WARWICK
FEATURES
2 8 BARRY GIBB The last Bee Gee reflects on delinquency, disco and belated solo flight. Plus, the steel in the soul of the Brothers Grin:“We knew that we were not going to give up until we became famous.”
3 4 BESSIE SMITH A voice from the margins that captivated America, bursting barriers of racism and violence.An extract from Scottish poet Jackie Kay’s new book offers insight into the Empress Of The Blues.
4 0 EDGAR BROUGHTON BAND Beefheart! Socialism! Riots! Hell’s Angels! Max Clifford! Life was never simple for the UK’s ultimate underground warriors. “It was a primal scream sort of thing,” they reveal.
4 6 BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD Thrilling, pan-generic jams from the 14-legged groove machine going somewhere fast. But what do Richard Hell, Ariana Grande and Fleetwood Mac have to do with it? Victoria Segal investigates.
50 COWBOY JUNKIES Some of the most bewitching music of the ’80s was made by Canuck siren Margo Timmins and band. Read how it came together:“It was an out-ofbody experience!”
54 CAROLE KING Fifty
BARRY GIBB, P2 8
COVER STORY
6 2 THE CURE The 30 Greatest Songs of Robert Smith’s post-punk dream-weavers, the kings of quirk and charm through six decades. Plus: their early transformations, and why the “corduroys, Hush Puppies and grandpa jumper” just had to go.
Getty
“We became overexposed… but you can’t knock it, mate! It was wonderful.”
years since it first smashed the charts around the world, Tapestry is still weaving its spell. Its creators tell MOJO why:“We had made the soundtrack of a lot of people’s lives.”
MOJO 3
Viola Davis has the blues in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Screen, p103.
REGULARS 9
ALL BACK TO MY PLACE Stephen Morris, Edie Brickell and Steven Wilson salute those about to rock.
1 0 6 REAL GONE Harold Budd, Leslie West, Gerry Marsden, Charley Pride, Howard Wales, Andrew White and others, goodnight.
1 1 2 ASK FRED What has Stevie Nicks been home-taping?
1 1 4 HELLO GOODBYE Rose Simpson remembers her time in The Incredible String Band:“It was complete freedom!”
Say Hi to Don Bryant, Cult Heroes, p20.
WHAT GOES ON! 12
DAVID BOWIE This January 10 he was five years gone. How did the world mark it, and how will his mighty legacy be curated during 2021?
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HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF Alynda Segarra gets out of New York to prepare a new LP for an America in flux, with reggaeton, astrology and Lou Reed on her mind.
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DANIEL LANOIS He’s aided and abetted Eno, U2, Dylan, Peter Gabriel and many others. Now the Quebecois production hand has his own music to make. In Confidential mode, he reveals what drives him.
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GANG OF FOUR Andy Gill left us last February 1, an early victim of Covid. Now a star-packed tribute album honours his life’s work, as his partner Catherine Mayer and devotee Gary Numan explain.
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REVOLUTIONARY CUBAN LP ART In 1959, Fidel Castro and his forces booted out the yankees and reorganised on Marxist principles. This made for a unique and thriving music scene: read on for high-impact visual explanations.
MOJO FILTER 80
NEW ALBUMS Outlook stormy at The Weather Station, Mogwai and many more.
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REISSUES Serge Gainsbourg, The Band, the ‘other’Nirvana and more.
1 0 3 SCREEN Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Dylan’s Rolling Thunder, Bee Gees and more.
1 0 4 BOOKS The Velvet Mafia, Jimi Hendrix – songwriter, don’t dread drone and more.
THIS MONTH'S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...
4 MOJO
Jackie Kay
Tom Oldham
Corey Brickley
Author of The Adoption Papers, Trumpet and Red Dust Road, Jackie has been National Poet of Scotland since 2 0 1 6 . She is currently Chancellor of the University of Salford, spending time in Glasgow and Manchester. Her book on blues diva Bessie Smith is extracted from p3 4 .
Tom says he was honoured to be back in the saddle for MOJO, made special by shooting Black Country, New Road in the premier rock’n’roll location that is the Columbia Hotel. “The walls scream good times at you and it was great to be back.” See feature, p4 6 .
Corey is a freelance illustrator in Philadelphia. He has worked with The New Yorker, New York Times, Netflix, Folio Society, Penguin, Harpercollins, and more! He has won awards from the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration and elsewhere, and illustrates MOJO’s Album of the Month, p8 0 .
Corey Brickley (2), David Lee/Netflix, Niels Vinck, Mary McCartney
Storm warning: The Weather Station, Lead Album, p80.
12 x 7” SING LE BOX-SET AVAILABLE NOW
Contains all 1 2 revolutionaryBuzzcock s 4 5 s released byUnited Artists between 1 9 7 7 and 1 9 8 0 . Re-mastered from the original tapes and in the original Malcolm Garrett designed sleeves. Also includes a 3 6 -page book let written byacclaimed author and punk chronicler Clinton Heylin. HARMONIES IN YOUR HEAD, HISTORY IN YOUR HANDS
A collaboration born out of the friendship between the Scottish singer-songwriter & the free-wheeling Swedish collective. An instinctive,loose-limbed and joyfullisten.
22 January 2021 • LP / CD / DL / JIGSAW
Frank Ockenfels,Catherine Wygal,Alamy (2),Getty,Janina Gallert,Avalon.red
Perhaps the most famous Cure cover of all (if we discreetly ignore Adele’s Lovesong), J Mascis and co’s surging take on the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me hit surfaced only a couple of years after the original. Robert Smith loved it. For newcomers:the ending is meant to be like that…
David Gedge has long been adept at reshaping classic songs to fit the Wedding Present aesthetic, ever since he recorded 12 cover versions to adorn the B-sides of 1992’s monthly “Hit Parade” singles. This stab at High, from 2008, replaces the original’s baggyish lope with speedy cheesewire guitars.
Like Gedge, Dean Wareham’s career also stretches deep into the ‘80s, to his tenure as one-third of Galaxie 500. As frontman of Luna, his taste for spindly, Velvets-infused psych proves to be a fine way of treating this early Cure classic. From Luna’s 2017 reunion album of covers, A Sentimental Education.
Written by Smith/Gallup/Thompson/Williams/ Tolhurst. Published by UMPG. ᝈ&©1 9 8 7 Dinosaur Jr. From You’re Living AllOver Me (Baked Goods Records). www.dinosaurjr.com/
Written by Smith/Gallup/Williams/Thompson/ Bamonte. Published by Fiction Songs Limited. ᝈ&©2 0 0 8 Scopitones. From Just Like Heaven (A Tribute To The Cure) (American Laundromat Records). www.alr-music.com
Written by Dempsey/Smith/Tolhurst. Published by Universal Music Publishing. ©2 0 17 Luna. From A SentimentalEducation (Double Feature Records). www.lunamusic.com
UK rapper Kingslee ‘Akala’ Daley brilliantly interpolated the guitar riff from Lullaby into this closing track from his second solo LP. A deeper Cure connection, too:like Robert Smith and his original bandmates, Akala comes from Crawley.
As half of Nouvelle Vague, French producer Marc Collin specialised in beatnik, lounge takes on classic punk and post-punk – including, notably, A Forest. Stranger Than Angels is his new project with the American singer and David Lynch muse Chrystabell, an entire album of Cure covers like this fingerclicking, jazz noir The Walk.
Written by K. Daley/R. Safinia (Illa State Music – now Immovable Music Publishing) & incorporating elements of ‘Lullaby’ by Smith/ Williams/Thompson/O’Donnell/Tolhurst/Gallup. Published by Fiction Songs Ltd. Features a sample of ‘Lullaby’ by The Cure. Licensed courtesy of Fiction Records/Polydor Ltd.
6 MOJO
Written by Smith/Tolhurst. ISRC: FR1 3 Z2 0 0 0 0 2 0 . Publishing: Fiction Songs Ltd Recorded. Produced and mixed by Marc Collin. Mastering by Benoît Joubert / Biduloscope ᝈ&©2 0 2 0 Kwaidan Records
Mark Lanegan’s collaborations are numerous and often obscure. Even the most diligent fan may’ve missed this 2012 gem:a solemn recitation of Close To Me to muted orchestration. The Separate project was curated by Setanta label boss Keith Cullen, wherein some of his favourite singers sang his favourite songs. Written by Robert Smith. Published by Universal Music Publishing, 2 0 1 2 . From OrchestralVariations V.01 (Setanta)
No doubting Rose’s commitment to The Cure:in 2019, the former Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls singer covered Seventeen Seconds in its entirety. She handled it pretty faithfully, too, not least on this jauntily unnerving Play For Today. Written by Gallup/Hartley/Smith/Tolhurst. Published by Fiction Records (Universal) adm. Universal Music-MGB Songs OBO Fiction Songs Ltd. ᝈ&©2 0 1 9 Slumberland Records. From Seventeen Seconds (Slumberland Records). www. slumberlandrecords.com/
Moss came to prominence with The Duke Spirit in 2005. More recently she’s focused on a synth-rock solo sound, and what MOJO’s reviewer of her Who The Power LP described as a “stadium-friendly reach”. This cover comes from the 2019 EP A Little Bit Of Rain, where it shares space with other precipitationthemed songs by Eurythmics, Ann Peebles and Scott Walker. Written by Smith/Williams/Thompson/O’Donnell/ Tolhurst/Gallup. Published by Fiction Songs. From the A Little Bit Of Rain EP (Bella Union)
Even The Cure’s poppiest moments harbour strange undercurrents, as excavated here by the unstoppable Bridgers. What appears to be a mournful, stripped-down version, from 2018, is destabilised by ethereal echoes and a piano which wanders from predictable lines. Written by Bamonte/Williams/Gallup/Smith/ Thompson. Published by Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited (PRS). ᝈ&©2 0 1 8 Dead Oceans, Courtesy of Dead Oceans
8:58 is a solo project by Paul Hartnoll, better known as half of techno duo Orbital. His 2015 8 :5 8 set featured a guest turn from Robert Smith, and this imaginative rethink of A Forest. The vividly human vocals are by British folk singers Rachel and Becky Unthank. Written by Tolhurst/Hartley/Gallup/Smith. ᝈ&©2 0 1 5 ACP Recordings Ltd. Vocal recording by Adrian McNally. Drums by Dimitri Tikovoi. From 8:58 (ACP Recordings)
A London singer-songwriter with affinities stretching across postrock, goth, even metal, Williams also mixes artfully with a modern classical crowd. It’s a stark intensity that feeds into Lovesong. From her recent set of solo lockdown covers, Songs From Isolation, where she also tackles Nick Cave, Nine Inch Nails, Pixies, Radiohead and more. Written by Smith/Williams/Thompson/O’Donnell/ Tolhurst/Gallup. Published by Fiction Songs. From Songs Of Isolation (Bella Union)
Mark Andrew Hamilton, the one constant behind Woodpigeon, is an oft nomadic Canadian who over the past 15 years has linked with artists like Iron & Wine, Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake and more, plus the legendarily elusive Mary Margaret O’Hara. This gently propulsive, hypnotic Lullaby comes from Hamilton’s 2017 Devastating EP. Written by O’Donnell/Williams/Gallup/Smith/ Tolhurst/Thompson. Published by UMPG UK ᝈ&©1 9 8 9 . From the Devastating EP (Boompa Records). woodpigeon.bandcamp.com
A spare, suitably haunting version by the Canadian slowcore pioneers, Margo Timmins’ vocals punctuated by brother Michael’s startling guitar eruptions. MOJO’s Eyewitness this month focuses on the making of the Junkies’ breakthrough masterpiece, The Trinity Session;find it beginning on page 50. Written by Gallup/Hartley/Smith/Tolhurst. Published by BLEU DISQUE MUSIC CO INC. ᝈ2 0 0 4 Latent Recordings under exclusive license to Cooking Vinyl ©2 0 0 4 Cooking Vinyl under exclusive license from Latent Recordings
The churning, apocalyptic aspect of The Cure’s music has always been catnip to certain metal acts, such as The Deftones, or widescreen postrockers like Mogwai. Canadian duo Nadja effectively have feet in both camps, specialising in heavy drone frequencies and elusive vocals, sunk deep in the mix, à la My Bloody Valentine. Here, in an exclusive new recording, they harness all their skills in a monumental take on Faith. Written by Gallup, Smith, Tolhurst. Published by Universal Publishing MGB Limited (ASCAP).
“The Cure were the last great pop band, I think,” the trip-hop auteur told The Wire in 2008, and his love of the band led him to employ their sometime mixer, Mark Saunders, to produce his landmark debut, Maxinquaye. It wasn’t until 2003, though, that he recorded this taut and menacing Love Cats with Italian singer Costanza Francavilla. Written by Smith. Published by Fiction Songs LTD (Universal Music Publishing). ᝈ&©2 0 0 3 Anti, Inc. From Vulnerable (Anti, Inc.). www.anti.com
CARGO COLLECTIVE
VIRGINIAWING
STILL CORNERS
RATS ON RAFTS
THE WEDDING PRESENT
privateLIFE
THE LAST EXIT
EXCERPTS FROM CHAPTER 3 : THE MIND RUNS ANET OF RABBIT PATHS
LOCK ED DOWN & STRIPPED BACK
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Stephen Morris BEATS NEVER END What music are you currently grooving to? Currently, the Working Men’s Club LP, Marie Davidson’s Working Class Woman and quite a bit of Bob Dylan. I watched the Rolling Thunder doc on Netflix and found myself desperate to hear Blood On The Tracks. I hear his new one’s pretty good. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Probably Love’s Forever Changes. It really is an all-time five-star classic. You can always find some tiny detail that you’ve never noticed before. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? First 45 was The Loco-Motion by Little Eva from a record shop in Churchwallgate, Macclesfield. Album was, embarrassingly, Gather Me by Melanie. I’d gone to buy In Search Of Space by Hawkwind but didn’t have enough cash so I grabbed the one with Brand New Key. I didn’t play it much.
It was from Hodgsons in Chestergate. Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? I’d love to be able to play drums as well as Jaki Liebezeit from Can. I’d like a go at Keith Moon cherry-bomb hotel wrecking. Sadly, I’m too polite. What do you sing in the shower? My singing has been declared a crime under the Geneva Convention. I have lapsed into a pissed pub singer rendition of Life On Mars or Jean Jeanie. What is your favourite Saturday night record? Rebel Rebel by David Bowie always says Saturday night to me. And your Sunday morning record? Something by Lee Hazlewood. Souls Island, probably, or Meaning? by Annette Peacock. They’re both reflective songs, which is usually how Sundays make me feel. Fast Forward: Confessions of a Post-Punk Percussionist: Volume II (Constable) is out.
A LL B AC K TO MY PL AC E THE STARS REVEAL THE SONIC DELIGHTS GUARANTEED TO GET THEM GOING...
Steven Wilson POST-PROG POWER RANGER What music are you currently grooving to? Of all the original ’90s generation of Warp label electronic acts, Autechre have proved to be the most inventive, and I love both new albums, Sign and Plus. I love postminimalism fused with electronics, and Max Richter’s album Voices is some of the most beautiful music. I recently discovered Shawn Phillips’ Second Contribution, from 1970, which blew me away. What, if push comes to shove,
is your all-time favourite album? You’ll think I’m joking:Swingin’ In A Winter Wonderland by The Hiltonaires With The Tony Mansell Singers – easy listening Christmas standards, it holds such nostalgic resonance. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Carly Simon, Nobody Does It Better, from Rumbelows, Hemel Hempstead, after my dad had taken me to see The Spy Who Loved Me. I still love it. Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? Prince. He was the ultimate pop star, he could do everything.
Warren Jackson,Victoria Will/Invision/AP/Shutterstock
What do you sing in the shower? With a sense of weary irony, Cliff Richard’s Summer Holiday, because we haven’t had one. Also, Slug Bait by Throbbing Gristle. What is your favourite Saturday night record? Donna Summer’s Love To Love You Baby. It was one of two LPs my parents listened to over and over. The relevant reason is you can create disco-based music, and turn it into a journey. As for [her sexy moaning], I thought she was excited about what she what doing! And your Sunday morning record? Talk Talk’s The Colour Of Spring. They’re in a transitional phase, moving to something more sophisticated. The Future Bites is out on January 2 9 on Caroline International.
Edie Brickell WHAT SHE IS What music are you currently grooving to? Ave Maria (Schubert), by Jessye Norman. It takes me back to my first European tour in a hotel room in Brussels when a gorgeous, old church bell rang right outside my open window as the sheer curtains billowed in a soft breeze while this song played on the sound system. Also revisiting Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots by Flaming Lips. There’s fun-loving sunshine and light in that entire album. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Songs In The Key Of Life [Stevie Wonder] is such a joyful, enduring collection. I love how it makes me feel, especially the song As – an uplifting spiritual experience every listen. As on repeat has a healing effect. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Superstition by Stevie Wonder. It was my first favourite song. I walked to a little record shop in the strip mall by our apartment [in Dallas] and bought the 45. I played it over and over and over and over.
“Imagine playing Clair De Lune for the first time.”
Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? Debussy. Imagine writing and playing Nocturne or Clair De Lune for the first time, offering such stunning gifts of beauty to our world. What do you sing in the shower? Improvisational lyrics and melodies that free the spirit of the mood I’m in, another kind of cleansing. What is your favourite Saturday night record? Hyperballad by Björk. I love her voice, melodies and imagination so much. She’s a truly brilliant artist. And your Sunday morning record? Roly Poly by Bob Wills And His Texas Playboys. It’s fun to listen to while I cook breakfast for a house full of kids. Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ Hunter And The Dog Star is out on February 1 9 on Shuffle Records.
EDIE BRICKELL MOJO 9
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Editor John Mulvey Senior Editor Danny Eccleston Art Editor Mark Wagstaff Associate Editor (Production) Geoff Brown 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 For mojo4music.com contact Danny Eccleston Thanks for their help with this issue: Keith Cameron, Fred Dellar, Ian Whent Among this month’s contributors: Martin Aston, John Aizlewood, Mark Blake, Mike Barnes, Dave Bowler, Glyn Brown, John Bungey, David Buckley, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Stevie Chick, Andrew Collins, Andy Cowan, Fred Dellar, Niall Doherty, Tom Doyle, Daryl Easlea, David Fricke, Andy Fyfe, Pat Gilbert, Grayson Haver Currin, David Hutcheon, Jim Irvin, Colin Irwin, Jackie Kay, David Katz, Andrew Male, James McNair, Chris Nelson, Lucy O’Brien, Lyndsey Parker, Andrew Perry, Jude Rogers, Jon Savage, Victoria Segal, David Sheppard, Michael Simmons, Sylvie Simmons, Ben Thompson, Kieron Tyler, Charles Waring, Roy Wilkinson, Lois Wilson, Stephen Worthy Among this month’s photographers: Cover:Steve Double/Camera Press;Insets:Alamy (2) Adrian Boot, Todd Crusham, Rose Marie Cromwell, Jak Kilby, Gie Knaeps, Richard Mann, Jim McCrary, Tom Oldham, Ebet Roberts, Joshua Schoemaker, Tom Sheehan, Matthew Parri Thomas
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Theories, rants, etc. MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk
THE WEIRDEST ART, AS WE’VE OFTEN
observed, flourishes in the most innocuous places. This month, MOJO returns to the suburban hinterlands of Southern England in the late 1970s, and to Crawley, a sprawl of roundabouts and housing estates next to Gatwick Airport. It’s here we find the nascent Cure, working on an outsider music as uncompromising as it is strangely accessible. There are fights at hospital dinner dances, ill-advised cover versions, disastrous record deals and, at first, a prevailing suspicion the band might never escape their hometown. “Deep in our psyche we knew,” the drummer Lol Tolhurst tells Keith Cameron, “If we don’t do something, we’re destined to live in this place until we die.” It would be foolish, though, to underestimate the stubbornness and will to succeed of genius. Robert Smith’s vision transcended their hometown, confounded the sceptics and led The Cure to become the cult band nonpareil of the next 40 years:one who could find room for both joyous pop hits and blasted, sepulchral epics in their unique aesthetic. In this issue, MOJO’s backcombed battalion of writers dig deep into that catalogue to select our 30 greatest Cure songs. Maybe we missed your favourite? If so, please let us know:mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk.
Believe me, nothing is trivial A huge thank you to John Harris for his wholly immersive and superb article marking 40 years since the death of John Lennon [MOJO 327]. It was so important to remember this anniversary and Mr Harris’ story allowed me to go right back to December 1980 to relive my own memories. I was only seven years old, but I clearly remember the huge impact John’s death had on the whole community and their overwhelming sense of loss. I also saw how those huge gatherings in New York and Liverpool were replicated in smaller but no less meaningful ways across my whole town and the renewed closeness it created among neighbours and acquaintances. Losing John Lennon really did feel like losing a member of the family, and it was clear to see that he was much more than his incredible music. He shone a light of dignity, compassion and hope, and his impact will live on for many generations to come.
Craig Isherwood, Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire …Whilst John Harris makes a valid point on the inappropriateness of showing Help! the night after John Lennon’s murder, to have shown the following year’s How I Won The War would have been a spectacular own goal;it does not end well
for Lennon’s Musketeer Gripweed. This is the film that united the two highest-ranked entertainers in 2002’s BBC Top 100 Greatest Britons poll, with Lennon at 8 and Michael Crawford at a staggering 17 (?!?), edging out one Paul McCartney at 19. It also provided the film link in the last Theories, Rants, Etc. Incidentally, the Lennon cover is another bold, unadorned work of art. These subscribers’ edition covers are a joy in themselves.
Chris Rodden, Norwich
Goddamn creatures of the night. They never learn I must commend you on the fabulous Echo And The Bunnymen article in MOJO 324. I’ve loved that band since I first heard Crocodiles in 1980 and have pretty much kept up with them ever since. Having said that, I hadn’t played Crocodiles for many years and went back to it after reading your article. What a record! It sent shivers down my spine and, if I wasn’t as bald as a coot these days, my hair would have been on end. When they played Edinburgh Queen’s Hall several years ago I had a long chat with Will Sergeant, who was charm personified. He signed something for me and got the reclusive Ian McCulloch to sign it as well. Also, I loved the Elvis Costello piece. Seeing the
stage decorated by Barney Bubbles artwork made me think it’s about time you had a piece on that genius of record sleeve design. His work with Hawkwind in the 1970s was era-defining and enhanced those great records to pieces of art. I treasure each one.
Angus Self, Edinburgh
There are energies aligning against you Revisionist history is a real bummer, man. In MOJO 327, a self-proclaimed “American hippy dating from 1964” asserts that American hippies thought The Beatles “were squares of the most severe type”. Wow, is this dude trippin’, or what? The American hippies who formed The Byrds, Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield and Jefferson Airplane – to name just a few – were directly inspired by watching The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night (1964). “I knew right then what my life was going to be,” declared David Crosby. “We were Beatle-struck. Who could not be struck by The Beatles?” Jim McGuinn bought a 12-string Rickenbacker guitar the very next day. “You can be young, you can be far-out, and you can still make it,” observed a surprised Jerry Garcia. Phil Lesh immediately went home and combed his hair over his forehead:“I became one of the first long-haired freaks in San Francisco,” he would recall. Sounds like The Beatles were indeed “proto-hippies” after all.
Neal McCabe, Los Angeles
Disorder, chaos, anarchy – now that’s fun! I love The Beatles and the other obvious choices for MOJO cover. Still, it was seriously delight-provoking that MOJO 324 featured some less obvious, but still favourite artists of mine:Jon Hassell and Sun Ra. It got me thinking, what if this trend continued? What if some other less than well-known artists appeared in MOJO more regularly:Magma and their relationship to planet Kobaia, Steve Roach, Steve Tibbetts, Pere Ubu;and, most obviously, Eyeless In Gaza on the cover? That would be truly mindblowing. Make space, because space is the place!
Andreas Schmitz, via e-mail
Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever Best of… lists are always highly subjective, of course, and positively invite alternative views, but come on, guys! The omission of 1979’s Recent Songs from the Leonard Cohen How To Buy [MOJO 326] was frankly criminal:I’d argue for its inclusion in the Top 3. The inclusion in the Top 10 of Death Of A Ladies’ Man – the only irredeemably bad album Cohen ever made – and the exclusion of Recent Songs was nothing short of perverse. You do publish one helluva great magazine, though.
A man has an idea. The idea attracts others Reading the Kid A article in MOJO 325, I was pleasantly surprised to see Jim Irvin mentioning Talk Talk. I always see similarities between Radiohead and Talk Talk. Especially if you compare the development over their first four albums. Both start with albums that are very much of their time and now somewhat dated, The Party’s Over and Pablo Honey. The next albums show a lot of development and the emergence of a distinctive sound, It’s My Life and The Bends. Next up:triumphant masterpieces – OK Computer and The Colour Of Spring. And finally, albums that alienate many fans and initially baffle critics:Kid A and Spirit Of Eden. Isn’t it time for a Talk Talk retrospective? A somewhat enigmatic, and in my opinion underappreciated, band that deserves more attention.
Dennis Ewald, Heerlen, The Netherlands
Nothin’ in this town happens without my say-so I thought we’d got this cleared up last December, what with the omission of both Alex Cameron and Andrew Bird releases from your annual best of. Sadly, not. I’ve had to call you back to ask what were you listening to when the Destroyer and BC Camplight albums dropped [MOJO 326]? And Haim at 39? What are you thinking? What have you been doing? Licking your rulers? Hanging out with the navel gazers? Again?
Mr Drayton, Newcastle upon Tyne
So many cops, you’d think they were giving away donuts What a bad year 2020 has been. First we had the coronavirus, but reading MOJO 326 highlighted how sorrowful the music has been also. If these really were the best 75 albums, then heaven knows how poor the rest must be. Playing the accompanying CD there were only about three just about passable tracks and none shone. OK, Bob Dylan has somehow improved his voice somewhat compared with his last few CDs – just sufficient to make him slightly listenable, but it is not a great listening experience. I’m sure there will be some who praise the selection, but if they could only compare with bygone music and listen properly, then they would be shocked at the low standard of what should rightfully be “their” music. PS:good White Stripes article in the same edition.
Graham Stark, Yateley, Hampshire
We can work it out, right? I was quoted in MOJO 327 as saying Ian Brown once described John Squire as a “moaner”. What I actually said was, Ian described John as “a loner”. I just wanted to clear this up. Thank you.
John Lindley, Congleton, Cheshire
Terri Hall, Stone Roses publicist, 1 9 8 9 to 1 9 9 6
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OFF ER V O C CE ! PRI MOJO 11
W H AT G O E S ON! THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO
Future Legend Five years have passed since we said goodbye. But where next for David Bowie in 2 0 2 1 ?
T
HE WEEK ending of January 8-10, which marked both David Bowie’s birthday and the fifth anniversary of his passing, was marked by a surge of activity. This included the streaming premiere of the Lazarus stage show and Mike Garson’s Just For One Day all-star charity live stream. The BBC’s cross-platform Five Years On tribute, meanwhile, included archive interviews and performances, documentaries and Pete Townshend recalling his old friend. “Time flashes by and I think about him a lot,” Townshend told BBC Radio 6Music’s Chris Hawkins. “There was so much about David
“I was always, you know, a few steps behind.”
Pat Pope/Shutterstock
PETE TOWNSHEND that I didn’t get in the early days. I didn’t get the makeup. I didn’t get the theatrical stuff. I didn’t get the chameleon changes in direction. I was always, you know, a few steps behind.” It all confirms that, though Bowie may have left the planet, he remains vividly present. And so, 2021 will see the curation of his catalogue continue with a fifth, presumably penultimate album box set to cover the years 1993-2001. Enhancements of fan favourites Outside (1995) and Earthling (1997) are inevitable, while 1999’s ‘hours…’ is, arguably, sorely in need of the kind of sonic reboot previously given to Lodger, The Man Who Sold The World and more. Furthermore, as collaborator Reeves Gabrels once observed to this writer, “There is an earlier version [of ‘hours…’ ] that had more to do with Diamond Dogs, a different mix and Jason Cooper from The Cure played drums. It’s darker, it’s a little sloppier and less polished, the vocals are for the most part the same but it’s a completely different mix.” It is also rumoured that iterations of 2001’s unreleased Toy album will be released. Additionally, live albums from the ’90s will
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ultimately form the box Brilliant Live Adventures 1 9 9 5 -1 9 9 9 . Of the long-planned Tin Machine archive reload, however, Gabrels says, “the Tin Machine box set is on hold until we sort out details on the corporate end… that would put it into 2022 at the earliest.” Indeed, 2022 could be a busy year for anniversary editions, with 50-year anniversaries for some of Bowie’s most iconic albums drawing close. As for actual unheard music, Bowiephiles should exercise caution. A September 1979 re-recording of Rebel Rebel is known to exist, for example, as is a song completed during the Station To Station sessions in 1975. But producer Harry Maslin confirms of the latter song, “I don’t think ‘Fish’(which was just a working title given to me by David when I asked for a title to put on the tape box) will ever see the light of day.” Maslin is also pessimistic about an unfinished alternative soundtrack for The Man Who Fell To Earth by Bowie and Paul Buckmaster, though he says, “I am aware there is a DAT tape of it.” Film-wise, some of the most exciting Bowie-related artefacts to emerge in recent years have come from the anonymous archive footage restorer and editor Nacho, whose works have been posted on Bowie’s official site. “The two large projects I want to put out in 2021 are an updated The Man Who Fell To Earth film – for the 45th anniversary,” he says. “The second, in June, is David Bowie Live At Earls Court 1978.” Additionally, Bowie’s producer and friend Tony Visconti says this year will bring his new solo album. Garson, though, admits his touring plans are on hold until 2022. Luckily, there are always books. In September, Bowie Odyssey 71 by Simon Goddard promises to be a novelistic narrative of that crucial year. Several Bowie friends and colleagues have mentioned memoirs, including Geoff MacCormack, partners Carlos Alomar and Robin Clark, Suzi Ronson, Frank Simms and Jeff Rougvie, while Steve Pafford’s Crankin’Out:David Bowie In The 1990s revisits the stylish fan magazine and will feature forewords, contributions and new material from Bryan Ferry, Neil Tennant, Clem Burke, Tony Zanetta and ex-manager Tony Defries.
David Buckley Pete Townshend was speaking to Chris Hawkins on BBC Radio 6 Music (5 am-7 am) as part of the BBC’s Bowie Five Years On series. All programmes are currently available to listen back to on BBC Sounds.
Thru’These Architect’s Eyes:Bowie looks forward at the time of 1997’s Earthling.
MOJO 13
W H AT G O E S O N ! Bob Dylan takes pot luck in a pool hall in Kingston, NY, December 11, 1964.
spree is that streaming data makes the value of legacy catalogues easier to identify. Another is the relative stability of song rights. Mercuriadis likes to say that songs are a safer investment than oil or gold because demand is impervious to economic and political upheavals. The year of Covid-19 bore this of songs to around 57,836, including the out, as listeners sat at home streaming while catalogues of Blondie, Chrissie Hynde and artists saw concert revenue evaporate. RZA, at a cost of $670m (£500m). In Buyers of catalogues can maximise their November, Stevie Nicks sold 80 per cent investment by more aggressively licensing of her rights to Primary Wave for an songs to ads, movies and TV shows. Dylan estimated $80m (£60m). The market is has licensed songs to commercials for Apple, currently red-hot for older songwriters IBM and Pepsi and even appeared in a 2004 with proven longevity, who are also the spot for Victoria’s Secret, but he has now surrendered his power to pick and choose. most susceptible to trading future earnings “When the criteria is simply ‘how much?’ for a handsome lump sum. and there is no reference back to the “I don’t think anyone would be selling their rights at the moment if they hadn’t been songwriter,” says Platz, “you may see Blowin’ In The Wind used for all sorts so catastrophically devalued,” of products.” says Crispin Hunt, chair of the It seems that fans should “You Ivors Academy of Music prepare to hear beloved Creators. “It’s not a willing may see songs in new, and perhaps buyer/willing seller market. It’s Blowin’ In unwelcome, contexts. like selling your house because “Dylan’s catalogue is not only otherwise they’re going to The Wind about the wonder of those knock it down.” As for used for Universal, says Hunt, Dylan’s amazing songs, it’s about catalogue is a symbolic trophy. everything they stand for,” says all sorts of “They are doing this to stop “Every tune is now up products…” Hunt. people like Hipgnosis getting for grabs as a jingle. I think it a market share. They feel will really upset Dylan fans. SIMON PLATZ threatened.” It will upset me.” One reason for this buying Dorian Lynskey
AS DYLAN SELLS HIS PUBLISHING,WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE CANON? OB DYLAN fans are accustomed to surprises but rarely on the scale of his decision to sell his entire catalogue of over 600 songs to Universal Music Publishing Group last month. UMPG called the deal, estimated to be worth over $300 million (£225m), “one of the most important of all time”. (Sony/ATV will continue to administer Dylan’s international rights beyond the US until its deal expires.) One reaction came from David Crosby, who tweeted:“I am selling mine also …I can’t work …and streaming stole my record money …it’s my only option.” Why now for Dylan? He may have considerable tax incentives, and he may never get a better price. “Private equity funds have deemed publishing to be sexy,” says Simon Platz, MD of the independent publishers Bucks Music Group. “The money is looking good.” Last year saw an unprecedented boom in the acquisition of song catalogues, with funds paying up to 20 times the value of a publisher’s net annual royalties. Between March and September, Merck Mercuriadis’s Hipgnosis Songs Fund more than quadrupled its bank
B
Daniel Kramer
GIMME FIVE… BLUES THINGS
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Blues Creation
Blues Dimension
Black Strobe
Slim Harpo
Groundhogs
Blu es Creation
Blu es Dimension
Blu es Fight
Blu es Hangover
Blu es Obitu ary
(POLYDOR, 1969)
(DECCA, 1968)
(BLACKSTROBE, 2014)
(FLYRIGHT, 1976)
(LIBERTY, 1969)
With Kazuo Takeda on guitar, these Tokyo rockers do psych’d up cover versions of Memphis Slim, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson and others. And then they got even heavier, freer and fuzzier on the 1971 album Demon & Eleven Children.
From Zwolle in the Netherlands, this up-for-it soul band with horns does Smokey Robinson and Otis Redding tunes, and groovy pop originals.They put undertakers on the cover of B.D.Is Dead Long Live B.D. and expired in ’69.
Brylcreemed ex-death metaller Arnaud Rebotini’s analogue electro/rock project – who’ve graced Peaky Blinders, Django Unchained and other soundtracks – bring twangy guitars to spare synths, dreaming of American punch-ups, in France.
Alone, skint and grimly surrounded by empty bottles o’ booze, the I’m A King Bee man goes into the grisly details of the morning after the night before.Things are so bad he’s only getting “a slice o’ jelly cake” for his Christmas.
Featuring Rev ‘TS’ McPhee and crew, who buried their version of the blues before setting out, fangs glinting, in pursuit of Thank Christ For The Bomb and Split.In 2012 it inspired Mark Lanegan’s Blues Funeral, and who knew opener B.D.D. was a hit in Lebanon?
The Black Keys
Brothers Deluxe Remastered 1 0 th Anniversary Edition
Fully remastered with previously unreleased songs New liner notes by David Fricke Various formats including Limited Edition 7 ” Box Set with Special light-sensitive ink 6 0 -page book of unreleased photos Exclusive poster
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MOJO
“What is my vision… let’s make that fucking happen!” ALYNDA SEGARRA
FACT SHEET Title: TBC Date: summer/ autumn 2 0 21 Production: Brad Cook Songs: Jupiter’s Dance The Buzz: “I don’t think it’s a crazy departure but I’m hoping it shows a lot of growth, using synths and beats and combining that with the natural world.” Alynda Segarra
Hoi Polloi (and the hidden riders of tomorrow):Alynda Segarra collages her life in Durham, NC.
POWER UP – ALYNDA SEGARRA IS BACK WITH HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF’S SEVENTH LP LYNDA SEGARRA was not alone in taking up running during the pandemic;field-recording crows while exercising, however, makes her more of an outlier. One bird collected from her New Orleans neighbourhood is looped on a track intended for Hurray For The Riff Raff’s seventh album, its caw emphasising a political point.
