniversary edition 4xLP box set.
SCOPITONES LP / CD
PLANET MU LP
MERGE RECORDS LP / CD
CALL OF THE VOID 2LP / CD
This album is a counterpart to his two Rakka albums which were a personal reflection on the nature and sound-world of the northern Arctic wilderness.
“a coming of age for both [Hollie] Cook and modern lovers rock, with the nine songs a sumptuous wash of mellow melodic groove and soft, soulful voice.” —MOJO
Their last original full-length for 2 decades stands as the final masterpiece postpunk album released before the C86 era. Now includes 1985’s 7” single “It’s A Cracker” & “What A Carry On” 12” EP. “Lloyd’s cracked it. A f*****g good album.” Mark E. Smith, The Fall.
THE CAT’S MIAOW
JOAN SHELLEY
PARTY DOZEN
BOBBY OROZA
THE SPUR
THE REAL WORK
GET ON THE OTHERSIDE
SONGS ‘94-’98
NO QUARTER LP / CD
TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD LP / CD
BIG CROWN RECORDS LP / CD
WORLD OF ECHO LP
Joan Shelley’s first new album in three years. A profound meditation on light and darkness.
The undefinable sax & drums duo from Australia deliver their fiercest and most diverse album yet. Features guest vocals by Nick Cave.
Bobby Oroza puts his desire for the profound on wax with his sophomore album Get On The Otherside mixing his renowned sound with lyrics about self-examination & coming to terms with the vastness of the human experience.
RIYL: Galaxie 500, Marine Girls & Beat Happening. Part of the burgeoning international pop underground of the nineties, The Cat’s Miaow’s legend has only built over subsequent decades, as more people discover this most quixotic & curious of groups.
BASS COMMUNION
NIGHTLANDS
EXPERIMENTAL AUDIO RESEARCH
SUNNY & THE SUNLINERS
BASS COMMUNION (I)
MOONSHINE
BEYOND THE PALE
MR. BROWN EYED SOUL VOL. 2
HIDDEN ART CD
WESTERN VINYL LP / CD
SPACE AGE RECORDINGS CD
BIG CROWN RECORDS LP / CD
Solo project of English musician Steven Wilson, best known for his lead role in the rock band Porcupine Tree. Remastered, new artwork and now including the brilliant extra track, No News Is Good News.
War on Drugs’ bassist Dave Hartley aka Nightlands, uses lush vocal harmonies to create what Uncut calls “… multi-layered reveries and gently subversive laments.” R.I.Y.L. Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Sam Evian.
Produced & mixed by Sonic Boom & has been repressed in a limited run for 2022. The new, deluxe digifile, looking crisper, brighter & cleaner retains the original artwork, created by artist Anthony Ausgang. Ltd vinyl edition available later in the year.
A compilation of hits & rarities from The Legendary Sunny & The Sunliners, a group that helped define the San Antonio Chicano Soul Sound.
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MOJO 345
INCLUDES
14-TRACK
AUGUST 2022
CD!
BEACH BOYS
BRIAN, MIKE, AL & BRUCE ON 60 YEARS OF... HARMONY?
146
RE V
NEW INTERVIEW!
“WE HAVE TO CELEBRATE BEING ALIVE”
Patti Smith
A LIFE ON THE FRONT LINE
IE NEIL YO UNG, JA WS CK W H K E N DR IT E I CH R I ST CK L A M A R IN E M c & M O R V IE E
SIMPLE MINDS
NEW GOLD DREAMERS
THE STONES
RETURN TO EXILE
JIM KELTNER
“DYLAN, LENNON, LANA DEL REY AND ME”
LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO
THE VOICES OF GRACELAND
VANGELIS WWW.MOJO4MUSIC.COM
TALES OF THE FUTURE
THE LAST NEW YORK DOLL If your CD is missing please inform your newsagent. For copyright reasons the CD is not available in some overseas territories.
AUG 2022 £6.25 US$12.50 CAN$15.75 AUS$14.99
CON T EN T S LONDON AUGUST 2022
✦
MEMPHIS
✦
TODMORDEN Issue 345
FEATURES
30 JIM KELTNER
Stoking vibes for Bob Dylan, John Lennon and hundreds more, he’s the sensitive sideman with all the stories. “I’ve always been a crier,” he tells Bob Mehr.
36 SIMPLE MINDS
Forty years since they made the album that changed their lives, the Scots return to New Gold Dream. Dracula, magic mushrooms and the Ku Klux Klan all figure.
42 MANFRED MANN
Eyewitnesses recall how ’60s R&B ascendancy, and a US Number 1, turned suddenly sour. Paul Jones: “I said, ‘I’m going.’ They said, ‘We’ll sue you.’”
46 NEW YORK DOLLS Retracing their
stack-heeled steps in ’70s New York, David Johansen tells all to Jon Savage: “We were great friends with Lynyrd Skynyrd, believe it or not.”
54 WORKING MEN’S CLUB Cabaret Voltaire, ’80s
Manchester and Detroit techno combine in the Sleaford Modsapproved angst-pop of Syd MinskySargeant: “A young Paul Weller,” they reckon.
58 THE BEACH BOYS Sixty years since their first hit single and album, the band reflect on their early years. Plus: 1962 – a deep dive via David Leaf’s freshly reduxed band biog.
AL JARDINE, THE BEACH BOYS, P64
68 LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO Though founder Joseph Shabalala has passed, the legendary South African vocal group remain men on a mission: “People need to be encouraged and inspired.”
COVER STORY
72 PATTI SMITH Between
visits to UK stages, the peerless punk poet on what keeps her going – and the relics and talismans that replenish her powers. Plus: Lenny Kaye on the Patti Smith Group, then and now…
Getty
“It’s kind of comical because we didn’t have rehearsals. We simply showed up and we would sing.”
MOJO 3
REGULARS 9 Oui, the people: it’s hello to Yes’s Steve Howe (left, see p122) and a sad goodbye to drummer Alan White, RIP.
ALL BACK TO MY PLACE
Sheryl Crow, Colin Newman and Vieux Farka Touré on the songs that made them who they are.
112 REAL GONE Vangelis, Judy Henske, Cathal Coughlan, Alan White, Ronnie Hawkins and many more, thank you and goodnight.
120 ASK MOJO Which rockers liked to associate with the underworld?
122 HELLO GOODBYE It started with fortuitous harmony. And ended when everyone else left. Steve Howe recalls the hi, the bye and the hi agains of Yes.
The lad done well: Peter Doherty, Lead Book, p110.
WHAT GOES ON! 14
EXILE ON MAIN ST. Ace
16
DAVID BOWIE Wild new doc
18
ROBYN HITCHCOCK The former Soft Boy and leader of The Egyptians has a new album to unveil, helped by Aztec gods, old bandmates, a former Smith, a Beatles scion, and his two cats. “Some of those songs ricocheted all the way around the world!” he says.
20
STEVE EARLE In Confidential mood, the outlaw country diehard talks loss, treading the boards and why he’s covered an album of songs by Jerry Jeff Walker.
22
OREN AMBARCHI Seeking the
photographer Norman Seeff unearths images from his famed shoot of the Stones on the jetty, escaping the tax man, for their classic 1972 LP. “It couldn’t just be a photoshoot,” he remembers.
Moonage Daydream was pieced together from five million items in Bowie’s personal archive by Montage Of Heck filmmaker Brett Morgen. MOJO goes to the premiere in Cannes and asks him what it’s really about.
inspirational spot between mystification and understanding, the Sydney guitar voyager talks risk, the importance of space and blending the pop and the weird.
MOJO FILTER
Renaissance man: Jack White, Lead Album, p84.
84
NEW ALBUMS Jack White’s divine
98
REISSUES Revisiting Christine McVie’s
inspiration, plus Kendrick Lamar and Interpol. Songbird, plus Neil Young, Twink and Orbital.
110 BOOKS Peter Doherty’s cracking
memoir, plus Glam! and the life of a Four Top.
4 MOJO
Jon Savage
David Leaf
Jill Furmanovsky
Longtime MOJO contributor Jon lives in North Wales. His current activity includes the launch of the British Pop Archive at the John Rylands Library in Manchester and a book about the gay influence on pop culture. He never saw the New York Dolls (see page 46) but does remember the Rainbow Room at Biba.
David Leaf is a writer, director and producer of films including Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson And The Story Of SMiLE, and a lecturer at the UCLA Herb Alpert School Of Music in LA. His updated book God Only Knows: The Story Of Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys And The California Myth is excerpted from page 58.
Jill’s photos have appeared in MOJO since the start. This month we tap her archive for portraits of Simple Minds (page 36). “My first shoot with them,” she recalls. “Some notes from my diary on August 7, 1981 describe them as ‘welcoming, sweet, trusting and yet fully capable’!” See more of Jill’s work at rockarchive.com.
Kevin Westenberg, Borja, Getty (2)
THIS MONTH'S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...
THE TCHAD BLAKE MIX 2022 REISSUE OF THE ICONIC DUO’S SEMINAL SECOND ALBUM Featuring two albums – the original recording and a new mix by the multiple Grammy Award-winning TCHAD BLAKE (U2, The Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys) DELUXE 2xLP on BLACK & GOLD SMOKE VINYL featuring both mixes 2xCD featuring both mixes | LIMITED GOLD VINYL LP featuring The Tchad Blake Mix LP featuring The Tchad Blake Mix | DIGITAL THEKILLS.TV | DOMINOMUSIC.COM
AVAILABLE NOW
24.06.22
MOJO PRESENTS
Break It Up! NEW YORK ART, ROCK, POETRY AND NOISE 1956-2022
1 RICHARD HELL AND THE VOIDOIDS 2 GLENN BRANCA BLANK GENERATION
Where better to begin than a crucial document of NYC punk at its most louche and literate? When Richard Hell retooled Rod McKuen’s Beat Generation in 1976, he’d already formed and quit The Heartbreakers and Television – whose first review was written by Patti Smith.
Barry Plummer, Getty (2), Alamy, Bob Coscarelli, Bradly Brown, Chuck Russell/Audika
Written by Richard Hell Published by Automatic Music Inc. adm by Warner-Tamerlane Pub. (BMI) / Doraflo Music, Inc., BMI / Quickmix Music, BMI / Warner-Chappell Music., Inc. 1977 WEA International Inc. USWB19904285 Licensed courtesy of Warner Music UK Ltd.
LESSON NO. 1
The anthemic, pulverising solo debut of Downtown eminence grise Glenn Branca, 1980’s Lesson No. 1 makes systems symphonics out of the raw punk frequencies of electric guitar. Not just a vital precursor to so much avant-rock that followed, Branca also provided a launchpad for some of those disciples: Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore both participated in his Guitar Orchestra in the early ’80s. Written by Glenn Branca. Publ. Reg Bloor Music (MBI) &©1980. 99 Records. glennbranca.com
3 ALAN VEGA NOTHING LEFT
Born in Brooklyn in 1938, Alan Vega began his shift from visual art to confrontational music in the late ’60s, the epochal Suicide first performing as early as 1970. Vega’s belief in the primal threat and underground resonances of rock’n’roll never diminished, as this vicious throbber recorded in 2015, a year before his death, makes clear. Written by Vega, Vaughn, Delran, Dwyer. Published by Saturn Strip, Ltd. (ASCAP / Harry Fox), Quonset Music / BMG (BMI), Hot Stream (ASCAP), Black Coda Music (BMI).
4 SOUNDWALK COLLECTIVE WITH PATTI SMITH ETERNITY
Smith hasn’t made her own album since 2012’s Banga, focusing on live work and writing. But don’t miss her three albums with NYC’s Soundwalk Collective: this incantatory gem is on 2019’s Mummer Love, about her beloved Rimbaud’s time in Africa. By Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith, featuring Philip Glass & Sufi Group of Sheik Ibrahim. Copyright Control. &©2019 Bella Union. From Mummer Love. Patti Smith appears courtesy of Columbia Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment.
9 DIM STARS
10 JON SPENCER & THE HITMAKERS 11 ARTHUR RUSSELL
12 JONATHAN KANE
Not a bad line-up, as the unjustly neglected Dim Stars were a 1990s low-key supergroup comprising Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley, producer/guitarist Don Fleming and, upfront, the redoubtable Richard Hell. Plus also on guitar, the late great Voidoid and Lou Reed sideman Robert Quine.
An incendiary rabble-rouser through decades of piloting NYC scuzz-rock demons Pussy Galore, Boss Hog and, of course, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Spencer’s potency is undimmed in 2022. Hence the HITmakers, a volatile new outfit incorporating Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss of Quasi (though drummer here is Bob Bert, ex-Pussy Galore and, yep, Sonic Youth).
A collaborator of NYC minimalist godheads Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young, and the original Swans drummer, Kane branched out on his own with the motorik blues of his February project, and this 2005 take on the old spiritual. A connection with Arthur Russell’s Instrumentals: bassist Ernie Brooks figured in both set-ups, as well as The Modern Lovers.
MONKEY
Monkey (Spurts 2013 Remaster). Written by Richard Hell, Thurston Moore, Steve Shelley, Robert Quine. &©2022 Dim Stars courtesy of Dim Stars. From Spurts – The Richard Hell Story (Rhino). rhino.com/product/spurts-the-richardhell-story
6 MOJO
GET IT RIGHT NOW
INSTRUMENTALS VOLUME 1 (PART 1)
Written by Spencer, J. Published by Patricia Ann Music (BMI) &©2022 Jon Spencer under exclusive license to Bronzerat Records. From Spencer Gets It Lit (Bronzerat); bronzerat.com
Published by Echo & Feedback Newsletter Music (ASCAP) administered by Domino Publishing 2006 Audika Records LLC under exclusive license from the estate of Arthur Russell. Licensed to Rough Trade Records in Europe. © Rough Trade Records Limited. From Instrumentals (Rough Trade Records) www.roughtraderecords.com
Russell took disco and country into NYC’s febrile creative scene; a Buddhist avant-clubber with a unique aesthetic, and a cello. But on this gorgeous 1974 recording, he leads a Downtown combo through a piece that adds jazz thrust and swing to minimalist intricacies.
MOTHERLESS CHILD
Traditional, arranged by Jonathan Kane. (Mythco Music/BMI) &©2005 Table of the Elements. From February (Table of the Elements Records); www.tableoftheelements.org/jonathan-kane
“D
REAMS! ADORATIONS! ILLUMINATIONS! RELIGIONS! THE whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!” From Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, tuning into new visions before heading out west, to wave after wave of disruptive Downtown noisemakers, New York has been a crucible of radical art for decades. No wave, street jazz, garage jams, revolutionary poetry, deviant rock’n’roll, avant-noise, incantations, meditations, “sensitive bullshit” and senseless freakouts – it’s all on Break It Up!. Through these 14 tracks, certain key figures overlap, interact and recur: the artfully-distressed punk pioneer Richard Hell, for instance; or Sonic Youth, inexhaustibly creative standard-bearers bringing New York subcultures into the indie rock mainstream. And then, of course, there’s Patti Smith, this month’s wise and regal MOJO cover star. Smith’s enduring brilliance manifests in conjunction with the Soundwalk Collective on Eternity, from 2019, and is hymned by Jim Carroll in his 1980 tribute to her, Crow: “It was so sweet,” he observes, “when you brought donuts to the junkies.” To quote from Ginsberg again, “Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!” – they’re all here, and much more besides. Break it up!
5 MOONDOG
6 SONIC YOUTH
7 ALLEN GINSBERG
8 LAURIE ANDERSON
If the New York music celebrated on Break It Up! often exists at the interface between street life and experimentation, few musicians exemplify the concept better than Louis ‘Moondog’ Hardin: a Sixth Avenue busker whose work inspired minimalist composers, jazz fiends and more. All Is Loneliness first turned up on his 1957 album, More Moondog; fellow NYC icon Anohni covered it in the early 2000s.
While Sonic Youth released huge amounts of transformative music during their 1981-2011 lifespan, plenty more still lies in their vaults. For example: the righteous Velvetsy chug of Basement Contender, jammed out in the early 2000s and on this year’s very fine In/Out/In compilation of unreleased gems.
A polestar for, and friend of, Patti Smith, Ginsberg wrote Howl in San Francisco, but much of its action and visions stem from his time in New York, at the dawn of the Beats. Here he reads from Part II, at the first recorded performance of Howl at Reed College, Portland, in 1956.
Players on New York’s Downtown scene in the ’70s and ’80s often blurred the lines between music, poetry and performance art, not least Laurie Anderson. Dark Time In The Revolution comes from her last new album, 2010’s Homeland, an O Superman-like state of the nation address that has only become more relevant over the intervening years. Anohni adds backing vocals.
ALL IS LONELINESS
Written by Moondog. Copyright Control. First released 1957.
BASEMENT CONTENDER
Written by Sonic Youth. Published by Sonik Tooth Music, administered by Songs of Kobalt Music Publishing (BMI) &©2021 Three Lobed Recordings. From In/Out/In. (Three Lobed Recordings); http://threelobed.com/tlr/
13 GARLAND JEFFREYS
14 THE JIM CARROLL BAND
An unstinting chronicler of the New York streets, Jeffreys fell in with Lou Reed at Syracuse University and turned up on John Cale’s Vintage Violence before launching his own long and valuable solo career. The Stonesy funk of The Contortionist comes from his fine 2012 set, The King Of In Between; listen closely to hear Lou Reed himself on backing vocals.
The poet, memoirist and rocker was encouraged into a musical career by Patti Smith, his sometime flatmate. In return, he paid tribute on his 1980 debut album, detailing Smith’s fall off the stage at a 1976 Tampa gig, and pinpointing her literary passions, fomented as a bookstore cashier, “Surrounded by the history of your true loves…”
THE CONTORTIONIST
Published by Black & White Alike, Inc. (ASCAP) adm. Downtown DLJ Songs. From The King of In Between (Luna Park Records).
CROW
Written by Jim Carroll and Terrell Winn. Published by Missing Finger Music (BMI), Earl McGrath Music (ASCAP), &©1980 Fat Possum Records. From Catholic Boy (Fat Possum Records); https:// jimcarroll.lnk.to/CatholicBoy
HOWL (PART II)
Written by Allen Ginsberg. 2021 Allen Ginsberg LLC. under exclusive license to Omnivore Recordings. All Rights Reserved. ©2021 Omnivore Recordings a division of Omnivore Entertainment Group LLC. From At Reed College; www. omnivorerecordings.com/shop/at-reed-college
DARK TIME IN THE REVOLUTION
Written by Laurie Anderson. Published by Difficult Music (BMI), &©2010 Nonesuch Records, Inc. From Homeland (Nonesuch), www.nonesuch.com
“I WANT TO RECORD ONE MORE RECORD THAT’S WORTHY OF PUTTING OUT IN THE WORLD.” PATTI SMITH SPEAKS. INTERVIEW BEGINS PAGE 72
Sheryl Crow STILL HAVING FUN
What music are you currently grooving to? Blood Orange, Anderson .Paak, the new Courtney Barnett LP, and I really like this band Lucius. I did the deep dive into the Beatles doc, and started digging back through John Lennon, Wings and George Harrison. I came in with a lot of melancholy, so I’m always moved by moody chords and a great melody. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? All Things Must Pass. A lot of things resonated with me on that record, the fact that you felt George’s passion to be his own person. What was the first record you ever bought, and where did you buy it? It was Rumours, believe it or not, from our record store downtown in Kennett, Missouri. I was 13, my sister had the LP, but I wanted to own it. I wore it out and got my hair cut just like Stevie’s! Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be?
Oh my gosh, I think I wanted to not be me. But I wanted to be Prince. I mean, to have that freedom to just go to any instrument and be incredible on it. Being me? It’s not a bad person to be. What do you sing in the shower? “Tempted by the fruit of another…” [Tempted by Squeeze] …it’s become an ear worm. What is your favourite Saturday night record? I have no problem with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. That’s the stuff that makes me want to get up and dance. And your Sunday morning record? A little James Taylor, a little Carole King, maybe a little Neil Young. We have a big backyard, and coffee looking into the woods with the entire Harvest record, that’s a good morning, right there. Sheryl: Music From The Feature Documentary is out now on UMe/Big Machine.
A LL B AC K TO MY PL AC E THE STARS REVEAL THE SONIC DELIGHTS GUARANTEED TO GET THEM GOING...
Vieux Farka Touré
BAMAKO BLUES SCION
Owen Richards, D Shore, Kiss Diouara
What music are you currently grooving to? I love the traditional hunter’s music from Mali. It relaxes me when I am on tour far from home. I also like to listen to Arabic music, also when we are in the car, I like to just turn on the radio and listen to whatever comes on. Music is always interest-
ing to me, even if it is not a style that I really love. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? A very tough question. I would choose The River, by my father Ali Farka Touré. What was the first record you ever bought, and where did you buy it? I think it was Phil Collins’ …But Seriously. I loved Phil Collins when I was growing up and, of course, I still do. Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? I have never wanted to be anyone other than myself. I have always felt blessed to be born who I was, into my family, to have my mother and my father. I suppose I can say Ali, my father, is the musician I wanted to be, but I never wanted to be him. I have always wanted to be like him – to be such a master and such a wise and generous person. I want to help people and make my people proud the way that my father did. What do you sing in the shower? I actually don’t, I listen to instrumental music. In particular Toumani Diabaté, and relaxing music like his in the shower. What is your favourite Saturday night record? I would pick Alpha Blondy, Masada. I have loved that album since I was a young teenager and I still do. And your Sunday morning record? A blues album, like B.B. King’s Take It Home. Les Racines is out now on World Circuit.
Colin Newman ALL WIRE’D UP
What music are you currently grooving to? If you want to know, listen to Malka [Spigel, Colin’s partner] and I’s radio show Swimming In Sound, which goes out every week. We did our 100th episode yesterday [selections included Kevin Ayers, Acid Arab, Minimal Compact and more]. We have an extremely wide taste in music, curated by aesthetic, not genre. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians, the original edition, although there have been other versions over the past few years – Erik Hall recorded the whole thing with four instruments. Every single track is brilliant. What was the first record you ever bought, and where did you buy it? I’m Crying by The Animals, which I bought in a record shop in Newbury in Berkshire, where I grew up. The first LP I got was Sgt. Pepper’s, which I got as a Christmas present. I find the new 2017 remix satisfying – I can’t really listen to the originals. Old
“I can sing soul music in the shower.” COLIN NEWMAN
music often sounds less good when heard on modern equipment because it was designed to be played on Dansettes or transistor radios. Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? No-one. I think that is the weirdest question. What do you sing in the shower? This Old Heart Of Mine… by The Isley Brothers. I’ve always liked soul music. I don’t think I’d make a very good soul singer, but I can do it in the shower. What is your favourite Saturday night record? Fort Street by a Detroit collective called Scan 7. The poppest Detroit techno you could possibly get, and it just makes me happy. And your Sunday morning record? Komorebi by Frank Birtwistle. Solo acoustic guitar work, very beautiful. Wire’s Not About To Die is out on Pinkflag. Hear Colin and Malka’s choices at swimminginsound.com/
MOJO 9
New album out now + vinyl 24 June ‘A wonderful album’ - The Sunday Times C7KH HYHUêSUROLo F 0LNH 6FRWW UHWXUQV WR SHDN FUHDWLYLW\ - MOJO
An Appointment with Mr Yeats ê UHPDVWHUHG UHPL[HG QHZ WUDFNV -XQH YLQ\O SUHêRUGHU
ZZZ PLNHVFRWWZDWHUER\V FRP IRU OLYH GDWHV LQFOXGLQJ KHDGOLQH Glastonbury Acoustic Stage 6DWXUGD\ -XQH
THE BEAT GOES ON… For these and many more great releases, visit our website at www.bgo-records.com
THE GRASS ROOTS
MASON WILLIAMS
Where Were You When I Needed You / Let’s Live For Today / Feelings / Lovin’ Things
The Mason Williams Phonograph Record / Ear Show / Music / Handmade / Sharepickers
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BGOCD1481
MELANIE Born To Be / Melanie / Candles In The Rain / Leftover Wine + bonus track
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NILS LOFGREN Night After Night
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Editor John Mulvey Senior Editor Danny Eccleston Art Editor Mark Wagstaff Production Editor Simon McEwen Associate Editor (Reviews) Jenny Bulley Associate Editor (News) Ian Harrison Deputy Art Editor Del Gentleman Picture Editor Matt Turner Senior Associate Editor Andrew Male Contributing Editors Phil Alexander, Keith Cameron, Sylvie Simmons Thanks for their help with this issue: Keith Cameron, Del Gentleman, Ian Whent Among this month’s contributors: Manish Agarwal, John Aizlewood, Martin Aston, Mike Barnes, Mark Blake, Glyn Brown, David Buckley, John Bungey, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Stevie Chick, Andrew Collins, Andy Cowan, Max Décharné, Tom Doyle, David Fricke, Andy Fyfe, Ed Gibbs, Pat Gilbert, Grayson Haver Currin, Will Hodgkinson, David Hutcheon, Jim Irvin, Colin Irwin, David Katz, David Leaf, Andrew Male, James McNair, Bob Mehr, Kris Needs, 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. Among this month’s photographers: Cover: Gijsbert Hanekroot / Retouching by Clayton Hickman (inset: Getty) Peter Anderson, Dick Cooper, Lillie Eiger, Jeremy Fletcher, Jill Furmanovsky, Bob Gruen, Roger Kisby, Norman Seeff, Tom Sheehan, Brad Trent, Virginia Turbett.
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THERE ARE MANY THINGS WE CAN REASONABLY
expect from our musical heroes: wild thrills, profound insights. Drama. Epiphanies. Transcendence. Their skills as life coaches, however, can be a bit more hit and miss. As in so many things, Patti Smith is an exception that proves the rule. At 75, she stands apart as a rock’n’roll icon whose ability to connect a devotion to art with a practical existence remains inspirational. “I realised, very early on, that there’s always a million reasons to live,” she tells MOJO’s Andrew Male, in a series of intimate and significant interviews. “I saw, as Allen Ginsberg would say, some of the best minds of my generation lose their life over accidents, mistakes, carelessness or tragedy. I just decided as a teenager that I wasn’t going to be addicted to anything, except perhaps art and love.” This month, then, we present a kind of History Of Patti Smith In 100 Objects; a gently instructive guide to living one’s best life that involves Ginsberg and Dylan, Burroughs and Stipe, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’s Mosrite guitar and Patti’s own boots. “We have to celebrate being alive several times a day,” she encourages. Even as she’s cleaning out the cat litter.
JOHN MULVEY, EDITOR How long have I been gone, do you know?
Being the subject of a micro-section of the recent article on Magazine in MOJO 343, I’d like to share a few reflections on the published photo of myself [page 50] with Magazine from September ’77. I’ve analysed this picture on several occasions in the past, and what I can say is that the sheet in front of me on the piano stand is my original handwritten manuscript for the keyboard part to Motorcade. Judging also by my finger positions on the keys, this could be an early rehearsal/working of Motorcade. Acknowledged as the co-writer of Motorcade, another bit of context here: the song started life not in rehearsals with the band but as a solo keyboard piece sometime in August ’77 in the back room of my parents’ home in Bury, influenced very much by some Satie piano pieces. It was then later presented to the band during one of the early rehearsal sessions. At the time of the photo, I was commuting from the Department of American Music at Keele University (where I was completing a PhD in North American Live Electronic Music) on a fairly regular daily basis. Additionally, I was also working with Dick Witts, prior to his formation of The Passage, as part of his work with the Manchester Musicians Collective. Magazine was very much an extra-curricular activity
for myself at the time, as my primary focus was avantgarde and experimental music. A few months before the published photo, Dick and I had performed The Sinking Of The Titanic by Gavin Bryars at the Peterloo Gallery in Manchester.
Bob Dickinson, Lincoln
Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him
After reading the five-star review of Michael Head’s Dear Scott [MOJO 343], I’ll just relay the time I was lucky enough to meet him. I was working for Liverpool City Council as an electrician back in 1995 when I was sent to a repair in Kensington. To my surprise, Mick answered the door to his mum’s house, and after doing the job we got talking. He gave me a cassette that later turned out to become the album Michael Head Introducing The Strands, and a T-shirt he had worn during the Pale Fountains’ tour of Japan. Any success that comes his way with the new album will be thoroughly earned – he’s a musical genius.
Mike Matthews, Liverpool
I wanted to see him so bad
I’ve just noticed in the (extremely informative) David Bowie article in MOJO 344 that Bowie
➢ MOJO 11
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and the band went to see Alice Cooper at the Rainbow in November ’71 – that he was “appalled by the vaudevillian spectacle” and that they walked out before the end. Well I was at the gig and lemme tell ya, Cooper and the chaps were nothing short of bloody amazing! Far more entertaining than Bowie ever was, IMHO. I truly cannot believe that Dave and the boys weren’t seriously entertained that night – not enough Anthony Newley?
the author got it mixed up with Bickershaw, where it rained heavily and a lot of bands didn’t appear. Hollywood was without doubt the best festival I’ve been to. The Dawn label bands were really good and the more well-known acts like Family, Airforce, Colosseum and Traffic were also great. And Mungo Jerry got called back on the second day because everyone loved them so much. A superb bank holiday weekend… And very sunny!
You must look to the sky and never at the ground
He always laughed real hard about it
Robert Angelo Sawyer, via e-mail
I feel I must respond to Steve Richards’ letter criticising the decision to put Liam Gallagher on the cover of MOJO 343. To find Liam Gallagher not to your taste is one thing, as we all, of course, have our own musical preferences. However, to dismiss him as “talentless and frankly, unpleasant” is a ludicrous statement and one that is frankly unkind and unjust. Liam Gallagher has one of the most defining voices in rock, and his interpretation of Noel Gallagher’s lyrics helped shape a cultural movement in the 1990s. He continues to impress now, with strong albums and, arguably, even stronger vocals. His interviews are always fascinating, with often surreal and laugh-out-loud answers. And while Andy Partridge, Roy Harper, Robyn Hitchcock and Paddy McAloon are very talented musicians, I’d suggest that in terms of comparative magazine sales, covers featuring them may lead to, shall we say, more challenging overall sales figures.
Gary Wilson, Chester-le-Street
You guys are gonna love this
Strangely you do not mention this anywhere in MOJO 344, but are you aware Sparks’ 2008 re-recorded version of This Town Ain’t Big Enough on the rather excellent Glam Nuggets CD this month has never been released anywhere before? I honestly think the CD is one of the best you have ever given us. Gumbo – who the hell are they? – are tremendous; Dana Gillespie’s great version of Andy Warhol. Sometimes you spoil us.
Tim Brooks, via e-mail
Could we go there now?
I was very pleased when the Grateful Dead CD fell out of MOJO 343 and I loved the article. One comment though. Reference is made to the Hollywood Music Festival, about which the writer states the Dead’s performance was spoiled by rain and technical issues. I was at the festival (my first, aged 16) and if you check out the lengthy and detailed website it states, “the police were fairly cool, the local populace were not up in arms about the festival being held in their area. The local press were supportive, the bands played really well, the line-up was great, the whole thing was well organised and, most importantly, it didn’t RAIN.” I think maybe
Terry Maunder, Leeds
Reading the Sting article [MOJO 343] reminded me of seeing The Police in Torquay Town Hall in 1978 with Chelsea and Patrik Fitzgerald. A half-empty gig and we sat on the edge of the stage during their set. Very impressive live – so I made my own Police badge for school the following day… Cue being ridiculed. No one liked the name (or the badge). Always good to be ahead of the masses.
Dave Portch, via e-mail
It feels good to be in new clothes, huh?
I’ve been a subscriber to your excellent magazine for many years and have always found the free CDs useful. Sometimes the music is not to my taste, or I begin to worry that, at 68, I’m getting too old to enjoy new stuff. However I must congratulate you on the 2022 CD with MOJO 341 as all of it was interesting (and I had generally never heard of the artists before) – in particular Rokia Koné, Curtis Harding, caroline and Arooj Aftab. Keep it up, that’s all I can say.
Alan Mitchell, Swindon
I can guarantee you the safety zone will be eliminated!
What a great issue 344 was, and it was good to have a fascinating new interview by Tom Doyle with the everenigmatic Mr Fripp. I was querying the health status of John Bungey: has he recovered after reviewing Fripp’s 32-disc Exposures 1977-1983? I would be interested to read an article on how he accomplished it and indeed how long it took him to do!
Paul Forrester, via e-mail
Thatʼs only her in a movie. A long time ago.
Ziggy turns 50? Crikey. How time flies when you’re reinventing pop music. And apt that the movie quotes on MOJO 344’s Letters Page are all taken from Wes Anderson’s 2004 film, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou – the link being that Seu Jorge’s character Pelé dos Santos spends his time in the film serenely playing an array of Portuguese-translated Bowie songs while on board the Belafonte.
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Unearthed! Norman Seeff’s unseen Exile… images. Plus, the Stones’ Sixty Tour comes home.
T
HE ROLLING STONES’ Exile On Main St.: 50 years old yet strangely timeless, rough and ready yet miraculously integrated. So too the packaging. Recruited at the suggestion of Stones assistant Chris O’Dell, art director John Van Hamersveld has spoken about the sleeve art of Exile… in detail. Having his say today is Van Hamersveld’s thendesign partner – and the only visual creative actually pictured on that hallowed sleeve – the legendary photographer Norman Seeff. What’s more, for his ongoing exhibition in Los Angeles, the pin-sharp 83-year-old has unearthed not only a Stones shoot in their Bel Air mansion, but the elaborately staged session Mick Jagger originally commissioned for the sleeve. “Mick had seen a picture of the Ballets Russes defecting from Russia, and The Rolling Stones were defecting to France for tax purposes. I had to shoot them on a dock,” Seeff recalls. The Long Beach docks discounted for fear of a riot, they rented a Hollywood studio stage with movie outfitters Western Costume supplying the attire. “My crew built the dockside set to make it look very Titanic,” says Seeff. When the band (minus Bill Wyman, whose place was taken by a stand-in) turned up at midnight, the lensman recalled having, “a good look at Keith… I went, Well, we’re all fine! But he was amenable, professional and did what he did.” Seeff adds, “It couldn’t just be a photoshoot, something had to happen – a Rolling Stones moment.” And so he announced, “‘We’ve got to
“Something had to happen – a Rolling Stones moment.” NORMAN SEEFF
Mat Snow
Fifty Years In Exile runs at the Rock Photography Museum in Glendale, CA until July 17. For info and purchasing, see rockphotographymuseum.com
Norman Seeff
Back On Main St.
push the envelope!’ The girl standing next to Mick decided she was gonna give him a great big kiss. She spun around to grab him and they both lost their footing and did a complete airborne somersault.” Clicking furiously, not only had Seeff his moment, but a whole action sequence. Meanwhile, veteran documentary photographer Robert Frank, who died in 2019, had also been recruited to the project by Jagger and Charlie Watts after they discovered his classic 1958 collection The Americans. Frank had been snapping and filming the band on Super 8 at the seedier end of LA’s Main Street. So taken were the Stones by the idea of these verité images as a collage, they added …On Main St. to the Exile working title. For the front cover, they selected a matching patchwork, Tattoo Parlor, an outtake from The Americans. Seeff’s session? Repurposed as a concertina of postcards inserted into early LP pressings, the whole package was assembled by Seeff, Van Hamersveld and Jagger himself, “with scissors and sticky tape. We had Mick scribble the linernotes. A really beautiful, harmonious experience.” As for the Stones, their Sixty Tour hits Britain this month, with dates at Hyde Park on June 25 and July 3. Promising the hits plus surprise deep-catalogue picks, last month Keith Richards told The Times a new LP was coming in 2023, and observed, “Mick and I are still firmly at the reins… we still don’t know what the reins do, though.”
W H AT G O E S O N !
Daydream believer: (clockwise from below) Bowie gets a lift, 1973; director Brett Morgen; the promo poster for his forthcoming doc.
THE BOWIE FILM VAULT OPENS IN BRETT MORGEN’S REVELATORY MOONAGE DAYDREAM!
F
ILMMAKER BRETT Morgen doesn’t due to ill health. When the director mind admitting he’d “checked out” re-established contact with Bowie’s estate from David Bowie’s career after after the singer’s 2016 passing, plans to 1983’s Let’s Dance made Bowie a mega-selling utilise his vast audio-visual archive of his life MTV favourite. What that provided some began to take shape. At which point, Morgen 40 years later, during a torturous lockdown suffered a massive heart attack. edit o Morgen’s genre busting Bowie film “As I started to recover, I was immersing Moonage Daydream, was the element of mysel in Bowie, he says, citing the five surprise: at pretty much every turn, nuggets million assets the estate provided for him to kept appearing. scrutinise. In Bowie’s tireless and insightful “My favourite discovery,” he tells MOJO creativity, he says, “what I discovered was a at Cannes, where the film had its world sort of guide to how to live a satisfying and premiere in May, “were the outtakes for [’95 balanced and ulfilled li e… a roadmap or single video] The Hearts Filthy Lesson. I how to survive the 21st century.” used the shots during what I call the ‘Philip The archive, much of it unseen, was lass se uences’ o the film, that have the mostly undigitised and took two years of orchestral music, and David starts in a sorting – a process that swallowed up the crouch and then comes up. If you watch the film’s budget. Then Covid hit and Morgen [original] video, that doesn’t exist. Getting was faced with having to complete the these music video dailies from like, 20 years pro ect himsel in isolation. ou know, ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, to me that’s you’re watching all this footage and suddenly always revelatory. Everything we got from it cuts to some video David made in his home the outtakes was gold.” in ’74 – like three hours of it – and he’s The pre-teen Morgen’s entry point into talking to himself and it’s so intimate,” says the Bowie universe occurred Morgen. “Then the [1974] Soul way back in 1980, post-Scary Tour comes on. I’m like, ‘Oh “It’s the Monsters. As the A filmmaker my God, there’s two fucking won plaudits for his noughties shows.’ I felt like, ‘Someone polar documentary portraits of Kurt else has to experience this.’” opposite Cobain, the Stones and others, The resulting film is a so his ambition to work with colour-soaked assault on the of Montage senses, with Bowie his hero began to crystallise. A the Of Heck.” meeting with Bowie in 2007 performer in all his guises went well, though the star uxtaposed with news ootage BRETT MORGEN couldn’t commit to Morgen’s (the atom bomb and the moon hybrid non fiction pro ect landings , film montages
(including clips from Kubrick, Oshima and, especially, Wiene’s 1920 horror landmark The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari) and other iconic th century art signifiers ittle Richard and William Burroughs both feature). For the soundtrack, Morgen worked closely with producer Tony Visconti on mixing and sourcing the individual sound stems from Bowie’s original tracks, nailing every narrative beat in what his wife calls “the anti-Montage Of Heck”, in reference to Morgen’s Kurt Cobain film. It’s the polar opposite,” he says. “[Bowie] is someone who knew how to survive and deal with life.” Even now, though, some footage will remain in the vaults: Morgen did not use any material when the individual camera master tapes were lost. “That eliminated anything from Top Of The Pops, it eliminated Glastonbury,” he explains. “My favourite David Bowie performance of all time is Berlin 2002 and the song Heathen (The ays and his rendition o eroes . We ust couldn’t find the camera masters. I had a rule that if we couldn’t edit the performances, we couldn’t use the performances. So, I had to leave it out.”
Ed Gibbs
Moonage Daydream is due in cinemas in September.
GIMME FIVE… TRANSPORT TUNES Baba Brooks
Prince
Pink Floyd
Duke Ellington
Mad Unity
(BLACK SWAN, 1964)
(WARNER BROS, 1982)
(EMI, 1967)
(VICTOR, 1941)
(VOGUE, 1975)
A strangely elegiac, jazzy ska rumpshaker, which suggests that for trumpet ace Baba Brooks, a cancellation in bus services was no biggie. See also The Revolutionaries’ Bus Strike Dub, The Hollies’ Bus Stop and Clark Terry’s Serenade To A Bus Seat.
Funkily, Prince pours out his troubled heart to long-suffering titular cabbie (whether she accepted his tears in lieu of fare remains unknown). Twin it with Wreckless Eric’s High Noon-at-the-cemetery epic The Final Taxi for a true panorama of life and death.
Syd’s bicycle doesn’t sound like it’s hitting the road any time soon, preoccupied as he is with cloaks and mice called Gerald. Pedal there faster with Madness’s Riding On My Bike, The Mixtures’ The Pushbike Song and, of course, Silver Machine by Hawkwind.
The great bandleader’s sublime signature number was Billy Strayhorn’s ode to the New York subway line to Harlem. Alternately, feel the degradation with Soft Cell’s Down In The Subway or The Jam’s Down In Tube Station At Midnight.
The clanging of the rails heralds jazz-funk-prog from library music mover Janko Nilovic’s outfit. For more tramcar intrigue, see Wigwam’s Tram Driver, Can’s Waiting For The Streetcar and migrant-smuggling boogie Turkish Tram Conductor Blues by The Move.
Getty
Bus Strike
16 MOJO
Lady Cab Driver
Bike
Take The ‘A’ Train
Funky Tramway
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MOJO WO R K I N G “I’d sit there with my cat, Tubby, or sometimes his brother Ringo.” ROBYN HITCHCOCK
FACT SHEET
Moggy notion: (main) Hitchcock and Telecaster at home in Nashville; (inset) recording engineer Ringo M Stardust checks the levels (assistant engineer Tubby Vincent not pictured).
ROBYN HITCHCOCK PLAYS WITH SOFT BOYS, JOHNNY MARR , SEAN ONO LENNON AND MORE, FOR LP 22!
“I
WAS IN the palace of the feathery serpent god in Mexico at Christmas 2019,” says cult psych auteur Robyn Hitchcock, en route to Los Angeles airport. “Something clicked, and I began to write songs… it was like one of those chiropractor things – you get a bone in your back realigned, and suddenly the chakras are all there, and the stuff was flowing through in a way I like.” You can always rely on the feathery serpent god Quetzalcoatl, AKA the Aztec Lord Of The Winds. Hitchcock hadn’t made a new solo LP since 2017, but from January 2020 he wrote songs at home in Nashville. He then began recording voice-and-guitar versions
Emma Swift (2), Getty
A L S O WO R K I N G
18 MOJO
…THE BLACK CROWES’ Chris Robinson spoke to Forbes about their recent covers EP, 1972, and forthcoming original songs: “Getting back in the studio after many, many years… kind of answered a lot of questions about the new material that we’re writing” …JULIA JACKLIN’s (above) Pre Pleasure arrives at the end of August.
Title: Shufflemania! Due: October 21 Production: Robyn Hitchcock Songs: Noirer Than Noir/The Raging Muse/The Shuffle Man/The Sir Tommy Shovel/The Man Who Loves The Rain/ Midnight Tram To Nowhere The Buzz: “Centuries ago, I had a 4-track tape recorder and I used to do a lot of recording at home. I kind of wanted to get back to that. Part of it was wanting to get a real pure ‘me,’ the other was just seeing what these people would make of it.” Robyn Hitchcock
on his newly purchased digital 4-track. “I set the machine up and I’d sit there with my cat Tubby, or sometimes his brother Ringo,” says Hitchcock. “I was able to start songs and more importantly, finish them.” Thereafter digital files were dispatched to rock’n’roll friends and collaborators. In this way, Johnny Marr completed lonely-in-theBrill Building stargazer The Inner Life Of Scorpio, Brendan Benson beefed up capricious rocker The Shuffle Man, and Kelly Stoltz added sitar and Shruti box to The Feathery Serpent God. “I didn’t give any direction,” says Hitchcock. “I just sent Johnny a phone demo and
“The songs on this record took either three years to write or three minutes,” she says. It was recorded in Montreal with members of The Weather Station and Arcade Fire, and an orchestra recorded in Prague …THE AFGHAN WHIGS’ How Do You Burn? arrives in September. It was recorded remotely, with guests including the late Mark Lanegan, who sings on two songs. “It was Mark who named
he overdubbed it, so I then had to re-record what I did to that. So, they’d add themselves to the song, I’d maybe add or subtract a bit more of myself, or send it off to somebody else… some of those songs ricocheted all the way around the world.” There are also older pals on hand. With extra vocals by his partner Emma Swift, Hitchcock recorded aeronautical Hellenic fantasy Socrates In Thin Air at Abbey Road in London in September 2020, with his ex-Soft Boy bandmate Kimberley Rew contributing electric guitar from his Cambridgeshire studio. Another Soft Boy appears on Beatles-esque humanitarian plea One Day (It’s Being Scheduled): drummer Morris Windsor sang harmony from his office in Gloucester to a track fleshed out by Sean Ono Lennon. “I think Morris had a phone in his laptop or something,” says Hitchcock. “He’s a lovely singer and it’s great to have his harmonies. Even if Kimberley’s playing a tennis racket, he’s a very forceful guitarist with a lot of attack. Even by post, the essential Kim-ness and the elegant fury of his playing comes through… we like playing together [though] I would be surprised if there was another Soft Boys record. God knows.” Mixed and mastered in 2021, Hitchcock adds that the influence of Swift has made the record a neater and more accomplished package. “I sort of get things as near as I can to what I’d like and then bung them out, which means, often, they were a bit unfinished with out-of-tune vocals,” he says. “Emma’s a great singer and she made me redo a load of vocals right at the end, so they’re a bit more disciplined on this one than they have been.” With that he arrives at the airport. But what about that collaboration with Andy Partridge, wonders MOJO – might there be a follow-up to 2019’s Planet England EP? “He and I sort of have these bursts, intensely,” says Hitchcock. “We did start something and then lockdown happened and that rather put the kibosh on me going out to Swindon. But we might well resume. Watch these spaces.” Ian Harrison
the album,” said Whigs frontman Greg Dulli …SUEDE’s ninth LP, Autofiction, arrives in September. Recorded at Konk studios with Ed Buller, Brett Anderson calls it, “our punk record. No whistles and bells. Just the five of us in a room with all the glitches and fuck-ups revealed.” Songs include Personality Disorder, It’s Always The Quiet Ones, 15 Again and Turn Off Your Brain And Yell
…last month, LANA DEL REY told fashion magazine W about her new music: “I’ll just sing whatever comes to mind into my Voice Notes app… I’ve been sending those really raw-sounding files to a composer, Drew Erickson, and he’ll add an orchestra beneath the words,” she said, adding, “I’m angry” … The Sun reports that ELTON JOHN (left) is also working on new music while playing his farewell tour…
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LADYSMITH BLACK MAMBAZO +Muntu Valdo South African vocal powerhouse that shot to global stardom on Paul Simon’s Graceland now return with a live tour Wed 12 Oct | POOLE Lighthouse Thu 13 Oct | BRISTOL St George’s Fri 14 Oct | GUILDFORD G-Live Sat 15 Oct | LONDON Queen Elizabeth Hall (2.30pm & 7.30pm)
Sun 16 Oct | BRIGHTON Theatre Royal Tue 18 Oct | CANTERBURY Gulbenkian Wed 19 Oct | BASINGSTOKE Anvil Thu 20 Oct | BEXHILL De La Warr Pavilion Fri 21 Oct | LONDON Alexandra Palace Theatre
Book at serious.org.uk/Mambazo
Sat 22 Oct | SAFFRON WALDEN Saffron Hall Sun 23 Oct | LONDON Richmond Theatre Tue 25 Oct | MANCHESTER Bridgewater Hall Wed 26 Oct | SUNDERLAND The Fire Station Thu 27 Oct | BIRMINGHAM Town Hall Sun 29 Oct | YORK Grand Opera House Sun 30 Oct | NOTTINGHAM Theatre Royal Tue 1 Nov | DUBLIN National Concert Hall* Wed 2 Nov | EDINBURGH Usher Hall *Muntu Valdo will not be performing in Dublin
P.P. Arnold The soul powerhouse salutes Aretha Franklin’s Respect (Atlantic, 1967). I’d been an Ikette with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue in the States, playing the Chitlin’ Circuit in the South. Because of the whole racist vibe in America at the time, these were the clubs where all the black people hung out and partied hard. Then, the white stations didn’t play black music and black stations didn’t play the white music, which is why Ike & Tina’s River Deep – Mountain High didn’t happen in the States. I first came to the UK in ’67, and being with The Rolling Stones, they’d opened the door to a lot of artists. When I heard Aretha singing Respect on the radio, it was very profound. She’d had an impact on me since I was a little girl, in church. She hit a chord with my gospel roots, and came from such a long line of great black female singers, from Mahalia Jackson, Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday… Respect was such a strong statement for women, and for me, coming out of an abusive teen marriage then standing on my own to be here in the UK. I used to sing loads of Aretha in my set, I’d say more than I did my own songs back then. So I sang Respect as part of my repertoire, everywhere – in [London nightspots] the Cromwellian, the Bag O’ Nails, the Ram Jam Club, the Flamingo, Blaises – wow! Amazing places to go, there’d be loads of Mods dancing, so loving the soul and the blues from America. I had no idea that the British public was so turned on to the music from the States. It was such a great time, and Respect changed everybody’s lives – Aretha singing it from a woman’s point of view, and also Otis Redding singing it from a human point of view. These days I’m not singing Respect – I’m gonna sing P.P. and show respect to the songs I’ve done! But Respect, oh yeah, it’s always there. As told to Ian Harrison P.P. Arnold’s memoir Soul Survivor is published by Nine Eight Books on July 7.
W H AT G O E S O N !
AS A.I. CLEANS UP ‘BROTHER’ JACK McDUFF LIVE IN ’82, WHERE NEXT FOR DIGITAL AUDIO RESTORATION?
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HEN JAZZ organ freak Scott audible in pristine audio, on last year’s Get Hawthorn watched Hammond Back doc. Furthermore, individual instruB3 great ‘Brother’ Jack McDuff ments and vocal takes recorded in mono at Parnell’s club in Seattle in June 1982, he during rehearsals were isolated and given was aware that the keyboardist’s Leslie greater clarity. What’s exciting about A.I. cabinet had a rip in its bass woofer. “Because audio is that we can now extract vocals, of the particular notes that ‘farted’,” basslines and other elements o a mix straight Hawthorn says today of the damaged off any recording,” says Passavanti, “which speaker’s distorted sound, “it really did opens the door to the possibility of making seem to add to the funk.” music beyond the constraints of traditional Hawthorn taped the four nights and multi-track technology. I think this is very, shared them – audio murk, hiss, ‘farts’ and very exciting. all with other Mc u aficionados. But That these individual stems are then in a years on, via advances in A.I. sound restoraorm ripe or manipulation and remixing tion technology, the recordings are to be much more easily than ever before – makes made available in uncannily listenable, or tantalising speculation. Imagine awed scrubbed-up form as Live At Parnell’s. How live documents such as The Beatles At The Hollywood Bowl, Metallic KO (below) by The did this happen? Thank Greg Boraman of the Soul Bank Stooges or Syd Barrett live at the Olympia in reissue label, who sent the recordings to getting an audio reconstruction. Claudio Passavanti of London mastering There’s also the prospect of the democratised outfit r Mix, who set to work using the deconstruction of the canon, like last year’s audio editor developed by firm creditable Clash project Mohawk Revenge, i otope. uses artificial intelligence to where oe trummer’s voice was extracted repair aws in audio recordings, says from 1985’s unloved, electronic Cut The Crap iZotope’s Christoph Hartwig, who points LP and set to a guitar-bass-drums punk out the process is common practice in backing. Add to this ABBA’s digital rebirth T and film. This includes removing and the growth of the deepfake, and feverish complex noise or reverb rom recordings as dreams of a quantum leap into A.I.-generated well as restoring missing information in original songs sung by computer-resurrected audio data. It’s almost like a photo editing singers don’t seem so outré. tool for sound.” Scott, who also befriended McDuff before his death in , sounds “We were blown away a note of caution. “There by the level of audio was much more to being manipulation that was there than just audio,” possible with A.I. tech. he says. “The smells, the It’s like black magic!” says conversations, the soul Passavanti, who adds that food, the sense of danger other tools were used to in his performances… it smooth out hiss and other all added to the atmosdistortions. “Once the phere.” Yet Hartwig is recording was cleaned up, ready to suspend his we manually mastered it scepticism. “Increasing using mostly hardware processing power in analogue gear.” computers and artificial Another user of A.I. to intelligence has taken many “It’s almost de-shroud vital hidden audio people by surprise,” he says. treasure was Peter Jackson, like a photo “I know that there will be who de mixed Michael more innovations that will editing tool Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be leave us speechless.” footage to strip out other for sound.” Ian Harrison sound sources and make CHRISTOPH previously hidden conversaLive At Parnell’s is out on September HARTWIG 2 via Soul Bank Music. tions between Beatles Destroy the fart: (from left) the A.I.-restored ‘Brother’ Jack McDuff and George, Yoko and John.
Getty, Alamy
L A ST N I G H T A RECORD CHANGED MY L I F E
C U LT H E RO E S
Easy, tiger!: Oren Ambarchi throws himself out of his comfort zone; (below) totally wired – performing at Café OTO, Dalston, London, 2019.
AVANT-GUITAR SEER OREN AMBARCHI FINDS NEW SENSATIONS VIA IMPOSSIBLE METHODS
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Manuel Mota, Greg Clement
N THE 25 or more years that Sydney-born multi-instrumentalist and composer Oren Ambarchi has been making music, he has always thrived on seeking out the unheard or the unknown. Listen to the ickering, supernatural guitar drones that run through Ghosted, his recent acoustic jazz trio collaboration, or the glittering Noh-play noise abstractions he creates with Jim O’Rourke and Japanese guitarist Keiji Haino, and there is always the unexpected uxtaposition or in uence, or an otherworldly quality that betrays no clear in uence or guide.
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“I’m a huge fan of what 10cc did production-wise.” OREN AMBARCHI
music, and a lot of the time the musicians with training were the ones who fell back on clichés. Then I saw Keiji Haino in the early ’90s which was both confounding and compelling. You’re sort of questioning, “Is this good? Is this bad?” I’m always attracted to something when I don’t understand it.” Ambarchi went back to Australia and booked a live show playing improvised guitar. “I knew nothing about guitar,” he says. “Everyone thought I was crazy… it was pretty scary but exciting and you just learn from your ORENJUICE mistakes in a really fast way because you’re taking a risk.” Ambarchi’s starter Consequently, Ambarchi’s for three. guitar LPs, such as 2007’s In THE GUITAR ALBUM The Pendulum’s Embrace, were suspended, minimalist Oren Ambarchi Grapes From The Estate lattices of buzzing harmonics (TOUCH, 2004) and ambient tone clusters A devout solo suggestive of heavy days spent artist communes in summer’s shade. In time, with the guitar an urge to “collaborate and in monastic seclusion. experiment with rhythm” The drones, hums, rumbles led to 2012’s Audience Of One, and clicks are reminiscent of where the multi-layered church organ, medieval Knots was sculpted around plainsong and stone-walled Melbourne drummer Joe church ambience. Talia’s propulsive percussion. THE COLLABORATION His use of space and sound has remained constantly Sunn O))) innovative. “I’m a huge fan Monoliths & Dimensions (SOUTHERN LORD, 2009) of what 10cc did producThe record tion-wise,” he says. “They where Ambarchi never did the same thing discovered the twice. I love for people to experimental joys of playing hear the in uence o di erent through a Leslie speaker, spaces, whether it’s a giant incorporating the near-physical concert hall or a tiny room.” idiosyncrasies of this rotating As to future plans, there tremolo/vibrato/Doppler will be collaborations with effect speaker into the doom guitarists Julia Reidy and B.J. lords’ down-tuned choir of choral dread. Cole and further releases on his own label, Black Tru e, THE RHYTHM LP all defined by a singular Oren Ambarchi aesthetic. “It’s always about Live Hubris finding catalysts to throw me (BLACK TRUFFLE, 2021) out of my comfort zone,” says Live at Café OTO Ambarchi. “If music is doing in 2019, Ambarchi things to you that you’ve conducts an all-star gathering never felt before that’s of Jim O’Rourke, interesting. If you don’t know Eiko Ishibashi, Joe Talia and how it’s being done, that’s others in a huge, ever-expandeven better.” ing polyrhythmic motorik beast
“I think that might be all down to The Beatles,” posits Ambarchi from his Berlin home. “I was into music before I could speak, I wasn’t interested in playing with of driving euphoric release. toys. The White Album was Probably the finest recorded example of the artist as ust a massive in uence collective player. because you’d hear Revolution 9 sandwiched in between Cry Baby Cry and Good Night. It meant that I didn’t really differentiate between the pop and the weird.” Utilising a birthday drum kit plus tape recorders and effect pedals from his grandfather’s junk shop, the nine-year-old Ambarchi started making tape collages, and teaching himself how to play music with no formal training. “I’m really thankful for that [experience],” he says. “I was living in New York in the late ’80s and I was exposed to a lot of experimental live
Andrew Male
MOJO R I S I N G “I’m an artist, not a musician”: Fantastic Negrito tells his forebears’ story.
“I’m interested in the freedom to not give a fuck.” FANTASTIC NEGRITO
FACT SHEET
For fans of Prince, World Party, Sly & The Family Stone ● Dphrepaulezz’s monthly underground club in South Central Los Angeles included a film theatre and a jacuzzi. Police, Bloods and Crips were keen patrons. “It looked like the bridge on Star Trek. The police came in after their shifts and hung out. The gangbangers gave me a pass because I drove a 1967 stickshift Volvo, had all these pretty girls and wasn’t from LA. We’d put everyone’s guns in a cabinet so it was a safe space.” ● He’s discovered family roots in Surrey as well as Scotland. “They were Quakers rather than slave owners.” ●
BABY I’M A STAR! THE EMANCIPATED FUTURE-BLUES OF FANTASTIC NEGRITO
Travis Shinn
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N 1750S VIRGINIA, interracial relationships were illegal. Nature, though, took its course when Elizabeth Gallimore, a Scottish indentured servant, fell for a slave whose name has been lost. The racism of Virginian laws meant that even after Elizabeth had been charged with “co-habiting with a negro”, the children of the union would be “free negroes”; in total there were 50,000 in the future heartland of the Confederacy. In 1968, their great-great-great-greatgreat-great-great-grandson, Xavier Amin Dphrepaulezz, was born. And in 2014, after a chequered but undeniably eventful career as a drug dealer, major label artist, illegal nightclub grandee, legal marijuana farmer and coma survivor, Dphrepaulezz became Fantastic Negrito. Four albums and three Grammys later, he discovered his forebears’ story following an e-mail from a previously unknown cousin. Album number five, White Jesus Black Problems, would tell it. “I thought of this white Scottish woman who, perhaps while cleaning, had a glimpse
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hand, Dphrepaulezz was dropped. “I never thought I’d do music again, I didn’t feel it, wasn’t inspired and no longer cared about being famous. When I eventually started Negrito, I had the wisdom of a grandfather with the freedom of a 17-year-old. Now I’m an artist, not a musician: I still don’t know anything about music and I couldn’t care less whether I play an of sweating, muscular forbidden instrument or not.” fruit and thought, ‘That doesn’t KEY TRACKS The previous three Fantastic ● Venomous Dogma look bad!’ How did it happen? How Negrito outings won Best ● They Go Low could they meet up when slaves ● Virginia Soil Contemporary Blues Album weren’t allowed to even look at a Grammys. Whittled down from 70 white person?” recorded songs, White Jesus Black Problems is Falling into the family-tree rabbit hole far too scattergun to join them. There’s alongside his PhD historian brother, gospel, hip-hop, Joe Meek-style wizardry, Dphrepaulezz learned much about himself, World Party-style layering and as much not least that he is 28 per cent white. mischief as anger. Prince might have “I had no idea. I pressed a button and it approved, as might Sly Stone. was, ‘Oh shit, I’m white’. As a descendant of “What I’m interested in is the freedom to slaves, I felt almost guilt. I do view the world not give a fuck. Prince didn’t in his early days, and white people a little differently now, nor did David Bowie, but they were musical but I was always different myself. Growing up geniuses and they belonged. I’ve never in Oakland I was into punk, so the black kids belonged – neither did Grandma Gallimore. would go, ‘Do you worship the devil, As I have to say in the stream of consciousness motherfucker?’ In my mid-twenties, I moved that is You Don’t Belong Here, 250 years later to LA to become famous and Jimmy Iovine people are still being told they don’t belong.” gave me a million bucks to make an album.” John Aizlewood That album, 1995’s The X Factor by Xavier, didn’t sell. After spending time in a coma Fantastic Negrito’s White Jesus Black Problems is following a near-fatal car crash which out now on Storefront. He plays London Jazz Café on July 26 and 27. permanently damaged his guitar-playing
JP MUSIC PROMOTIONS
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ARLIER THIS summer, Katy J Pearson and a vaporous flute, and forms a conceptual played the O2 Academy in her adopted bookend with the closing cover of Willow’s hometown of Bristol, at a benefit for Song from The Wicker Man soundtrack. Ukraine. “I felt really proud,” she beams, “of Though KJP’s version is recast in a deep Bristol representing.” The line-up included motorik groove, it retains the contrast Idles, Portishead and Billy Nomates, plus between sensual warmth and unnerving guest host, the actor Paul McGann. “Soundchill in Paul Giovanni’s original. check was kind of overwhelming,” Pearson “I feel like the record as a whole is a admits, “but backstage there mixture of quite grounding was a real community spirit and comforting and quite – being part of it made me feel brash and unsettling,” she really happy.” considers. Throughout its After 2020’s psychedelic stylistic contours (folk, roots, Return, Pearson is about to pop) runs a strong, songwritrelease her second album, erly backbone, translating Sound Of The Morning – a personal anxieties into KATY J PEARSON record overflowing with broader human connections. stylistic playfulness and Presciently, Alligator was melody, foregrounding her winsome, Jane written in the fallout from a huge gas bill, Wiedlin-meets-Dolly Parton vocals. But her while a conversation with her mum yielded career began aged 15 when Ardyn, her duo Confession, a subtle interrogation of #metoo: with brother Rob, won a battle of the bands at “As a young artist I’ve been in situations with Gloucester Guildhall. The pair were spotted male writers that were creepy as hell.” by the head of A&R at Polydor. “They wanted Such experiences, however, didn’t deter me to be a pop star,” she remembers, wincing her from collaboration, with numerous artists slightly. “Like a London Grammar, singer kind passing through the new record. “I remember of vibe. But at that age it’s impossible to truly saying, ‘I don’t want to have too many know what your sound is.” After two years, collaborators,’” she laughs. “Then as soon Polydor let them go. “It wasn’t the best as I let go, it made everything better.” An experience,” she admits, “but it was the most extension, perhaps, of Bristol’s well-connectfantastic baptism by fire.” ed creative hub? “I’ve had space to flourish in Despite having a natural flair for melody, Bristol,” she agrees, though the city’s the major-label experience left her initially liberal-mindedness FACT SHEET pop-cautious. “I think I had a vendetta played less well on a ● For fans of: Kate against grand pianos,” she laughs. “When I recent visit to a London Bush, Aldous first went into the studio with [producer] Ali tattooist. “As soon as the Harding, Jess Chant, I was like, ‘No, that’s where all the pop guy found out I was from Williamson ● Katy J Pearson songs are written, on pianos.’” Instead, her Bristol he went on a rant started writing songs debut was warm, rootsy and purposely about statues,” she aged six. Her guitarscuffed around the edges. shudders. “And it was a playing dad taught Its follow-up, Sound Of The Morning, shows rubbish tattoo. I had to get her and her triplet brothers Rob and no such tentativeness, sounding as fresh with it fixed.” David to use Cubase Jenny Bulley possibilities as its name suggests. With its hint music software. of pagan mysticism, the title “really feels like Sound Of The Morning is ● Sound Of The what I was trying to encompass.” The Morning’s guests released on Heavenly included Samantha opening title track has a suggestion of rebirth Recordings on July 8.
“I think I had a vendetta against grand pianos.”
Morning star: Katy J Pearson mixes the comforting and the unsettling.
Crain, H Hawkline, Orlando Weeks from The Maccabees, Morgan Simpson from Black Midi. All were recorded “in the room”. ● KJP is a fan of cows. The video for her 2020 single Miracle, featuring a life-size plastic cow grown from a kit, was directed by the comedian Joe Lycett.
KEY TRACKS
Credit in here
● ● ●
Talk Over Town Float Willow’s Song
Tune in! For the best in folk-blues, chakra-jams and alco-punk.
1CASS McCOMBS UNPROUD WARRIOR A pensive, poignant, rather unsteady jazz-folk shuffle about a military veteran heralds the Californian troubadour’s tenth album, due in August. Find it: streaming services
2 KIWI JR. UNSPEAKABLE THINGS
Tough-pop Canadians blend Morrisseyish syntax (things “gather unsold at auction”) with bittersweet, Go-Betweens swoon and circling organ. Find it: streaming services
3 RICH RUTH TAKEN BACK
Ambient jazz meets guitar freakout on this chakra-realigning jam out of Nashville. Where Jon Hassell, Alice Coltrane and John McLaughlin meet. Find it: YouTube
4 GAZ COOMBES SONNY THE STRONG
Based on the sorry tale of Randolph Turpin, the British boxer who beat Sugar Ray Robinson, the ’Grass man brings a shivery transmission of rain-drenched ghost-rock. Find it: streaming services
DREAM MACHINE 5 THE TOO STONED TO DIE
Merseydelic Coral-affiliated hairies bend sinister into a garbled rocker of daytime carousing, death and rebirth. Feel those trousers flapping in the storm! Find it: streaming services
6 CAT POWER YOU GOT THE SILVER
Chan Marshall’s latest reading of the Jagger-Richards runes shares the original’s heartsore folk-blues but keeps it slow and sad. Find it: streaming services
CHATS I’VE BEEN DRUNK IN EVERY PUB IN BRISBANE 7 THE
Get ’em in for 90 life-affirming seconds of yabbering antipodean alco-punk, plus guitar solo. Find it: streaming services
8 JAMES RIGHTON LOVER BOY
The ex-Klaxon and producers Soulwax make like late-era Japan for a bittersweet, drunk-inthe-tropics reverie of longing to be elsewhere. Find it: streaming services
FORCE PROJECT 9 HEALING DIORAMA OBSCURA
From Italy, art-loft discordant trumpet, mutating electronics and jackhammer drum and bass fight their way into metaphysical silence. Find it: streaming services
DIANA ROSS & TAME IMPALA TURN UP THE 10 SUNSHINE
From the new Minions movie, Miss Ross sounds her old self on this warm-wave retro-funk, via Australia. Find it: YouTube
Giovanni Duca
FROM TEEN-POP BAPTISM BY FIRE, TO SUMMERISLE REBIRTH, KATY J PEARSON RETURNS STRONGER
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MOJO M E M B E R S H I P AT G R E ATM AG A Z I N E S .C O.U K / M O J O
FOR NEARLY 30 YEARS, MANY OF YOU WILL HAVE FELT PART OF A MOJO CLUB.
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THE MOJO INTERVIEW
The Master Drummer to Dylan, Lennon, Neil, Lana Del Rey and dozens more has come through overdoses and epiphanies to be the heartbeat of the greatest rock and pop. His secret? “It’s allowing the music to blossom,” says Jim Keltner. Interview by BOB MEHR • Portrait by ROGER KISBY
Scott Robert Ritchie
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HE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN MY arrison and ingo tarr. In addition, he’s maintained decades career, says im Keltner, ashing a grin, long collaborations with ylan, ric Clapton, y Cooder and was being thrust in the middle o so andy ewman, helped define hits or everyone rom ames Taylor many geniuses. to teely an, and remains a talisman or a whole new generation ne could argue that the most o stars eager or the Keltner touch. enduring, versatile and prolific drummer With his th birthday approaching, Keltner is in a re ective in rock history is underselling himsel . ohn ennon and eorge mood, ruminating on a li e filled with musical magic and coloured arrison, Bob ylan and eil oung, and more besides, probably by loss. e rattles o a long list o elled riends, rom childhood would too. But Keltner’s having none o it. laying with those pal Albert tinson a gi ted a bassist taken by heroin at age guys, he says, I really couldn’t go wrong. to his early mentor im ordon the erek The ominos It’s a balmy spring day in os Angeles, and Keltner is meeting drummer consumed by mental illness, and later sent to prison M at his uno ficial o fices, rum octors, a rental and storage or killing his mother , and victims o drug and alcohol abuse acility used by some o the top percussionists in the business. including esse d avis and Carl adle. ntering the airy warehouse space, Keltner cuts a amiliar figure I sometimes wonder why that didn’t happen to me, says in his signature aviator sunglasses. The shades are less rock star Keltner. I’ve died twice that I know o , and came very close a ectation than a by product o Fuchs’ dystrophy, a condition another time, rom overdoses, and I’m still living. That’s one which led him to undergo a pair o corneal miracle. There’s been many other kinds o transplants over the last decade. miracles I’ve experienced. The main one WE’RE NOT WORTHY Born in Tulsa to a white kie ather being my wi e. Ringo Starr on his and Mexican mother Keltner grew up in Keltner and spouse Cynthia met in unior brother in rhythm. outhern Cali ornia where, in the mid ’ s, high school in asadena in the late ’ s, ”Jim is my favourite a chance encounter with teen pop hit maker and have remained together ever since. I drummer of all time. It ary ewis thrust him into the hothouse o probably would’ve had a similar ate to some started at the Concert For Bangladesh. I found that the os Angeles studio scene. By the late ’ s, o those guys i it hadn’t been or Cynthia, when I played with other a ter turns on the road with elaney Bonnie he says. he’s always been my grounding. drummers, there was a and oe Cocker, Keltner would ollow ate ensitivity to the songs’ is invariably cited competition, but it was into the most rarified musical circles, as an as Keltner’s , but that’s not all he’s sensitive always relaxed with Jim: I’d take a fill, he’d take the next one. He’s a very inventive invaluable ally in the solo careers o ennon, to. As he looks back with M over his ➢ player, and a beautiful human being.”
MOJO 31
life and career, the master drummer finds himsel choking up more than once. ou know, I read somewhere that when you get older you cry more easily. I’m finding that’s true, he says. I’ve always been a crier, anyway.
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What are your earliest memories of music? My dad’s collection of old 78s. There was R&B stuff like [Louis Jordan’s] Saturday Night Fish Fry, with great singing and real funny lyrics. Then there was Benny Goodman records with Gene Krupa. There was a song called Disc Jockey Jump, with Krupa playing an arrangement by Gerry Mulligan. If I played it for you right now, you’d think it was recorded last week. It’s very modern, especially the drum sound. I always tried to emulate that. To this day, I still emulate that sound.
Courtesy Jim Keltner, Linda Wolf, Bob Gruen, Dick Cooper, Henry Diltz, Getty (3), Dick Cooper Collection from Florence-Lauderdale Public Library, Courtesy Now Sounds/Steve Stanley
Seems like you came from a rhythmic family background. My dad was a drummer. He met my mom at a recreation centre in Tulsa, playing for a dance. When they got married, he sold his drums to get some money. And she warned him: “One of these days you’re going to have a son and he’s going to want some drums” (laughs). My mom’s brother, my uncle Willie Mendoza, played bass. What was your childhood like? Growing up it was me and my sister, Judy Kay. We had lost my little sister, Jacqueline Marie. She died when she was six and I was eight. And it killed me. It killed a part of my soul. The day of her funeral, I went up and saw her in the casket and started crying. I just cried forever it seemed like. Then I remember they were bringing my mom out, my dad and my uncle were carrying her. My mom basically had a nervous breakdown. So they sent me to be with my aunt and uncle and my cousins, down in the swamps in Louisiana, for a while. It was a great distraction.
You began playing drums just as you hit your teens. My dad was a Shriner and they had a marching band, he was one of the drummers. My mom took us [to a parade] one time and we sat on the curb on main street. As they came closer the sound of the drums just filled my whole body. That piqued my interest. I went with my dad to a rehearsal in the basement of this Shriners club. And they were all old men – like in their thirties (laughs) – smoking cigars, drinking Scotch and telling dirty jokes. I listened to them play and practise all night, doing their cadences. At the end of the night, I picked my dad’s drumsticks up and played the exact same things I had heard. They were all impressed and my dad was impressed. That was obviously a big moment. That’s what prompted my dad to get a drum set for me. Just a few months later, your father uprooted the family and moved to Southern California… One of the reasons was my mom. She was sneaking out with my aunt Connie to Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa all the time. They loved dancing. My dad was a hard-working guy and had two jobs – he was a painter during the day and at night he was a Deputy Sheriff. He called Tulsa “this godforsaken place”. I don’t think he meant it. But we left for California with a tiny little trailer hitched to the car. He had a gig lined up in Santa Monica, but it fell through. My mom said, “Let’s go back – they all said you’d be right back just like everybody else.” And that pissed my dad off. So we stayed another day and sure enough he got a job at Santa Anita racetrack. We ended up moving to Pasadena. Were you always determined to be a professional musician? No, I was a baseball player, a pitcher. I was really good. For me, the drums were fun but it wasn’t as big a deal as baseball. Then this strange
A LIFE IN PICTURES
thing happened where I would be playing, working up a sweat, especially in the sun, and I would break out in hives. I was young and athletic, and it made me crazy. One day, I mowed the lawn, and went to get a haircut, and rode my bicycle up to the barber. While I was sitting in the chair, I started breaking out again. It got real bad, and I passed out. Not only did I pass out, but my lips swelled up massively, my ear lobes swelled up, my neck started to swell, my eyelids swelled shut. The barber panicked and called the paramedics. By the time they got there it had worn off. That led me to becoming a guinea pig for the doctors at UCLA, who were studying this condition, urticaria – they’d never seen it come on so violently and then disappear after 20 or 30 minutes. They were developing an antihistamine at the time and had me testing it. That was the thing that transitioned me from baseball to drums. Drums became the full-time passion. You grew up in the rock’n’roll era, but pretty soon you were hooked on jazz. Like every other teenager, I liked the songs on the radio at the time, doo-wop and early R&B. But then I met my buddies who were jazz guys, hardcore jazz snobs. My very best friend in life was Albert Stinson. He ended up playing [bass] with Miles Davis. Albert was my main partner and we’d go see music. I fell in love with Elvin Jones, big time. We’d see all these drummers – Shelly Manne, Irv Cottler – guys who lived in LA and would be in different places playing. My problem was there was another drummer named Mike Romero, a guy who lived around us, and he was just incredible. I thought I’ll never be as good as Mike, so why should I keep trying? I was ready to quit. But Albert said to me one time, “You’re going to be a great drummer someday.” Because he said that, I didn’t quit. He saved me and I stuck with it. Later, he got me my first real jazz gig with John Handy.
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He bangs the drums: Jim in focus.
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King of the beat: Jim Keltner, aged 17, with his first kit, Pasadena, California, 1959. What’s the equation?: Jim (back right) with MC Squared, circa 1968. Sticksman to the stars: on Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen Tour, 1970. “More tom-tom?”: recording John Lennon’s Walls And Bridges with (from left) Jesse Ed Davis, Eddie Mottau, Klaus Voormann, Keltner, Lennon and Shelly Yakus, The Record Plant, NY, 1974.
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pals (from left) Tom Petty, Jeff Lynne, Jim, Paul McCartney, Joe Walsh, Olivia and Dhani Harrison, Hollywood, 2009.
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The drum club: talking shop with Ringo Starr, 1989.
“Music is the greatest form of spirituality there is”: Jim takes it to the
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next level, London, 1971.
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”Bob wanted to not be a big deal”: with Dylan and Diane Coleman, recording the Saved album, 1980.
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“She’s always been my grounding”: with wife Cynthia in 2017.
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32 MOJO
Honouring George Harrison with old
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But fate intervenes and you join a Top 40 pop band, Gary Lewis & The Playboys… When I joined, I went from making $85 a week to $250 a week. First thing I did was buy a brand-new Corvette (laughs). But talk about fate. Gary changed my whole life. He comes into the music store where I work, and he just happens to be the son of my favourite entertainer in the world, Jerry Lewis. I loved Jerry – used to cut my hair like him for years. Suddenly I’m at his house in Bel Air once a week rehearsing. Playing with Gary, that put me on the path to the pop, rock world. You only lasted a year or so with Gary – at which point you got fired. I became really full of myself. I’m this young cute kid and I could be a little funny too – I was trying to be Jerry Lewis (laughs). So I would get all the attention. Pretty soon at the press conferences, I was getting too many questions. So I got fired. But that was a great lesson. A very important lesson in learning how to behave when you’re the sideman as opposed to the star.
had booked myself a flight to New York to do a record with Gábor Szabó and Lena Horne – and I wasn’t going to miss that for anything. I said to Delaney, I got to go do this thing – I can get a sub, I can get Jimmy Gordon, I can get anybody you want. And he said, “Nope – you’re the drummer.” That ticked me off. So I left. The next day when I was at the hotel in New York I got the call: “You don’t have to come back.” You bounced back, though, with Joe Cocker and Leon Russell on Mad Dogs & Englishmen. That seemed like an incredible circus.
star I worked with, but he was such a normal dude – he just wanted to play and hang. It was another stroke of good luck, through Clapton, that led you to John Lennon… I was staying at Eric’s house in Surrey. We had been recording in Barnes, in London at Olympic, and getting back really late. One morning the phone kept ringing and no one was answering – and for some crazy reason I decided to pick it up. It was Phil Spector and he wanted Eric to come play on a [Lennon] session. I didn’t want to wake Eric up. And so Spector just said, “Well do you want to come and play on John’s record?” And I didn’t know it was Imagine – it didn’t have a name yet. Couple days later I’m in the studio with John and Phil. The very first song I played on was Jealous Guy.
“I learned a great lesson in how to behave when you’re the sideman as opposed to the star.”
You soon fell into a studio scene in LA that, coincidentally, was filled with a bunch of your fellow Tulsans. When I met Leon Russell he said, “Oh, you’re an Okie too?” There was this whole Tulsa clan in LA, and they took me in and showed me what I should listen to and how to play. Being in that environment, I got to learn up close from the most incredible drummers: Hal Blaine, Earl Palmer, Chuck Blackwell. And then eventually Jimmy Gordon became kind of an idol of mine. I loved the feel and precision of his playing.
Playing with Cocker, this white version of Ray Charles, he was just on fire then. You had Leon as the musical director and all these great musicians and singers in the band. The reviews and the response was astonishing. It was incredible, but not sustainable either. The lifestyle took over pretty quickly and it got nuts.
In the late ’60s you joined up with Delaney & Bonnie – but they fired you too. We were scheduled to do some TV show and I
Clapton had really been enamoured of Delaney & Bonnie and he came in and basically became one of us. Eric was the first big English
You landed in England playing with Eric Clapton – the start of your ‘Sideman To The Stars’ career. Was that ever intimidating, working with someone who was considered ‘God’?
You got very close with Lennon and played on nearly all his albums until the end. John was so full of life and so full of energy in the studio. And, obviously, he was John Lennon so his songs were just killer. Being on the same page, loving what we were playing and hearing, that’s how the friendship was born. And I was very close with John. He was in our lives so strongly, me and my wife. It was like, How did this even happen? Everything happened so fast in those days, you know? When John took that break [in the mid ’70s] he partially did that to save his own marriage. He had gotten really out of hand – we all had. He had his son Sean and then him and Yoko made the Double Fantasy album without us – me and [guitarist] Jesse Ed Davis and [bassist] Klaus Voormann. But I have a letter that John sent, a mimeographed letter, we each got it, and he says, “Guys, we’re gonna get back together very soon. I want to make another record.” But he was gone not long after ➢
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Rhythm King: Jim Keltner, Drum Doctors, Los Angeles, March 21, 2022.
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“Dylan’s singing and I just started crying. I’m crying hard. And I’m thinking, ‘Don’t blow the take!’” ➣
that. You can’t imagine the frustration of knowing we could never make music again or just be around him. There was nobody like him. You developed a similarly close relationship with George Harrison, playing on all his records. Why do you think John and George – who could’ve played with anyone – stuck with you? I always felt that John and George were huge fans of Dylan, and huge fans of Ry Cooder and Randy Newman, and they knew my association with those guys. That was one of the things that worked in my favour. And, of course, in the process you also connected with Ringo Starr. Was that awkward initially since you were taking his place in a way? Going back to the ’60s, every time I would hear a Beatles record I would be amazed at the drumming. It was not powerful, it wasn’t precise, but it was still serving the music in an amazing way. That’s what I wanted to do. When I met Ringo, he embraced me, which I really appreciated. I didn’t want there to be a negative vibe. But we got close and talked
34 MOJO
constantly about drums and drumming. I remember Ringo telling me he was [naturally] left-handed and that’s what made him go for a fill in a different way. His time feel, where he felt the time, was the beauty of it. It’s interesting that although you’re obviously highly skilled, you’re not known as a technical player either. On one hand, I was affected by the guys who did have that wonderful technique and I wanted that. But on the other hand, I would hear someone like Ringo or Charlie Watts or – God bless him – Levon Helm play, and I would realise, it’s really about the music, and how you allow for the music to blossom. Maybe get out of the way. I did an almost systematic undoing of technique in my playing for many years. Leon Russell first brought you in to work with Dylan – cutting Watching The River Flow and When I Paint My Masterpiece – in 1971. What was that experience like? For me, at the time, Bob wasn’t that big of a deal. I had a sense that Bob liked not being a big deal. He wanted to not be a big deal. In the
control room, standing next to Bob, I felt comfortable enough to say something really stupid. I said something – unbelievably – like, “Bob, I hear you got a lot of kids” (laughs). I remember distinctly, he didn’t acknowledge it in any kind of way at all. I was thinking, “Why did I say that? Why did I say anything?” I learned my lesson with Bob to just be cool. How does one maintain a 50-year relationship with Bob Dylan? Bob is really particular about the people he plays with. He can tell if you’re listening to him, or just there, or playing for yourself. He has a trust in me and vice versa. You can’t play your very best without a certain amount of trust, otherwise you just go on automatic. And automatic is not a good thing, especially in the studio. What’s so unique to me about Bob is his vocal phrasing. His phrasing is not that of a rock singer or a crooner. He’s more from the jazz world than he is from anything. That’s the way I think of Bob. He told me he came up in those [New York City] clubs, used to do gigs with [jazz pianist] Cecil Taylor, that’s the kind of stuff he was exposed to. That’s one of the things that drew us together musically.
see if I’d like it and go out with him. Because of that I got to listen to a couple of his records before anybody, just hanging with Bob. With [Slow Train Coming] the instructions were for me to listen to the record, and then come up and see Bob in his office afterward. I sat down and started listening. There were all these songs about Jesus. It’s like, “What? What is he saying? What’s happened here?” Suddenly, I was crying like a baby. Crying uncontrollably listening to these songs. There was a box of
BEAT POETRY Five of Keltner’s fave deep cuts, by Keltner.
Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan Dance Wit Me
(FROM RUFUS FEATURING CHAKA KHAN, 1975)
“I never got credit on this song, because I was actually subbing for [Rufus] drummer André Fischer. The great Bobby Watson, the bass player, produced my drum track. It was this great groove thing. What all these songs have in common is that the guitar and bass is genius, fantastic stuff. So it made me play better.”
Ziggy Marley And The Melody Makers All Day All Night (FROM SPIRIT OF MUSIC, 1999)
“This is a Bob Marley composition. The band was me, Bob Marley’s keyboard guy Tyrone Downie, Chinna Smith on guitar, and Ziggy and his brothers Stephen and Julian. That day I learned how to play the one drop beat in a different way than I ever had. Listening to playback with Chinna, he looked up at me, grinned, and said, ‘Wicked, man.’”
Mavis Staples
Eyes On The Prize (FROM WE’LL NEVER TURN BACK, 2007)
Roger Kisby
You were there for Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid… When we did Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, that was such a moment. We were in the dark, looking at a big screen with the film showing, and Bob’s playing this song, with these changes, and those words. My God! Then, the fact that Katy Jurado, the Mexican actress, she’s got these big ol’ eyes like my mom, and her husband is this white guy, this sheriff, and he’s dying at the edge of the river. And Bob’s singing… and, man, I just started crying. I’m playing, but I’m crying hard. And I’m thinking, “Don’t blow it, don’t blow the take!” A few years later, I did Short People with Randy Newman. And I was in the same situation, but I was laughing instead of crying. I was hearing Randy say these words that had me cracking up, and I’m thinking, “Don’t ruin it, this is a good take!” You largely avoided touring for most of the ’70s, but ended up going on the road with Dylan for a couple years at the end of the decade during his Born Again period. What prompted that? I stayed off the road for all the obvious reasons – mainly I was working almost every day in the studio. With Bob, he asked several times for me. He never said in so many words, “Come on the road with me.” He’d say, “You want to come down and listen to the new record?” Maybe to
“This song is just an incredible use of space. That’s the genius of [album producer/guitarist] Ry Cooder. The way he played and Mike Elizondo played bass – really simple and pure – and then Mavis’s singing. I heard it and was – bam! – able to play it. It’s unusual to be able to do it quickly like that. But with Ry everything has to be quick (laughs).”
Eric Clapton
That’s No Way To Get Along (FROM CLAPTON, 2010)
“At the time, I was producing an album by Jerry Lee Lewis in one studio, and then going across the parking lot to another studio to record with Eric at night. This particular song lent itself to a New Orleans groove that I had tried before and just never worked. But, this time, everything that everybody was doing just hugged it real tight. I love listening to it.”
Jerry Lee Lewis Middle Age Crazy (FROM MEAN OLD MAN, 2010)
“This song always gets me. Jerry Lee’s singing is so beautiful and [multi-instrumentalist] Jon Brion is playing so much great stuff. The drums are nice – not perfect or cool, but just serving the song. Jerry Lee’s vocal and the whole essence of the record, it moves me every time.”
Kleenex sitting there – I don’t know if Bob knew I’d need it, but I went through that whole box. Later on, some real Christian friends of mine called it the anointing: “The anointing was on you.” I got up after the last song, walked upstairs – and I had never been into the room where he wrote – and opened the door and he’s sitting there typing. I just remember telling Bob, “Wherever you’re going or whatever you’re going to do, I want to go do it with you.” Sounds like you were profoundly affected. On the road, I’m being hit in the head every night with these songs, and you would’ve thought I’d want to be like Jesus, to be more like what he talked about. And I actually went the opposite way. But when that period was done and I got back to normal life, it had changed me. I had real feelings of connection, spiritually, that I know I didn’t have before that tour. I think this was fate. This was another one of those fateful things in my life that involved Bob Dylan. How many people can say that? Among the other big figures who’ve enlisted your services is Neil Young. You’ve done some great work with him over the years, particularly in the early-’90s where you and Booker T. & The M.G.’s backed him on tour. I always told Neil how much I loved Crazy Horse. I saw them play a couple times live and I was amazed at how they – with hardly any effort really, and not a great deal of facility – made his songs come alive in such a compelling, honest way. For me to be able to play with Neil, I just wanted to do that. In the studio we did a record that was very tame, [2000’s] Silver & Gold, but it had really cool songs. When I would hear things back, I’d think, “Oh I wish this was more like Crazy Horse” (laughs). But I found myself having a whole lot of fun playing with Neil live. And I realised playing with him was like playing with a jazz guy too. More than I would have thought. Remarkably, after six decades, you continue to be the go-to session drummer for a whole new generation of artists – people like Phoebe Bridgers, Jenny Lewis, Conor Oberst, Perfume Genius… The latest one was Lana Del Rey. I knew her name but didn’t know her music or anything. And my great grandkids, a few weeks ago when they were here, said, “Grandpa, who are you playing with now?” They love that I played with the guys in The Beatles – to them that’s a big deal. Anyway, I just mentioned Lana to them. “You played with Lana Del Rey? You played on Watercolor Eyes?” – that song is in the Euphoria TV show. And I don’t know Euphoria, but that’s one of the most popular shows for their generation. That day in the studio with Lana, I discovered she’s got one of those amazing voices. You don’t carry yourself like someone who’s 80. What’s your secret? Since I’m a kid and my little sister died, and everybody was trying to comfort me, people would say, “You just gotta pray and everything is going to be OK.” My aunties would say that, my mom – “Just pray, honey.” There’s never been a time when I sat down behind the drums where I didn’t say a little prayer. Never a big crying kind of prayer, just a little thank you for making this great. There was a long period in the studio where I would go, “God, help me to play better than I’ve ever played in my life today!” (laughs). For years, I never really believed it, it was just something I did. But as time went on, and the more I look back, the more I know God has answered every prayer I’ve ever had. I think you need to have a spiritual connection – and music is the greatest form of spirituality there is. M MOJO 35
Credit in here
And then there were four: Simple Minds looking to the future on Castlehill, Edinburgh, August 1981 (from left) Jim Kerr, Derek Forbes, Charlie Burchill, Mick MacNeil.
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N SEPTEMBER 25, 1982, imple Minds’ fi th album entered the K chart at umber the band’s irst Top record. It was titled New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) , an auspicious, slightly pretentious declaration o context, momentum, and intent there’s where we’ve been, here’s where we’re going. n previous albums I still elt we were a student band, says im Kerr. In the sense we’re still learning rom those who inspired us Maga ine, Bowie, oxy and so on, using base metals to get to our own thing. With New Gold Dream, it was like this is us now. These are our times. ne week later, littering ri e, a celestial union o iridescent melody, assertive rhythm and Kerr singing about the price o lost love and the attraction o ame , sashayed into the Top singles chart like a counter actual ’ s oxy Music that no had never le t. ix months earlier, their Top debut had promised you a miracle here now was the assured con irmation o imple Minds’ metamorphosis rom agitated art rock mis its into heralds o an aspirational new pop. oon enough, however, the sublime bowed to the ridiculous. aving pre aced their album’s release with some low key K gigs, by the time New Gold Dream charted, imple Minds were touring Australia and ew ealand. The ourney home included dates in Canada, with ancouver and Toronto bookending an eastward slog across the endless prairies o Alberta, askatchewan and Manitoba. The tour rom hell! chuckles drummer Mike gletree. There was a truck accident, one o the drivers broke his collarbone, my drums were strewn across the highway… ate ctober ound gletree in a askatchewan hotel room watching a documentary about the Ku Klux Klan a weird premonition o the subse uent
gig in a local student union hall. Because it was a alloween party, these people had turned up dressed as Ku Klux Klan, he says. We were basically in redneck country. im reaked out at the promoter et them the uck out o here.’ Bassist erek Forbes remembers grabbing the promoter by the throat. e was dressed as racula. is head’s down, he’s ashamed, people in the audience thinking Ku Klux Klan outfits were a good choice or a band with a black drummer. I says, ou’re an asshole.’ e says, ey I might be an asshole, but I’m the biggest asshole in Canada.’ In im Kerr’s recollection, the promoter later tried to make amends by driving the singer, guitarist Charlie Burchill and gletree across town in search o entertainment, only to be stopped by the police. Fortunately we weren’t carrying anything, but racula got hauled o . We’re le t by the side o the road in askatoon. That was one o my avourite tours. A ucking disaster, but riveting. odgy e uipment, dodgy trucks, a bus that was years out o date. It was a eart arkness eeling I we can get to Toronto, we’ll be saved.’ Toronto on ovember would be Mike gletree’s last act as a member o imple Minds. pon returning to the K, at a band meeting in ondon’s Columbia otel he was told he wouldn’t be on the orthcoming K tour. They said, We’re using Mel aynor rom now on. ere’s bucks and a ticket to cotland.’ gletree laughs. It was good natured because o me, y’know, I’m an easy going guy. And I loved the band. till do. It was the second time in a matter o months that gletree had been usurped by Mel aynor. uring the New Gold Dream recording sessions, producer eter Walsh identified the need or a drummer who worked uicker and more accurately . aving engineered aynor on a slew o Brit unk records by Beggar Co, Central ine and ight The World, Walsh knew he fitted that bill and more. In the ➢ MOJO 37
end, aynor played on five tracks to gletree’s three. Mike did the bulk o the groundwork, and Mel’s stepped in and taken the glory in the studio, says keyboardist Mick Mac eil. But once Mel was on the seat, it was obvious nobody was gonna beat that guy. e was like Muhammad Ali on drums. The Canadian debacle impelled an upgrade o the band’s components to a level commensurate with their new record’s gilded aura and next level com mercial status. Fundamentally, in Charlie Burchill’s estimation, we realised we need to get better live. Ironically, however, Mike gletree had played a pivotal role in re orienting imple Minds towards this brilliant uture. is tenure in the band lasted barely eight months, similar to his predecessor Kenny yslop, who succeeded ounder member Brian Mc ee in August and played on the band’s break through hit, only to be sacked shortly a terwards. et i yslop’s brie period in imple Minds proved significant he sourced the ri that begat romised ou A Miracle rom a ew ork Kiss FM megamix gletree’s was even more so. uring his time, imple Minds utilised a brand new tonal palette, pro oundly shaped by the drummer’s particular style, rom which they created New Gold Dream, a imple Minds album unlike any be ore or since and one with which the band are still reckoning today.
Virgina Turbett (2), Tom Sheehan, Peter Anderson
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A I ,T I T unemployment total in the K was , , one in eight o the population, and the highest figure since the s. That same month, Britain went to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Meanwhile, on a arm ust outside the Fi e village o ewburgh, imple Minds began work on a new album. I call New Gold Dream our Sgt. Pepper, says erek Forbes, because the arm in ewburgh had a cook. o you boys like mushrooms ’ Aye’. K, we’re having mushroom pi a tonight.’ Whooft! Would you like some mushroom tea as well Try it!’ o we tried it. very night was mush room this, mushroom that. And the penny dropped. I was in the shower ollowing a bubble o steam around. That was us, the whole album. The chemistry was there. espite, or in reaction to, the o ten grim political landscape, was a year o trans ormative energy or bands orged in the post punk cauldron. Also in April, ew rder unveiled their single Temptation, an exultant synthesis o machine precision and raw emotion, while The Associates, high concept pop mavericks rom undee, made a bravura entry into the Top with the head spin ning arty Fears Two. With romised ou A Miracle heading in the same direction, maybe it was time or imple Minds to paint in di erent colours. In the barn at ewburgh, rom his vantage point on top o erek Forbes’s x Ampeg speaker, im Kerr was keeping his eyes and ears wide open. It was springtime, cotland at its most dreamy version o Avalon, with the iver Tay below us… and, I have to say, uite a lot o amphetamine. Because we wanted to play hours a day! I had this huge ghetto blaster and would record everything. o one really came in with a song. What have you got ’ I’ve got this bassline.’ We would play with it or hours, like Krautrock, going
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round in a loop, the mood would be ama ing. Then somebody would change a chord wow, what’s that ! And I’d go back to the tape at night and take notes. There’s this bit here…’ The songs were collages that bit by bit got edited down. It was a very home made language, there was no real writer. ven the drummer would come in and start with the groove. Mike gletree was working as a driver and guard or ecuricor in Kilmarnock when he got the call rom Bruce Findlay, imple Minds’ manager, who had also managed gletree’s previous band, the upert ine produced sophisto prog trio Ca ac ues. Accepting Findlay’s o er to audition, he sought the opinion o a musician riend. I’d heard o imple Minds, because Bruce was managing them, saw them a couple o times in , but I didn’t really know much about them. My riend said, imple Minds They’re ama ing! ou got an audition That’s unbelievable!’ In Kilmarnock’s habby oad studio, imple Minds watched as gletree played along to their two most recent albums, Empires And Dance and Sons And Fascination. Charlie said it was a ormality, ust to make sure I could still play, says gletree. I really liked what Brian had done on those records. Trance rock, very power ul, tribal dr umming. I thought, I could do that, but make it a ier, unkier. Funky trance! They thought it could work. At ewburgh, their isolated locale and the personnel change as well as the psychedelic menu brought resh per spectives, calmer rhythms, ethereal textures. We started finding a lot o tracks were uite gentle, says Burchill. Mike was a le t handed player, who played his kit right handed uite an unorthodox way o playing the hi hat. Because he was new, we didn’t really have any history there. o he was ust playing what he was hearing. For Mick Mac eil, imple Minds’ recent rapid turnover o drummers was becoming a source o anxiety. In the pre MI I era, his plate was ull enough dealing with multiple keyboards and pedals, without also worrying whether this latest incumbent was keeping time. Mike gletree really did lay it back, and pulled the whole thing into a cooler space where he wasn’t playing so much. We never uestioned whether it was su ficient or not, it ust fitted per ectly. Also, says Burchill, we started realising we could actually write songs! p to that point, we never saw any o the albums as having songs on them. They were all collections o instrumental parts. im did an ama ing ob o throwing all that together. is overview was great. ATC I T WB AM A I Kerr was eter Walsh, a year old south ondoner schooled in the engineer’s cra t by hil Wainman at topia tudios in rimrose ill, where he’d recorded and mixed the likes o eatwave, tevie Wonder, Boomtown ats’ I on’t ike Mondays and, in late , a reworking o imple Minds’ weat In Bullet. A ter success ully delivering romised ou A Miracle in uick order and into the charts, Walsh was now tasked by
Good news from the new world: (clockwise from above) Kerr puts a brave face on 1982’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’ Canadian tour; in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh (from left) MacNeil, Forbes, Burchill, new drummer Kenny Hyslop and Kerr, August 27, 1981; Kerr on-stage in 1981; Burchill and MacNeil, responsible for Simple Minds’ guitar/keyboards special relationship, on-stage at Tiffany’s, Glasgow, November 19, 1982.
irgin ecords with his first album production. e noted that unlike romised ou A Miracle, which was more or less completely written and arranged in advance, the ewburgh material was very much in development, with no lyrics, apart rom the sinister Talking eads creep o King Is White And In The Crowd, which had eatured on a February BBC adio session or Kid ensen. There was a big, open fireplace, says Walsh. o im would be tending the fire, as it were. e’d be making comments about what he liked. e’s involved in the discussion but not actively per orming. The band were in ront o us, and he and I were sitting on so as. Kind o directing it. Walsh was particularly struck by the relationship between Charlie Burchill and Mick Mac eil. In a more conventionally structured band, the guitar and keyboards might behave as virtuosic rivals, competing or the listener’s attention. In imple Minds, however, the combination was so sel e acing it was o ten unclear who was playing what. The way the keyboards and the guitar sat in the same space was respect ul o each other. Their interaction was great.