A
Joshua Schoemaker, Getty (2)
A L SO WO R K I N G
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…after 40 years in the music game, Minneapolis eminences JIMMY JAM and TERRY LEWIS (right) will release their debut duo album later in 2021.The former Time members will collaborate with names from across their career, including Babyface – will Janet Jackson and Phil Oakey be close behind? …PAT
“Louisiana is becoming a place where a lot of undocumented people are being jailed,” explains Segarra, “and you combine lyricism about something like that with this crow, and the crow becomes a character. It’s really cool to watch that come to life – like, collaging my life and experience.” Ornithomancy is just a fraction of
METHENY has left the Nonesuch label for BMG’s Modern Recordings and will release new record Road To The Sun in March: guests include guitarist Jason Vieaux and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet, whose Scott Tennant spoke of, “Such beautiful melodic and harmonic flow! …a soundscape of epic proportions” …there’s a guitar duet of note coming this year when MARISA ANDERSON and
Segarra’s follow-up to 2017’s The Navigator, a concept album that used the story of future street-kid Navita to explore Puerto Rican history and urban gentrification. “Now this is me saying, ‘It’s OK to be a bit more vulnerable, a bit more exposed,’” she says. Trauma and healing are key themes. “Growing up a New Yorker definitely raised me to keep hustling, keep moving, don’t think about it, just fucking keep doing the thing – and this has all forced me just to be quiet and to be still.” Voluntary work visiting detention centres also deeply influenced her writing, while a song called Jupiter’s Dance is named after Congolese musician Jupiter Bokondji of Okwess International. “It was making me think so much about how, in astrology, Jupiter brings blessings. How could I write a song that’s giving people hope?” Segarra partly credits this openness to connecting with Bon Iver/Waxahatchee producer Brad Cook. Working with him was, she says, a “safe space” – at least once she reached his base in Durham, North Carolina. Unwilling to fly and a nervous driver (a trait she ascribes to a New York upbringing), the singer relied on friends prepared to take both a Covid test and a road trip. Once in Durham, though, Cook and Segarra’s Covid-secure studio bubble had unexpected advantages, not least removing a band’s need for creative diplomacy:“It was more about, ‘What is my vision and let’s make that fucking happen!’” There was also freedom to experiment: “I’ve always been really intimidated by gear and electronic music and making beats. With Brad, it was such a great environment to play and fuck around with his gear and just make sounds.” Segarra’s recent listening has included Beverly Glenn-Copeland (“like this fantasy forest”), the “joy” of Bad Bunny, Colombian-Canadian singer Lido Pimienta and reggaeton. Yet she soon laughs. “No matter what, I’m still coming from where I come from musically, and there’s going to be Lou Reed rip-offs,” she says. “Throw all that together – and then remember I grew up in New York City being obsessed with The Velvet Underground.” Victoria Segal
WILLIAM TYLER team up.It will be released on Thrill Jockey… Adam Granduciel opened up about the new WAR OF DRUGS record to the Stereogum site.“Some songs have been reimagined” since lockdown, he said. “Some songs have had just one more layer of mud removed from them.” Tracks will include Harmonia’s Dream, I Don’t Live Here Anymore and Ocean Of Darkness. He has enough left as a
basis for another LP …SUEDE (Brett Anderson, left) are planning a new LP, and invite one and all to take part by sending voice recordings to a special e-mail facility. “Please make sure there’s no back- ground noise from radios, TVs or fridges,” they say.“Sing and shout along when we ask you to” …originally due in 2020, LIZ PHAIR’s nobly-titled Soberish – her first LP for a decade – now arrives in 2021…
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He produces the goods:Daniel Lanois comes upon a verdant garden of delights.
LANOIS! HEAT DL’s “turning point” tunes 1 The Message
Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five (FROM THE MESSAGE, SUGAR HILL, 1 9 8 2 )
2 The Model
Kraftwerk (FROM THE
band and it becomes a little less polarised. When I worked with Neil Young [on 2010’s Le Noise], there were half a dozen songs that didn’t get on the record. They were all good songs, but I provided Neil with a bit of advice about what would make for the best balance for this body of work. I suppose you could draw some kind of an analogy to an artist that’s having a show of paintings and it’s good to have a curator.
MAN-MACHINE, CAPITOL, 1 9 7 8 )
What do you remember of 1985’s aborted Scott Walker album that (FROM HATE TO SEE YOU GO, you tried to co-produce with Eno? CHESS,1 9 6 9 ) 4 An Ending We were very excited to be working (Ascent) Brian Eno with Scott. But he was a very private (FROM APOLLO ATMOSPHERES AND SOUNDTRACKS, EG, 1 9 8 3 ) man regarding some of what he was 5 In Time Sly & The doing. He wouldn’t let us hear Family Stone (FROM FRESH, EPIC, 1 9 7 3 ) songs in their entirety. We weren’t allowed to look at the lyrics. At a certain point, it started feeling like we didn’t have the communication that we were used to. Y’know, if I could get in the time machine, I might be able to solve whatever problems we had. We were just making tracks and there was no singing on them. At a certain point it just became a little too mysterious and I didn’t know what to do any more. 3 Mellow Down
Easy Little Walter
Is it true Scott chucked the tapes in the Thames? I like the sound of that! I’ll run with that and I’ll get back to you.
DANIEL LANOIS The Eno/Dylan/U2 collaborator talks gospel, curation and change.
S A COLLABORATIVE musician, producer and general studio vibesman, Quebec-born Daniel Lanois has made his rootsy, atmospheric presence felt on key albums by U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel and Neil Young. Following his time as co-architect of Brian Eno’s early ’80s ambient albums, the pair took exploratory sonics into the mainstream. In recent years, he has worked on Leonard Cohen’s posthumous 2019 album Thanks For The Dance and pursued adventures in electronica with Venetian Snares. Looping back to his early studio years in Toronto, Lanois’upcoming Heavy Sun is a space gospel record featuring Johnny Shepherd, a singer/ organist from Louisiana.
Floria Sigismondi
A
Heavy Sun recalls your early days, recording gospel singers. Yes, I was associated with a Christian organisation and these folks brought singing
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groups from all over the world to tour in Canada. One of the touring stops was two days in my studio to make a gospel record. So, I got to hear a lot of beautiful music. It was a big part of my understanding of the structure of harmony. Why do you think you’ve proven to be so in-demand? I like helping people. It’s always been in my nature to try and make things as good as they can be. It might be just that simple. It makes people wanna do better when they’re around me. As a producer, how do Bob Dylan sessions differ from Neil Young sessions? If it’s a one-on-one situation as it was with Bob Dylan on Oh Mercy, then the work becomes a little more snapshot-driven. If we move the clock ahead to Time Out Of Mind, we had an 11-piece
It’s the 30th anniversary of Achtung Baby this year. Those Berlin sessions were famously gnarly and nearly broke up U2… Y’know, I hear those stories. I wasn’t fully aware of whatever difficulties were going on. Let’s call it a soul-searching record. The records we had made in the early- and mid-’80s, The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua Tree, we were all kids and it was as if we had come upon a beautiful verdant garden full of delights. But by the time we got to Berlin, that innocence had gone away and we had to walk through another door. I think it’s a great rock’n’roll record with very imaginative toppings. The lyrical journey is substantial. What’s the single most important lesson you’ve learned from a lifetime in music? Nothing stays the same. We’re lucky enough to take snapshots of what we’re doing along the way.
Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before. I’ve been thinking about my teenage years and, y’know, I had a brush with delinquency. Then, at a certain point, I was smart enough to know that that was about to be a dead-end street. That fork in the road… where are you DANIEL LANOIS gonna go, man? I chose music. I made the right decisions to stay out of trouble. Tom Doyle
“Y’know, I had a brush with delinquency.”
Daniel Lanois’ Heavy Sun is released in April.
W H AT G O E S O N !
L A ST N I G H T A RECORD CHANGED MY L I F E
IDLES,NUMAN AND MORE CathalCoughlan PAY TRIBUTE TO ANDY Microdisney maverick lauds Lal GILL AND GANG OF FOUR Waterson & Oliver Knight’s Once Like many errant Irish musicians, I began deriving great pleasure and inspiration from the folk music of the common people of Britain on my arrival in London in the 1980s, largely through libraries in north London. At that point, Lal Waterson’s voice, a timeless, unearthly presence, was heard to best effect on the album Bright Phoebus. Her songs on that album, for this listener, stop time. Fast forward to soon after the turn of the century. Lal was gone, taken by illness in 1998. I was looking for ‘other music’ to keep my interest alive. Commuting hours a day, there was time to seek transcendence. Lal’s later works became part of that menu. Once In A Blue Moon is all that Lal’s songs from Bright Phoebus were, and more. Flight Of The Pelican is a slowly beating heart of the record. A skeletal guitar figure delineates time, only for the vocal to probe such delineation: “We who dreamed young and were silent this autumn…” It’s by no means all doom and gloom. Some Old Salty, a kind of Baptist sea shanty, sung chorally, may be a jaunty recalling of teenage life in coastal Yorkshire in the 1950s – but there’s still much else to compel rumination. Altisidora is a meditation on a little girl’s painting of a landscape – nothing twee or patronising about it, and there’s a sense that something else, something transcendent, is being alluded to. There are no spare parts, not from the collection’s more musical-hall moments, to its Arthur Rimbaud setting Dazed, and its second beating heart, Midnight Feast. Cumulatively, I’m sure without premeditation, it bears comparison to certain later works of Scott Walker and the spectral operas of Robert Ashley. It continues to offer fresh elements of itself, reminding me now, as it always has, how the finest work can exist independent of ornamentation and commercial fanfare.
EFORE HIS passing on February 1, edge coronavirus had reached the country 2020, Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill had this early, Mayer herself conducted a track been working on a 40-year celebration and trace among friends and relatives, of the band’s 1979 post-punk masterpiece which turned up numerous positive tests Entertainment! He’d made a list of artists to (including Go4’s tour manager), leading cover its tracks and was fielding finished to the deduction that Gill died of Covid. music when he was admitted to hospital After that harrowing process, the on January 18 with suspected pneumonia. completion of the project has been therapeu“This album was his utter obsession,” says tic, if necessarily bittersweet. Entitled The Catherine Mayer, Gill’s wife for 30 years, and Problem Of Leisure: A Celebration Of Andy Gill And Gang Of Four, and due in May, the album’s an author and women’s campaigner. “He literally delayed his ambulance, for me to go list of contributors includes post-millennial back inside and get his laptop so he could disciples (LoneLady, Idles) and international keep doing stuff in his hospital bed. Then he stars (Germany’s Herbert Grönemeyer, kept sending me home to find hard drives Japan’s Hotei) through to post-punk peers and noise-cancelling headphones, so he Killing Joke and Gary Numan. could listen through to mixes as they came.” Reveals Numan, “Andy said I could do By the time of his hospitalisation, the whatever I wanted, but I chose Anthrax [off project had evolved into a career-traversing Entertainment!] because it was the song I tribute to the Leeds-founded ensemble, who thought I had half a chance of doing justice injected funk and political radicalism into to. I’d sung it once before with Nine Inch punk’s furious mix. “One of the last things Nails in Los Angeles, when I was reminded Andy did,” says Catherine, “was listen to the just how different it was.” Robert Del Naja [AKA Massive Attack’s 3D] A version of Entertainment! track Natural’s remix of Where The Not In It by Rage Against Nightingale Sings, which The Machine guitarist Andy absolutely loved – and Tom Morello and System Of Flea and John Frusciante’s A Down’s Serj Tankian will wonderfully bonkers version appear on January 1 (Gill’s of Not Great Men with the 65th birthday). Mayer hopes children’s choir, which also that these musical tributes came in that day.” will help secure Gill’s legacy. As Mayer has detailed in “I don’t think he had any Good Grief:Embracing Life idea how many people were At A Time Of Death, her actually inspired by him,” recent book about losing she says. “Andy had a lot of both her husband and confidence in his vision, but stepfather within 10 days “This album he was never at all confident of each other, Gill entered was his utter about himself as a public hospital with symptoms of a figure. I think he would have treatable form of pneumonia. obsession.” been utterly astonished by After he was put into an CATHERINE MAYER the outpouring, and I wish induced coma, he died five he had seen it.” days later. As the UK government didn’t acknowlAndrew Perry
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In A Blue Moon (Topic, 1 9 9 6 )
Cathal Coughlan’s Song Of Co-Aklan is out on March 5 , 2 0 2 1 on Dimple Discs.
That’s entertainment!: Andy Gill with GO4, Cromer, March ’79;(above) Damien Hirst cover art for The Problem Of Leisure.
C U LT H E RO E S
Memphis turnaround: Don Bryant on-stage in the ’70s;(below) still in the city’s life.
AFTER DECADES IN THE WILDERNESS, SOUTHERN SOUL SURVIVOR DON BRYANT GETS HIS SHOT O COME BACK, and have the opportunity to write and sing again after all these years?” laughs 78-year-old Memphis soul man Don Bryant. “It’s a blessing.” He’s reflecting on the late resurgence of a solo career even he thought was over and done decades ago. Instead, he’s earned a Grammy nomination for his third and latest album, You Make Me Feel. In essence, it’s a heartfelt love letter to his muse and wife of 46 years, soul legend Ann Peebles, for whom he began writing songs in the early 1970s, including the classic I Can’t Stand The Rain. “Ann is still my inspiration today,” says Bryant. “When she suffered a stroke and vocal problems [in 2012], I wanted to see if I could stand for myself, and take my career where she left off.” That career began when, as one of 10 children and steeped in gospel music, Bryant
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“I wanted to see if I still had ‘it’.” DON BRYANT
20 MOJO
my mother and grandmother, who were in the church and influenced me.” sang in several R&B groups as a teenager. Yet, after spending several decades These included The Four Kings, who caught in obscurity, Bryant was approached by Memphis producer Scott the ear of rising Memphis bandleader and producer, BRYANT STORM! Bomar in 2017. “He called me to see if I would be Willie Mitchell, in 1958. interested in playing some Don’s triple threat. Mitchell signed Bryant to shows with his band The Hi Records in the ’60s as a Precious Soul Bo-Keys when their vocalist solo singer, and cut several (HI, 1969) “Vocally, I was Percy Wiggins got sick,” records with him, though giving it all I got explains Bryant. “I said yes with little success. The and hoping my because I hadn’t been doing arrival of Ann Peebles at singing would go anything, and wanted to see the label in 1969 further over better by if I still had ‘it’.” blunted Bryant’s solo hollering,” says Bryant of the He indisputably did:his prospects. “Willie concen12 covers here, from Wilson time-weathered, still-strong Pickett’s raw sensuality with trated on her and didn’t have Marvin Gaye’s velour phrasing. voice remains a soulful a whole lot of time for instrument, able to morph recording me,” says Bryant, The HiRecords from husky growl to seraphic “but Ann needed material, Singles Collection falsetto. Bomar helmed (SOLID, 2013) so I laid everything else aside From dancefloor acclaimed comeback LP Don’t and wrote songs with her. I to heart-rending Give Up On Love, Bryant’s first got so deep and involved, I ballads, here are in 48 years. Three years on began to enjoy songwriting Bryant’s 11 Hi 45s and with that Grammy in as much as singing.” and flipsides, plus his sights, the singer’s still six duets with Marion Brittnam, The two married in 1974, pinching himself. “To have a demos and two incendiary but when the 1980s arrived, collaborations with Ann Peebles. nomination in this period of the commercial decline of my life is a great honour,” Southern soul prompted a Don’t Give Up he says. “I never would have On Love change of direction, and thought my career would (FAT POSSUM, 2017) Bryant embraced gospel. Packed with have turned out this well!” “There wasn’t a whole lot tales of desire, Charles Waring going on with my recording heartbreak, career,” he confesses. “I did You Make Me Feel is available on and separation, Bryant’s majestic Fat Possum now. it as an acknowledgement of comeback LP affirmed the Bluff City songwriter as a top Southern soul storyteller.
W H AT G O E S O N !
Havana Rave Up! The Soul Jazz label digs deep into the world of Revolu tionary Cu banLP Art. IKE ITS CARIBBEAN neighbour Jamaica, Cuba has punched well above its weight when it comes to making music to get the world dancing, a fusion of West African and Spanish influences leaving intoxicating cross-rhythmic fertilisation in its wake. But it’s fair to say that the nation’s status as a socialist country under a near-seven-decade US economic embargo has made this music harder to sample uncut. Now Gilles Peterson and Soul Jazz label honcho Stuart Baker have made it easier to get closer to the source with their book Cuba – Music And Revolution:Original Album Cover Art Of Cuban Music (Record Sleeve Designs Of Revolutionary Cuba 1959-1990). Containing over 350 sleeves, more than two-thirds in large format, it actually begins during the Batista era, where commercial covers connote an American playground of jet-setting and exotica congas. The 1959 revolution and Cuba’s realignment to the USSR changes all that. A fascinating parallel story of the record business in a command economy, and much else going on in that society, is told via album covers. The role of state record company
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Egrem was not, says Baker, “to sell the most records… it was to produce ‘culturally valuable artefacts’.” A chapter concerning the ’60s still displays images of glamour and romance on discs by Benny Moré, Gina León, Orquesta Aragón and others. But, with all musicians now declared to be state employees, in the ’70s fun gives way to starker graphics and experimentation, politically urgent music and such militant statements as the AK-47 on the sleeve of Grupo De Experimentación Sonora Del ICAIC’s 1976 album. While record art in the ’80s seems to return to less confrontational forms, the collapse of international communism put the Cuban record industry on notice, and by 1996 it had ceased. “That these nationalist and propagandist weapons were all released alongside música bailable (dance music), jazz combos, experimental electro-acoustic music and Afro-Cuban rituals almost defies belief,” writes Baker. “Together they help produce a fascinating document of a society.” Further insight comes via pieces on Cuban music in New York, Santería and Communism, Latin Jazz and more, with other choice details including the fact that Cuban leader Fidel Castro was a fan of orchestra leader Pedro ‘Pello El Afrokan’
Izquierdo, whose multi-drums-with-a frying-pan Mozambique style blazed a trail in the early ’60s, and that these records were never available in the Anglosphere but were exported to friendly rumba hotspots including Hungary, China, Albania and elsewhere in the communist world. “It would be fair to say that this book has taken a long time to publish,” says Baker, explaining that in 2015, Egrem came to an arrangement with Sony Music to distribute Cuban music on the basis that it was “informational materials” and therefore exempt from the US embargo. “Both Sony Music and Egrem allowed us to make this book.”
Ian Harrison Cuba: Music And Revolution – Original Album Cover Art Of Cuban Music is published by Soul Jazz Books (£ 3 5 ). On Soul Jazz Records, Cuba: Music And Revolution: Culture Clash In Havana: Experiments In Latin Music 1 9 7 5 -8 5 Vol.1 is compiled by Gilles Peterson and Stuart Baker.
“…nationalist and propagandist weapons… jazz combos, experimental electro-acoustic music and AfroCuban rituals…” STUART BAKER
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High Fidel-ity:Cuban album art entices you to do the Bolero, Guajira, Mambo, Son, Pilon and more with Comandante Guevara (above).
MOJO R I S I N G
“He said we had to make it a life or death thing.” SHANE FOGERTY
FACT SHEET For fans of The Lemon Twigs and (Shane says) “anything recorded at Abbey Road from the mid-’6 0 s to 19 74 ”. ● John Fogerty actually has seven kids. He had three children with his first wife Martha before they divorced in the ’7 0 s, and then Shane, Tyler and Kelsy with second (and current) wife Julie, who also has a daughter from a previous marriage. ● Shane studied at the Thornton School Of Music, part of the University of Southern California. Lamont Dozier is a former lecturer, while alumni include Herb Alpert and Flea. ●
while because they were my favourite band when I was 13.” Fogerty Sr also warned about the pitfalls of rock’n’roll – not that his sons always took notice. “He said we had to make it a life or death thing,” Tyler recalls, “and along the way people would drift off with a girlfriend or just not be interested. We were, like, Yeah yeah Dad, but it turned out to be true, so more idealistic, from being recorded eventually we started listening.” on an iPhone to performing in an And will the curse of sibling empty Dodger Stadium.” rivalry ever raise its head to mar The Hearty Har’s debut album Radio KEY TRACKS ● Radio Man Fog’s great work? His boys think Astro does nothing by halves. ● Scream And Shout they’ve got that problem licked, too. Brimming with baroque touches, ● Calling You Out “There hasn’t been a time yet instrumental wig outs and brotherly when we’re recording a song and sunshine harmonies, at its heart is classic melodic songwriting. While similarities one person’s not been like, Come on, you with their father’s legacy are easy to hear – can’t like this?,” Tyler says as they both burst particularly in the brothers’voices – they out laughing. “I think we maybe have a claim a very different set of influences, different relationship than other brothers preferring ELO, Stax and Kraftwerk to swamp where we don’t step on each other’s toes blues. Which isn’t to suggest Dad hasn’t been too much. We have our disagreements but a guiding light, even if he was a reluctant we’re pretty chill with each other and we guitar teacher who would rather pay for an really are best friends.” outside tutor. Andy Fyfe “We’d go to him for little tips how to play Hearty Har’s debut album, Radio Astro, is out AC/DC or Green Day,” Shane says. “In fact, he February 1 9 on BMG. became quite a fan of The Offspring for a
FORTUNATE SONS! JOHN FOGERTY’S BOYS ESCAPE THE FACTORY TO FORM HEARTY HAR WO OF THE biggest tricks the rock gods can play on a band are having siblings at its creative core, and being the progeny of rock royalty. In which case, Shane and Tyler Fogerty’s psychedelic blues pop band Hearty Har have the cards stacked against them. It’s a full house. The sons of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s John Fogerty, the brothers make no bones about their pedigree. Not only do they both play in their dad’s touring band, they also joined him and their 18-year-old sister Kelsy on a series of lockdown videos that gradually morphed into the Fogerty’s Factory album of family-reimagined CCR tracks, released late last year. “They were really fun to do,” says Shane from the studio the brothers built in the Los Angeles suburbs near Ventura County. “It was especially fun to watch them get bigger and
Justin McWilliams
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Having the last laugh: “We don’t step on each other’s toes too much”: Tyler (left) and Shane Fogerty of Hearty Har.
MOJO PLAYLIST
PRAISE THE NEW ORACLE OF SPIRITUAL JAZZ, ANGEL BAT DAWID JUST SO happen to play clarinet and in a place where I wanted to go through the piano and sing,” Angel Bat Dawid motions of acting like I wasn’t. I’d come to explains, down the line from Chicago, Europe with a very open mind, because “but those are only the instruments:they are everybody’s like, ‘Ooh, they like black music nothing without me. If all I’ve got is two over there, ooh, they love jazz’– that’s all you spoons, I’m still gonna play ’em.” ever hear. But we arrived in Germany and all The billowing clouds of notes Dawid these micro-aggressions started happening. summoned up on her beguiling iPhone ‘voice What was really getting me steamed up wasn’t notes’function-facilitated 2019 solo debut The my specific situation, I was thinking more Oracle have been some of the most eloquent about Nina Simone and Duke Ellington and all smoke signals of Chicago’s the people that passed the ongoing jazz renaissance. same way before me who got On her new LP, Live, that way worse than I did – all smoke turns to cleansing those other live albums that fire, as she drop-kicks the have got the same ferociouspromise of previous work ness, but where we don’t into a new dimension of know the back story.” free-form intensity. Salient features of Dawid’s ANGEL BAT DAWID The record starts with an back pages include the four explosion of rage prompted years her parents spent as by bad vibes experienced at Berlin’s missionaries in Kenya during her childhood piquantly-named (under the circumstances) – the cries of the muezzin from the local Duke Ellington Hotel:“Ever since I’ve been mosque jockey for here, y’all have treated me like shit!” It ends position in her music FACT SHEET ● For fans of Mary with vocal samples from a panel discussion, with her parents’gospel Lou Williams, processed into an electronic fever dream heritage. She later spent Rahsaan Roland Kirk, worthy of Dawid’s fellow second city jazz the same amount of time Alice Coltrane. ● All but two of maverick Eddie Harris. In between, from working in fabled Chicago Angel Bat Dawid’s London’s gleeful celebration of better times second-hand store Hyde current album Live’s in a different European capital, to Dr. Wattz Park Records. “I’m a vinyl 13 tracks were n’em’s riot in a hymn-book factory, lies as addict,” she proclaims recorded with her ensemble Tha potent a musical distillation of rage and joy proudly. “That’s where Brothahood at you’ll hear in this or any year. I get all my information the 2 019 Berlin Whatever percentage of the iceberg one from. There’s more Jazz Festival. might estimate is above the water in the education in my records ● Her next album, out later this year, average live jazz recording, this is the whole than any school or will be a fully of the iceberg. “Yeah, it was exactly that,” university.” orchestrated 12 -part laughs Dawid. “I was upset, and I just wasn’t Ben Thompson funeral mass,
“I
“There’s more education in my records than in any school.”
“Y’all have treated me like shit!” Angel Bat Dawid won’t take it any more.
Requiem For Jazz, which she premiered at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in Chicago in 2 019. It was inspired by Ed Bland’s remarkable Sun Ra-soundtracked 19 5 9 film The Cry Of Jazz (a YouTube must for anyone who hasn’t seen it) and will feature Arkestra magus Marshall Allen.
KEY TRACKS ● ● ●
London We Are Starzz Dr. Wattz n’em
Listenu p! It’s sou l, techno and trash-rock time.
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LANA DEL REY CHEMTRAILS OVER THE COUNTRY CLUB
Slo-mo California anomie from the remarkable Ms Del Rey, as the follow-up to Norman Fucking Rockwell looms. Find it: streaming services
BRITTANY HOWARD 13 TH CENTURY METAL 2(MICHAEL KIWANUKA REMIX) MK morphs Robert Glasper’s Morse code keys into tough funk, adding bongos and ecstatic choir to Brittany’s megaphone-delivered call for compassion. Find it: streaming services
3
THE BEATLES
GET BACK (SNEAK PEEK)
Musical montage from Peter Jackson’s 2 0 2 1 film: the gang’s all laughing, George’s gear is polyester-brite, Lennon and Macca dance together. How could a group this happy split? Find it: YouTube
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AL G REEN
BEFORE THE NEXT TEARDROP FALLS
Harking back to his classic Hi sides, the Rev Green’s first tune in a decade covers Freddy Fender’s 1 9 7 5 country hit, beauteously. Find it: YouTube
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NEW ORDER
BE A REBEL (MACEO PLEX REMIX)
A multi-part deconstruction of the recent NO mood-elevator, this sounds like several DJ sets in one, with a dash of Blue Monday. Find it: Soundcloud/1 2 -inch
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BADWAN/COXON
PROMISE LAND
The Horrors’ Faris and Spring Heel Jack guitarist John Coxon suspend jagged improv over the trash heap, like Iggy drooling Venus In Furs. Find it: Tough Love 1 2 -inch/Bandcamp
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NATALIE BERG MAN
I WILL PRAISE YOU
Gospel-infused pop soul from one half of Wild Belle: sounds like a transcendent cult of Aimee Mann choir – weird and uplifting. Find it: YouTube
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HISS G OLDEN MESSENG ER SANCTUARY
Another oak-aged, country-soul epiphany from North Carolina’s MC Taylor and gang, now toasting their first Grammy nomination. Find it: streaming services
Cristina Marx (photomusix),Neal Krug
FRY AND LUKE HAINES TEST DRIVING 9THEJIM NEW PRIUS An Earl Brutus/Auteurs musical horror-drama about “1 9 8 3 ’s answer to Wyndham Lewis,” out of his mind on bargain booze? Powerfully purgative. Find it: Mixcloud
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THOM YORKE, BURIAL & FOUR TET
HER REVOLUTION
The new crucial three descend into disintegrating beats, oxygenated plainsong and melody. Find it: YouTube
MOJO 25
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THE MOJO INTERVIEW
Their harmonies glowed golden over eclectic decades of pop pre-eminence. But for big brother ‘Bazza’, the Bee Gees’ sad depletion has made fame less sweet and solo flight more daunting. “There’s nothing more important than your family,” says Barry Gibb. Interview by JIM IRVIN • Portrait by ROSE MARIE CROMWELL
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ROM THE ISLE OF MAN TO MANCHESTER decided to return to England to see if fame came any easier there. to Australia and back, the Bee Gees took a It did. Hugh Gibb had sent an advance package of discs and picaresque route to fame, mostly at the heels of demos to Australian Robert Stigwood, then deputising for Brian their restive father, Hugh Gibb, a drummer and Epstein at NEMS. Soon, Bee Gees were hanging out at the Speakeasy, bandleader by inclination, a baker, photographer buying cars they couldn’t drive, scoring hits like autumn ’67’s lushly or salesman by necessity, doing anything he could layered Massachusetts, recording eclectic albums including 1969’s to feed a wife – Barbara, who often worked too – five kids (in conceptual Odessa, and enjoying their dream come true. But the dream faded. Facing commercial decline in the mid-’70s, order of appearance, Lesley, Barry, twins Robin & Maurice, and Barry asked RSO label-mate Eric Clapton for advice. “Try Miami,” Andy) and their far-fetched dreams of stardom. he said, having recently returned from there with a hit album, 4 6 1 Hardscrabble days of truancy, petty theft, arson and jam Ocean Boulevard. The Bee Gees went, rented the same address, “fell sandwiches in Whalley Range and Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester in love with the light” and made their own pivotal album, 1975’s – what Barry calls “a very typical post-war childhood in the ruins” Main Course, with the great Arif Mardin behind the glass. – were memorable but not ideal. When the family left for Australia A second, even wilder dose of fame came with their contribuin 1958, Barry had a suspended sentence hanging over him for tions to 1977 disco blockbuster Saturday Night Fever – success “borrowing” a pedal car. He was 12. Yet, this promising hoodlum shared by little brother Andy until addictions sped his death in loved music and was glued to his acoustic guitar, a present for his 1988, aged just 30. Subsequently, the Bee ninth Christmas – tuned to open D, Hawaiian Gees’standing waxed and waned:their Still tuning, which he uses to this day. The boys WE’RE NOT WORTHY Waters album was a hit everywhere in 1997, disembarked in Australia eager to entertain Mark Ronson on Barry’s the year the trio notoriously walked off Clive their new nation, which applauded their Bee Gees “magic”. Anderson’s irreverent BBC chat show. singing and tomfoolery at frequent show“I don’t think anyone Maurice died suddenly in 2003. Robin and stealing TV, radio and stage appearances. traversed eras the way the Barry retired the band name, before Robin Transfixed by Roy Orbison in 1961, Bee Gees did. To Love also passed in 2012. Barry took a while to Barry’s dreams turned towards dramatic Somebody is one of my favourite songs ever – the re-emerge, a triumphant appearance at pop and his writing exploded. But hits melody, the emotion in it. Glastonbury in 2017 reminding everyone, eluded the Bee Gees in Australia:“We were And Saturday Night Fever’s including himself, how much he was loved. too young for the girls to be interested,” songs are underrated:the production, the rhythm section… the singing. A great song In 2021, he’s promoting Greenfields – a ➢ he says, so in January 1967 the family plus a killer groove – that’s the magic.”
MOJO 29
new album of his songs sung in conjunction with some of country music’s prime movers – and a new Bee Gees documentary, How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, from lockdown in his Miami home. MOJO reaches out over the internet. “I’m not wearing any trousers,” Barry jokes, as we begin. “It’s all the rage here.”
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You moved around a lot when you were young, didn’t you? Absolutely. The gypsy in our souls, constantly on the move our entire lives, three different cultures without ever not being British. Australia had a thing called ‘The New Life’, it was 10 years after the war, there was no great economy to speak of. In England, it was freezing and foggy and we were always in trouble with the law. A policeman came to the door and said to my mum, “It might be a good idea to emigrate to Australia, because your kids might end up in prison if you don’t.” You already had dreams of stardom then? Yes, after falling in love with Elvis, Tommy Steele and Lonnie Donegan. That just triggered something in me. I wanted to be a pop star, and Maurice and Robin, being about six said, “Can we be that too?” and I said, “Sure, let’s be that together.” We called ourselves The Rattlesnakes, then we became Wee Johnny Hayes And The Bluecats (laughs). Your dad was a drummer and a bandleader. He played the drums with a 13-piece band during World War II, on the Mecca circuit, which played for American troops. Glenn Miller, Dorsey Brothers, Harry James, pretty mind-blowing when you see that kind of thing close up. There’s really nothing like it. He brought those kinds of records home and my sister started bringing home The Everly Brothers and rock’n’roll, around 1957. We all freaked out. This was going to be our
future. This is what we were going to do, hell or high water. On the ship on the way to Australia we became Barry And The Twins. We didn’t know we’d be the Bee Gees until we met a man called Bill Gates, who came to our house and said we had a great future of some kind. He was Brisbane’s leading DJ, Bill ‘Swinging’ Gates, with a show called Platter Chatter. We went on air and recorded five songs there. That was our first time in front of a microphone. What was the music business like there? It consisted of two major stars:Col Joye And The Joy Boys and Johnny O’Keefe, or J.O.K. They were the biggest rock’n’roll singers in Australia. You didn’t hear them anywhere else in the world. And there were many other artists, females like Judy Stone and Noeleen Batley. We were living and working in Surfers Paradise and Col Joye and his brother Kevin Jacobson were passing through. I chased them down and got to meet Col and he recorded the first song any artist ever recorded of mine, Starlight Of Love, and got us signed to Festival Records. That’s what happened. We had to go to Sydney. What was your act like in those days? We were a comedy trio. It wasn’t just us singing, we were acting up and making fun of each other. We were beating them down everywhere we went because you can’t follow a bunch of kids. What precedent did you have for wanting to be a songwriter? Singers weren’t usually seen as writers then, were they? I really fell for Roy Orbison. If you listen to Crying or In Dreams, or Blue Bayou there’s a sense of growth. He made records that just kept building and building. There was almost an Italian operatic element to them. For me, it’s always been about what’s beautiful. I don’t think in terms of categories;I ask,
A LIFE IN PICTURES
“Is it beautiful?” I miss the romance and the nostalgia that we found in great songs. Very important to me. I read an interview with an Australian artist from that period called John Blanchfield who stayed with you for a while and remembered a very particular atmosphere in the Gibb household. He said, “You got the impression you couldn’t get close to them. They had a very ‘us against the world’ attitude.” Do you think that’s true? I wouldn’t know if that’s true. I mean, everyone’s got a different truth. I don’t deny that impression was probably easy to attain. But I don’t think we were ever closed off from anyone. People may have felt that they couldn’t get close to us, as opposed to us pushing anyone away, you know? But did you feel embattled, trying to get your point across, as an act, back then? I think we always did. I don’t know that we’d ever have done it any other way. When we left Australia for England, many, many people, including reporters, told us we didn’t have a chance and that we shouldn’t go back to England, because the beat boom was over. And it really wasn’t. But that’s what we were being told. You met some resistance when you landed too, didn’t you? Yeah. Let me just paint the scene. It was early morning. It was dark. We could still see the ocean liner that we’d just stepped off, the lights coming from it. And this pop group that looked exactly like The Beatles was standing nearby on the dock. I don’t know why. I don’t know what they were doing there. It was about five in the morning and we were going looking for a chip shop. We weren’t gonna find one, but we didn’t know that. And they said, “Who are you?” or words to that effect. And we said, “We’re a band and we’ve come to try and make
2
Be a brother: Barry Gibb, Bee Gee.
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“You can’t follow a bunch of kids”:the young Gibbs in Australia (from left) Maurice, Robin and Barry acting up, early 1960s.
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We had to go to Sydney: (from left) Barry, Robin and Maurice in the mid-’60s. To love somebody:Barry with then-girlfriend Linda Gray, December 1968. They are still married.
“He was fantastic… one of the last great managers”: Gibb with Robert Stigwood.
“It was just the most incredible experience… hard to understand.” Barry basks in the glow, Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury, 2017.
“Nobody’s signing groups any more”:undiscouraged Barry, April 1967, not long after arriving back in Britain.
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In the event of something happening to me: now a band in the UK (from left) Barry, Robin, Maurice, Vince Melouney, Colin Petersen.
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I had my mind on something else: two days into his honeymoon, Barry rejoins his brothers to record, September 1970.
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They should be dancing:the Gibbs in 1977 – Saturday Night Fever will break out the following year.
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it.” And then they all said, like in unison, “No, no, no, go back to Australia. It’s all over here. Nobody’s signing groups up any more.” It took us five weeks to get here, you know, and we just felt very confident. We were inspired by The Beatles, of course, like everybody, but also The Hollies and The Fortunes and the great harmony groups. We felt we could compete with them. We were still young. But, Swinging London in 1967, the boom was still going. It was like an Austin Powers movie, I promise you. Did you meet The Beatles? There was a club in London called the Speakeasy. It was underground. It had a coffin in front of the door, you had to show your membership and then the wall would turn around and you were in this club. The Stones, The Beatles, The Who and anyone who wanted to have some privacy and be together and have things in common went there. I met Pete Townshend, the first rock star I’d ever met, you know? And he said, “Would you like to meet John?” Are you kidding? “He’s just sitting over there.” John was sitting there in like a fur waistcoat with his hair teased up at the back, which had become the thing at that point for them. Pete said, “Oh, John, I’d like you to meet one of the new kids. Barry Gibb.” And John without getting up or turning around, put his hand out behind him and said, “Pleased to meet you.” And I never saw his face. So I’ve always said, “I met the back of John Lennon.” Never saw him again. I got to know Paul quite well. He came to our first concert at the Saville Theatre [supporting Fats Domino]. He was there with Jane Asher. And he was very encouraging. Robert Stigwood invited him, which was probably not a good idea, because we were terrified that night. I don’t think we were very good.
So in a few days you graduated from being fans of The Beatles to hanging out with them? Ridiculous! Maurice was really good at that. He ended up living next door to Ringo in Hampstead and they became really good friends. It was very surreal. Because to us, they were gods who changed the world entirely. And suddenly, we were signed to the same company, with the same staff, same publicists. What were the pros and cons of being managed by Robert Stigwood? Well, first of all, you’ve got to remember, this
Bee Gees 1st is a fascinating record. Psychedelic on one side, and then it turns into a country-soul record on side two. It’s what I said earlier about categories. We never thought we should only write this type of song. Robin was coming up with his type of song, I was coming up with mine. Maurice was a brilliant musician who could play several instruments, and his contribution was priceless. But between Robin and I it was always a bit of a battle – we were in competition. Once we started having hits, we became more and more competitive. We liked songs that had depth, we liked to know what a song was about. We were on the hunt for something that belonged to us. Maybe rock’n’roll was never that thing for us. Pop music is and always was. We knew we were on a journey somewhere, we just didn’t know where, but we knew that we were not going to give up until we became famous.
“I wanted to be a pop star, and Maurice and Robin, being about six said, ‘Can we be that too?’” was a gay world, you know. We were heterosexual boys in a homosexual business, or at least that part of the business. Larry Parnes, Billy Fury’s manager, Robert Stigwood, Brian Epstein. It was a gay scene, you know, and so we had to always be on the lookout. There was always somebody that wanted to jump all over you. We were very naive. But we soon learned. But Stigwood was a good manager? He was fantastic, yeah. Robert was one of the last great managers. A manager is someone who creates an opportunity for you. And then says, “OK, now go live up to that.” And he did that. He did it so many times. He was just brilliant at creating the right opportunity for a group like us.
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Maurice told a story of bumping into Brian Epstein who said, “That Massachusetts is a worldwide Number 1,” and 48 hours later he’d died. So one of his last acts was to correctly predict you’d have a smash. Yes. When it was Number 1 in England, I remember saying to Robert, “Have we made it?” And he said, “No. I’ll tell you when you’ve made it.” So our feet were always on the ground because of that. He knew what he was doing. Am I right that you met your [second] wife, Linda, at Top Of The Pops…? Yes, that’s correct. …and she was being chaperoned by every parent’s first choice, Jimmy Savile? Well, I don’t mention that person. She’d become the hostess, because Samantha ➢
“You can’t knock it, mate. It was wonderful”: Barry Gibb, songwriter extraordinaire, 2020.
“Fame was like a drug, you know, that made us feel like we had to compete with each other.” ➣
Juste had just left and married Mickey Dolenz. She was the hostess for one week, the week Massachusetts was Number 1. And she’d never heard of it. We just saw each other across the room and something happened. And, um, we had bit of a cuddle in Doctor Who’s Tardis, surrounded by Daleks! Time travel 50-odd years in the future, you’re still together… Yeah, and Doctor Who’s still on! Didn’t Jimi Hendrix come to your 21st birthday party? Yes. (Laughs) It was at a place of ill-repute in Hamburg! I was sitting in the audience and Jimi was sat behind me and that’s how we got chatting. Nothing more sleazy than that. Who else was there? Dave Dee. I was very close to him. And Paul and Barry Ryan – we were all close. Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich… You must feel fortunate you didn’t wind up in that lane. Groups that are not brothers have a much higher risk factor. If you’re brothers, it’s much harder to break up. We always loved The Mills Brothers – Paper Doll, You Always Hurt The One You Love – our father would always make sure that we heard these songs, and that
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meant something. “This is what brothers do.” I wanted to ask about the brief period when you split in 1969. No. I don’t want to talk about that. You’re talking about 50 years ago, mate. Come on. I ask because I read about Robin being caught up in the 1967 Hither Green train crash and it occurred to me how big an impact that experience must have had upon him. All I know is it was a great shock. (pause) These are not subjects for me. I don’t really want to discuss anything that’s got a negative factor to it. It’s just that, you know, the loss of my brothers… I think I owe them that respect now. A year ago, two years ago, I might have emptied on a whole bunch of things about how I lost them. I can’t do that now. I don’t know what it’s like to be in a train crash, you know. I don’t know an answer to those kinds of inquiries. I just want to live in the present. I just wondered if that might have been one of the reasons the relationship came unglued for a while. There were a lot of reasons why it came unglued. The business itself. The business kept changing then and is changing now. I love making records and I love singing but don’t
ask me if I understand the record industry because I don’t. How much did you enjoy the second explosion of fame, post Main Course, when you started having hits again? Did it feel vindicating? It felt great to me. It was that moment in time, the mid to late ’70s. It was exactly what everybody wanted. There was no war. Nobody was mad at each other. It was a period where people were happy and wanted to get out. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that Saturday Night Fever got kids back into the gym, because they wanted to dance and get fit. I remember watching the preview at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, from the back of the audience, standing with John Travolta. And we both had the same feeling:that the dancing, the noise of people’s feet on the floor, was too loud. If you go to a club, you can’t hear people’s feet, you can only hear the music. And so we went to Robert and said, “You’ve got to silence the feet and turn the music up.” And that’s what he did. They actually shot the movie to the music, didn’t they? Yes, they did. John loved Stayin’ Alive, but he didn’t feel that he could dance to it. You Should Be Dancing became the favourite for
that before, where the applause just didn’t stop. I don’t understand that. But it’s wonderful. You wrote that song for Otis Redding. That’s right. I met him in New York, towards the end of 1967. Robert said, “Would you write a song for Otis? He’ll come and see you about seven o’clock this evening and you can talk about it.” And To Love Somebody was embryonic on that night – it came to mind after meeting him. Unfortunately, he didn’t live long enough to record it. How did the new duets album, Greenfields, come to be? Stephen, my eldest son, played me Chris Stapleton. And it just blew me away. Fantastic. Not only is it fresh, it’s people playing, not programmed. I’ve been desperate to get back to that. It was done by a producer named Dave Cobb. I love country music, bluegrass, love that world. So I thought, “Let’s make an
THREE BY THREE Selections of prime Gibb, served by Jim Irvin. THE FANFARE
Bee Gees
★★★★★ 1st (POLYDOR, 19 6 7 )
With confidence gained from their near 10 years of experience and Robert Stigwood behind them, the Brothers Gibb cut an audacious ‘debut’ album within weeks of returning to England, filling it with Beatle-like psych-pop (In My Own Time), lachrymose curiosities (New York Mining Disaster 1941), and proto-soul classics (To Love Somebody;I Can’t See Nobody), for a stylistic switchback ride as colourful and timely as its Klaus Voormann-designed sleeve.
him. He never felt Stayin’ Alive was a dance record. He said to Robert, “I don’t know if I can dance to that, but I can walk to it.” And that’s what happened.
Rose Marie Cromwell
On the charts in the spring of 1978 there was Stayin’ Alive, Night Fever, Samantha Sang’ s Emotions, Yvonne Elliman’ s If I Can’ t Have You, your brother Andy’ s Shadow Dancing. Eventually you had six consecutive Number 1s in the US. Did it become weird or daunting at any point? Does it start to feel pressurised when the success is that huge? I don’t think so. When something goes wrong there’s always disappointment. But failure builds strength. Every time that something didn’t go right, it would not put us off from trying again. We’d been dumped on so many times that it wasn’t something we didn’t expect. We became over-exposed to a certain extent, because there had been so much success. But you can’t knock it, mate! It was wonderful. I never went to Studio 54. Never could dance. But I had the time of my life. Another one of those must have been Glastonbury in 2017? It was just the most incredible experience, to play to 230,000 people, or something. And so many young people wearing those jackets that we wore on the cover of …Fever. Yeah, hard to understand. It’s an experience that’s never going to be surpassed for me. Every positive thing I can think of saying, I could say about that day. Perfect. After the response to To Love Somebody, I was on a cloud. I’d never heard
THE SPRAWLER
Bee Gees
★★★★ Odessa (POLYDOR, 19 6 9 )
Started in summer ’68 and released nine months later, this ambitious, semi-conceptual double album, dressed in vivid scarlet flock, proved to be the swansong for the five-piece pop band. Dense, dramatic, sometimes beautiful, sometimes baffling, based on a hard-to-grasp concept of Robin’s, dotted with orchestral instrumentals by arranger Bill Shepherd, and apparently unfinished, it split the group, the brothers and the critics, but remains fascinating.
THE GROOVER
Bee Gees
★★★★ Main Course (RSO, 19 7 5 )
With the relaxed Arif Mardin at the pass, the delicious Main Course demonstrated that the Bee Gees could still cook up something hearty and satisfying. Barry’s nape-bothering falsetto, a last-minute seasoning added to Nights On Broadway, would become a signature ingredient henceforth. And, fittingly inspired by the sound of car tyres crossing a bridge, Jive Talkin’’s irresistible groove helped them cross over from a period of slump to previously unimaginable success.
album like this.” And Dave Cobb agreed to do it. This was the legendary RCA studio;the Everlys, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison all made records in this room, and the one next to it, studio B. I spent a lot of time taking pictures because it’s such a rush. The room is huge. The ceiling’s like 50 or 60 foot high. Like a soundstage. And that will do some things to your voice. I really would have been happy if every artist had just sung the song themselves, and not worried about using me. Because I’m a fan. But I just got sucked into it. Alison Krauss, Too Much Heaven. Keith Urban who grew up 100 miles from us [in Queensland, Australia], and Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. Dave plays guitar like nobody else. Words Of A Fool with Jason Isbell. That’s one of my favourite tracks. Think of those little kids in Manchester, setting fire to billboards, and then appearing on billboards on Sunset Boulevard… Yes, it’s quite a circle isn’t it? I know. I know. I love that Robin and Maurice called each other Woggie and Bodding. Did they have a nickname for you? I don’t think so. In Australia of course I was always Bazza. And when we got back to England I had a friend who called me Skippy, after Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. My favourite now is Barry Effing Gibb. I’m quite proud of that. Were you kind of looking over your shoulder when you restarted making music after your brothers’ deaths? I just keep moving until I won’t any more. Obviously, it’s not the same without my brothers. But I no longer have to do everything by committee, you don’t have to agree on everything. So, after a good few years, which it has been now, I’m able to spread my wings, do what I want to do. There’ s a very moving moment in the new documentary where you talk about how you’ d rather have your brothers back and not have had any hits. Of course, of course;there’s nothing more important than your family. That was the basis of everything else. It would never have mattered if we’d never had a hit – we’d have had more fun. We were much more sharing in our love for each other before we ever became famous. Fame was like a drug, you know, that made us feel like we had to compete with each other. I guess that’s what happens, especially ultra fame, which I never had, I’ll never get and I don’t want it. That’s the kind of fame that destroys you. I got to know Michael Jackson pretty well. I noticed how lonely he was. He’d lost the ability to trust anybody. That’s what that kind of fame does. You don’t believe that anybody wants to be your friend without a reason. You look for the unconditional love, but it’s not there at that level of fame. So Michael travelled around visiting people who were famous like him, just to be able to relate to somebody else. I know he used to go and see Marlon Brando quite a bit. He would just walk into famous people’s houses, and he felt comfortable doing that. We spent weeks together, I got to know him pretty well, and he was very lonely and isolated. He would sit in my lounge dressed as if he was going on stage. It had basically taken over his whole life. He didn’t know how to be a normal person any more. He wished he was somewhere else, or someone else. I never had that kind of fame. I managed to keep my distance, love and raise my kids and basically keep my sanity, to some extent. That’s probably my best achievement. M Greenfields:The Gibb Brothers Songbook Vol.1 by Barry Gibb & Friends is out now on Universal Music.
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Donaldson Collection/Getty
CCORDING TO THE DATE ON HER MARRIAGE certificate, Bessie Smith was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 15, 1894. But we cannot be sure. In his 1971 biography, Bessie, Chris Albertson tells us that “Southern bureaucracy made little distinction between its black population and its dogs;such official records as a birth certificate were not always considered necessary.” She was one of eight children. Her father, William Smith, was a part-time Baptist preacher who ran a small mission. He died soon after Bessie was born. One of her brothers had died in infancy. Her family lived in crushing poverty in what she later described as “a little ramshackle cabin”, where the rats outnumbered the children. Her mother, Laura Smith, was dead by the time Bessie was eight. Another brother died around the same time as her mother. With no adults to earn money or care for them, the Smith children had to do it for themselves. Viola, Bessie’s elder sister, took on the main responsibility to make ends meet, taking in laundry which she boiled on top of an outdoor coal stove. She looked after the
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surviving Smiths – Bessie, Tinnie, Lulu, Andrew and Clarence. From the age of nine Bessie sang for nickels – maybe a dime once in a blue moon – on Chattanooga’s Ninth Street, a stretch along which the city’s black nightlife centred. From a very early age, singing was literally her survival. When anyone threw a coin, she would say, “That’s right, give to the church.” She was 17 when she joined the Moses Stokes Travelling Show in 1912. Stokes’s stars included Ma and Pa Rainey, who were dubbed ‘The Assassinators Of The Blues’. Ma Rainey was also a lesbian. (Amongst the many Smith myths and legends are different accounts of Ma Rainey kidnapping Bessie. Some say she got her henchmen to go down to Charles Street and throw the girl into a big burlap bag to bring her back to her. At every crucial juncture in Bessie Smith’s life there are wild stories, but this is the very best.) Although Bessie was initially taken on by Stokes as a dancer, she soon began to sing the blues. She moved on from Stokes to join Irving C. Miller’s tent show in 1913, until ➢
➣ was such a natural, she could wreck anybody’s show.”
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licence from the clerk at the Orphans’ Court, Philadelphia County. Their relationship lasted six years and obsessed Bessie for several more. He loved power and from the outset of their relationship he tried to take over her life. Gee frequently beat Bessie up very badly, knocking her downstairs and threatening to kill her. The few people on the road who went to her defence were beaten up too. On her very first date with Gee somebody shot him and nearly killed him. (Wasn’t that enough of a sign for her?) When he came out of hospital, Bessie already had her first recording date for Downhearted Blues. He pawned his watch so that he could buy her a red dress for the occasion. A gift that she never forgot. ESSIE SMITH LIVED AN EPIC life. Her life could be painted on a broad canvas. She was big in stature, size and influence. She was the people. Her ability to write, record and perform songs that touched the heart of everyone who listened to her is what has kept her alive for so many years. She was her time. She totally reflects her time. She had a huge pair of lungs and could fill a massive hall with her voice. She didn’t need a microphone. She just belted those blues out. As clarinettist Buster Bailey said, “There was none of this whispering jive.” The fascinating thing about the voice of Bessie Smith, for all its blueness, is its total lack of sentimentality. She can sing unnerving, sad songs without a note of self-pity. It is the very flatness of her voice, singing about tragedies, that so moves us. It is not in any way the voice of a victim. It is unrefined. It is not sweet, sugary. It is not smooth. So why did the record companies initially reject her? Her voice was that of an ordinary working-class black woman. And they didn’t think that the voice of an ordinary working-class black woman could or would ever sell records. They didn’t realise that ordinary black people would so identify with the blues that the blues would seem to be the singing version of their lives. It was this that made the records of the pioneering blueswomen – Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, Victoria Spivey and others – so popular and, with Bessie Smith at least, so long-lasting. There are many stories about how Bessie Smith came to make her first record. Frank Walker – who was in charge of the Columbia record company’s ‘race list’of records by black artists – tells it like this:“I don’t think there could have been more than 50 people up North who had heard about Bessie Smith when I sent [pianist] Clarence Williams down South to get her… I told Clarence about the Smith girl and said, ‘This is what you’ve got to do. Go down
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This is apparently untrue, since two weeks earlier she was being rejected by the OKeh company in New York. Clarence Williams only had to go as far as South Philadelphia to bring her to Frank Walker. The idea of Clarence Williams being sent all the way to the ramshackle cabin in Chattanooga and bringing a poor black girl with an already legendary voice straight into a recording studio belongs to the American Dream. According to Walker, the girl that Clarence brought back from the deep South was no dream singer. “She looked anything but a singer. She looked about 17 – tall and fat and scared to death – just awful.” In fact this was 1923 and Smith was 29. She had already been on the road for 11 years and had built up huge audiences in the clubs in the South. Fellow blues singer Ethel Waters said Bessie’s shouting brought worship wherever she worked. She was earning $50 to $75 a week – “big money for our kind of vaudeville”. But maybe she did arrive in the studio looking like a teenager, tall, fat and scared to death. It took two days for Smith to conquer her nerves when she first turned up on February 15, 1923 at Columbia studio in New York to record Downhearted Blues and Gulf Coast Blues. First, she tried ’Tain’t Nobody’s Biz-ness If I Do nine times and failed, and she tried Downhearted Blues twice and failed. Maybe it was her nerves or maybe it was that strange conical horn which stuck out from a drapery-covered wall. The effect must have been quite sinister. Bessie probably didn’t trust the damn thing. Maybe her head was full of bad memories of all the previous times she had been in recording studios and been rejected. She might have felt she was being had.
But she soon got the hang of it. In The Best Of Jazz, Humphrey Lyttelton wrote: “The singing that was transmitted to wax was, from the outset, mature, steeped in harsh experience and formidably commanding.” The sales of Downhearted Blues – three quarters of a million copies in six months – far exceeded the sales of any other blues record. The black public were eager to purchase records through mail-order catalogues, record stores in black neighbourhoods or even through the Pullman porters. In the South, the blues sold to black and white people; in the more ‘liberal’ North, they just sold to black people. It is possible to have been white in the North in the ’20s and never have known blues records even existed. This is because in the North, advertising so-called ‘race records’was restricted
Beale Street Mama:(clockwise from far left) Bessie Smith in her late twenties in New York City, circa 1922;on-stage in Philadelphia as Smith’s reputation grows;a good man is hard to find – with second husband Jack Gee in 1923, soon after their wedding;poster for the 1929 film St. Louis Blues.
Once Smith had recorded her version of a the records took place only in black areas. Bessie was at the height of her popularity after her first records were released. Everywhere she went it was the same story. People had heard Bessie’s records and now they wanted to hear her in person. Five records were now on the market – Downhearted Blues, Gulf Coast Blues, Aggravatin’ Papa, Beale Street Mama and Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home – and her reputation had grown beyond all ex-
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In 1923 Bessie recorded song after song after song. Columbia signed her up for a lucrative eight-year contract. Between 1923 and 1931, she recorded 160 songs with Columbia, roughly 20 a year. Bessie Smith wrote and composed 37 of these blues. During that period, she worked alongside some of the best musicians of her day: Fletcher Henderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Longshaw, Jack
➣ her fans that fame hadn’t changed her,
version, showcased in a pioneering short film (see YouTube), is an episodic epic, sobbingly swollen by Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra. But both are Smith at her most harrowing – moaning, bereft. “She was raw!” her soul.”
testifies to her relish. “Women weren’t supposed to talk the way Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey talked,” says Shemekia Copeland. “I love any artist who defies what they’re supposed to do. Bessie was always herself.”
(Columbia, 1927) “Bessie didn’t have a whole lot of luck in love,” understates Copeland, and Smith roars this out like she’s exorcising Jack
(Columbia, 1923) Smith’s multi-layered paean to personal freedom contained the ‘freedom’to be beaten and robbed by her man (“I’d rather my man would hit me, than to jump right up and quit me…”). Clarence Williams’ piano is impeccably supportive.
you, and should be!”
EITHER BESSIE SMITH NOR ANY OF THE OTHER classic blues singers received royalties for their songs back then. They were paid per usable side;the amount varied depending on their popularity. At her peak, Bessie could earn as much as $250 per usable side. She was the best paid of all the classic blueswomen. But success would not last. After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Depression, a new combo style of blues became fashionable. ‘Urban blues’or ‘Chicago blues’then dominated the scene from the mid-1930s through the 1940s. The likes of Muddy Waters and Howlin’Wolf took off;the classic blues singers were replaced by men with guitars. In 1930, she recorded Black Mountain Blues with cornettist Ed Allen. Black Mountain is synonymous with the Depression. It is a rough and ready place where there are no laws and everybody is out for themselves:“Back in Black Mountain, a child will smack your face/Babies crying for liquor and all the birds sing bass.” Bessie was on the long road down; she was making $500 per week now as opposed to her former $2,000. The audiences of the South still loved the Empress, and gave her a warm welcome whenever she
it from men.”
(Columbia, 1929)
on the ongoing with words by Smith herself. “I love the line ‘I’m and too strong to cry,’” says a strength in her
(Columbia, 1929) Smith tackled “In the ’20s and ’30s, it was all about the singer and the song”: Shemekia Copeland roars out the blues.
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cause I’m tired of wearing myself out. I can go home, get drunk, and be a lady – it’s up to you.” During this time Bessie continued to compose blues,
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although they were not recorded. Eubie Blake, a pianist and composer, remembers her coming into W. C. Handy’s office at the Apollo in April 1936 with new songs. He says they were good ideas but he was concerned that they would not make money, so they were never recorded. We will never know the lyrics of the last blues of the Empress. N SEPTEMBER 26, 1937 AT 11.30am in Ward One of the AfroAmerican Hospital, 615 Sunflower Drive, Clarksdale, Mississippi, Bessie Smith died. She had been on her way down Route 61 to a show date, travelling with Richard Morgan, with whom, for the past six years, she had been very happy. Smith’s old Packard, which Morgan was driving, hit a National Biscuit Company truck parked without lights in the town of Coahoma. Her arm was virtually severed. She was still alive when she was taken to the Afro-American Hospital, where her arm was amputated, but she died hours later of shock, blood loss and internal injuries. Her funeral was held in Philadelphia on Monday, October 4. Her body had been sent, two days earlier, by train to Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, where her brother Clarence was waiting. Richard Morgan, who had survived the accident, accompanied her body on the train. She was laid out at Upshur’s funeral home on 21st and Christian Street. When word of her death reached the black community, however, the body had to be moved to the O. V. Catto Elks Lodge on 16th and Fitzwater Streets, where 10,000 mourners filed past her bier on Sunday, October 3. Smith’s insurance policy ensured that she had a lavish
Nobody knows you when you’re down and out:(top left) Empress Of The Blues Bessie in the mid ’30s, life’s trials etched on her face;(clockwise from above centre) Louis Armstrong;Smith and Richard Morgan, her partner for the final years of her life;Ethel Waters, a contemporary who would later find fame in France;‘Mother of the Blues’, Ma Rainey.
send-off the following day. Her coffin, which cost $500, was trimmed with gold and lined with pink two-tone velvet. There were 40 floral arrangements. The auditorium at Catto Elks Lodge was full. The Reverend Andrew J. Sullivan presided over the service. A Mrs Emily Moten read a poem called Oh Life. Somebody fainted. The crowd outside was 7,000 strong and policemen were having a hard time holding it back, just like they had in the heyday of the Empress when thousands could not get into the theatres to hear her sing the blues. No other major stars showed up at her funeral. Ethel Waters was not there. Duke Ellington was not there. The cast of the Cotton Club Revue was not there. Louis Armstrong was not there. It seems fitting for a woman who preferred pigs’ feet parties to polite society, who never ever forgot her working-class roots, who despite her fame and fortune never changed her speech, her behaviour or her habits to conform to some notion of a star, that it was not stars and personalities who attended her funeral but ordinary people. The people who always mattered to her all along. Not the Harlem elite. All of the faces in the photographs taken of her grand exit are black. There is not a white face to be seen. M Extracted from Bessie Smith by Jackie Kay, published by Faber on February 1 8 , 2 0 2 1 . Pre-order from uk.bookshop.orgww MOJO 39
© Adrian Boot/urbanimage.tv,Headline type:Sarah Hampson
HEN THE EDGAR BROUGHTON BAND EMBARKED UPON a 10-date tour of Germany in the winter of 1970 their reputation preceded them. In the 18 months since the Hyde Park Free Concert on June 7, 1969, when they had seemingly emerged from nowhere, blasted through the low-key folky vibes of the day (Donovan, The Third Ear Band) and shamed an under-rehearsed Blind Faith into apology with their elemental Beefheart blues, these working-class Midlanders had become the fevered soundtrack of UK student insurrection. Led by autodidact scholarship dropout Rob Broughton (Edgar was his middle name), whose feral Bohemian appearance suggested a crazed laudanum addict on the rob in Mayhew’s London, this hairy triumvirate, with brother Steve on drums and school pal Arthur Grant on bass, became a fixture at free festivals and university campuses. Fired up on the post-’68 atmosphere of radical activism, young audiences embraced cathartic missives such as primal anti-establishment exhortation-chant, Out Demons Out, anti-vote single Up Yours! (“Phthrrp! to you in Whitehall!”) and animalistic Shadows/Beefheart mash-up, Apache Dropout. “It’s all a bit tongue-in-cheek”, the group told Melody Maker that year, but the game-playing also resulted in police raids and council bans and culminated in a free concert for a sit-in at Keele University in May 1970 where students “requisitioned” the group’s spray cans and repainted the brand-new refectory hall with numerous protest slogans including ‘Out, Demons, Out!’ Naturally, in Germany, home of the Red Army Faction, where students were violently protesting the ongoing employment of former Nazis in positions of government, matters were somewhat more serious. “We’d just played Essen,” remembers Rob Broughton. “And afterwards these students said, ‘Hey, we want to show you some films.’So I thought, Great. We go off in their car to this little cinema and the films are all of these old guys walking about, getting in and out of cars. ➢
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Brothers in arms:The Edgar Broughton Band, west London, 1973 (clockwise from left) Steve Broughton, Rob ‘Edgar’Broughton, Vic Unitt, Arthur Grant.
Demonstrate or die:(from left) Rob on-stage at Reading, 1972;an improv mobile concert in Brighton, halted by ‘the pigs’;(insets) EBB vinyl and inspirations.
and Jimmy Shand, plus their father’s small collection of blues records. “Then one day,” says Steve, “Dad came home with two Little Richard 78s. He said, ‘Listen to For his tenth birthday Rob got a ukulele. Two years
© Adrian Boot/urbanimage.tv,Getty (3),Alamy,Courtesy of Edgar Broughton Band/Peter Jones
➣
They said, ‘All these are on the list.’” “Politicians, policemen, big businessmen,” adds Steve Broughton. “They wanted us to help rid Germany of these people. I was thinking, This isn’t just us protesting on stage any more, this is people getting shot.” “They had plans,” continues Rob, “from public assassinations to bombings. They were showing us there was a reason to get these people. And I agreed. I kind of thought there was. But at the end of the films one guy approached I said, I’m going to play music.”
only kids having loud state-of-the-nation arguments with their parents. “Dad was a socialist,” says Steve. “But mum was in the Communist Party, a union organiser and a real firebrand.” “They opened the house as a kind of club for today they’d all be on ASBOs.” ’50s working-class mix of show tunes, American dance bands
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they were in a group, Tony And The Talons, playing Shadows covers at youth clubs and birthday parties. “But Rob was writing all the time,” says Steve. “He’s always been a thinker and a dreamer. He’d sit in his room and come down with these poems. Eventually, they turned into songs.” “I was influenced by the Beats,” says Rob. “The others would be off to the pub or the caff. I’d be in my room, imagining I was hitchhiking with Kerouac. Or I’d be in Warwick Castle woods, shooting rats. I always looked sad, but I kind of enjoyed it. It separated me The Talons became The Roadrunners, then The Original Roadrunners then The Edgar Broughton Blues Band and, when original guitarist Victor Unitt left in protest over Rob’s interest in Jimi Hendrix (“not blues”), the plain old Edgar Broughton Band, with Arthur Grant enlisted as bassist and mum and dad working as the road crew. “Joyce and Dennis were all about the boys,” says Grant. “Dennis looked after drums and the light show and Joyce drove us and did the bookings.” “She was a hustler,” adds Rob. “She said to us one day, ‘I was born in the wrong time. The group, who’d started out playing Cab Calloway and more of Rob Broughton’s songs, many of them influenced by the weird music being played on John Peel’s BBC shows, Top Gear and Night Ride. “I’d be listening to John Fahey’s The Death Of Clayton
Family matters:(top) Steve, Joyce Broughton, Rob/Edgar, Charlie Hunt, Dennis Broughton, London; the Broughton bros;(right) starry night with David Bowie after final Ziggy Stardust Hammersmith show, 1973;(bottom) Hell’s Angel.
Peacock and inventing these surreal lyrics,” says Rob. “Then, of course, I heard Captain Beefheart. We already did a version of Howlin’ Wolf ’s Smokestack Lightning and I just thought, I know this guy. Lumpy dirty blues and surreal lyrics. I liked the madness.” Alongside the cosmic influence of Fahey and the surrealism of Beefheart, the Broughtons were also inspired by a track on The Fugs’1967 long-player, Tenderness Junction, a live recording of the New York folk group and anti-war protesters camped outside The Pentagon, chanting “Out Demons Out”. “Yeah, we nicked that,” says Rob. “I thought, Wow, Out Demons Out! How many things can that be applied to? So, we added a Canned Heat kind of rhythm and just turned it into this protest against everything.” ELOCATED TO LONDON, WITH a part-time gig distributing The International Times, the group
we know, this Transit van with about 20 of them rolled up at Joyce and Dennis’s house. They’ve got all their weaponry on them but they hand it over before coming in the house: knives, chains, knuckle dusters… They were there as ‘peacekeepers’.” “In the park,” continues Rob, “the police tried to take our equipment – told us to put it in their van. And this Angel, Big Ray, said to this one officer, ‘Make me!’ I don’t think they’d ever seen anything like it. They just backed off.” After the free gig at Warwick Castle, the group were due to play a festival in Rugby, 30 miles away, with The Deviants and The Nice. The Hell’s Angels gave them a motorcycle escort. “It was more of a convoy,” qualifies Grant. “They just drove the other cars off the road. Amazing. Terrifying.” As the group’s reputation grew, so did “It was a primal scream sort of thing,”
Blackhill Enterprises.
Wasa Wasa, released in July Sing Brother Sing, tapped
then he got us signed to Harvest.”
Hell’s Angels.
didn’t really have any choice.”
“My therapist once
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© Adrian Boot/urbanimage.tv,Courtesy of Edgar Broughton Band/Jak Kilby,Getty
The Broughtons at the time of 1982’s Superchip;(left) Steve and Rob/Edgar, 1969; (insets) later album and (below) Tony Blackburn, 1971, with hot tip.
HAT SING BROTHER SING ALSO revealed was a more melodic side to The Edgar Broughton Band, something manager Peter Jenner hoped their next album would build on. It was decided to bring Victor Unitt back into the fold. “I was reluctant about Vic coming back,” says Rob. “We’d grown up together, he was a brother, but I thought the three-piece thing was going somewhere. Anyway, lovely sunny day, I’d just written this lyric on two pieces of foolscap. The roadie comes to pick me up and Vic’s sitting in the back with his acoustic guitar. He said, ‘I’ve got these chords.’ And he played E minor, D, C, D, and E Minor. I said, ‘I’ve got these lyrics,’ and we wrote Evening Over Rooftops.” One of many stand-out tracks on their self-titled 1971 LP (dubbed ‘The Meat Album’ after the hanging carcasses on its Hipgnosis-designed cover), Evening Over Roof tops was another of Broughton’s end-times visions, but this time rendered as a love song, Dave Bedford’s hovering string arrangement interposing a dusky summer haze. The album track plus haunting single Hotel Room both became fixtures on Tony Blackburn’s BBC breakfast show. Blackburn told listeners that Hotel Room was the best thing he’d heard that
“I’d just started the little drum intro for Out Demons Out when a snatch squad panicked and rushed us,” recalls Steve. “They pulled everybody off the flat-bed, pushed the gear over, the kids all started throwing things.It was a mini-riot.” The band, their roadies and about 30 fans, spent the night in Redcar police station. “We were making so much noise,” says Steve, “that the poor night sergeant said, ‘Look, if I open all the cell doors apart from the main exit, would you just be quiet?’Next morning our solicitor got everyone off apart from the band. Thirty quid fine. It was a total fit-up but that’s where we got our reputation from.” While manager Jenner embraced the countercultural cachet the Broughtons were accruing, the band themselves were starting to get frustrated. “Peter wasn’t about money, or record sales,” says Rob. Meanwhile,” says Grant. “Every other band is saying, ‘Why “Then,” says Rob. “Our wonderful young press officer,
AD THEY OWNED A CRYSTAL BALL, the late Clifford’s subsequent ‘rise’to the position of Britain’s most hated publicist
they were rushed by police.
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we were supposed to be in Brighton,” says Grant, still fuming. “They basically sold two different booking agents two different tours.” “We were exhausted by it all,” admits Steve. “We’d been booked into Eastdown Manor in Devon to record the next album [In Side Out]. We had this huge lump of hash with us and for the first few weeks we were just in this sort of stupor, miserable about this new management situation.” “I’ve never really talked about this before,” says Rob, “but at the beginning of that album, I was definitely dealing with depression. They got me out of my bed with the help of a little mescaline and we visited the Valley of Rocks [on the Devon coast near Lynton]. I remember Steve asked me to carry his little girl. I am half out of my box and looking down at the ground knowing all I had to do was get down to the beach. It allowed me to stop focusing on the World Wide thing and just be in the moment.” The mescaline experience fed into the album’s opening medley:Get Out Of Bed/There’s Nobody There/Side By Side. However, the overall sound was no-frills. “That was because our managerslash-bodyguard Wilf Pine appointed himself as producer,” explains Grant. “We’d do a track and he’d be, ‘That’s great. Don’t touch it. No overdubs! That’s costing us 50 quid!’” Feebly marketed, both In Side Out and its richly hallucinogenic follow-up Oora did little, saleswise. However, it wasn’t until World Wide refused to pick up studio costs, then requisitioned all the Broughtons’equipment, that a decision was made to take them to court. “We went to chambers on two separate occasions and World Wide never showed up,” explains Rob. “The judge was furious. He said, ‘Right, everything in your petition is granted. All rights returned to you.’ World Wide had to pay all costs and damages. I think that was a music history first.” “It didn’t happen without threats of violence,” adds Grant. “But we fronted them out, told them to fuck off.” “Wilf Pine was an ex-hoodlum,” says Steve. “He was used to violence, understood it, but was terrified of hallucinogens. So he’s screaming, shouting at us, and Chris Smith, our roadie, says, ‘If you do anything to anything for the rest of your life because you’ll be worried I spiked it with LSD.’ That was like a death threat to him.” ICTORY HAD BEEN ACHIEVED, BUT at what cost? The tapes for their next album, Bandages, had to be requisitioned from World Wide’s offices after they refused to hand them over. Recorded on a long holiday in Oslo, it was rich in keyboards and 12-string guitars – the sound of a band healing themselves but unsure of where to go next. That was borne out by their next recording, Parlez-Vous English?, recorded as The Broughtons
★★★★
★★★★
(Harvest, 1 9 7 1 ) From the shimmering if disquieting Evening Over Rooftops and the Peter Greenesque For Doctor Spock to the white-boy soul testifying of What Is A Woman For? and Madhatter’s cynical Toytown psych, this was the sound of the heavy trio growing into maturity and learning how to use the studio as an instrument.