A ter our weeks in Fi e, imple Minds moved to irgin’s Townhouse tudios in west ondon to begin recording. They brought with them a compilation o the arm instrumentals, recorded on Kerr’s ghetto blaster which compressed the music around the bass drum, lending a pulsing ambience. In ormed by his grounding in club music, Walsh was determined to retain that characteristic. is approach was also shaped by watching the band live in Belgium earlier in the year. The beat and the power I was blown away. I thought i we can capture that excitement by playing live on tape it would be very special. o, in the bass and drums in particular, I was a ter a very precise articulation o what we’d rehearsed. A ter our days, only two songs had backing tracks. In a ew, we couldn’t get through it to the end, says Walsh. And that’s a problem, i you’re recording on tape, and you want to get a live eeling. There’s a di erence between live and recording. Maybe Mike had a bit o red light ever. The last thing I wanted was to get a new drummer in, but I remember a certain amount o rustration. im went We need to work aster on this.’ nter Mel aynor with his big bag o drums. Accounts di er over the whys and where ores o gletree’s sidelining. Although the drummer acknowledges eeling uncom ortable in the glass cage environment o the studio, he saw the time issue as a red herring. I thought it was going pretty good, but ete liked Mel’s sound, and him and eter had a working relationship. I think ete really ➢ MOJO 39
wanted to get him in the band. So Mel basically just played the grooves that I’d been doing… Because the grooves weren’t the problem. It was the sound Peter wanted that he said he wasn’t getting. It wasn’t a subterfuge. It was an agreement for the good of the band and the album – and I agreed as well.” Beyond dispute is the fact that Gaynor nailed the parts right away, as directed by Walsh and Ogletree. The two drummers even played together, on what became the album’s euphoric title track: sat opposite each other, Gaynor on the left, Ogletree the right. Between them, amid the almighty noise filling the oot high Townhouse stone room (where Phil Collins’s In The Air Tonight was recorded), stood Derek Forbes, thundering his cyclical bassline to infinity and beyond. ne o the best moments in a studio I’ve ever had, he says. The two o them, looking at each other. What a sound! What a brilliant sound!” With backing tracks approaching completion, an unexpected guest appeared at the Townhouse to check out the acilities. We didn’t know who erbie ancock was, admits Burchill. Well, Mike would have, and Pete Walsh. But the rest of us knew nothing. We just said, ‘Do you fancy having a play?’ Because they were saying, ‘This guy’s amazing!’” Suitably awestruck at meeting the legendary jazz pianist, Walsh set aside the three remaining tracks on the song Hunter And The Hunted and pointed Hancock towards Mick MacNeil’s Oberheim B synthesi er. As soon as ancock began per ectly essaying a solo, Mac eil knew he was in the presence o greatness. I think he heard the track once, he never even asked for a run through, he just went up and played the thing. It was fantastic. I was frightened of the guy, I gotta say. And then I’m just sitting about for the next month, thinking, ‘Shit, I’ve got to learn how to play that now.’” A ter three awless takes, ancock bade them arewell. Thanks for letting me drop by guys. Hope I didn’t ruin your album.”
JIM KERR is a morning person. Nonetheless, it’s still impressive to see him in the Hôtel Le Louis Versailles Château’s breakfast room looking quite so fresh, a mere 12 hours after leading Simple Minds on-stage at the Seine Musicale auditorium in Paris. Kerr’s enjoying the reactivated 40 Years Of Hits tour, two years after being halted by the pandemic. Yet he ascribes his energy to anticipation at the imminent release of new LP, Direction Of The Heart. “We did not sit on our thumbs during Covid,” he smiles, nodding towards Charlie Burchill, Kerr’s creative partner throughout Simple Minds’ lifespan. Until relatively late in the process, a 24-song double album was planned. “But then,” Burchill says, “we decided no – one LP, and we’re keeping it to nine tracks. You need to put your cards on the table and say: ‘We think these ones are good.’” Work got underway during 2019, in Glasgow, where Kerr was living close to his terminally ill father. “For six months, I spent every day there. But my dad wouldn’t have me just sitting around. He’s like, ‘You gotta work.’ So Charlie came over, we started writing. Fortunately, my dad didn’t suffer long. He felt he’d lived a great life. Also, he was teaching me for what’s coming. It was great getting his thoughts on things.” Album opener Vision Thing emerged from this emotionally charged situation, albeit not without a critique from Kerr Snr. “I realise I’m writing about things he’s told me, and I’m getting excited about this song,” says Jim. “And he’s shouting: ‘The noise! Fucking turn it down!’ I’m like, (mutters) ‘I’m writing a song about this cunt…’” Kerr laughs. “But the song, it’s so celebratory.” When the first 2020 lockdown eased, Kerr and Burchill resumed recording, initially in Hamburg, and then in Taormina in Sicily, where the hotel that Kerr owns was sitting empty. “We moved all the gear in and it was like The Shining, just me and
him. ‘Don’t touch the peanuts on the bar Charlie!’ We recorded a ton of stuff, had a great old time, just ourselves, being creative.” Other standouts include the JG Ballard-inspired Human Traffic, with its ear-catching cameo from Sparks’ Russell Mael, and First You Jump, a classic Simple Minds anthem with sky-scraping Burchill guitar heroics. Direction… is disconcertingly energetic. Burchill chuckles at MOJO’s suggested descriptor “Valhalla disco” – but says he’ll take it. “We wanted to defy where we are,” says Kerr, “both in life and in music. Y’know, we’re getting on, we should be reflective… To hell with that. The greatest thing for Simple Minds at this stage of the game is to feel that vitality. There’s something visceral still there.” Direction Of The Heart is released on October 21, on BMG.
ORK MOVED TO THE MANOR, VIRGIN’S residential facility in Oxfordshire, for overdubs and Jim Kerr’s vocals. Until that point, an album’s worth of music had been recorded without the singer committing a single word to tape. Songs had working titles – Arpeggio Riff became Colours Fly And Catherine Wheel; The Low Song became Hunter And The Hunted; Festival Riff became New Gold Dream itself – but the album’s specific character had yet to be defined. The process entailed a certain amount of jeopardy, primarily for the singer. There’d always be a lyric in my head, a melody, says Kerr. But I really had to match the atmosphere of what I perceived in the music. After three or four weeks, these tracks are sounding monumental. I started to have the fear of the penalty taker, because you’ve got that long walk out to the mike, everyone’s in the room: is he gonna put the ball in the net or sky it over the bar?” As Burchill notes, however, Kerr’s omnipresence during the sessions meant the singer saw the big picture clearer than anyone else, and understood exactly what was re uired. is voice had changed, he’d got more confident, I think because there was space in the music – a lot easier to sing across.” The predominant mood, almost palpable amid the humid vistas of Someone Somewhere In Summertime or Hunter And The Hunted’s stately processional, was sweet, romantic melancholy, the music permanently on the verge of immaculate ascent. When finally revealed, Kerr’s lyrical ga e had shi ted decisively, rom previous albums’ alienated third person cut ups to first person entreaties, evoking a universal oneness. The evangelical subtext bubbled over on the title track vocal, delivered in late July at the eleventh hour as Walsh lobbied Virgin for extra time. We were meant to finish on the Friday, and we had a estival in weden, says Kerr. Between the soundcheck and the gig, I had a bath. Listening to the track, I thought, ‘That ‘new gold dream’ chant I had a while back… That’s it!’ When I’d heard the stuff at the Townhouse, the feeling in the room was ecstatic. That ecstasy in the sound brought these ecstatic lyrics. ‘Worldwide on the widest screen’. I was trying to say: we’ve arrived.”
Christie Goodwin, Courtesy Peter Walsh, Getty (2), Avalon
➣ The beat goes on: JIm Kerr and Sarah Brown fronting Simple Minds, Zenith Arena, Lille, May 2, 2022.
ORTY YEARS AFTER THAT Archimedes moment, New Gold Dream continues to ripple through the lives of all its participants. MOJO meets Jim Kerr and Charlie Burchill the morning after the current Simple Minds play Paris on the 40 Years Of Hits Tour, a two-and-half hour celebration delayed for two years by the pandemic. In Paris, New Gold Dream is the most-represented album, with five songs. The remaining our are guaranteed to air on August 13, when the entire record will be performed, in sequence, in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens, to benefit the IC F For Children In kraine appeal. New Gold Dream occupies sacred space within the Simple Minds community. It managed the rare eat o taking a band to a whole new audience without alienating the old one. Subsequent albums, most notably Sparkle In The Rain and Once Upon A Time, sold more but are loved less. Kerr and Burchill are taking great lengths to do their landmark record ustice. Burchill, in particular, the band’s de acto musical director, has been diligently working out the logistics o taking st century technology, and personnel, back in time. “I’m going to sit down with Cherisse [Osei, drums] and get orensic on that drum area. The keys are the keys. The bass, ed [Grimes]’s got that nailed. Obviously the guitar, I can sort out. The only thing we can’t do is get im sounding like years o age! He laughs. It’s so easy to mess up an album like that live. We could never do it properly with Mel, funnily enough. Because live, Mel would ust go into Mel’. And he wasn’t Mel’ on New Gold Dream. So we had to always keep a lid on that.
Miracle workers: (clockwise from top left) New Gold Dream producer Peter Walsh; Simple Minds in 1982, with drummer Mike Ogletree (second from right); in 1984, with Ogletree’s replacement Mel Gaynor (far left), “like Muhammad Ali on drums”; surprise New Gold Dream guest soloist Herbie Hancock.
erek Forbes and Mick Mac eil are above-averagely interested in their old pals’ legacy curation. Forbes still plays New Gold Dream material with his band The ark. We sound more like imple Minds than they do now! he grins. New Gold Dream is a masterpiece. The album’s rookie producer, meanwhile, ourished in its wake and continues to en oy a success ul career. eter Walsh’s long association with cott Walker began, in , directly because o Walker’s appreciation for New Gold Dream. In , Walsh presented an Abbey oad Institute mix workshop using the original multi track tapes a kind o new gold wet dream or M tech heads. It’s very dear to me, he says. The unny thing is, I’m so much more experienced as a producer and engineer, I could probably do a much better mix o it now. But I don’t know i it would be as good. As or Mike gletree, he took his one way ticket back to cotland and kept on going. e subse uently oined Fiction Factory, scoring a K Top single with Feels ike eaven, a whole months before Simple Minds achieved similar with Don’t You Forget About Me . Today he’s the artist in residence at the Meadowlark Motel in orth Carolina’s reat moky Mountains, singing traditional Scottish and Irish songs – a remit that does, he admits, extend to granting requests for New Gold Dream unplugged. We created a new space, a new sound or imple Minds, gletree says. ne that everybody loved. M MOJO 41
They’ve got your number: Manfred Mann, 1964 (from left) Mike Hugg, Mike Vickers, Manfred Mann, Tom McGuinness, Paul Jones.
MOJO EYEWITNESS
MANFRED MANN DOOWAH-DIDDY THE SIXTIES! Formed as the British Blues boomed in ’62, the Anglo-South African R&B hit squad took the decade by the horns, wailing the theme to Ready Steady Go!, being the first British Invasion group to score a US Number 1 and forging ahead despite the ’66 departure of vocalist Paul Jones. But as the ’60s drew to a close, not even another tranche of Top 10 hits could stop the rot. “The biggest illusion in pop music is that all you have to do is succeed,” recall the group. “You actually have to succeed over and over…”
Paul Jones: I was studying English at Oxford and I heard T-Bone Walker’s T-Bone Blues. Everything changed! I dropped out – my dad wasn’t at all pleased – and I started going to Ealing Jazz Club to see Alexis Korner. This was early ’62, incredibly exciting. Alexis was a serial encourager of young musicians, and we would cluster at the front. There was me, Mick Jagger… he’d point at one of us and we’d jump up and sing. I was going under the name ‘PP Jones’, after BB King and with ‘PP’ standing for my real name, Paul Pond. Manfred Mann: I moved to London from Johannesburg in 1961. I’d been playing in a jazz trio and my father made the joke: “Manfred is going to London. Apparently they are short of musicians.” In summer ’62 Graham Bond had a residency at Clacton Butlin’s and he asked me ➢
Jeremy Fletcher/Redferns
Interviews: LOIS WILSON • Photograph by JEREMY FLETCHER
MOJO 43
Mann alive: (clockwise from left) Vickers, McGuinness and Jones tear it up; Ready Steady Go! presenter Cathy McGowan and Jones, 1965; the new model Manfreds in 1967 (from left) Hugg, Klaus Voorman, Mann, McGuinness, Mike D’Abo; (inset) hit 45s.
“THEY SAID, ‘WE’LL SUE YOU.’ I CALLED THEIR BLUFF…” Paul Jones
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to do the weekends. Mike Hugg was playing vibraphone and we hit it off. After summer we put together a jazz group, the Mann-Hugg Quartet. At some point we became the MannHugg Blues Menn, then the Mann-Hugg Blues Brothers.
Mike Hugg: Graham Bond was playing with Alexis Korner and took me down to see them and I was blown away. He had these jazz musicians, Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, but they were also doing blues. We decided to start doing that in our set alongside the jazz, so now we needed a singer. PJ: Manfred and Mike asked the Marquee to recommend “a shouter.” They recommended me. We did our first gigs on the south coast, every Tuesday at the Bassett Hotel in Southampton, then soon after Wednesdays at Le Disque A Go! Go! in Bournemouth, then Thursdays in Portsmouth. We did Muddy Waters, Ray Charles, Jimmy Witherspoon, Lightnin’ Slim’s Rooster Blues.
Getty (6), Shutterstock
Dave Richmond: Those early days weren’t glamorous. I used to drive Paul and me to gigs in my three-wheeler Reliant van. We auditioned for Pye and Decca and they turned us down, then EMI’s John Burgess signed us. MM: John Burgess changed our name to Manfred Mann. I found that really uncomfortable. I spent a weekend coming up with other names: The Driving Wheels, The Government… John Burgess wouldn’t have it. PJ: We did our first single, Why Should We Not? [released in July ’63], then I wrote Cock-A-Hoop [released in November ’63]. I was very influenced by Bo Diddley’s bragging blues. We performed it
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on [TV show] Ready Steady Go! and they asked us if we would write their signature tune. They said, “It’s got to have a countdown.” We had a gig that night and wrote it in the van on the way there. That was 5-4-3-2-1. DR: I was kicked out soon after. I was annoying the band. My playing was too busy, I was too loud. Manfred said, “We won’t be needing you again.” It was a jolt. Tom McGuinness: In early ’63 I was in The Roosters with Eric Clapton and we opened for Manfred Mann at the Marquee. I knew Paul – we’d tried to get a band together in Oxford in ’61 but failed. When Dave went, they got me in. They said, “Will you promise to play simply?” As I was a guitarist and had never played bass before, that wasn’t difficult. PJ: We were booked in to do our first tour in February ’64 with Joe Brown & The Bruvvers headlining, and Johnny Kidd & The Pirates and The Crystals also on the bill. We were hired as the backing band for the groups that needed one. When 5-4-3-2-1 hit Number 5 in January we got our own spot, but still backed The Crystals. TM: It went crazy, girls crying “Paul! Paul!” and chasing us and trying to cut off bits of our hair. MM: Having that first hit was the most exciting moment of my career. But the biggest illusion in pop music is that all you have to do is succeed. You actually have to succeed over and over. We
naively thought, “We’ve written one hit, we’ll just write another.” So we wrote Hubble Bubble (Toil And Trouble) and it only hit Number 11 [in April 1964], and within a few months our audience started to crumble away. Such is the short-lived nature of pop. PJ: Because it didn’t make the Top 10, EMI brought in the unbreakable rule, that we never got to write another single. We had to get in proper songwriters. I immediately went to my record collection. I had The Exciters’ Do Wah Diddy which I loved, and we started doing it in our live set and when John Burgess asked us if we had anything to record, we played him it, and he said immediately, “That’s a big record”. MH: When Do Wah Diddy Diddy hit Number 1 in the US [in September 1964] we went over to tour, in November ’64. We were on a bill with Peter & Gordon as headliners, and before each show the fans brought us presents, soft toys, sweets, that kind of thing. When we arrived in LA to do [US TV show] Shindig!, on the first morning I drew the hotel curtains – Steve McQueen was getting into his car below me. That was something. TM: When we got to New York it was my birthday – we went to see John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus turned up. We hung out with the Dixie Cups and they played us Otis Redding records. The only downside was when the promoters decided to add The Exciters to the bill as they were local. They sang Do Wah Diddy in the first half of the show and we did it in the second. We apologised to them afterwards. MM: [In October 1965] Paul said he was leaving and I thought, “That’s the end of everything.” MH: EMI also let us go and signed Paul as a solo artist, and there was fear, because then we had no singer and no label. PJ: A Bob Dylan obsession had taken over the
If you gotta go: during the Mann-Jones “brittle” period (from left) Vickers, Mann, McGuinness, Jones, Hugg, 1965.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Paul Jones (vocals, handclaps, harmonica) ●
Manfred Mann (keyboards) ●
band. We did With God On Our Side, and it wasn’t like I didn’t like Bob Dylan, but I wanted to do music of black origin, and I felt as the lead singer I should be entitled to choose. I said, “I’m going.” They said, “We’ll sue you.” I called their bluff and they asked me to stay until they found a replacement. It ended up being nine months. In that time we did another Dylan cover, If You Gotta Go, Go Now, which made Number 2, and then Pretty Flamingo which got to Number 1, and which I did not like. TM: Things got brittle between Manfred and Paul. I found myself in the position of the child of a divorcing couple. Manfred would say, “Would you ask Paul if…?” blah blah, and Paul would say, “Tell Manfred that’s fine, but also tell him…” Then Pretty Flamingo got to Number 1, and then it was how are we going to replace Paul, find a new label and still have Number 1 hits? Mike D’Abo: I was playing keyboards in A Band Of Angels. We did a lot of Beatles covers, but I’d written Invitation, and the band got me to sing lead on it. When we performed it on [TV show] A Whole Scene Going, Manfred Mann were also performing and saw the playback. Manfred, not giving anything away, asked for my phone number. MH: We saw Mike singing and knew he was the one. He had a great voice, and as a bonus resembled Paul a little bit.
Mike Hugg (drums, vibes, keyboards) ●
Dave Richmond (bass) ●
Tom McGuinness (bass, guitar) ●
Mike D’Abo (vocals, keyboards) ●
in, I saw this very cool, incredibly good-looking man. I thought Manfred was about to say this is our new singer, but he said, “This is our new bassist, Klaus Voorman.” [Vickers left in September ’66 and McGuinness moved to guitar]. Klaus Voorman: I was working at an advertising agency for guitarist Mac McGann. He was a friend of Tom McGuiness’s and recommended me. I went for a rehearsal at Manfred’s. We started doing some songs and at the end I said, “Am I in the band?” and he said, “Yes, yes”, and that was it. Me and Mike, being the new boys, bonded. He has a good soul. MD: In late ’66, the Daily Mirror put a photo of me and Paul shaking hands with Manfred in the middle, looking like a boxing match referee, on their front cover. It was very much, the gloves were off. Paul put out High Time which went to Number 4 then I’ve Been A Bad Bad Boy which went to Number 5, and we signed to Fontana and did Bob Dylan’s Just Like A Woman which got to Number 10, so it was Round 1 to Paul Jones. PJ: Except, I was still with John Burgess and he wanted me to do more songs like Pretty Flamingo. He also recommended a manager/agent, who recommended a music director… I had more people telling me what to do than I had when I was in Manfred Mann. MD: I was told my job was to keep the hits coming, so it was pop ditties: Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James got to Number 2, Ha! Ha! Said The Clown, Number 4, The Mighty Quinn,
MD: I had to pass an audition and a screen test and record a number of songs with them. Eventually Manfred invited me to his house, and as I walked Klaus Voorman (bass)
Number 1. A band needs a galvanising force. I was writing songs like Handbags And Gladrags and I wanted to be Otis Redding, but having just joined I was never going to get much say. MH: By the end, the live shows had stopped and we were only getting together in the studio to record hit singles. Manfred and I were doing TV commercials and had done the soundtrack for [1968 kitchen sink drama] Up The Junction, and we put a band together just for fun – Emanon, which is No Name backwards. We decided this is what we want to do, and that evolved into [jazz rockers] Manfred Mann Chapter Three. MM: Manfred Mann were a great pop band but we had no credibility. By [May 1969 single] Ragamuffin Man, I was frustrated. It got in the Top 10 but I needed to do something different. MD: Manfred came up to me in a TV studio in Holland and said he wanted to go back to his jazz roots. I was delighted. I was already writing, producing and recording at Immediate. TM: We did Ragamuffin Man on the Eamonn Andrews show and me and Eamonn demolished the best part of a bottle of brandy in the green room after. Then I got in a taxi, thinking “That’s it, I’ll have to get a proper job now.” Less than a year later I was in the chart with McGuinness Flint. MM: I formed Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in 1971 and am still touring. The Manfreds [with Jones, D’Abo, Hugg and McGuinness] are doing their thing. Sometimes I get asked if I’m going to be playing a date they are doing, and sometimes they get asked about the lyrics to [1976 Earth Band smash] Blinded By The Light, but it’s a slight irritant. What’s important is, there’s a good M relationship between us all. For Manfreds tour dates go to themanfreds.com. For Manfred Mann’s Earth Band tour dates go to manfredmann.co.uk.
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MOJO 45
Credit in here
Credit in here
All dolled up: New York Dolls (from left) Arthur Kane, David Johansen, Johnny Thunders (part obscured), Sylvain Sylvain (in hat) and Jerry 46 MO JO dressing room, Nolan, Paradiso Amsterdam, December 7, 1973.
MOJO 47
Getty
Credit in here
Getty (4), Shutterstock
N JUNE 13, 1972, THE New York Dolls played the first o Tuesday nights at the scar Wilde oom in the Mercer Arts Center, on Broadway West rd treet. tretching into ctober, this residency established the band as the premier new group in Manhattan, and created a meeting place or the outsiders who attended Max’s Kansas City and peopled the ast illage Warholite scenesters, pop stars, drag ueens, designers, disa ected teens, what writer Alan Betrock called the olls’ nouveau reakish bisexual audience . This interview with olls singer avid ohansen covers their story between the start o that residency and the release o their first album in uly . The subse uent down all o the group has been much emphasised in the intervening five decades, yet in the summer o ’ the olls struck many as a power ul restatement o rock’n’roll verities namely that songs should be short, attitudinal and exciting, played by a young group they were all aged between and who re ected their place and their time. Fusing Chuck Berry via The olling tones with ’ s girl group harmonies, chord changes and inter ections, the olls sounded like their ast illage neighbourhood an urban petri dish o cheap rents, plenti ul thri t stores and colour ul characters. As ohansen tells M today, ince the ’ s with the beatniks, the ast illage had been incrementally moving along, and wound up at this spot, in , and the rest o the country was still in the ’ s. In and early , the olls stood alone. ohansen was inuenced by anis oplin, Mitch yder and out there art troupe The Cockettes, while guitarists ylvain ylvain and ohnny Thunders’s
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East Village people: (clockwise from above) Dolls (from left) Billy Murcia, Thunders, Johansen, Kane and Sylvain, October 30, 1972; Ridiculous Theatrical Company founder Charles Ludlam; Johansen gets lippy, 1973; Janis Joplin (1967): David was “crazy” about her; Johansen and Jayne County share a bottle; big influence Mitch Ryder, circa 1967.
thri t store cross dressing chic placed them at the cutting edge o ashion. The look brought them attention both positive and negative while the olls were heterosexual, they looked like they cared less what you thought they were. In the spirit o the time, they en oyed playing with the possibilities o what a man could look like and what a man could be, and i that meant wearing women’s clothes, so what evertheless, a wider American public would prove less receptive to those ambiguities. In these early days, however, success was not the goal. aving un was. Catching a show at Max’s Kansas City in anuary , the drama critic te an Brecht the son o playwright Bertholt noted the group’s curious innocence The olls are ust that real dolls nice, pretty, gentle, riendly, clean youngsters, nothing more except that avid is intelligent and a good perormer or the public , nothing else. et darkness had already touched them original drummer Billy Murcia choked to death in ovember on the group’s first trip to ondon a tragic and shocking event. Following the deaths o ohnny Thunders in , drummer erry olan in , bassist Arthur Killer’ Kane in and ylvain in , avid ohansen is now the last o the first five olls. Although recovering rom a recent illness, he’s in good spirits and warms to en uiries about the roots o his band and its early impact. And as he reveals, more olls related activity is a oot. A orthcoming documentary by Martin corsese will o er an overview o ohansen’s years as an iconic American per ormer.
used to put on these great, eclectic kind of shows, you could see Miles Davis and The Who, there was a lot happening there. I’d been in bands in high school. I wanted to be in a band, and make music. I used to work for this guy at this shop called Matchless in St Mark’s, Lohr Wilson. He used to say, “Ah, you’re not gonna do anything, you’ll never do anything.”I was kind of like his slave, and I think that gave me the impetus, you know, I’ll show you. Everyone in the Dolls had a kind of musical speciality. A fandom speciality. Syl was a T. Rex kind of guy, Arthur liked Sky Saxon and The Seeds, John [Genzale/Thunders] liked the MC5, I was crazy about Janis Joplin. I can’t remember what [original drummer] Billy [Murcia]’s thing was.
It’s 50 years since you started your residency at the Mercer. How did it come about? Well, I knew a guy called Eric Emerson. He had this band, Magic Tramps, a gypsy violin kind of band, and he told me he was gonna play at this new place, the Mercer Arts Center in a room called The Kitchen – Nam June Paik had videos in there, that kind of business – and I said, “Yeah, I’d like to play there with you.” So we opened for him, and the manager of the place – I think his name was Al Lewis – says, “I want you guys to play again.” I guess he was impressed by… I don’t know what. So anyway, we played again, and I went into his office to get the 30 dollars or whatever it was, and he asked if we would we like to play on a weekly basis in the Oscar Wilde room – I think they had five rooms. So that was that. What was the Oscar Wilde room actually like? It wasn’t that big. It had very tall ceilings, there was a stage and a little area in front where you could dance, and then there was like bleacher seating that went back up to the ceiling. That’s what I recall, anyway. It wasn’t huge, but you could comfortably fit a hundred or 200 people in there. So is that where you built your audience? Yeah. There was a lot of people on the street in the East Village who had, ah, artistic pursuits: dress designers, actors, playwrights, everything. I think that room, when we played there, was somewhere they could come together and meet each other, rather than just observing each other on the street. It became a scene where people could network, make business, stuff like that. Was there a gay element to that? Yeah, but, you know, people didn’t use the word ‘gay’ so much in those days. People were just people. If someone was outrageously gay, you wouldn’t say that person was gay, you might say they were fantastic, maybe. Gay wasn’t a part of the lexicon.
So you weren’t typifying people. Did you play with Jayne County as well? Sure, we used to put on all kinds of shows there. Eventually we moved to the Sean O’Casey Theatre, the “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest room”, we used to call it, because that’s what was running there, the play. When we moved there, we started putting on longer shows, with like five bands, but at the Mercer, people would come in and open for us. I know we played with Wayne, we were good friends with her. Where did the Dolls get their sense of style from? Was it each member bringing something, or was it something in the air at the time? Well, both. I mean, we noticed each other because of that, the way we would dress on the street. Essentially that was how it was when we met. It wasn’t like we were trying to be outrageous, or anything. Going back a bit, you were from Staten Island? What is the relationship of somewhere like Staten Island to Manhattan? Depends where on Staten Island you’re talking about. The area I come from is called the North Shore, it’s close to the ferry, the skyline is there across the bay, so it’s a bit more cosmopolitan, more Democrat, whereas the South Shore is what we used to call the ass-end of Staten Island. It’s hard to explain what it’s like, but you really wouldn’t want to hang out there. Provincial. But where I lived, you could get on the ferry for a nickel and be in Manhattan in 25 minutes. All the Dolls came from outside Manhattan, didn’t they? Do you think that made Manhattan special for you, that when you got there you could make it your playground? I guess. I don’t know. I had been living in Manhattan for a while before I met any of the other guys in the Dolls. I’d been through this, for want of a better word, hippy metamorphosis, the psychedelic scene, going to the Fillmore, they
So what was your inspiration for wanting to form a band in the first place? I always liked rock’n’roll. I have five siblings, two of them are older, and when I showed up, rock’n’roll was playing. We used to go to the Murray the ‘K’ show, you could see the show all day if you wanted to, and the person who got me was Mitch Ryder. They gave the bands five minutes, and Mitch Ryder would come on and in five minutes he’d do three or four monster songs. At the end of it, he’d have no shirt on, he was soaking, sweat was flying everywhere. I was awestruck by him, I think that cemented that I’m really gonna do this. I didn’t really have any other ideas about what to do, so… Were you inspired by The Beatles or The Rolling Stones? To a degree. I liked all of those bands. The Kinks, The Zombies, whatever came out, all the bands from England. But also tempered with American R&B. The band that we had then, we could do things like Mustang Sally – but also the Four Seasons, crazy singers like Lou Christie. Something about the camp value of rock’n’roll appealed to me. Did you work with [actor/director and Ridiculous Theatrical Company founder] Charles Ludlam? Well, the guy I mentioned before, who had the store on St Mark’s Place, he had these racks of costumes – big, lush boas and wild costumes with sequins, there was this giant sequinned phallus – and I wondered what he was doing with this stuff. “Oh, this is a costume that I’m making for Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater” – and I thought I’ve gotta check this out. So, I went to rehearsals, I guess, and these were like the greatest people I’d ever met. They were so much fun, and so brilliant. I’d met individuals like that, but I’d never met a mob of them! And I just started to make myself useful, and became good friends with one of the writers – his name was Bill Vehr. We used to go to a lot of rock’n’roll shows together, we went to Boulder, Colorado, San Francisco, hit the road, kind of thing. He passed away from AIDS. I would string the guitars, when they did a musical, I would back them up, do sound ➢ MOJO 49
“More bubbly?”: Johansen with producer Todd Rundgren, NYC, August 1, 1973.
IN THE ANNALS of rock, the New York Dolls’ self-titled debut has generally been pegged somewhere between a flawed masterpiece and a heroic failure, and yet its significance outstripped its sales from the very beginning. As 1973 dawned, the group had so much going for them: critical adoration, patronage from colossi like David Bowie and Lou Reed, their own burgeoning demi-monde scene, and a contrastingly colourless surrounding landscape – a pop-cultural tabula rasa upon which to scrawl their own ramalama aesthetic, in glossy lipstick. Their Mercury deal left them with the mere formality, surely, of converting all that sizzle – and some fantastic songs – into the substance of a landmark debut. Only it didn’t quite turn out that way. After the band were snubbed by prospective producers Leiber & Stoller, Phil Spector, Bowie and ‘Shadow’ Morton, sessions at midtown Manhattan’s Record Plant were
helmed by Todd Rundgren, the pop auteur concurrently en route to a prog phase. The two parties didn’t click: Rundgren later sniffily opined, “As far as I was concerned they were just imitation Rolling Stones, all dressed up as women for a singles jacket,” and at one point during recording reputedly shouted, “Get the glitter out of your asses and play!” His other beefs included a control room full of wasted hangers-on and a hurried mix. However, New York Dolls has survived the intervening five decades for its many inspirational virtues: David Johansen’s wonderfully yowling Big Apple street charisma, Johnny Thunders’s explosive proto-punk guitar playing, the collective air of ramshackle genius which, despite everything, radiates from every groove. Critics loved it on both sides of the Atlantic, with UK pro-punkers Nick Kent and later Tony Parsons flagging it as “where a new decade began”. More than just on Frankenstein (Orig.) – about green out-of-towners grappling with monstrous NYC – and Subway Train’s thrilling underground ride, this ever-pulse-quickening record channels the band members’ excitement at converging and cavorting in the big city, where kids could make their own rules and change the world. That self-belief, that attitude, carries the day, unstoppably, still. 50 MOJO
Do you think it influenced you, when you started performing? Yeah, absolutely. There are so many influences coming out, when you’re performing, you can’t really catalogue them all. Like spices in a soup, or something. They come together in a combination that would be peculiar to oneself. But yeah, they definitely influenced me. Making a spectacle that’s not shoe-gazing. I got a lot from them, and from Little Richard, things like that. Did you ever see Little Richard live? Yeah, I saw him. I went to this party he had at the Waldorf, this was before I was in the Dolls. I think I saw him at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park. Then I went with a bunch of people back to the hotel. There was a wild party back there, and he was carrying on, really funny, making all these pronouncements, he was a great character. Years later we gave an award to somebody at the Grammys, me and him. What comes through is the sense of humour, and the Dolls had that, at least early on. If it’s not fun, then it’s drudgery, really. I can’t name names because I can’t even remember who’s who, but a lot of bands, it doesn’t seem like they’re having much fun. But if it’s not fun, why do it? Who drove the band, in the Dolls? There’s always somebody. Well, we used to rehearse in this bicycle shop on the Upper West Side, and there was a guy, I think he was one of Arthur’s friends, he was a guitar player, and I just had a feeling in my gut that it wasn’t right, and one night he didn’t show up, and who comes in but Syl. I think he’d just got off a plane from being deported from Amsterdam, or something, he had this little carpet bag, and a guitar. He comes in. I’m like, this guy’s cool, he’s kind of like the same size as John and Billy, and he played really well – I thought he was probably the best player in the band at that point. I said, “We got to get this guy into the band, the other guy is kind of… lumbersome.” Syl was bouncing around all over the place, he really liked rock’n’roll, musically he was very astute. But over time, it would shift a little bit, here and there. In the beginning, John really wanted to rehearse a lot. Every day, practically. So he used to drive the band in the very beginning, to excel, and Syl made it possible for him to do that. When Syl became more integrated into the band, he exerted more influence. Did they write tunes and you put the lyrics over them, or were the songs more integrated? I had a couple of songs I’d been writing, and I taught them those. Looking For A Kiss was one. There were some covers that would tickle me, like Pills, and Don’t Start Me Talking, we would learn that. Then John would play a riff, and it would get my attention, so I would write words to it. I would keep a notebook of words and ideas, and put them to the riffs that the guys would play in rehearsal.
A lot of the songs on the first album are about being young in New York… Yeah. Rock’n’roll, particularly at that time when it didn’t have so much history to it, was a teenage thing. When we were kids, we were obsessed with rock’n’roll, but rock’n’roll for adults was unheard of. So yeah, we put a lot of that into it. It was very different to a lot of the music that was around then: the singer-songwriters. Yeah… I guess we noticed it, but it was like elevator music. It wasn’t something we would even comment about. We were into songs that were concise, you know. You’d be at the Fillmore and somebody would start a drum solo, and you’d think, “I’ll come back in 20 minutes. See what’s going on in the lobby,” or whatever. A lot of the bands at that time had just become this be-denimed mass. We wanted to have a show that was explosive, in a way. It wasn’t even that we choreographed or planned it, nothing like that, it happened spontaneously. When did you get a sense that the Dolls were really taking off? Never! Taking off in the neighbourhood, maybe. “This is better than I expected,” you know. But beyond that, not really. In the neighbourhood we were just free, but when we left it, there were certain places we could go, and get that great reaction, but then there would be places where we would be kind of called out: “What are you doing? How dare you!” And we’d be, “This is no place for us,” you know. So I don’t think we ever had any great expectations about taking over the mainstream. In New York, we felt good, it felt right. We loved our audience and they loved us. It was a good match. Did you actually say, “I’m trisexual, I’ll try anything”? Oh, probably, but everybody used to say that in those days. It’s not something that I came up with, so to speak. It’s a way of saying, “Get off my back, don’t talk to me about this stuff…” Did you want to get a record contract? Did you want to go through all that? John really did. There’s a thing when you’re a kid, and naive about business, you think that if you get a contract, your worries are over. But then there’s a whole new kettle of fish. The powers that be have an interest in taming your rebelliousness, and that becomes a headache. Trying to satisfy everybody and remain true to yourself. Did you find it difficult to get a contract? I didn’t, [Dolls manager] Marty Thau did. A lot of people would come along to that theatre room, at the Mercer Arts Center. They used to bring people down like Clive Davis and Ahmet Ertegun, all these record honchos would all come at once, to see the show. This guy, Paul Nelson, loved the band: he was an A&R guy at Mercury and he went to bat for the band, with a guy from Mercury in Chicago, Irwin Steinberg I think his name was – a lovely man but he was an accountant, a bean counter. He had no inkling about music or what could be a trend. He put out good records, but they were like Dinah Washington records. So Paul went to bat for us, and kept picking away at Irwin, until he essentially acquiesced to Paul’s desires. ➢
Bob Gruen (3), Getty
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effects, shaking the tin so it’s thunder, all that kind of business. Occasionally I would be a spear carrier, you know. I just liked being with them, they were such great characters.
Trash City Rockers: (clockwise from above) Kane and Johansen on-stage at Mercer Arts Center, NY, December 31, 1972; poolside in LA, September 1973; Grand Central Hotel, housing Mercer Arts Center, collapses, August 3, 1973; Johansen with hero Little Richard, presenting at the 1988 Grammys.
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Johansen and Johnny Thunders rip it up, Hilversum, Netherlands, 1973.
Can I ask about Billy’s death? It was devastating. A shocking situation. It was a horrible misadventure, really. You don’t really get over things like that. Did it change the band? You got Jerry Nolan in... Yeah. Jerry was good, at that time. A little more commercial, in a way. He was a big Gene Krupa guy, you know, and I’ve learned since that if a drummer is a Gene Krupa guy, they’re going to be good. The drummer I have now is a Gene Krupa guy. He made us a touch more listenable, maybe. I can’t really tell. I haven’t heard any stuff that Billy played on, lately. Jerry was maybe a little more consistent, but all those things are a matter of taste. When you came to record the album, you had all the songs ready? Yeah, and then some. Can you remember if songs like Trash and Jet Boy were about particular people, or just the kind of people you were around? I would imagine they were amalgams of people. Jet Boy is like an ideal. Trash could be about a million people. It’s hard to remember. I don’t know where it comes from, it’s in the air. When you write for a band it’s like being a speech writer for a political party or something, you want to make it representative. If you start writing personal songs in a band like that, it’s like, iffy, to say the least.
(7-inch, Mercury, 1973) The sound of the disreputable backstreets as Shangri-Las suss – that pouty, attitudinal intro – collides with the Bo Diddley beat. But for all the messy playing, it’s still delivered with a sexy, ‘fuck you’ economy.
(on Lipstick Killers – The Mercer Street Sessions 1972, ROIR, 1981) A staple of their early live set and recorded at NYC’s Blue Rock Studios in June ’72, the Dolls never officially released a version of the Otis Redding song despite this demo combining high camp with raw power to great effect.
(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) Bo Diddley’s 1961 Chess single given the Dolls treatment: sped up and saturated in Lower East Side sleaze with Johansen salivating over lyrics about a rock’n’roll nurse giving pills and shots. A genius coupling.
(7-inch, Mercury, 1973) The Dolls hijack Mickey & Sylvia’s Love Is Strange single from 1956 – “How do you call your lover boy?” – adding hard rock, glam flash and cutesy girl-group harmonies. Voilà: a manifesto for a transgressive age.
(7-inch, Mercury, 1973) A licentious coming together of past and future where, over golden-age rock’n’roll – all primitive guitar riffing, piano pumping and forceful drums – Johansen bays about changing into “the wolf man howling at the moon”. 52 MOJO
(on Lipstick Killers – The Mercer Street Sessions 1972, ROIR, 1981) A studio version of Sonny Boy
(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) A rare ballad and a tale of heartbreak and loss on a Phil Spector scale. OK, it’s delivered tongue-in-cheek and it might be about drugs, not a girl, but it’s still tender and poignant and a side of the Dolls rarely heard.
(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) An anomaly at seconds shy of six minutes, this foreboding part-Stooges, part-MC5, proto-grunge dirge is the closest the group ever got to mainstream heavy rock, although its lyric celebrating teen dysfunction is pure Dolls.
(on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) The bluesman’s railroad-as-life metaphor transplanted to the New York subway. As Johansen pines for his lost love, Thunders takes on the guitar hero mantle with a hurtling-downthe-track guitar solo that’s Pullman class.
Tell me about the image on the album cover… We showed up with the clothes. Syl had arranged with Betsy Bunky Nini [a designer clothing store founded by Betsey Johnson, Anita Latour and Linda Mitchell] for them to do the shoot. Syl had been in the rag trade, he and Billy had a sweater company. There had been another shoot, I can’t remember what it was, but it just didn’t look right. It was in some kind of doll place, it was a bit heavy-handed with the dolls. And it was antique dolls, it looked very old fashioned. It was wrong. Anyway, he got them to do this thing which was more modern. Toshi was the photographer. So, we came in and the whole thing was there, the couch was there, it was all set up. I don’t think I had any inkling of what it was going to be. There was a make-up person there. We went for it. We availed ourselves of the hairdressers, and the makeup, and the Betsey Johnson people were so into it, it was kind of infectious. When that image came out, do you think people couldn’t cope with it? I suppose. Whether they could cope with it or not, it didn’t matter to me. The East Village social scene was evolving rapidly, in terms of things that were becoming normal there. It was so far from the rest of the country, they couldn’t really make that leap. So it was kind of shocking to them, but the important thing is that they needed to be shocked. You went out on tour with Mott The Hoople. How was the reaction to you across the country? Detroit was great, LA was great, San Francisco was great, there were a couple of places in Texas that were surprisingly great. Toronto was great, Fort Lauderdale and Miami were great. Atlanta was great. We were great friends with Lynyrd
Bob Gruen (2), Alamy (2), Getty
(7-inch, Mercury, 1973) Girl-group melodrama meets Planet Stories comic book as Jet Boy steals our hero’s baby and Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain rip it up. When they played this on OGWT in November ’73, presenter Bob Harris dubbed it “mock rock”. As if!
Williamson II’s 1955 blues appears on their second album, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, but they were demoing it back in 1972. Smothered in blues harp, it sounded even more tough, raw and trebly.
Can you remember anything about writing Frankenstein? Yeah, John had this loft in Chrystie Street, we used to play there. People would walk in and out, it was a crazy place. There were all these dramas going on. There was a guy tripping, trying to rewire the place. He was obsessed that something was going on in the wires. And we came up with that tune. Certain songs I can remember exactly, I get a very vivid photograph of where it was when we created it.
MOJO PRESENTS
Updating synth-pop and avant-dance moves for modern paranoiacs, Syd Minsky-Sargeant’s WORKING MEN’S CLUB are poised to bring their stark yet luminous sounds to the mainstream. But how will popularity sit with this self-confessed “awkward outsider”? “If I could backtrack,” he tells IAN HARRISON, “I’d probably choose to be anonymous.”
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Photography by LILLIE EIGER
ARCH 30, LONDON’S CORSICA STUDIOS. IN AN INTIMATE CONCRETE SPACE dubbed a “Covid sauna” by one attendee, Working Men’s Club are playing a taster gig for their new album Fear Fear. On-stage, a dark-clad four-piece with live bass and two synth players are cranking out a pounding onslaught of future-retro machine music for dancing. Out front is mainman Syd Minsky-Sargeant, wearing a T-shirt reading ‘Todmoron’ in honour of his West Yorkshire home, Todmorden. As he howls, stares and jerks with a Tourette’s-ish intensity he shares with his friend Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods, songs from 2020’s self-titled debut and Fear Fear balance menace and trauma with a strange yet undeniable upli t. They finish with an encore o ’s cowbell bashing throbber Teeth: as Minsky-Sargeant, keyboardist Hannah Cobb and bassist Liam Ogburn leave the stage, guitarist/ keyboardist Mairead O’Connor lets the ensemble’s stern mask slip, by smiling for a split second. “A lot of WMC is just humour, really,” Minsky-Sargeant tells MOJO later. “We have a proper laugh, you know. I think the message is fairly clear in the lyrics – it is satire, a piss-take out of a dark, dark narrative…” He pauses for re ection. The ucking inside o your own head it’s uite perverse, innit Someone who’s also familiar with the art of dredging the mind’s fouler precincts for catharsis is Williamson, who is aghast at Minsky argeant’s talent. yd’s imagine what he’ll be doing in five years he says. It reminds me o a young Paul Weller, kicking out In The City and This Is The Modern World. I see that a lot in yd. It’s uite astonishing. ➢
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Social beings: Working Men’s Club (from left) Mairead O'Connor, Syd Minsky-Sargeant, Liam Ogburn and Hannah Cobb, Zap Studios, Camberwell, London, March 4, 2022.
“SYD REMINDS ME OF A YOUNG PAUL WELLER, KICKING OUT IN THE CITY. IT’S QUITE ASTONISHING.”
In da Club: (clockwise from left) first single Bad Blood and eponymous debut LP; Syd shows some skin, YES, Manchester, 2019; original WMC line-up (from left) Jake Bogacki, Minsky-Sargeant and Giulia Bonometti; supporting New Order, Heaton Park, September 2021; Minksy-Sargeant: “making music is kind of therapy”; handle with care – Syd gets high, Manchester Ritz, November 12, 2021.
Jason Williamson
Rosie Butcher, Lillie Eiger, Alamy, Getty (3), Piran Aston (2)
A
WEEK LATER, MOJO HEADS TO TODMORDEN to meet Minsky-Sargeant in his studio. Based in a former industrial premises, it’s a working environment with a no-fat set-up of analogue synths, computers and vinyl. A bulging record bag in the corner contains the 1986 House Sound Of Chicago compilation, Altern 8’s Activ 8 and the latest remaster of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, among other eclectic selections from a recent DJ set at the nearby Golden Lion pub. Touchingly, his mum Helen works next door. A feminist artist who explores the maternal world in a variety of media, she gave Syd the pendant he wears around his neck: a small yellow acid house smiley with a sad face (the happy version is on the reverse). Born in London, he lived in King’s Cross before moving to Prestwich, home of The Fall’s Mark E Smith. “Both my parents are artistic, but I wouldn’t say they’re hip, exactly,” says MinskySargeant. “They’re fairly normal people really.” That said, he grew up without a television and with restricted access to gaming and computers, and rom the age o five was recording his own voice and-guitar compositions. This was a useful fall-back later, in Todmorden, when he found himself with an acute case of alienation. “I hated school,” he says. “I was fairly awkward, I still am, a bit, and didn’t have particularly fond memories of growing up. But there’s not really a sob story. It was what it was.” He studied guitar and then songwriting at Manchester’s BIMM Institute, where he “just about” completed the course. He and fellow students Giulia Bonometti (AKA Julia Bardo, vocals and guitar) and Jake Bogacki (drums) formed Working Men’s Club as 2017 turned into 2018, and were signed to Manchester’s Melodic label after a gig to an audience of 10 at Oldham Street’s Night & Day Café. Debut single Bad Blood, a scratchy indie-dancer with percussive vocals, followed in February 2019. “There was a fairly large element of naivety in that formative period,” he says. “It was just a name, and then we actually started being seen as a band.” The name, redolent of mid-20th century English working-class
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culture, is a loaded thing. As someone who admits, “I’d say I’m middle class, the life I live now,” does he see any contradictions in it? Flicking a switch, repeatedly, on a nearby Klarks Teknik compressor unit – rather how Mark E Smith would shake a matchbox if a question was irritating him – he retorts, “I’m not gonna change the fucking name.” There was a similar refusal to bend or yield when Working Men’s Club’s ounding line up oundered. It was the session or Teeth, says he field producer oss rton, who’s also worked with Arctic Monkeys, Amyl And The Sniffers, Yard Act and The Fall, as well as co-helming Working Men’s Club’s two LPs. “It wasn’t the happiest vibes. Julia was on the verge of leaving to pursue her solo thing, and young Jake was very much, ‘I want to be in a punk band.’ And young Syd was like, ‘I want to be more electronic.’” “I wouldn’t discredit anyone who’s been involved in this band,” says Minsky-Sargeant. “But it was best that everyone went their separate ways. Bands – they are fucking terrible things. Brilliant things, and terrible.” Does a band need a dictator, wonders MOJO? “There’s got to be,” he explains, “some form of nihilistic presence somewhere, constantly.”
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HE ORIGINAL FORMATION OF WORKING MEN’S Club actually ended five days be ore their first headline gig in London, at the Lexington in Islington in September 2019. Minsky-Sargeant says he was adamant that gigging and recording schedules should be honoured. “I mean, I was panicked and scared and nervous but we got through it,” he says. With former Moonlandingz member O’Connor plus Rob Graham of Drenge (guitar) joining MinskySargeant and bassist Liam Ogburn, operations were resumed,
BLEEPS OF FAITH
Four of Syd Minsky-Sargeant’s inspirations. I think. The album of theirs I love is Dare, the track is Love Action.”
DAVID BOWIE
FORGEMASTERS
and the debut album was recorded with rton in he field. “He wasn’t really using synths then, so I would do the programming stu , notes rton. ow he’s overtaken me with all that. e’s got an in built mechanism that’s like a nuclear reactor. is ideas are ust gushing. A breakthrough or the band may have come sooner, had the first ’s textured, dynamic rave rock not been released between lockdowns in . et to listeners attuned during those days o tedium and isolation, the album was an electric shock reminder o the chaotic and o ten destructive impulses that drive li e. ncapsulated by Tomorrow’s cheery chorus ou’re my sunshine, suicide, break my mind here was trauma, loathing and death, to a disco beat. Fear Fear is a refinement o that usion o glowing synth punk energy with eelings o entrapment and impending doom, re ecting how time warps and li e escapes when months go by slowly. articularly haunting is Widow, sparked by a random encounter with a stranger struggling with the death o their partner. ust was easy, until you died, sings Minsky argeant. ow I uck inside my head but not outside. That song, the way it deals with love and loss, it’s like a wise plus year old wrote it, says rton. e’s not embarrassed at all to explain his shit in his music you can hear the darkness. When someone does come orward with a bit o an attitude like that, it’s scary. It’s kind o therapy, making music, to get something o my chest or chill mysel out, says Minsky argeant, who declines to name in uential lyricists, but does admit to liking the words to Aphex Twin’s in amously puerile Milkman. There is a lot more conscious thinking on this album than the last one, and when I’m making a song I’m not lying. It’s genuine or me. The therapeutic honesty will continue on a third album Minsky argeant is already working on, which he’s sharing with trusted associates. It’s very acoustic y, a complete split rom what he’s doing with Working Men’s Club, says Williamson, who adds he and Minsky argeant are due to discuss a possible collaboration. e’s got a lot o good taste, he’s uite defiant, he’s not a wanker… we need that in music in our country. What me and yd clicked on was this idea o trying to run away rom your ego. p until about three or our years ago I was vehemently opposed to anybody I didn’t like, but he’s got this intelligence already like, who am I to slag people o
“The Track With No Name is technically the first bleep techno track, and everything you want from a minimal dance production. You go back to early Warp and see how that progressed from Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League – people listening to the sounds of industry, and trying to turn that into music. An amazing record.”