★★★★★
(Harvest, 1 9 7 3 ) If 1972’s In Side captured the
revelation. The (especially in Rock ’N’ Roller) but drenched in a rich hallucinoarrangements and gorgeous backing vox by Doris Troy and Madeline Bell.
★★★
(Telex/Sheet, 1 9 8 2 ) Adjust your brain. Forget heavy rock, this is the kind of new wave rock opera that should be filed alongside Sudden Sway’s Spacemate, Godley & Creme’s L or the eccentric solo works of Rob Calvert. Divisive, certainly, but richly inventive, naggingly infectious and
and featuring a distinctly new wave-style cover by Hipgnosis. “We were back with Pete Jenner and ‘The Broughtons’was a stupid, confused idea and Parlez-Vous English? is a confused album,” admits Rob. “We were self-conscious about how elemental we’d been in the past. We’re on a new label! We can’t do a regular Edgar Broughton band album. So we kept adding to it, pretending we were confident. But we didn’t know where we were any more and I was just so tired.” A break-up was on the cards, but not before the recording of their final and most unlikely album, 1982’s Superchip:a concept album about the coming apocalypse – this time, brought on by computers – that simultaneously calls to mind Godley & Creme’s L, Charlie Brooker’s TV sci-fi series Black Mirror, and Robert Calvert’s Captain Lockheed And The Starfighters. “The Edgar Broughton Band always needed something or someone to kick up the ass,” says Rob. “All that stuff got blurred. But on Superchip it came back. Not everybody will agree with that. That’s fine.” Originally released on their own label, Superchip has been remastered as part of a new, definitive Broughtons box set for Cherry Red. The band, who briefly reformed in 2006 with Edgar’s son Luke on keyboards and Andrew Lewis Taylor (AKA, Britsoul outlier Lewis Taylor) on guitar, are however no longer playing together. Rob Broughton lets out a sigh. “That was a fabulous incarnation of the band,” he says. “Andrew is an amazing guitarist, and an incredible, sometimes difficult person. Well, suddenly this guitarist can’t work with Steve. Doesn’t ‘No, I’ll never talk to him.’Then Luke leaves.” At 73, Rob Broughton still plays out as a solo performer but no longer thinks he has the energy to do the band thing all over again. “These days,” he says, “Steve can only sit at a drum kit for half an hour because of his back. Arthur has got really bad arthritis and can hardly stand with a bass. I wrote them all a letter recently. It said, ‘I haven’t thrown you out of the band, I haven’t left the band. I’m just not gonna try and fix everything any more.’” Happily, the legacy of the Edgar Broughton Band is in better shape. Revisiting their key recordings, you’d be hard pressed to name a British group who better articulated the egalitarian promise of the rock’n’roll underground. The bond with their audience, certainly, was something that rarely needed fixing. “We talked to the people,” says Rob. “We read up on what was going on in their community. I don’t want to sound pretentious but it was a communal sort of levelling. You had to commit. We divided people. That was a M good thing.” The Edgar Broughton Band box set, Speak Down The Wires: The Recordings 1 9 7 5 -1 9 8 2 , is released on January 2 9 by Esoteric Recordings. MOJO 45
Black Country, New Road (from left) Charlie Wayne, Tyler Hyde, Isaac Wood, Lewis Evans, Luke Mark, Georgia Ellery (at window), May Kershaw, Columbia Hotel, London, December 2, 2020.
MOJO PRESENTS
Guitar! Sax! Shouting! BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD are the seven-piece “raging beast” who mash up rock’s past while satirising our digital present, their slowburning jams fuelled by a mercurial mix of self-laceration and “love for each other”. “Like Fleetwood Mac, basically,” they tell VICTORIA SEGAL. Photography by TOM OLDHAM
Tom Oldham
I
T WAS ONLY AFTER HE HAD PICKED THE NAME FROM WIKIPEDIA – “IT sounds very post-rock, let’s go for it” – that Isaac Wood realised Black Country, New Road might have a deeper symbolism. “It’s really funny, because when I found it, I didn’t really realise what it quite obviously meant,” says the 22-year-old singer and guitarist. “Hilariously, it was exactly what we wanted to say. Over time, someone pointed out to me that it obviously means a dark place, and then moving on from that. And that’s definitely what it was.” On the surface, the band’s route to their debut album, For The First Time, which is released early next month, doesn’t seem too treacherous. “There’s not that many examples of people who are like you when you’re a seven-piece with two acoustic instruments that aren’t guitars,” acknowledges saxophonist Lewis Evans, but even so, they have followed a steady curve. There was their growing live reputation as a band formidably mixing post-rock and post-punk, jazz and klezmer;an affiliation with the scene (they prefer “community”) around The Windmill in Brixton, spiritual home of Fat White Family and Black Midi; plus two exhilarating singles, Athen’s, France and Sunglasses, on producer Dan Carey’s buzzy Speedy Wunderground label. Yet if they have become a band to mention, nobody drops their name with quite the ➢
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Look to the light:BCNR convene a board meeting; (insets) the new album and first two singles.
TO MOVE ON. IT WAS IMPORTANT THAT WE CARVED OUT A NEW FUTURE FOR OURSELVES.” Isaac Wood ➣
same passion as Wood. “It’s black country out there!” he howls repeatedly on their third single, Science Fair, as if he’s warning of quicksand, or poisoned ground, or a sudden sheer drop.
Tom Oldham,Matthew Parri Thomas,Eyevine,Getty (5),Avalon
T
HE BAND’S ROOTS LIE IN THE LESS threatening flat spaces of Cambridge, where most of the members met at school and sixth-form college. They now live in London:Wood and guitarist Luke Mark, friends since they were five, share a flat close to Evans. The rest – violinist Georgia Ellery, bassist Tyler Hyde, keyboardist May Kershaw and drummer Charlie Wayne – are scattered across the city, yet even boxed off on Zoom their closeness is clear. Wood remembers the night of February 4, 2020, when Black Country, New Road played to their largest audience so far, at London’s Village Underground. “It was one of the best moments of my life, performing that concert,” he says, dreamily. “The best shows are when the audience ceases to exist and we feel this sense of togetherness as people, we lock into each other, understand each other, and the outside world ceases to exist in that moment. We feel pride, love for each other, and understanding in a singular unit. That’s a remarkable feeling.” They are all aged between 21 and 23, but Ellery reckons their fans are generally older than them:“I don’t know why…” Wood can guess:“Most of the stuff that sounds most similar to our music was made between 1990 and 1995.” When did they realise the similarities? “After we started making it,” laughs Wood. “We already sounded like it but we just never quite realised. Like Slint and June Of ’44 – I’d heard the Slint record but that was it. The other stuff was like, ‘You know you sound like this?’and I would listen to it and I was like, ‘Oh shit, yeah.’” When Wood’s mother tells him about her adolescence in Essex, she explains the factions of her youth – “You could be a Mod or a skinhead, speaking like that, dressing like that, acting like that, hanging out with those people.” For Wood’s generation, though, “everyone just liked everything because we had access to all of it. You have the freedom of choice and the access to all the information once you’re old enough to use a computer.” If Wood wants to quote Phoebe Bridgers and Bruce Springsteen
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taking the piss out of myself ”). At times, Wood sounds like Grinderman-era Nick Cave (“I’m more than adequate/Leave Kanye out of this/Leave your Sertraline in the cabinet!”); at others, Jarvis Cocker (“Still living with my mother/As I move from one microinfluencer to another”). He hasn’t heard The Birthday Party, but his mum played Pulp in the car.
I
N 2018, WOOD MADE A SOLO TRACK CALLED THEME From Failure Pt 1, under the name of Guest, a fierce, funny monologue that was part self-laceration, part self-improvement tract (“I Googled myself so many times/I started trending”). It mentions “being the hero of my dope childhood dreams”. Which were? “To be a rock star,” he says, tongue slightly in cheek. “My friend Theo, when I was about eight years old, just came to school and was like, ‘You have to come back to my house after school and watch this video I found on YouTube.’ And it was the music video for Smells Like Teen Spirit. That just blew my mind in two. I grew my hair out and bought flannel shirts and got my brother’s guitar and stuff. And pretty much consistently since then, that’s all I ever wanted.” He smiles. “I know it sounds funny but it just is really awesome to just stand around and play loud guitars.” At sixth-form college, they formed a band, Nervous Conditions, with another singer, playing their first gig at the city’s venerable Portland Arms. They were so young they were barred from the dressing room;when Evans left his saxophone backstage after an illicit foray, he had to send Tyler’s dad – Karl Hyde of Underworld – to fetch it. London, however, was the goal. Hyde studied art in Manchester, but soon Evans, Kershaw and new friend Ellery were studying at Guildhall School Of Music And Drama;Wood followed. Wood is now studying electronic music at Guildhall (a “very specific technical side of music production” that is “incredibly
Wood, Ellery, Evans, Mark, Hyde and Kershaw on-stage at the O2 Forum Kentish Town, north London, May 15, 2019;(below) Wood, Manchester, January 22, 2020; (below, right) sunny days ahead.
REFERENCES! REFERENCES! REFERENCES! A partial guide to the pantheon of Black Country, New Road.
BLACK MIDI
separate” from the band). Yet at this point, he wasn’t having quite such a good time as his friends. “I got kicked out of my sixth form college, so I didn’t have any A levels,” he says. “I couldn’t really study, so I just worked for a long time in pubs and stuff, delivering food, just while we were doing that other band and while everyone else was at university. Me and the singer weren’t doing much other than working and playing music, and that was the long-term plan. That whole period of my life was quite difficult.” Throughout 2017, Wood’s friend Joscelin Dent-Pooley – AKA musician Jerskin Fendrix – kept telling people that 2018 was going to be the “Year Of Fear”. “It was this weird joke he had,” explains Wood. By the end of January 2018, though, it rang with a grim truth. The original singer of Nervous Conditions was accused on social media of sexual assault; the other members dissolved the band. “So 2018 was definitely the year of fear,” says Wood, “but it was also the year where we had to build ourselves something new.” When they regrouped as Black Country, New Road, there were necessary changes. Wood stepped up as frontman. They shed their improvisational slant for tighter structures and wrote the songs that Wood sees as “lifelines”. “I didn’t feel anger towards things,” he says about the urgency in this music, “but I was aggressive in my desire to move on and carve out something new for us as people and friends. We supported each other and it was important that we carved out a new future for ourselves.”
“I told you I loved you in front of Black Midi,” sings Wood on Track X, a woozy cross between Julia Holter and Wild Beasts. Associates from the scene around south London’s Windmill, the two bands united as Black Midi, New Road for a charity show at the venue last Christmas.
SLINT On Science Fair, a fable of raging insecurity and humiliation, Isaac Wood wishes he could have “fled from the stage with the world’s second-best Slint tribute act.” The Kentucky post-rock pioneers have left an undoubted mark on Black Country, New Road’s dynamics and storytelling;Wood’s penchant for self-laceration strikes again.
KENDALL JENNER Half-sister to the Kardashians, Jenner has been a constant presence for the Insta-generation. Black Country, New Road have an early non-album track that bears her name, a sinister meditation on growing up in public and the violence – real or metaphorical – it entails.
ARIANA GRANDE In the single version of Athen’s, France (lyrics changed for the album), Wood sings of a girl who has the former child star’s 2019 hit Thank U, Next “stuck in her head”. Not necessarily a positive sign for their relationship, given it lists her previous lovers and then commits only to “Ari” herself.
RICHARD HELL “I wish all my kids would stop dressing up as Richard Hell,” snarls Wood on the menaceheavy middle section of Sunglasses, as the narrator hides behind shades, feeling invincible. All the generations here are pretty blank, though, from the raging father figure to the girl who “sells chemtrails to the students at Bedales” – a rare post-rock namecheck for the artsy boarding school in Hampshire.
F
OR THE FIRST TIME CHARTS that first leap forward. Largely recorded just before March’s lockdown, producer Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, Ray Davies) aimed to catch their live energy. “Often bands with unusual lineups and multiple members can be sonically confused and messy in a live context,” says Savours. “But they sounded so focused and compact – like one raging beast!” To the band, it already feels like a marker of the past;they’re now writing their second LP. “There’s less of a sense of urgency in the new music,” says Wood.“It’s able to be more meditative, we’re able to relax into writing something that doesn’t have to be so fast and aggressive.” Evans refers to live favourite Basketball Shoes as a future direction:a dream about meeting Charli XCX (“She knows who I am/She’s studied my prose”).“The music is allowed to be a little different,” says Wood, “more than something we needed to do to design ourselves a new future and identity.” Even in Zoom boxes, Wood, Ellery and Hyde contemplate their connection. “I can’t really speak for everyone but there was never an option for me in my mind not to play with these people,” says Hyde. “There wasn’t a plan B. Not that I couldn’t have gone on and done something else, but these guys are in my heart. In my blood.” Ellery agrees. “I think we’ve overcome a lot as a band, so with ever ything we overcome we get a lot closer and the music gets a lot better. It’s like Fleetwood Mac, basically.” There’s a pause. “It’s not.” “We just love each other basically,” says M Wood, “and that’s about it.” MOJO 49
Give it to me three times: in the wake of The Trinity Session, Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins, on-stage in Brussels, June 22, 1989.
MOJO EYEWITNESS
COWBOY JUNKIES MAINLINE THE TRINITY SESSION With roots in post-punk and improv, this band of Toronto siblings were refining a hushed blues aesthetic on the independent margins. Then, on Friday, November 27, 1987, they entered their hometown’s Church Of The Holy Trinity to record their second album. Sustaining dream-moods of country, the Velvets and Elvis, its hushed, mantric devotionals reverberated into the wider world. “A lot of things came together on that record,” they say. “We had a taste of being big.” Interviews by DAVE BOWLER • Portrait by GIE KNAEPS
Mike Timmins:Peter [Moore, producer] felt that the Church of the Holy Trinity would make a great place for us to record. It had a nice reverb to it, it wasn’t overwhelming and, having done some strings and jazz things there, he thought it would be worth trying a rock band in there. Nothing to lose, no money involved, we rented the church, got some musicians in on spec. No huge investment, so if it didn’t work we’d go someplace else. And we were almost expecting that. But it worked. ➢
Gie Knaeps/Getty
Margo Timmins:I think the stillness and the beauty of the church added to how well we played that day.
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FROM PEOPLE TRYING TO GET OFF COCAINE, THANKING US.” Peter Moore, producer ➣
Alan Anton:It took a long time to set up in there. I remember saying to Mike at about two o’clock, “If it doesn’t start happening in the next hour, let’s can it.” We knew exactly what it should sound like but it just wasn’t happening. We’d run through something, record it, listen back, then Peter would move the microphone or us again and then, finally, he got it and we heard him say, “OK, that’s it!” It was a huge difference.
Getty (4),Courtesy of Cowboy Junkies Archive (4),Courtesy of Jim Powers
Mike:Not a ton of people came through, it’s not like a huge tourist attraction, but some did, we had a few takes ruined, but it was kinda funny. When we were recording Sweet Jane, I think the version that made it to the record, a young couple walked in at the far end of the church. We heard the door opening, but we just kept on playing because it felt like a good take. They sat down for a while and listened, then after a few songs, they left. No big deal… about 10 years later, I was having some work done on my house and one of the dry-wallers there said, “You know, when you were recording Trinity Session, I was there with my girlfriend listening.” It was the weirdest thing. Margo:I don’t think it was guts to put [a cappella song Mining For Gold] on first. I think it was just ignorance is bliss. My whole life has been that way – somebody invites me to go walking up to Mount Everest, and I’m “Sure, I’ll do that,” without thinking, and you end up camping on a snow strip! I started doing a cappellas in our early shows because we didn’t have guitar techs, so it took Mike forever to retune between songs. There’d be these long gaps and, in those days, there was no way I was going to look at the audience, let alone talk to them, so to fill the gap I’d sing until he’d finished. So when we were doing Trinity Session, I thought those were a part of what we were doing. Peter Moore:It doesn’t sound like an a cappella, does it? We were in an old church, built in the 1840s or whatever… you really get to hear the church too, that natural reverb and decay – it has an ethereal quality to it.
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Mike:We were going to do to Blue Moon the same kind of thing that we did to the covers on [1986 debut album] Whites Off Earth Now!! The three of us worked on the music in the rehearsal space without Margo. We discovered that lopey groove that it ended up with, then Margo came in and started to sing those words – she didn’t actually know what we were working on! But it worked straight away and so we segued into Blue Moon from there and it was a nice combination. AA:We were very much into that repetition thing, which was a very Velvet Underground kind of idea, then bands like The Fall got into that, too. That song had a great groove, so stay with it. Mike:Blue Moon was that Tin Pan Alley side, we had to do something from Hank Williams, from Patsy Cline, then we added Sweet Jane to that, which gave it a different edge. Lou Reed is one of the great American songwriters, too, [and] The Velvet Underground were just such a cool band, everything rock’n’roll should be about… we figured it had been covered so many times and so badly by so many people that we should do it right. Of all the covers, it’s probably the straightest, because we went back to the live version on 1969. PM:Fortunately, [on Blue Moon] she’s not belting it out, she sings softly, quiet. And she was singing through a speaker, softly into the mike, so she didn’t need to force anything.She was standing off to one side, with the speaker in the centre.I worked it so the microphone distance to the speaker was exactly the same distance she was, so she was mixing her own vocals by leaning in, backing off, and she heard it from the monitor. What she was hearing was what the mike was hearing. Mike:We released The Trinity Session like we released Whites Off Earth Now!!, just as a little independent record [on Latent Records in early ’88]. When it came out, I was working as a courier in Toronto. While I was driving around, I listened to this great university radio station all the time.
We sent copies out to them and, as I was driving around one day, this DJ, who was my favourite, he said, “I got this record today, and I gotta tell you, folks – if you only have money for one record this year, buy this one.” And he put our record on… it just grew. These little wildfires would take off. Peter Timmins:Graham Henderson saw a show we played and he called us at the Crawford house where we were all living, and said, “I don’t usually do this but I saw you play. I’m a lawyer, I’d like to work with you.” And he started shopping the tape around the labels for us. A lot of people were interested at that point but they came with demands, like they wanted us to change the name of the band, so we didn’t want to deal with those kind of labels. Some of them wanted all the focus to be on Margo, for Margo to shorten her skirt. There was a buzz about us, so the companies were interested because they thought they had to be;I don’t think they really got it. Then we met Jim Powers, the A&R guy from BMG. Jim Powers:I went up [to Toronto] and saw them playing at a small club – may have been Clinton’s, but I’m not positive. It was a small place with a bar in the front as you went in and then a corner in the back where bands would play. I’m not even sure they were on a riser! No lighting, nothing, I think Margo was turned away from the front of the stage for about 80 per cent of the show, just quietly singing, and it gave you a feeling like you were peering in on a very private world. AA:We recorded it and just carried on doing our thing for about a year. We carried on like we had before, there wasn’t any sudden change. Then RCA put it out [it was re-released on November 15, 1988], and there was. The hype hit pretty fast; it was amazing. Within a couple of months, we were in Rolling Stone, the New York Times. Margo:I was in People magazine. Gap ads. The ‘50 Most Beautiful People in the World’– I liked that one the best! It suddenly struck me how big
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
● Margo Timmins (vocals)
● Mike Timmins (guitar)
Western baroque: the group play Saturday Night Live, February 19, 1989.
Peter Timmins (drums) ●
this thing had got when I was on the stage ready to do Saturday Night Live. You think of all the people that had done the show and suddenly we’re there! Even though we did all that, the record didn’t really sell any more… if I were to choose, I’d rather have what we’ve had than being a huge pop act for five minutes. It gave us longevity. It gave us a chance to build a crowd. We had a taste of being big, we could see how easily it happens, how easily it goes crazy. We had [album track] Misguided Angel pulled from a radio station in British Columbia because it supposedly had satanic references! How are you supposed to take that seriously? …Videos are fine if you’re selling something other than music. If you’re a sexy pop star and you want to show off your pierced belly button… AA:There was one [later video] idea that might have turned out pretty interesting. Hunter S. Thompson had written a book called Songs Of The Doomed, and in the first few pages he mentions sitting around and listening to something off [1990 follow-up] The Caution Horses, then he mentions the band later on in there, too. He’s always been one of our favourite wackos, so we decided to call him up and see if we could maybe work on something together… his idea was we’d go to his ranch out in Colorado, get a camera crew, no script and “just go crazy, man!” …Eventually he got really pissed off for some reason. He sent us a fax, saying, “If you guys show up here, you’re going home in body bags!” What did we do to piss him off that much?
● Alan Anton (bass)
● Peter Moore (producer)
● Jeff Bird (fiddle, harmonica, mandolin)
● John Timmins (guitar, backing vocals)
● Jim Powers (A&R, BMG Records)
Mike:[When the group met Lou Reed after he called the Cowboy Junkies’ cover “The best and most authentic version [of Sweet Jane] that I’ve ever heard.”] [Lou] was real friendly. The first thing he said was, “Fire your manager, don’t trust your record company and don’t talk to journalists.” When we saw him doing a show in Paris, he held on the bridge in the song which we put back in and said, “I’d like to thank Cowboy Junkies for this.” That’s pretty cool. PM:The coolest reaction was we used to get lots of letters from people in LA, trying to get off cocaine, thanking us for The Trinity Session! This was the late 1980s, early 1990s, so coke was now an evil drug. They were realising that if they needed to sell their house to pay for it, they might just have a problem! Things like, “I’ve been doing coke really heavy for four or five years and, if it hadn’t been for that record, I couldn’t have got off it.“
is what it is, complete. But there was no vision from God that this would change our world. All I knew was we’d made a great-sounding record that had achieved the goals we set for ourselves. John Timmins:Trinity Session was fortunate in that it came at a time when music was so produced, so awful, so goddamned grotesque that something honest like that record was needed. The Junkies were the band doing that just at the moment that the window was open for a fleeting second. I don’t think there was any way to anticipate what would happen as a result of it. PT:The buzz around Trinity just blew up the balloon. People come to see you because of that and then the balloon shrinks back to the people who really get it. We knew that would happen. That’s fine because that part of the audience only came to sit in the back and talk. Jeff Bird:Later, people’s concentration on it did irritate them – more so in the past because they’ve gone beyond that now. I think you just have to accept that it was a defining record and be proud of it. Mike:We were spoiled by Trinity. A lot of things all came together at one time on that record, and we probably didn’t realise until later just how rare that was.
Margo:Music is a very spiritual thing. When it works, it’s like you had nothing to do with it, you were just there as it happened… the day we did The Trinity Session, during I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, I can remember hearing my voice floating up to the top of the church and back down again and thinking, “My God, that’s so beautiful.” Totally hearing it as if somebody else was singing, for the first time. It was nothing to do with me, it wasn’t, “Look at me, I can sing”, it was an out-of-body experience.
JB:We found out that the church is considered to be on a huge power spot. There are three ley lines that converge there – two rivers converged there, too – and, long before the white people came, the natives held it as a really strong, sacred spot. Even when we went back there in 2006 to make [guest-assisted remake] Trinity Revisited, it still had something about it… as soon as we started to play that room kicked in, it became something special. I guess we picked the right spot. M
PM:I wanted this to be a movie, to be a stage play, to open, flow and end. You couldn’t break it up, change it round. It
Music Is The Drug: The Authorised Biography Of Cowboy Junkies by Dave Bowler is published by Omnibus Press on February 1 1 .
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Jim McCrary/Getty
Natural woman:Carole King in an outtake from the session used on the iconic cover of 1971’s Tapestry.
OT LONG AFTER Lou Adler met Carole King in 1961, he realised he had a problem with his new company’s young songwriter: Her demos were so
Tapestry would resonate with In the 50 years since Adler made his Tapestry
Tapestry
to return them. Indeed, Tapestry’s enduring power
Getty (2),Jim McCrary/Getty (2),David J. & Janice L. Frent/Corbis via Getty Images,
York’s Brill Building. Late in 1960, The Shirelles had given the kids their first hit with the cascading doo-wop of Will You Love Me Tomorrow? A decade older, Adler had already found success himself as a California songwriter and music manager before Aldon recruited him to open a West Coast branch. In New York to meet the bosses and get to know their talent, Adler recognised that the very quality that made King’s demos a keepsake would eventually make her a star. That is, she was as good as the couple’s songs, maybe better. “The first time I met Carole, she had a playpen with her kid in it. From that point, I had one of her kids on my hip or in a basket below the soundboard wherever we were working,” Adler, now 87, remembers with a wry chuckle. “But I knew from that first time, watching her play piano and sing, that if you took that exact setting and put it on the stage, she wins. With the talent she had to put a song across, she was captivating.”
years of writing hits in a New Jersey suburb, Goffin and King had split and moved separately to Los Angeles. King had found new songwriting partners, new bandmates, and, reluctantly, a new career – singing her own songs at the start of the singer-songwriter era.
chops and her decade of experience hearing her tunes become hits. In California as the ’70s dawned, the Jewish piano prodigy from Brooklyn – so slight that the New York Times noted “she could have been mistaken for the babysitter” (this was in 1970, when she was 28) – unlocked a newfound sense of liberation and self-confidence. King never wanted to be a star, tour, or talk to the press. (As has been her wont for almost 50 years, she declined an interview for this piece.) She just wanted to sing her own songs her own way. “Carole was the musical genesis for Tapestry, dictating how she wanted the thing to sound,” says James Taylor. “That was relatively rare then, but that was the singer-songwriter thing. It was liberated from a commercial sensibility, with a producer always looking over your shoulder. It was open to chance.” HE THREADS ULTIMATELY WOVEN into Tapestry were spun soon after King arrived in Laurel Canyon in March 1968 with her daughters, Sherry and Louise. Before King and Goffin split, they’d visited Los Angeles on a business trip to discuss The Monkees, a publishing deal when she was 17, was The Monkees’ music supervisor. He wanted Goffin and King on the with the show’s co-creator, Bert Schneider. He No, but his paramour, Toni Stern, had
on Will You Love Me Tomorrow? Issued by Adler’s Ode label on February 10, 1971, the day after King’s 29th birthday, Tapestry steadily generated glowing reviews. In April, the LP entered the US charts, where it remained uninterrupted for the next six years. It soon began a 50-week stay on the UK charts.
Adler, referencing 1970’s box office smash. “Danny didn’t like that very much, because The writer:(from top) with earliest hits co-writer Gerry Goffin in a promotional photo, New York City, late ’50s;Tapestry and 45s by Aretha Franklin, The Shirelles and The Monkees covering King.
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“It would take me days to write a lyric, but she would
everybody worked.”
➢
The writer (clockwise from above left):King admires the view from the house on Appian Way, Laurel James Taylor;poster for concert supporting presidential candidate
You’ve got some friends:(above, from left) Danny Kortchmar, King, Russ Kunkel, Charles Larkey and Ralph Schuckett during Tapestry sessions, A&M studios, LA, 1971; (below, from left) James Taylor, engineer Hank Cicalo, Joni Mitchell (back), King, Lou Adler listen to a playback, A&M, ’71;(right) cover shoot outtake;(inset below) Taylor’s album breakthrough.
Jim McCrary/Getty (3),Bobbi Rich,Alexa Viscius
➣
When King relocated to Los Angeles, Stern – a lifelong Californian and bon vivant whose mother managed a vogue apartment building full of celebrities and entrepreneurs – became her tour guide and, for years, her main collaborator. Stern would create exact drafts on yellow legal pads, with the verses, chorus, and bridge broken into columns. They’d meet at King’s crowded house on Wonderland Avenue or Stern’s small home 10 minutes away on Kirkwood Drive, gather around the piano, and then drive to the studio for King to cut the demo. Writing together, Stern and Adler agree, offered King a permission slip, a belief she could craft songs without her ex-husband by her side. “When we met, she was married with two kids and a live-in housekeeper. I was this kid from LA discovering who I was – 23, at my hormonal peak,” says Stern. “I exuded this self-confidence, this cool. I think that helped her realise she could write herself.” Another boost soon came with the California arrival of several old East Coast acquaintances. During the middle of their tenure at Aldon, Goffin and King started a short-lived label, Tomorrow Records, to release several King demos and some singles by hooky folk-rock upstarts The Myddle Class. The band backed King on several of her songs;their bassist, Charlie Larkey, was instantly smitten. “I was 18 when we met. There was quite a spark, if we can put it that way,” says Larkey today, with a bashful giggle.
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But The Myddle Class couldn’t overcome unforeseen obstacles, like a sound system that exploded when they opened for The Animals at New York’s Town Hall. When they split, Larkey enlisted with art-cum-rock act The Fugs. Soon after The Fugs played Los Angeles in 1968, Larkey gave the band his notice and told King to make room – he was moving to California to live with her and the kids. Several years earlier, Larkey and his Myddle Class bandmates had taken King to the fabled Greenwich Village haunt The Night Owl Café to see The Flying Machine. Formed by two bluesloving friends who knew one another from summers on Martha’s Vineyard, James Taylor and Danny Kortchmar, The Flying Machine were a folk-rock act looking for their big break. When, instead, they broke up, Kortchmar also took a job with The Fugs. It also led him to California. “I was tired of The Fugs and freezing cold. California was warm, everyone was very friendly, and there was opportunity,” says Kortchmar. “Bands could just set up in a house, which I could never imagine in New York, and rehearse. There was more of everything in Los Angeles.” ORTCHMAR – OR KOOTCH, AS HE’D BEEN CALLED since childhood – began showing up at King’s house at Wonderland Avenue with his guitar, jamming with her on piano and Larkey on bass. They retooled songs King had written with Goffin,
plus new ones from her budding partnership with Stern. Larkey, who loved Adler’s work with The Mamas And The Papas, suggested King call her old friend to listen. Adler responded with a record contract. By the end of the year, their band, The City, had recorded and released Now That Everything’s Been Said. The trio’s ambitions were quickly quashed. Just as it was issued, Adler left CBS Records, taking his label, Ode, to A&M. With no marketing push, Now That Everything’s Been Said languished. It was their first and final album;for Larkey, it felt like the end of a career and a relationship that had never begun. He moved out of King’s house, got his own garage apartment, and started working as a busboy at the legendary vegetarian restaurant, H.E.L.P. “I didn’t really understand what depression was, but, in retrospect, I was depressed,” he says. “Everything wasn’t terrible, because it was still Southern California. But it was not a happy time.” After less than a year, though, Larkey had returned to music and to King. Soon after he moved back into their little place on Wonderland, they married in the front yard, three months before making Tapestry. Just nine months after releasing the record they had Molly, their first of two children together. For Adler, The City accomplished precisely what he hoped. After hearing the band, he’d initially offered only King a recording contract, a proposal she rejected. Making the trio album slowly coaxed her toward the spotlight while providing her the cover of being in a band. “As the producer and label owner, I never thought of The City as a group that was going to make their next album and promote it. I thought of The City as a recording entity,” Adler says. “I was always thinking about what Carole would be doing next.” The City’s stunted lifespan reintroduced King to someone whose belief in her musicianship cleared the path to Tapestry. Back at The Night Owl, she’d briefly met James Taylor before The Flying Machine wowed her. Now in Los Angeles, Kortchmar introduced her to Peter Asher, who had signed Taylor to The Beatles’ Apple Records and followed him to California after his debut flopped. Asher gushed when he met King in 1969, telling her about all the Goffin & King standards he and The Beatles had loved, learned, and played. He asked her to stop by the sprawling house he was renting and hear Taylor’s new songs. “James is sitting there with the guitar, just staring at his shoes, which was his primary mode of operation at the time,” Asher says. “I said, ‘Why don’t you both sit at the piano bench and play?’It fit immediately. They just liked each other, genuine love and respect of the most basic kind.” Weeks later, she was at Sunset Sound, playing piano and adding harmonies to Taylor’s breakthrough LP, Sweet Baby James. He returned the favour for her 1970 solo debut, Writer. When she joined his touring band, he urged her to sing one of her hits with Goffin, Up On The Roof, at Queens College, New York, her alma mater. At last, King was standing somewhere near the spotlight. “She had just thought of herself as a tunesmith, this hired gun,” says Taylor. “I didn’t do it as a project or something premeditated. It was just easy to say, ‘Everybody knows this song, Carole. C’mon, sing it.’She’s the one that wrote it.” Y LATE NOVEMBER OF 1970, TAYLOR’S STAR HAD risen significantly thanks to Sweet Baby James. He was scheduled
back her, she relented.
King taught him the words. When Taylor was recording Horizon
a casual cover for their own amusement. Asher lamented that it wasn’t their song to release. Taylor asked King if they might share it, since Adler had already convinced her to record it for Tapestry. The song, which he now calls “the national anthem of friendship”, earned Taylor his first Grammy and only Number 1 Billboard single. “If it would have been me and someone would have scooped me on a song like that…” says Taylor, his voice trailing off in search of the answer. “For her to say go ahead, that’s unheard-of generosity.” Such give-and-take appears to have epitomised the sessions for Tapestry – by all accounts, uneventful except for the songs they were recording. In a clear break from the wild mores that governed Laurel Canyon, there was no booze, drugs, or “carrying on in the studio”, as engineer Hank Cicalo puts it. Instead, the atmosphere in A&M’s Studio B was relaxed in the right way, owing to everyone’s familiarity with one another and the material. Larkey and King were newlyweds who had rehearsed many of these songs at home. What’s more, the core band – Larkey, Kortchmar, drummer Joel O’Brien and keyboardist Ralph Schuckett – had recently started the romping quintet, Jo Mama, and released their first album on Atlantic. They were ready to play, and King ➢
“As I was really getting into singer-songwriters like Joan Baez when I was 19, my dad said, ‘I think you would really love Carole King.’Tapestry is a monster – it feels like every song could be a single, and it’s so cohesive. Every time she sings a chorus, there’s a different vocal run that is so smart and so memorable. People don’t write like that any more – smart pop that’s hooky and deep and poetic. Everyone just wants stuff that sounds like a song lyric – my husband, Jeremy Ivey, and I call them ‘na-na na-na boo-boo’ songs, where it just repeats over and over. Something that’s missing from a lot of pop music today is melody. Carole had melodies to carry whatever it is she was saying.”
“I heard the songs on Tapestry performed by other people before I heard Tapestry. I learned how to sing by singing to Aretha Franklin, and, of course, she did …A Natural Woman. In my early twenties, I found Tapestry in a record store in Phoenix, Revolver Records, and I saw …A Natural Woman on the back
cover, and that led me to get it. I remember thinking how cool it was that this lady in ’71 could write these eloquent and beautiful songs so simply. It’s so easy to write this way and be cheesy or bad, but she writes
➣ Everything’s been said:The City (from left) Charles Larkey, Danny Kortchmar, King.
+++++
++++ (Hear Music, 2 0 1 2 ) The most concise and consistent of King demo trawls reaches from her early gems with Gerry Goffin to the template of Tapestry. A shuffle through Pleasant Valley Sunday, circa 1966, is instantly winning, while King’s solo rendition of Just Once In My Life offers an impassioned plea for purpose that highlights her early vocal command.