THE HUMAN LEAGUE
“Human [Virgin, 1986] is just a brilliant pop song. It’s got that massive chorus, how slow it is, the R&B influence… there’s a lot to take from it, which probably inspired a lot of today’s pop music,
“I listened to the Best Of Bowie [2002] in my dad’s car as a kid, and something just clicked. I really, really loved the tunes and I just wanted to listen to it all the time. And from there I just wanted to make tunes too, and not really do anything else. Now, it’s all I do.”
UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE
“I first heard them about five years ago. Fucking wicked tunes, a massive influence on what I do in this group, and I love the fact it’s a collective making militant electronic music, which remains in Detroit. There’s a political stance for people to perceive themselves. They’ll never go overground.”
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ACK I W T K , T AFT . Fish and chips are eaten. Minsky argeant says he finds the peace o Todmorden conducive to creativity, and stresses the importance o listening to albums rom start to finish. I’ve struggled to fit in, but one o the things I’ve grown up to realise is, perhaps I don’t really like fitting in, he says. I eel more com ortable in an outsider’s environment. When talk turns to his love o etroit techno insurrectionists nderground esistance see sidebar , he expresses admiration or their initial re usal to be photographed without masks and e orts to build a body o work ree rom the complications o personality. I get people wanting to know the character o who’s portraying the song, he says, but I think the music speaks or itsel . as Working Men’s Club already brought more ame than he’d pre er I think i I could backtrack, he says, I probably would choose to be anonymous. With that, he pumps up ou on’t Want one This, a track by Michigan electro veterans Aux . As the vocoder laced sound o this Kra twerk indebted mind and body music swells, he looks around his bunker here a beer bottle, there a bass guitar, M there a er gun bullet and smiles. MOJO 57
The next step would be what were called “personal appearances”. One of the earliest Beach Boys concerts took place in the early spring of 1962. William F. Williams, one of the disc jockeys at KM in an Bernardino over miles inland o the acific Ocean), recalled their performance. “Harris department store had a ‘Deb-Teens’ department and the girls at the area high schools who bought their clothes there became members of a ‘club’. Harris had a fashion show/concert each year for the girls who were members. KMEN was in charge of putting together the talent for Harris’s concert, and I remember Murry Wilson came to us and literally begged us to let The Beach Boys be the opening act. As I recall, they barely knew which end of the guitar case was up. They looked very badly, played very badly, and sang very badly.” Candix Records was having financial trouble, and it folded sometime before the summer of 1962. Russ Regan, then working for Candix’s distributor, Buckeye, remembered that “Candix sold their masters to ERA Records. Because of that, Murry had the right to terminate. They had a clause in their contract that The Beach Boys couldn’t be sold to another record company.” Murry had never liked urfin’. Brian remembered him saying, “‘Well, look, you don’t hear the guitar, you don’t hear this, what is going on here? Listen, I’m going to have to take over as producer,’ which he did. He took over as producer.” Murry and Hite Morgan, the group’s publisher, began a search for a new recording deal. The group also went into Western Studios and cut a number of demos (probably Surfer Girl, Judy, The ur er Moon, urfin’ a ari and , which Hite and Murry used to help sell the group. Russ Regan, who had become Murr y’s confidant, recalled that Murry didn’t want to sign with another company as small as Candix: “He wanted to be with a big company.” So Regan sent the demo o urfin’ a ari to Wink Martindale, who was then an A&R man at Dot Records. According to Regan, Wink “heard the record, loved the record and played it for his boss. is boss turned it down because he elt that surfing music was ust a ash in the pan. Now Hite Morgan jumped ship. In 1971, nine years after the fact, Murry Wilson would still gloat: “That cost him two million, seven hundred thousand dollars, that statement. It cost him,” Murry repeated, “two million, seven hundred thousand dollars.” At the same time that The Beach Boys were searching for a record deal, they were undergoing their first line up change. Al ardine elt that the financial uture o being a Beach Boy wasn’t all that promising, and he quit the group and returned to college with the intention of eventually going to dental school. Taking Al’s place was a neighbour of the Wilsons, 15-year-old avid Marks, a youngster who fitted well into the group. The Wilsons’ mother Audree, however, claimed that, “Brian would not allow him to sing on record because he couldn’t sing… David was a pain in the neck, he really was. He would drive everyone crazy.” For the moment, nevertheless, Marks was a full-fledged member. And when the group finally signed a contract with Capitol ecords, it was Marks, not Al ardine, who was the fi th Beach Boy.
Getty (3), Alamy
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IK VENET WAS A 21-YEAR-OLD STAFF PRODUCER at Capitol Records in 1962 and one of the few men in the business who seemed to understand the importance of ‘teen’ music. Russ Regan suggested Murry take the demo to Venet. The relationship got off to a shaky start. Murry had called for an
60 MOJO
Riding the wave: (clockwise from above) in the studio, 1962, (from left) Love, Brian, Carl and Dennis; in ’62 again (from left) Dennis, Marks, Carl, Love and Brian; the young Boys playing Torrance High School gymnasium, March 1962 (from left) David Marks, Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson; Dean Torrence and Jan Berry receive a lesson in tuning up from Kathryn Minner, AKA The Little Old Lady From Pasadena, 1964.
appointment, and Venet asked him to wait for two weeks because he was on his way to Nashville on business. Venet believed that Murry was insulted by the delay. But when he heard the demo, he was blown away. Venet remembered, “Every once in a while as a producer… before the second eight bars have spun around, you know that the record is a umber record. e was talking about urfin’ a ari. “I wasn’t one for hiding my feelings,” Venet continued. “I mean, if I wanted to drive a bargain, I should have just sat there mum, but I got all excited, and I started jumpin’ around, and I said, ‘We have to make the deal.’” Murry Wilson remembered it quite differently: “Nik acted real cool. He said, ‘You come back in an hour, and we’ll let you know if we want you to become Capitol artists.’ He didn’t act like he was too excited.” The contradiction was the first in a series o disagreements that have occurred in print between Venet and the Wilson family. Audree Wilson reckoned “the main problem was that [Venet] didn’t tell the truth.” Carl Wilson was more blunt. He said that Venet was “full of shit” when it came to The Beach Boys. Venet told writer Tom Nolan that Murry Wilson’s visits to his o fice were to be dreaded. e had the receptionist warn him o Murry’s impending arrival and he would hide under his desk. One day, Murry burst past Venet’s secretary, not believing her claim that Venet wasn’t in, and spent the entire day using Venet’s phone while Venet crouched under his desk. To Audree Wilson, it was another of Venet’s “copped-up stories. Venet made Murry out to be some kind of monster. He lied, he really did.” Murry was abrasive in his dealing with Capitol, but he was fighting or his sons. What enet really ob ected to were Murry’s
“THEY BARELY KNEW WHICH END OF THE GUITAR CASE WAS UP. THEY LOOKED VERY BADLY, PLAYED VERY BADLY, AND SANG VERY BADLY.” WILLIAM F. WILLIAMS, KMEN DJ
musical ideas. Venet noted that Murry felt that Brian could be the next Elvis Presley. Venet also recalled that Murry “wanted to elevate the boys by putting them into ‘pretty music’.” According to Venet, Murry Wilson’s music was from another time, the schmaltz of the early and mid-20th century, and Murry didn’t really know “where his sons were at… I think Murry really fucked up the group for a couple of years.” The feud reveals a lot about the worst side of both camps, and their intermittent battles made the early years of the group’s Capitol stay very unpleasant. But regardless of the bad feelings between Venet and the Wilsons, the former did persuade Capitol Vice President Voyle Gilmore to purchase The Beach Boys’ demos or dollars. The signing also included a five per cent royalty, and although not a generous deal, it was fairly typical for the times. For The Beach Boys, it was an opportunity to make more records.
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HE GROUP’S FIRST CAPITOL RELEASE WAS SURFIN’ Safari on one side and 409 on the other. The co-author of 409 was Gary Usher, the newest member of the Beach Boys family. Usher’s uncle, Benny Jones, lived near the Wilsons in Hawthorne. Uncle Benny suggested that Gary go over and meet the Wilsons as Gary also had a single out (Tomorrow, as Gary Usher &
The Highbrows, on the Lancet label), and they would have something in common. Finally, one Sunday in January 1962, as Usher recalled, “I went over and talked to them. They were practising, you could hear them all over the neighbourhood. I seemed to hit it off with Brian right away I seemed to have a soul a finity with him. sher remembered the first day I went over there, we wrote together. I played a little rhythm guitar and a little bass, not much, and Brian played interesting piano. He knew all the progressive progressions. He knew all about The Four Freshmen, but he needed someone to help him break it down into contemporary forms and make that vast knowledge apply to rock’n’roll. In some respects, I was a channel for that… In the beginning stages, it was vital.” The first song they wrote together was The onely ea it took them 20 minutes. 409, a paean to a hot rod that Usher hoped he might someday own, was part of the package sold to Capitol. urfin’ a ari was a big overnight hit. was also a hit, giving the group its first two sided success. The exposure brought The Beach Boys to the attention of Jan And Dean, the LA vocal duo who’d been having hits since 1959; the two acts would meet at a record hop in Hawthorne in 1962. “Since we weren’t a self-contained band, [The Beach Boys] were going to back us up,” remembered Dean Torrence. “So we met a couple of hours early in a house trailer and practised; they learned our four songs and they had their six or seven.” Although Jan And Dean were the headliners, Torrence recalled that “the audience was very pro-Beach Boy.” At the end of Jan And Dean’s set, the audience wanted an encore. The two groups hadn’t rehearsed anything else, so the headliners decided to per orm two Beach Boys songs, urfin’ and urfin’ a ari. Torrence remembered, They kind o looked at us as if to say, ‘You’d do our songs with us and let us stand up front?’ They thought they had to stand in the back… they were really amazed. We had a lot of fun doing it.” an And ean realised that surfing music was a bandwagon they wanted to jump on, and they decided to record a couple of surf tunes on their next album, Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin’. At that time, Brian Wilson was writing the only vocal songs about surfing, so ➢ MOJO 61
Family affair: (clockwise from above) the three Wilson brothers (from left) Brian, Dennis and (far right) Carl with mother Audree Wilson in 1979; gearing up in 1963 (from left) Brian, the returning Al Jardine, Dennis, Carl and Mike Love; manager and father Murry Wilson; producer Nik Venet; songwriter Gary Usher; The Beach Boys at the Capitol Records building in Hollywood, 1962 (from left) Brian, Carl, Dennis, Marks and Love.
Jan And Dean called The Beach Boys. Torrence: “[We said], ‘We’ll put your two songs on the album… and you can come and help us [record it].’ They were thrilled.”
➣ Getty (6)
T
HE ARRIVAL OF THE BEACH BOYS PRESAGED A NEW trend in popular music – the self-contained band: a group that wrote, produced and performed their own material. Up until that time, all groups recorded in the studios provided by the label, used the engineers and producers and musicians that the label told them to use. Brian (with help from Murry) forced Capitol to let the group record outside Capitol’s studios and to produce themselves. By forcing that policy change, Brian helped free California for young up-and-coming producers and musicians. Brian would use young unknown musicians, and, along with Phil Spector, made people like Glen Campbell and Leon Russell studio stars long before they were successful on their own. Roger Christian, a disc jockey who co-authored a number of tunes with both Brian and Jan Berry, felt “The Beach Boys were not accorded the respect [by Capitol] because they were kids… and half the time, they’d come in, they wouldn’t be wearing shoes, because that’s the way it was. It was hard to get older people at Capitol to accept [the fact] that The Beach Boys were keeping them alive… verything The Beach Boys did at Capitol, they had to fight or. Chuck Britz, who engineered almost all The Beach Boys’ hits at Western Studios, reckoned the studio was isolated from the business and therefore the band felt “more free to do what they wanted to do.” Britz noted that in any in-house studio, “It’s easy for people to walk in and out and destroy the process that gets you going. If you’re in a groove, there’s nothing worse than somebody coming in and asking a political or a financial uestion. The musicians dug Brian, but Capitol Records never really tried
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“PEOPLE ASK, ‘WASN’T IT A STRUGGLE? HOW LONG DID IT TAKE BEFORE YOU WERE RECOGNISED?’ AND I SAY, ‘ABOUT TWO WEEKS.’” MIKE LOVE
to understand him. oger Christian said ik enet had a definite idea of what a record would sound like, and Brian had his idea. Brian could take it from start to finish. He’d create the idea, produce it, and perform on it. Brian can handle it all. He knew what he could get out of his brothers, and how to work with them because they’d been doing it at home for years.” Murry recalled that Brian came home one day almost crying: “Go down and tell Capitol we don’t want [Venet] any more, he’s changing our sound.” Murry then told Capitol’s Voyle Gilmore, “You folks don’t know how to produce a rock’n’roll hit in your studios downstairs… Leave us alone and we’ll make hits for you.” The first two Beach Boys albums bear the credit roduced by Nik Venet.” Audree Wilson insisted this was “totally inaccurate. He had nothing to do with producing.” Venet explained what he provided was “an objective viewpoint… The di ficulty was, everybody was trying to write and arrange with [Brian].My job was to let him arrange and write, keep his theories alive. His ideas were always better than anyone’s.” Whatever Venet’s contribution, nobody has disputed that Brian Wilson was responsible for the development of the Beach Boys sound. Nobody, except Murry Wilson. “See, the whole world trade has given Brian credit for everything,” said Murry. “Truthfully – I’m not beating myself on the
back, but knowing them as their father, I knew their voices, right? And I’m musical, my wife is, we knew how to sing on key and when they were at and sharp, and how they could sound good in a song. Murry claimed that he put on the echo and surged on the power to make them sound like gods . As Chuck Brit remembered it, That was his avourite line. urge. e always said that. urge here, surge there. I wouldn’t do it because you can only surge so much. Brit would raise the volume o the control room monitor so that Murry would think he was doing what he’d been told. n the actual recording, though, Brit wouldn’t surge . Brit ’s take on the Wilsons’ ather was not wholly negative I really liked Murry , but when it came to musical decisions, it was almost always Brian… Brian was the only guy who could put all the parts together… There’s a lot o people who give credit to other people. I still think the heaviest burden o it all was on Brian’s shoulders, and he knew it.
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CK B IT I B AC B IT rom ur er irl to ood ibrations, but wasn’t involved in the recording o The Beach Boys’ first op single, a rather lame Ten ittle Indians, the children’s chant given the Beach Boys vocal treatment. till, the group had a strong enough ollowing by the all o ’ that the record made it into the Top in the Billboard charts, peaking at umber . But it only remained in the charts eight weeks, compared to weeks or urfin’ a ari. Momentum was restored with the ctober release o their first album, Surfin’ Sa ari. Its success firmly established The Beach Boys as the nation’s umber surfing group and, combined with the hit singles, made them a lot o money. For Brian, that overnight success, overnight wealth… hit me the hardest. While airplay and record sales gave him confidence, the ame was rightening to me… I ust elt it was a challenge at first, to handle it, to handle the success that had come. Mike ove recalled that it was ust unbelievable, the swi t rise to a relatively secure position in music. eople ask, Wasn’t it a struggle ow long did it take be ore you were recognised ’ And I say, About two weeks.’ et it took a while be ore The Beach Boys could establish themselves as a live draw. By Murry’s own admission, he held them back rom ma or concerts because he didn’t think they were ready or the big time . e booked them at store openings and local dances. Audree recalled they used to drive to an Bernardino and other cities to play ree shows. It was a smart move, actually, she said. The s were all putting on their own dances at that time. They’d call, and we’d go. What no one will admit on the record is The Beach Boys did receive compensation in the orm o valuable airplay. Besides the ree shows, the steadily improving Beach Boys did play gigs or pay, both as a eatured attraction and as a backup band. oger Christian remembers that he used to do record hops, and The Beach Boys or The ur aris were my backup group. I used to pay them about a hundred dollars a night, dollars a man. Bob ubanks, best known or hosting T ’s The ewlywed ame, was a os Angeles in . e recalled, When I was a at K A, I would hire The Beach Boys. I would pay them dollars to come out on Friday night and play ainbow ardens. ubanks also tried to get them to change their name because I elt that their name was so regional that they wouldn’t have much success out o a coastal area. In fact, on the strength of their records, The Beach Boys were already a well known group inland, but, as per ormers, they hadn’t strayed too ar rom A. The Beach Boys were still a outhern Cali ornia act as came to a close. would be the year they’d become national stars.
Photo by Vicki
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d n n T eS r rian i n T e ea & T e a i rnia u i ed ni u June
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“I’m blessed that he’s my friend”: Brian Wilson and David Leaf share a plate.
YOU STILL BELIEVE IN ME DAVID LEAF celebrates 40-odd years in Brian Wilson’s inner circle with a book reboot. “I felt like I was on a mission,” he tells DANNY ECCLESTON.
It was the beginning of AMONG THE aspects of Omnibus’s unprecedented access to The Beach upcoming update of David Leaf’s Boys’ circle. Yet Leaf’s proximity, vintage Brian Wilson/Beach Boys and fandom, didn’t prevent him biog likely to be embraced by from grasping nettles and when his readers, there’s this: unlike previous book came out it was not loved by out-of-print editions, it won’t cost all Beach Boys equally. you an arm and a leg on Ebay. “Dennis Wilson called me at “I was at a concert in New York,” three o’clock in the morning,” Leaf recalls Leaf. “And this guy came up to recalls. “And he’s like, ‘Why did you me and said, ‘Mr Leaf, I just bought a write this?’ And, I said, ‘Well, you copy of your book for $500.’ I said, know, Dennis, ordinarily, I wouldn’t ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’” reveal my source. But in this case, I’ll In 1978, when the first edition of make an exception. It was your Leaf’s book emerged (as The Beach mother.’ And he says, ‘Well, why do Boys And The California Myth) it was you believe her?’ And as soon as he one of the first exposés of the true said it, he realised the absurdity of complexity of the group’s story: the it. We both burst into hysterics.” abusiveness of the Wilson brothers’ A second edition, addressing father Murry; the mental struggles Dennis Wilson’s tragic decline, that prompted Brian’s retirement emerged in 1985. The latest from touring at the dawn of ’65 update affords an inside and the abandonment of track on Brian’s slow the Smile LP in 1967; the “DENNIS rehabilitation from the friction between WILSON CALLED 300-pound mess Leaf visionary Brian and ME AT THREE recalls visiting in pragmatic Mike; the O’CLOCK IN THE Pacific Palisades in bickering over MORNING. 1982. Eugene Landy, credit and credits. AND HE’S LIKE, who saved Brian’s When Leaf moved to ‘WHY DID YOU life at the expense of California in 1975, a WRITE THIS?’” turning him into “a degree in journalism DAVID LEAF prisoner”. The Brian under his belt and solo albums. The new Wilsonian harmonies care afforded the curation of buzzing in his head, his The Beach Boys’ back catalogue in dream was to write a book about the ’90s, and Brian’s eventual return The Beach Boys, but the politics he to the road with The Wondermints. found himself pitched into were “Me and my late wife were like, unexpected. Meanwhile, the band Well, that’s the worst idea we’ve he loved were languishing, both in ever heard,” chuckles Leaf. “Let’s terms of record sales and kudos. pause a moment to consider how “It was a calling,” says Leaf. “I felt wrong we were. Without Brian like I was on a mission to tell Brian’s going back on tour, nothing that story, like I was gonna grab the came afterwards could have world by the scruff of its neck and happened: the Pet Sounds tours; shake them: ‘Don’t you Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE At understand how The Royal Festival Hall; the All-Star important this guy is?’” Tribute To Brian Wilson at Radio Leaf’s first encounter City Music Hall…” with his hero had an air of In 2022 many Beach Boys issues bizarre serendipity. A little remain unresolved, but the over six months after he’d reputation of Brian Wilson could arrived in LA, he was hardly be in better shape. Leaf playing basketball with a admits that in this he could hardly college friend at the YMCA be regarded as impartial. in West Los Angeles. “And “The reason I focused the lo and behold, Mike Love’s original book on Brian Wilson, the brother Stan walks on the reason I called my fanzine Pet court and with him is Sounds, the reason I will, at the drop Brian.” The quartet played of a hat, talk endlessly about the two-on-two. In his book, subject is because he is so important Leaf memorably describes to the history of popular music. And Wilson’s game as “all I’m blessed that he’s my friend.” offence, no D”.
NOW WE ARE 60…
...ish. The surviving Beach Boys deliver their own, typically contradictory takes on their irresistible rise to TOM DOYLE. “THERE WAS A STRENGTH TO BEING DIFFERENT” MIKE LOVE on drugular differences, and writing knee-to-knee.
“BRIAN AND I were close friends. He would come over to my house and we would play on the piano. Then, because my dad [a sheet metal worker] had to get up to go to work so early, 5.30, 6 in the morning, he would tell us to shut up. So, we’d go out in the car and listen to the radio and sing Everly Brothers songs and stuff. Then we gravitated towards The Four Freshmen. So, you have the doo wop influence, the Everlys’ blend and then Chuck Berry’s lyrical [influence] and tempo and his style of guitar, which influenced Carl. Brian is amazingly adept at chord progressions and coming up with harmonies and so on. I was pretty quick on the lyrical side, and the hooks. So, we were just a very good partnership at that time. Whether it’d be Fun, Fun, Fun, or I Get Around or Help Me Rhonda, or any of those hits at that time that we co-wrote, it was literally I would sit next to him at the piano. And we would work out both the musical and the lyrical components, which complemented the musical mood that was going on at the time. The Warmth Of The Sun we wrote the night before President Kennedy was getting up to go on this final drive in Dallas in 1963. It had a mystical mood to it. It was very melancholy, and I came up with the lyrics and that was something that was really poignant because we woke up to the news next morning that President Kennedy had been assassinated. It’s always had that haunting feeling and association with it.
Murry Wilson was very helpful in the very early days, getting us gigs and airplay to establish us somewhat. What he wasn’t so great at was putting my name down for co-writing the songs (laughs). That was terrible. Because I relied on him. I trusted him as my uncle. I never envisioned that he would eliminate my participation. So, it said, ‘I Get Around by Brian Wilson,’ but I came up with, ‘Round round, get around, I get around’ and wrote many of the words and so on. It was very disheartening. Murry, he was very overbearing, but he was also not very kind to his nephew, Mike. [The recording of Help Me Rhonda and argument that led to the band sacking Murry Wilson in 1964] was very uncomfortable. Because Brian and myself and the rest of the group, we knew what kind of sound we wanted to get on the recording. But Murry differed with us in his thoughts. He was very disturbed when Brian would play the bass with a little bit of fuzz on it. Overall, we were looking for a rock’n’roll record, and a particular sound, but Murry was from the old school. And so it was tough, because there were differences and strong opinions. Murry was a very strongly opinionated person. He said we didn’t know what we were doing. But, actually, history proves that we did pretty well, in spite of his opinion. I think everybody did a little bit of marijuana. But then beyond that, the LSD came into play, and then cocaine, and then heroin. All those pretty tough drugs. I never went past a bit of pot. But unfortunately, y’know, along the way, Brian participated in several of those things I just mentioned. And I think it caused a schism in the group in terms of who was involved in that kind of drug experience, and who wasn’t. Alan and myself and Bruce never participated in those heavier things. And yet, Brian, Dennis and Carl did. So, there definitely was a lifestyle shift that was starting in 1965. One of the things about The Beach Boys was there was a strength to being different and unique. Y’know, with the different lead singers, or a different subject matter, or a different mood or tempo. Brian, he’s a Gemini, right? Multiple interests. The Little Girl I Once Knew was a lot different from California Girls, but for better or for worse, that experimentation and that variation came into play. And I think it has something to do with our longevity. Other songs that get overlooked? I always liked Little Honda, I always liked Hawaii. Y’know, sometimes you write and record a song,
you think it’s going to be the greatest thing and then it doesn’t turn out that way. But they certainly remained on albums and have been pretty well loved. In fact, we often do those songs in concert. Any reunion plans? Well, Brian and Al are going out [co-headlining] with the group Chicago. And Bruce and I are going on our tours as well. We were trying to make something [involving the whole band] happen in Los Angeles, but there were conflicts because Brian was already booked somewhere else. But we’re looking out for a date when we might be able to do something together, which would be nice, y’know. And I think there may well be a tribute album, where we get involved with other people doing versions of our songs.”
“IT WAS ABOUT KEEPING PACE WITH BRIAN” AL JARDINE on dentistry, too many chefs and not rehearsing.
“WE WERE a novice little band called The Pendletones. We were singing for pleasure, getting around the piano, basically just enjoying Brian’s passion for singing pretty jazzy harmonies vis-à-vis The Four Freshmen. We only had one song, Surfin’. Twenty-six takes later our A-side was recorded at a little studio on Melrose Avenue. Brian and I were walking home from class, and we ran over to my mom and dad’s house and listened to it on the radio for the very first time. It was the most ebullient, wonderful feeling. But I needed a job because I didn’t know what to do with myself after high school. And so, I enrolled in El Camino College [to study dentistry]. I left the band for about a year to pursue my studies. But Brian surprised me with a phone call and asked me to please come back into the band because he was having problems touring and producing the records. So, I re-entered the recording studio and I’ve been here ever since. My first lead [vocal] was Help Me Rhonda. We had two versions. We had one on The Beach Boys Today! album, and it didn’t quite click. It was pleasant but not hit-worthy. So, we went at it again as a single version. And that clicked. We had a wonderful new session with the Wrecking Crew. And these guys, really, they put it together. Especially Carol Kaye, her bass guitar line was just wonderful. And that just set the tone for our career right there. ➢
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“MURRY WILSON SAID WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT WE WERE DOING. BUT, ACTUALLY, HISTORY PROVES THAT WE DID PRETTY WELL.”
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MIKE LOVE
They get around: The Beach Boys (from left) Al Jardine, Mike Love, Dennis Wilson, Brian Wilson and Carl Wilson on their little Hondas, LA, 1964; (below left) Al and Brian at work on Beach Boys’ Party!, September 1965.
Monkey business: The Beach Boys perform with Annette Funicello for Disney’s 1965 comedy The Monkey’s Uncle; (below) ace of bass: Brian and co rehearsing at home, 1964.
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The argument between Brian and Murry during the session? Fortunately, I was in the studio on the microphone. So, I didn’t hear what was going on inside the control room (laughs). But apparently they were having a father and son showdown about who was actually producing this record. Murry felt that he had the credentials to be the producer. And, of course, there’s only room for one chef in the kitchen. And it was very clear that Brian had to show his leadership. And his father decided, ‘Well, I guess I’m no longer needed here.’ First Glen Campbell replaced Brian on the road for about six months. And then he went off to have his own career. And enter Bruce Johnston who was a huge Beach Boys fan. He and Terry Melcher would be at a lot of our sessions, listening to these songs. The music was intoxicating and joyful. And, I mean, everybody wanted to be a Beach Boy. It was good because it allowed us to tour and record simultaneously. Please Let Me Wonder [from …Today!], that’s a classic. That’s just a masterpiece of musical engineering. It’s something that can’t really be explained, other than the emotions that you feel when you sing. Even as singers, it moved us
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deeply. I mean, just having that kind of material to be able to sing, it was really miraculous. But at the time, of course, we didn’t appreciate it at that level, because we were so young and ambitious. For us, it was about keeping pace with Brian. Every day it was another challenge. It was more of a challenge than anything else just keeping up with the enormous amount of work. When I think back on it, it’s kind of comical because we didn’t have rehearsals. We simply showed up and we would sing. And we played on our own tracks, of course, early on. I Get Around, Don’t Worry Baby. We’d come off the road with our instruments strapped on, right off the truck. We’d go in and we’d record Don’t Worry Baby, just without ever having heard it before. We were always, always working. I’m going out on tour again with Brian. And we’ll just look at each other. And we’ll know that we know what we know. I mean, it’s like breathing in and out. Any reunion plans for this year? No. Other than in my own head. I’m planning on it myself. I don’t know if anybody else is (laughs). I know that Brian and his camp are hoping. We’re all hoping for it. But it’s really up to Mike. It’s really his call.
“REUNION PLANS? GOD ONLY KNOWS. I’M JUST STANDING BY FOR THE BUS TO PICK ME UP. I DON’T KNOW WHICH BUS.” BRUCE JOHNSTON
Tell him I really would like to do a worldwide tour with him one more time. In spite of all the politics, it’s a celebration that I think the world deserves right now.”
“MIKE WAS LIKE A RUNAWAY FAX MACHINE”
BRUCE JOHNSTON on California Girls, slow-dancing and fitting in. “I WAS A fan of the band before I joined. I was down at a surf spot in San Diego, and I was taking my surfboard out of my car, and on the radio comes Surfin’ by The Beach Boys. I listened to it, and I thought, Oh my gosh, now there are vocals to go with the instrumentals that people were making about surfing. I had seen the band live a couple of times. Once in a teeny, weeny club when everyone wore
“Brian who?”: The Beach Boys (clockwise from top) Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Al Jardine, Dennis Wilson and Mike Love backstage at Ready Steady Go!, November 6, 1964; (below) ’64’s All Summer Long LP.
“SURFIN’ SAFARI DIDN’T SOUND LIKE A HIT!”
And, finally, some anniversary reflections from The Beach Boys’ poet of sound: BRIAN WILSON. Can you describe the thrill of hearing yourselves on the radio for the first time, when KFWB played Surfin’? It was amazing and fun… It was on KBLA AM radio first. It was 1961, I was about 19 years old, in my house in Hawthorne… the house I grew up in. What do you remember about writing Surfin’ Safari, your first hit? It didn’t sound like a hit, haha! When I Get Around became the band’s first US Number 1 and million-seller in 1964 – what changed? It totally changed things for the good. It brought success but pressure as well. The Warmth Of The Sun was written on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was assassinated. Did the news add to the song’s haunting mood? It was written after we heard the news about the President and it did add to the mood… It was a sad mood when Mike and I wrote it. Looking back, what were the most positive impacts Murry Wilson made? He taught us how to work hard… He spanked us. Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) marks the first appearance of Bruce on record. How did he fit into the group dynamic, or change it? He brought a good vocal to the group.
Pendleton shirts, and then two times at the Cow Palace that held about 10,000 people in San Francisco. And the band without any extra musicians at that point sounded exactly like the recordings. It was impressive. I never thought of joining The Beach Boys, ever, because Terry Melcher and I had a good thing going on. We were producers at Columbia Records on the staff, and we were having some hits. It was a very small community then, so we would go across the street, to United Recorders, and see my old classmates from high school, Jan And Dean. Or we’d go up to Western Recorders and we knew Brian and everyone. We’d drop in and say, ‘Hey what’s going on?’ I remember hearing the recording of Wendy [from 1964’s All Summer Long] as the band was around one microphone. And I never realised that several months later I would be filling in for Glen Campbell, who was filling in for Brian, for a weekend. That’s how it got started. Brian asked me, and Carl taught me the vocal parts. I still have the legal-size paper tablets, where I wrote everything down, all the parts. Getting on-stage, April 9, 1965, in New Orleans, I knew all the songs, and somehow I fitted in. I totally focused on what part I would be singing. It was very professional. Brian was on his game. I wasn’t aware of any of the psychological problems that he probably in hindsight was going to suffer from. It emerged a little later. The first recording I made was California Girls. Mike Love was brilliant. I was in the hallway of Western and Brian kind of popped his head out the door and said, ‘Hey Mike, I’ve just recorded this track. I want to call it California Girls. Write some lyrics.’ So, I just hung out with Mike in the
hallway and watched him write, like a runaway fax machine. Two hours later, he had the words for California Girls. You wouldn’t have these songs without Mike, and Mike wouldn’t have them without Brian. And then Mike was such a ‘go go go’ guy about touring and promoting and going to radio stations back in the day. So, he brought a lot to the table beyond his ability to write lyrics. I think Brian, on California Girls, he liked my timbre – it kind of rubbed a different way than what he had with the band. He liked my voice sounding like that. Somehow I hung in there. I would say the one song that the label missed, that should have been a hit, is Kiss Me, Baby from The Beach Boys Today! album. It’s unbelievable. It’s got just enough of the Wrecking Crew cruising around, and enough of the band. In the ’50s, we would slow-dance to doo wop. I asked Mike about this a couple of weeks ago. I said, ‘Did you slow dance, like I did, to In The Still Of The Night by The Five Satins?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ So, 10 years later when it’s recorded, Kiss Me, Baby is kind of The Beach Boys’ more sophisticated version of doo wop. The vocals are crazy perfect. Any reunion plans? My only answer is, God only knows. What can I say? I don’t know who’s doing what, where, how, when. I’m just standing by for the bus to pick me up. I don’t know which bus. Maybe the reunion bus is gonna drop by. I don’t know. Listen, I’m still the new guy. Sixty years later, does it feel like another life entirely? No, it’s only another summer (laughs).” M
Much has been made of the Brian Wilson/Mike Love rivalry in the band. But there must have been a brotherly closeness too? Well Mike was and is a great singer… and he thought I was funny. Which songs from the pre-Pet Sounds era do you feel get overlooked or underrated? Don’t Worry Baby. Sixty years on, does it all feel like another life entirely? Those memories are still vivid… What are the reunion plans for this year? No plans. Might there be another Beach Boys album? Probably not… but who knows…
Sounds Of Summer: The Very Best Of The Beach Boys, updated, with 80 tracks over three discs, including 24 new mixes, is out now on UMC. A combined Carl And The Passions – “So Tough” and Holland box set, titled Sail On, Sailor, is due in the autumn. Boy wonder: Brian Wilson, circa 1963. Three MOJO also 67 years later, success brought “pressure”.
from the Zulu for “walk softly”. “It’s the music we use for traditional dances,” he explains. “When people left their homes to work in mines they would sing because they were missing their families. In our culture, singing is not complete unless you are dancing, and we had a stomping dance.” Behind him, Sibongiseni demonstrates, shu ing across the room, his eet hitting the oor noisily as he goes. “The guards who policed the miners would tell them to stop,” continues Mazibuko, “so they started to dance on their tiptoes instead.”
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N THE FIRST HALF OF THE 20th century, Zulu a cappella music was all the rage in South Africa. Solomon Linda’s song Mbube (The Lion) would sweep the world twice, first as Wimoweh, then as The Lion Sleeps Tonight. The mine companies that plundered South Africa’s mineral riches – gold, diamonds, coal, platinum, plutonium, chromium – organised singing competitions across the country with considerable status afforded triumphant choirs. Back in the townships, young Joseph Shabalala was listening intently. He’d been raised on a white-owned farm in the 1940s and worked as a waiter in Ladysmith. Mazibuko remembers Shabalala telling him that this music was good, but that something was missing: “He was asking us what we could do to make it better.” The legend of LBM says the answer came to Shabalala in a series of dreams that lasted six months in 1964. “He had the same dream every night. But that’s where he got the idea for our music. What he dreamt was perfect. The harmonies… the dancing in time to the music… he learnt all these things from his dream.” With Shabalala writing their material and drilling them until their dancing was precise, LBM crushed all-comers in the isicathamiya contests. With South Africa’s racist pass laws denying them free movement, however, life on the road was precarious for young black men supposed to remain in designated, racially segregated areas. “We had gone to Johannesburg to perform on a Friday night in 1973,” remembers Mazibuko, “and we were supposed to drive home afterwards for work, knowing the police would stop us hoping we didn’t have permission to travel between cities. But there was a gas shortage and the petrol stations had to close at 6pm on Friday and not open until 6am on Monday. We were stuck in Johannesburg. And if the police found you walking the street you had to produce your ID, and if you were not registered as working with a local company they would take you to the police station. If you couldn’t pay the fine you would be ailed or a month. We were all fired rom our obs that weekend. After that disastrous show, the band split: seven decided to find proper obs, five remained
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(Motella, 1973) Certified gold (25,000 sales) on release, LBM’s debut shows Joseph Shabalala had the formula in place from the start – the extra bass voices giving them more depth than their peers. Hat tip to producer West Nkosi, a township jive star in his own right who also recorded Mahlathini And The Mahotella Queens.
(Warner Bros, 1987) The first of a trio recorded for Warner Bros to capitalise on the success of Graceland and arguably the pick of all their studio albums. Shabalala returned to songs they had already recorded, but Paul Simon’s production takes tracks like Hello My Baby and Rain, Rain, Beautiful Rain up a notch.
(Polygram, 1998) Your one-stopshop best-of. Though it favours their glossier, post-Graceland recordings, the production lets you get right inside those harmonies. Released on the back of a Heinz commercial that used the title track, it sold a million in Britain – both album and single got to Number 2.
(Ladysmith Black Mambazo, 2014) Fifty years on from Joseph Shabalala’s dream, LBM collaborated with British classical composer Ella Spira to create a stage show that brought music, dance and song together. Though most of the classic line-up had departed, here was proof of the group’s continuing potency.
and new singers were recruited. But as one door closed… In 1973, LBM recorded a session for Radio Zulu, their songs – full of positive messages but apolitical – caused a sensation, swamping the network’s mailroom, switchboard and foyer with requests for more. Overcoming his boss’s belief that isicathamiya wouldn’t sell, West Nkosi, a talent scout with the Gallo label, recorded an LP, Amabutho. On advance sales alone it became the country’s first gold LP. Mazibuko remembers the Thursday it was released: “And we were called back into the studio on Friday to record more songs.” HE 1970s BELONGED TO LADYSMITH: every LP went gold, they played all over southern Africa: in Lesotho, Botswana, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Swaziland (now Eswatini), where 65,000 packed a stadium and Mazibuko remembers their surprise at the number of white faces in the crowd in that apartheid-free country. “We had white fans at home, but they had to hide in the balcony at concerts. We sang at a white people’s wedding once and afterwards somebody called the police while we were eating and we had to run.” By the 1980s, though, isicathamiya’s popularity was fading. Enter Paul Simon. Stung by the reception to his 1983 LP Hearts And Bones and at a low ebb, he had travelled to Johannesburg to see if recording with local musicians could re-ignite his creative spark. It did, but
© 2015 Brad Trent
A Body Of Evidence PATTI SMITH: singer, poet, warrior… But also, detective, collecting the clues that build a picture of herself. As her rock’n’roll mission hits the road once more, she takes time to share some of her most meaningful possessions, prompting talk of desks and dancing, new songs and old, sadness and hope. “We’re allowed to celebrate being alive,” she tells ANDREW MALE. Portrait by BRAD TRENT.
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Credit in here
Mystery train: Patti Smith at the Amtrak departure lounge in Penn Station, New York City, 2015.
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T’S A BEAUTIFUL SPRING MORNING IN ROCKAWAY BEACH, NEW YORK, AND Patti Smith is drinking black coffee in her small workers’ bungalow, a bolthole and retreat for the 75-year-old singer and poet since 2012. She’s part way through her extensive 2022 world tour and just back from Austin, Texas, where she entertained an audience of 3,000 with a transportive evening of songs and stories that encompassed her entire life. ignificantly, she has no album to promote, and hasn’t since ’s Banga, and the merchandise table is solely given over to copies of her 2019 book, Year Of The Monkey. Because Patti Smith is also a writer, has been from the age of 12. Since the 2010 publication of Just Kids, her award-winning memoir documenting her friendship with the late artist Robert Mapplethorpe – who took the iconic, imperious photograph of Smith that stares from the cover of her 1975 debut album, Horses – she has published a brace of poetic, funny, moving, lyrical and elliptic works – M Train and Monkey that she calls autobiographical fiction . More recently, she’s been busy on a surreal dream memoir called The Melting, that she reads for her thousands of followers on the online subscription platform, Substack. “I never wanted to be a songwriter,” she says, laughing. “I couldn’t write songs like Smokey Robinson. I don’t have that touch that strikes the common chord. I didn’t dream of being a songwriter. I dreamed of writing. I still struggle but it was a pleasure to write M Train and Year Of The Monkey and The Melting. Just Kids was total non-fiction, no embellishments, no exaggeration, but my current style is different, a sort of navigating of the territory between fact and imagination, dream and reality.” It’s that territory that we’ve decided to explore today. Throughout Smith’s writing is a constant reference to talismanic objects, relics of her past that spark memory. The idea is for Patti to send MOJO a series of photos of things she’s held onto throughout her life, objects that remind her of people, times, places, events, jumping off points for a freewheeling talk about her life, her music and her writing. Last time MOJO did a big interview with you, you were sorting through the belongings in your Manhattan apartment before your move to Rockaway Beach. What happened to the stuff you couldn’t bring with you?
So this is the desk where you wrote Just Kids, M Train and Year Of The Monkey? I remember you saying you only ever used to be able to write on beds, or sitting on the floor. When I was younger I’d sit on my bed and write all night, but when I got married to Fred and moved to Detroit, and had children, I had to find time for myself when the children were asleep or when I didn’t have duties. So I started waking up at five in the morning, when everyone else was sleeping, and I’d sit at the card table in the kitchen, where I’d taped a picture of Camus to the wall, and I sat there and trained myself to write early in the morning at my card table. And I wrote like that for 16 years and that’s how I prefer to write.
I know you’re a fan of detective novels and your Audiobook reading of Year Of The Monkey has the feel of a surreal detective novel. Are you gradually working towards writing one? Well, I’ve loved detective stories since I was a kid. Freddy The Pig Detective, Sherlock Holmes, Poe, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane and British detective series are still my favourite thing to watch on TV and, yes, I have been quietly working on two different detective stories. I have a female detective and a male detective and it’s my secret dream. The funny thing is, I was very close with William Burroughs and it was Bill’s secret dream to write a hard-boiled detective story. He’s got the feel of the gumshoe in many of his books but he never wrote a straight-out detective story. We used to talk about that all the time. Both of us had that secret dream, but I think that I will accomplish it. Another of the photos you sent me was of some German Edgar Wallace detective novels. Oh, well I just sent them because I have a penchant for buying books I can’t read. I only speak English, a little French but I just love mystery and crime books so much and I couldn’t resist them. That was just a little window into my idiosyncratic buying habits. They didn’t cost anything but they’re like small works of art. I couldn’t resist them. You said once that you’d make a terrible detective because you’re not observant enough. But in your writing, you have the eye of the European detective. A European detective, maybe. I just
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Well, I still have a place in New York. Rockaway Beach is very small, just a little bungalow. Hurricane Sandy [2012] almost destroyed it and it took a couple of years to rebuild. It’s just one big room across from the ocean. It’s not really a place for business or figuring out tours or domestic tasks. It’s just my little writer’s retreat, just one big room with a little skylight, some overhead fans turning and I have a beautiful, very simple Italian desk which I received in a very nice way, maybe
12 years ago. I was looking for some furniture with my friend Johnny Depp and I said, “Oh, I like desks.” So we looked at hundreds of desks – Chippendale desks, Louis XIV-style desks – and I said, “I’d like something simple and utilitarian.” I showed him the kind of desk then forgot about it. And then I went on tour. And I came home a month and a half later, and the desk was sitting in my living room. He’d arranged for it to be sent to my home.
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Patti & The Stooges: Smith with Iggy Pop and James Williamson at the Whisky A Go Go, Los Angeles, November 1974; (below, from left) Smith’s German Edgar Wallace editions; her writing desk; William Blake’s life mask keeps watch.
What was the reason for choosing the photo of the William Blake life mask? Blake was a point of connection for you with both Robert Mapplethorpe and William Burroughs… It was given to me as a gift after I did the Blake Society Annual Lecture in London in 2006. He’s grimacing because they didn’t lubricate his nostrils enough and the straws got stuck up his nose. I love it because you get a real sense of him as a human being. Robert and I both liked Blake’s palette, the blues and pinks and golds. My attraction to Blake started as a child. My mother gave me a little copy of Songs Of Innocence when I was a little girl. I loved poetry, and didn’t understand all of his poems, but I understood The Lamb and Tyger Tyger. My continuing interest in Blake stemmed from Allen Ginsberg who was truly a Blake scholar. He believed his spiritual lineage was Walt Whitman, and William Blake. So I learned a lot about Blake through Allen. What I drew from Blake was the idea of merging image with language, that idea of writing your own work and illustrating everything yourself. There’s a sense with both Blake and Whitman that they are not writing solely for their own time but for the future, which seems to be something you’re drawn to. That’s such a great observation. The importance of thinking of future generations, yes. Jesus said, “Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” and Whitman wrote, “Young poet, I am writing for you,” 250 years later. Allen Ginsberg responded to those lines, as that young poet. He felt Whitman wrote for him. Allen was also a generous artist who was writing for the future. You mention Jesus, and that opening line of Gloria on Horses, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” will perhaps be the line that is always associated with you, an incendiary, proto-punk line. But it can be interpreted as a generous line, because you’re basically saying, I don’t want him to bear the responsibility… Well I wrote that poem when I was 20 and I wrote it as a declaration of my own independence, that I wanted to take responsibility for my own mistakes. People would say to me, “How could you write that you don’t believe in Jesus?” I said, “I believe him in him so much that I invoke Him as the first word on my first record. Even though it has that youthful arrogance it’s me saying, “I will take responsibility for my own mistakes.” I didn’t want to burden a great teacher who had an entire world to deal with. It would also work as a line delivered by Lenny Bruce. It’s funny. Yeah, it’s the joke and then the riff. The humour is very important. It’s not a line I ever regret but ➢ 76 MOJO
“It’s Spiritual Release, Like Outer Meditation” What it feels like to be in the Patti Smith Group in 2022. By LENNY KAYE.
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HE PANDEMIC took us off the road for almost 18 months, and I realised how much we need to play music, not for the adulation but the physical and spiritual release, like outer meditation, it takes you to another place. What’s changed since the group started is our understanding of the material and how deep it runs, parallel to our growth as artists and humans. It’s not like sports where the body starts letting you down. I think, with musicians, there is a grace in growing older, and I understand better how to get to where I need to, and make each song new. What’s stayed the same is our commitment to our art and idealism, to bring a positive energy and inspire the audience to swim in their own sea of possibilities. We live in very difficult times at the moment, and what we offer is a beacon of hope and engagement, and by extension a sense of empowerment. I love seeing that our audiences are not age-dominated. The first five rows are still mostly girls, who see in Patti a passion and encouragement and the sense that, even if you’re a renegade or idiosyncratic, you can find a way to make your art. Our band came from as far left-field as we could, with poetry and one guitar. We didn’t set out to be a rock’n’roll band; we just followed our instincts. We’ll play all sorts, from soft, intimate moments to ramping it up into a field of healing noise. For me, our relationship to the songs hasn’t changed. I’m really happy to revisit our hits, because you understand the impact they have made, but I get the same rush from playing Free Money as I did in 1976 – we amp up the energy, follow its twists and turns, and I feel I
“PATTI IS THE ARROW, AND WE’RE THE FEATHERS AIMING THE ARROW TOWARDS THE BULLSEYE.”
can move a mile an hour faster than I did then! Land is still a jumping-off point for Patti to improvise a train of thought – as with Birdland, I love to see where that bird will fly! I still feel the emotional depth when we play Because The Night, specifically the love the lyrics embrace between Patti and [late husband] Fred, but it’s reflected by the audience as they sing it back to us.
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HE BAND is myself, Jay Dee [Daugherty, drums], Tony [Shanahan, bass/keys] and [Patti’s son] Jackson [guitar]. Everyone brings different influences and strengths, but the music goes through Patti’s persona and sense of drive. We all try to get to the door and open it for her before she whisks through! Jackson’s a remarkable guitarist; to me he brings a sense of Chet Atkins, while I’m more rock-oriented. The band is like family anyway. Jay Dee’s been with us since 1975, Tony for over 25 years. Jay Dee is the backbone of the band. Tony brings a sense of McCartney’s arranging to enhance the music. Patti is the arrow, and we’re the feathers aiming the arrow towards the bullseye. With Patti, you just seize moments in time. We’ll have our setlist but we don’t know where her imagination or vision will lead. I’ve been standing to her stage-left for 50 years, and I’ve never heard Patti sing a false note. She’s committed to making each song, and concert, relevant to that moment in time. We just played in Austin, and the Kentucky derby had been won by a little red horse, 80-1 odds, it just burst through from nowhere. We felt that night that we’d know how to pony when we played Land! Backstage is quiet these days, because of Covid, but the band has never been into rock’n’roll bacchanalia – we’re workers. I like dancing to White Wedding at 3am as much as anyone but I also like to get up early and remember what our mission is. The challenge of touring now is the logistics of travel and time spent in a sardine can, from city to city and the lack of sleep. When I get home to Pennsylvania, I feel pretty beat up! Coming up is three and a half weeks in Europe – I wouldn’t want to tour for eight weeks any more. But once we’re at soundcheck, there’s a big sigh of relief. You get to play for yourself and a couple of thousand people. It’s every musician’s dream.” As told to Martin Aston
Barry Plummer, David Godlis
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couldn’t make it as an American one. But, yes, I think there’s a bit of the detective in so many artists. Look at the artist’s process, they have all these pictures on the wall like evidence of the crime, and their art is bringing together all these pieces of evidence. Picasso did hundreds of tiny sketches for Guernica that found their way into the solution of the puzzle, which is the finished work of art.