++++ (ABC, 1 9 7 0 ) When producer Bill Szymczyk introduced Kings B.B. and Carole, he offered the obvious joke – you know, were they related? The elder’s follow-up to Completely Well is a trove of jubilant blues, the players revelling in every moment. Hear these Kings tangle with drummer Russ Kunkel on a spectacularly loose Ain’t Gonna Worry My Life Anymore. 60 MOJO
(Ode/Light in the Attic, 1 9 6 8 /2 0 1 5 ) Two former Fugs, Carole King, and Jim Gordon? Had Lou Adler never left CBS, The City might have had a hit with this 12-song LP that perfectly balances the pop esprit of King’s pedigree and the folk-rock haze of late-’60s California. King’s rendition of I Wasn’t Born To Follow, essayed by The Byrds in Easy Rider, boasts an authority the famous version lacks.
+++ (Ode, 1 9 7 6 ) King’s final album with Adler and Ode represented both the close of a prolific period in her career and the start of a tumultuous (and abusive) relationship following a move to Idaho. But these songs – incisive reflections on love, endurance, motherhood, and loss – sport a hard-won wisdom. It feels like Tapestry, thoroughly grown.
N HER 2012 MEMOIR, A NATURAL WOMAN, KING recalls her daughters traipsing in and out of the studio and their evening calls about homework or sibling squabbles. Cicalo, himself a father of three, remembers his admiration when King would arrive each morning, occasionally exhausted from making breakfast for the kids and preparing them for school. Some of those days, he says, they’d simply track the band with King on piano and leave the vocals for days when she was rested. Indeed, the mood was so domestic that Cicalo surprised Adler with a quixotic idea while the band rehearsed: they should turn the lights off in the control room so that the musicians would forget they were there, watching and listening and recording. Cicalo wanted the studio to feel like the living room where King and Larkey worked. “We didn’t want to cause any distraction. Studios are bad – you put a sign on the door that says ‘Recording’, and there are suddenly three guys there looking for cigarettes,” says Cicalo in a galloping Brooklyn accent, a reminder that he and King grew up in nearby neighbourhoods a decade apart. “They ignored us, like they didn’t even know we were there.” The sense of family and home that pervaded the Tapestry sessions stemmed in part from who was working next door and down the street. Taylor was a mile away at Crystal Sound, making Mud Slide Slim. And Joni Mitchell, Taylor’s girlfriend for a pivotal spell, was also at A&M, recording Blue down the hall in Studio C. King, Mitchell and Taylor floated in and out of one another’s sessions, singing or playing on one another’s albums. Taylor added guitar to King’s version of You’ve Got A Friend, while Mitchell sang on his. In an act of reclaiming the past, they harmonised on King’s debut hit from a decade earlier, Will You Love Me Tomorrow? Kortchmar, meanwhile, shuffled between Crystal Sound and A&M, working with Taylor and King. And drummer Russ Kunkel played on several songs from Tapestry, Blue and Mud Slide Slim, a career-making trifecta packed into a month. Kunkel’s knack for understanding and enhancing mood made him a longtime singersongwriter favourite. On Tapestry, he gives So Far Away its sense of insistent drift, a song always in search of home. “Russ is not trying to drive the tune, which is a very difficult thing for a drummer,” says Taylor. “Russ somehow drives things while listening and being totally open to anything you want to try.” Before they’d started recording Tapestry, Cicalo took King on a tour of A&M’s three Steinway pianos. A&M cofounder Herb Alpert had purchased a German-built Steinway made from deep red wood, as opposed to the New York-built Steinways. With bright high notes, it responded perfectly to King’s heavy left hand and coruscant leads. “She looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘This is it, isn’t it?’” remembers Cicalo. “She could just feel it.” There was just one problem:Joni Mitchell was using that piano in Studio C for Blue. One January evening, while Mitchell was taking a break, King’s band rushed into Studio C and cut three songs – I Feel The Earth Move, You’ve Got A Friend, and (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. The piano gave them the punch they needed. When Mitchell finished Blue, Cicalo had the piano wheeled into Studio B, where King finished Tapestry with it. But that was the album’s highest drama.
Courtesy of Ode Sounds & Visuals,Inc.,Jim McCrary/Getty (2),BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images,Gail Oskin/Getty
was ready to lead. “When Carole enters the studio, there is no doubt in her mind what she’s doing. She’s got all the elements, like the sheets the musicians need,” says Adler. “All we had to add was the creative process, and we had very cool musicians there to work.” When Stern stopped by the studio with her hulking seven-yearold German Shepherd, Arf, Adler snuck him through studio security by insisting they were going to record his barks. She marvelled as the band worked, stunned by their ease with the pair of tunes she’d co-written, Where You Lead and It’s Too Late. “The impression I got from the control room was just how good-looking and talented everyone was,” Stern remembers. “There were no egos or histrionics. I owe so much of that to the mood Carole set. It was all about the craft.”
Some kind of wonderful:(left) Carole rewrites a chorus;(right, from top) receiving the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from US president Barack Obama, the White House, Washington DC, May 22, 2013;onstage with Leland Sklar (centre) and James Taylor, Troubadour reunion tour, Boston TD Garden, June 20, 2010.
UT IF MAKING TAPESTRY SEEMED EFFORTLESS, preparing it for the public was not. Though Adler takes pride in being hands-off in the studio, he takes as much pride in shaping the package: “Marketing, sales, art, all the way down to the promotion.” He and King laboured over potential sequences, discarding every attempt. “In The Mamas And Papas, John Phillips was very sequence-minded, thinking about how you get to the next track without a musical bump,” Adler says. “With Tapestry, I was very concerned that there wouldn’t be any kind of bump, lyrically or with feel.” So Adler took the unfinished Tapestry to his vacation home in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he tinkered with the tracklist daily for three weeks. He cut Out In The Cold, a lithe R&B tune that offers a cautionary tale about cheating, and (he believes) a 14th song that, amazingly, he never came across again. One of his key decisions, he remembers, was closing with King’s restrained take on (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman. She’d written it four years earlier with her first husband for Aretha Franklin; now, she had recorded it with her second husband on upright bass. It was less about reclaiming the anthem from Aretha Franklin and more about claiming it for King, too. Tapestry, after all,
was a record about a married mother at the edge of 30 staking out a more complete identity. “It was a Goffin & King song, and I thought they should be represented on Tapestry. But we weren’t competing with Aretha,” Adler says. “We were showing the birth of the song. When Carole presented songs like that, like her demos, it resonated because of her feelings for the lyrics.” In mid-December 2020, Adler turned 87. On his birthday, he received an e-mail from his nine-year-old grandson, Walter, at home in Ireland. The boy had sung one of his favourite songs and sent it as a gift. It was Tapestry, King’s fable of light and dark, life and death, and the only song she plays solo on the album that bears its name. For decades, Adler had barely thought about the tune, a sleeper just ahead of the …Natural Woman finale. Hearing a new generation sing it, Adler realised again how quickly King’s writing had grown. He forwarded her the recording. On a quarantined birthday where, as he puts it, he longed to hug his family, the sentiment connected. “A lot of people write songs. A lot of people write hit songs. But when Carole sings So Far Away or Home Again, she’s able to bring forth her personal feelings,” he says. “And the feelings on Tapestry M touch so many nerves. On my birthday, it hit me that way.” MOJO 61
FROM PLAYING SONGS OF SUBURBAN landscape that permits DayGlo fantasy and alienation in English church halls to symphonising monochrome gloom, the euphoric and the infernal, the mysteries of life across the world’s most The Love Cats (“So wonderfully, wonderfully, prestigious stages, the odyssey of The Cure spans wonderfully, wonderfully pretty!”) and One six decades and defies rock’n’roll logic. Yes, it says: Hundred Years (“It doesn’t matter if we all die!”). you can do whatever you want, all the time, in your Tears, tunes and boxes of lipstick-flavour chocolates own time, and people will fill football stadiums – Robert Smith dispenses them all, sweet and to vindicate you. A post-punk sour, like Willy Wonka with Monet, Robert Smith has worked a baritone guitar. with a consistent palette for A new Cure album, the more than 40 years – but thanks first since 2008, is reportedly to the rigour and intricacy of his near to completion. Then craft, there’s always something again, Smith said as much in new to catch your eye. 2019. Such are the perils of Keith Cameron returns Because The Cure’s song perfectionism. But as MOJO’s to the birth of The Cure. canon is as varied as any in pop, Top 30 emphasises, the world Read how Thin Lizzy and Tie A Yellow Ribbon presaged comparable with Smith’s hero of his band is already bursting Three Imaginary Boys David Bowie for creative with wonders. Just close your handbrake turns, a sonic eyes and see…
by Mogwai’s Stuart Braithwaite Martin Aston, Jenny Bulley, Keith Cameron, Andrew Collins, Andy Cowan, Tom Doyle, Pat Gilbert, Ted Kessler, Dorian Lynskey, James McNair, Lyndsey Parker, Andrew Perry, Victoria Segal, Roy Wilkinson, Lois Wilson Foreword by Keith Cameron
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Portrait by Tom Sheehan. Illustration by Mark Wagstaff.
– a doomed romance
(Small Wonder single, 1978)
(from Pornography, 1982)
Bazaar ramifications.
A bestial apparition with a touch of evil. For a few years, obsessed with Siouxsie & The Banshees. He an album with Steve Severin as The Glove and modelled his rag-doll image on Siouxsie, hence the hysterical tom-tom rhythm that drives this bad trip of a song. It’s a sweaty hallucination of animals (or people dressed as animals) kissing, screaming and dying in a place whose name suggests a site of execution rather than horticulture. LSD is one hell of a drug. DL
(from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987) Stalker confessional disguised as chart charmer. How Cure. Having already pastiched The Bare Necessities with Love Cats, Smith chose another Jungle Book hit as the template for Kiss Me…’s daffy pop moment. Why Can’t I Be You? was effectively I Wanna Be Like You’s Louis Prima swing transposed to a drunken pyjama party, the feckless cavort underpinned by Simon Gallup’s Motown bass line. The lyric had just enough creepy undercurrent (“I’ll eat you all up or I’ll just hug you to death”) to still resonate with Pornography devotees. KC
(from Three Imaginary Boys, 1979) Fey, in the best way. A sonic blueprint being sketched in real time, the lines and angles of a version of The Cure we would come to know very well materialise in the chorused guitars and disorientated lyrics of Three Imaginary Boys. There’s even a hint of I Am The Walrus in the boom bap beat and spitty vocal rhythm. Smith casts himself as ghost or intruder (or both) in the verses. In the choruses, he’s under the bed clothes frightened by the prospect of daylight and depression. TD
RW
SIOUXSIE & THE BANSHEES: ill met by moonlight? Robert Smith was smitten by Siouxsie & The Banshees from the moment he heard Hong Kong Garden on a John Peel session in February 1978. He soon insinuated himself into their world when, with The Cure supporting on the Join Hands tour, guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris quit two dates in and Smith stepped up. He has admitted that Pornography was his effort to summon the darkness that the Banshees were masters and mistress of, and when John McGeoch cracked under touring pressures in November ’82, Smith was the obvious supersub, appearing on the band’s Top 5 cover of The Beatles’ Dear Prudence, then at autumn ’83’s two shows at the Royal Albert Hall, as documented on the Nocturne double-live album, and on ’84’s Hyaena. Though his efforts were manful in briefly managing parallel careers in two upwardly mobile groups, as a guitarist he never truly emerged from McGeoch’s shadow, and overall spread his talents a little thinly across three successively recorded albums (including The Glove’s Blue Sunshine, see p74). When Smith in turn bailed before May ’84’s Hyaena tour, apparently on doctor’s orders due to exhaustion and blood poisoning, and then swanned off to worldwide success with The Cure, the friendship soured, and the ever-catty Banshees accused him of contributing little, just using them to further his own cause. KEY SONG: Swimming Horses (from Hyaena), whose gambolling piano chords – like a cat racing across the keys – is pure mid-’80s Smith genius (he revived the idea for Six Different Ways on The Head On The Door). AP
(from 4 :13 Dream, 2008) Dreamy long-form skygazer channels Crazy Horse! Shades of Disintegration in the protracted intro to this opener from Smith’s most recent collection of all-new material, whose fraught genesis involved Morrissey-esque web broadsides against his label. The deliberate pace and reverbed fuzz chords echo Neil Young’s Cortez The Killer, until at 1:50 a Cure-y riff chimes in, and we’re in Smith’s World of Romance, the wispy effects around his vocal approximating celestial ether, as goth’s first couple enjoy a wondrous star-gazing clinch. AP
(from Disintegration, 1989) It’s Spiderman, just not the Marvel type… “I screamed for what seemed like days,” Robert Smith told NME of his uncle’s grim bedside stories and the recurring arachnid nightmares they induced. Lullaby made them flesh; Smith’s whispering dread escalating above a claustrophobic beat and the ghostly intrusions of Roger O’Donnell’s sticky synth-strings. A pure moment when The Cure’s pop and dark sides coalesced amid Disintegration’s deathly soul-purging, the Freudian gift of Smith devouring himself in Tim Pope’s lurid, Polanskiinspired video burrowed it into the UK Top 5. AC
(from The Cure, 2004)
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(from Three Imaginary Boys, 1979) (from Wish, 1992) “Really out there in Happyland,” noted Bob. Echoing The Easybeats’ famous diary-build to weekend ardour, this slick, jangling ear-worm comes on like a record company ultimatum for a single, yet it still takes 30 seconds for the lead vocal to show. “To taxi drivers, I’m that bloke that sings Friday I’m In Love,” said Smith, flagging the song’s new demographic reach. A proper hit both sides of the pond, built around a chord sequence so blatantly perfect The Cure’s leader worried he’d nicked it. JMc
Spells it out:The Cure were going to be different. What fire in Cairo? And why has Smith’s mind wandered to north Africa again? With little concrete to illuminate it, Fire In Cairo retains a weird, unsettling mystique:for starters, is the fleeting lovers’ triste here, soon dissolving like a mirage, real or simply imagined? The Eastern-sounding chord change in the bridge and parched guitar stabs evocatively colour this desert story, but it’s the clever, tonguetwisting spelling-out of the title in the chorus that insinuates Smith’s uncommon gift for prosody in song. PG
Ebet Roberst/Getty,Tom Sheehan
Boys do cry, after all. The song title suggests another classic tilting-at-windmills Smith whinge, yet The End Of The World is actually a love song, from a drama queen’s point of view:“Not just a boy and a girl /It’s just the end of the world.” Smith references tears, kisses, sighs and lies as The Cure shift into chugging, streamlined, hook-driven beat group mode (albeit with an incongruous mid-section synth solo). It’s not as iconic as Boys Don’t Cry but there’s a lineage between both singles. MA
Lost in the time tunnel: The Cure, 1981 (from left) Simon Gallup, Robert Smith, Lol Tolhurst.
(single, 1981)
In 1969, British novelist Penelope Farmer published Charlotte Sometimes, her third in a children’s series featuring the twins Emma and Charlotte Makepeace. The plots were pure fantasy – the ability to fly, and time travel – rooted in harsh reality. Like the fictional Makepeaces, Farmer and her own twin sister were “incarcerated” (her description) at boarding school. Charlotte Sometimes channelled dreams of escape into a story where our heroine is transported to 1918, trading places with another boarder there, Clare. After much derring-do, Clare dies and the time-trapped Charlotte arrives home, sweet home. Farmer decided her theme was identity – a particularly sensitive faultline for twins – but the tone cut deeper still. “Its most memorable passages are… concerned with absence, loss, or death,” claimed one reviewer. Another identified, “a study in disintegration.” No wonder Robert Smith was smitten enough to write his own version. Fantasy had long had a hold on Smith. Aged five he’d claimed there were unwelcome visitors in the house, only visible to him. He became obsessed with Peter Pan, the boy that flew and never grew up. When he discovered Farmer’s book, it never left him. And he called on Charlotte when he needed her.
By the time the song became a standalone single in October 1981, Smith was feeling as trapped by the suffocating gloom as Charlotte at boarding school. Haunted by death – specifically his grandmother and Ian Curtis, with drummer Lol Tolhurst’s mother also terminally ill – Smith was drinking “into oblivion… I had no faith in anything,” he said. Like the preceding album Faith, the mood of The Cure’s seventh single was drizzly-grey and despondent, with Tolhurst’s steady electronic pulsebeat icy and precise. Swathes of Smith’s lyrics were virtual rewrites of Farmer’s anxious imagery, suggesting he’d simply traded places with Charlotte. “The light seems bright/And glares on white walls… night after night… alone in bed/Her eyes so open to the dark.” At the end, she’s “crying and crying for a girl who died so many years before…” Clare? Or a stand-in for Smith’s younger self? Yet at its core, the song glowed. Smith once described Farmer’s book as “very romantic”, and his tribute radiated a new-found warmth from Smith’s flanged guitar and choral harmonies, with a wraparound ambient hum in the background. “We started out as punks, playing everything straight and dour and strong,” Tolhurst tells MOJO today, “but Charlotte Sometimes is when we started delivering the hard stuff with the most beautiful sounds.” The Cure would move on to their bleakest album, but Charlotte Sometimes provided a timely refuge, for those times when unwelcome visitors make their presence felt. MOJO 65
thanks to Simon Gallup whose performance is so energetic you see his blusher sliding off in the video. JB
(Fiction single, 1983)
(from Pornography, 1982) Dying on a beach. Amid Pornography’s churning horrorscapes, A Strange Day strikes a lonely beatific note. So plaint, tectonic bass, last-gasp beats (Tolhurst bought a 10-inch deep snare drum from The Specials’ John Bradbury) and Robert Smith floating into the apocalypse as the sun hums, the sea grows, “and the sky and the impossible explode”. With nuclear dread a post-punk staple, The Cure re-cast Armageddon as the ultimate heartbreak. KC
(Fiction single, 1982) The pros and cons of getting it on. Post Pornography, Smith detoxed in the Lake District and, refreshed, set about scrubbing up much-demoed – once deemed too lightweight – into a deliberately more extrovert alt-disco format, complete with
milk”, etc), Smith seems to be lampooning the “It’s just the same, a stupid game”), but the silky synth-pop groove is sexy as hell. AP
(from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987) Now US-friendly, Cure go gorgeously soft. Unlikely contenders (as the music weeklies had it) to “SLAY STATES”, something went right in ’87 among the grab-bag 18 tracks on Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, winning The Cure Billboard Top 40 kudos. Lack of an organising principle allowed disparate singles, including this dreamilystrummed, deeply analgesic ditty, inspired by the childbirth/coma scene in Rocky 2 (no, really) and lushly romanticised in a French Rivieraset promo – Smith and co taking goth coiffs and studio tans for a sacrilegious turn in the sunshine. Emily Dickinson verses were pinned around the Manor studio for reference. ACol
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5 Cure covers, some cool, some curious…
(from Disintegration, 1989) A pessimist’s concession to true romance.
(from Three Imaginary Boys, 1979) Smith’s admiration for Hendrix was/is heartfelt, yet this punky deconstruction, sung by Michael Dempsey (doing his best Pete Shelley impression) was levered onto The Cure’s debut against his will. Amazing fact:one MOJO writer thought this should be in our Cure Top 30. “No, Lol, no!”
(from Rubáiyát: Elektra's 4 0 th Anniversary, 1990) The Doors’ distillation of weird pop from dark materials surely spoke to Smith, but this is lumpy. Smith fails to own the lyric, while the guitar solo is the most retro-rock in the Cure canon. The brooding ‘Psychedelic Mix’ on The Cure’s Join The Dots rarities comp, is unrecognisable, and therefore preferable.
(From Stone Free: A Tribute To Jimi Hendrix, 1993) Hendrix goes baggy with digital hi-hats and muted house piano. Still, the impressionistic approach kind of works – it’s a neo-psychedelic sojourn on the mid-’90s dancefloor. “Hendrix was the first person I had come across who seemed completely free,” said Smith. Chill enough to dig this? Perhaps.
(from 1 0 4 .9 , 1995) From a compilation commissioned by the once-alternative London radio station XFM (co-founded by Fiction grand fromage Chris Parry). Once you get over the cheapo synth version of Bowie’s brass, it’s an admirably quirky rethink, with the unique rhythms of Smith’s vocal phrasing to the fore. Funny line:“Do you remember… President Clinton?”
(from The Art Of McCartney, 2014) Has Smith ever had more fun than in the YouTube promo for this rum tribute album? It’s also a sturdy, faithful, playful versh of Macca’s Beatle bagatelle, with scion James McCartney on keys and Smith’s pipes in fine fettle. Almost makes you want to hear Airborne Toxic Event’s No More Lonely Nights.
(from Faith, 1981) The adolescent angst begins to curdle. The first track recorded for Faith and the album’s sole single nails that period Cure’s preoccupation with loss of innocence and search for some emotional substitute for Smith and Tolhurst’s childhood Catholicism (both encounter grief for the first time during the album’s protracted recording). The song has sleeping children dressed in white, a worrying suicide fixation and no guitars (Smith plays six-string bass). High-speed, helicoptering ominousness offsets all pomposity, largely
Smith began dating Mary Poole when he was 14 but it took him 15 years to marry her and write her, as a gift, a straightforward love song devoid of metaphor or whimsy (“She would have preferred diamonds,” he quipped). Uniquely on Disintegration, Lovesong gets straight down to business, Gallup’s gymnastic bass line setting off a chain reaction of hooks as Smith expresses unqualified gratitude and undying fidelity, until it concludes as crisply as it began. Better than diamonds after all. DL
(from Seventeen Seconds, 1980) A chilly kitchen-sink drama. This is the sound of metamorphosis. The first song Smith wrote for The Cure’s second album, Play For Today was also his last composition with the same kind of angst-pop dynamics heard on their debut. Frosty drum effects helped to bridge the gap between the band’s past and its present. Named after the long-running BBC drama anthology, Smith succinctly described his own three-minute tragedy as addressing “the fraudulent aspects of an insincere relationship.” A story as old as time. TK
(Fiction single, 1983) Playful wheeze morphs to purrfect pop. “A joke composed drunk,” claimed Smith, but alleycat meows and purrs, ‘milk-bottle’ percussion and giant moggie costumes (see video) only cemented The Love Cats’ appeal. Part uxorious love song, part Cure excursion into skiffle-ish jazz, it all hangs on Phil Thornalley’s fat double bass, plus Smith’s slinky piano and hitherto hidden flair for bouncing, Django Reinhardt-style guitar chords. Tolhurst’s contribution? Vibraphone. Their first UK Top 10 single, and about as gothic as Top Cat. JMc
(from The Head On The Door, 1985) A band called Malice break America. Perfect Curepop, full of scowling, romantic regret. The lyric was written in the rain, Smith said (“I was upset”), while the Roxy-ish chord structure was a slowed down version of Plastic Passion from Three Imaginary Boys. Its origins stretch back as far as December 1976 when Malice – the school band whose line-up included Smith, Tolhurst, Porl Thompson and Michael Dempsey – played an antecedent of Plastic Passion, entitled A Night Like This, at St Wilfrid’s School Hall in Crawley. JB Continues on page 7 4
Tom Sheehan
In an instant, it changed ev-ry-thing… The Cure became a streamlined synthpop twosome following the temporary departure of bassist Simon Gallup, though fans might’ve assumed that Peter Hook had replaced him on this bright, pulsing track. The Cure’s danceduo era was short-lived, and this clubby commercial breakthrough – with its wolf-whistling vocals, loopy lyrics, and drummer-turned-keyboardist Lol Tolhurst’s chirping, circling circusmusic riff – could’ve been just a whimsical oneoff in the band’s otherwise doomy discography. Yet The Walk unexpectedly established the happy/sad aesthetic of the many smash singles that followed. LP
Make up to break up: Robert Smith in his Disintegration-era finery, April 1989.
(from Disintegration, 1989)
In autumn 1988, a fire destroyed Robert Smith’s room in Hook End Manor, the residential Oxfordshire studio where The Cure were recording Disintegration. Amid the wreckage he came upon a wallet with photographs of his wife Mary, dating back through the 10-plus years they’d been together. One, depicting her bare shoulders and neck from above, had graced the cover of 1981’s Charlotte Sometimes, distorted and reversed into negative, but would be displayed in full clarity for the sleeve of Pictures Of You – the elegantly poised sevenminute masterpiece that discovering this cache of images inspired – when it was released as the fourth single off Disintegration in March 1990. This glacially-paced weepie was, however, anything but a recent bridegroom’s rush of euphoria. Here, a funereal beat establishes a slo-mo groove, which, overlaid with frostily sustained synth chords and a gentle, flanged strum, broods for almost two minutes before Smith launches into a litany of woe, recounting the memories of a lost love evoked by just such a stack of photos, which he ultimately tears to pieces in despair. While this romantic profile scarcely tallied with his own, Smith’s mood was dark going into making Disintegration. Unhappy with ongoing pressure to sustain his mid-’80s pop success, he approached
the winter ’88-89 sessions at Hook End Manor in Oxfordshire “like a monk”, he later admitted, or perhaps a method actor, consciously prompting the communication breakdowns and LSD binges that characterised Pornography’s fraught genesis, in order to regather the thread of what he believed was his most substantial work. Sound-wise, Smith was once again in pursuit of the barren, keyboard-driven mood of David Bowie’s Low but, with five years’ extra experience under his belt, the results were grander. Pictures Of You’s undulating rhythm is actually a little like A Forest’s alienated funk slowed down, while its verses’ first line echoes the melodica part in Your Silent Face off New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies – another Smith obsession. After that beyond-patient intro (to hell with pop radio!), the tragedy in Smith’s lyrical narrative is gradually and crushingly revealed. The second couplet – “I’ve been living so long with my pictures of you/I almost believe that the pictures are all I can feel” – is quite possibly Smith’s absolute high water mark in frazzled numbness, and the rainlashed scene of “we kissed as the sky fell in” like a doomed goth update on The Ronettes’ I Wish I Never Saw The Sunshine. At track two on side one, Pictures Of You became a tone-setter for Disintegration, which, to Smith’s ongoing discomfort, went on to sell three million copies worldwide, and took the band into stadiums Stateside. As a loser-in-love’s anthem, it’s unparalleled. MOJO 67
th e birth of th e cu re
wh ispers in th e silence ou t of newtownennu i g rew th e cu re’s peerless pop, bu t not before h ospital g ig s, biscu it bribery and ‘tie a yellow ribbon’ made robert smith ’s orig inal bandmates despair. it took pu nk epiph anies, a key kiwi, and th eir leader’s resolve to effect th e g reat escape. “rob doesn’t care wh at you th ink abou t h im,” discovers keith cameron. “ h e always h ad h is ownvisionof wh at h e was g oing tobe.” pictu re by rich ard mann.
Saturday night fever: The Cure in 1979 (from left) Michael Dempsey, Lol Tolhurst, Robert Smith.
Richard Mann/Avalon.red
o
N DECEMBER 20, 1976 A BAND called Malice made its debut public performance at St. Wilfrid’s Catholic School in Crawley – where guitaristsinger Robert Smith, drummer Laurence ‘Lol’Tolhurst and bassist Michael Dempsey had until recently been pupils. They opened their set with Thin Lizzy’s Jailbreak, sung by Martin Creasy, a local journalist wearing a brown three-piece suit. “We had never rehearsed with him,” Dempsey recalls. “I think we would have left along with most of the audience if that were possible.” Tolhurst, meanwhile, wore a black studded catsuit and mascara in the style of his hero Alice Cooper. The set ended with a version of Wild Thing, sung by the drummer. “It was a disaster,” Tolhurst said, 40 years later, in his memoir Cured. “I thought, ‘That’s that, then.’But it wasn’t.” On December 31, 1977, the same group, but with a different name and minus the singing journalist, assembled at Orpington General Hospital. The hospital staff assumed that having a band called Easy Cure playing their New Year’s Eve dinner dance must be a joke. The members of Easy Cure, however, weren’t laughing. From a school to a hospital in 12 months didn’t feel like huge progress. Still, the reward for playing two one-hour party-hearty sets would be riches beyond their dreams:£20 each and unlimited free beer. “For 20 quid, we’ll play anywhere,” they agreed. An inkling of trouble ahead came during soundcheck, when Tolhurst was told to stop tuning his drums:the noise was “disturbing the patients”. Smith, meanwhile, drew up a setlist that mostly comprised the band’s own songs: punkblasted sneers like Heroin Face and I Want To Be Old, or a creepy vignette inspired by Albert Camus’ L’Étranger, called Killing An Arab. As the first set ended amid restive booing, Easy Cure took a break and discussed how to proceed without being lynched by Orpington Hospital’s by now well-lubricated nurses, porters and clerical workers. Their manager, Dempsey’s brotherin-law, suggested the trump card held by every sensible light entertainment ensemble in 1977: Tony Orlando & Dawn’s Tie A Yellow Ribbon. To general amazement, lead guitarist ➢
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Can you help me:Smith, Tolhurst and Dempsey ask the questions at London’s Natural History Museum, January 17, 1979;(insets, from top) poster for Malice gig;cover songs; Easy Cure poster;Crawley’s many attractions;Hansa’s bands-wanted ad;The Cure, Sounds, Jan 27, 1979.
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Porl Thompson admitted he knew the song from playing in a cabaret band. Unfortunately, he couldn’t remember how to play the whole thing. Thus, Easy Cure opened their second set
Paul Slattery/Avalon.red,Getty (3)
ad nauseam friend Mar y Poole were pursued by some angry patrons into the car park, where a fight ensued. The scene, typical of the apathy-cum-hostility the band encountered in their Home Counties hinterland, marked a turning point. “We realised then that we couldn’t just go and play any old place,” Smith later reflected. “We didn’t want to learn other people’s songs. That way we would have become yet another pub band.” Thirteen months after the hospital debacle, the same band, now reconfigured as a trio of Robert Smith, Michael Dempsey and Lol Tolhurst, and definitively man who had signed The Jam, their debut record Killing An Arab was NME’s Single Of The Week, and they were on the front cover of Sounds, proclaimed “Stars In Embryo.” Even given the accelerated momentum of the post-punk era, this was a remarkable turnaround. What catalytic energy had driven The Cure so far, so soon? “The band was a ticket out of Crawley,” Tolhurst tells MOJO today, “out of going down the pub and having fights with skinheads. Deep in our psyche we knew:If we don’t do something, we’re destined to live in this place until we die.”
f
IRST SETTLED IN THE 5TH CENTURY BY Saxons who named it Crow’s Leah – a clearing infested by crows – modern Crawley hides its rural origins beneath blandly utilitarian architecture and a collection of distinct residential neighbourhoods
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“To be different in says Michael Dempsey, “but you immediately stood out. There was a steady beat of aggression – largely born out of suspicion of anything that failed to conform.” The town’s economy was (and still is) principally driven by the adjacent proliferation of light industr y units, including Upjohn Ltd, a pharmaceutical manufacturer that from the mid-’60s was managed by Alex Smith, father of Robert. With three railway stations, the M23 on its eastern edge and the airport to the north, Crawley has an abundance of transport links – yet that didn’t make it any easier for Robert Smith and friends to get out. “There were only two ways to escape,” Tolhurst considers. “You either had to be a great footballer, or in a band.” As it happened, the teenage Robert Smith was a pretty good footballer. In March 1975, the Crawley Observer commended his “devastating wing play” for Three Bridges Wasps in a 3-2 defeat to Shoreham in the Minor Sussex Cup. But music seemed a more feasible option. At 16, the school careers officer quizzed him and his friends about their future ambitions. “I said I wanted to be in a pop group and they all giggled,” Smith subsequently recalled. “Another boy said he wanted to be an astronaut and they giggled at that too. He ended up working in a bookies, but I was really self-centred and went ahead. At least I’ve tried.” With his 30-year-old brother Richard a knowledgable source of head food for mid-’70s teenage English misfits – King Crimson, Nick
The outsiders:early inspirations (clockwise, from below) Wire, The Stranglers, Buzzcocks; (right) Fiction Records’boss Chris Parry with The Cure in 1982;(insets) Woolworths Top 20 guitar;key 1978 Wire support gig; Killing An Arab and Boys Don’t Cry 45s.
Drake, MC5, Trout Mask Replica tra’s Birds Of Fire
“He said, ‘Well, can we have the rights to our mer of 1976, a group of sorts began rehearsing at the Smith family home on Cobbett Close. On January 20, 1977, Tolhurst suggested a trip to Croydon to see The Stranglers at the Red Deer. Dempsey drove, Lol bought the tickets, Robert and Mary sat in the back seat. Punk, hitherto an exotic concept they’d only read about in the music press, was now made flesh. A month later, The Stranglers played Crawley himself on-stage dancing with Jean-Jacques Burnel and went home missing a shoe. In Robert Smith’s mind, blanks were filling in:“When I first saw The Stranglers, I thought, This is it. I saw the Buzzcocks the following week, and I thought, This is definitely it.” Fuelled by the latest punk singles bought from Rick Gallup’s record counter at Horley Radio Rentals, Easy Cure began their escape. In April they answered a Melody Maker advert from the German record label Hansa – home to Boney M – and were invited to audition at Morgan Studios in Willesden, north-west London. To their amazement, they were offered a contract – and Easy Cure signed. “It was the catastrophe before the shining moment of realisation,” says Tolhurst. Over the subsequent months, while the band established semi-regular gigs at Crawley pub The Rocket, Hansa made clearer their interest in photogenic teen-bait playing a ticket o cover versions (Japan were signed from the same auditions). But Easy o ut o f go Cure gave the notion short shrift.
Shortly afterwards, Porl Thompson played his
“The early Cure sound was pure
At the end of May, The Cure recorded a
(“Hello. I’m Robert from The Cure. We don’t have any contracts but we would like some”), a tea bag and a Digestive biscuit. As Dempsey recalls, “We were rejected by everyone f crawley. – Phonogram, Virgin, EMI, Island – many using the same phrasing:‘Not do wn th e the type of material we are ➢
ut o in g p u b an d h avin g fig h ts with skin h eads.” lo l to lh u rst
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never enou g h ! the most is how their songs have not one but several melodies, all interwoven, which makes their music so interesting. It’s such an atmospheric sound and they’re not afraid to use different tools to manipulate and affect the mood. The first Cure show I saw was on the Prayer tour, at Glasgow SECC, MY SISTER WAS a huge Cure fan, 1989. They played the whole of and through her, I became totally Disintegration, which blew my mind, obsessed with the Standing On A three hours every night. There Beach singles compilation, on aren’t many bands that play for so cassette, with all the B-sides. long, but I never find their shows too Disintegration was the first album long:you just need strong ankles! I ever bought, and I bought all The Cure have endured as a live their others too. band because Robert is a perfecThere are many different layers tionist. Most bands just get up to The Cure, so much that they can and bash away, but he takes it do. Obviously, they’re a brilliant unbelievably seriously, with a level singles band, but they can be of detail I’ve never seen elsewhere. amazingly minimalist or more They have a little practice space frenzied too. Robert’s lyrics have backstage so they can rehearse resonated with me my whole life, something if they want, and as a kid, then a teenager and Robert listens back to every still now that I’m older. show, all three hours of it Pornography is my “th e cu re or more. When Mogwai favourite album, I think h ave endu red have toured with the because I’ll always be as a live band Cure, I’ve only missed a teenage goth. But becau se robert is one of their shows it’s very focused a perfectionist.” after we played, when and loud, and very Celtic were playing singular. I listened to Faith just the other day.
life as a cu re fan, from far away toclose-u p, by stu art braithwaite of serial su pport act mogwai.
music in quite the same Pornography – A
Mogwai have some songs that sound just like The Cure, but beyond that, what we’ve incorporated
’s title track has a really frantic energy. It’s great watching Rob give As told to Martin Aston
i
N BETWEEN SESSIONS, PARRY SENT THE BAND OUT of their suburban domain, with support slots for Wire and The Jam in Canterbury, UK Subs at the West Hampstead Moonlight Club, and a short tour opening for Generation X, including Birmingham where they covered Paranoid. Seeing Wire on October 5, however, had a profound impact on Smith’s vision for The Cure. “Wire gave me the idea to follow a different course, to hold out against the punk wave,” Smith told Guitar World in 1996. “During the first song, about half the audience left. It was the most intense thing I thought I’d ever see – blinding white lights shooting straight into the audience and this incredible wall of noise. Then they’d stop it and do little quiet bits. I remember a big row with the others in the van afterwards because they all thought it was shit, and I thought it was immense. That’s what I wanted The Cure to do.” Still finessing the details of Fiction’s accommodation with Polydor, Chris Parry struck a one-off deal with Walthamstow independent label Small Wonder to release a double A-side single featuring setlist standouts Killing An Arab and 10.15 Saturday Night. Parry regretted what he now regards as “throwing away” the latter, but if he wanted to make an impression, Killing An Arab did the job. It’s a measure of the era’s ambivalent – or insensitive – attitude to race and gender politics that the press barely addressed the song’s power
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If it takes me all night: Robert Smith and his “strong ankles” in 1989; (below) Stuart Braithwaite: “Robert is a perfectionist.”
looking for.’ Except Chris Parry, who wrote back saying, ‘I would like to meet the group.’” A 29-year-old New Zealander, Parry had enjoyed chart success in his homeland as drummer with late-’60s psych-pop band The Fourmyula, before moving to the UK and joining Polydor’s A&R department in 1974. He signed The Jam in 1977, but only after his attempts to bring The Clash and the Sex Pistols to the label were thwarted by superiors. His disgruntlement boiled over in mid-1978 when his enthusiasm for The Cure’s demo fell on cloth ears. “They just went, ‘Huh, s’all right.’ I thought, Ah fuck you, it’s better than that. So I put my notice in. On that tape there were two extraordinary songs: 10.15 Saturday Night and Boys Don’t Cry. From an A&R point of view, the important thing is:Does this have what in the old days would be called ‘the sound’? Is there something distinctive? It’s often the voice. Robert did have a distinctive voice. Then meeting him, I felt there was something about him, he was a very bright boy.” He pauses. “They looked shocking though.” Parry was especially appalled by Michael Dempsey’s “corduroys, Hush Puppies and grandpa jumper.” For their part, although initially disappointed to discover he was offering to sign them to a label that did not yet exist (fittingly, it was soon named Fiction), The Cure soon warmed to Parry (Dempsey:“We were entertained by his casual manner”). Both shared an outsider’s perspective, had already been bruised by the establishment, and were driven by an entrenched belief they knew best. Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, these common instincts would soon conflict, but in September 1978, The Cure happily acquiesced with Parry’s still nebulous future. It wasn’t like anyone else had dunked their Digestive. “Without Chris Parry there would have been no Cure,” says Tolhurst. “We would have probably circled around the plughole a few more times, and disappeared. He was the only person from London who bothered to come and see us play in our hometown.” Parry’s plan was essentially to get Polydor to sign his new label: to demonstrate his viability he needed a Cure record out, pronto. An initial session at Morgan Studios yielded a stinging version of Killing An Arab, which all agreed should be the first single. Parry himself produced, with the studio’s in-house rookie Mike Hedges engineering, an arrangement repeated over two subsequent bookings in November and January, yielding some 25 songs, from which the debut Cure album Three Imaginary Boys emerged. Parry sought to distance The Cure from punk, without necessarily abandoning their astringent perspective on the human condition. “We wanted space,” he says. “How can we make this sound more lonely? Can we make this emptier? The approach was to take the songs and these three characters and make a really good record, but one that left you thinking, ‘These guys are a bit weird – there’s something not quite right here.’”
“th e early cu re was pu re nih ilism. we stripped away everyth ing Smith played with both bands, to confuse. In the Sounds cover following the exit of the headfeature, Smith stated that Hansa we loath ed inmu sic and liners’guitarist John McKay. Days had refused to entertain releasing fo u n d we were n o t left later, after a tense Cure meeting, it “’cos we had to keep in with the Smith phoned Chris Parry and told Arabs… it was so ridiculous.” On with mu ch .” mich ael him he would only continue “with a band tour in February 1979, other perspecdempsey I can get my head around” – ie. without tives were made apparent. The National Front showed up in force at the West Kensington Nashville Rooms. The next night, at Kingston Polytechnic, the students union banned them from playing Killing An Arab, until Smith explained the lyric’s A-level origins. “I don’t recall for a moment discussing how anybody might misconstrue this lyric,’ says Dempsey, Smith’s English Lit classmate, “but then we had overlooked the obvious:not everybody had read the book.” The Cure felt even more misconstrued when their album was released. On the subse-
Getty,Ray Stevenson/Shutterstock,© Philippe Carly - www.newwavephotos.com
This, he said, was how the album should have sounded. “Cr unchy cheap guitars, à la Buzzcocks,” says Parry. “Join the queue. Mike Hedges and I were not looking back at punk, we were looking forward.” “Robert says he doesn’t like the first album,” says Tolhurst. “Well, the reason is, because he wasn’t in control of it.” Parry’s studio methods caused friction, but far more contentious was his deciding on a tracklist (bizarrely including a version of Foxy Lady, sung by Dempsey) and artwork that infamously represented the trio as household appliances, without consulting The Cure. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Parry, “this was a young band. I wanted to do the best by them. But I needed to create something, and I knew how to create it and they didn’t.” Although Three Imaginary Boys presented a unique artistic into the world was proving fraught. Major bumps still lay ahead – and there would be casualties. “Perhaps all the problems with the making of Three Imaginary Boys demonstrated in one quick, early lesson, how not to do it,” says Dempsey. “And gave Robert, who was a ver y quick learner, the knowledge of what to avoid in the coming years.” Michael Dempsey played with The Cure for the last time at Hammersmith Odeon on October 15, 1979, the final date of an extraordinary tour supporting Siouxsie & The Banshees on which Robert Boys keep swinging:(main) The Cure at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, New York, March 29, 2019 (from left) Pearl Thompson, Boris Williams, Michael Dempsey, Lol Tolhurst, Perry Bamonte, Robert Smith, Jason Cooper, Roger O’Donnell, Simon Gallup, Reeves Gabrels;(above left) at the Marquee, March 4, 1979 (Joy Division supported); (right) Smith on the ’79 Banshees tour.
Dempsey. Smith invited Parry to his parents’
“I think Michael challenged Robert in a way that
In January 1980, Robert Smith took his
Seventeen Seconds, co-
not playing Tie A Yellow Ribbon…’” N MARCH 29, 2019, BEFORE A STAR-STUDded audience in New York, The Cure were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Accepting the honour from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, Robert Smith was flanked to his left by the current members of Dempsey and Tolhurst:the original three imaginary boys reunited. Significantly, Smith’s speech acknowledged just one other person. “When we very first started, and we were a teenage trio in 1978 playing in the south of England, at one of our very first shows this small bloke came along, and we weren’t very sure who he was. Chris Parry – proving that he did get something right after all.”
M
(from The Top, 1984)
(from Faith, 1981) “When all candles be out all cattes be gray.” – 16th century proverb. Inspired by a cavedweller in Mervyn Peake’s gothic Gormenghast books, as well as the death of Smith’s grandmother, All Cats Are Grey is nevertheless among The Cure’s most pleasingly ambient and psychedelic works. Warm, soft synths unfurl as Smith croons distantly about all cats being grey: a proverb Benjamin Franklin popularised to excuse his promiscuousness. The song found renewed appeal as a rave-era chill-out room staple, with Soft Cell’s Marc Almond enthusing about hearing it the first time he took ecstasy in New York. TK
(from The Head On The Door, 1985) Through the wardrobe to the Curepop renaissance. While no one could blame Smith for retreating to childhood after the gloom trilogy, the handclaps and xylophone scales here offer only superficial comfort. In the studio, Smith paired the music with a pre-existing lyric that relived the sense of dread and hallucinatory confusion he felt during an infant bout of chicken pox (the same “nightmare visions” gave the album its title). Tim Pope’s video famously channelled the track’s claustrophobia by locking The Cure in a wardrobe and throwing it off Beachy Head. JB
(Fiction single, 1979) Last stand for bassist Michael Dempsey. After a show in June ’79 with the Merton Parkas, Smith penned The Cure’s standalone third single, a swipe at the Mod/ska revivals. A careening smartpop piece that threatens to derail at any moment, the disdain
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(from Pornography, 1982)
Inside Robert Smith’s patchouliperfumed side-project. After 1982’s harrowing Pornography campaign, Robert Smith needed a holiday;instead, he entered into the prickly politics of Siouxsie & The Banshees, where Siouxsie and drummer Budgie, newly an item, were booked to record an album together as The Creatures. Thus, in late ’82 bassist Steve Severin seconded Smith into a tit-for-tat collaboration as The Glove, which resulted in three months of rolling sessions characterised by heavy drinking and LSD intake – just what the doctor ordered. The album, Blue Sunshine, furthered a Beatles interest already evident in the Banshees’ Smith-assisted cover of Dear Prudence (on which Smith’s sister Janet played harpsichord). Their alias, The Glove, referenced Yellow Submarine, and the music they created together was expert neo-psych updated by Smith’s predilection for synths and other hi-tech developments in percussion and production. Since Smith was contractually banned from singing in another band, they drafted in sometime Top Of The Pops dancer (and Budgie’s ex-girlfriend) Jeanette Landray, whose powerful voicing carried off Severin’s pervy/fried lyrics with gusto. Blue Sunshine – named after a Jeff Lieberman movie where those who ingest the titular acid later turn into psychopathic murderers – was too whacked for early-’80s chart action, but was clearly a queasy-pop prelude to The Love Cats, recorded three months later. But there was a mystery:why had The Glove taken Smith out of circulation for so long? One theory is that an ill-advised hair process had left Smith resembling bubble-permed soccer star Kevin Keegan, and he needed to lie low until it grew out. KEY SONG: Mr Alphabet Says, Smith sneaking in as singer on a piano-pumping Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da homage. AP
is palpable throughout, from the sharp lyric (“If you pick up on it quick/You can say you were there”) and detached delivery to the “sub Townshend” opening guitar chord, accelerating rhythm and glorious topping: Lol Tolhurst’s onomatopoeic speedingdown-the-track drum coda. LW
Putting the creepy into Crawley. Out of interdepartmental chaos – drugs, sauce, issues – The Cure’s makeor-forsake fourth album groans like a stricken liner amid death-rattle electronic beat and caterwauling guitar. Smith gets to the point:“It doesn’t matter if we all die.” Poe-infused imagery dances macabrely to bunking-off nihilism:“Something small falls out of your mouth… the death of her father pushing her.” Wickedly addictive, squalling, desperate, terrifying, off what was – naturally – their first Top 10 album. Smith took a restorative camping holiday. Critics, satisfied, danced on The Cure’s grave. ACol
(from Three Imaginary Boys, 1979) Suburban alienation gets its theme-tune. The deluxe edition of The Cure’s debut has an illuminating home demo of its opening track. Slowed down and played on his sister Janet’s Hammond organ, it reveals Smith’s Bowie fixation;in this case, roughly, the guitar part to Some Weird Sin off Iggy’s Lust For Life. Meanwhile, the album version is a metronomic race through suburban isolation imagery – strip lighting, tap dripping, telephone staying silent – befitting its hasty recording:at night, on cheap rates in Morgan Studios, Lol Tolhurst borrowing Jam drummer Rick Buckler’s kit. JB
(from Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, 1987) So good that Dinosaur Jr. got out of bed to cover it. Enough happens in the instrumental prelude alone to affirm Just Like Heaven’s greatness: the heavily torqued Gallup-Williams intro, yearning synth and giddy lead guitar create an entire plotline in 49 seconds, whereupon Smith’s vocal simply rides the euphoric wave to an eternal deep blue horizon:“Why are you so far away?” the girl asks the narrator, too lost in himself to notice. A perfect example of the muscular mid-’80s Cure’s capacity for powering Smith’s inner light to the world. KC
(Fiction single, 1979) Stiff-upper-lip England debunked. Featured on the demo that secured The Cure’s deal with Fiction, and later resonant enough to command its own episode of BBC Radio 4’s Soul Music, Boys Don’t Cry loosed the emotional repression of late ’70s Crawley, and helped lads everywhere feel feelings. Hatched in the party-room extension of Smith’s parents’ house, it ekes singular magic from Lol Tolhurst’s ritardando drum hook and Smith’s simple, rising guitar chords. The faux-naif mood masks real emotional intelligence. JMcN
Howard Tyler/Retna,Tom Sheehan
The mushroom tea kicks in… A neo-psychedelic campfire song that grew out of a far more ominous (and Pornography-like) demo, with heavy rolling tom-toms and lyrical spiders excised. The Caterpillar revelled in flamenco-ish pop:all castanets and congas, scratchy violin and madhouse piano. Robert Smith’s vocal piled on the anguished emotion (he later confessed he fretted he’d gone “too far” as he sang it). But, fittingly, romantic deception and possible guilt lay at its heart – when our narrator stops covering up his “lemon lies”, the girl will fly away. TD
The day his world turned Day-Glo: Robert Smith, 1985, with psychedelic socks from the In Between Days video.
(from The Head On The Door, 1985)
Glastonbury, 1986 and Saturday night headliners The Cure are putting on such an impressive show a thunderstorm has joined them on-stage. As lightning flashes overhead, Robert Smith makes a curious announcement:“This is a Ralph McTell song called In Between Days.” There’s no obvious connection between The Cure’s single and the Streets Of London folk singer, but the deadpan comment betrays Smith’s lurking unease about the fact In Between Days was written and partly performed on a McTell-friendly acoustic guitar, an instrument he had previously viewed with suspicion. “I’d always associated it with… not hippies,” said Smith in 2019, “but it wasn’t really in the spirit of punk, playing an acoustic guitar.” By 1985, though, The Cure themselves weren’t entirely in the spirit of punk:that skin had split, revealing new wings. In Between Days was The Cure’s fourth consecutive Top 20 hit in the UK, but if its predecessors felt like hothouse exotics, all cats, caterpillars and eccentric embellishments, In Between Days felt less fretful about subverting the hit-writing process. From Boris Williams’s opening drum burst to the final forlorn fade, it was an unmistakably glorious pop song, one broken
relationship crushed into two verses and three minutes. It was the first thing recorded during The Head On The Door sessions on a “really vibrant summer’s day”, the sunshine brightened by bassist Simon Gallup’s return after his post-Pornography estrangement. It feels generous, abundant, the intro rapidly layering drums, bass and that acoustic guitar, before the synth riff lifts the whole song up by its corners, throwing it into the blue. Yet underneath is the sound of a crashing low, the music bouncing Smith along from terror to defiance to abjection. The chorus is a slippery pileup of pronouns and prepositions:“I know I was wrong when I said it was true/That it couldn’t be me and be her/In between without you.” There’s a hint of a bizarre love triangle but the specific relationship geometry is unclear. The verses, though, unfold with the clarity of a post-punk Yesterday, as Smith sings of a lover who had to go, of saying something wrong, of being half the man he used to be:“Yesterday I got so old/I felt like I could die.” He also “shivered like a child”. Adulthood is a treacherous thing in The Cure’s world, and it’s not about to help now. Young and old, happy and sad:In Between Days exists in a state of perfect unresolved yearning, oscillating in its own never-ending story. “Just walk away,” sings Smith, “Come back to me.” A love song, a hate song, a pop song, a sad song. Everything in between. MOJO 75
Into the void:The Cure, April 1980 (from left) Lol Tolhurst, Robert Smith, Mathieu Hartley, Simon Gallup.
“It’s always the same” is such an archetypal Cure sentiment that before it appeared in A Forest it had featured in 10:15 Saturday Night. In one song Robert Smith is waiting for something that will never happen;in the other he is looking for someone who isn’t there. In real life, Smith was admirably prolific and ambitious but in his songs, the biggest Camus fan in Crawley suggested that action and inaction had the same result. He crystallised this existential quandary most brilliantly in A Forest:the sound of a band becoming themselves, even if they would later become many other things. In late 1979, dissatisfied with the scratchy, primitive Three Imaginary Boys, Smith had an icily clear idea of what he wanted The Cure’s second album to be. Writing the demos on a Woolworths guitar, a drum machine and his sister’s Hammond organ, his touchstones were David Bowie’s Low, Nick Drake’s Fruit Tree, Van Morrison’s Madame George, Jimi Hendrix’s performance of All Along The Watchtower at the Isle of Wight festival and the Adagio from Aram Khachaturian’s 1942 ballet Gayane, made famous by 2001:A Space Odyssey. Apart from the second side of Low – clean, modern, emptied-out – Seventeen Seconds doesn’t sound much like any of those but they got him where he needed to go. Compared to the dispiriting seven-month slog of making Faith a few months later, the Seventeen Seconds sessions with producer 76 MOJO
A FOREST IS LESS A SONG THAN AN ATMOSPHERE. SMITH once said that it stemmed from a dream about being trapped in the woods and it does have that tantalising dream-quality of pursuing something just out of reach, combined with the depressive’s sensation of being stuck with no hope that anything will, or even can, change. The lyric is self-negating. In the first verse, a siren call beckons the narrator into the trees:“Find the girl, if you can.” Then he takes over the story, doing as he’s told, only to find himself lost and alone. “The girl was never there/It’s always the same/I’m
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(Fiction single, 1980)
Mike Hedges at Morgan Studios in Willesden in January 1980 were virtually a party. Smith, drummer Lol Tolhurst and new recruits Simon Gallup (bass) and Matthieu Hartley (keyboards) recorded it in eight days and mixed it in seven, sleeping on the floor to save time and money. The watchword was minimalism. “Anyone who wanted to play more than one piano note could go and do it somewhere else,” Smith explained. This bare-bones aesthetic extended to the words. Most songs have scant or inaudible lyrics, two have none at all, and the palette of imagery is monochrome:empty rooms, night-time, cold, silence, time passing slowly. It is an album about absence and futility, where the only options are going through the motions or doing nothing. Still only 20, Smith was already trying to articulate in these cheerless songs the feeling that would soon overwhelm him. “I felt really old,” he remembered. “I felt life was pointless. I had no faith in anything.” The last song in the session, the one that took the most time, was A Forest.
running towards nothing.” Sameness, nothingness, neverness:these are the anti-qualities of which the young Robert Smith was the master. Action leads to another kind of stasis;change is worse than staying put. The effect is purgatorial. Like its protagonist, the song doesn’t really go anywhere but loops in cold, grey circles, “again and again and again and again…” One thing that distinguishes A Forest from a stone-cold bummer like All Cats Are Grey is that it moves at a fair old clip, propelled by Gallup’s indelible four-note bass line and Tolhurst’s clipped, motorik beat:“simultaneously rushing forward and standing still,” the drummer said recently. It may go nowhere but it goes nowhere fast. As various remixes and cover versions have revealed, it functions very effectively as dance music, the repetition trance-like and addictive. Even though the song does properly end rather than fading out, it gives the impression that it has been going on forever and you’ve just tuned in for six minutes. Even in the studio, Gallup didn’t know when it had actually finished. “The drums would stop, Robert would carry on playing guitar and I was never sure when he was going to stop so I’d just carry on after him,” he recalled. The song also feels too huge to be claustrophobic.
dimensional space, in which the music and lyrics were constantly describing each other. A Forest feels like a forest:the rhythm section running close to the ground, the synths hovering at the treeline alongside Smith’s frosty moan, the guitar circling like birds. No wonder the video and sleeve art were so literal. As the novelist Ian Rankin has said, “It sounds like a film waiting to be made, almost certainly in black and white.” It’s either that or something like The Blair Witch Project. A Forest is, after all, a kind of ghost story. A Forest gave The Cure their first Top 40 hit but it really lives on stage, where it is by far the most performed song in their catalogue. Its psychedelicjam quality means that it can be prolonged indefinitely and still feel too short, turning depression into ecstasy and straitened solitude into communal motion. Smith has written stronger melodies and sharper lyrics but nothing so inexhaustibly compelling – nothing that insists so forcefully on being heard again and again and again and again. MOJO 77
Music’s legends. MOJO’s finest writers. The full stories.
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MOJO FILTE R YOUR GUIDE TO THE MONTH'S BEST MUSIC EDITED BY JENNY BULLEY jenny.bulley@bauermedia.co.uk
CONTENTS
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ALBUMS • Anticyclonic effect:a new album from The Weather Station • From Mogwai, with love • Lone star:Steve Earle • Plus, the month in Jazz and Electronica. Foo Fighters, Goat Girl, Femi Kuti, Django Django, Tindersticks, John Carpenter, The Staves, Osees and more.
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REISSUES • Serge Gainsbourg:back to fidélité monorale • Rebels with a cause:the Nat Turner Rebellion • File Under:The Band • Nirvana (the other one) on vinyl • Plus, J Dilla, Gary Lucas, Nancy Sinatra, Spiritual Jazz, Mad Professor and more.
1 0 0 HOW TO BUY • Locating the essence of Lucinda Williams.
1 0 3 SCREEN • We can all kiss Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.
1 0 4 BOOKS • The semi-mythical Velvet Mafia • Plus Hendrix, Incredible String Band, and more.
“Gainsbourg made a habit of failing to an extraordinary degree.” TOP OF LE FLOPS WITH DAVID HUTCHEON, REISSUES P9 2
INDEX Aerial East Alostmen Another Michael Another New Thing Baio Band, The Besnard Lakes, The Bicep Black Country, New Road Blakeslee, Guy Bravo, Fimber Brennan, Patricia Brickell, Edie Brokaw, Chris Brooklyn Raga Massive Carpenter, John Curved Air Dagsland, Sturle Dead Daisies, The Dilla, J Disco Zombies Divide And Dissolve Django Django Earle, Steve Ellis, Carwyn Foo Fighters Gainsbourg, Serge
85 90 83 88 89 96 90 89 90 87 88 87 87 82 85 89 97 83 86 94 98 83 86 84 89 82 92
Gibb, Barry Glass House Goat Girl Guided By Voices Hey Colossus King, Evelyn ‘Champagne’ Kirby, Katy Kuti, Femi Kuti, Made Lamarr, Delvon Lindahl, Mason Lost Horizons Lucas, Gary Mad Professor McCreadie, Fergus Mogwai Nance, David Nat Turner Rebellion Neale, Lael Nirvana Notwist, The Nubyian Twist O’Rouke, Declan O’Sullivan, Daniel + Youngs, Richard Osees Rats On Rafts Resende, Marcos
82 94 82 88 85 94 90 86 86 87 88 85 95 98 87 83 83 94 88 97 85 90 82 90 86 86 95
Rhye 85 Sanko, Myles 87 Savage, Anna B 89 Screamers 91 Sinatra, Nancy 95 Slowthai 88 Staves, The 86 Stone, Bill 95 Subliminals, The 97 Sweet, Matthew 86 Timony, Mary 95 Tindersticks 88 TP Orchestre PolyRythmo De Cotonou 9 8 VA: Café Exil 97 VA: Spiritual Jazz 13 9 5 VA: Tokyo Dreaming 9 7 VA: Two Synths, A Guitar (And) A Drum Machine 97 VA: Totale Of La Bande À Renaud 97 Viagra Boys 90 Weather Station, The 8 0 Whitney K 85 Wilson, Jackie 95 Winged Victory For The Sullen, A 89 Woods, Danny 94
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F I LT E R A L B UM S
Forty-six degrees of separation The challenge of loving a world on fire: Tamara Lindeman’s climate grief masterpiece is a new kind of protest record. By JohnMu lvey. Illustration by Corey Brickley. freestyling on saxophone, percussion, flecked electric guitar, abrupt piano chords of the kind Mark Hollis would once leave hanging in dead air. The lowering accents of a string section provide an atmosphere akin to that of Massive Attack’s Ignorance Unfinished Sympathy. And then, hovering above it FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP/MC all, Lindeman’s voice, outlining how our world has been stolen from us by an elite business class whose HERE ARE NOW, perhaps unsurprisingly, criminality goes mostly undetected. The plan, (as academics who study the emotional rather Lindeman explains on page 82), is to draw on than the physical impact of climate change. “order and chaos”, but there’s a lot of space and One is Panu Pihkala, a specialist in eco-anxiety at room to manoeuvre in the mix, too. The Weather the University of Helsinki. In a BBC online piece Station have never been this accessible before, or from last April, Pihkala wrote about using the work “The music this experimental. The combination is urgent, and of grief researchers who’d investigated the impact of is frantic and gripping, as the subject matter demands. bereavement. “[William] Worden defined that one of This, it soon transpires, is the model for much of the key tasks in the grief process is ‘the adjustment to gorgeous, Ignorance. As a folk singer who always previously a new environment’,” Pihkala observed. “Something a sensory composed on guitar, Lindeman’s vocal melodies has profoundly changed, something or someone is tended to direct the ebb and flow of the music. But either lost or in the process of going away, and grief overload.” on these 10 songs, she often seems thrillingly can help us to adjust… These definitions match the unanchored, buffeted by the tangents of the needed scale of climate grief.” improvising players, carried along by the persistent “organic disco” On first listen, much of the fifth album by Tamara Lindeman, rhythms. She has long written with precision about uncertainty, an exceptional Canadian singer-songwriter who performs as The describing in a very measured way emotions in transition. Here, Weather Station, appears to be about the end of an affair. One though, there is often a necessary air of panic. song, Trust, specifically mentions a divorce, and “court “My God, my God, what a sunset,” she exclaims at the start of proceedings”. But then Lindeman asks for the evidence to be Atlantic, as she recalls lying in a field, a little drunk, watching presented:“The baskets of wild roses, the crumpled petals and shearwaters fly overhead. The music is frantic and gorgeous, a misshapen heads of reeds and rushes/The bodies of the common sensory overload to match the sunset, but her anxiety permeates birds, robins, crows, and thrushes.” Ignorance is about many things, even these ecstatic moments. How, she implies, do we recalibrate but again and again it uses elaborate our aesthetic responses to beauty when that beauty is being metaphors of a dysfunctional relationship, existentially threatened? “I should get all this dying off my mind,” of the loss of a loved one, to articulate she admits. “I should really know better than to read the headlines.” Lindeman’s own personal climate grief. To It isn’t, of course, quite that easy. On Parking Lot – svelte, mourn the imminent passing of, as she puts pacey adult pop;a little Christine McVie, perhaps – she becomes it in Trust, “Everything that I have loved preoccupied with a bird flying above the venue where she’s about and all the light touches.” to play a show. Again, the spectacle of the present makes the future An environmental break-up album is an unbearable. Grief paralyses. “Is it all right if I don’t wanna sing original but challenging concept, but it’s in BACK STORY: tonight?” she sings. “I know you are tired of seeing tears in my eyes.” safe, skilled hands with Lindeman. For just WEATHER ’TIS Ignorance is hardly the first record to find attractive musical NOBLER IN over a decade, she has been releasing literate THE MIND… ways to articulate sadness, but Lindeman’s triumph is more and finely-wrought folk albums as The ● Around the time The sophisticated than a simple contrast. The ravishing music is Weather Station were Weather Station;albums that have often – studded with jazz details – the impressionistic gusts of saxophone starting up, Tamara thanks to her poetic candour, her Lindeman was winding and flute;Lindeman’s own clangorous guitar overdubs – that add understated, deceptively offhand way with down an early-2 0 0 0 s a neurotic edge to the proceedings. The words, meanwhile, acting career – as a melody, and of course her nationality – luxuriate in the prettiness of our world, the better to emphasise Tamara Hope – that had brought comparisons with Joni Mitchell. spanned youthful roles what we’re in the process of losing. It’s a mix that embraces As with Mitchell, though, folk music could as Elizabeth I and Tilda complexity and eschews the normal vocabulary of protest, but Swinton’s daughter, and only contain her talent for so long. If 2015’s finds a new and highly personalised one that’s every bit as potent. as a snowboarder in Loyalty and 2017’s The Weather Station found Canadian TV series These are difficult subjects, but Lindeman is gifted enough to Lindeman carefully expanding the Whistler. “Maybe acting express them with a clarity of nuance. Heart, like Trust, is another influenced my interest parameters of her sound, Ignorance, song where love could either be for a person or for an entire in being scrupulously recorded swiftly in the spring and early truthful,” she said in ecosystem;what matters is her need to assert that love’s validity. 2 0 1 5 . “Music allowed me summer of 2019, blows it wide open. “Don’t ask me for indifference, don’t come to me for distance,” to be fully present in a The album begins with Robber, and she sings, and this is what Ignorance delivers:the document of an way that’s difficult in a sense of four distinct musical ideas life, let alone in the introvert empowered by the vastest crisis of passion imaginable. film industry. It was happening at once. There is a rhythm the place I went to section holding down a clipped, linear STATION CHIEF ON NEBULOUS be honest.” RHYTHM AND BEING SQUISHY. groove. A second tranche of musicians
The Weather Station
★★★★
Getty
T
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TAMARA TALKS!
Declan O’Rourke
★★★★
★★★★
Greenfields: The Gibb Brothers Songbook Vol. 1
Arrivals
UNIVERSAL. CD/DL/LP
The Bee Gees’song catalogue gets the Nashville treatment.
“Lyrics are scary”: Tamara Lindeman, testing her limits.
“I was writing from a bluntly emotional place.” The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman speaks to JohnMu lvey. Did you have a defined idea of how Ignorance would sound when you started work on it? “I did, actually. I wanted to have these conflicting qualities of vulnerability and propulsive strength, and this order and chaos. I have such bad rhythm;I love The Incredible String Band and all this music that’s very nebulous, rhythmically. But I thought it’d be nice to take a break from that. In part, because my nebulous rhythm makes it difficult for me to play music with other people, and I wanted to make space for other musicians to accompany me. And it came out, essentially, how I wanted it to, which was great.” Were there any specific records that inspired you? “As I was talking about this sound I wanted to make, a few people said, ‘That sounds like Talk Talk.’ Then I listened to Talk Talk, and I was like, Oh my God, I love this, but I can’t listen to it because I’m gonna be too influenced by it. But for sure, it gave me that little jolt of permission.” How did you come up with the album’s concept of our treatment of the environment playing out as a dysfunctional relationship? “I was going through something people have started to describe as climate grief, or climate anxiety. I found it to be a radicalising experience that broke me open in a very profound way. I was writing from a bluntly emotional place and I tried, more than usual, to let it be that way. I’m very critical. I’m afraid of words, they’re so permanent, and lyrics are really scary. That’s why I take so long to write a song. But I challenged myself to let some of the lyrics stand that seemed far too emotional, because I felt I was expressing something very elemental. “There’s this profound conflict in the way everyone relates to each other right now. I think it exists for good reasons:people are trying to change the world. But there’s also this level of, how can you learn to relate to a person when everything you see around you is so unloving and unaccepting? I’ve been thinking a lot about how so many people were, and are, completely entranced by Donald Trump. Why is that? And how is that any different from emotional abuse in relationships, and why people don’t leave abusive partners? What is it about our minds that we call so many things love that are the opposite of love? And why are we building this world that’s so ahuman? It’s like we’re building a world for robots, forgetting that we’re very soft, squishy, vulnerable, sensitive beings.” In 2015 you told me your songwriting was a reaction to your early acting career, because you wanted to be “scrupulously truthful”. Is that still the case? “I’ve never changed. I feel my task in life is to figure out how to be honest. I’ve been testing my limits a little bit this year:what happens if I say exactly what I mean? Surprisingly, it’s often pretty good. Being an actor was cool, because I got to make money and travel and meet people. But it was a dangerous thing for someone like me to do, because it made me very porous to the world. I wish I’d known I was allowed to protect myself. I’m only learning that now.”
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Recorded in RCA Studios amid the sonic ghosts of Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison and The Everly Brothers, Barry Gibb’s take on modern country – despite the presence of Jason Isbell and Gillian Welch/ David Rawlings – is defiantly mainstream. Still, it’s certainly not weedy, relying on big Nashville arrangements filled with swelling strings and modulating Hammond organ. The lovelorn yearning and recurring self-flagellation of the Gibbs’s songs are perfect for country, with the septuagenarian fragility of Barry’s voice only adding to the emotional weight as he trades verses with Brandi Carlile on Run To Me and Sheryl Crow on How Can You Mend A Broken Heart. It’s not all countrified, either:Lonely Days from 1970’s 2 Years On faithfully retains its baroque pop vibe and Kinks-y swing. Best of all is Gibb, Welch and Rawlings adding soaring heart to the premature nostalgia of 1966’s Butterfly. Tom Doyle
EASTWEST. CD/DL/LP
Celebrity producer aside, his seventh studio album is his best yet. If producer Paul Weller was behind Declan O’Rourke’s decision to make an album largely featuring just himself and his acoustic guitar, then give the man a medal. O’Rourke has been a ‘best kept secret’ ever since his 2004 debut in spite of picking up fans such as Weller, John Prine and Eddi Reader. Equally at home on trad folk ground singing about transport ships (Convict Ways), laughing at himself for age-inappropriate partying on Andy Sells Coke, or observing philosophical tilers (The Harbour), O’Rourke is a masterful lyricist and staggering guitarist. Stripped back like this, allowing both his lyrical and picking dexterity to shine, he deserves to be talked about in the same breath as Michael Chapman or Prine himself. Ultimately, Weller’s involvement may be a red herring for ‘Modfather’ fans, but as a bit of marketing it deserves to pay off handsomely for O’Rourke. Andy Fyfe
Foo Fighters Chris Brokaw
★★★★ Puritan 12XU. DL/LP
Prolific, much-travelled East Coast guitarist’s 10th solo long-player. Membership of both Codeine and Come places Chris Brokaw in the heartsore vanguard of the US underground, but it’s the guitarist’s sheer versatility – jangling in the Lemonheads or avantgardening with Rhys Chatham – that decisively characterises Puritan. Here Brokaw returns his weatherbeaten voice to the helm of a rock band, alongside bassist Dave Carlson and drummer Pete Koeplin, an understated trio with flex appeal:from I’m The Only One For You’s reverberant doo wop through the spectral The Bragging Rights (with vocal from Come’s Thalia Zedek), they then harness the fissile energy of epic Wipers-go-Crazy Horse flare-out The Heart Of Human Trafficking. A master of veiled melody and tonal nuance, Brokaw’s essence lies amid the high plains drift of Depending: “I’m bound for something new/And I won’t depend on you,” he sings, the veteran who still doesn’t quite fit in any one place. Keith Cameron
★★★ Medicine At Midnight ROSWELL/COLUMBIA. CD/DL/LP
Foos’tenth brings the big rock moves but lacks lyrical resonance. Begun as an act of catharsis, Foo Fighters have evolved into a showcase for Dave Grohl’s versatility as a rock craftsman, especially on their first collaboration with popattuned producer Greg Kurstin, 2017’s Concrete And Gold. Kurstin returns here, Grohl once again demonstrating his impressive stylistic flexibility, flitting between funk-as-QOTSA-would-play-it
(Shame Shame), half-speed Motörhead pastiche (No Son Of Mine) and lovely soft rock balladry (Chasing Birds). But though Grohl’s abundant affection for his inspirations is infectious and his gift for a tune remains infallible, Medicine At Midnight is strangely impersonal, with little to declare beyond its maker’s skill at the form. The lyrics, meanwhile, are often undercooked, the likes of Making A Fire’s gospelharmonising hard rock wedded to platitudinous placeholder catchphrases. Grohl has never hidden his love for the Big Rock Moves, but the absence of punk rock’s intimacy leaves Medicine At Midnight feeling off-balance. Stevie Chick
Goat Girl
★★★★ On All Fours ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP
Caprine south Londoners’ inventive second LP. On All Fours exists in a queasy, halfawake state that feels like it could slip into a nightmare at any moment. The quartet’s debut lurched and snarled like The Fall on heavy tranquillizers, and while that uneasy distemper remains, here it’s mutated into something subtler. Songs build from hypnotic bass grooves and spindly guitar lines, Lottie Pendlebury’s nonchalant vocals intertwined with circular countermelodies that pull you into their undertow (they’re really good at an outro). Lyrically deft and witty, P.T.S.Tea uses drummer Rosie Jones being scalded at a breakfast buffet as an allegory for male aggression. The softly melancholic Anxiety Feels captures the day-to-day dreariness of depression, while They Bite On You mirrors Pendlebury’s account of having scabies with a suitably skin crawling atmosphere. Even as relatively optimistic closer A-Men drifts off into the sunset, Goat Girl’s warped, off-kilter MO means you fear what the next night might have in store. Chris Catchpole Goat Girl:deft and witty.
Daniel Dorsa
Barry Gibb
Glasgow kisses Glasgow’s now slightly older team still in conquering form on Zoomproduced tenth. By Andrew Perry.