Credit in here
Land dwellers: Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye on-stage at the Rainbow Theatre, London, April 2, 1978; (opposite page) the Patti Smith Group performing in New York, 2011 (from left) Tony Shanahan, Smith, Kaye.
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Sonic rendezvous: (clockwise from above): Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith’s Mosrite guitar; Fred and Patti in New York, March 17, 1990.
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then my regrets are not from my work. Whether I wrote a bad poem, or some, you know, hubristic ideology, I was always trying to do the best possible work I could. My only regrets are personal. I wish I would have spent more time with my mother. I wish I would have been more considerate to other people. Why was I such an asshole, you know? But I leave my work alone because my work continues. Each work is a stepping stone that gets you to the next. You can’t pull them out and say, “Well, this is a bad one, I’m gonna throw it away.” They all got you to this moment of your newest and most recent struggle.
Getty, Danny Fields. Shutterstock
I
F YOU CHART SMITH’S CREATIVE stepping stones, from 1974’s social realist freedom cry Piss Factory – which announced her escape from her hometown of Woodbury, New Jersey, to the New York City of the late ’60s – to her work today, you see two significant gaps, one between ’s waltzing, romantic Wave LP and 1988’s Dream Of Life and the other between Dream Of Life and 1996’s Gone Again. From 1980 to 1995 Smith effectively lived in semi-retirement in St Clair Shores, Michigan with her husband, MC5 guitarist Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith and their two children Jackson and Jesse. If that was a time of family it was also a time of loss. Robert Mapplethorpe died on
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March 9, 1989 due to complications from HIV/Aids, then Richard Sohl, Smith’s long-serving pianist, died of a heart attack in 1990. Then, on November 4, 1994, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith died of heart failure. Just a few weeks later, Smith’s brother Todd, who was her road manager, suffered a fatal stroke. “It was a very, very di ficult time, admits mith. At first my mission was survival, to negotiate my responsibilities being a mother and a widow, and I also lost my brother. Then step by step I had to reconnect with performing, but I had good support. Allen Ginsberg spoke to Bob Dylan and Bob invited us to tour with him, which was my first tour since 1979, and Michael Stipe went out on tour with me,
just to be there. My mission changed to, ‘Just do the best work you can’. I’d also promised Robert on his deathbed that I would write our story. So that was another mission which was, you know, complicated and took me a very long time. My missions shift, but I was still raising a son and a daughter on my own, after Fred died, but we came out o it fine. We’re all productive. We’re all healthy. You sent me a photo of Fred’s Mosrite guitar. Why did you want to include that? Because people don’t get to see it. It was such a famous guitar, through the most revolutionary part of the late ’60s and early ’70s. He played it on-stage until around 1980 then retired it. It was his most precious guitar and I included it because it was his work tool
On the street, on the stage: Patti’s boots; (left) Smith greets Bob Dylan, The Other End, NYC, June 25, 1975; (below) with Michael Stipe, 1995.
and it was a voice in our cultural revolution. Fred could make that guitar sound like a violin or an explosion. Can you remember the first time you heard that guitar? In person it was in ’77, late spring when I started to go see Fred in Detroit. I got to see him play it at The Second Chance in Ann Arbor. There was really no one like him (pause). He was the master. Do you hear his personality in that guitar sound? Well, Fred was a very private man and I don’t like speculating on things like that but, yes, there was an emotional spectrum to his music. I wish people could have heard more of what he did. I wish you could have heard him on saxophone. We played at home a lot. He loved Coltrane. He’d play tenor saxophone and I’d play clarinet, and we would improvise. It was really great to play with him. But I wasn’t part of that ’60s culture like Fred. I lived in South Jersey, I worked in a factory, then a bookstore. I didn’t start doing things publicly ’til the early-to-mid ’70s. But you do seem to draw on that ’60s psychedelic consciousness in how you use poetry, language as a transportive, hallucinogenic thing. Year Of The Monkey seems to be written as a consciousness-expanding exercise. To use an old phrase: it’s a trip. Good, I’m glad. I was a very sickly child. My mother had to work very hard to keep me alive, over and over again. And I loved art all my life and I realised, very early on, that there’s always a million reasons to live, you know? To listen to Puccini, Wagner, Bob Dylan, to read all the great books. I mean, I love being alive. I saw, as Allen Ginsberg would say, some of the best minds of my generation lose their life over accidents, mistakes, carelessness or tragedy. I just decided as a teenager that I wasn’t going to be addicted
to anything, except perhaps art and love. Maybe coffee? Hey, the day that I was pregnant, I stopped drinking coffee for nine months. The day I had my son, I drank a cup of coffee. I can cold turkey very quickly. In Year Of The Monkey, you talk about pulling an oblong box from under your bed and opening the lid to smooth the folds of your wedding dress. Was there a moment you thought, Do I share this? It’s an incredibly moving moment. Well, like the guitar, every once in a while, I just feel like sharing something that is real and precious. I mean, I’ve been a widow since the end of 1994. A long time. But once I was a bride, you know? It has its sorrow and pain, but also its pride and beauty. Have you always collected talismans, relics…? Yes. I wasn’t Catholic but when I was a little girl I was very fascinated with the ephemera of Catholicism, their rosaries, their saints. I didn’t like new things. I liked my grandmother’s English porcelain cups as opposed to the plastic Melmac ones all the ’50s housewives had. I liked antiques, little statues. I had my own little altars. Not for prayer but because I loved inanimate objects. It could be a toy, a broken doll, an old soldier. You know, one part religion, one part fairy tale, one part art. At some point they become memento mori. Yes, because I have so many people in my life who have passed away. I have my mother’s sunglasses, her hairbrush, my father’s cup, my brother’s books, my husband’s guitar picks. A lot of these things are commonplace, but, you know, when you lose the people that you love their
commonplace objects become very precious. They’re evidence. (Laughs) My room is filled with evidence, evidence from my whole life! I’ve got books from my childhood, little objects I’ve had for 70 years. All these little things. They don’t necessarily have any monetary value but they’re very precious to me.
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UR FIRST HOUR IS UP. “LET’S TALK again tomorrow,” says Smith. “I’ll make coffee and I’ll call you, or if you can’t sleep, call me in the dead of night. I’m looking forward to it.” The next day, our conversation starts with tour preparation. She has a week off before she arrives in the UK to play the Bearded Theory Festival in south Derbyshire and she’s in the process of packing. “I take the same thing, whether I’m going away for a week or a month,” she says. “Six very worn fine cotton T shirts. ix pairs o socks, six pairs of underwear, a little packet of masks, a couple of notebooks and some pens, a phone, a computer, a book I want to be reading. Black pants. One black jacket. And some talisman, like a bracelet from my daughter or a little stone that I fret with.” And your boots. Let’s talk about the photo you sent us of your boots. Yes. They’re the boots I wear almost all the time now. They’re the boots I wear on the street and on the stage. They slip on. They’re comfortable. They’re like my friends. I can look down at them on-stage and know they’re the same boots that walked on the street. They’re part of my armour, my uniform. I wear the same kind of T-shirt, ➢ MOJO 79
You’re touring at the moment but you don’t have a new album to promote. What’s the reason to keep doing it? Well, I’ve never really thought of myself as someone who tours to promote records. I mean, my records don’t sell all that much. I’ve never had a gold record in America. To me, performing is its own animal. I’m basically a reclusive person. I’m not very social, but there’s a part of me that is compelled to greet people or perform. I like working with my band. It’s camaraderie, it gives people work and gives me a chance to play on-stage with old friends and my son. And hopefully it’s a transforming ritual. We’re lucky to have a very young audience who are energising and inspiring and I just hope we can provide
“If I’m Feeling A Bit Boxed In I’ll Put On Some Glenn Gould” PATTI SMITH’s home listening. Film soundtracks a speciality. “I REALLY like my CD player. It’s about 10 years old and it’s really cool-looking. I love my CDs because they are portable. I don’t stream and I don’t really have many records left. I have a little EP of June Christy doing Something Cool. That’s one of the few records that survived. But I have lots of CDs: Albert Ayler, John Coltrane, Maria Callas, and lots of soundtracks. I love Kenji Kawai’s soundtrack to Ghost In The Shell. If I have trouble sleeping, I’ll just put on Philip Glass’s soundcheck to Mishima. I also like to listen to that if I write. If I’m feeling a bit boxed in I’ll put on some Glenn Gould, something without words. Maybe a little Ornette Coleman. The Naked Lunch soundtrack is a good one. These days I’ve also been listening a lot to Daniel Hart’s soundtrack to Green Knight, Hans Zimmer’s Dune soundtrack, which I just love, and Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack to the Phantom Thread which is beautiful. I found that film so heartbreaking, when at the end Reynolds Woodcock [the Daniel Day-Lewis character] says, “Kiss me darling, before I get sick again.” It’s just the most mystically strange love story ever. The way Woodcock and [his wife] Alma are entwined. The conspiracy between them. Because that’s what love is, a mutual conspiracy.”
Credit in here
No words: Glenn Gould, backstage at Hill Auditorium, Ann Arbor, May 4, 1958.
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some kind of positive energy exchange, call attention to things in the world. Also at my age, at 75 I can’t predict how long I‘ll have the physical stamina or the voice to do good concerts. So since I seem to be in good form right now it’s good to be able to greet the people for a couple more rounds. You sent us a picture of a tambourine and a necklace Robert Mapplethorpe made for you. I like how they go against the image he left behind in his art. I met Robert when we were both 20. We hadn’t experienced a whole lot of life. He was very romantic, very kind and he was my boyfriend. We didn’t have much money but we both believed in ourselves. Robert was painting, drawing, doing collages, small installations. He hadn’t started taking photographs. For my 21st birthday, because we had no money, he secretly made me that tambourine and I mean made. He got a round frame, stretched goatskin on it and tattooed the Capricorn symbol on it, and because I love ribbons and was sort of gypsy-like when I was young, he added all these multicoloured ribbons. He made the perfect gift for me. It reflected not just his care for me, but his understanding of what I would like. He gave it to me on December 30, 1967. The ribbons have faded but it’s totally intact and still has a nice sound. Also, in a way, it’s his first portrait of you. Yes. When I look at it, I can see my 20-yearold self. I asked you to send me a picture of your bed because so many of your ideas come from your dreams. It looks like something from a monastic cell… In Year Of The Monkey I quote the first line from Gérard de Nerval’s Aurélia, “Our dreams are a second life.” I’ve always thought dreams were a writer’s tool. You know how a poem is a code? Dreams are the same. They’re not fettered by linear logic. People that say, “Oh, I want to write but I don’t know what to write.” I always say, “Get a notebook and every morning, write down your dream, just a few sentences. Then, after several months, you can look and think, Well, I have all this imagery that can be used in a poem or a story.” I’m not a surrealist, I just think our dreams are our own and we can either be comforted or horrified by them or we can exploit them. I have a song, My Blakean Year. That was from a rough period in my life when I was feeling not appreciated, disenfranchised. Then, in my dream I saw Blake walking past these depressing factories and superimposed on them were angels. I’m not a prolific songwriter, but I woke up and that was still in my head and I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it all down. That was a gift from a dream. It’s a nice shift from the dream world to something as solid as a pocket knife. The playwright Sam Shepard’s pocket knife. What’s the story behind this? I was with him in Kentucky, in 2017, the last year of his life. He was suffering with ALS [a type of motor neurone disease] and I was assisting him as he
wrote his last book. He had this big cigar box full of pocket knives and he wanted me to have one. I asked him to choose for me. He thought for a long time and chose that one, so it probably speaks more of me than him. He always thought of me as tough, but delicate. When I met him I hardly weighed 100 pounds – gangly, underfed. He had bigger pocket knives, ones with attachments, but he gave me this one. Simple, delicate. I felt that spoke to how he might think of me, of knowing each other for half a century, something that can protect you but that you can hold in your hands. I do cherish it. What else do you think he gave you? Self-confidence. Also, I learned to improvise from Sam. Before I did my first poetry reading, probably 1970, I said, “Well, how do I know if it’s good or a mistake?” He said, “It’s just like jazz. You miss a beat? Invent another one. Find yourself trapped? Kick a hole in the wall.” I was very young when I met him and he was already an acclaimed playwright. He believed in me. He encouraged me to write and he was protective. I derived a lot of self-confidence from being his friend. And we could talk about writing together. He gave me companionship. Even at the end of his life, even in his suffering, I felt his companionship. We were friends. I mean, he was my boyfriend for a time and that was exciting, but more wonderful is we stayed friends for half a century.
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HERE IS A BEAUTIFUL MOMENT IN the epilogue of Year Of The Monkey where Smith is writing about Sam Shepard, and she sees herself with him, in his kitchen in Kentucky talking about writing, and The Temptations’ Papa Was A Rollin’ Stone is playing on a “brown tweed, sort of ’40s-looking radio”. Then Patti realises that Sam is dead, and she’s in a dream and will soon have to wake up from it. Music, and its relationship to memories and dreams, is a powerful presence in Smith’s recent writing so I tell her that it’s strange she hasn’t sent any photos of records. We haven’t really talked about records as objects have we? Have you held onto any of the records that were important as you was growing up? Well, songs like The Shirelles’ Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, The Love Of My Man by Theola Kilgore, songs that fulfilled teenage longing. But the songs that were really important were songs you could dance to. Living in rural South Jersey, where you paid 50 cents to go to the monthly dance at the Armory, and Hank Ballard might come by and do one song, dancing was very important. It was a way to have a little moment with a boy, express yourself, show off your dancing skills, expel some teenage energy. You saw rock’n’roll evolve in real time. Then, with a song like Land [on Horses] you become part of that evolution. It’s an obvious call-back to those soul and R&B records you grew up with but you’re placing it within this new form. It’s what I knew how to do. I wasn’t a singer or songwriter. I was a poet-performer but I came from a generation where everybody sang on street corners. I liked to improvise, but I’d choose really simple songs that spoke to me when I was young. In 1973 I’d started telling this seven-min-
Alamy
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the same black jacket, same boots. I don’t like having a special outfit on-stage. I like to feel a seamless sense of being on the street and on the stage.
Bob Gruen, Getty
ute-long poem that would go into, “You know how to pony…” and the song part would be a very short, three-chord rap. Then every night it evolved. It used to start like this, “Look at this land where we am. Night falls like a final curtain. How Shakespearian.” It was all about New York City. So I was really just looking for a song that had the word ‘land’ in it. Oh! Land Of A Thousand Dances. Eventually we dropped that poem and it became a field for a character to go through a transformation. Also, William Burroughs gave me his book The Wild Boys, and the antihero is Johnny. I plucked Johnny from Wild Boys, and made him the hero of Land. William used to come to CBGB’s to hear us, sitting there in his suit and tie while I was doing the song. It was William who gave me language for these things, who explained what I was doing and magnified some of the swagger or arrogance. Something very needed for a young woman on the scene in 1973. Yeah, it’s funny, but as a female in what they would called a man’s world, performing rock’n’roll, it was really other men who were very supportive. Bobby Neuwirth. Sam Shepard, Robert. William Burroughs. All these men. There were detractors of course, all the guys at the bar shouting, “Go back into the kitchen. Get off the stage! Comb your hair!” But I had my armour. Rituals seem very important to you. Yeah. Repetition makes me nauseous but ritual is
its own thing. My concerts are ritualistic. Each night, when my bass player Tony [Shanahan] and I do the setlist we think about the general atmosphere, we see the people waiting outside. How do they seem? How does the venue feel? How is the history of the area? What’s happening in our world right now? On-stage, same clothes as I had on the street. We don’t do the same thing every night, but I have the same mental template and that’s to give people a night that is transformative. It doesn’t matter if it’s flawed or funny, or really intense as long as it feels transformative. People asked me how do you want to be remembered? Well, basically as a friend or somebody they can trust to do the best job I can. You know? I’m never going to try to steer people wrong. I’ve done my work as best as I can. I’ve always tried to be the best person possible. Are you writing songs? Yes. I want to record one more record that is worthy of putting out in the world. But I’m 75 years old. I’ve seen a lot. But with everything I saw, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X, the loss of Jimi Hendrix, Vietnam and on and on, I always felt we could straighten it out as a people, that there was
Dreams of life: Smith on-stage at Central Park, July 9, 1976; (left) with Kaye at Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa, May 6, 2022; (above, from left) the tambourine and necklace given to Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe; her penknife gift from Sam Shepard; Patti’s bed.
still time, but now we are in such mortal crisis. Not just the pandemic, but the environmental pandemic, the rise of nationalism, it’s… We were playing in Tulsa recently, having a great time, and I said, “We’re allowed to have a great time!” We’re allowed to celebrate being alive because we all know how bad things are. Women struggling for their rights again, what is happening in the Ukraine. We’re not forgetting it. But in the process we have to celebrate being alive several times a day. And we have to do our work. We have to be who we are supposed to be. Next week I have a big week. I’m getting the Legion Of Honour from the President of France, and a doctorate from Columbia University, but I promise you on those other days I’ll be cleaning cat litter, and washing my clothes. It’s life. M Patti Smith and her band play Higher Ground Festival, Alexandra Palace, London on July 24.
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John Murry
Rodrigo y Gabriela 'Rodrigo y Gabriela'
Rodrigo y Gabriela & C.U.B.A.
Moving Hearts
'The Graceless Age' 10th anniversary gold-coloured double vinyl, new half-speed
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10th anniversary remaster for Rodrigo y Gabriela's Cuban album,
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remaster in a gatefold sleeve with insert.
on red/blue splattered double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with insert.
'Live In Dublin'
seminal Irish folk - Celtic rock band. Freshly remastered and pressed on red/yellow double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve.
Funeral Suits
Little Roy
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a contemporary American songbook of covers, including
this autumn.
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Wyvern Lingo
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The Minutes
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MOJO F ILT E R YOUR GUIDE TO THE MONTH'S BEST MUSIC EDITED BY JENNY BULLEY jenny.bulley@bauermedia.co.uk
CONTENTS
84 ALBUMS
• Jack White: he’s a lover not a fighter • Notes to self: Kendrick Lamar’s Mr Morale & The Big Steppers • Black Midi: diabolically good • Nina Nastasia at full gallop • Interpol: they’re not making this up • Plus, Nick Cave, Jessie Buckley & Bernard Butler, Laura Veirs, Ty Segall, Gwenno, The Sadies, ZZ Top, UB40 and more.
98 REISSUES
• Christine McVie: Songbird’s solo flight • Neil Young’s slow-cooked Toast • Brit psych hero Twink • File Under: Linda Hoover – gifted teen/ ancestor of Steely Dan • Plus, Zappa, Max Roach, Asha Puthli, Amy Winehouse, Orbital, The Associates and more.
108 HOW TO BUY • Sitar star, Ravi Shankar.
110 BOOKS
• Peter Doherty (you wouldn’t wanna be in his shoes) • Plus, Ava Cherry, Glam!, Pauline Oliveros and more.
INDEX
“Peer into the fog of blurred remembrance and sift fact from fiction, reality from drug hallucination.” THE ALLURE OF PETER DOHERTY, BY PAT GILBERT, BOOKS PAGE 110
Associates, The Ayler, Albert Babe Ruth Bangs & Talbot Black Midi Bock, Naima Brian Jonestown Massacre Brown, Arthur Buckley, Jessie & Butler, Bernard Burning Hell, The Cave, Nick Chemistry Set Cosmic Analog Ensemble Courtney, Martin Di Meola, Al, McLaughlin, John, De Lucia, Paco Earle, Steve Egan, Nicky Entourage, The Ephemeron Loop, The Forbert, Steve Gauthier, Mary Godley & Creme Guided By Voices Gwenno Harkin Hoover, Linda Interpol Jones, Glenn Jurado, Damien
103 104 103 94 93 90 92 87 86 94 96 93 89 87 100 91 95 103 89 92 91 105 91 90 94 102 91 90 87
Kirk, Rahsaan Roland Lamar, Kendrick Lloyd, Charles MacDonald, Mississippi Mallinder, Stephen Master Musicians Of Jajouka McKendree, RJ McVie, Christine Michael, George Mogorosi, Tumi Momma Nastasia, Nina Neilson, Tami Nightlands Nutini, Paolo O’Sullivan, Gilbert Oliveros, Pauline Orbital Orchestre Massako Osbourne, Johnny Pearson, Katy J Perfume Genius Pink Mountaintops Puthli, Asha Pye Corner Audio
104 86 94 95 94 90 92 98 104 95 91 88 87 90 90 95 105 104 100 100 86 87 92 103 89
Revelators Sound System Righton, James Roach, Max Sadies, The Segall, Ty Spektor, Regina Spiral Stairs Stars Stewart, Dave Tedeschi Trucks Band Twink UB40 ft. Ali Campbell & Astro UK Subs VA: Gotta Get A Good Thing Goin’ VA: Pay It All Back Vol. 8 VA: Studio One Women VA: Bob Crewe’s ’60s Sounds Veirs, Laura White, Jack Winehouse, Amy Working Men’s Club XTC Young, Neil Zappa, Frank ZZ Top
89 86 104 89 87 86 89 92 95 95 101 92 103 103 92 100 105 94 84 103 87 104 100 104 90
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F I LT E R A L B UM S
Greater love hath no man The mellowed firebrand wonders about the workings of love. How this generation’s Dylan got saved. By Grayson Haver Currin. Illustration by Borja.
Jack White
to hold hands in public and butter his paramour’s literal and metaphorical bread. “Oh lord, let them see,” he begs. But self-doubt plagues even this peppy confession, as he worries that he’s wasting her time or doomed to repeat past wrongs. Such Entering Heaven Alive fears wrap around the warm acoustic strums and THIRD MAN. CD/DL/LP ascendant keys of Please God, Don’t Tell Anyone ACK WHITE pivoted like a pro when it came to like barbed wire, spiking the blues-rock shuffle the question of a third marriage. “I’d love to with White’s warnings about just how bad he has have more kids before I’m instantly a grandpa sometimes been. He’s stolen and cheated and while they’re growing up,” he told MOJO in early sinned in uncountable ways, even though he January after the idea of nuptials arose, grinning believes it’s mostly been in service of someone else beneath his sweep of electric blue hair in his gilded – a crying daughter, a screaming son, a dejected “Someone who Nashville office. “So many things have taken me lover. “Have I proven myself to no one?” White has enjoyed away from that. It might already be too late.” wonders, just before his voice begins to break. Though he had been the first to mention Olivia Jean There is, of course, more to this burgeoning love success but is Markel, his longtime girlfriend and collaborator, he than tortured self-flagellation. The dim lick of All still searching Along The Way may sound swiped from some dark took care not to overcommit. But less than three months later, in April, White Delta dungeon, but White actually lifts from Hansel for a deeper took the plunge in Detroit’s massive Masonic And Gretel and, uh, antiquated Florida agricultural contentment Temple, not far from his childhood home. After practices to pledge his support and partnership. inviting Olivia Jean on-stage to play The White with life itself.” (Olivia Jean aptly plays bass and guitar here.) Its Stripes’ Hotel Yorba, he proposed. Moments later, Wurlitzer-led chaser, Help Me Along, is a guileless they were married in front of the crowd, a sequence and winning devotional that smartly acknowledges so surprising and swift it even caught their officiant, Third Man there’s work to be done, its rush of sweetness aside. “I’ll keep co-owner Ben Swank, off guard. Given the speed of it all, maybe nothing else from you,” he sings near the start, hinting at a prior White hadn’t known the answer 11 weeks earlier. fault. These five minutes feel like a march straight out of couple’s Still, it is now difficult to hear Entering Heaven Alive – White’s therapy and to the altar – or, in the case of White and Olivia Jean, second album of 2022, the plainspoken rootsy counterpart to Fear onto the stage. Of The Dawn, released the day he exchanged vows – without The love story is only one of two primary threads here. This is, thinking of a lover sorting out the terms and conditions of the after all, perhaps the most mellow and settled LP of White’s budding romance he wants and even needs to last. These 11 songs career, its largely acoustic canter taking it from New Orleans back map the mind of someone who has enjoyed to Nashville, from occasional jaunts to the Brill Building to success and its finer trappings, from money frequent back porch jams. Recorded almost entirely at White’s and power to a little family of his own, but home studio, with a small cast of veteran collaborators and pals, is still searching for more: lasting love, these 11 songs are built for theatres, not arenas, a rare retreat shared happiness, a deeper contentment given White’s public bravado. His guitar heroics, so riveting during with life itself. If the delightfully madcap Fear Of The Dawn, are almost entirely absent here. Aside from the Fear Of The Dawn suggested a sonic sleek jazz winks and brief lysergic roar of I’ve Got You Surrounded berserker fighting to be free, Entering (With My Love), a cosmic excursion that suggests Steely Dan BACK STORY: Heaven Alive is a plea to be bound to taking Tom Waits for a test-drive, White sits back and picks, too AN OUROBOROS someone who mostly wants the same. contemplative now for paroxysms. ● Entering Heaven Alive ends just like Fear Of White, of course, never fancies this will These slow burns seem good for White, who passed 45 around The Dawn begins – with be easy, given both his troubled past and the time he was writing them. “Ask yourself if you are happy and Taking Me Back, a tune busy present. During Love Is Selfish, he then you cease to be,” he sings at the album’s start, paraphrasing about forgiveness or complete lack thereof turns the inherited wisdom of Bible verse the autobiography of political philosopher John Stuart Mill. Piano and the easiest track hokum on its head, admitting that his love and drums suddenly lash against him, like a stentorian for White to finish on both albums. Where isn’t necessarily patient or kind, that it does schoolteacher reminding him not to repeat the mistakes of his the fiery first version is seek its own advantage. “I’ve been trying youth. Shut up, and just be. all guitar pyrotechnics over the years to try and overcome these White has lived his public life often seeking out some bleeding and mauling rhythms, this one, subtitled fears,” he sings, voice pitched slightly over edge of rock music, sometimes stumbling badly. Even the (Gently), is a fiddle-lined an acoustic guitar that wants to frolic but seemingly primitive blues of The White Stripes were an exercise in shuffle with bounding instead sounds forever frustrated. “But ecstatic minimalism, in pushing a set of elemental binaries, like piano. White likes the interplay of the two nothing I come up with proves I can/And red versus white or guitar versus drums, to extremes. Fear Of The interpretations. “The I work real hard to make you understand.” Dawn, then, showed White still had the itch to see how much he song is the same, but Failure isn’t just an option, then, it’s could twist rock’s weird branches. But what is more basic and it’s just not what you’re saying,” he barer than falling in love and trying to figure out how not to fuck it the expectation. says. “It’s how you’re up? That is the language of Entering Heaven Alive, or of walking into He gets flirty and lascivious during the displaying it.” paradise with your dignity intact before it’s already too late. ragtime update Queen Of The Bees, asking
★★★★
J
84 MOJO
The real feel: Kendrick Lamar, raw and resonant.
★★★
For All Our Days That Tear The Heart EMI. CD/DL/LP
Arresting mind-meld between actor and guitar hero.
The Power Of Now Long-awaited, introspective epic from 21st century hip-hop’s poet laureate. By Stevie Chick.
Kendrick Lamar
★★★★
Mr Morale & The Big Steppers AFTERMATH. CD/DL
HALF-A-DECADE on from his last album, Kendrick Lamar offers a simple explanation for his lengthy silence in the first lines of this, his fifth long-player: “I’ve been going through something.” Many things, in fact. Themes surfacing across Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers include the challenges of monogamy and parenthood, Covid, institutional racism and the weight of black celebrity, and his struggles to heal generational trauma within his family and halt long-established patterns of selfdestructive behaviour. Heavy stuff. But then, Lamar is the first rapper to win a Pulitzer. He doesn’t deal in escapist fantasies or lurid entertainment, nor does he have a clothing brand or signature champagne to hawk. “I’m not in the music business/I’m in the human business”, he raps on Crown (the album’s roll call of guest voices includes Oprah-approved self-help author, Eckhart Tolle). He doesn’t preach or lecture; rather, he externalises his thought processes, making listeners feel his conflicts. His confessional rhymes touch upon complex issues with a rare depth; like De La Soul’s Posdnuos before him, Lamar’s not hard – he’s complicated. Emotional, intimate, interior – almost uncomfortably so – Mr. Morale… shares a mood
86 MOJO
with 4:44, Jay-Z’s remarkable set of atonement following his extramarital indiscretions. Here, Lamar’s negotiating the distance between his own shortcomings and those of the world, finding truths in contradictions. As he’s tackling toxic manhood on Father Time, he’s acknowledging his enduring enmity towards Drake and admitting, “I’m not as mature as I think”. On Auntie Diaries, he chronicles his aunt’s gender transition alongside his own journey to acceptance and understanding, and then sends listeners along to confront their own intolerances. Aiming to transcend cycles of damage, Lamar is a self-acknowledged work in progress, and eminently fallible. And Mr. Morales… falls prey to the same weaknesses of every double album, overlong, overwhelming and uneven. The bristling jazz, offbeat funk and ambitious detours of To Pimp A Butterfly and Untitled gone in favour of low-key, downbeat hiphop, the music subservient to the text. But when the album works – which is often – it works magnificently. It peaks on Mother I Sober, built around a mournful piano figure and desolate vocals from Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. “I’m sensitive, I feel everything, I feel everybody,” Lamar begins, tracing the destructive ripples emanating from historic trauma, the “generational curses”. It’s powerful, anguished stuff, but as Lamar snaps from his litany of tragedy and commits to breaking the chain of pain, the sense of release and uplift is resonant. Unkempt and lopsided, Mr. Morales… doesn’t scream “masterpiece!” like the inspired, sculpted works that preceded it, but you sense this is an album Lamar had to make. Raw and resonant, its substance, and solemn reach for transcendence, is commendable.
There is no shortage of drama on this record – an inevitable consequence, maybe, of a creative union between Oscar-nominated actor and stage musical star Jessie Buckley and a musician and producer of Bernard Butler’s expressive skills. Buckley’s love of Sam Lee’s Butler-produced Old Wow led her to the former Suede guitarist’s door; this expansive album just about contains the flood of songs that followed. The Eagle And The Dove has a fairy tale Song To A Seagull grandeur; occasional spills into staginess are tempered by Beautiful Regret’s country toughness or the Fleetwood Mac wistfulness of We Haven’t Spoke About The Weather. The stamping of a flamenco dancer’s feet; references to Georgian singing, Gertrude Stein and Vita Sackville-West; Buckley’s red-wineand-black-coffee voice: it’s all expertly arranged to maximise the unbrushed bohemian intensity. If you don’t quite feel it, it’s fine – there’s enough passion here for two. Victoria Segal
James Righton
★★★
Jim, I’m Still Here
Katy J Pearson
★★★★
Sound Of The Morning HEAVENLY. CD/DL/LP
Bristolian singersongwriter’s second LP does the same again, only better. Katy J Pearson’s second album heralds few radical stylistic shifts, but showcases renewed confidence, intention and focus. There’s a harder edge to her vocal, too, erstwhile country winsomeness sharpened by Stevie Nicksstyle grit. Otherwise, Sound Of The Morning plays like her 2020 debut Return, robing her folkrock tuneage with booming guitars and keening synths. Pearson’s gift for translating trauma into fine pop – the shimmering throb of Talk Over Town making something anthemic of her disillusionment, Alligator expressing her anxiety via the medium of jagged post-punk – is a joy, as is her unflagging dry wit. And she has a killer ear for detail, from the George Harrison-esque slide guitar gilding Game Of Cards’ elegant grooves, to a majestic cover of Willow’s Song, the haunting ballad from The Wicker Man, rendered in urgent motorik rhythms, pealing mariachi horns and her mystic, eye-of-thestorm vocals. Stevie Chick
Regina Spektor
★★★
Home, Before And After
DEEWEE. CD/DL/LP
WARNER. CD/DL/LP
Former Klaxon adopts “deluded rock star” alter-ego Jim and dives into the ’80s.
Russian-American singersongwriter’s eighth album in two-decade career.
James Righton has been busy in recent years: playing with Arctic Monkeys, helping to put together the live band for Abba’s Voyage show, releasing in 2020 his first solo album, The Performer, with its ’70s singer-songwriter bent. This follow-up is way more synthy and explores the idiosyncratic productions of Japan and Prince. Opener Livestream Superstar, detailing in spoken word Righton’s online promo activities (“coming direct to you live from my garage”) is pretty funny but doesn’t bear repeated listens, while the electro Touch sails dangerously close to Peter Gabriel’s I Have The Touch. Better are Playing To Win’s echoes of Ultravox’s Vienna and Benny Andersson’s Synclavier breakout on Empty Rooms. There’s sincerity in Righton’s lament for a Covidkilled friend in A Day At The Races, but for the most part the emphasis is firmly on the kitsch. Tom Doyle
Although Regina Spektor came up alongside The Strokes in the skinny jeanswearing New York scene of the early ’00s, she’s now considered established enough to warrant her own sign on the Bronx Walk Of Fame and can fill Carnegie Hall. Home, Before And After further pursues the piano and orchestra direction of 2016’s Remember Us To Life, while bringing in co-producer John Congleton, who characteristically reinforces the beats. Opening with the street blues narrative of Becoming All Alone and the rap vocal rhythms and dramatic tempo changes of Up The Mountain, the tracks then move further into the domain of musical theatre. There are tap-dancing beats in Spacetime Fairytale and distinct Rodgers and Hammerstein ambitions to the gratingly quirky What Might’ve Been. But it’s when Spektor is less showy and more direct that her songs are most affecting. Tom Doyle
Supplied press photo
Jessie Buckley & Bernard Butler
F I LT E R A L B UM S
★★★★
Reggae Film Star MARAQOPA. CD/DL/LP
Seattleite singer-songwriter delivers affecting, low-key concept album. Jurado’s 18th full-length release is a concept album format, but it’s no Tales From Topographic Oceans-esque folly. This characteristically downbeat song cycle sings the inner monologues of actors and bit-players idling on a movie set somewhere, their anxieties rising to the surface. Scored by acoustic guitar, restrained chamber orchestra and piano – the vibe suggests Simon & Garfunkel at their most intimate – these unfurling dramas often seem lowstakes; the wry Taped In Front Of A Live Studio Audience closes on a repeated refrain of, “Have we decided who’s picking up the kids after school?” But Jurado understands such little details can be breaking points, and while Reggae Film Star is often droll, Jurado’s empathy for his characters – from the enduring recriminations of Lois Lambert to the aching isolation of What Happened To The Class Of ’65? – often makes for affecting songwriting. Stevie Chick
the feeling that his journey towards some kind of resolution has been long, but it’s far from over. Mike Barnes
best, Fear Fear is as compact and airless as its title, an existential crisis dancing in warm leatherette. Victoria Segal
Working Men’s Club
★★★★
HEAVENLY. CD/DL/LP
Tami Neilson
Distress to impress: Unhappy Valley synthpoppers feel the chill on second album.
★★★★
Kingmaker
Given the bleak resurgence in Cold War terrors, the second album from Todmorden quartet Working Men’s Club has arrived at a fitting moment. Deeply influenced by the protect-and-survive paranoias of ’80s synth-pop, Fear Fear might have hatched under pandemic conditions, but the band’s newly intensified darkness is cryptic enough to have multiple applications. Frontman Syd MinskySargeant marshals his martial electronics with an icy conviction, flashes of occasional light – Kraftwerk, Pulp, Chemical Brothers – at odds with the Being Boiled terrors of 19, the whiplash Depeche Mode of Widow or Circumference’s Numan-esque stare. These are songs about alienation, claustrophobia, even their lustiest moments spiked with worry (Heart Attack, a track that suggests the possibility of an electroclash revival). At its
Hello, Hi
DRAG CITY. CD/DL/LP/MC
Chameleonic psych-rock time-traveller goes acoustic again. Segall’s 2010 breakthrough, Melted, suggested an ambition akin to Jack White’s: its fusion of hooks and noise hinting at a Nirvana-style crossover. Ten albums and countless sideprojects on, however, it’s clear Segall has little interest in bothering the mainstream, preferring life as a cultish time traveller, exploring yesteryear flavours of psychedelia. An about-face from the gnarly rock of his Freedom Band, Segall’s fourteenth studio album is mostly acoustic, recorded at home alone. Its gauzy visions suggesting some rediscovered private press folk oddity from the ’70s, Segall’s faultless melodic instincts lent an edge by Bolan-esque warble, inward-looking lyrics
Sinna Nasseri
Perfume Genius
★★★
Tami Neilson has a distinctive approach, blending soul and rockabilly with a lush country hinterland. Here, she rips into misogyny in all its irksome forms, and each number’s so hooky you wonder how you didn’t already know it. Soaked with shivering Fender, the title track blooms into Ennio Morricone orchestral as she turns out to be a king herself. Careless Woman is hugely satisfying – tribal drumbeat, vocal with the swagger of a feral Peggy Lee: “A careless woman/She play too rough/She laugh too loud/ She talk too much. Wanna be her when I grow up.” Elsewhere, there are storming echoes of Amy Winehouse, Bobbie Gentry, even the kitsch, growly sarcasm of The Cramps. While Spanish guitar waltz
MATADOR. DL/LP
Soundtrack to dance project drifts into abstract pop and further strangeness. The previous LP by Iowa’s Michael Alden Hadreas, 2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, moved between electronica and baroque arrangements. This is very different, being the soundtrack to his 2019 theatrical production, The Sun Still Burns Here, in which he appeared alongside choreographer Kate Wallich. Much of the music is instrumental, and when Hadreas’s voice does feature, as in both Herem and Teeth, it’s mostly in gossamer layers of harmony, while coproducer Blake Mills gives the brass, strings and celeste parts room to breathe and directs the odd, mumbling dub of the title track. At its most extreme, the repetitive piano frills of Scherzo come across like an erratic Nils Frahm, and Hellbent is five minutes of teeth-grinding industrial noise. Without the accompanying visuals, Ugly Season makes most sense when there’s a vocal to centre it. Tom Doyle
Melon man: Martin Courtney brings the positive vibes.
Magic Sign DOMINO. CD/DL/LP
Dreamy-headed guitar pop from Real Estate singer.
MAGNETIC EYE. CD/DL/LP
HAPPILY WALLOWING in nostalgia, Martin Courtney refers in the title of his second solo album to what, as a late teenager, he and his friends would call the “magic” road signs that would guide them home in New Jersey when they were driving around high and purposely directionless. These hazy, watercolour memories are most evident in breezy strumming opener Corncob, where the singer fails to remember the name of a one-time buddy (“It’s on the tip of your tongue”). Like Courtney’s solo debut predecessor, 2015’s Many Moons, this doesn’t deviate wildly from the Real Estate blueprint, featuring pealing Byrds-y guitars, simple analogue synth counter-melodies and his semi-detached, Elliott Smithlike vocals. Time To Go offroads into soul and Exit Music is a gentle stomper resounding with positive vibes, and all in all, it’s lovely, uplifting stuff.
Even if Long Long Road had been rather average, we might still have given Arthur Brown a pat on the back for lifetime achievement. But on the opening Gas Tanks he sings with astonishing intensity, battling it out with swirling Hammond organ that recalls Vincent Crane’s lines on his 1968 single, Fire. Brown plays guitars and piano and the rest is down to multi-instrumentalist Rick Patten. On The Blues And Messing Around, he evokes Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, singing, ”She tried to poison me with mushrooms/She wanted to use her power on me”. The prevailing mood is darkly psychedelic R&B and soul, with jazzy inflections on Going Down, on which he unleashes his trademark yell. Once I Had Illusions exemplifies Brown’s dissatisfaction with the state of the world and reinforces
Canadian alt-country, soul, and rockabilly queen’s incendiary fifth outing.
★★★★
★★★★
Vital 80th birthday celebrations from the God of Hellfire.
OUTSIDE MUSIC. CD/DL/LP
Ty Segall
★★★★ Long Long Road
Beyond The Stars has the bereaved Neilson talking to her musician dad in dreams, Willie Nelson guesting as Neilson Snr; it’s immensely touching. Glyn Brown
Ugly Season
Fear Fear
Martin Courtney Arthur Brown
and, on Saturday Pt 2, wild saxophone duets. Meanwhile, the introspective Over finds Segall crooning, “I want to start over/But who will I be?”; the title-track’s unexpected blast of biker-rock riffage suggest this inveterate shapeshifter is ready for his next metamorphosis. Stevie Chick
Tom Doyle
Credit in here
Damien Jurado
MOJO 87
UNDERGROUND BY ANDREW MALE
★★★
Expo Botanica HISSTOLOGY. DL/LP
Charif Megarbane’s thirtyfirst album as Cosmic Analog Ensemble. Since 2009. With a work ethic that makes Prince seem slothful, Lebanese whirlwind Megarbane has released over 100 albums over the past decade on his own label, under all sorts of pseudonyms, playing almost everything himself. Cosmic Analog Ensemble is one of his favourite trading names and, in much the same way as 2013’s Fish Fingers chronicled a fish’s journey from sea to breadcrumb-coated food, Expo Botanica comprises 16 near-instrumental tracks which imagine the life of a plant. He is, of course, responsible for the cover painting. So far, so gloriously bonkers, but there’s delicious, funk-tinged discipline to the Roy Ayersesque Ever So Slightly, while the delicate Ohms & Watts explores the quieter side of electro and both Version Des Faits and La Corde Sensible could have made the Un Homme Et Une Femme soundtrack. Presumably the follow-up was ready last week. John Aizlewood
Pye Corner Audio
★★★★
Let’s Emerge! SONIC CATHEDRAL. CD/DL/LP
Sub terra British producer Martin Jenkins channels a new above-ground energy. In the 12 years Martin Jenkins has been recording as sinister ‘audio transcription service’ Pye Corner Audio, his niche
Revelators Sound System
★★★★
Revelators 37D03D. CD/DL
Hiss Golden Messenger’s MC Taylor explores his love of psychedelic jazz. To help make sense of Covid, North Carolina songsmith MC Taylor – best known for Dylan-esque country rockers with a side order of soulful introspection – started working up this side-project with bassist Cameron Ralston. Its four long, richly-textured instrumentals thrum with existential reverence. Whether it’s the looped guitars, earthy sax and space-edged synths of Collected Water or shadowy keys, electric clavinet and Holger Czukay-like bass pulse of Grieving, both disintegrate two-thirds through, tapping into Taylor’s affection for dub of a Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry vintage. Elsewhere, Taylor gets devotional on the psych-tinged George The Revelator and tips his Stetson to Alice Coltrane on Bury The Bell, a slow-burn spiritual odyssey buoyed by wispy strings. Far from mournful, Revelators betrays his mysIn full flow: The Sadies, with the late Dallas Good (far right).
tic sensitivities, rivalling the day job for emotional urgency. Andy Cowan
The Sadies
★★★★
Colder Streams YEP ROC. CD/DL/LP
Toronto band’s final album with founding member Dallas Good. Prior to his sudden death in February due to a heart condition, The Sadies’ singer/ guitarist Dallas Good had penned a minimalist bio for his band’s 11th LP. “Colder Streams is, by far, the best record that has ever been made by anyone”, it begins. Tongue-incheek, of course, but God this LP’s good. Fathoms deep in reverb, and produced by Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, its sure-footed ’60s psych, garage and country is potently rendered; Message To Belial conjuring The Byrds channelling The Stranglers’ Golden Brown, and You Should Be Worried a splashy, easyrolling showcase for Dallas and his brother Travis’s exemplary, now more poignant vocal harmonies. With guest Jon Spencer bringing hot fuzz to No One’s Listening and Cut Up High And Dry redolent of some lost psychedelic western, the stars align throughout. James McNair
Spiral Stairs
The Ephemeron Loop
★★★★
Psychonautic Escapism HEAT CRIMES. DL/MC
Alter ego speed-gaze solo debut from Urocerus Gigas of Leeds-based “xenofeminist” noise duo, Guttersnipe. Psychedelics have always been about change, from LSD’s post-war use in the treatment of mental disorders to its role in the social upheaval of the 1960s and recent resurgence as a tool for neurobiological therapy. For Guttersnipe’s Urocerus Gigas they enabled her gradual transformation from disaffected Welsh teen, raised on the pummelling misanthropy of thrash and black metal, to Vymethoxy Redspiders, “magical trans woman” creator of this intense, escapist, multi-layered dream-pop epic. Yet Psychonautic Escapism is not a work of total jubilation. The dark grindcore ghosts of Gigas’s past self regularly break through the blissful layers of reverberant Slowdive psychedelia. The result is the vulnerable sound of release, where demons are loosed alongside one’s newer, better self, “a confrontation of opposites” to quote Gigas, and a thrilling meeting of dysphoria and euphoria.
ALSO RELEASED
★★★
Medley Attack!!! AMAZING GREASE. DL/LP/MC
Julia Reidy
Tony Rolando
World In World
Breakin’ Is A Memory
Charmingly ragged mid-life indie-rock with a dark heart, from Pavement guitarist.
★★★★
BLACK TRUFFLE. DL/LP
IMPREC. DL/LP
Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg intended his sixth postPavement LP as a final blowout before relocating Down Under and retiring from the music business (save, we imagine, for the occasional lucrative reunion tour). But Covid delayed the sessions, meaning Kannberg had to direct his band (including Kelley Stoltz and No Age’s Randy Randall) from Australia. So it’s remarkable that Medley Attack!!! feels like buddies jamming together in a room, swinging between Stonesy chugging (Mole, Baron Please) and Bunnymen-esque introspection (Time = Cuz). The sudden death of friend and bassist Matt Harris midway through the project casts a heavy shadow, Kannberg ruminating upon loss and the fragility of life, especially on his affecting tribute to Harris, Pressure Drop. The result is an album of ramshackle midlife rock with dark, resonant depths, and easily Kannberg’s finest in years. Here’s hoping he reneges on the retirement. Stevie Chick
In which the Berlinbased guitaristcomposer strips out the lush electronic accompaniment of previous albums and is left alone in a room with just-intoned, microtonal guitar and AutoTuned voice. Bold but beautiful, at rest somewhere between Loren Connors’ blues guitar miniatures and Eric Chenaux’s softly comforting experimentation, this is future-proof guitar soli for dark and peaceful summer nights.
Tony Rolando is the founder of North Carolina modular synth manufacturers Make Noise and there are points when listening to this, his debut LP, where it feels like he might have created little more than a demonstration album for his products. Yet gradually, subtly, these synth arpeggios and oscillations grow in emotional weight and meaning until you are immersed in its minimalist, nostalgic melancholy.
Nils Økland
Diatom Deli
Glødetrådar
Time-Lapse Nature
★★★★
★★★
★★★
HUBRO. CD/DL/LP
RVNG INTL. CD/DL/LP
Originally composed by the Norwegian harbinger fiddle player for Norway’s Vossa Jazz festival in 2016, in collaboration with members of his own band and his occasional “power trio” Lumen Drones, this is an organic, lyrical demonstration of Økland at his finest; effortlessly moving from reflective, meditative folk pieces to free abstraction and swirling, Necks-style acoustic power-jazz.
Listening to the fragile, diaphanous songs of Tennesseeborn Delisa PalomaSisk, an immediate reference point might be Minnie Riperton, but cross-processed with some self-released ambient US folk LP of the mid ’70s. Field recordings of rainstorms and local parks interlaced with PalomaSisk’s ethereal soul lullabies and melancholy guitar-picking to conjure up lazy pastoral days of hope and sadness. AM
Credit in here
Cosmic Analog Ensemble
aesthetic of electronic discordance has gradually crept overground, most noticeably in films such as Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin and Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth; unsettling dreamlike worlds of temporal slippage where something otherworldly has infected the banal present. That hallucinatory sound reached a kind of unnerving peak with last year’s Entangled Routes, a semi-conceptual work about plant communication systems. In bright contrast, this new LP draws on different sources, such as the pulsing E-chord tremolo of Spacemen 3 and, on Warmth Of The Sun, the arpeggiated guitars of Manuel Göttsching’s Ash Ra Tempel. If not quite the Beach Boys euphoria that title suggests, it is at least the sound of an artist surfacing from his dank hypogean world and embracing a new warmth. Andrew Male
MOJO 89
F I LT E R A L B UM S with him and emerge into a new and better world. Andrew Male
rhythm that seems to echo through the ages. David Katz
ZZ Top
Master Musicians Of Jajouka Led By Bachir Attar
Naima Bock
Produced by Billy Gibbons “in righteous memory of Dusty Hill.”
Glenn Jones
★★★★
Vade Mecum THRILL JOCKEY. CD/DL/LP
Cul De Sac founder and American Primitive guitar acolyte’s eighth solo LP. In The Time Machine, George Pal’s 1960 film adaptation of the HG Wells’ 1895 novella, we see Rod Taylor’s Victorian time traveller journey into our present and future on a machine that is defiantly, resolutely of the past, a valve and steam-powered contraption almost comically incongruous. Listening to this, the eighth solo studio album from Jones, you get a similar feeling, that here is an artist going into the beyond armed only with the most ancient of acoustic materials; guitar and banjo. Drawing on nearly 70 years of personal history of memory and loss, Jones manages to transform these sad notes of memoir into glistening maps for moving forward. There is an optimism and experimentation in Jones’s playing that is simultaneously uplifting and beguiling. He has moved the past into the future and you find that you are happy to travel
★★★★
Giant Palm Ex-Goat Girl’s solo debut: a heavenly folk fusion.
GLITTERBEAT. CD/DL
A double dose of healing trance music from the Moroccan shamans. In an isolated village in the foothills of the Rif mountains, a group of Jbala sufi musicians have been preserving the folkloric traditions of their Persian and Arcadian forebears for thousands of years. Recorded by Brian Jones in 1968 and harnessed by Ornette Coleman on Dancing In Your Head, the Master Musicians Of Jajouka are rightly revered for their ecstatic trance music, the double-reeded ghaitas and an array of hand-drums capable of excising demons and healing psychic wounds. Recorded in Jajouka in 2019 on full-spectrum audio equipment, Dancing Under The Moon presents two hours of surprisingly varied musical wonder, delivered in extended jams that build to startling climaxes: Dancing In Your Mind and Hlilya give the ghaitas free rein; L’Ayta has duelling oud and violin, and Khamsa Khamsin is propelled by a galloping
Born to a Brazilian father and Greek mother, Bock grew up in São Paulo but has long called London home, where she co-founded Goat Girl before leaving the band in 2019. After that schooling in abrasive indie-gothic-country, solo Bock is coolness and calmness personified, tapping her bloodline with strands of Tropicália entwined with European folk; take note, lovers of England’s Canterbury scene, particularly Robert Wyatt’s plaintive airs and Kevin Ayers’s ’wine ‘o’clock’ whimsy. Producer/arranger Joel Burton steeps Bock’s buttery-rich voice in shifting contours that match the nuances in her words while leaving acres of space. Woodwind dominates, but there’s room for wriggly synths and harpsichord (Giant Palm) and multi-tracked violin (Toll). At the end: electric piano on O Morro, a cover of Carlos Lyra and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri’s 1963 ode to Brazil’s favelas, a fusion of sorrow and affection that also defines Bock’s exquisite solo debut. Martin Aston
Gwenno: modern, primal and otherworldly.
★★★★ Tresor
SHELTER/BMG. CD/LP
SUB POP/MEMORIALS OF DISTINCTION. CD/DL/LP
Dancing Under The Moon
Gwenno
RAW
Nightlands
★★★
Moonshine WESTERN VINYL. CD/DL/LP
The War On Drugs bassist takes another shot at solo project. Even Justin Vernon might have to crane his neck to see the top of the vocal harmonies Dave Hartley has so meticulously piled up on the fourth Nightlands album. They gather in heaps and drift as Hartley, the bassist with The War On Drugs, shows he’s not afraid of the layered and lush, or to turn up the soft-rock saxophone ambience on his songs. If moments sound like Bon Iver covering Arthur’s Theme – a breathtaking mountaintop with wine bar attached – there’s also an endearing blend of wonder and anxiety here. Blooming exotica combines with Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s New Age synth affirmations on Greenway and Down Here, while No Kiss For The Lonely keeps an eye on the depressing human realm. Moonshine occupies that rich space between hope and melancholy, smooth, maybe, but not without its hooks and catches. Victoria Segal
The new ZZ Top studio album that was reportedly done and Dustied (sic) by the time of the bassist’s passing in 2021 has yet to appear, so there’s a slight air of holding pattern about RAW, a live and audience-less set recorded at venerable honky-tonk joint Gruene Hall while the trio were making 2019 Netflix documentary That Little Ol’ Band From Texas. An 11-song mix of milestones (La Grange), early hits (Tush) and ’80s MTV smashes (Gimme All Your Lovin’), it puts ZZ’s impeccably-tuned engine room under the microscope, their “just us and the music” gambit paying off. The trio are already back on the road again with their former guitar-tech Elwood Francis on bass as per Dusty’s wishes, but the honed, half-century synergy evidenced here will be tough to re-enact. James McNair
Paolo Nutini
★★★★
Last Night In The Bittersweet
HEAVENLY. CD/DL/LP
ATLANTIC. CD/DL/LP
Jewel-bright third album from Cornish/Welsh seeker.
Fourth album from under-the-radar star.
WHEN TRANSLATED from Cornish, the opening words of Gwenno Saunders’ third album are, “Welcome, sit down/Fancy a cuppa?” – an oddly ordinary opening for such an otherworldly record. Flittering between cold hard modernity and something more primal, Tresor follows the Cornish Krautrock of 2018’s Le Kov with songs exploring different kinds of self-determination. Saunders addresses motherhood, freedom, language and identity in songs that flicker and blotch like frames from a 1940s experimental film. Occult hymn Anima sounds like a Kibbo Kift rave; ominous trance Ardamm prods the legacy of a “mother tongue”, while NYCAW (it stands for “Wales Is Not For Sale”) slips from Cornish into Welsh to demand radical change. It’s the garlanded ritual folk of Kan Me (“May Song”), however, that underlines this is a record of changing seasons and transitional states. Accept the offer of tea but prepare to lose days in the process.
Victoria Segal
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Paolo Nutini’s rise from the bars of Paisley to the arena circuit happened without him compromising his challenging material which, with its covert hooks, gruff, mumbled vocals and often despairing lyrics, nodded to John Martyn. Meanwhile, his unobtrusive, but mildly grumpy presence served only to summon a wider audience. Quiet since 2014’s soul-inflected Caustic Love, he’s re-emerged with a significantly broader musical palette and a sound which, on the heroic Shine A Light, borders on anthemic. But there’s more. Lose It merges Split Enz’s I Got You with the relentlessness of Krautrock; Heart Filled Up begins in almost hymnal fashion and finishes like late-period Julian Cope, while the opening Afterneath samples Quentin Tarantino’s True Romance and, remarkably, owes much to Throbbing Gristle. At 70 minutes it’s worth wallowing in. He’s pushing his own boundaries. John Aizlewood
Clare Marie Bailey
★★★★
★★★
Show of strength Two decades of doom and uplift reach a point of assured power on NYC trio’s seventh. By Tom Doyle.
Interpol
★★★★
The Other Side Of Make-Believe
Interpol: a powerful mood.
MATADOR. CD/DL/LP
EN ROUTE to becoming an enormous cult band – with the kind of devoted following who treat their songs as soul-mining poetry and ink their skins with their lyrics and artwork – Interpol, to many casual listeners, have seemed to paint in very similar shades of noir-ish rock. Their colours seem to range from dark to even darker, though years of dogged touring, along with the contrasting emotional uplift of their music, has found them occupying a position similar to the oftmissing-in-action Cure. The last we heard of the New York trio, in 2017, they were celebrating the 15th anniversary of their Turn On The Bright Lights debut and following it up, in 2018, with Marauder, an album recorded with Flaming Lips/Mogwai producer Dave Fridmann onto tape, to preserve its rawness and live-played ambience. This successor is different in mood and character: closer and warmer. With songs written separately (singer Paul Banks being pandemic-grounded in Edinburgh for nine months), then woodshedded in a rented house in the
Mary Gauthier
★★★★
Dark Enough To See The Stars THIRTY TIGERS. CD/DL/LP
Ebru Yildiz
First new album since her 2018 collaboration with military veterans, Rifles & Rosary Beads. Gauthier’s eleventh album feels less a followup to Rifles… than 2014’s Trouble & Love – but with one big difference. Trouble… was all about the wreckage of romance; Dark… is all about love. The first three tracks here are full-on love songs. In Fall Apart World, the I-Shall-BeReleased-ish opener, a stranded woman finds love. In the Dylan-esque Amsterdam the lovers are together and Gauthier has “everything I ever need”, followed by the churchlike I Thank God For You – ”you” being singer-guitarist Jaimee Harris, Gauthier’s partner, who adds tender harmonies to Gauthier’s rough edges. Of all the personal stories Gauthier has fearlessly told, this kind of sweet contentment might well have been the toughest. Great songs though, slow folk-gospel
Catskills and recorded in London, it is sonically shaped by Flood and Alan Moulder, specialists through their work with Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode in producing shadowy music with arena-sized dimensions. If the record marks a shift in Interpol’s working methods from jamming out ideas together in a rehearsal space, the result is greater attention to detail and a deepening of each of the three’s musical characters. Built around Daniel Kessler’s increasingly spidery, web-weaving guitar lines, Sam Fogarino’s twisting and turning art-rock beats (with their circular figures and surprising accents) and topped here and there with deceptively simple, repetitive piano lines, the tracks have a hypnotic effect. Banks’s vocals, meanwhile, are more intimate than ever, crooning directly into the listener’s ears. The early-years influence of Ian Curtis on Banks’s singing style has meanwhile given way to something closer to the tortured passion of Ian McCulloch. In places, the band follow
beauties, with a subtle band that includes Peter Case and Ben Glover. Other highlights: The Meadow; Till I See You Again; and the dark, moving title track. Sylvie Simmons
Guided By Voices
★★★★
Tremblers And Goggles By Rank GBV INC. CD/DL/LP
What’s he building in there? Indefatigable Ohioans’ latest creation. He who rests rusts, they say, but GBV’s current, 14-albumsin-five-years metric is a remarkable V-sign to stasis. While March’s Crystal Nuns Cathedral housed its hooks in succinct, poppy songs, Tremblers… is a much proggier shift at the absurdist coalface, veteran linchpin Robert
Pollard overseeing time signature changes and collaged, shape-shifting arrangements as he lives and breathes the work, the work, the work. Again, his tightly drilled obsessions build worlds uniquely skewed, hence the Big-Star-gone-awry thrills of Roosevelt’s Marching Band, the delicious stop-start eccentricities of Cartoon Fashion (Bongo Lake), and the pulsing, imagery-rich opener Lizard On The Red Brick Wall. “What is the mission statement?/Who makes the call?” sings Pollard on the latter. You do wonder what, exactly, fires his pistons and to what end, but quality control remains excellent. James McNair
Momma
★★★
Household Name LUCKY NUMBER. CD/DL/LP
Los Angeles quartet’s third album pumps up the grunge-pop nostalgia. Alongside a revival in ’90s fashion, grunge-era alt rock is currently vibrant again, with The Breeders and
suit – Gran Hotel comes over like a worldweary take on the Bunnymen’s The Cutter. Lyrically, Banks is typically allusive. In the past, he’s elliptically detailed his troubles with alcohol and substances, particularly after getting clean in 2006. But still the struggles appear to be never far away. “I need someone to grasp at,” he confesses in Passenger, “when I fall into a hole with a mountain on my back.” Even at his doomiest, however, whether personally or in terms of bleak worldview, there’s hope at the heart of these songs. “It’s time we made something stable,” he urges amid the snaking instrumental parts of Fables. Depending on your perspective, Interpol may well remain either strangely samey or capable of sustaining a powerful mood. Ultimately, though, there’s something quietly masterful about The Other Side Of Make-Believe. Strong, dignified, scarred but moving forwards, it’s the sound of a band charting emotional disturbances, but emerging renewed.
Pavement the two clearest poles of influence. Momma’s two singer-guitarists Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten initially took cues from the Deal sisters’ own scratchy origins, but Household Name is their Cannonball moment, supercharged pop that also acknowledges Smashing Pumpkins and Veruca Salt. Momma wear it well; celebrating, not denying, their inspiration. One lyrical thread is the “rise and fall of the rock star”, with namechecks for Smashing Pumpkins’ Hummer in Rockstar and Pavement’s Gold Soundz in Speeding 72. Momma also take note of that era’s many casualties; as No Stage puts it, “If I’m famous for the night, I’ll be lonely all my life.” The title, Household Name, is therefore as much a warning as an aspiration. Martin Aston
masterful as Earle hadn’t planned on two covers albums in a row. But after playing at Outlaw Country troubadour Jerry Jeff Walker’s memorial last year, he booked a studio and recorded 10 of his songs. Steve and Jerry Jeff go way back. In his teens, Earl went to Nashville to learn at the feet of Walker, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Having made posthumous tributes to Townes and Guy, it was Jerry Jeff’s turn. Though some of Walker’s songs might be lesser known, this could well be the best of the three albums. It just sounds so good. Warm and natural. And Earle’s voice has rarely sounded better, from easy-going barroom country opener Gettin’ By, to simple, beautiful, tear-jerking folk My Old Man, and a very fine version of Mr Bojangles, Jerry Jeff’s most famous song. Sylvie Simmons
Steve Earle & The Dukes
★★★★ Jerry Jeff
NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP
Earle follows 2021 tribute to his late son with a tribute to a late friend and mentor. It’s a good bet that a songwriter as prolific and
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Various
★★★★
Pay It All Back Vol. 8 ON-U SOUND. CD/DL/LP
The latest instalment of fresh odds & sods from On-U Sound. Pay-back time: Denise Sherwood joins the On-U roster.
NOW IN its 42nd year, Adrian Sherwood’s left-field label On-U Sound showcases its wares via the long-running Pay It All Back sampler series. Volume 8 compiles outstanding tracks from forthcoming LPs, interspersed with alternate mixes and vintage session outtakes. High points include Horace Andy’s devotional Watch Over Them, a plea to the Almighty to give guidance to the youth; Rita Morar’s Meri Awaaz Suno (Hear My Voice), delivered in Hindi, from Adrian Sherwood’s forthcoming Dub No Frontiers project, voiced by female singers from around the world; a percussion-heavy chant called Asalatua from African Head Charge; and a brilliant horn-andmelodica groove, titled Stonebridge Warrior, from the first Creation Rebel release in over 40 years. Mark Stewart, Tackhead, cult dub-country hero Jeb Loy Nichols and Sherwood’s daughter Denise all get a look-in, and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s playful Many Names Of God reminds of his recent passing.
David Katz
Minute (2:30 To Be Exact), this is Newcombe celebrating the moment and at his best. Lois Wilson
Pink Mountaintops
★★★
Peacock Pools
The Brian Jonestown Massacre
★★★★
Fire Doesn’t Grow On Trees A RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP
© Harry Devenish
The first of two BJM albums planned this year. After a period of writer’s block, BJM frontman Anton Newcombe went into his Berlin studio and wrote and recorded 70 songs in 70 days; all live and most in one take. Ten of those comprise this nineteenth LP which Newcombe says is all about “the affirmation [one gets] by just living”, and throughout there is a sense of making music for the sheer thrill of it. Whether on The Real, with its transcendental squalls of fuzz guitar and distorted keyboard riffing topped off with Newcombe’s petulant cry “No one said life would be fair”, or Ineffable Mindfuck, which hurtles along at high velocity, all persistent drone, pulse and psychedelic soloing, or the beatific pop noise of Wait A
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ATO. CD/DL/LP
First album for eight years from Black Mountain man’s wild, weird side-project. The polymorphous flipside to Black Mountain’s stoner heaviosity, Pink Mountaintops’ fifth album finds leader Stephen McBean welcoming aboard Melvins’ Dale Crover and Redd Kross’s Steven McDonald. A coked-out ’80s rock cover of Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown sets the tone for an LP awash with sly references for music nerds (song titles included Nikki Go Sudden and Swollen Maps). Occasionally, the joke is pushed too far (the feigned English accents and campy synth-pop of Muscles). Mostly, however, McBean’s native gift for riff and songcraft transcend any conceptual archness. Shake The Dust, an all-too-timely slab of Middle Eastern punk-funk with a chant of, “We’re through with the cold war/On to the new war”, is darkly anthemic, while the sombre psychedelia of You Still Around and gnarly thrash
of All This Death Is Killing Me prove McBean’s a master of divergent styles. Stevie Chick
RJ McKendree
★★★★
Wallflower HAND OF GLORY. CD/DL/LP/MC
to a divine necromancy: a communication with lost voices, rich in wonder, longing and exalted psychedelic flight. Andrew Male
to take the last chance I’ll be given”, they are heartbreakers. John Aizlewood
Steve Forbert
★★★★
Moving Through America BLUE ROSE. CD/DL/LP
Eleven new songs from veteran roots-rock folkie. Forbert’s last record, Early Morning Rain (2020), was all covers – a rarity among the 20-plus albums of originals he’s released these past 44 years. Those songs he covered were diverse, and there’s diversity in these new originals too. They range from troubadour folk (opener Buffalo Nickel, just voice and guitar) to up-tempo blues rock (Living The Dream) and one pretty odd folk-funk number (It’s Too Bad (You Super Freak)). What they have in common – besides the craftmanship and that distinctive, fragile but potent voice – is that they’re all portraits of regular guys in small towns or on the margins. Old men struggling to keep up, an ex-jailbird just happy to be free – people who were raised on and believed in the whole American Dream even as that mythical America disappears like an old coin or, in album highlight Palo Alto, crumbles into the sea. Sylvie Simmons
Stars
UB40 Featuring Ali Campbell & Astro
From Capelton Hill
Unprecedented
★★★★
★★★★
Will Twynham’s imaginary ’60s psych-folk LP for Tom Cox’s new novel, Villager.
LAST GANG. CD/DL/LP
UMC. CD/DL
Curiously unheralded Canadians strike gold again.
A moving tribute to a UK reggae hero.
Of the numerous dread phrases in music, the top three would be “imaginary soundtrack”, “lost psych classic” and “rock’n’roll novel”. So how to respond to news that the full-length fiction debut by revered memoirist Tom Cox centres on a cult Californian musician living out in a West Country village and that Cox’s friend, Will “Dimorphodons” Twynham, has recorded an imagined version of McKendree’s lost 1968 psych LP? With awe and wonder is how. If Cox’s novel is an exquisitely detailed, many-voiced tale of people, place and folklore, Twynham’s music is its haunted, illusory heart. Referencing the isolated, multi-tracked mysticism of Skip Spence’s Oar, the soaring West Coast sadness of Dennis Wilson’s Pacific Ocean Blue and the amorphous acoustic dislocations of Steve R Smith, Twynham, like Cox, has gone beyond pastiche or replication
Never having shed a member, Montreal’s Stars have been a sextet since 2014, but they’ve been making ideaspacked, sweet-sounding yet lonesome albums since 2001. Oddly, for all their obvious accessibility they’ve never been a serious commercial proposition. The piano-dominated From Capelton Hill doesn’t solve that mystery. Mostly a mulling over the passing of time, mortality and placing “all our bets on being young forever”, it’s a retrenchment of the considered indie electro-pop which makes them so beguiling. On the pop stomper Pretenders, they evoke The Pierces, but, as ever, they’re at their best when Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell trade vocal lines, especially on the bereft Back To The End (“no song I sing will make us feel less alone”); and when they trade verses on Snowy Owl as Millan sings, “I’m trying
Finished just two weeks before Astro, AKA Terence Wilson, died, this follow-up to 2018’s A Real Labour Of Love captures him and Ali Campbell on top form, with a return to the roots reggae style that inspired them to form UB40 in the first place. Almost half of the album was recorded during a five-day stay in Jamaica, the pair backed by drummer Sly Dunbar, bassist Chris Meredith, keyboardist Robbie Lyn and guitarist Mitchum ‘Khan’ Chan, resulting in a moment of pop reggae genius when they all come together on East 17’s Stay Another Day. Other highpoints include a stirring Sufferer, originally by The Kingstonians, and Caught You In A Lie, the Louisa Marks’ lovers cut here sung by Campbell’s daughter Indica. The original compositions, We’ll Never Find Another Love in particular, are satisfying too. Lois Wilson
Blazing a trail: Black Midi’s (from left) Geordie Greep, Cameron Picton and Morgan Simpson get joyfully audacious on their third LP.
Dead Good Murder, perdition and strange beauty in an indie-prog opera. Danny Eccleston’s mind boggles.
Black Midi
★★★★ Hellfire
Atiba Jefferson
ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP
IF EVER A band had “Not For Everyone” tattooed across their foreheads – or possibly used as the title for a song-suite with sections in 11/8 time – it would be Black Midi. Many listeners of a certain age will take at least two of their alleged antecedents – Primus and The Cardiacs – as signals to run for the hills. Yet the band’s audience continues to grow among younger and older alike, and what is difficult or abstruse or in-jokey about their music and how they present it is worn as a badge of honour in the same way it’s worn by Zappa fans. Meanwhile, the peculiar alternauniverse that singer-guitarist Geordie Greep appears to inhabit – the Instagram videos where he would deadpanly dispense cod business advice; the breadcrumb trails concerning an enigmatic alter-ego group, the Orange Tree Boys – is a rabbit hole into which admirers willingly plunge.
And ‘plunging’ is definitely the correct approach to Black Midi if you’re to glean anything nourishing from them. They don’t offer half measures and it seems pointless to pick and choose from what is not so much à la carte as a tasting menu. Their third album is probably best described as a rock opera. It comes in waves of explosive set-pieces interspersed with jazzy lulls, rather than as discrete songs, it has a cast of characters (including Satan), and it has a theme: death, war, the end. How far this resembles any of the real threats the world currently faces – exactly how seriously we’re meant to take any of it, in fact – is unclear. As Greep heatedly speed-hollers, in his ridiculous no-attemptat-authenticity American accent, in The Race Is About To Begin, there’s “no end to this nothing nonsense non-song”. It would be forbidding if it wasn’t so much fun. BRIT-schooled Black Midi are virtuosic – drummer Morgan Simpson sounds as comfortable with a blastbeat as he is with jazz-fusion (at Glastonbury in 2019, Kamasi Washington was decidedly taken with him) – but their gymnastics come across as joyful audacity not academic circumlocution. Hellfire begins with its title track – Brecht & Weill via Tom & Jerry – before the showstopping Sugar/Tzu mixes speed-prog
with Broadway theatrics (and crooning) and ends in a blazing big band flame-out. Bassist Cameron Picton weighs in with appealingly naive vocals on Eat Men Eat’s demonic bolero and the unexpectedly tender and beautiful Still. While a lyrical obsession with death, and what may or may not come after, prevails, it’s in the spirit of a picaresque. People are ridiculous – “idiots are infinite,” Greep notes at one point – why should their demise be less so? Hellfire is recognisably the itchy, complex work of the group that made Schlagenheim (2019) and Cavalcade (2021), so why is it more satisfying, more addictive? Ultimately, it’s a matter of timbre. Hellfire, for all its sporadic intensity, is less harsh than previous Black Midi records. The bedding-in of keyboard player Seth Evans and saxophonist Kaidi Akinnibi has added sweetness to the craziness; Marta Salogni’s production allows a more spacious canvas where the instruments seem to live more naturally. Previously, exposure to Black Midi required an immediate lie-down with a cool flannel pressed to the forehead. But there’s something about the shape and dynamic of Hellfire that makes you want to play it again, straight away. Not for everyone? Black Midi probably wouldn’t have it any other way. But even sceptics may be about to discover their hell ain’t a bad place to be.
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Laura Veirs
★★★★
Found Light
Laura Veirs: forming and realigning new boundaries.
BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
Portland singer-songwriter surveys post-divorce landscape on twelfth album.
WITH 2020’s My Echo, Laura Veirs inadvertently charted the disintegration of her marriage to her producer Tucker Martine. Found Light, then, arrives as a statement of fresh independence, the indie-punk gallop of Winter Windows the most decisive line drawn under her past. Yet a songwriter as sensitive as Veirs was never just going to trade in pure defiance: these songs pin down the emotional phantom pains of separation, the bits of past entangled in the present. The pattering electronica of Eucalyptus deals with memory, regret, and collateral damage; Ring Song’s delicate piano filigree is a pawn-shop blues for the internet age. Naked Hymn and Can’t Help But Sing, meanwhile, suggest complicated alloys of sadness and joy, release and reclamation. It’s a beautiful, nuanced record, the sound of new boundaries forming and realigning: as she sings on Seaside Haiku, “I’ll give a lot/But not too much away”.
Victoria Segal
Charles Lloyd
Stephen Mallinder
★★★★ Chapel
★★★★
Tick Tick Tick
BLUE NOTE. CD/DL/LP
Saxophonist’s first ‘Trio Of Trios’ album is a beat-free meditation with Bill Frisell and Thomas Morgan.
Chris Bangs & Mick Talbot
★★★
Back To Business ACID JAZZ. CD/DL/LP
Small combo Hammond jazz from former Style Councillor. Organist Mick Talbot is best known for co-founding The Style Council with Paul Weller. Chris Bangs is a DJ, producer and percussionist. The pair have previously recorded together in acid jazz outfits Yada Yada and Soundscape UK – Bangs actually coined the phrase ‘acid jazz’. As Bangs & Talbot, they make Mod jazz for dancers. Some of it is reminiscent of the instrumentals Talbot wrote in TSC; Goody Goody, a gospel piano blues for instance, with its brass and handclaps and snatch of Watermelon Man, and Pick’n’Mick’s, a Mick solo piece where he goes overboard playing pianos, Hammonds, Wurlitzers and Rhodes bass. Other tracks, meanwhile, look to Motown – an instrumental take on Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) and the poppy It’s Alright could be off-cuts from an Earl Van Dyke session. Lois Wilson
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Endlessly on a quest for fresh ways to frame his improvisational gifts, cherished Memphis elder statesman Charles Lloyd captured this trio’s potency on their first outing, within the delicate acoustics of San Antonio’s Coates Chapel in 2018. Billy Strayhorn’s Blood Count and Bola de Nieve’s Ay Amor are both rhapsodically re-imagined, Lloyd soulfully riffing off Frisell and Morgan’s intimate rapport and understated skills. Lloyd’s dignity and selflessness – letting his partner’s gentle chordings and shadowy gapfilling take the lead on graceful originals Song My Lady Sings and Dorotea’s Studio – never diminishes his own contributions. If anything, his searching tenor’s storytelling solos are tailor-made for a set-up that often plays as one, intuitively completing each other’s phrases. It gets this series off to an elegant flyer. Andy Cowan
DAIS. CD/DL/LP
Fluid rhythms drive rare solo outing by Cabaret Voltaire co-founder.
Harkin
★★★★
Honeymoon Suite HAND MIRROR. CD/DL/LP
UK multi-instrumentalist’s pandemic adventures in dreamy electronica. Formerly of Leeds indie quartet Sky Larkin, Katie Harkin’s world expanded as a touring member of Sleater-Kinney, and with Kurt Vile and Courtney Barnett. None of that history, nor her own self-titled debut’s fiery guitars, are reflected in Honeymoon Suite, her second LP, recorded in 2020, at home, alone, with her new wife sharing the same workspace. Harkin’s adoption of “digital intimacy” is most extreme on Driving Down A Flight Of Stairs, 11 minutes of floating ambience that suggests a particularly immersive moment of solitude. Otherwise, the LP delves into gorgeous dreampop. Lockdown’s simultaneous anxiety and peace plays out in Here Again, or Matchless Lighting’s sombre glow, the joyful (Give Me) The Streets Of Leeds and A New Day. “No beauty without friction,” Harkin declares on Listening Out. “The mountain shivers on.” Martin Aston
Fastidiously rendered with his long-time Wrangler foil Benge, Mallinder’s second solo LP in a lengthy career defined by collaboration flirts with house, electro and techno while staying true to his industrial heritage. The bass guitar he rediscovered on Clinker – last year’s mini-LP with LoneLady – is upfront too, a one-note riff driving the flighty keys and multi-layered percussion of Contact and bringing lowslung funk to Galaxy. Shades of Detroit infuse the raindrop synth spatters and shuffling rhythms of Shock To The Body, while the downbeat title track drips with deadpan menace. Mallinder’s opaque whispers – HB shading rather than bright colours – are a crucial part of the fabric, making a little go a long way on a contagious return, up there with commercial peak Cabs circa The Crackdown and Micro-Phonies. Andy Cowan
The Burning Hell
★★★★
Garbage Island BB*ISLAND. CD/DL/LP
Bitingly droll missives from Canada’s increasingly besieged coast. The Burning Hell’s base is St John’s, Canada’s easternmost city. There, on the island of Newfoundland, it’s impossible to be unaware of the flotsampeppered shoreline. For The Burning Hell’s Mathias Kom, the torrent of debris came to represent Garbage Island. The album of the same name tells the backstories of what he observed: Minor Characters charts the peculiarities of a corkscrew, a pedal boat and the gulls dive-bombing the booty; in The Last Normal Day, a human presence is oblivious to this inundation potentially signifying the end. With his regular co-conspirators Ariel Sharratt and Jake Nicoll, Kom’s concept LP could be a parade of misery but instead it’s funny, sardonic and literate. Add in a new wavey, Loaded-era VU sensibility, and it’s impossible not to be swayed by these acerbically funny story songs. Kieron Tyler
The Chemistry Set
★★★
Pink Felt Trip FRUITS DE MER. LP+CD
First LP in six years from London’s own Paisley Underground renegades. The Chemistry Set are aptly named; each track on Pink Felt Trip feels like an experiment, testing how many different styles can be forged from the psychedelic equation. Sometimes, they play with fusion and fission; a cover of Mark Fry’s The Witch swaps a Gregorian chant for acidic folk rock; Self-Expression Trinity traverses ’60s mellotrons, ’80s Mod-psych and ’90s indie; Moody Blues cover Legend Of A Mind veers between Michael Head and Kaleidoscope. More singularly, Lovely Cup Of Tea resembles Carnaby Street music hall; Sail Away could be Noel’s High Flying Birds. It would be brazenly opportunistic if the songwriting wasn’t so strong and their conviction so reassuring, with plenty of goosebump moments along the way. All this, and a homage to Fillmore East designer Victor Moscoso on the cover. Martin Aston
BLUES BY TONY RUSSELL
Gilbert O’Sullivan
★★★★ Driven
BMG. CD/DL/LP
More tuneful cuttings from Gilbert’s late flowering. Gilbert O’Sullivan’s renaissance is to be applauded. After years in a greatest hits-recycling wilderness, his self-titled 2018 album took him into the UK Top 20 for the first time since 1974. Bolstered by this, O’Sullivan returns with his twentieth LP confidently replicating the creative achievements of its predecessor. Produced by Andy Wright at London’s RAK Studios, the new material brims with early-’70s authenticity. Love Casualty is a superb driving blues and the Beatles-esque title track is a standout. The sing-song Don’t Get Under Each Other’s Skin is exactly the sort of Clair-style ditty that is meat and drink to his detractors; ostensibly wafer thin, its childlike simplicity and salutary message soon become another O’Sullivan earworm. With guests such as KT Tunstall and Mick Hucknall dropping through, Driven is like the best of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s work, well-crafted and unshowy. Daryl Easlea
Dave Stewart
★★★
Ebony McQueen BAY STREET. DL/LP
The former Eurythmic’s semiautobiographical potential film and musical. Crikey. He’s based in the Bahamas these days, but Dave Stewart grew up on Wearside in the ’50s and ’60s, where, as Ebony McQueen details, he was first seduced by music. As is Stew-
art’s way, there are ideas to spare on this lavishly packed 3-LP box and many of them are daft, not least Ebony McQueen being a fictional voodoo blues queen who visits teenage Stewart in Sunderland. Yet, over 26 songs which feature occasional special guests (old chum Ringo Starr drums on the jaunty, harmony-laden One Morning; Black Key Dan Auerbach adds guitar to People Change and Things Will Never Be The Same (Without You); Helena Christensen took the cover shots) and a 70-piece orchestra, Stewart lovingly embraces a cornucopia of styles. The Kinksian As You Like It, the uplifting gospel climax of Dream On and the claustrophobic bleakness of What’s The Fucking Point? help make it more hit than miss. John Aizlewood
Tedeschi Trucks Band
★★★★
I Am The Moon – 1. Crescent FANTASY. CD/DL/LP
Part one of a film score by blues-rocking couple. This is the first audio instalment of an ambitious four-album, four-film series by this blues-rock jam band ensemble led by wife/singer Susan Tedeschi and husband/ slide guitarist Derek Trucks. Based on a poem by Nizami Ganjavi, the Persian poet whose work also inspired Layla, the textures are reminiscent of that Derek And The Dominos song, and Trucks conjures the late Duane Allman whose slide playing added immeasurably to that classic. The murmuring vocals, moaning horns, tinkling piano and gorgeous, ambient atmosphere speak to the music’s function as a film score, while Tedeschi and Gabe Dixon’s lead singing add a soul-gospel feel. The star is Derek Trucks’ sweeping washes of whooshes that wrap the five tunes in a warm blanket, 12-minute ender Pasaquan showcasing his stinging, dexterous, raga-blues brilliance. Michael Simmons
Alan Dunkley © 2021 Another Planet Music Ltd.
Dave Stewart: taking a walk on the Wearside.
Nicky Egan
★★★
This Life TRANSISTOR SOUNDS. CD/DL/LP
Pennsylvania-born, Berkleeschooled, LA-resident singer’s enjoyably heartfelt longform debut. Co-written and produced by Dap-Kings guitarist Joe Crispiano and recorded with the cream of New York session players, This Life is a bright, soulful and engaging record that showcases the varied skills of multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Nicky Egan. This is the Berklee graduate’s first full-length album, following her sojourns in various bands (most recently she was a touring member of Chicano Batman and Tune-Yards) and releasing several ‘digital 45s’. Recorded on 8-track, although This Life may sometimes lack in musical originality – there’s a preponderance of mid-tempo Fender Rhodes-led R&B – it’s more than amply compensated by Egan’s passion and especially her voice, a beguiling mixture of Amy Winehouse and Elizabeth Fraser. The opening Changes is funky and fuzz-inflected, while Back To You has a languid, dog day afternoon groove. The closing ballad, Godchild, is heartfelt and sincere, an affecting lullaby to an infant, full of hope for an empowered future. Daryl Easlea
Mississippi MacDonald
★★★★
Do Right, Say Right APM. CD
Superior soul-blues singing and songwriting from an Englishman called Mississippi. A trenchant slow blues, I Was Wrong kicks this off in an Albert King groove to which MacDonald often returns. Better still is the next and nimbler track I Heard It Twice, a blues-about-theblues with an ingenious joke at its core. What’s great about this record, as saying “blues” three times may have hinted, is how old-fashionedly/righteously/unexpectedly (choose adverb according to point of view) bluesy it is. Neither MacDonald’s compositions, which are well-turned and often amusing, nor his delivery, whether vocal or on guitar, acknowledge anything remotely ‘progressive’ done in the name of the blues in the last 40 years. (A very good thing.) Blues-rock fans may want to pass. Anyone else: stay around and enjoy MacDonald doing it right and saying it right.
Tumi Mogorosi
★★★★
Group Theory: Black Music MUSHROOM HOUR/ NEW SOIL. CD/DL/LP
A nine-person choir’s soaring operatics define South African drummer’s bold second outing. While the use of a choir in jazz has a few precedents – Max Roach, Billy Harper, Donald Byrd – it scales fresh emotive heights on this exploration from Mogorosi, drummer in Shabaka And The Ancestors. He builds on the quartet of voices he deployed on 2014 debut Project ELO to tap deep into his country’s conflicted past, carefully marshalling a choir that slides and soars around Tumi Pheko and fellow Ancestor Mthunzi Mvubu’s recurring horn motif. By turns dramatic (Wadada), poetic (Mmama), rocky (The Fall) and deep (Thaba Bosiu), Group Theory… peaks on Siyabonga Mthembu and Gabi Motuba’s contrasting vocal readings of dyed-in-wool spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child, rivalling Dwight Trible’s quivering take with Cosmic Vibrations for spiritual heft. Andy Cowan
ALSO RELEASED
Jose Ramirez
★★★
Charlie Musselwhite
DELMARK. CD/DL
Mississippi Son
Major League Blues A singer/guitarist of Latin-American heritage, Ramirez wanted his debut to “sound like the records I used to listen to growing up”. He’s boosted on the front half of the album by a seasoned Chicago crew, including Jimmy Johnson on possibly his last session, and afterwards by his own band playing his own material. Soulful singer, elegant guitarist, Jose Ramirez is equally at ease in both settings.
★★★
ALLIGATOR. CD/DL/LP
Musselwhite has been playing backcountry blues guitar for years, but this is the first time he’s done so throughout an album, accompanied only by his harmonica and sometimes stand-up bass and drums. His singing, always restrained, is so low-key that it risks losing the listener’s attention, but the playing supplies the feeling, from Charley Patton’s Pea Vine Blues to Guy Clark’s The Dark.
The Love Light Orchestra
Mike Zito
★★★
★★★
NOLA BLUE. CD/DL
GULF COAST. CD/DL
An old-school singer with a blues orchestra: the notion seems almost archaic, like something from the chitlin circuit a lifetime ago, but the singer is the accomplished and versatile John Németh, the setlist – all originals, apart from Lowell Fulson’s Three O’Clock Blues – thoughtfully conceived, and the nine-piece band as tight as Tom Wolfe’s sock suspenders.
The instrumental title track refers not to Chicago (though there are nods elsewhere to Magic Sam and Muddy Waters) but to South St Louis, where Zito started out. This live 2-CD set is both a personal retrospective and an extensive display case for Zito’s cataclysmic blues playing, from Texas Flood and Johnny B. Goode to duets with Tony Campanella and Eric Gales. TR
Leave The Light On
Blues For The Southside
MOJO 95
F I LT E R A L B UM S E X T R A
Automatic
Akusmi
Mart Avi
Excess
Fleeting Future
Blade
★★★
STONES THROW. CD/DL/LP
★★★★
TONAL UNION. DL/LP
★★★★ BANDCAMP. DL
LA trio’s second cocks a snook at modern ills. Be it Realms’ Numan-esque disaffection or On The Edge’s pop smarts, their sparse minimalism – thick synths, throbbing bass, outthe-box percussion – screams edgy drive. Think Suicide, Go-Go’s and Tones On Tail. AC
French multi-instrumentalist Pascal Bideau meshes Gamelan and gong with electronica and jazz on a suite where Nyman-like purrs of sax brush up against synths and strings. A fiercely focused electro-acoustic masterclass, full of life-affirming zeal. AC
For album seven, the Estonian neo-soul enigma croons from the shadows in a film noir of his own making. Luxuriate in deep synth dives and off-world vistas galore: then Tides goes systems music-Fools Gold, and it’s cocktail time on the space station. Ace. IH
J-Rocc
JTQ
A Wonderful Letter
Man In The Hot Seat
Penny Rimbaud & Kate Shortt
★★★★
STONES THROW. DL/LP
Whether hymning his home city with rappers LMNO & Key Kool or party-rocking with Egyptian Lover, J-Rocc – an LA DJ fixture alongside Madlib and the late J Dilla – veers from deep concentration to flat-out ebullience in the flip of a dusty drum sample. AC
★★★★
AUDIO NETWORK. DL/LP
Taking Lalo Schifrin, Quincy Jones and John Barry as his touchstones, the Hammond man returns to The Money Spyder territory and with horn and string sections sculpts a gripping LP of tense crime jazz, cinematic funk and ’70s-styled espionage themes. LW
★★★★
Kernschmelze III CALIBAN. CD/DL
The third most captivating riff on Rimbaud’s 2011 elegy to Fukushima is a squalling yet tender meditation, Shortt’s improvisations blur the lines between avant-garde electronica and free jazz. AC
Bon Voyage Organisation
★★★
(Loin Des) Rivages
Jasmine Myra
★★★★ Horizons
GONDWANA. CD/DL/LP
The aural equivalent of Scorsese long shots, BVO overseer Adrien Durand’s third harnesses a 13-piece Parisian orchestra to enhance his strobing soundscape grooves. Topped by a reworking of Coltrane’s Naïma. AC
INVITATION MUSICALE. CD/DL/LP/MC
From Leeds’s busy jazz scene, saxophonist Myra proves herself a sensitive performer/ composer across a set of velvety originals, played with coiled intensity, while paying subtle homage to Kenny Wheeler on Morningtide and The Promise. AC
The Shipbuilders
Paul Simpson
Spring Tide
Death Must Be Beautiful
★★★★
MAI 68. CD/DL/LP
Debut from Liverpool quartet led by clinical psychologist Matty Loughlin-Day who creates magical worlds with his exhilarating jumble of Sergio Leone, sea shanty and Mersey melody. The highpoints: the rousing Stranger’s Lament, the transfixing Northern Rose. LW
★★★★ AV8. LP
Made in a depressed fugue in 2004 after the death of his distant father, The Wild Swans’ mainman manifests sparse, bittersweet regret, betrayal and anguish. Even here – see I Never Got Over It – his subtle energies prove cathartic. IH
EXTENDED PLAY
Nick Cave
★★★★
Seven Psalms EP
Steven R. Smith
CAVE THINGS. DL/LP
Sylvie Simmons
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★★★★ Spring
SOFT ABUSE. DL/LP
After 30 years of folk-drone magic, the West Coast guitarist still beguiles. Made with clarinetist Gareth Davis, Spring is like Bruce Langhorne’s Hired Hand score stretched thin so the light can shine through, the centre can dissolve, and the edges fray and distort. AM
The Umoza Music Project
★★★★ Home
RIGHT TRACK/UNIVERSAL. CD/DL
Tender pray: Nick Cave meditates on “faith, rage, love, grief…”.
A virtual-hook up of Malawian and UK musicians, one of them, Paul McCartney, adding a tight groove to the title track (the LP highlight). The rest fuses hiphop, reggae, jazz, funk and more, sung in Chichewa. JB
Megan Cullen
CAVE THINGS, Nick Cave’s merch bazaar, is a wondrous curiosity shop filled with all sorts of strange, unexpected, often beautiful little objects that are almost impossible to star-rate. So this vinyl 10-inch, recorded with Warren Ellis during the Carnage album sessions, should feel right at home. Like the title says, there’s seven psalms, which Cave wrote in a week during lockdown, one a day. Each of them is spoken word, less than two minutes long, and set to music that’s ominous (Have Mercy On Me), ambient (Splendour, Glorious Splendour), spectral and spiritual. That’s side one; side two is taken up with a 12-minute instrumental – a ruminative play of dark on dark, with a deep drone and a synthesized choir of ghosts that’s quite lovely. Cave calls the record “one long meditation on faith, rage, love, grief, mercy, sex, and praise. A veiled, contemplative offering borne of an uncertain time.”
NEW RELEASES FROM HOLLIE COOK Happy Hour
REDD KROSS Neurotica 35th Anniversary Remastered Reissue + 12 Unreleased Demos
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F I LT E R R E I S SU E S
Yesterday’s Gone Fleetwood Mac’s long-reigning queen of the blues explores life, love and male shortcomings on a remastered solo career resumé. By Mark Blake.
Christine McVie
Eric Clapton’s sleepy-sounding guitar, captured on a flying visit to Montreux’s Mountain Studios. Meanwhile, Ask Anybody, recorded after a convivial afternoon in a Salisbury pub, is date-stamped by bubbling fretless bass and her drinking partner Songbird: A Solo Collection and co-writer Steve Winwood’s parping keyboard. RHINO. CD/DL/LP Musically, it would have slotted right onto Winwood’s Talking Back To The Night album. H, WHAT stories Christine McVie could As often happens on the older material, McVie’s tell. The daughter of a psychic faith healer, voice and lyrics transcend those very-’80s moments. the former Christine Perfect was a Ask Anybody isn’t the only song here in which she Birmingham art-school graduate who ran away to addresses the men in her life, but it’s the best. London and joined the British blues boom. She “He’s a devil and an angel,” she sings, “and the spent the late ’60s as the lone female in guitarist “Pretty much combination’s driving me wild.” This is, after all, Stan Webb’s boys’ club Chicken Shack, followed by everything here somebody who was once engaged to wayward Beach the best part of 50 years, off and on, as Fleetwood Boy Dennis Wilson. Mac’s co-vocalist, songwriter and keyboard player. has a peerless Most of Songbird, though, comes from the period Christine joined the group in 1970, just as their after McVie left Fleetwood Mac for a time in 1998. quixotic guitarist Peter Green was heading for the melody.” Christine talked about re-training as a chef and emergency exit. She rode out the lean years, opening a restaurant, but returned seven years later blossoming as a songwriter in the mid-’70s, bigwith In The Meantime, created with extended Mac family members, sunglasses-and-silver-coke-spoon version of Fleetwood Mac. McVie recently ex-husband and Portuguese musician Eddy Quintela, and composed and sang Don’t Stop and You Make Loving Fun, while her nephew Dan Perfect. sharing a studio and stage with her spurned ex-husband, bass The weakest song here, despite the sweetest melody, is guitarist John, and refereeing new recruits and estranged lovers Northern Star, where Aunt Christine cheerfully serenades Dan’s Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. wife for him. She’s better when exploring her own life and loves. McVie’s blues roots and English enunciation (although she Friend contains the album’s biggest hook and packs the same claims she sometimes Americanised her voice to fit in) balanced melancholy punch (on the line “I even told the rising sun…”) as out her Californian bandmates’ navel-gazing pop and witchy most of 2017’s quietly brilliant Buckingham McVie, the best album ballads. One of her most famous Mac compositions, Songbird, Fleetwood Mac never made. is revived here, and lends its title to this 10-song collection. McVie completely inhabits Sweet Revenge, smiling serenely as she Of course, no two Fleetwood Mac members’ solo careers are dismisses another feckless lover. Less woman scorned, more woman the same. Stevie Nicks went to Number 1 in the US with her 1981 indifferent; the message is compounded by some tinkling musical debut, Bella Donna, while Lindsey Buckingham continues to preach box-style keyboards and the song’s otherwise sunny disposition. beautifully to what Shakespeare’s Henry V called “we happy few, we band of brothers”. Christine never joined in, though. She had Eddy Quintela previously had a credit on Fleetwood Mac’s what she called “a brief skirmish” with a solo career, releasing Little Lies and co-wrote this album’s Easy Come, Easy Go. McVie Christine Perfect, an album of half originals and half covers, in 1970. could probably sing this sort of burnished bluesy pop while halfThat was it until 1984’s Christine McVie and 2004’s In The asleep. So too, the semi-acoustic Givin’ It Back (composed with Meantime, the two sets from which Songbird is drawn. Neither album Fleetwood Mac’s sometime guitarist Billy Burnette). But both challenged Fleetwood Mac’s sales figures, retain an effortless charm. but both illustrate McVie’s talent in its purest There are two not-quite new songs here. The chirpy but slight form. This is Christine McVie uncut. Slow Down was written but rejected for the soundtrack to 1985’s Producer Glyn Johns’ deft re-mastering American Flyers, in which Kevin Costner played a cyclist battling papers over the join between songs an aneurysm. The movie flopped. Far superior is All You Gotta recorded two decades and several lifetimes Do, a vocal duet with her songwriting partner and bassist, of technology apart. More importantly, the late George Hawkins. It’s a shuffling, soulful waltz, and was McVie’s songwriting rarely wavers off lost for over 15 years before being re-discovered for this project. course. “I’m good with a hook,” she once A reworked Songbird closes the album. The original was BACK STORY: IN DREAMS understated, and pretty much everything recorded for 1977’s Rumours in an empty auditorium in Berkeley, ● Christine McVie here has a peerless melody. That, and what California, late at night. McVie sang and played piano while (above) says the chords McVie called “the boogie-bass, left-hand Buckingham strummed an acoustic guitar to help keep time. and lyrics to Songbird came to her fully formed thing”; meaning the seesawing Fats Domino This new version surrounds McVie’s original vocal with sweeping in a dream. She woke up, swing which propelled Say You Love Me, strings arranged by Grammy Award-winning composer Vince sat down at the piano Don’t Stop, Hold Me, etc. Mendoza. It doesn’t usurp the Rumours version but it shines a new and played and sang the whole song straight McVie recorded her self-titled LP when light on the song. away. “It was as if I’d Fleetwood Mac were on one of their breaks. Songbird doesn’t overstay its welcome, and a few more entries been visited… a Surprisingly, only two songs from it make from the catalogue (including those missing Billboard hits) would spiritual thing,” she said. McVie was so terrified of the cut here. The modest hits, Love Will have been welcome. But there’s a sense here of McVie shoring up forgetting it, she spent Show Us How and Got A Hold On Me her legacy, and gently reminding the world that the Mac’s brilliant, the rest of the night (Billboard Top 30 and Top 10 respectively), bickering Buckingham and Nicks aren’t their only gifted songwriters. re-playing the song, until Sausalito’s Record Plant are strangely absent. After selling more than 120 million records worldwide, no group studio opened in the Instead, The Challenge’s loping could seriously claim to have a secret weapon. But Songbird helps morning and she could FM-radio groove includes Lindsey demonstrate that Christine McVie is the closest thing Fleetwood record an early version. Mac have to one. After all, they’re never the same without her. Buckingham’s whispery backing vocals and
★★★★
Shutterstock, Alamy
O
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Christine McVie: the closest thing Fleetwood Mac have to a secret weapon.
Back in the saddle: Neil Young, packing heat with the Horse.
Love To Burn Twenty years on, the long-awaited Toast – and it’s very well-done, says Sylvie Simmons.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse
★★★★ Toast
REPRISE. CD/DL/LP
BARELY HALF a year after Barn, Neil’s second album in a row with the Horse, we have a third. Named for the San Francisco
studio where it was recorded in 2001, Toast’s legendary status among Neil’s abandoned albums was up there with Homegrown (1975) until he finally released that record in 2020. It’s interesting the reason Neil gave for shelving Homegrown was the same he gave for Toast: that it was “too sad”. Both concerned love gone wrong, first Carrie Snodgress, then Pegi Young. “I couldn’t handle it at that time,” Neil said. “I just skipped it and went on to do another album in its place.” That album was Are You Passionate? (2002), made with Booker T And The M.G.’s, the Stax
successfully remakes Pete Seeger’s Turn! Turn! Turn! as rub-a-dub; the former delivers Tyrone Davis’s Can I Change My Mind in an early-reggae style. Obscurities, meanwhile, include Nana McLean’s enchanting cover of the Everly Brothers’ ’Til I Kissed You. Lois Wilson
Various
★★★★
Getty
Studio One Women Vol. 2
Johnny Osbourne
★★★
Never Stop Fighting
SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP
GREENSLEEVES. DL/LP
Ska, rocksteady, roots, lovers and more from the Sound Of Young Jamaica’s female roster.
Dancehall don’s Scientistmixed 1982 set.