Mogwai
★★★★ As The Love Continues ROCK ACTION. CD/DL/LP
A QUARTER-century into an unflashy career, Glasgow’s Mogwai go from strength to strength, hitting the grown-up Top 10 with their last two records, and breaking into movies and arenas. Circa late-’90s, lurid tales of Euro-festival hi-jinks seemed to ‘explain’ their feral, party-hard take on post-rock, where quiet-loud marathons such as Like Herod unleashed spasms of savage feedback, more pumped on punk and post-hardcore than any mathematics. Big-league auspices were virtually zero. Their first soundtrack, for 2006’s footballhero doc Zidane:A 21st Century Portrait, crystallised the cinematic potential of their expansive, mostly vocal-free journeys-in-sound. Upward mobility ensued, until touring 2017’s Dave Fridmann-produced Every Country’s Sun culminated with a ‘post-rock Spike Island’ at their hometown enormodome, the SSE Hydro. Its successor, As The Love Continues, sees Fridmann producing his fourth Mogwai LP via video link:prevented from travelling to his upstate New York facility, the band recorded at Vale Studios in rural Worcestershire, with
David Nance
Warehouse music:Mogwai enjoy their sonic zoom.
the Mercury Rev/Flaming Lips overseer also chipping in later during post-production and mixing. To The Bin My Friend, Tonight We Vacate Earth raises the curtain with proof that the core quartet can largely manage alone. It’s a masterclass in surging dynamics as a two-note bass pulse, one-finger piano, atmospheric synths, a tapped cymbal and simple guitar picking are deftly interwoven, gradually building until, at 2:32, fuzzed electric chords crunch in, soon overlaid with the kind of meanderingly triumphant synth melody which makes Mogwai accessible to anyone, if not pop radio. At the outset, the track’s only words – its title – are spoken by Benjamin John Power, of Fuck Buttons fame, from a recording of him sleep-talking. Such titular in-jokes have long deflated any perceived pomposity in their otherwise wordless aural majesty. Mogwai’s tenth non-OST album also has their clearest vocal to date, not from a guest,
Covers Come Off have the torn and frayed country basement vibe of Exile On Main St., and there’s a prevailing hint of Alex Chilton circa Like Flies On Sherbert. Nevertheless, Nance also recalls Chicago’s undervalued Califone, focused more than dissolute;a low-key artisan making skeletal rock’n’roll sound fresh and radical again. John Mulvey
★★★★ Staunch Honey TROUBLE IN MIND. CD/DL/LP
Fifth album from Nebraskan avant-garage visionary. Listeners to last month’s MOJO CD, Psych Ops, will already be familiar with David Nance’s This Side Of The Moon, a bony outlier amidst the prevailingly frantic garage rock therein. Nance, from Omaha, has been finessing a skewed take on rock classicism for a few years now (2017’s Negative Boogie is another keeper), usually with a minimal but rowdy band backing him. Staunch Honey is mostly Nance at home, multitracking himself, though the grooves of July Sunrise and If The Truth Ever Shows Up – kosmische boogie, loosely – feel way more organic than that might suggest. The Merchandise and When The
Divide And Dissolve
★★★★ Gas Lit
Are Really Worried About You allow more space for Reed’s heavily-treated soprano sax to puncture the intense humming of doom. Broken up by a spoken word call to arms from Minori Sanchiz-Fung that’s hardly an invitation to Glee Club, a brooding beauty gradually emerges from within the extreme heaviness, captured with unerring clarity by Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson. Dissonant yet heavenly, Gas Lit is an album that seethes, soothes, liberates and bewitches in equal measures. Andy Cowan
INVADA. CD/DL/LP
Melbourne noise duo’s third slab of instrumental activism. Takiaya Reed and Sylvie Nehill expressly designed their wordless protest music with one purpose – to abolish white supremacy. While the Cherokee guitarist and Māori drummer defined their intensely physical, dangerously low-end style amid the bludgeoning riffs, warped drones and ceaseless cymbals of 2017’s Basic and 2018’s Abomination, Gas Lit’s standouts Oblique, Denial and We
Another Michael
★★★★ New Music And Big Pop
but from guitarist/mouthpiece Stuart Braithwaite. Where the voice on Here We… Go Forever is FX’d beyond verbal recognition, on Ritchie Sacramento it’s startlingly bare and comprehensible, as Braithwaite combines wistful musing on obsolescence and borderline-Coldplay anthemics. Other tracks erode sonic boundaries:Dry Fantasy could be the closest they’ve come to outright techno, its keyboard motif matching the futuristic Far-East beauty of vintage Yellow Magic Orchestra (is Ritchie Sacramento a pun on Ryuichi Sakamoto?), while Midnight Flit integrates violin swirls arranged by latter-day Nine Inch Nails avatar Atticus Ross. Elsewhere, horses-for-courses thrills like Drive The Nail’s mammoth MBV strum, Ceiling Granny’s loping Dinosaur Jr groove and Supposedly We Were Nightmares’ Michael Rother-fronts-Joy Division propulsion are top-quality on yet another high water mark in Mogwai’s irresistible rise.
Painstakingly crafted but delivered with an intoxicating lightness of touch, the songs of the titular Michael Doherty are beatific, sun-soaked things. There’s an endearing innocence to Doherty’s semi-acoustic soft-pop confections and his earnest, conversational, hearton-sleeve directness. And while the autumnal folk rock of I’m Not Home strikes a darker note, Another Michael’s debut album mostly plays to his whimsical, vulnerable impulses, with Shaky Cam suggesting Shudder To Think at their most playful and delicate, and Hone dovetailing into devotional harmonies whispering “break my heart”. The weightlessly tuneful Big Pop, meanwhile, is an unabashed pile-up of candied hooks, capturing Doherty’s art at its apex. Stevie Chick
RUN FOR COVER. CD/DL/LP
Philadelphia trio’s warmhearted, dulcet pop debut. New Music And Big Pop is an understated treat, channelling the fragility, wiry falsetto and deft orchestration of early Built To Spill, along with the homespun romanticism of My Morning Jacket, and even R.E.M. at their most chamber-pop.
Sturle Dagsland
water reservoir, an abandoned industrial estate and a remote island lighthouse:inhospitable worlds that have seeped into a mutating landscape of electronica, noise, ambience and multiple indigenous instruments, including Zimbabwe finger harp, Norwegian billy goat horn and fretless zither. Dagsland casts such a spell, it feels closer to sorcery than songwriting. Throughout, he croons, squeals and jabbers, sometimes (the folk-operatic Waif, for example) resembling a male Björk. Blood and ancestry frequently emerge:Noaidi references his Sami mother;Blót details a Norse blood sacrifice ritual; Nyckelharpa – inspired by the vast fjords on his doorstep – epitomises the frozen north, simultaneously beautiful, terrifying and exhilarating, which goes for this astonishing record as a whole. Martin Aston
★★★★ Sturle Dagsland STURLE DAGSLAND. DL/LP
Norwegian debutant’s avant-rock adventure. Sturle Dagsland clearly doesn’t believe in short cuts. Recording locations across Scandinavia and Russia for his first album include an old
MOJO 83
Steve Earle with his son Justin Townes ‘J.T.’ Earle:“My arms had never felt so empty.”
The great Texan troubadour’s heartfelt tribute to his son. By Sylvie Simmons.
Steve Earle
★★★★ J.T. NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP
IN AUGUST last year, Steve Earle posted a photo of himself and his firstborn son on Twitter. In the picture Steve is seated and his adult son lies shirtless in his lap. A lot like the Pietà – except the two of them are laughing. Earle’s tweet read simply:“Justin Townes Earle 1982-2020”. J.T., as Steve called him, died that month of an accidental overdose, aged 38. J.T. will be released on what would have been its namesake’s 39th birthday. J.T. left behind a respectable Americana catalogue of one EP and eight full albums, and 10 of these 11 tracks are covers of his songs. It’s not the first time Earle’s recorded a tribute album to someone he loved – in 2009 there was Townes (Van Zandt, whom J.T. was
84 MOJO
named for) and in 2019 Guy (Clark, Earle’s other mentor). But it’s hard to imagine an undertaking more harrowing than recording a tribute to a dead son. Even Earle’s linernotes are heartwrenching, opening with a description of J.T.’s birth and the nurse placing the baby in his father’s arms. “I don’t know how I ever negotiated the walk down the hall without tripping over my own two feet,” he writes. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him and he looked right back at me, hardly blinking, as if to say, ‘I know you.’ After a bit of a gentle tug-of-war at the nursery door I reluctantly relinquished custody to the nurse. My arms had never felt so empty… For better or worse, right or wrong, I loved Justin Townes Earle more than anything else on Earth. That being said, I made this record, like every other record I’ve ever made, for me. It was the only way I knew to say goodbye.” But not, for the most part, a mournful goodbye. It’s too celebratory for that. More of a wake than a dirge. Having the Dukes accompany him rather than going it alone was a smart idea, bringing a back-porch warmth to I Don’t Care and Ain’t Glad I’m Leaving,
Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now. But Earle saves the closing song for himself. “I was there when you were born, took you from your mama’s arms,” he sings in Last Words “I wish I could have held you when you left this world.” It’s an honest, heartfelt ending to a truly fine album. All proceeds from sales will go into a trust for J.T.’s three-year-old daughter.
Sarah Sharpe
One from the heart
and a lively energy to rousing barroom countryblues Champagne Corolla and old-style country They Killed John Henry. There are a few dark numbers (Lone Pine Hill;The Saint Of Lost Causes) but even in the warmer songs there are lyrics about love, death and leaving that can cause goose-pimples. Like slow, lovely Far Away In Another Town: “Next time you come looking I won’t be around.” Or upbeat Harlem River Blues – the album’s highlight – “Tell my mama I love her, tell my father I tried/Give my money to my baby to spend/’Cos I’m going uptown to the Harlem River to drown.” Though some albums were bypassed, the selections are pretty comprehensive, from J.T.’s first EP in 2007 to his last album The Saint Of Lost Causes in 2020. There are four songs from The Good Life and one each from Midnight At The Movies, Kids In The Street and
F I LT E R A L B UM S
Brooklyn Raga Massive
★★★★ In D
Feel Good Hit Of The Summer, and each successive track builds in intensity from such clanging, undeviating repetition. Its centrepiece, A Trembling Rose, stretches that propulsive MO past the quarter-hour mark, two minutes from its end adding a third guitarist for a skull-busting finale. The second half of Dances/Curses busts different moves, exploring sonic depthof-field, twangier dynamics and a spoken word ‘feature’ from Mark Lanegan. All told, pretty colossal. Andrew Perry
necessary salt and acid. Yet with the knowing retroetherealism of Every Beat That Passed (featuring Swedish vocalist Kavi Kwai) or Cordelia’s new age tides controlled by John Grant, In Quiet Moments opens out its own space to wander, a many-moods piece for complicated times. Victoria Segal
Rhye
MORR MUSIC. CD/DL/LP
LOMA VISTA. CD/DL/LP
Terry Riley’s In C gets its deserved sequel.
Canadian-MoldovanUkrainian Michael Milosh’s fourth album.
Lost Horizons
★★★★ In Quiet Moments BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
Second album from superduo contains multitudes. In 2017, former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde and Dif Juz drummer Richie Thomas reignited a collaboration they originally started in the ’80s, resulting in the dawn-to-dusk atmospheres of expansive debut Ojala. In Quiet Moments creates a similar ombré effect, an impressive cast of guests – John Grant, Midlake’s Tim Smith, Ren Harvieu – helping shade these songs from happy to sad. Not everything is as striking as the cosmic glide of the title track, featuring Portland soul veteran Ural Thomas, or One For Regret, Porridge Radio’s Dana Margolin adding
In 2013 Woman seemed to herald the arrival of a major new talent in the form of two-man Rhye. Three albums later, Rhye have shed a member and seemingly surrendered their commercial momentum. Now, it seems to be time to fly again and Home is as challenging as it is comforting. Michael Milosh, a classically trained cellist with a voice spookily reminiscent of Sade (Sweetest Revenge resembles The Sweetest Taboo in more than title), has delved into ostensibly smooth but curveball-laden, distinctly adult R&B with a Darren Hayesstyle twist. Along the way, he underpins his subtle, insistent grooves with orchestral swell and piano (most beautifully on Fire), while the Danish National Girls’ Choir guest on the bookends Intro and
★★★★ Lo-fi Canadian explores wobbly path away from Americana.
Vertigo Days
Home
Whitney K MAPLE DEATH. CD/DL/LP
★★★
★★★
too much deliberation went into the creation of Vertigo Days. This may coalesce in a live setting. Kieron Tyler
Two Years
The Notwist
BRM. DL
Good idea, this. In 2017, the self-explanatory Brooklyn Raga Massive released a transporting take on In C:a version of the minimalist classic reconfigured for the Indian drone instrumentation that had inspired Terry Riley. Riley loved the Raga Massive’s interpretation, and planned a collaboration, but when the date fell through the collective’s Neel Murgai and David Ellenbogen conceived this sequel, In D. As with Riley’s original, In D is built out of musical “cells” that each participant can play in any order – a potential recipe for chaos that somehow coalesces into this beautiful music:steeped in Indian classical tradition, open-ended enough to embrace notes of jazz, klezmer and more, as well as cosmic minimalism. And like In C, In D proves to be a triumph of ornate and intuitive community playing – even though the 25 musicians (including Riley’s son Gyan on guitar) were masked and spaced out in the studio. Ecstatic groupthink can transcend, it seems, social distancing. John Mulvey
Outro. Everything comes together on Black Rain which initially hurtles along like a disco favourite, but, apropos of nothing, somersaults to emerge as something quite hypnotically Krautrock. Right now, there is nobody quite like Michael Milosh. John Aizlewood
Venerable German sonic architects balance the hard with the soft. When Vertigo Days comes into focus, a great beauty is revealed. Night’s Too Dark is a delicate reflection with a gentle motorik chug and a sighing vocal. Similarly yearning, Loose Ends has the spaciness of The Chills in their prime. Overall though, the ninth studio album in 30 years from Germany’s The Notwist feels out of reach, as if shrouded in gauze. While Exit Strategy To Myself and Into The Ice Age elegantly merge Tago Mago and Future Days Can, a vapourousness induces distance. During Al Sur, featuring Juana Molina, the curtain pulls back to reveal a sharpness absent elsewhere. When this is contrasted with the flashes of loveliness, the diffuse area between these poles is revealed as the album’s weak point. Perhaps
AerialEast
Konner Whitney may hail from the lessthan white hot rock’n’roll capital of Whitehorse, Yukon (pop. about the same as Bishop Auckland), but that doesn’t prevent him from making a remarkably sophisticated musical blend. Taking ingredients from Mark E Smith, Lou Reed, Jeff Tweedy and others, his debut album is charmingly – but deceptively – lo-fi and ramshackle. Although rooted in the sounds associated with plaid shirts and woolly denim jackets, from the scratchy opening of Good Morning, Whitney spins into Americana’s outer reaches as he charts two years of personal change and self-development. Occasional overearnest missteps are more than compensated for by the tongue-in-cheek longing of Me Or The Party #165 and the acquiescence to love of poignant closer Maryland, inventing exciting new directions for roots music all along the way. Andy Fyfe
Aerial East’s distinctive vision.
★★★★ Try Harder PARTISAN. DL/LP
Hey Colossus
★★★★ Dances/Curses WRONG SPEED. CD/DL/LP
Brianna Capozzi
Thirteen albums in, DIY Brit heavy rockers’eureka moment. This longrunning sextet’s most high-profile phase, with doom/postmetal bastion Rocket Recordings through the mid-2010s, saw them meting out Swansmeets-Idles pummellings ever heedless of listener care. With this first self-release on Wrong Speed, that unbending stance has shifted, very much for the better, revealing a muscular, diversely able ensemble now occupying the middle ground between Queens Of The Stone Age’s stoner groove and The Black Angels’ Doors-flavoured neo-psych. Hey Colossus’s 76-minute voyage of discovery opens, on The Eyeball Dance, with a sibling riff to QOTSA’s
Brooklyn-based Texan’s second long-player of adventurous desert folk.
THE DAUGHTER of a military family, Aerial East spent much of her childhood in Europe, and that enforced wanderlust and her return to west Texas as a rootless teenager informs much of the desert folk-tinged Try Harder. Wholly drumsfree, it takes time to reveal its charms. It’s a slow moving galleon of a collection where East’s wistful, Kate Havnevikstyle vocals glide over textures which take unlikely tangents, such trombone on the angelic I Love Dick, or the jazzy, jungle background noise which makes Doin’ Somethin’ sound like a ship-
The Things We Build, which owes as much to The Wayfaring Stranger as Mary Margaret O’Hara, and the heart-breaking Ryan, she excels at
unvarnished beauty too. The highly regarded Okay Kaya adds throaty vocals to the brief-but-bitter Jonas Said, but this is one woman’s distinctive vision.
John Aizlewood
MOJO 85
F I LT E R A L B UM S The Staves: triumph from tumult. often charms. “I wanted to tell the ugly truth”, Sweet has said. And so he has. Beautifully. James McNair
Osees
★★★★ Metamorphosed ROCK IS HELL. LP
Another set in John Dwyer’s latest musical splurge.
Jessica and Camilla Staveley-Taylor have
The Staves
★★★★ Good Woman ATLANTIC. CD/DL/LP
Strong showing from Watford’s singing sisters after six years.
BIRTH, BEREAVEMENT, breakups:since the release of The Staves’ last full album, 2015’s Justin Vernon-produced If I Was, Emily,
integrated desire to push at the edges of
sisters have turned that pain and drama into this elegantly nuanced third album, their subtle, sea-glassy voices (Jessica sang on Leonard Cohen’s posthumous Thanks For The Dance) able to reflect the sunshine melancholy of Best Friend or the clouded tension of Devotion with equal clarity. There’s a well-
glint of Bon Iver or The Flaming Lips crunch on Careful, Kid neither overspills their songs, nor obliterates them. It’s the Fleetwood Mac drive of the title track that stands as the album’s defining, defying statement, however;a demand to be heard on their own terms.
The Dead Daisies
Django Django
★★★
★★★★
FemiKuti/Made Kuti
Holy Ground
Glowing In The Dark
★★★★
THE DEAD DAISIES PTY LTD. CD/DL/LP
BECAUSE. CD/DL/LP
Legacy+
Aussie/British/American hard rock collective’s fifth.
Scottish/Northern Irish band alliance shore up their sound.
PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP
Masterminded by David Lowy, guitar-playing principal of his family’s private investment firm, The Dead Daisies have always seemed like a millionaire’s vanity project, as if Lowy is signing up estranged members of Whitesnake and Journey to help indulge his rock star fantasies. And now he’s landed his biggest catch yet:Deep Purple’s ex-singing bassist Glenn Hughes, whose almighty roar elevates Holy Ground, just as it did The KLF’s What Time Is Love? in 1991. It all sounds disgustingly expensive – the musical equivalent of a custom supercar – but fun. Unspoken thunders away like The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again played by a metal covers band, while moonlighting Whitesnake guitarist Doug Aldrich manages to rein it in on a cover of Humble Pie’s 30 Days In The Hole. Hughes’s voice papers over the songwriting cracks, but everyone sounds like they’re having the time of their lives. Mark Blake
Tantalisingly, in these largely gig-free times, Django Django’s fourth kicks off with Spirals – drum rolls and synth arpeggios gradually speeding up and growing in intensity, in what is clearly designed as a live curtain-raiser. The airpunching mood is further evident in the title track, all ’80s house shapes and stuttering vocal hook. Throughout, the quartet further hone their signature style – rockabilly electro, Beta Band playfulness – while uncharacteristic lyrical doubt creeps into the deceptively upbeat Got Me Worried, as singer Vincent Neff frets about his bank balance and the future. Repeating the move Neff made on 2018 predecessor Marble Skies, where he stepped aside to let Rebecca Lucy Taylor front Surface To Air, here Charlotte Gainsbourg’s voice floats over the lovely, Smiths-y Waking Up. All in all, with its pervading doubts and joyful release, Glowing In The Dark is very much for these times. Tom Doyle
86 MOJO
Fela’s son and grandson uphold the family’s Afrobeat traditions on two-album set. Having served apprenticeship in father Femi’s band, Afrobeat scion Made Kuti’s solo debut For(e)ward arrives as one half of this double-album set, alongside Femi’s 11th fulllength, Stop The Hate. While both records share Fela’s fierce agit-funk as their primary inspiration, father and son take radically different approaches. Stop The Hate hews closest to the Fela blueprint, its uplifting riot foregrounding live horn sections, restless polyrhythms and Femi’s bristling sax. Made, meanwhile, performs every note of For(e)ward himself, but this solitary method hasn’t hampered his ability to stir up feverish Afrobeats on the ground-shifting shuffle of Blood, the tense, jazzy Higher You’ll Find and the simmering Your Enemy. Indeed, For(e) ward’s modernist, idiosyncratic approach and more meditative vibe give it the slight edge over his father’s contribution, but both halves of Legacy+
Victoria Segal prove the Kuti continuum to be in rude health. Stevie Chick
Those struggling to keep up with Oseesrelated releases will be cursing 2020’s off-road enforcement, as here is Dwyer’s fifth LP in five months, including three from his main outfit and two from jazz project Bent Arcana. Where November’s Panther Rotate housed offcuts and alternate takes from September’s prog-yet-punchy Protean Thrust, this one stands in similar relation to 2019’s Face Stabber – the delay due to logjams at pressing plants. Metamorphosed’s opening three tracks are sub-twominute punk blitzes, opener Saignant resembling a hardcore-thrash tilt at My Bloody Valentine’s You Made Me Realise. The rest is devoted to two long-form end-of-session jams doubtless muscled aside by Face Stabber’s 20-minute monster, Henchlock. I Got A Lot is the pick, showcasing Osees’ twin-sticksman assault in full flight across a shapeshifting Afro-tribal trance-up. Andrew Perry
Rats On Rafts
★★★
Matthew Sweet
Excerpts From Chapter 3 : The Mind Runs A Net Of Rabbit Paths
★★★★
FIRE. CD/DL/LP
Catspaw OMNIVORE. CD/DL/LP
Lockdown spawns Sweet’s 15th album, nodding at Big Star, Television, Cheap Trick. Cut him and Sweet would likely bleed powerpop, so despite Catspaw’s shift to darker subject matter (life’s inherent cruelty;the trials of ageing), this latest missive from the Nebraskan’s Black Squirrel Submarine studio packs ear-worms and dulcet vocal harmonies galore. Spattered with sparky guitar leads, it peaks with Challenge The Gods, a let-us-not-go-gently call to “punch the world in the face”, the soaring, natureappreciative ballad Drifting, a joyous happening that is Stars Explode, and punchy opener Blown Away, which feints at T.Rex’s Children Of The Revolution. Though the strictlyadhered-to stylistic template could perhaps have done with a shake-up before Parade Of Lights’ backwards guitars finally press reset, Catspaw
Rotterdammers’soundtrack for a non-existent book. This strange album, the fourth – including a set with fellow Lowlanders De Kift – from Rats On Rafts, is a cryptic concept piece. It opens with rain, wind, fire and the birth of a child. There is plague, drought, a desert, looming, poisonous shadows, and the search for government facilities where secret files are stored. Musically, it’s a busy mélange of The Fall circa Container Drivers, and Motorpsycho, suggesting a very angry Go! Team, plus wobbly soundscapes punctuated by clanging guitars, piano and wind FX, over which declarations are made about a “cold blue light”, “dark clouds” and impending, ominous announcements. A Fall-ish T.M.E. references socialism in Tokyo and an emperor. For their previous non-collaborative album, 2015’s Tape Hiss, Rats On Rafts were as unrelenting. Now, they’ve added impenetrability to the armoury. Kieron Tyler
JAZZ B Y A N DY C O WA N
Organ Trio
★★★★ I Told You So COLEMINE. CD/DL/LP
Superb follow up to 2018’s Number 1 US contemporary jazz LP Close But No Cigar. Formed in Seattle in 2015, Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio are organist Delvon Lamarr, guitarist Jimmy James and drummer Dan Weiss. Their music is steeped in the ’60s and early-’70s soul-jazz of Jimmy Smith, Baby Face Willette and Booker T. And The M.G.’s, and the more contemporary sounds of the James Taylor Quartet. An obvious mastery of their craft and unmistakable joy in their playing elevates them above mimicry, from an extraordinary deconstruction of Wham!’s Careless Whisper (think California Dreaming-era Wes Montgomery), to Aces, a frantic four-and-a-half-minutes of chicken scratch funk with a soaring Hendrixy guitar solo, and Right Place Right Time, a detour into mesmeric African blues. I Told You So is a delight. Lois Wilson
Edie Brickell And The New Bohemians
★★★ Hunter And The Dog Star THIRTY TIGERS. CD/DL/LP
Not so new any more, the Bohemians resume their pan-genre escapades. Your awareness of Edie Brickell And The New Bohemians may begin and end with the first track on their first LP – What I Am – the Texas-
Patricia Brennan: time to chime.
born band’s 1988 smash about self-definition and cereal boxes. Perhaps you encountered Brickell again during her contemporary bluegrass spins alongside Steve Martin or in newspapers with spouse Paul Simon. But Brickell and her Bohemians have forever been polyglots, webbing soul, pop, funk and folk into eccentric jam themes. That can make for some awkward moments in 2021, on just their third album since 1995. The electropop of Stubborn Love is as bumpy as the quasi-rap of the aptly named Tripwire. Still, Rough Beginnings, a winning country hymn about beating hard times, and Miracles, a psychblues smoulder about salvation, highlight Brickell’s easy grace and the Bohemians’ seamless sophistication. At their best, these 11 songs are warm reminders of how prescient their fusion once was. Grayson Haver Currin
Guy Blakeslee
★★★★ Postcards From The Edge ENTRANCE. CD/DL/LP
Former blues revivalist finds redemption on the streets of the Big Easy Previously, under the name Entrance, Guy Blakeslee was a wandering bluesman penning psychedelic requiems for Sandy Bull. This solo album, however, finds him seeking sanctuary at the New Orleans studio of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, a wounded songbird exorcising his broken heart over classic, confessional pop. These songs are embroidered with funereal horns, wheezing organs and sorrowful strings, but the key element is Blakeslee’s plangent vibrato vocal. By turns mournful and declamatory, his voice wallows in the rich misery of Postcards…’s marvellously downcast first side, and locates the bittersweetness that lends the album’s redemptive second half its edge. Blakeslee’s heartache never suffocates his songcraft, with the likes of What Love Can Do and the title track cutting a darkly anthemic swathe.
Sweetest of the bunch is Blue Butterfly, an acid-dipped, introspective lullaby soaked in New Orleans ambience. Stevie Chick
Myles Sanko
★★★★ Memories Of Love LÉGÈRE/213 MUSIC. CD/DL/LP
Soul-jazz troubadour’s arresting fourth album. The son of a Ghanaian fisherman, Accra-born Sanko moved to the UK with his family and was raised in Cambridge. Now Londonbased, he’s made quite an impression in Europe, especially in Germany, where his dynamic live performances and three previous LPs have earned him renown. There are hints of Bill Withers and Gregory Porter in Sanko’s musical DNA, but as Memories Of Love shows, the 40-year-old singer/songwriter has forged a distinctive style that blends impassioned soul sermonising with cool jazz sophistication. With his latest album, he explores the vicissitudes of love;but not just the romantic kind, as evidenced by Where Do We Stand, a poignant meditation on his relationship with his father. Elsewhere, two optimistic anthems, Rainbow In Your Cloud and the Martin Luther King-inspired Whatever You Are, reveal Sanko’s talent for writing rousing, memorable choruses. Charles Waring
Patricia Brennan
★★★★ Maquishti VALLEY OF SEARCH. CD/DL/LP
Mexican-born vibraphone and marimba player’s soul-searching debut. Her sheer passion for improvisation marks Patricia Brennan out from a posse of emerging vibraphone talents like Chris Dingman, Joel Ross and Sasha Berliner. The teenage Youth Orchestra Of The Americas member has made big strides from her early work with Yo-Yo Ma and Paquito D’Rivera as the captivating études of Solar and Sonnet prove, pure-toned delicate sprawls played in the moment with minimal augmentation. Later, her instrument transforms, rewired into a whirr of interlocking chimes on the unsettling Away From Us and delicate push and pull of Derrumbe De Turquesas. As with her collaborations with Vijay Iyer and Tomas Fujiwara, there’s much more going on inside Maquishti than first meets the ear, its intimate, almost faux-meditative tunes demanding, and richly rewarding, investment. Andy Cowan
Fergus McCreadie
★★★★★ Cairn EDITION. CD/DL/LP
Finely tuned Scottish piano trio’s vivid Highlands excursion. 2018’s self-released debut Turas emerged, Fergus McCreadie’s outstanding second continues an infatuation with using traditional folk melodies to evoke his country’s rugged, untamed landscapes. Whether it’s the thoughtful ruminations of The Stones Of Brodgar or the title track’s stop/start limb-stretching, predicated on David Bowden’s teasing bass lines, McCreadie’s unrestrained solos echo Keith Jarrett, dodging all the obvious notes. The ex-bagpiper is in his element on the dynamic Jig, powered by Stephen Henderson’s pulsing percussion, and the timeless, hymnal An Old Friend, taking listeners through the whole emotional gamut in one song. A trio capable of rivalling EST or The Bad Plus for sheer excitement, Cairn doesn’t so much play jazz with a broad Scottish accent as smother it with Glasgow kisses. Rock on.
ALSO RELEASED
William Parker
Caroline Shaw
★★★★
★★★★
Migration Of Silence Into And Out Of The Tone World
Narrow Sea
CENTURING/AUM FIDELITY. CD
Female voices are at the centre of Parker’s latest – an audacious 10-hour, 10-disc odyssey that c aptures the austere Bronxborn free jazz bassist/composer taking inspiration from around the globe and firing it back with polyrhythmic force. A rich, autobiographical sonic tapestry reveals a range that peaks on Manzanar, a four-part coalition with the Universal Tonality String Quartet.
Caixa Cubo
NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP
Equally at home producing Kanye West as conducting symphony orchestras, Pulitzer Prize-winning polymath Shaw is the high priestess of out-there theatrical chamber jazz. A melodic resetting of 19th century text The Sacred Harp, the fivesuite title track embraces wayfaring folk, Dawn Upshaw’s powerful voice surfing Sō Percussion’s textured tomfoolery. Stylistic boundaries are twisted further out of the shape on stand-alone oddity Taxidermy.
★★★
De Beren Gieren
Angela
Less Is Endless
HEAVENLY. DL/LP
Azymuth fans will find much to savour on this Brazilian fusion trio’s seventh set. Live-sounding and jam-like, it’s dominated by Henrique Gomide’s playful Rhodes and synth runs which keep João Fideles and Noa Stroeter on their toes. Standouts include Palavras, a duet with singer Zé Leônidase, and a surging, energetic cover of Egberto Gismonti’s Baião Malandro that mines James Brown’s Funky Drummer.
★★★★ SDBAN ULTRA. CD/DL/LP
Among Europe’s most adventurous, this Dutch-Belgian trio breathe life into an old format. Be it the tense hypnotic precision of A Funny Discover or the title track’s downbeat cinematic lurch, keys maestro Fulco Ottervanger keeps his keen melodic acuity in close check. He briefly lets go amid A Random Walk’s lengthy rumbling darkness, before it resets into compulsive motorik syncopation. Ingenious stuff. AC
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F I LT E R A L B UM S
★★★★ Lunar Tredd MOSHI MOSHI. CD/DL/LP
Inspiring follow-up to 2013’s Con-Fusion from the Trinidadian steel pan player. Current events lend Fimber Bravo’s second solo album a lyrical stridency;his resistance poetry set to a steel pan beat soundtracking the concerns arising from Black Lives Matter. The opener You Can’t Control We rages with a righteous fire and defiant spirit:“They ban our street voice and they choke we/We still shout you can’t control we,” he cries. Caribbean Bluez (In The Shadow Of Windrush) is another strong, reverberating piece. On the spiritual Call My Name, meanwhile, the Trinidadian south Londoner, who first came to prominence with the 20th Century Steel Band, is joined by Senegalese kora player Kadialy Kouyate, the pair spinning a gossamer web over a driving electronic pulse. Other guests include The Horrors’ Tom Furse and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, but throughout it’s Bravo’s own innovation that defines this. Lois Wilson
Another New Thing
Guided By Voices
Slowthai
★★★
★★★★
Tyron
XYZZY
Styles We Paid For
METHOD. CD/DL/LP
DIPPED IN GOLD. CD/DL/LP
GBV, INC. CD/DL/LP
Moonlandingz’Dean Honer in deep tech-deviance mode.
Once-mercurial cult phenom maintain the focus of their late-period purple patch.
Embattled Northampton rapper proves skills on emotive second album.
The visibility afforded to Dean Honer and keyboard sidekick Adrian Flanagan by 2018’s Fat White Family teamup on The Moonlandingz’ album Interplanetary Class Classics was well overdue. Dating back to his late-’90s aliases The All Seeing I and I Monster, this shadowy Yorkshireman has been a trusty custodian of Sheffield’s electronic lineage, a clanky knowhow he also brought to Add N To (X). Following further Flanagan-assisted outings as International Teachers Of Pop, this latest project sees him enlisted by Paul Nagle (synths, from Preston) and Pennsylvania’s Don Himlin (vocals, guitar, bass) for production, tech savvy, spiritual corruption, and more. Do Not Fail’s expensivesounding juxtaposition of analogue riffing and digisoundscaping exudes rare class, like 21st-century Roxy Music, while Probe The Action Membrane’s more ribald sleaze recalls primetime Frankie Goes To Hollywood (in a good way!). The second half of XYZZY relinquishes pop/dancefloor kicks for abstract gurglings, and a moral abandonment that’s incrementally seductive with each listen. Andrew Perry
★★★★
Consistency had never previously been their watchword, but the latest incarnation of Guided By Voices has seen former schoolteacher Robert Pollard set aside his more haywire compulsions in favour of focused tunefulness. The group’s sixth album in two years maintains their recent high standard, long-time foil Doug Gillard’s lucidly poetic guitar lines making delicious sense of Pollard’s fevered Wire-meets-Genesis-meetsThe-Who confections. The hits-from-another-dimension come thick and fast:Mr Child feeds Byrdsian psychedelia into the post-punk mangle, Crash At Lake Placebo evokes the sweet mystery of Murmurera R.E.M., and They Don’t Play The Drums Anymore’s winningly lopsided lurch harbours the unforgettable hook, “They sit beating their puds and staring at their screensavers.” The proggy meander of War Of The Devils and Slaughterhouse’s murky stomp, meanwhile, prove that Pollard’s late-era discipline has not come at the cost of his unique and unpredictable charm. Stevie Chick
★★★★ Kissing Rosy In The Rain TOMPKINS SQUARE. DL/LP
American primitivist’s second set of guitar instrumentals. The title to Mason Lindahl’s second album is aptly sensuous, his microphones picking up the graze of fingers across strings, the idle creak of furniture, every drop of feedback and reverb etching these nine instrumentals. Firmly in the lineage of American primitive mavericks, from Robbie Basho through 21st century descendants Ryley Walker and William Tyler, Lindahl’s music is rooted in folk and classical, but he’s equally invested in ambience and atmospherics, the dynamic possibilities of such intimate music. Opener Sky Breaking, Clouds Falling is a piece of elemental drama, Lindahl’s rolling picking and strums scraping against dark waves of synth, while Deep Wish lends emotional charge to its every peak and plummet. A supreme headphones experience, it sounds like Lindahl has spent the 11 years since his debut poring over every note and element. Stevie Chick
“Tyron for PM!” boasted 2019’s establishmentwrecking debut Nothing Great About Britain, before events took an unexpected turn. Publicly shamed for ill-advised banter with comedian Katherine Ryan at the NME Awards, TYRON is Slowthai’s rounded, unrepentant response. Frontloaded with gut-punching, maniacal rap strikes like 45 SMOKE, WOT and VEX whose tense, slashy strings and grime-flecked beats refuse to kowtow to the doubters and accentuate his fluid, trebly delivery – equal parts Dizzee Rascal and attackmode Danny Brown. While the provocative first half plays to known strengths, the second is introspective and intricately layered, Slowthai showing his vulnerability on Push, a fingerpicked duet with singer Deb Never that’s surely his Stan, and Feel Away, amid Mount Kimbie’s spectral electronics and James Blake’s tremulous ache. Clearly heartfelt, TYRON unpacks its creator’s complex character, flaws bravely to the fore. Andy Cowan
Tindersticks
★★★ Distractions
LaelNeale
★★★★
Lael Neale:on board with the Omnichord.