Female singers were afforded few opportunities in Kingston, JA but when they did get in front of the mike, they made it count. At Studio One, Marcia Griffiths was queen, and three of the 18 tracks collected on this cherry pick of Clement Dodd’s reggae sisters are hers; 1966’s You’re No Good, 1968’s Melody Life and 1970’s Shimmering Star are all showcases for her smooth but strong delivery. Other big names included are Hortense Ellis and Jennifer Lara. Both deeply soulful, the latter
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After finding initial success at Jamaica’s foundation label Studio One in the late-’60s, Johnny Osbourne’s career stalled after a 10-year sojourn in Canada. But he then came back with a bang: 1980’s Truth And Rights LP for the imprint was a proto-dancehall smash. Two years on, this Henry ‘Junjo’ Lawes-produced set for UK imprint Greensleeves was an altogether looser, less rootsy, proposition. Over Roots Radics’ sturdy rockstone rhythms, Osbourne’s versatile
tenor positively soars on the militant title track and hornsassisted rocker Give A Little Love – both bolstered by King Tubby protégé Scientist’s sparse, punchy treatment. The odd lyrical blunder aside (Sister Mister’s “Hey, sister, I really wanna be your mister”), Never Stop Fighting nonetheless showcases a supremely talented singer at the top of his game and at one with the emergent dancehall sound. Simon McEwen
Orchestre Massako
★★★★
Orchestre Massako
house band he’d been playing with since the mid ’90s. Passionate was hardly a cheer-fest either. Three of its songs were on the original Toast, including Goin’ Home, one of the highlights on both albums and featuring the Horse, not the M.G.’s. Neil knew there was just one band to do justice to a heavy, heartbroken song about Native Americans, General Custer, the Battle of Bighorn and Neil’s own marital battleground. Toast has just seven tracks, but most are lengthy. Two are epics. Boom Boom Boom, the 13-minute closer, is a strange, slinky-murky song that didn’t make it onto Passionate and might have sounded better there. Gateway Of Love was listed on Passionate’s sleeve, but not actually included on the album; with a melancholy, melodic ’60s pop feel and female backing vocals (Neil’s half-sister Astrid and wife Pegi), it sounds great. Quit, meanwhile, which seems a bit too downtempo and downcast for the role of Toast’s opening song, feels more at home as track four on Passionate. And the rest? How Ya Doin’ has a slow, doomy intro, a touch of sad ’60s Beach Boys – “that happy glow” – tender vocals and guitar. While Timberline – minor key, grungey guitar intro – tells a strange story that seems to be about a lumberjack who can’t cut trees. But to these ears, the finest moments come when the Horse have a song like Standing In The Light Of Love to cut loose on and set about building that glorious, messy, monolithic sound – in this case, around a riff that sounds an awful lot like Smoke On The Water. “Where they let me go, where they took me, was unbelievable,” Neil said. “Toast stands on its own in my collection.”
remained at the helm of this mighty musical giant until its disbanding in 1997, and the four prolonged floor-fillers on this 180-gram vinyl release are all excellent, culled from their prime peak of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Opener Gnekelhe Mohi, one of two songs featuring Guinean singer Amara Touré, is a mesmerising stomp, equal parts rumba and mbalax; Boungoumoune shows off the competency of the horns; and the call-andresponse Dibembi, from the extremely rare Volume 1 album, has complex time signatures, a deft guitar hook, and percussive elements that reach down to your bones. David Katz
ANALOG AFRICA. DL/LP
Extended dance tracks from Gabon’s national orchestra. After receiving encouragement from Congolese rumba giant Franco Luambo, Gabonese singer-songwriter Jean-Christian Mboumba Mackaya began fronting a popular act called Negro Tropical, and when Gabon’s armed forces formed their own brass band in 1971, Mack-Joss was naturally chosen to lead it. He
Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin, Paco De Lucia
★★★★
Saturday Night In San Francisco EARMUSIC. CD/LP
Three acoustic guitars, three mikes, a blizzard of notes. In 1981, for a certain sort of shred-friendly jazzer, there was nowt more voguish than Friday Night In San Francisco.
Recorded live at The Warfield Theatre, it captured fusion greats McLaughlin and Di Meola in a three-way joust with flamenco great De Lucia and posturing rarely sounded so good. For 40 years it was thought no sister recording of Friday’s follow-up gig existed, but after much searching by Di Meola and his team, here it is. The setlist is completely different, but the combustible interaction remains, the triumvirate reaching ecstatic heights of baton-passing fluidity 12 minutes into Meeting Of The Spirits. Though perhaps only De Lucia’s solo performance of Monasterio de Sal reaches the compositional heights of Friday Night’s… Mediterranean Sundance, whoops from the blissed-out audience remind us that Saturday night was fevered too. James McNair
F I LT E R R E I S SU E S
Star man: cosmic traveller Twink brushes up on his Aleister Crowley.
Super Fuzz A cult figure of English psychedelia compiles his own set of cosmic curios. By Mat Snow.
Twink
★★★★
You Reached For The Stars: The Best Of Twink
David Radford
SUNDAZED. CD/DL/LP
FOR LONDON counterculture impresario Joe Boyd, the ’60s peaked in the early hours of July 1, 1967. His UFO Club partner, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, had just been jailed after a dodgy drug bust, with the News Of The World stoking the persecution of the long-haired, free-thinking and free-loving every Sunday, most notoriously Stones Mick and Keith. In protest, that night some 200 UFO regulars marched to the NOTW building; at its head, Twink, the drummer of the evening’s entertainment, Tomorrow. Back at the UFO by 4am, Tomorrow played the show of their lives, Twink leaping into the crowd, hugging, crawling and chanting “Revolution, revolution!”
At that moment, Boyd recalls in his memoir White Bicycles, “The tide of history was with us and music was the key.” Fifty-five years later and now Mohammed Abdullah, Twink (the name fans had thrust upon Colchester’s John Alder after a hair product to tame unruly curls) is still with us, a legendary figure in that high tide of history but something of a footnote in the actual music. Where Spinal Tap bizarrely mislaid drummer after drummer as it leaped aboard every new bandwagon from its beat group origins, Twink combusted through bands in a similar stylistic progress before brushing the medium time with psych-rockers Tomorrow and SF Sorrow-era Pretty Things, then co-founding Ladbroke Grove’s hedonistic answer to the MC5, Pink Fairies. As the ’60s sun set, he squeezed out a solo LP, Think Pink, the core of this compilation and template for his subsequent stop-start career of cosmic curios, trippy twaddle, maximum heaviosity
and occasional oddball inspiration – basically, the kind of thing that pairs nicely with a Camberwell Carrot. Sadly missing from Twink’s own track selection here is the achingly grateful Mum & Dad from 2015’s Think Pink II, as that would have perfectly teed up Ain’t Got A Clue, penned by his father in 1965 in protest against protest songs and recorded by Twink in 2019 in the muscular psych style he’d settled on 50 years before; think Bedazzled by Drimble Wedge And The Vegetation and you’re halfway there. Where Peter Cook camped up a flat English non-singing style, like many sceptred isle song thrushes, Twink genuinely shies away from trying too hard, a refusenik attitude suited to such tunes as Fear Of The Unknown, a reverse bucket list too scary to attempt. But on 1968’s title track You Reached For The Stars he tries and succeeds in a song eerily foreshadowing Bowie’s Blackstar. Being British psych, a parallel Fotherington-Tomas feyness gives us Lydia Ladybird, and, far better, Think Pink’s Tiptoe On The Highest Hill, with fabulous guitar by Pink Fairy Paul Rudolph. This alone matches any Pink Floyd effort of the time, and if ever Saucerful Of Secrets want a support act, think Twink.
MOJO 101
Teen spirit: Linda Hoover shines over half a century on.
F I L E U N D E R ...
Green-eyed teenage singer Linda Hoover made a record with some future heavyweights. Then nothing happened. By Jim Irvin.
I
N 1965, after winning a high-school talent contest, 14-year-old Linda Hoover was invited to meet with American singing star Bobby Darin’s manager, Ed Burton, and his young staff-producer Gary Kannon at Darin’s TM Music label. Hoover’s father trusted Burton but wasn’t sure about the young hipster. But she recalls, “I liked Gary immediately, thought he was funny and cool and spoke my language.” Kannon kept in touch, and several years later invited her to the Brill Building offices of JATA, the publishing company of dwindling hitmakers Jay & The Americans. There she met one of the band, Kenny Vance, who took her to a tiny room just big enough for a piano, a desk and two young songwriters, whose quirky songs Vance thought might suit Linda, now 19, and possessed of a strong voice but not much material. Those writers were Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, soon to be Steely Dan. Kannon’s real name was Gary Katz, and he would produce all the Dan’s albums in the ’70s. But their glorious decade would commence working on an LP for Hoover which Katz had persuaded hard-ball music man Morris Levy to bankroll. The players would be the nascent Dan, formed after guitarist Denny Dias had placed a
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theatrical tone.”
Joel Brodsky
Little Green
However, an amended I Mean To Shine was recorded by Barbra Streisand on her 1971 album produced by Richard Perry (which also includes her startling cover of John Lennon’s Mother). And Katz took tapes of the LP to his newspaper ad looking for musicians, asking audition with ABC Records, securing the deal that “No assholes” apply. Hoover’s strident, slightly theatrical tone that led directly to Steely Dan. He offered Hoover the chance to join them in California, sounded very much of her generation, as if but she felt too disillusioned and penniless to she might have been in the cast of Hair. Fagen came up with a song called I Mean To make the trip. Reluctantly, she returned to live with her parents. Shine, which became the record’s title cut. Fifty-one years later, the Hoover/Dan Fagen and Becker provided five songs. Jones, collaboration is given its first official release. an early example of their thing about I Mean To Shine (Omnivore) ★★★★, with addiction, a favourite topic, might seem Linda’s green eyes blazing from Joel slightly out of reach for a callow teen, but Brodsky’s front cover image. Despite an Hoover makes a good stab at The Roaring obvious discrepancy between Hoover’s Of The Lamb, a knotty song that jejune, heartfelt songs and Becker and Fagen’s immediately rhymes “fullback” with chewier, more worldly compositions, it’s a “bivouac”, its chorus like something by Jimmy Webb, tricky with an opaque lyric: remarkably cohesive record with a country“The roaring of the lamb revealed its rock leaning. A tender cover of The Band’s In awesome powers, and the minutes turned to A Station is a highlight, and on Stephen Stills’ hours, no one’s the same.” 4 + 20 Linda Hoover soars Cute, but you can like Linda Ronstadt. understand why publishers Sonically, you wouldn’t hadn’t been exactly falling recognise this as Steely Dan over themselves to give – with the country aspect these guys a break until and more acoustic guitar they’d mumbled their way than they ever used – but into JATA’s office. their high standards are Unfortunately, the album audible in the atmospheric was shelved by Levy soon brass arrangements and after completion, apparently creamy harmonies. because he suddenly realised Though she never found that he didn’t stand to make stardom, Hoover continued “Hoover has money from publishing on it. to make music. Her So it wouldn’t provide the treasured tape copy of her a strident, kick-start either Hoover or lost album is the source for slightly the Dan were expecting. this fascinating release.
F I LT E R R E I S SU E S
The Associates
★★★★ Sulk
BMG. CD/LP
The album which sent them into the charts with Party Fears Two gets deluxe 40th anniversary edition.
Amy Winehouse
★★★★
Live At Glastonbury 2007 UMC. LP
June 22, 2007 set available on 2-LP black vinyl or as an exclusive crystal clear set. Amy was hit or miss live, but on the Pyramid Stage in 2007 she was fabulous. With her kohl eye make-up and beehive standing high, she brought a late-night intimacy to a packed-out, muddy field, under inclement skies. She was nervous – less so during her second appearance later that evening on the Jazz World stage – but vocally invested on her 16-song set, the majority from Back To Black: a brilliant Rehab, a bewitching Tears Dry On Their Own, a stirring Love Is A Losing Game – and uproarious covers of Monkey Man and Cupid, the latter performed live for the first time. By the end of the year, she’d been hospitalised with exhaustion and cancelled all her live dates. Here, though, for a moment, she’s happy, shining bright. Lois Wilson
Asha Puthli
★★★★
The Essential Asha Puthli MR BONGO. CD/DL/LP
Career-spanning compilation of wild card Indian singer/actress. Asha Puthli never looked back after producer John Hammond signer her to Columbia. The classically trained Indian singer, first heard on The Savages’ 1968 B-side Pain, junked her job as a BA flight attendant and relocated to New York where her whimsical, high-pitched tones lit up Ornette Coleman’s trippy breakthrough Science Fiction. This breathless oscillation of career highs takes in her phase-shifting cover of JJ Cale’s Lies and the wispy hedonism of the Gamble & Huff-produced One Night Affair before she finds her galactic disco feet with the proto-Moroder The Devil Is Loose and much-sampled cosmic synthbop of Space Talk. Puthli’s sultry East/West fusions combined pop smarts with jazz longings and post-modernisms (see Chipko Chipko, a Hindi techno retake of Smooth
BILLY MACKENZIE (voice, words) and Alan Rankine (much of everything else) approached pop from deep left-field. After an awkward debut and a year of clamourous, dissonant indie singles, in 1982 they suddenly took off with this tauntingly perverse collision of possibilities. The big hits, Party Fears Two (its piano riff written five years earlier but deemed too like ABBA for the time of punk) and Club Country, were refreshingly weird and histrionic, while No opens with a duet for treated amplifier buzz and jiggled tape measures. Extra discs of outtakes, rarities, remixes and radio sessions underline their apparent ethos: ‘If it’s odd, turn it up, if it’s hooky, fuck it up.’ Stardom didn’t agree with Mackenzie, Rankine retired frustrated, an outcome that ultimately benefited neither. Their spotlight moment still sounds gloriously illogical in all departments.
The Associates’ Billy Mackenzie (left) and Alan Rankine: gloriously illogical.
Jim Irvin
Criminal), creating a her own distinct sensibility. Andy Cowan
Babe Ruth
★★★★
Darker Than Blue: The Harvest Years (1972-1975) CHERRY RED. CD/DL
From Hatfield but spiritually Mexico City and Memphis; the Harvest label’s most underrated, on 3-CDs. The first sounds on Babe Ruth’s 1972 debut First Base is Alan Shacklock’s insistent riff and Jenny Haan’s belting holler, suggesting a tightly executed but standard imprint of UK hard rock. What follows shatters that image. Decorated by Spanish guitar, oboe and cello, The Runaways could have been written by Ennio Morricone; his For A Few Dollars More is incorporated into The Mexican’s rollicking beats. Second album Amar Caballero was more nominally ‘pop’ but tinged with soul and R&B, plus the title track’s spaghetti western drama. An eponymous third album included a sympathetic and epic cover of Curtis
Mayfield’s We People Darker Than Blue, but original dynamos like Dancer and The Duchess Of Orleans underlined Shacklock’s all-round gifts, which he took with him when he left Babe Ruth to concentrate on producing. Martin Aston
The Entourage Music And Theatre Ensemble
★★★★
The Mermaid’s Purse: Live At Chatham College, 1976 SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS. CD/DL
Wall Matthews’ Baltimoreborn ’70s collective captured at their live peak. Ever since 2018, when Tompkins Square released Ceremony Of Dreams, a collection of studio sessions recorded between 1972 and 1977, this once obscure folk-improv collective have undergone a critical renaissance. Although sampled by Four Tet on 2003’s Rounds, it’s the collective work of Matthews and TS that placed this Rust Belt Popol Vuh back within the present. Listening to this live set it’s easy to hear why. Although centred in a gentle, organic space reminiscent of Ralph Towner’s ’70s folk-jazz group Oregon, Entourage also take their acoustic guitar, percussion, keyboards, sax and viola to places utterly
chaotic and free. The brilliantly titled Giraffes We Ride Through Lightning Spilling pulls together North African jazz, speed metal drumming and extraneous noise wrangling, while the elemental, explosive Space Needle Suicide sounds like a drunken Sun City Girls attempting to reach nirvana and pulling you along with them. You’ll go willingly. Andrew Male
heading for a whole lotta trouble… When I go down the park, she’s there, I go to the pub, buy a round, she’s sitting on my chair.” Cheers, Uncle Punk. Andrew Collins
UK Subs
CHERRY RED. CD/DL
★★★
Yellow Leader CHERRY RED. LP
Double 10-inch revival of 2015 LP for eternal Praetorian punkers. Anarcho-ologists will soon be brushing off gnarled fragments of amyl nitrate bottles from the original site of the Roxy club in London’s Covent Garden. At 77, punk icon Charlie Harper remains the sole original UK Sub, trailing 70-odd past band members in his wake. The whip-smart Yellow Leader was nominally the band’s 22nd studio outing, sleeved with a Pop Art spoof (“You’ve missed the target”). Recorded in 2015, prescient standouts include Slave (an appropriately dim view of human trafficking) and soothsaying Virus (“must be contained,” Harper rasps). Few tracks belie their vintage, as if recorded yesterday, but the chugging Big Bug gifts Harper a domestic narrative: “I’m
Various
★★★★
Gotta Get A Good Thing Goin’ Timely survey of Black Music In ’60s Britain. Like Soul Jazz’s recent Life Between Islands, this 4-CD box celebrates black musical expression in the UK but with the focus solely on the 1960s, a decade impacted by the Windrush generation’s emerging sound system culture, the African diaspora and the wider availability of US soul imports, touring revues and pirate radio playlists. Half the material is given over to soul and R&B, the material rich and varied, spanning the formative anti-racist protest of Liverpool’s The Chants – later The Real Thing – and rave-ups by Geno Washington and Herbie Goins, both American servicemen who made the UK their home. Vital ska, rocksteady and early reggae sounds are provided by Rico, Laurel Aitken and Winston Groovy, while there is also belt-it-out jazz from Dames Cleo Laine and Shirley Bassey, and highlife from Flash Domincii & The Supersonics. Lois Wilson
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Rave on: Orbital’s Phil (left) and Paul Hartnoll celebrate over 30 years in the game.
F I LT E R R E I S SU E S
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
★★★★ Blacknuss
MODERN HARMONIC. LP
One-man-horn-section’s magnum opus reissued on its 50th birthday.
★★★★
30 Something LONDON. CD/DL/LP
Rooted in the rich soil of DIY, 30 years of the Hartnolls on 2-CD/4-LP.
COLLECTIVELY NAMED after a motorway, brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll from Otford, Kent, preceded Harry Potter in a cupboard under the stairs. Borrowing dad’s tape recorder while the nascent rave scene boiled
beyond their reach, local news reported “hundreds of people gathering for the latest craze”. Their accidental rave anthem Chime – which reached Number 17 – landed them on TOTP, where they wore anti-Poll Tax T-shirts and sent a squelch to Thatcher. Fame beckoned and Orbital never looked back without their torch-battery headsets. This well-heeled 24-track collection has been hand-picked,
hear the audience feeling the spirit, as if this French crowd were in a Gospel church, enthusiastically hollering after each tune. Michael Simmons
Frank Zappa
★★★
Zappa/Erie
Albert Ayler
★★★★
Revelations ELEMENTAL MUSIC. CD/DL/LP
Free jazz giant’s complete Fondation Maeght concerts on 4-CD/5-LP. In one of his final concerts before his tragic death in 1970, tenor and soprano saxophonist Albert Ayler and his girlfriend/ collaborator Mary Parks performed for two nights at the museum of modern art in SaintPaul-de-Vence, near Nice. This is the first complete release of those gigs, and they serve as a bittersweet curtain call. Revered by Coltrane, Ayler’s sound was characterised by an unmatched physicality wherein he wrung every note out of his instrument. He performed everything from folk tunes to marching music and R&B, but the melody remained secondary to the spirited delivery. Parks sang self-penned songs and played a second soprano sax and they were joined by a rhythm section. One can
104 MOJO
ZAPPA/UME. CD/DL
Three full concerts featuring 71 tracks from 1974-76. “We’ll play you one hell of a show,” Zappa announces at the start of the 1974 set from Edinboro University in Erie County, PA – and they do. This is as well played and recorded as one would expect, and Zappa’s restless creative tinkering yielded revised arrangements of Village Of The Sun and a series of songs from The Mothers’ 1966 debut Freak Out!. The ’76 concert at Erie County Fieldhouse is equally impressive. But with ’70s shows come the inevitable longueurs. Only 10 minutes of this music has been released before – More Trouble Every Day and Son Of Orange County on Roxy & Elsewhere – and tellingly they were edited. But here we get the full versions, and 22 minutes of Dupree’s Paradise and 19 minutes of Black Napkins proves too much of a good thing. Mike Barnes
remixed and re-imagined by the likes of David Holmes, whose 12-minute Belfast is a genuine, architectural epic, and features Orbital’s highest placed single Satan Live, scaling to Number 3 in 1996. It also includes a planned 2012 Paralympics duet with Professor Stephen Hawking. If you left a piece of yourself in Glastonbury 1994 – or at a subsequent Orbital festival epoch – 30 Something taps back into past, present and Phuture.
Andrew Collins
George Michael
Max Roach
Older
Members, Don’t Git Weary
★★★★ SONY. CD/LP
Downbeat, broody, jazz-tinged third album, vastly expanded. By 1996, George Michael was battered. His lover Anselmo Feleppa had died from Aids and the world’s biggest pop star had spent two years in an unsuccessful legal battle with his former label. Michael poured his grief and anger into Older, which he would come to regard as his finest moment. All these years later, its languid, grown-up charms remain undimmed, most notably on the reflective title track (“Don’t you think I’m looking older?”) and the heartbreaking tribute to Feleppa, You Have Been Loved, although the joint being lit at the end of Spinning The Wheel cheekily revealed how he was dealing with the pain. Alongside the standard vinyl version, there’s a 5-CD box set which includes an exhaustive cachet of previously available remixes and oddities, such as Michael’s collaboration with Astrud Gilberto on Antônio Carlos Jobim’s Desafinado and the gospel version of One More Try. Excellent, still. John Aizlewood
★★★★
COLLECTOR’S CHOICE. LP
Vinyl reissue of the be-bop drummer’s proto-fusion landmark. Released in 1968, two years after the curiously pedestrian swingpercussion showcase Drums Unlimited, this is the sound of Max Roach leaving behind his trademark civil rights battle cries and polyrhythmic experiments, and finding a new, lyrical melodicism. Here he drew on the trend for jubilant ‘New Thing’ spiritualism, while pointing the way towards the ’70s jazz fusion of Lonnie Liston Smith and Herbie Hancock. This is Roach caught between innovation and a kind of desperation, working with veteran bassist Jymie Merritt on electric bass plus the young talents of saxophonist Gary Bartz, trumpeter Charles Tolliver, Stanley Cowell on electric and acoustic piano, plus vocalist Andy Bey on the gospel-tinged title track. It’s not a perfect recording. Cowell’s piano often sounds muffled, while Tolliver’s trumpet sounds sharp, but it’s that semi-pro on-therun quality that gives this set its youth, fire and energy. Andrew Male
XTC
★★★
White Music PANEGYRIC. LP
Swindon art punks’ landmark 1978 debut remastered. XTC keyboard player Barry Andrews used to wear a T-shirt with a hand-painted slogan, “I Ain’t Never Been To Art School”, which ironically, looked exactly like the work of an art student. The group used the new wave as a springboard into an arch, agitated style that was described as “quirky”, “herky-jerky” and, as singer and guitarist Andy Partridge noted, “almost any adjective ending in -ky”. White Music is a garish and strikingly confident release, including a bizarre and dissonant cover of All Along The Watchtower and some great pop tunes like Science Friction, Statue Of Liberty, and of course, This Is Pop. But then Cross Wires is delivered in such a hysterical, bug-eyed way that, even at two minutes, it’s quite exhausting. White Music was influential and is great fun, if somewhat flawed. And for XTC the best was yet to come. Mike Barnes
Brian Rasic
Orbital
Thelonious Monk’s notorious eccentricities pale into insignificance in comparison with the musical antics of multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, an extrovert jazz savant whose combustible live performances married a humorous stand-up-style routine with trenchant political invective and wild displays of virtuosity (his party piece was blowing three horns at once). Of all the albums he made during his relatively short life (he died aged 42), 1972’s Blacknuss (newly mastered by the in-demand sound guru Kevin Gray) best encapsulates Kirk’s anarchic musical approach via its riotously inventive mash-up of soul, funk, jazz, blues and gospel elements. Alongside a cache of terrific R&B covers – including a dreamy flute-led take on Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine and a febrile deconstruction of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On – Kirk refashions a soft-rock standard, Bread’s Make It With You, into a late-night blues, and offers some striking selfpenned numbers, including the rousing, Afro-centric title song. Kaleidoscopic stuff. Charles Waring
REISSUES EXTRA
★★★★
Whatever You Want: Bob Crewe’s 60s Soul Sounds KENT. CD/DL
Doo wop, R&B and tough pop from the backroom Jersey boy. Bob Crewe was the Newark, New Jersey-born writer and producer who masterminded numerous hits for Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons – he also suggested Valli use his falsetto voice. Sherry etc aren’t on this collection of Crewe’s work though. The focus here is on his less celebrated songs, so we get The Four Seasons’ popular Northern spin I’m Gonna Change, taken from 1967’s New Gold Hits, and Valli’s deeply soulful solo track (You’re Gonna) Hurt Yourself from ’65 instead. Crewe likened his songs to film shorts, and Chuck Jackson’s Another Day and Jerry Butler’s title cut, both drama-unfolding ballads, are perfect illustrations. Crewe was also a keen soundtracker of the teen condition – see the girl-group pop of Dee Dee Sharp’s Deep Dark Secret and Long Time, No See by Tracey Dey. Lois Wilson
Godley & Crème
★★★
Frabjous Days: The Secret World Of Godley & Crème 1967-69 GRAPEFRUIT. CD
Before 10cc, there was this. In 1969, rapscallion entrepreneur Giorgio Gomelsky decided to discover and mentor the British Simon & Garfunkel. Settling on a couple of former art students playing in a Manchester R&B band, Gomelsky renamed Kevin Godley and Lol Crème Frabjoy & Runcible Spoon and, he claimed, financed an LP. Alas, Gomelsky disappeared and the untitled album – Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart guested – remained unreleased until now, where it’s joined by assorted extras
Chuck Armstrong
Beastie Boys
Farben
Check Your Head
Textstar+
★★★★
★★★
Shackin’ Up
★★★★
UME. LP
MORR MUSIC. DL/LP
George Kerr-produced Southern soul collectable from ’76, when Al Green was at his peak. Armstrong’s tone and phrasing are very like Green’s, but who’s quibbling with tracks as strong as Goodness Gracious or You’ve Got To Deal With It (This Superworld). JB
Thirtieth anniversary, 4-LP reissue of the Beasties’ live hiphop band opus: fuzzy, grooving and appealingly wayward, it still sounds freshly smoked. The two extra discs of live material and remixes pour more gravy on the cake. And everyone thought they were history. IH
The glitchy, avant-techno of the millennial cusp has aged pretty elegantly, as this 1999-2002 EPs comp by German producer Jan Jelinek attests: experimental clicks and cuts subsumed into mellow house that works as a dancefloor correlative to the dub manoeuvres of Pole. JM
The House Of Love
The Rolling Stones
Various
Burn Down The World
7” Singles 1963-1966
REAL GONE. LP
Pauline Oliveros
★★★★
Accordion & Voice IMPREC. CD/DL/LP
The 1982 debut solo acoustic LP from the experimental electronic composer. Recorded when Oliveros had just turned 50 and was living in an A-frame house in a meadow at the Zen Mountain Centre in upstate New York, Accordion & Voice is an album inspired by landscape, changing seasons and the sound of the wind through the trees. It is also a record about meditation and patience, captured in the long, deep tones she was able to conjure from her huge, customised bass accordion. If that suggests something soothing and reflective, think again. The first piece, Horse Sings From Cloud, starts off as a sharp, piercing migraine tone that gradually opens up into a shimmering series of wave patterns. Joined by Oliveros’s wordless long-tone vocals, and then processed electronically, the drones assume a dark, mantric complexity reminiscent of Terry Riley’s Shri Camel or Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra, a rich, immersive sound that effortlessly shifts from unnerving to mesmerising. Andrew Male
COMING NEXT MONTH…
Danger Mouse & Black Thought, OSees, Hot Chip, Muse, Julia Jacklin, Ezra Furman, Josh Rouse, Isobel Campbell, Tim Finn & Phil Manzanera, Tall Dwarves, She & Him (pictured) and more.
★★★
★★★
★★★★
Never Ending Songs Of Love
CHERRY RED. CD
ABKCO. LP
DOCTOR BIRD. CD
Rock hugeness was the plan, but when guitarist Terry Bickers left in ’88, Guy Chadwick’s band didn’t recover. Over eight discs and 139 studio, demo and live tracks, their 3-LP major-label period is fitfully wonderful, but elsewhere stricken with entropy. IH
The first 18 singles, in a variety of tastefully restored US picture bags, with a 32-page booklet, photos and poster. Blues covers, exploratory Nanker Phelge tunes and, latterly, platinum JaggerRichards co-writes make it a luxurious glimpse into the Stones’ dawn. IH
Two-CD round-up (one vocal; one dubwise) of Treasure Isle producer Duke Reid’s romance-themed pop-reggae 45s from 1973-75. Top-tier singers – Pat Kelly, Beres Hammond, Roman Stewart – put in a turn, but the lack of any Rasta fire (The Duke was no fan) or dub thump makes it all a tad mushy. SM
Various
Luis Vecchio
Alan Vega
Contactos
Saturn Strip
★★★★
★★★
United Dreadlocks Volumes 1 & 2 DOCTOR BIRD. CD
Top ranking, 44-track selection of late-’70s reggae productions by Jamaica’s ‘Mighty Two’ – Joe Gibbs and genius engineer Errol Thompson. This golden era’s crème de la crème – Dennis Brown, Culture, Gregory Isaacs, etc – serve up hit after hit of joyous, righteous roots music. SM
★★★
ALTERCAT. CD/DL/LP
REAL GONE MUSIC. CD/DL/LP
In 1977, fêted Argentinian pianist Luis Vecchio moved to Gran Canaria, where he set up a jazz school and recorded this freeform jazz-fusion, Miles-Davis-onmeth concept album about his ominous communications with parallel-universe entity, Adionesis. AM
1983 solo rewiring of Suicide’s brutalist electronic essays for the video age. Aided by Ric Ocasek and Al Jourgensen, grooves judder and shimmy; dogs bark and Vega sings as much as growls. Suicide-lite, perhaps, but its pop moves sound bang up to date. Dig Kid Congo, a tribute to the Gun Club guitarist. JB
RATINGS & FORMATS
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
Sophie Hur
Various
including Hello Blinkers and Goodnight Blinkers, both recorded for Manchester’s late-’60s celebrity hangout, Blinkers. Very much of its time lyrically (“Do you know wrong from right, virgin soldiers?”), it’s salvaged by multi-layered harmonies which resemble The Mamas & The Papas without The Mamas on Cowboys And Indians, and, on It’s The Best Seaside In The World, the wry pop undertow which would serve 10cc so well. John Aizlewood
MOJO 105
B U R I E D T R E A SU R E
CREDITS
standards which could easily ulfil the Buried Treasure brie by itsel . An intimate trio album recorded in ust one and hal days at Br nner’s Berlin studio, its lush orchestrations were written by Nan chwart , a ormer student o veteran a and screen arranger Johnny Mandel, and overdubbed later by the eutsches ymphonie rchester Berlin. It got uite a bit o attention, says Br nner, but not as much as Mark had hoped for.” When Br nner and Murphy reconvened in 2006, the players, soundworld and studios were the same, but the repertoire was different, with songs by Johnny Cash (So Doggone Lonesome) and Coldplay (What If) alongside familiar but re-imagined pieces like Murphy’s vocal version o liver elson’s tolen Moments and the much covered nce pon A ummertime. “It took me a moment to get him to the The cat with the point to choose the songs, says Br nner. scat: Mark Murphy, “We talked about it, and it was pretty the singer’s singer. obvious that he elt, I’m probably not going to do more records, so I have to be very precise, and think about what is unnecessary… there was a looking back’ aspect involved, and I think a glimpse into the ew years after the record.” minent a trumpeter Till Built or the small hours, the album Br nner dubbed the re ects on big issues like love, regret and erman Chet Baker death, with gravity, verve and hipster style, chanced upon him at a as Murphy e ortlessly traverses his range, sparsely attended gig at the accentuating, ri fing and retreating to A Trane club in Berlin’s better reach the core and essence of the Charlottenburg. “He did songs. Remarkably, he recorded all his an encore, accompanying vocals in ust one take Br nner reserves himself on the piano, and it particular praise or his version o touched me so much I had ballad Too Late Now, which sends the tears running down my face,” original’s evocation o new romance into a recalls Br nner. It was probably one of the deepest shadow world of remembrance and regret. per ormances I’ve seen, with a language “The little monologue he gave be ore really and a level o its own… like he was an moved me, he says. e made it up a ter artist and a singer from another planet.” seeing the Brokeback Mountain movie, which After the show he spoke to Murphy and he told me he saw 10 times in a row. Mark was gave him a C . A ter initial coolness on homosexual and rom that era o having to Murphy’s part, they arranged to work keep it pretty much secret, so he was very together. The trumpeter remembers a bright, much touched by that story. Knowing that, sensitive and humorous collaborator, but and listening to those beautiful lyrics, that still adds, “he wasn’t an easy person to be around if gives me the shivers. he elt you weren’t on his level, and I could tell But again, the ultimate breakthrough was he was still hoping for some sort of bigger not to be, and Murphy remained the cognoscenti’s choice. He carried on success. He was a best-kept recording and playing gigs, and secret in a way, aware of how stayed in touch with Br nner, many great singers adored who played his 80th birthday him, and how he was so much celebration. The great a better than many other singer’s last live appearance people… that is something he was in 2013, and he died on regretted, is the feeling I had.” October 22, 2015. For those Br nner had a vision or unacquainted with his artistry, their collaboration. “Not Love Is What Stays is an entry everybody elt his scat singing point to savour. The budget was the best he had to offer,” was very little, and everybody he says. “I felt his ability to was aware that we were only address a ballad, and sing “There’s a going to go for the music, and about all the lost things in life, party goin’ nothing but the music,” says were a lot more of what he was Br nner, whose career in a good at.” on in Mark’s and photography continues. Recorded in 2002 and head and I I’ve never felt as free from the released in 2005, Once To want to go need to make compromises Every Heart was a captivating, than with these records.” autumnal selection of to it.” spontaneously-chosen Ian Harrison
The Last Beat This month on obscuria’s abandoned jukebox, a jazz singer supreme reflects on the end.
Mark Murphy
Love Is What Stays VERVE, 2007
Idols
W
HEN ELLA FITZGERALD did an impromptu scat-singing duet of Tea For Two with Mark Murphy at Ronnie Scott’s in 1968, she memorably declared, “he’s as good as I am.” Scott Walker and usty pringfield also loved Murphy’s singing, while Liza Minnelli is credited with the words, “There’s a party goin’ on in Mark’s head and I want to go to it.” Yet mainstream acclaim was always denied him. A wildly expressive, tirelessly explorative and technically virtuosic a singer born in Syracuse, New York in 1932, his mind opened to the music in the presence of Peggy Lee and Nat ‘King’ Cole, among others. After debuting with Meet Mark Murphy in 1956, his was a long career o imminent but never realised li t o s. Moves to os Angeles and Britain ollowed, as did, in the decades that followed, recordings for multiple labels – LP concepts included Jack Kerouac, UFOs and Latin re-imaginings of Cole Porter – which earned him the “singer’s singer” tag, not to mention acclaim on ondon’s ’ s acid a scene. A restless, wandering talent given to o the wall scatting, his output was re uently deemed too a even or a ans. An unrepentant wearer o the most unconvincing wigs, his worldview was also one of an in-the-moment, unfettered beatnik: in Peter Jones’ excellent 2018 Murphy biography This Is Hip, the singer’s friend Roger Treece called him, “probably the least well adapted human being that I’ve ever met to living in this world. In 2001, the 69-year-old Murphy was teaching at the conservatory in Graz, Austria.
106 MOJO
Tracks: Stolen Moments/Angel Eyes/My Foolish Heart/So Doggone Lonesome/What If/ The Interview/Once Upon A Summertime/Stolen Moments (1st Reprise)/Love Is What Stays/Stolen Moments (2nd Reprise)/Too Late Now/Blue Cell Phone/Did I Ever Really Live Personnel: Mark Murphy (vocals), Till Brönner (trumpet, flugelhorn, arranger), Lee Konitz (alto saxophone), Frank Chastenier (piano), Chuck Loeb, Johan Leijonhufvud, Kai Brückner, Kai Schloz (guitar), Sebastian Merk (drums), Arne Schuhmann (accordion), Peter Pühn (bass), Christian Von Kaphengst (double bass), Grégoire Peters (flute, tenor sax), Peter Weniger (tenor sax), Don Grusin (synth), Nan Schwartz (arranger, conductor), The Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin Producer: Till Brönner (co-producer, Nan Schwartz). Mixing: Arne Schuhmann Released: 2007 Recorded: Till’s Studio, Teldex Studio, Berlin Current availability: Spotify
LIZA MINNELLI
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Raga superstar: sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar with the instrument he made his name with.
Shankar 10 Ravi Chants Of India ANGEL, 1997
You say: “I absolutely love Chants Of India, from Harrison’s production to the song selection to Anoushka’s conducting.” Ana Leorne, via Twitter “One of the most difficult challenges in my life,” confessed Shankar, “as a composer and arranger.” He would later claim this collection of sacred prayers set to music as one of the best albums of his career. It’s certainly his most accessible, and if all you know of Indian music was released by The Beatles, start here. Recorded in Madras and producer George Harrison’s home in Oxfordshire as one of several projects to mark Shankar’s 75th birthday (though released two years later), there’s not a huge amount of sitar, but the tanpura drones, flute and Indian choruses (plus Harrison’s autoharp) make it an immersive joy, thoroughly purifying.
Sitar hero to most. By David Hutcheon.
This month you chose your Top 10 Ravi Shankar LPs. Next month we want your Steve Albini Top 10. Send selections via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or e-mail to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy Steve Albini’ and we’ll print the best comments.
virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin, two men responsible for boosting N NOVEMBER, it will be a decade since Ravi his profile beyond India – the Shankar’s final performance; when he first toured former by asking him to compose Europe – as a dancer with his brother Uday’s soundtracks, the latter by putting troupe – Hindenburg was German chancellor and the in motion a tour of the US. Fifteen swastika was everywhere, which must have seemed years later, he was hanging with welcoming to a young Hindu from Varanasi. If The Beatles and part of Monterey Shankar’s 92 years on this planet covered most of the and Woodstock lore. 20th century, the span of his music is no less The rest is history, of course, and hopefully a more impressive – Indian classical music, of course, but complete story will be revealed through the following also its Western equivalent, and jazz, ambient and 10 albums. Unusually for a How To Buy, where the folk, plus his influence on, and presence at, some of smart way in would usually be to start with Number the most significant developments in rock. 1, we would suggest the gateway here is Number 10, Born in 1920 to a well-to-do then you can dig progressively political family, Shankar gave up deeper. Don’t be put off by the aura dancing to study the sitar, an of spirituality or any gaps in your “The top slot instrument that puts great physical knowledge of Indian culture or is as catchy strain on the player, not least classical music: the top slot is as and potent as because of the contortions required catchy and potent as anything the to sit hunched over it for lengthy Fab Four could have done in 1963. anything the periods. In the 1940s, he moved to And now, to paraphrase the great Fab Four could man at the Concert for Bangladesh Delhi, then a “green and unpolluted place”, to work for All India Radio, (and many, many shows after): “If have done which brought him into contact with you liked this preamble so much, in 1963.” the film director Satyajit Ray and the I hope you will like the music more.”
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Ravi Shankar 4 Music Of India (Three Classical Ragas)
HIS MASTER’S VOICE, 1956
You say: “Incredible album, a big influence on both Davey Graham and Don Cherry.” Chris Queen, via Twitter Perhaps the reason so many of the previous albums are boundary-pushing in nature is because Shankar knew he’d got so much right on this, his debut LP, recorded (in London) and released shortly after he had quit his job as music director at All India Radio. Just what the title suggests, three pieces of music, with the side-long Raga Jog highlighting not just how dynamic the tune is, but also the sitarist’s physical strength as he demonstrates as many sides of Hindustani classical music as he can over its 28 minutes. The legend of the “power trio” starts here, albeit with tabla and tanpura.
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Ravi Shankar
CAST YOUR VOTES…
H OW T O B U Y
Shankar Ravi Shankar Ravi Shankar Shankar Ravi Shankar 9GlassRavi And Philip 8Monterey Live At The 7Kremlin Inside The 6An Ravi A Morning Raga/ 5 Improvisations Evening Raga WORLD PACIFIC, 1962
Passages
PRIVATE MUSIC, 1990
You say: “Quiet genius. East and West seamlessly working together.” A Reddy, via Twitter Glass was an early disciple, meeting Shankar “before The Beatles met Ravi” – as a student he had been transcribing Indian film scores. Twenty-five years in the making, then, this debut collaboration finds each man composing three songs then handing them over to the other to arrange. Shankar takes to minimalism with ease, Offering has a balletic quality; the lasting effect those early studies had on Glass’s compositions weaves a spell throughout Ragas In Minor Scale. It’s an outlier in Shankar’s discography, but a fine one, and the LP’s live debut, with Anoushka Shankar and the Britten Sinfonia, was a highlight of the 2017 BBC Proms season.
International Pop Festival WORLD PACIFIC, 1967
You say: “The Monterey performance is more exhilarating than Woodstock’s.” Mahir Ali, via Facebook The earliest of his festival LPs is a landmark for countless reasons. Shankar had moved to California in 1967 but was shocked by the hippies’ notion that his music – his entire culture – was associated with drugs. He was also upset at the way some musicians (Hendrix, The Who) treated their instruments. His set, then, can be viewed as a master musician and ambassador setting the record straight, but it’s also about the doors of perception being blown open, with the 27 minutes of Raga Bhimpalasi throwing down the gauntlet to all the stone groovers who thought they had taken rock as far as it could go by June 1967.
PRIVATE MUSIC, 1988
WORLD PACIFIC, 1968
You say: “A work of cross-cultural synthesis that bypasses the West entirely. Still blows me away.” Ben L Connor, via Facebook
You say: “Serving suggestion: scrambled eggs/ a good malt whisky.” June Morris, via mojo4music.com
By now it should be clear that Shankar’s virtuosity on the sitar is only a small part of his legacy – it’s his abilities as a composer and arranger that set him apart. In July 1988, he closed an Indian festival in the USSR with a concert that involved 140 musicians. The music is Indian, its treatment less so: the Moscow Philharmonic fly solo on Three Ragas In D Minor; the Government Chorus Of Ministry Of Culture Of USSR trade lines with Shankar’s own ensemble on Shanti-Mantra. It’s the symphonic Bahu-Rang that seals the deal: cross-border folk music, improvisation and vocal percussion in 25 spellbinding minutes.
Like, for example, cricket, the jargon attached to Indian classical music seems designed purposefully to dissuade us non-specialists from investigating, all that stuff about beats and rhythms. In MOJOspeak, this is a Sundaymorning/Saturday-night album: the first half, Raga Nata Bhairav, is slow-building and perfect for waking up to – after 13 minutes of solo sitar, the tabla kicks in like an espresso, by the time it finishes you will feel much more alive. The second piece, the 24-minuteplus Raga Mishra Piloo, is not exactly Studio 54, but you get the point, this is where the sun sets. And that, frankly, is all the background knowledge you need.
You say: “As great at soundtracks as Ennio Morricone. There, I said it.” Stephen Ellsworth, via e-mail Shankar’s Californian experiences begin to influence and broaden his music: the opener here, Improvisation On The Theme Music From Pather Panchali, is based on his soundtrack to the 1955 film by Satyajit Ray that introduced him to Western audiences. One outcome of his film work was his friendship with Yehudi Menuhin, and it was the American-born violinist/ conductor who suggested Shankar start recording in Los Angeles. There are also two ragas here, but it is Fire Night, inspired by bush fires across Bel Air in 1961 that catches the ear: Shankar steps back and lets jazz flautist Bud Shank and bassist Gary Peacock kick. We have just arrived in uncharted territory.
NOW DIG THIS
Ravi Shankar Yehudi 3Sessions The Living Room 2 Menuhin & Part 1 Ravi Shankar EAST MEETS WEST, 2012
You say: “Amazing – his final recordings, and his playing was still flawless.” Jason Brayshaw, via Facebook Footage exists of Shankar’s final performance, in November 2012, aged 92 and just a month from his death, in which he has oxygen tubes attached to his nose, yet as India Today put it: “He did not miss a single sur [tone of a note]”. That goes for the final LP released in his lifetime (it earned him a Grammy for Best World Music Album), four ragas recorded a year earlier in his California home with longtime accompanist Tanmoy Bose on tabla and two tanpura players. Naturally, it’s heavily symbolic – opener Raga Malgunji contemplates the distance between humans and the supreme – but, really, we should all mark our nineties in such style.
West Meets East ANGEL, 1967
You say: “The climax blows my head off every time!” Richard Charnas, via mojo4music.com West Meets East Volume 1 was a bona fide groundbreaker – spending months at the top of the US classical charts, winning a Grammy (a first for any Asian) and causing Indian purists to accuse Shankar of selling out. So, naturally, we are not recommending that. Search for the 1999 comp West Meets East – The Historic Shankar/Menuhin Sessions instead. It collects highlights from the three LPs the classical colossi recorded (1967/68/76), and brings the sitar, violin and cultural crosspollination to the fore to great effect. Given the original release dates, the heads pounced on these tracks with good reason: the most organically psychedelic LP you’ll ever hear.
Shankar 1Ravi Portrait Of Genius WORLD PACIFIC, 1964
You say: “My parents’ only unusual album in their collection. Does this mean they were cool?” Dan Carroll, via e-mail Recorded in Los Angeles in 1964, in the same studios frequented by The Wrecking Crew and sundry hip pop stars, Ravi Shankar’s mid-’60s output slyly suggested the possibilities are endless and lights the blue touch-paper on the second half of the decade. If you can only listen to one album from that period, this is simply magnificent: six short numbers (three less than three minutes), with each performer in Shankar’s ensemble given time and space to make an impression, and one lengthy wig-out (at nearly 20 minutes, Raga Multani takes up all of side two), beautifully produced in well-balanced stereo. Mind blown, David Crosby set about convincing all his pals to tune in, and the rest is history. Genius? Aye, and then some…
In Celebration (Angel, 1996) is justly recognised as the best compilation available, with four CDs covering classical sitar, collaborations, orchestral work, vocals and experimental outings – something for everyone. Other suggestions that polled well include the Charly soundtrack, his contribution to The Concert For Bangladesh, and “if you like a bit of Ringo with your Ravi”, Shankar Family & Friends. Speaking of family, Anoushka Shankar’s Traces Of You shows the lineage is in good hands, while other daughter Norah Jones has done not too badly. It’s very much of its time, but nephew Ananda Shankar’s version of Jumpin’ Jack Flash would probably have got the maestro’s seal of approval.
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WHAT WE’VE LEARNT Doherty is adamant he wasn’t present at the moment Mark Blanco died in a fall from an east London flat in 2006 and is at pains to express his sympathy for the anguish felt by Blanco’s family. ● Around 2007, Doherty went on holiday to Thailand with Kate Moss and, curiously, the Duchess Of York, Sarah Ferguson. Going AWOL after an argument about getting a suit measured, Doherty was arrested and bailed after “banging up heroin” in a backpackers’ hostel. “The next thing I woke up at Heathrow in a pair of Thai policeman’s shorts, didn’t even have my passport.” His tailored suit duly turned up three days later. ● Doherty describes his deep affection for Peaches Geldof, who died in 2014 from a drug overdose. “There wasn’t any… y’know,” he reassures us of their relationship. ●
Living on the edge: Peter Doherty seeks clarity from the murk.
In It For The Crack The extraordinary life and times of indie rock’s most spectacular wastrel, in his own words. By Pat Gilbert.
A Likely Lad ★★★★★
Peter Doherty with Simon Spence CONSTABLE. £20
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N A MEMOIR where drugs, violence, death and HMP loom large, there’s one passage more deeply disturbing than most. During a holiday in Wales to write material for a second Libertines album, Peter Doherty tells how he and his bandmate Carl Barât argue over a girl, after which Barât attempts suicide by stabbing broken glass into his face. The next day, Doherty is blamed by management for his horrific in uries Bar t says nothing. Was Doherty responsible? This is the reader’s dilemma, and part of A Likely Lad’s irresistible allure – to peer into the fog of blurred remembrance and sift fact from fiction, reality rom drug hallucination. id Kate Moss really burn Doherty’s beloved teddy bear Pandy when they split? And, more gravely, where exactly was the singer when playwright Mark Blanco fatally fell from a
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the Welsh writing break that ended in A&E – the author portrays himself as a wide-eyed, bruised balcony, minutes after they rowed (see panel)? romantic, trouble forever To its credit, A Likely Lad – expertly pieced finding him, rarely vice together by writer Simon Spence from hours of versa. Things really get interviews with its sub ect doesn’t try to dark around 2005, when whitewash past events. Indeed, Doherty, like us, Babyshambles take off and seems to be seeking clarity from the murk. From he begins a love affair with the start, the narrative is revelatory, debunking supermodel Kate Moss, myths about his supposedly tough “army brat” drawing him into a upbringing he adored his o ficer ather and celebrity world of yachts comprehensive schooling in Liverpool (it was and expensive holidays but really Bedworth). We learn in forensic detail also tabloid excoriation. Entertaining drug about his arrival in east London in 1997, where cameos from Shane MacGowan, Bobby dreams of becoming a poet quickly gave way to Gillespie and Keith Richards (“Try not to go in starting a band with his sister’s wannabe-actor the vein”) bring some light relief, but friend Carl Barât. But “there was a lot of tension ultimately more prison, violence, deaths and from day one,” he notes. sordidness follow. Even in 2019, he’s His and Barât’s complicated friendship is urinating on a French police counter while the fundamental engine of the whole story, wearing a QPR shirt. from salvation to fall and back again. As The Thankfully, A Likely Lad has a happy ending: Libertines slowly take off, mind games and a ter a success ul ibertines reunion and finding ealousies abound, with oherty hurt by love, lockdown coincided with Doherty cleaning his bandmate’s easy charm up – hence this memoir. Some and popularity (at one gig (not me) might feel that the “Damon Albarn was all over singer’s contribution to music “The author him”, he fumes), while in turn is too slim to warrant the portrays Barât despairs at his younger attention he receives, and the friend’s vertiginous descent lack of musical discourse here himself as a into crack, heroin addiction might not help his cause, but no wide-eyed, and criminality. one can tell you this isn’t an Throughout their travails extraordinary hymn to indie’s bruised on stage fights, oherty’s own Rimbaud and degenerate romantic.” ailing or burgling Bar t’s at, noughties London.
F I LT E R B O O K S
Access All Areas
★★★★
Barbara Charone WHITE RABBIT. £20
Inimitable music PR’s memoir, with a foreword by Elvis Costello. Barbara Charone (BC to all) has handled publicity for a tranche of famous artists, most notably Rod Stewart, Foo Fighters and Madonna. Access All Areas is a love letter to popular music, first drafted after she heard The Beatles while growing up in a Chicago suburb. Charone moved to London in 1973 and started working for Sounds (she expresses remorse here for shoeing Yes’s Tales From Topographic Oceans), before landing a plum gig five years later, writing Keith Richards’ biography. This memoir is rich on Stones/Keef knowledge and trivia but becomes a more cautious read after its author moves into PR. Charone addresses the difficulties of looking after Madonna, without abandoning PR-client privilege, but cheerily reveals the worst job she ever had: a Q magazine cover shoot with Aerosmith in 2001. Frustratingly, Access All Areas checks out after just 200 pages. BC, like any great showbiz diva, leaves her audience wanting more. Mark Blake
All That Glitters: The Ava Cherry Story
★★★
Ava Cherry and Lisa Torem
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AQUARIUS PRESS. £16.99
Ex-Bowie and Luther Vandross collaborator tells her story. Ava Cherry was one of the important women in David Bowie’s life. From 1973 to ’75 she was his backing singer, and later lover, but perhaps her biggest contribution, according to this revealing, though flawed biography, was in terms of helping to create Bowie’s ‘soul boy’ or ‘gouster’ look, something she takes direct credit for after lending Bowie her father’s old suit. An independently-minded woman born into a changing social and racial landscape of the 1950s, in
the ’70s her model-looks and exuberance intoxicated Bowie. Fans will enjoy the details revealed, such as Bowie painting the walls of his London residence black in sympathy with the striking miners in winter ’73/74 or Cherry having to hide drugs from him, so high was the concern over his wellbeing in 1975, but the general reader may have a harder time. The book’s staccato start doesn’t help, with two forewords, an introduction and a mini review of a contemporary Ava Cherry concert all before the main narrative starts. And Cherry’s story, constructed as it is from what appear to be straight interview transcriptions and excerpts from previously published sources, reads like an extended series of articles rather than a satisfying biography. David Buckley
I’ll Be There: My Life With The Four Tops
Glam! When Superstars Rocked The World, 1970-1974
★★★★
Mark Paytress OMNIBUS. £30
Gorgeously illustrated history of the Children Of The Revolution. “Was this the end of Rocktopia?” asked the Daily Telegraph magazine after a disappointing 1970 Isle Of Wight Festival. Yet a star-shaped dais was rising over the horizon. In Glam!, Mark Paytress lovingly charts the stack-heeled ascent of this new pop, tracing the careers of big beasts David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Slade and Elton John, as well as the Chinnichap strain of hits. The narrative is stuffed with cross-cultural details – Sunday Times critic Harold Hobson comparing David Essex’s Godspell performance to “El Greco’s tortured Christ”; a young Benazir Bhutto doorstepping Mott The Hoople fan club secretary Kris Needs – while a scrapbook bulge of illustrations includes a lovely letter Freddie Mercury wrote to John Peel. It’s Bolan’s tragic arc that shapes this book, though, the talk of him one day producing his “godchildren” Siouxsie And The Banshees a poignant reminder of glam’s fuselighting flame. Victoria Segal
★★★★
Duke Fakir with Kathleen McGhee-Anderson OMNIBUS. £20
Touching, affectionate memoir from The Four Tops’ surviving member, now 86. Duke Fakir’s recollections of the group he co-founded in 1953, when he and his pals got on-stage unrehearsed at a high school graduation party, are engaging throughout, but most thrilling in their evocation of ’60s Detroit, where as The Four Tops they shaped the Motown sound. Label boss Berry Gordy, he writes, had a “laser like focus”, although his plans for lead singer Levi Stubbs to go solo are thwarted by Stubbs who remains loyal to the group – their original line-up remained together until ’97 when Lawrence Payton passed. Esther Gordy, Berry’s sister, meanwhile, is “a tough negotiator” who fights segregation in her booking policy, and Holland-DozierHolland are “tailors of music” providing the group with hit after hit. Later there is substance and alcohol abuse, gambling and dodgy investments, but ultimately this is a feel-good story about a thoroughly respectful and respected band. Lois Wilson
Marc Bolan: the Godfather of Glam.
Quantum Listening
★★★★
Pauline Oliveros IGNOTA. £5.99
Slim volume of big ideas by the late pioneering composer, introduced by Laurie Anderson. Pauline Oliveros was a towering figure in the early days of electronic and experimental music, fascinated with listening deeply to sound two decades before Brian Eno ‘invented’ ambient. Getting a primitive tape recorder for her 21st birthday in 1953, she recorded the street outside, obsessing about the sounds she hadn’t noticed; by 1962 she was co-founder of the pioneering San Francisco Tape Music Center; later she recorded in caves, worked with visual artists, choirs and Sonic Youth. This reprint of her curious, playful 1999 essay marries academic thinking with beguiling questions (“What is listening for?” “Does sound have consciousness?”). Easy answers aren’t forthcoming, but that’s not its point. Instead, we’re encouraged to consider how much more open we were to sounds as children, how listening shapes our culture, and how listening can change us. The accompanying, sprightly essays by Laurie Anderson and sound artist Ione keep Oliveros’s vibrations alive. Jude Rogers
Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise And Fall Of SST Records
★★★★
Jim Ruland HACHETTE. £17
The mercurial story of one of the greatest underground rock labels of the ’80s. Black Flag’s gruelling myth is retold here, but Ruland’s true focus is the record label built by Flag honcho Greg Ginn, authoritatively chronicling SST Records’ unlikely triumph over shady industry trickery, moral panic and intimidation. Legends like Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr and Meat Puppets pass through SST’s ranks, but Ruland also spotlights lesserknown punks like The Stains, whose pioneering fusion of punk and metal was a deep influence on Ginn’s guitar style. The book is commendably unforgiving as the same obstinate attitude that fuelled SST curdles into something darker after Ginn splits Black Flag, gets deep into jam bands and drum machines and sidles into the wilderness. Ruland’s reporting is energetic, nuanced and impassioned, and even as SST descends into grim irrelevance, he finds space to champion the label’s “last great album”, Oxbow’s Serenade In Red. A compelling read. Stevie Chick
RE AL GONE
THE LEGACY
Electronic éminence grise and soundtrack icon Vangelis left us on May 17.
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VÁNGELOS ODYSSÉAS Papathanassíou was always captivated by the expressive possibilities of keyboards, and even as a four-year-old would marvel at the sound of his parents’ piano, having appended miscellaneous kitchen utensils to its strings. Innately talented, he rejected music lessons and remained an instinctive, autodidact composer, once opining that formal tuition would only have impaired his intuitive creativity. Born in 1943, in Agria, Thessaly, and raised in Athens, Vangelis’s career took off in 1964, as organist in Greece’s first popular rock band, The Forminx, who would enjoy a string of chart successes. After a right-wing junta overthrew the Greek government in 1967, he, like many of his peers, absconded, initially targeting London but settling instead in Paris. There, he would launch psych-progrockers Aphrodite’s Child, alongside fellow émigrés Demis Roussos and Loukas
Sideras. Originally billed as Vangelis And His Orchestra, they recorded three albums for Mercury, enjoyed hit singles, including the millionselling Rain And Tears, and became major stars in France. Their 1972 chef d’oeuvre, the ambitious, sprawling double-set, 666, was their last, and Vangelis’s debut solo album, Fais Que Ton Rêve Soit Plus Long Que La Nuit (Make Your Dream Last Longer Than The Night), inspired by the May ’68 Paris riots, was also released that year. He relocated to London in 1974, signing to RCA and crafting a sequence of chart-grazing, synth-heavy solo LPs in his Nemo ‘sound laboratory’ near Marble Arch, not least 1975’s Heaven And Hell, which was mined for the soundtrack to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos TV series. Vangelis’s stock rose further after signing on for a 1981 film conflating faith and the 1924 Paris Olympics called Chariots Of Fire being directed by Hugh Hudson, an erstwhile collaborator on a commercial
“He rejected music lessons and remained an instinctive, autodidact composer.”
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The Album: Blade Runner OST (Warners/East West, 1994) The Sound: As emblematic of Ridley Scott’s celebrated sci-fi-neo-noir as its rain-drenched, off-world megalopolis sets, Vangelis’s desolate analogue synth-scapes underpin the film’s dystopian futurism while simultaneously articulating the existential angst of its human/replicant protagonists. Even Demis Roussos is deployed hauntingly, decorating the brooding Tales Of The Future in a tremulous alien qawwali.
for Chanel. Hudson advocated for the track L’enfant from Vangelis’s 1979 album Opéra Sauvage as title music, but the composer convinced him otherwise. The resulting theme would garner an Oscar, and the accompanying album topped the Billboard charts, while its august, Yamaha C-80 synth-led title theme was a global hit single and a still-enduring, oft-parodied trope of sports broadcasting. Vangelis’s elegiac score for 1982’s Blade Runner was similarly acclaimed, and influential on a generation of electronic artists, although rights issues would delay the soundtrack album until 1994 – bootlegs contributing to the music’s burgeoning mythos in the interim. Other major film commissions followed, including The Bounty, Bitter Moon, 1492: Conquest Of Paradise and Alexander, and he created celebratory accompaniments for a brace of Olympic Games and the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Vangelis’s final album, 2021’s Juno To Jupiter, saluted the titular NASA probe, and he maintained a lifelong fascination with space, even composing music for the 2018 funeral of Professor Stephen Hawking, which was beamed into the cosmos by the European Space Agency. David Sheppard
Getty
The Running Man
Feed the fire: Vangelis – head man of electronica.
Judy Henske Imposing beatnik queen of the 1960s BORN 1936 “There are three types of singer: male, female and banjo-playing chick,” announced Judy Henske. Tall (6’, 1”), with a deep, strident voice and wild unkempt hair, and with just a few songs in her repertoire – which required her to be funny to pad the time – she was a beatnik curiosity in the LA jazz clubs and coffee houses she unsettled as the 1960s dawned. Following a stint with the Whiskeyhill Singers in 1961, and a lauded TV appearance with Judy Garland, she signed with Elektra in 1962. The label styled her as a cocktail singer in the Julie London mould, which didn’t suit her voice or personality, both of which remained unfettered. Moving to New York, she briefly became a folk world sensation, appearing on the cover of Time and in Greenwich Village with Bob Dylan and Woody Allen, who’s said to have based Annie Hall on her. Her performing style influenced Bette Midler, Mama Cass and Carly Simon, but didn’t sell records, and Elektra let her go. After marrying her stage sidekick, Jerry Yester of The Lovin’ Spoonful, her career faltered. A bold 1966 live recording, produced by Jack Nitzsche, featuring folk chestnuts, soul songs and surreal monologues, captured her uncategorisable persona but flopped. In 1969, she made an album with Yester, Farewell Aldebaran, an arresting psychedelic
gumbo too strange for mass consumption. When their subsequent band Rosebud failed, they divorced in 1971 and Henske married band colleague Craig Doerge. The couple lived and worked together for many years in Pasadena, California, releasing Loose In The World (1999) and She Sang California (2004). Henske was working on a memoir at the time of her death. Jim Irvin
Norman Dolph Velvets enabler and more BORN 1939 It was through his involvement in New York’s mid-’60s art scene that Norman Dolph came to ensure his place in rock’n’roll history. Bringing his mobile disco – one of America’s first – to downtown art happenings, the part-time recording engineer met Andy Warhol, who in turn introduced Dolph to his then-unknown managerial charges The Velvet Underground. In the Scepter label’s Manhattan studio, Dolph recorded early versions of future classics that would end up on the VU and Nico’s 1967 debut album. He took an acetate to Columbia, where he freelanced as a salesman, whereupon he was told: “You’re out of your mind” (in 2014 the acetate sold for $25,000). Dolph left the Velvets to their own devices to become a songwriter, art collector, painter, columnist for
Courtesy Beggars Opera Archive, Eyevine, Courtesy Eve Dolph, Getty
Ricky Gardiner: electric warrior.
The beatnik goes on: the uncategorisable Judy Henske.
the entrepreneurial magazine Success, and insurance executive. Will Hodgkinson
Ricky Gardiner Bowie/Iggy guitarist BORN 1948 Arguably the best guitar work on any David Bowie album is that of Ricky Gardiner’s space-age/ art-rock lead lines on Side 1 of 1977’s Low. Early the same year Gardiner would be guitarist in Iggy Pop’s touring band, standing shirtless in overalls behind a flat-capped Bowie on piano, before teaming up with Iggy to work on his Lust For Life epic in West Berlin, writing the brilliant lead guitar part for The Passenger, and co-writing Neighbourhood Threat with Bowie and Iggy. In September 1977 he recorded the live guitar backing track for Bowie’s performance of “Heroes” on Top Of The Pops. Before his involvement with Bowie and Iggy, the Edinburgh-born musician had played with prog rockers Beggars Opera. In later life he moved to South Wales and released his solo album, Songs For The Electric, in 2015. Gardiner’s career was cut short through illness, first with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and for 12 years up to his death, Parkinson’s disease.
“Ricky was the nicest guy to ever play guitar.” IGGY POP
“Dearest Ricky,” wrote Iggy in tribute: “nicest guy who ever played guitar.” David Buckley
Ric Parnell
Atomic Rooster, Spinal Tap drummer BORN 1951 Born in London, Ric Parnell’s dad was drummer, screen composer and Muppet Show bandleader Jack Parnell. After drumming with Engelbert Humperdinck and hard rockers Horse, he joined Atomic Rooster for Made In England (1972) and Nice’n’Greasy (1973). He later played with Italian chart act The Tritons, prog act Ibis and fusionists Nova, with one notable session date being Toni Basil’s 1982 hit Mickey. In 1984 Parnell was cast in beloved mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap as Mick Shrimpton, the fourth in a long line of ill-fated drummers, who suddenly exploded on-stage on the last date of a US tour. When Spinal Tap recorded and gigged in 1984 and 1992, Parnell was back at the kit, as Mick’s twin brother Ric Shrimpton (thereafter, in Tap mythology, Ric was presumed dead after selling his dialysis machine for drugs). Parnell also played with Wayne Kramer, Michael Des Barres, Ava Cherry and Deniz Tek, among others, and later resided in Missoula, Montana, where he presented a radio show entitled Spontaneous Combustion. “No one ever rocked harder,” said Spinal Tap bandmate Derek Smalls, AKA Harry Shearer, in tribute. Ian Harrison MOJO 113
RE AL GONE Ronnie Hawkins The Hawk
BORN 1935
Yes man Alan White: a gent, quick-learner and provider of much rock muscle.
Revealing Science Yes and Plastic Ono Band drummer Alan White left us on May 26.
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F THE ability to learn quickly is a mark of great musicianship, then Alan White had few drumming rivals. When John Lennon asked him in 1970 to join his Plastic Ono Band for a gig in Toronto (the Beatle had seen White play in a small London club the night before) the 20-year-old drummer learnt the parts on the Boeing 707 flying over, using the back of the seat in front as a drum pad. In 1972 when Bill Bruford left Yes, White was drafted in with just three days to learn an epic set before playing to 15,000 fans in Dallas. The Plastic Ono Band rattled through rock’n’roll standards – as documented on the Live Peace In Toronto album. But joining Yes involved speed-learning the intricacies of Roundabout and Close To The Edge with drum parts created by Bruford, one of the great technicians of the day. White, born in Co Durham in 1949, began gigging locally on drums aged 13. Within a few years he had worked with Billy Fury, Alan Price, Terry Reid and Ginger Baker’s Air Force. But it was the phone call from Lennon that propelled him to the elite – a call that White initially assumed was a prank. White played on Imagine and Jealous Guy. On Instant Karma!, Phil Spector “used echo to make the drums reverberate
like someone slapping a wet fish on a marble slab”, as Richard Williams’ biography of the producer put it. Work for George Harrison followed, with White playing on All Things Must Pass. “On the one hand they were The Beatles. On the other, maybe because I was so young and brash, I felt I could play with them,” he said. In 1972 when Bruford quit Yes for King Crimson, White turned down an offer in the same week from Jethro Tull and signed up for a three-month probation period with Yes. The new boy in fact stayed for almost 50 years, drumming on more than 3,000 shows, and in the studio sometimes also contributing piano and songwriting. Amid multiple personnel changes and the death of bassist Chris Squire in 2015, White was the constant. His bandmates recognised White’s pre-Yes work on their 2019 tour when they included Imagine as an encore. As well as a fine musician, White seems to have been a gent too. When Bruford quit, Yes’s management insisted he gave half his royalties for Close To The Edge to his replacement. Forty years later Bruford, still feeling an injustice, asked his successor for the money back. Sportingly, White agreed. In recent years, with White’s health failing, Yes began taking a second drummer, Jay Schellen, on tour and Schellen is behind the kit on UK dates this year. John Bungey
“They were The Beatles… I was so young and brash, I felt I could play with them.”
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The Album: Yes Tales From Topographic Oceans (Atlantic, 1973) The Sound: There was no soft launch for White’s Yes career. On this, the band’s most epic and arcane work, the drummer’s multitracked percussion fusillade 14 minutes into Ritual (Nous Sommes du Soleil) became a live highlight. White added rock muscle to the Yes sound, but could swing to jazzier invention when required.
ALAN WHITE
Cigar man: Ronnie Hawkins with his 1970 LP and a John and Yoko Christmas card.
Getty (2)
THE LEGACY
Ronnie Hawkins knew that any valediction to him would inevitably mention Bob Dylan. His backing group The Hawks famously morphed into The Band, and Hawkins even played a character named ‘Bob Dylan’ in Bob’s 1978 film, Renaldo & Clara. In reality, he spent 87 years being the Hawk, leaving behind a well-connected trail of jumping rock’n’roll records, wild tales and wilder performances. Born in Huntsville, Arkansas into a musical family, Hawkins’ first cousin Dale hit big in 1957 with Susie Q. In 1958 Ronnie and The Hawks first played in Canada, eventually moving there permanently. After a small-label debut single, he signed to New York industry heavyweight Roulette in 1959, and within months he was playing hit Forty Days on Dick Clark’s show. Next year he came to Britain for the Boy Meets Girls TV programme with his long-time drummer, Levon Helm, who later recalled, “He’s a good friend and a great leader, with an uncanny ability to pick the best musicians and build them into first-rate bands.” Other Hawks alumni included Richard Bell of Janis Joplin’s Full Tilt Boogie Band, Burton Cummings of The Guess Who and Pat Travers. Related tales of his life in rock’n’roll are legion: John and Yoko planned peace initiatives at Hawkins’ farm outside Toronto in 1969, Scorsese filmed him for The Last Waltz, and he played alongside Dylan at Bill Clinton’s Presidential inauguration in 1993. Throughout it all, Hawkins quipped, “If I don’t hit the big time in the next 25 or 30 years, I’m gonna pack in the music business and become a full-time gigolo.” Max Décharné
Opponent of “housetrained music”: Cathal Coughlan, AKA Satan O’Sullivan.
Cathal Coughlan
Microdisney/Fatima Mansions firebrand BORN 1960 IN THE hours before Cathal Coughlan’s passing was reported on May 24, his new release EP Of Co-Aklan was announced. It was a gesture not unlike the timing of David Bowie’s Blackstar, where the primacy of the artistic statement was all, even when death was near. Coughlan had long specialised in wrong-footing moves. Born in Glounthaune outside Cork, he formed first group Microdisney in 1980. “I didn’t really have any formed ideas,” co-leader Sean O’Hagan told MOJO. “Cathal had lots.” Despite their classic melodicism, lyrical edge and Coughlan’s rich, Scott Walker-indebted delivery, Microdisney failed to cross over beyond 1987 single Town To Town’s Number 55 placing and split in 1988 after five LPs. Coughlan followed up with the furious, genre-grinding output of The Fatima Mansions, who memorably supported U2 in 1992: on-stage in Milan, Coughlan caused a stir by appearing to insert a Virgin Mary-shaped shampoo bottle into his anus. Again, despite or because of the earth-scorching likes of Blues For Ceausescu, crossover was denied them and they split in 1995, not before a deranged cover of Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do (I Do It For You) was smuggled into the Top 10 as a charity double A-side with the Manic Street Preachers. Coughlan said he had no time for “house trained” music: another notable vehicle was the sublimely puerile Bubonique, his project with comedian Sean Hughes. As contractual difficulties slowed his output, he worked for BBC Online, and would release seven solo albums. A greater Irish songwriter than other more lauded contemporaries, his last solo LP was 2021’s Song Of Co-Aklan, a typically incisive articulation of modern confusions and conflicts. He also reunited with Microdisney in 2018 and 2019, and collaborated again with O’Hagan. “I never had a brother,” wrote O’Hagan, “but Cathal was as close to one as I had.” Ian Harrison
Bob Neuwirth Musician, Artist, Scenemaker
Shutterstick (2), Getty
BORN 1939 “BACK THEN it wasn’t money-driven,” explained Bobby Neuwirth in Martin Scorsese’s 2005 Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home. “It was about if an artist had something to say.” He was discussing the early-’60s Village
folk scene, but he might as well have been referring to any point in his adventurous life, in which he was pivotal in the careers of Dylan, Janis Joplin, Kris Kristofferson, Patti Smith, John Cale and others. A singer-songwriter as well as an acclaimed painter, he became a countercultural legend as Dylan’s acid-tongued road manager and sidekick in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 doc Dont Look Back. He co-wrote Joplin’s a cappella Mercedes Benz, urged Smith to turn her poems into
songs and helped Dylan wrangle 1975’s Rolling Thunder Revue. Albums included his eponymous 1974 solo debut and Last Day On Earth, 1994’s apocalyptic collab with Cale. He was the stage manager for the Monterey Pop Festival in ’67 and later worked with Hal Willner and T Bone Burnett on various multi-artist concerts. In 2011 he presented an exhibition of his paintings spanning 1964-2009. As a cheerleader, he inspired Smith, songwriter Vince Bell and others to Bob Neuwirth: the art of provocation.
create. To his occasional dismay, however, he’ll be best remembered for his wiseass “taste for provocation,” as Dylan called it in Chronicles Volume One. His considerable loyalty made many forgive him at day’s end. “Neuwirth was quick-witted, funny and fun to hang out with,” notes Al Kooper. “But Dylan also trusted him implicitly, which Bob didn’t often do. No one else came close.” Michael Simmons
Naomi Judd Country matriarch BORN 1946 THE QUEEN of ’80s country, Naomi Judd struggled her entire life: against family tragedy, then desertion by the father of her first daughter and singing partner, Wynonna, as well as illness and depression. Born Diana Ellen Judd (her name change referenced an abandoned Biblical character), she brought up two daughters alone after her first divorce, eventually forming The Judds with Wynonna while Ashley went into acting. The duo won five Grammys and over 20 country music awards, but Naomi all but retired from singing in 1991 when she was diagnosed with hepatitis C. She later hosted a talk show, was a judge on Arsenio Hall’s Star Search, and wrote self-help books. She died at her Tennessee home from a self-inflicted gunshot wound the evening before being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Andy Fyfe MOJO 115
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12 July
T IM E M AC HIN E
You want it starkers: (clockwise) RATM (from left, Tim Commerford, Zack de la Rocha, Brad Wilk and Tom Morello) on-stage in Philly; Tipper Gore (left) thinks of the children; upstanding protesters, earlier.
JULY 1993 …Rage Against
The Machine’s naked protest
Getty (4), Shutterstock, Retna/Avalon, Alamy
had long been nudity in JULY 18 There rock. Ray Sawyer from Dr.
Hook, for example, or Hawkwind’s Stacia, or the infamous GG Allin, had proudly bared all on-stage. But few instances were as militant or unanimous as when Rage Against The Machine played touring alt-rock festival Lollapalooza this July day at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium. Appearing on the main stage before acts including Primus, Tool, Alice In Chains and Front 242, their music-free show featured every band member stark naked, with gaffer tape over their mouths and the letters ‘P’, ‘M’, ‘R’ and ‘C’ painted on their chests. It was all a massive two fingers to the PMRC, or the Parents Music Resource Center, a pressure group with the ear of government who sought to defend America’s music-listening youth from corrupting lyrics of sex, violence, drugs and ungodliness. One of the campaign’s high-profile activists was Tipper Gore, wife of then-Vice-President Al: curiously, she had played drums in a band called The Wildcats in the ’60s and would later sit in with Grateful Dead successor group The Dead, Willie Nelson and Herbie Hancock. Yet, appalled that her daughter had heard Prince’s pervy Darling Nikki in 1985, she and some well-connected friends started plotting to get clunky ‘Parental Advisory Explicit Content’ warnings on risqué albums’ sleeves. Up against the free-thinking likes of Frank Zappa, John Denver and Twisted
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Sister’s Dee Snider at Senate hearings on the matter, Gore declared herself “pro-First Amendment” but in favour of “consumer information”. The PMRC had succeeded in getting their brand on albums by Dr Dre, Madonna, Faith No More and others. Zappa, meanwhile, sampled the hearings on his 1985 piece Porn Wars: other anti-PMRC
“I was thinking about how the wind felt…” BRAD WILK
retorts were recorded by Ice-T, Todd Rundgren and the Ramones. The very idea of censorship was intolerable provocation to a group like Rage Against The Machine. Purveyors of an incendiary hybrid of metal and rap which demanded nothing less than the overthrow of exploitative capitalism, this intensely politically-aware Los Angeles group were already sworn enemies of the American military-industrial complex. With its PMRC-baiting declaration “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”, late-’92’s insurrectionary debut single Killing In The Name anthemically set out their stall, while their self-titled debut album was threatening further aggro at US Number 111. A statement had to be made, and today they decided to turn singer Zack de la Rocha losing his voice to their advantage. Hence, for their 15-minute opening slot, they let guitars feed back and strode out to nakedly face down the world and the PMRC. Guitarist Tom Morello later told Spin that the crowd went wild for the first five minutes but then “were silent, waiting for the rock to begin, then the last five minutes they were actively hostile, very uncomfortable, and upset. And that was the whole point… to let them know you will not be able to hear the music you want to hear unless you do something about it.” Soon, missiles including bottles and coins were being thrown, obliging band members
ALSO ON! to brazen it out with a mixture of anxiety and calm. “I was thinking about how the wind felt underneath my scrotum,” drummer Brad Wilk said of his thoughts and feelings at the moment of nudity, to Modern Drummer’s Ken Micallef in 1996. “Actually, doing that was no big deal. It didn’t freak me out. That’s how we all came into the world. It’s a liberating thing… we just wanted to make a point.” Afterwards, the band were escorted off stage by police, but no charges were brought. Lollapalooza rolled on across the US until August 7, and in November RATM came back to Philadelphia and played a free show at the Trocadero. “Some people who had been at the show, who paid a lot for a Lollapalooza ticket, were there to principally see us,” Morello told The Columbus Edge afterwards. “I guess they did get to see us, but they didn’t get to hear us, so we thought we’d make it up to them.” Their next two albums, Evil Empire (1996) and The Battle Of Los Angeles (1999), would both top the US charts before the evervolatile group splintered in 2000. Since, they’ve reunited for gigs on two occasions, and their next world tour is due to begin in July. In a world of free information exchange, where the PMRC’s attempts to police public morals seems quaint and anachronistic, the use of state coercion against the individual remains, however, a pressing concern. Or as Morello later told writer Steve Lowe of Killing In The Name’s “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” mantra: “I think that simple slogan cuts right to the heart of all healthy rebellion.” Ian Harrison
TOP TEN EUROCHART SINGLES JULY 3 IS LOVE 1WHAT HADDAWAY DANCE 2 TRIBAL 2 UNLIMITED ( I CAN’T 3FALLING HELP) IN COCONUT
DREAM ON
3 Ain’t that a Reykjavik in the head: Björk comes out.
Björk makes her Debut
months after the demise JULY 5 Eight of The Sugarcubes, Björk
releases her first solo album Debut. Recorded in London, Los Angeles and Bombay with co-producer Nellee Hooper of Soul II Soul fame, the album blends techno, jazz and trip-hop; Björk tells I-D magazine, “too many people dismiss pop as crap because nobody has had the courage to make pop that’s relevant to the modern world.” Debut goes in at UK Number 3 on July 17 while lead single Human Behaviour, with its goofy Michel Gondry video, enters the Top 40 on July 19. Other Björk activities of the month include appearing on Later… With Jools Holland on July 2 singing LP track Aeroplane, backed by London R&B-jazzers D’Influence.
Gabrielle’s (above) Dreams spends the second of three weeks at UK Number 1. The song’s original version featured an uncleared sample of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car, though the re-recorded single escapes legal interest.
KLF RETURN(ISH)
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The K Foundation, heirs to The KLF, spend almost £50,000 on adverts saying their new single K Cera Cera (War Is Over If You Want It) will only be released “once world peace has been firmly established.” A limited run is made available in Israel that November.
GUNS GONE
Guns N’ Roses play the final date of their two17and-a-half year Use Your
Illusion Tour in Buenos Aires. Exhausted, the next time Slash and Duff McKagan will play with Axl Rose again is in June 2016 for the Not In This Lifetime… Tour.
BYTE
LOVE WITH YOU UB40
DEP INTERNATIONAL
ALL THAT 4 SHE WANTS ACE OF BASE MEGA
5 INFORMER SNOW 6 ENCORES DIRE STRAITS PRINCES 7 TWO SPIN DOCTORS LIMIT 8 NO 2 UNLIMITED DO YOU SEE 9(LOOKING THE LIGHT FOR) AMERICA
EASTWEST
VERTIGO
EPIC
BYTE
SNAP! LOGIC
10 DREAMS GABRIELLE GO! DISCS
CLASH BACK?
Mick Jones’s incidental music for the film 23 Amongst Friends is released.
There’s wild tabloid speculation that The Clash will soon re-form for a £50 million payday. Ex-Clash manager Bernie Rhodes tells Q, “They’re tempted. They’ve got families and mortgages. Whatever happens, I’m the only one who knows what to do with them.”
GOODBYE BASS THING
Ex-Wonder Stuff bassist Rob ‘The Bass Thing’ 31 Jones dies in New York aged 29. Having played on the band’s first two LPs, Hup and The Eight Legged Groove Machine, he later formed The Bridge & Tunnel Crew.
Grand royal: Spin Doctors at Number 7.
AD ARCHIVE 1993
Thom’s away: Radiohead play to win, as (inset) Yorke takes the plunge.
RADIOHEAD TAKE THE US their first US tour, Radiohead JULY 2 On open for Ned’s Atomic Dustbin
in Toronto. That day their debut LP, Pablo Honey, is at Number 74 on the American album charts, while lead single Creep is at US Number 76. Singer Thom Yorke later reflects he finds it hard to take US success seriously, telling the Boston Globe that Creep was, “a
song we were doing that hadn’t worked very well in rehearsals… it wasn’t intentional.” During a July 4 appearance on MTV’s Beach House, Yorke jumps into a swimming pool after singing Anyone Can Play Guitar, while on July 13 they play live on KROQ-FM, recording a version of Creep that later appears on the My Iron Lung EP.
Crossword-clue style Benson & Hedges advert brings together smoking cigs and playing the bagpipes. What could possibly go wrong?
MOJO 119
A S K MOJO
When did rock meet the underworld? Re: I was pleasantly surprised to see Herman Brood in MOJO [Ask MOJO 343]. One of my favourite promotional stunts in rock was when he was leaving court on a burglary charge in 1979, and was handed a platinum disc of his album Cha Cha by Dutch safe-cracker and prison escaper Aage Meinesz. When else has the wrong side of the law and music intersected like this? Nothing too vile, thanks. Mike Coleman, vie e-mail MOJO says: Ah, music’s dubious fascination with outlaws. There have been plenty of rockers up for a frisson of illegality: Super Furry Animals put the various disguises of Bridgend drug dealer Howard Marks on the sleeve of 1996 debut LP Fuzzy Logic, which included the song Hangin’ With Howard Marks; Phil Collins starred in and sang on 1988 crime rom-com Buster, about Great Train Robber Buster Edwards; and in the early noughties Snoop Dogg made Bishop Don ‘Magic’ Juan, an ex-pimp who said he found God after smoking PCP, his “spiritual advisor.” Examples of musicians and felons actually collaborating include train robber Ronnie Biggs and the rump Sex Pistols’ No One Is Innocent (A Punk Prayer By Ronald Biggs) in 1978, House Of The Ju-Ju Queen by ‘sex party’ thrower Janie Jones & The Lash (AKA The Clash and various Blockheads) in 1983, and the 1995 single British villain ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser made with trip-hop producer Mekon. It’s a grisly but lively area of enquiry, with rappers comparing themselves to any number of historic crimelords (hello, Capone-N-Noreaga), the mob-glamourising musica neomelodica of Naples, and the narcocorrido of Mexico. Of course, the underworld seems fascinated with showbiz in return – London gangsters the Kray Twins, for example, reputedly 120 MOJO
persuaded Judy Garland to sing for their mum at their East End home, and according to one former associate, Ronald Kray once planned to kidnap Cliff Richard. Fans, eh?
BOGUS DISCS (RETURN)
The Fut’s 1970 single Have You Heard The Word later did the rounds as a supposed Beatles outtake which was convincing enough for Yoko Ono to believe it really was Lennon singing. It’s pretty good, actually, and vocals are shared by one Maurice Gibb of Bee Gees fame. Richard Dunne, via e-mail There’s a Syd Barrett bootleg called Psychedelic Freak Out that contains songs purporting to be lost recordings by Syd-era Pink Floyd, which had serious heads thinking tunes including Stanley The Simpleton, Susan’s Lungs and Cinnamon Toast were the real deal. Peter Wright, via e-mail MOJO says: See also the case of Japanese composer Mamoru Samuragochi, who had not only said he was deaf, but had used a ghostwriter to compose his works. Then in 2007, the posthumous and acclaimed CD recordings of pianist Joyce Hatto playing the classical repertoire turned out, as Gramophone reported, to be wholesale grabs of other players’ performances. They were released by her husband William BarringtonCoupe, who had, intriguingly, worked with Joe Meek to launch the short-lived Triumph label in 1960. Expect more in the age of the deepfake!
TREMOLO HONEY
Concerning the enquiry of David Gebroe [Ask MOJO 340] on recordings featuring vocals with a tremolo effect – the only other example I know is Tommy James & The Shondells’ 1968 smash hit Crimson And Clover. There’s another track by James Blake called Don’t Miss It (2018) where this
effect is used on the vocal track, but in a different kind of way. I’m truly curious if other folks can come up with more instances. Martin Schreiber, Lahr, Germany MOJO says: Thanks to reader Jon Gregory for suggesting Planet Caravan by Black Sabbath as a good example of treated vocals. Keep ’em coming, tremolo fans.
DID SCRITTI FIGHT WITH PADDY?
I’m glad to hear Green Gartside is going to give us another album at long last. It made me remember a newspaper story about him having a tiff with Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout – another great songwriter who needs to make some more music. So, is this true and what was their argument about? Geoff Nott, via e-mail MOJO says: Green relates: “Many years ago a tabloid newspaper said that he and I had some kind of dispute, the headline was something like, ‘Arty Farties Fall Out At Party.’ But it wasn’t true. I dearly love him and he’s always had very kind things to say about me. So there was no beef!”
HELP MOJO
Recently I took a second look at the movie Festival Express (truly worth it). However, at the end of the trip the musicians involved presented the promoters (who lost a bundle but treated the musicians like royalty) a model train/trophy signed by all the members of the groups who participated. It left me wondering where that priceless artefact ended up. Any idea? Tom Blake, via e-mail
CONTACT MOJO 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.
Caroline Coon/Camera Press, Getty (2)
Time to have a crack at this month’s rock-related queries and head-scratching enigmas.
They fought the law: (clockwise from top left) The Clash meet future Ju-Ju Queen Janie Jones (centre) in 1977; fake-Floyd freak-out? Syd Barrett reflects; the Super Furries’ Howard Marks-adorned debut LP; Green Gartside – a lover not a fighter.
MOJO C OM PE T I T I O N ANSWERS
MOJO 343 Across: 1 Peggy Jones, 5 Chess, 8 Oil, 9 Spiderland, 12 Rev, 13 Herbie Hancock, 16 Autoharp, 17 This Heat, 18 Deacon, 21 The Wall, 22 Arlo, 23 Rubin, 24 Mama, 27 Sand, 29 SOS, 30 Spy, 32 Six O’Clock, 33 Family, 35 Rodrigo Y Gabriela, 39 Fur, 40 James, 42 Skylarking, 43 Spoon, 45 Jason Isbell, 47 Self, 49 Fenn, 51 Pip, 52 Barker, 54 Gruff Rhys, 56 Utah, 57 Avatar, 58 Zen, 59 All Right Now.
DIY Disco Win! A multi-pad Joué Play music interface and Lypertek PurePlay Z5 earphones.
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E’VE ALL got a song in us. And with the Joué Play, even the musically untrained can get it out. Consisting of up to four silicone pads representing guitar, piano, keyboards and drums, and an intuitive app that contains a bank of over 40 professional-quality sounds, it’s an easy-to-use, visually informative interface that makes mixing and creating songs easy. And when you paint your masterpiece, why not listen to it on some noise-cancelling Lypertek PurePlay Z5 earphones? Their 10mm dynamic drivers deliver detailed, natural sound, while the PureControl ANC app allows you to personalise EQ, controls and ambient modes for a complete wireless listening experience. 1
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We have both of the above prizes for this month’s crossword giveaway! Be in for a shot at the gold by completing this month’s rocking brain-twister, then send a scan of it to mojo@bauermedia.co.uk, making sure to type CROSSWORD 345 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 August 2. For the rules of the quiz, see www.mojo4music.com. For more information, visit www.jouemusic.com and lypertek.com
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1 The King Bee of the blues (4,5) 6 Digital music acronym (2) 8 AC/DC’s Mr Scott (3) 11 Black Lace’s terrible earworm (6) 14 Dr. John was one times two (2) 15 Tyne and Wear folk family (8) 17 The Doors’ last with Jim (2,5) 18 Spoonie, Rosko or Vaucher? (3) 19 Rapper Special -- (2) 20 AKA Reggae’s Lonely Lover (7, 6) 25 Lebanese-American guitar great (4,4) 28 Mr Shankar (4) 29 David Grisman’s type of canine (4) 30 Famed San Fran record den (6) 31 Trigger happy Glasgow rockers? (3) 32 When Nick Drake got Bryter (6) 34 Home of Al Green, Ann Peebles… (2) 35 Julian Cope salutes the All-Father (4) 38 Initially, Gruff Rhys’s men (3) 40 Swiss-Ghanaian Afro-soul voice (2) 41 Baker, O’Day or Lane? (5) 42 Mink DeVille’s soft yet tough debut (8) 46 Another way to describe a label? (7) 47 Isaac Hayes was the Black incarnation (5) 48 Cowpunks The ----- Skats (5) 49 Noted Stockport Smiths fans (8) 52 Faith, Green or Ant? (4) 55 Noted US synth manufacturer (3) 56 Warren Zevon’s was French (7) 59 Stylish house producer Robert (6) 61 Sydney’s improv giants (5) 63 London dance label who released DJ Sasha’s first disc (1,1,1) 64 Unfortunately-named US rap duo (5) 66 Gillan’s 2006 B&B? (3) 67 Greg Ginn’s label (1,1,1) 69 Peter Gabriel’s ’86 smash (2) 70 Where trance is played (3) 71 Silence Yourself, they said in 2013 (7) 72 On-U’s --- Loy Nichols (3) 75 He recorded with Tori Amos in 1996 (1,1) 76 Alias reggae engineer Errol Thompson (1,1) 77 Ed Ball’s indie Mods (5) 78 The Specials’ Roddy (9) 80 Clive Davis’s label (6) 84 Pianist Roger (3) 85 Vince Guaraldi’s -- Good Grief! (2) 86 Canadian synth-poppers (3,3) 88 Toumani Diabaté was its master (4) 90 Veteran Brixton electronic act (3) 91 Laibach’s defence pact LP (4) 92 Café, Happy or at Twilight (3) 93 Safe refuge for Joni, Jackson Browne, etc (6) 96 Tony Allen does the flamenco in 2007? (3) 98 Austrian oil firm with its own label (1,1,1) 99 Jacko’s space-Captain identity (2) 100 AKA Mr DiMucci (4) 101 Some Bizzare mastermind (5) 102 What fans call Ian Anderson’s band (4) 103 Musical forms which originated in Cuba (3) 104 And Out Come The Wolves, they warned (6) 105 Country great Porter (7)
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Winners: Mick Ferris of Godmanchester, Terence Desmond of Welling, Catherine Johnston of Shilbottle, Terry Balzanella of Evercreech and Andrew McWhinnie of Glasgow all win a pair of wireless Orange O Bones © headphones.
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Down: 1 Phoebe Snow, 2 Golden Earring, 3 Japan, 4 Eye, 5 Chapman, 6 Eldritch, 7 Steve Howe, 10 Drones, 11 RAK, 13 Hot Rats, 14 Art, 15 Apples, 19 Clark, 20 Ribcage, 25 A Sailor’s Life, 26 Robby Krieger, 28 Diamonds, 29 Stiff, 31 Prolapse, 34 Yorba, 36 Ivan, 37 One, 38 Ill, 40 Joan Baez, 41 Susie, 44 ELP, 45 Jordan, 46 Brutal, 48 Figaro, 50 Thing, 53 Rite, 55 Suit.
ACROSS
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1 See photoclue A (7,4) 2 Early Orbital label (8) 3 Cyndi Lauper, as she moves to the Occident (7) 4 Moebius & Plank’s Rastakraut ----- (5) 5 Hip-hop term of respect (1,1) 6 Noted Algerian label of the ’70s (1,1,1) 7 One of Richard Hawley’s neighbourhoods (8) 9 Home of those Mountain Daredevils (5) 10 NZ’s flying sister label? (3) 12 Label of Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, etc (3,6) 16 Ian North’s debut solo LP (3) 20 See photoclue B (6,6) 21 Broadway arranger Sid (5) 22 Martial artist and Italo-disco singer (3) 23 Another Reg Dwight alias? (3,5) 24 Legacy format now suddenly collectible? (2) 26 Sonic Youth let their minds wander? (8,6) 27 See photoclue C (10) 32 Heartbreakers’ mighty debut (1.1.1.1) 33 Mersey New Wavers Modern --- (3) 36 Jack Johnette? Something’s missing (2) 37 Black metaller Tony Särkkä’s alias (2) 39 Rezillos’ Fay (4) 42 Radiohead’s was, well, OK (8) 43 Badfinger’s donkey-friendly LP (3) 44 -- Music, New Order alias (2) 45 Pharaonic French rapper (9) 47 Easy listening (3) 50 NYC punks who played with James White (4) 51 Blur explode? (4) 53 The Jungle Brothers did their own (4) 54 Imagination’s Just -- Illusion (2) 56 US home of Buzzcocks and The Fall (1,1,1) 57 Lou Barlow alias (6) 58 Japan rockers -- Succession (2) 60 CCR’s Green waterway (5) 62 Chicago rapper and actor (6) 65 Miles gets extra-sensory in ’65 (1.1.1) 68 Bodysnatchers guitarist (1.1) 73 Yorkshire jazz-rock trio (4,4) 74 Those Bitchin’ ----- (5) 79 Daniel Miller’s project (6) 80 Duran Duran offshoot (7) 81 She let the music play (7) 82 ------- Green World? (7) 83 Quasimoto squints in 2000? (6) 87 Redd ----- (5) 89 Killing joke’s late bassist (5) 94 Amon Düül II’s abominable LP (4) 95 Rihanna’s ear-splitting 2010 LP (4) 97 His last LP was daear (3)
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H E L L O G O O D BY E Affirmative action: Yes (from left, Bill Bruford, Steve Howe, Jon Anderson, Chris Squire and Tony Kaye) play Yours Is No Disgrace on Top Of The Pops, March 31, 1971.
Steve Howe and Yes It began with busking, swing and harmony. But too many line-up changes forced a halt they thought was permanent.
Getty (2), Gottliebbros
HELLO JANUARY 1970 I’d just done an amazing tour with P.P. Arnold and those lovely guys Ashton, Gardner And Dyke. We played with Eric Clapton and Delaney & Bonnie. That knocked us sideways, hearing a big stomping Southern rock band rehearsing in the Lyceum. So I was – I could use the word ‘desperate’ to find a good gig. I mean, I was hungry. Then I got a phone call. Chris [Squire, Yes bassist] said, “We’ve seen you play, do you want to come down and play with us?” I said, “Well, I’ve heard of you but I haven’t heard the band.” So I went to Barnes a few days later with my [Gibson ES-]175. It’s a bit hazy. We were either in a small barn, or it could have been a small garage. Or a biggish room, somewhere in this house of their manager of the time. But it wasn’t an inappropriate place or a dump. Everyone had fairly minimal kind of equipment. I’d have said, “Give me a chord chart, and then I can busk along.” I saw them in the raw and I could see they were talented, and they were sort of encouraging me. Bill [Bruford, drums] was really impressing me. He had an element of jazz and swing even though he’s very minimalistic. I thought, Wow, these guys are good, this is the kind of band I’d like to join. So I was delighted when they said, “We think this is good.” I went back to Jon
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[Anderson, vocalist]’s flat in Kensington and had a chat with him. It was a quite harmonious day. I heard later that Bill’s only concern was that I was a bit more of a hippy than they were. The fact that they were offering a retainer was very encouraging, though like so many times in the past, that soon ended and it was, “We can’t pay that until we do some gigs.” But I was really confident. I mean, I was prepared to suffer again, which I’d already done, you know, not having any money and trying to feed a family. If I believe in the music I’m doing, then nobody’s going to stop that happening.
GOODBYE JANUARY 1981 Trevor Horn [vocals] and Geoff Downes [keyboards] from Buggles had joined for the Drama LP [1980]. There was a high quality of music and integrity on the Buggles LP – there were a couple of meets, there was a chemistry, and suddenly they were in Yes. The last leg of The Drama Tour had closed at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park [on December 18]. It was a good show, but it wasn’t the best of soundchecks – Chris was 45 minutes late, or something. After that, there was an impasse. There was a meeting at my house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, on a few sofas sat around a glass table. I guess my wonderful wife must have bought tea or coffee, and kind of left us to roast in there and work out the future. Trevor knew he had to deliver another Buggles album, and Chris and Alan [White, drums] had the idea that they were going to go off and play with Jimmy Page, the only thing was Jimmy Page wasn’t sure about it. So, Geoff and I were left holding the Yes baby,
“Bill’s concern was that I was a bit more of a hippy than they were.” STEVE HOWE
although we didn’t want it. We were like, “What, we’re the band?” After 10 years of fixing this group, you know, finding Rick Wakeman [keyboards]… you know, it was a hodgepodge. I’d had enough. We had a longer conversation, something like, “Well, if I change my mind about going on with Yes, we’ll talk, but I don’t think I can do that.” I felt… relieved. There had to be a conclusion. We’d put Trevor under a lot of pressure, not changing keys of the old songs which was blatantly unhelpful, and the rowdier British audiences who felt that, you know, they’d rather have Jon Anderson, could be very verbal. So when I closed the door on Geoff, I would have said to my wife Jan – that’s over. I had no idea there was any other way than forwards, and forwards meant forming a new band, which was Asia. That falls apart. So, form a new band – GTR. That falls apart. Form a new band – ABWH. That falls apart, and becomes Yes. Lo-and-behold, Yes would become a whole vehicle for me, for the rest of my life. But in 1981, I had no idea you could re-form and get the band back together – I think The Blues Brothers film may have invented that notion. As told to Ian Harrison Steve Howe was speaking in early May. Yes play their Close To The Edge 50th Anniversary UK Tour, which is dedicated to the memory of Alan White, until June 29.
Drama-lama-dingdong: Yes (Trevor Horn, second right) bow out; (left) Howe today.
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