LUCKY DOG/CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP
Beloved Nottingham-Euro quintet channel Sleaford Mods on an accordion.
Acquainted With Night SUB-POP. CD/DL/LP
Woman plus Omnichord equals rebirth for Virginian singersongwriter.
CLEARLY, the sombre arrangements for Neale’s Americana-leaning debut I’ll Be Your Man didn’t satisfy its creator:the album isn’t even listed on her website, and all subsequent recordings were scrapped until she discovered a vintage Omnichord. Acquainted With Night is 95 per cent Neale and her electronic companion, a simple but spacey combination of harp, harmonium and tinny drum pre-sets that matches Neale’s delicate Appalachian voice for shivers and warmth. Who knew the world was lacking a country-folk version of Broadcast until – hence the title – the album levitates with light and serenity:
88 MOJO
Summer Roses. “Why can’t I love someone?” aches Every Star Shivers
In The Dark, but by the end, Neale insists, “I’m gonna love someone.” Perhaps we all need an Omnichord in our lives.
Martin Aston
While Tindersticks share little artistic ground with Sleaford Mods, the Nottingham quintet’s 13th album bears more than a dash of Sleaford lo-fi, confirmed by 11-minute workout Man Alone (Can’t Stop The Fadin’). After the Sticks’ cohesive 2019 LP No Treasure But Hope, this sparse funk encourages tremulous repetitive strain from Stuart Staples, rising to an unexpected Kraftwerkian car crash;a similar nod to Roxy illuminates Television Personalities cover You’ll Have To Scream Louder. With band members across Europe, Tue-moi quivers in French while I Imagine You whispers eerily in a youth’s ear (“top of the cupboard there”). Semtex, maids and blackened peaches cause Staples to livereview his own album:“Overall, it’s going OK, some good ideas, badly executed.” The climactic Bough Bends leaves us with just distant birdsong. Recorded remotely, Distractions is febrile and modern but cries out for a through-line. Andrew Collins
ELECTRONICA BY STEPHEN WORTHY
A Winged Victory For The Sullen
★★★★ Invisible Cities ARTIFICIAL PINEARCH MANUFACTURING. CD/DL/LP
Soundtrack score to the multimedia theatrical show. A Winged Victory For The Sullen comprise Adam Wiltzie, co-founder of the American deep space ambient drone pioneers Stars Of The Lid, and the film and TV composer Dustin O’Halloran. The touring production of Invisible Cities, based on the 1972 novel by Italo Calvino, was inevitably put on hold early in 2020, but this 45-minute suite of music is an immersive standalone piece. Taken together, the 13 tracks have an ethereal ebb and flow, with gently arcing melodies. But rather than being an ambient wash, Invisible Cities feels three dimensional with some animated movement beneath the surface, from the hazy distorted keyboard playing a stately melody on The Dead Outnumber The Living, to The Divided City with its Glass-like piano arpeggios set on a sumptuous soundbed. The more overtly spacey spirit of Tangerine Dream infuses the radiant, chiming sequencer patterns of Nothing Of The City Touches The Earth. Mike Barnes
Anna B Savage
★★★★ A Common Turn CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP
A swooping mix of art rock and intelligent dance music on this City Slang debut. All purchasers of this album get a free pocket vibrator, which potentially adds to the fun of this debut by Savage, a London-based artist championed by the likes of Father John Misty and Jenny
Hval. It relates to the track Chelsea Hotel #3, a song about female pleasure that, with its humorous power-rock chorus, is a retort to Leonard Cohen’s laconic Chelsea Hotel #2. Savage has the same grand and dramatic sweep as Hval and the sorely missed Jeff Buckley – her rich, deep voice moving from tremulous and intimate to operatic. Her lyrics are conversational, cut through with vivid images (“Your brick red hair, the shortest it’s ever been”), while her questions on love, mental health and uncertain rules of attraction are underpinned by stringent guitar and co-producer William Doyle’s experimental IDM. Baroque pop at its most exhilarating. Lucy O’Brien
Baio
★★★ Dead Hand Control GLASSNOTE. CD/DL/LP
Vampire Weekend bassist takes leave to make third solo album. “I’ve been thinking about the End Times,” sings Chris Baio on the title track of his third solo album and while that’s hardly a USP at the moment, few people consider the future apocalypse with quite such springy enthusiasm. While Baio’s interest in nuclear missile systems (apparent on the ominous techno intrusions of Dead Hand) fits with his fondness for ’80s British synthpop, the follow-up to 2016’s Man Of The World comes with the smart lightness of touch that’s the Vampire Weekend birthright. Unsurprisingly, that’s most obvious on the sparkling, sprawling OMW, a revisited collaboration with Ezra Koenig, but it’s also there in his playful vocal touches – a glam rock “ooh!”, a sinister Gallic whisper – or the wry Anglophile disco of Endless Me, Endlessly in which Baio makes increasingly insistent offers of friendship. On this evidence, there should be plenty of takers. Victoria Segal
Dan Medhurst,
Lush listen: Carwyn Ellis’s Welsh Tropicália.
John Carpenter
★★★ Lost Themes III: Alive After Death SACRED BONES. CD/DL/LP
The horror! Ever stranger things from the mind of director and composer. John Carpenter, director of Assault On Precinct 13, The Fog and Halloween, started scoring his own films out of low-budget necessity. Since 2015, however, he has been releasing music shorn of any visuals. Volume three of Lost Themes, recorded once again with his son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies, proves again that his ominous synth atmospheres could turn any sitting room into the site of a terrifying chase. He’s never met a supernatural entity he can’t pair with thumping darktronica and stalking rock guitar – Weeping Ghost, Vampire’s Touch, Skeleton – but it’s done with a fabulously cold touch. And if you can’t thrill to a track titled Carpathian Darkness, you have no soul. Expect Carpenter to write a theme for you next. Victoria Segal
★★★★ Isles NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP
Gilt-edged club-leaning sounds that move both body and soul. long-player from Belfast-raised, London-based duo Bicep. Isles finds Matt McBriar and Andy Ferguson reflecting on their Northern Irish upbringing, as well as weaving in the diverse, polycultural musical influences they’ve encountered in their current home. This is music for smarter dancefloors, one where samples of field-recorded Malawian singers and chants from Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares are adroitly blended into swoonsome widescreen electro (Apricots) and twitchy UK garage rhythms are counterpointed by woozy ambient chords (Saku). In many ways, McBriar and Ferguson increasingly feel like natural heirs to the emotional, alt-club MO of Orbital. The opportunity to hear Isles in the setting of the intense, coruscating creativity of their live shows is something to look forward to.
ALSO RELEASED
Carwyn Ellis & Rio 18
★★★★ Mas BANANA & LOUIE. CD/DL/LP
The sound of 2022 comes early:in the form of Welshlanguage Tropicália. It may be too soon to hymn the benefits of Covid-19, but Carwyn Ellis’s second album of Welsh-language Tropicàlia wasn’t meant to be finished until next year, and these songs are the unexpected results of day-job lockdown and time spent in Cardiff, watching murmurations in the sky. There is a broadening of the palette from 2019’s Joia!, with Cwcan (Cooking) offering lusty, Arturo Sandoval-like trumpet over a Cuban beat, and Golau’r Glas a more direct nod to the 1960s (though inspired by Catalan rumba and a hint of samba). The lyrics may hide messages few will comprehend, but it’s a gorgeous listen, the lush blend of Cymraeg lilt, bossa nova and Brasil ’66esque backing vocals and keyboards dictating the overall mood and drawing a straight line from the docks of Tiger Bay to the beaches of Bahia. David Hutcheon
Martin Gore
★★★
Pauline Anna Strom
The Third Chimpanzee
★★★★
MUTE. CD/DL/LP
Angel Tears In Sunlight
Jared Diamond’s award-winning 1991 book on human evolution forms the basis of this EP-length collection of angular electro, cavernous soundscapes and delightfully off-kilter rhythms from Depeche Mode’s creative hub. On the slo-mo Kraftwerkian stomp of Vervet, Gore sets a twinkling, music box melody to juddering synth stabs to create a deliciously unnerving experience.
RVNG INTL. CD/DL/LP
Steve Moore
★★★★ Analog Senstivity BE WITH. LP
The themes that characterise the work of Steve Moore, whether as one half of progressive synth rockers Zombi, his ambient/drone solo output and, latterly, film soundtracks, percolate through this unique and meditative collaboration with the legendary British music library KPM. Created entirely on analogue synth hardware, it’s eerie and haunting, yet comforting and deeply affecting.
As Trans-Millenia Consort in the 1980s, San Francisco-based synthesist and new age music pioneer Pauline Anna Strom was discussed in hushed tones. Following her sad death at the end of last year comes this posthumous return. Angel Tears In Sunlight retains an elegant spirituality, Strom’s vivid blend of polyrhythms, hypnotic grooves and animalistic sounds feel like a beautiful lament.
Minotaur Shock
★★★★ Qi BYTES. DL/LP
David Edwards heralds his third decade as Minotaur Shock with an album of iridescent, ebullient electronica that pops and pings brightly from your speakers. Qui is six minutes of fizzing Sino-electro, Qua is sharp-elbowed two-step while the beatless Qis, with its intricate music box-style melody, is an complex, sweet-natured denouement. SW
MOJO 89
make Freedom Fables feel like a compilation, a wide streak of jazz connects the dots. Andy Cowan
Viagra Boys
★★★ Welfare Jazz YEAR0001. CD/DL/LP
Spam filters beware! Postpunk Swedish six return.
Alostmen:packing a colossal punch.
Alostmen
★★★★ Kologo STRUT. CD/DL/LP
Stevo Atambire’s debut as bandleader, produced by former Afro Gypsy, Wanlov The Kubolor
Abass Ismail
ORIGINALLY recorded on tour in Uganda and released in Atambire’s Ghanaian homeland in 2017, but
now “remixed for an international audience” with no audible ill-effects, Kologo stringed West African lute what Spokes Mashiyane did for the South African penny whistle. Atambire’s heavily rhythmic yet occasionally explosive playing finds muscular and virtuosic foils in singing fiddler Jo Ajusiwine, Nigerian talking drum
mixes” of blatant Sunday-afternoonat-Green-Man bangers Teach Me and Minus Me also pack a colossal punch, the latter with a potent blend of horn section and Barry White-style disco voice.
Black Country, New Road
DanielO’Sullivan + Richard Youngs
The Besnard Lakes
★★★★
★★★★
★★★★
For The First Time
Twelve Of Hearts
NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP
O GENESIS. DL/LP
Exploratory British alt-rock debut to get excited about!
British duo’s inventive digidoo wop experiment.
The Besnard Lakes Are The Last Of The Great Thunderstorm Warnings
Born from the unhappy collapse of the core members’ previous band Nervous Conditions, BCNR chicaned into an edgy ‘new road’ straddling post-punk and post-rock, with guitarist Isaac Wood uncertainly stepping up to murmur stream-of-consciousness narratives like a reluctant Steve Albini. The young seven-piece have since progressed at warpspeed, here passing the fulllength test with confidence. All six tracks unfold in linear structures, like an alt-rock take on bassist Tyler Hyde’s dad’s band, Underworld. Less precedented still, the spiralling violin (Georgia Ellery) and saxophone (Lewis Evans) on closer Opus reflect their grounding in east European klezmer. Yet For The First Time makes contemporary noises, too, at full pelt (on Science Fair’s skronkier passages) recalling tech-jazz visionaries The Comet Is Coming. Wood is magnetic as he rhymes “Scott Walker with “smooth talker”, and spins emotional yarns of unwaning impact. Andrew Perry
Two serial collaborators with a penchant for conceptual avant-folk, O’Sullivan and Youngs’ paths were destined to cross. Though the descriptions do them a disservice, O’Sullivan is a rhythm-minded inventor and Youngs a singersongwriter at heart. Twelve Of Hearts is the result of an adopted geometric formula – “the same four chords… and never change key” – and computers were part of the process, so how they’ve created this warm, lively collection of doo wop songs is a mystery. Only occasionally challenging (a sound like a synth-mangled bullhorn dominates First Throw Of The Ocean), the duo delight in cascading harmonies and tingling melodies against shifting backdrops, with fascinating sideways steps: Touch Of The Sun and Oblivion Riviera respectively inch closer to a madrigal and barbershop quartet. File alongside Robert Wyatt’s similarly uncanny approach to folk-song, and other unexpectedly great oddities. Martin Aston
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FULL TIME HOBBY. CD/DL/LP
Canadian psychedelicists return from the wilderness to ponder the after-life Reawakening after five years’ slumber, The Besnard Lakes’ sixth longplayer finds the Montreal dream-rockers ruminating upon mortality and what lies beyond, inspired in no small part by the passing of singer/guitarist Jace Lasek’s father. Such weighty themes lend further substance to their cosmic tuneage, the Lakes’ signature cloudbursts of synth, FX-laden guitar and Lasek and wife/bandmate Olga Goreas’s heavenly vocals finding hope in the bleakness. It’s a work of sensitive grandeur:earthshifting bass lines underpinning the church organ reveries of Raindrops, cavernous opener Blackstrap all soaring Floydian chord-changes and melting shoegaze textures. The Father Of Time Wakes Up is the standout – a glacial, graceful anthem that reasons “With love, there is no death”, like Flaming Lips shorn of gimmickry – but… Thunder-
Ben Thompson storm Warnings doesn’t put a foot wrong, delivering the big music with heart instead of bluster. Stevie Chick
Viagra Boys have made a name for themselves over the past few years with their frenzied live performances. But with the sweatbox gigs in which they excel on hold, this second album is an opportunity to show there’s more to them than the fleeting thrill of an on-stage charge. They take it. Less reliant on the spluttery punk thrills of 2018’s Street Worms, Welfare Jazz finds them dropping through the gears and settling on a sound that often resembles the frazzled nocturnal grooves magicked up during Josh Homme’s Desert Sessions. They do it best on Into The Sun, frontman Sebastian Murphy’s lip-curling drawl taking melodic shape over an unhurried psych-rock jam. When the shackles are thrown off, as on the gloriously deranged funk of Girls & Boys, it makes for an impactful offroad diversion. An impressive second showing, Viagra Boys have found order in the chaos. Niall Doherty
Katy Kirby
★★★★ Nubiyan Twist
★★★ Freedom Fables STRUT. CD/DL/LP
Many-legged Leeds/London fusion fiends show off an estimable range. These Leeds College of Music alumni have spent six years perfecting their freeflowing assemblage of jazz, soul, hip-hop and whatever other diasporic style they fancy adding to the mix. With regular on-stage focal point Nubiya Brandon seemingly absent, vocal slots are shared among a spread of guests, with one-time Tomorrow’s Warrior Cherise proving an ideal foil, cutting through the funk guitars and forthright brass of Tittle Tattle and holding her own on Brazilian workout Keeper. Elsewhere, breathy house chanteuse Ria Moran (Morning Light) and the agelessly sage Ego Ella May (24-7) easily earn their shine. While showcasing a further surfeit of talents – Zongo Brigade’s K.O.G., Ghanaian singer Pat Thomas, a raphappy Soweto Kinch – could
Cool Dry Place KEELED SCALES. CD/DL/LP
Startling debut converts evangelical pop into fragmented indie rock. It has taken years to create this album, but each song is perfectly realised. Katy Kirby had to rewire her Bible belt upbringing first, taking the influence of Christian worship music she heard as a child, and mixing it with overdriven pedals and percussive ambience to make a sound that is unique – like Michelle Shocked meets Katy Perry, fed through a sonic mincer. Recorded in Nashville with co-producer collaborators Logan Chung and Alberto Sewald, these songs veer from the gently analytical to the absurd. Traffic!, for instance, combines beatific church organ, Auto-Tune and plunging guitar in a wry, funny song about male privilege, while standout track Portals weaves a raw lyric of domestic upset with warped Moog chords, crooning melody, and sounds created with wine glasses, bowls and chains. Lucy O’Brien
F I LT E R A L B UM S E X T R A
★★★★
★★★★
★★★★
Is This What It’s Like
Xompulse
TheDeadCanRap
THOUSAND TONGUES. CD/DL
DULUOZ. CD/DL/LP
DEF PRESSÉ. DL
It Is Good That We Dream
The London singer’s stark acoustic covers album works best when furthest removed from the original. Pixies’ Where Is My Mind? and Nine Inch Nails’ Every Day Is Exactly The Same sound new and fresh; The Moody Blues’ Nights In White Satin not so much. AF
A perilously rhetorical title, but LA’s David and Meredith Metcalf favour a stylistic melting pot and their fifth LP is winningly diverse. What it’s like, roughly:lounge bar ballads with chansonnier shivers or synth-led disco and retro Arabic pop tempos. JB
Free-spirited Irish producer veers from woozy, jazzy ambient (Ariel Visions) to naked piano classicism (Xompulse) and ‘90s club throwbacks (Alien Boy 96). With hungry raps by Virginia’s Fly Anakin and Atlanta’s staHHr, Dulu’s debut is a late-night special. AC
Impending apocalypse, political corruption, global inequality are to the fore on this union of US art-rap pioneer Mike Ladd and UK street artist Remi Rough. Their resistance theology and sonic synth trickery meet vocal allies in Open Mike Eagle and New Kingdom’s Nosaj. AC
Vinyl compilation of previously digital-only tracks by Galway’s Dolan, whose airy voice and effortless melodies form a fine transatlantic conductor for West Coast pop warmth. Highlights include Superior Fiction and Lunar Drift. JB
★★★★
★★★★
Hinterland
★★★★
★★★★
Three Rivers
The Cinder Grove
★★★
Planet Gold
When
11A. DL/LP
GLITTERBEAT. CD/DL/LP
Diving Bell
PIAS. CD/DL/LP
THREE WORLDS. CD/DL
Meditative instrumentals from Cass McCombs and Eleanor Friedberger’s guitarist Dugré. Whether tuned like an Irish bouzouki on Foxglove or exploring space on Shining, subtle shades of Satie, Frahm and Yoshimura linger. A lush, surprising affair. AC
Follow-up to 2019’s Balsams further expands ambient pedal steel’s possibilities, adding strings, and piano for aural succour akin to Alice Coltrane’s Wurlitzer drones. This, despite being written as an elegy to lost Californian landscapes and opportunities. JB
FANDANGO. CD/DL/LP
Opener California sets the template:wistful memories of the ’90s with, ironically, the East Coast gravitas of Buffalo Tom. Brit songwriter Chris Hornsby channels rueful, plaid-shirted euphoria and his band have the swing to pull it off. JB
Piano instrumentals with a sense of place from a French composer whose musical travelogue takes in cities and landscapes from Paris to Madagascar. Reflective, brisk or jazzily dynamic, at 18 tracks it’s quite a trek but one that promises total escapism. JB
Brit French horn pioneer weds jazz to classical with assists from Nikki Iles, Michael Janisch, James Maddren and The Tear Quartet. His reflective, widescreen compositions benefit from the interplay;his solos channel melancholic lyricism on Solace and River Of Dreams. AC
★★★ Songs From Isolation BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP
★★★
CITÓG. DL/LP
EXTENDED PLAY
Screamers Screamers Demo Hollywood 7 7 SUPERIOR VIADUCT
★★★★ Cuttin’ Grass Vol 2 – The Cowboy Arms Sessions HIGH TOP MOUNTAIN. DL
Capricious country refusenik’s second tilt at his old songs with crack bluegrass band. Six from 2017’s A Sailor’s Guide To Earth benefit from the fleet-fingered makeover. Plus an unreleased co-write with Merle Haggard. JM
Death
★★★★ The Space In Which…
Getty
ATA. CD/DL/LP
Full title:…The Uncontrollable Unknown Resides, Can Be The Place From Which Creation Arises. Bassist Neil Innes and tenor sax Tony Burkill honour the risktaking ideology of Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. AC
An EP of the LA punk pioneers’ recently unearthed earliest demos, with explanatory notes by Jon Savage. Screamers were among the very first Angelenos to answer the Ramones/Sex Pistols call-to-arms, playing their first show in May ’77 at a party launching Slash fanzine. The Germs, X, Dils and Dead Kennedys all played early gigs supporting them, but this performance art-leaning quartet pursued a rare nonconformism, encapsulated in their line-up of two synth-players, drummer, and none-more-wild vocalist Tomata Du Plenty. After founder David Brown quit to start up scene label Dangerhouse, they also chose never to immortalise themselves on vinyl, preferring the bi-sensory assault of video. Despite their keyboard bedrock, these initial five demos from September ’77 are a million miles from Suicide’s pulse, rather weaponising the synth as an agent of deviance and otherness. Anti-media tirade Magazine Love imagines Can’s Malcolm Mooney fronting Devo, while Punish Or Be Damned tilts Eno/Krautrock’s arty electronic experimentalism towards gay S&M DIY. Pervy, inventive and stirringly nihilistic stuff. Andrew Perry
Screamers’ Tomata Du Plenty: stirringly nihilistic.
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F I LT E R R E I S SU E S
Pre Histoire… Before Melody Nelson: how Gainsbourg rose from unheralded chansonnier to the top of the Pope’s black list without any real hits. By David Hu tcheon.
Serge Gainsbourg
★★★★ Intégrale Des Enregistrements Studio, Volume 1 : 1 9 5 8 -1 9 7 0 WRASSE/MERCURY. LP
SUCCESSFUL songwriter, a confidant of Juliette Gréco and Jacques Brel, newly remarried:in 1964, Serge Gainsbourg, 36, should have been feeling unbeatable. In January, he L’Étonnant Serge Gainsbourg (The Astonishing…) “Foolishly, had released his fifth album, Gainsbourg Confidentiel, is one of those albums you buy after hearing the his first 12-track, 12-incher, described by Sylvie Gainsbourg opening track (La Chanson De Prévert) but grow Simmons in her biography, A Fistful Of Gitanes, ripped off increasingly disappointed by as you listen to the as “spare, sophisticated jazz with a rock-swing rest. Fortunately, in 1962, inspiration hit: element”. Yet it was distinctly out of step with the the Nigerian Intoxicated Man, Black Trombone, Requiem Pour times:Chez Les Yé-Yé and Le Temps Des Yoyos laid drummer Un Twister …No 4 is essential. The hiccup of into the teen stars of the day whose “imbecilic” Confidentiel’s calamitous sales, aside, it’s another ditties were threatening his career. Gainsbourg Babatunde great album, its sparse instrumentation hinting at Confidentiel sold 1,500 copies. Vindication of sorts. Olatunji. He Gainsbourg’s increasing confidence, a belief he had It’s always startling to realise how badly some now discovered his voice. didn’t record now-revered records did on release – Dusty In Naturally, a complete change of pace followed: Memphis, Pet Sounds, River Deep, Mountain High… for four years.” Gainsbourg Percussions applies his wordplay to African even discounting those that were never intended to rhythms. Foolishly, he freely ripped off the Nigerian ship platinum, the list is considerable – but drummer Babatunde Olatunji, whose 1960 album Drums Of Passion Gainsbourg made a habit of failing to an extraordinary degree. had been a million-seller in America. Wrist slapped, in need of a Between his first album, Du Chant À La Une! (Number 137 boost to his finances, Gainsbourg wouldn’t record again for four in 1958) and Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg (Number 4 in 1969), years, preferring to write pop songs that could stand proud among none of his albums charted. Perhaps he was a singles artist, you those imbecilic ditties in the hit parade. His return, with Initials say? Think again:his first French “hit”, Requiem Pour Un Con, B.B., finds an arch Gainsbourg in love with that world, revelling got to Number 49 in 1968. His songs in his role as a 40-year-old hipster, Brigitte Bardot on his arm, weren’t the issue – Poupée De Cire, Poupée singing about comic strips, American sports cars and Bonnie De Son won the Eurovision Song Contest And Clyde. For all that 1968 is, in Jon Savage’s words, “the year for France Gall in 1965 – but as a recording the decade exploded”, there are few albums more 1968 than artist, Gainsbourg couldn’t get arrested. this. When Gainsbourg, in his Nehru collar, asked Qui Est “In” As a result, his LPs sank without trace or Qui Est “Out” you knew he knew where he stood. Naturellement, repress. An original Confidentiel will set you it didn’t sell. back approximately £250;quadruple that if Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg broke the run of failures in you fancy a 1962 pressing of No 4 . Bizarrely, spectacular style. Though it is anchored by Je T’Aime Moi Non while Gainsbourg’s reputation grew through Plus, the couple’s Vatican-denounced heavy-breathing classic the 1970s and into the 1980s, much of his doesn’t overwhelm the rest of the album – L’Anamour, 69 Année back catalogue was out of print until around Érotique and Sous Le Soleil Exactement see to that – while Birkin 1984 (for cassettes) and 1994 (for CDs). ANNÉES ● The son of immigrants throws herself into her songs with convincing gusto. After more Crucially, when they were reissued, the from Russia, Gainsbourg than 10 years as a recording artist, and with a significant portfolio legend “Haute fidélité monorale” had been (who changed his name as a hit songwriter, Gainsbourg was an overnight sensation. Soon replaced on label and sleeve by “ Hifi-stéréo ”, from Lucien Ginsburg enough, he would find himself back at the lower end of the charts and hearing what the artist originally after having to wear a yellow star to signify his again, yet with a notoriety that would sustain his career when his intended has been an expensive indulgence Judaism during the sales failed to match his talent and, latterly, when his gifts left him for more than half a century. German occupation) had altogether. A story for another box set, no doubt. Collecting his first nine albums (1958planned to be an artist but found himself There’s an oft-repeated view of Gainsbourg as a Svengali, 70) plus an LP of singles and selected instead playing piano in writing songs for young women whose allure would take his songs soundtrack cuts, this weighty set comes cabarets, often places he would never be accepted. Yet, listened to end to end, with those markers of 21st-century deputising for his classically trained these 10 discs tell another story, one in which the master is the indulgence:half-speed remastering at father. At 3 0 , heavily pupil. He begins as an imitator of great chansonniers and flirts Abbey Road with engineer Miles Showell’s influenced by oldname stamped into each run-out groove. unconvincingly with Latin jazz and rock’n’roll, but it’s his time school-style singers such as Boris Vian and The 10-inch albums have been plumped away from recording that sees him learn that if he wants to be working for Michèle up to 12-inch with the addition of rarities Serge Gainsbourg he has to sound unlike anyone else. The early Arnaud (above), he such as the Romantique 60 EP. They albums are often very good indeed, but it’s when he is true to decided to record his own songs, their lyrics sound, unsurprisingly, fabulous, himself that his music becomes irresistible. The collection often considered too Gainsbourg as you ought to hear him – yet stops here, with his masterpieces ahead of him, but how he dark for other singers. few did or have, so the question remains: got there is quite the story.
A
Jacques Aubert,Getty
was he any good in the initial phases of his career? In February 1958, Gainsbourg had recorded his first demos, just him and piano. For his debut, Alain Goraguer was brought in, his orchestra adding flute, bass, drums, giving flavour, but not always in ways that were harmonious with lyrics about a Métro ticket inspector dreaming of stamping holes in their own head (Le Poinçonneur Des Lilas). No 2 is Serge Goes Mambo, with a hint of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. On the plus side, the sleeve is wonderful: cigarette in Gainsbourg’s right hand, a bouquet of red roses and a revolver on the table in front of him.
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Jeunes Femmes Et Vieux Messieurs:Serge Gainsbourg says it with roses and a revolver, as 1959’s No.2 is released.
Rebels with a cause: Joseph Jefferson (left) and Major Harris of the Nat Turner Rebellion.
No ordinary Joe Rare ’7 0 s Philly soul gems get wider release. By Geoff Brown.
Nat Turner Rebellion
★★★★ Laugh To Keep From Crying PHILLY GROOVE. CD/DL/LP
BORN IN PETERSBURG, Virginia, just south of Richmond, Joseph ‘Joe’ Jefferson will have been sharply aware of the risks and benefits in naming his group after the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion in the state. Undaunted, Jefferson and his Rebellion rose up to write a fascinating footnote in the story of Philadelphia soul thanks to four singles, released between 1970-72, and an unfinished
Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King
★★★★ The RCA Albums 1 9 7 7 -1 9 8 5
album, which are combined on Laugh To Keep From Crying. The album was released in 2019, notably on the Vinyl Me Please club, but now it has a new track and is more widely available. The Rebellion started when Jefferson, a drummer touring with The Sweet Inspirations, was stranded in Philadelphia in the late ’60s with a badly infected foot. While recovering, he decided to strike out on his own and went back to Petersburg to form the group, despite his mother’s strong misgivings about the name. The South, after all, was still the South, and even now prejudices and injustices persist. The group – Jefferson, Ron Harper, Bill Spratley and Jefferson’s brother Major Harris – were quickly signed to Stan Watson’s Philly Groove label, then hot with the sweet soul of
mature range. 1979’s Music Box and 1980’s Call On Me couldn’t broaden her appeal, but the title track of ’81’s I’m In Love, written by Kashif, took her to Number 1 R&B and the album reconnected with that vocal mixture of innocence and strength via her solid tone. She was still only 21. The peak of album five, Get Loose (1982), was Love Come Down, another US R&B Number 1 and at Number 7 her biggest UK pop hit, with Back To Love also confirming the pattern that Kashif wrote the best material for her. After three more albums she’d move on. Geoff Brown
SOULMUSIC. CD
An 8-CD box pops the corks again on Champagne’s bubbly disco. ‘Discovered’ by Theodore Life as she sang while cleaning a bathroom at Philadelphia International Records in the mid 1970s, T. Life eventually recorded Smooth Talk, which was released in 1977, the year King turned 17. The album’s Shame (US Top 10) and I Don’t Know If It’s Right (Top 25) perfectly captured her voice’s youthful eagerness and vivacity, as well as her gritty Chaka Khan phrasing and
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Danny Woods
When the group temporarily disbanded in 1972 he also made a terrific solo album for Holland-Dozier-Holland’s Invictus label. Recorded with the arrangers HB Barnum and McKinley Jackson, Aries comprises 10 tracks, seven of which are written or co-written by Brian Holland and Lamont Dozier, including Let Me Ride, a jubilatory gospel funk track played on the Northern soul scene, and at the other end of the spectrum, the deep, stirring Two Can Be As Lonely As One. His cover of Otis Redding’s I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now) delivers another strong performance, his voice invested with both desperation and desire. Lois Wilson
★★★★
The Delfonics. The Rebellion struck an altogether different Philly groove. Songwriter Jefferson had two main sources of inspiration – the rhythmic drive and vocal variety and assertion of Sly And the Family Stone and the more sophisticated harmonies of The Temptations, though with Norman Whitfield’s funk-psych pulsing behind them. Thus, Fat Back introduces instruments in an effective Dance To The Music fashion, Right On We’re Back is another excellent Family Stone clone while Tribute To A Slave speaks to the group’s namesake. (Jefferson identified so strongly he took to wearing a noose.) Driving, Temptations-like funk is the engine behind Laugh To Keep From Crying, Plastic People, Love Peace & Understanding and Fruit Of The Land, and Can’t Go On Living, written by Gamble & Huff collaborators Norman Harris and Alan Felder, was a 1971 single that features a very David Ruffin-style vocal from Major Harris. Of their ballads, Jefferson’s song McBride’s Daughter has a strong lyric and melody, Never Too Late is good Philly soul, but perhaps not distinctive enough from the pack. 1972’s attractive coming-of-age single Ruby Lee was audibly their biggest push at a commercial breakthrough, while its B-side, You Are My Sun Sign, a bright uptempo Temptations groove, is new to the LP, replacing Going In Circles. Nat Turner Rebellion folded in the early ’70s. Jefferson became a successful songwriter for The Detroit Spinners (One Of A Kind (Love Affair), Mighty Love) and The O’Jays (Brandy), while Harris joined The Delfonics and later had a big solo hit with 1975’s Love Won’t Let Me Wait, a US R&B Number 1 and Top 5 pop. Joseph Jefferson died in July 2020, the last survivor of Nat Turner’s Rebellion.
while that impacted negatively on the album’s sales back then, today we can just swoon at the beguiling brilliance of the reconfigured Detroit quartet – Sylvia Smith had replaced Pearl Jones since their debut outing although it’s Jones’s distinctly high voice leading The Man I’ll Never Have, an overwrought ballad she also co-wrote. Scherrie Payne, Freda’s younger sister and a future Supreme, is the draw as usual, though, her Diana Ross-like sweet, syrupy vocal wrapped in a swirl of strings on Honey Cone’s VIP and Bacharach & David’s A House Is Not A Home, and dramatic and emotional on Don’t Let It Rain On Me, her super co-pen with Holland and Dozier. Lois Wilson
Aries
Glass House
DEMON. LP
★★★★
1972’s impressive first solo album from Chairmen Of The Board singer. Danny Woods was one of the co-founders of Chairmen Of The Board and sang lead on the group’s hits Working On A Building Of Love and Pay To The Piper.
Thanks I Needed That
J Dilla
DEMON. LP
★★★★
1972 superb second LP by the HDH affiliated soul group.
Welcome 2 Detroit
Half of the material on this follow-up to 1971’s Inside The Glass House had already been issued on single, but
BBE. LP
Late hip-hop producer’s first solo LP gets deluxe 20th anniversary treatment. After a decade of DIY releases, remixes and increasingly starry production credits
(Jay-Z, Common, De La Soul, Busta Rhymes, Q-Tip) Slum Village mainstay Jay Dee rebranded with a coming of age set that totally ignored its breakbeat album brief. Weaving Detroit rappers Big Tone, Elzhi, Frank N Dank, Phat Kat and his own rhymes over boundary-breaking unquantised beat marvels, Dilla strayed into older city staples Afrofunk (the hard partying African Rhythms), jazz (Donald Byrd’s Think Twice stripped back) and techno (taking Kraftwerk to the strip club on B.B.E. (Big Booty Express)). Rehoused as a dozen 7-inch singles with added instrumentals, alternate mixes and rejigs from Muro and Azymuth, its once scattershot feel now seems ahead of the game. Andy Cowan
F I LT E R R E I S SU E S
Mary Timony
★★★★ Mountains MATADOR. LP
Ex-Hex and Wild Flag bandleader’s bleak, eccentric 2000 solo debut.
★★★★ Start Walkin’: 1 9 6 5 -1 9 7 6 LIGHT IN THE ATTIC. CD/DL/LP
Surprise:the oddities of her career sometimes out-strip the hits. A half-century removed from its heyday, the music of Nancy Sinatra has lost some revolutionary power thanks to popcultural ubiquity. Whether it was the FBI blasting These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ to force a cult into acquiescence or Quentin Tarantino borrowing Bang Bang to spice up Kill Bill, Sinatra can seem passé through sheer familiarity alone. But this 23-track set – unequal parts greatest hits collection and cache of curiosities – manages to capture the dizzying mix of danger, sexuality and sweetness that defined Sinatra’s brilliance, especially during her profound run with Lee Hazlewood. The standards are here, but so is Arkansas Coal, a heart-tugging snapshot of blue-collar tragedy, and Paris Summer, a B-side so cinematic you may find yourself imagining the movie it might score. Clad in those boots, Sinatra dances on a razor’s edge between innocence and cunning – her mesmerising trick here, from start to finish. Grayson Haver Currin
REELING from bereavement and in the midst of a deep depression, Mary Timony drew a line beneath the Breeders-esque pop of her recently defunct group Helium for this overlooked treasure. Holed up in a Boston loft, she swapped lopsided indie rock for stark, unusual orchestration (including viola, vibraphone and brass) and an unexpected turn towards medievalist folksong. The arch organ threnodies of 1542, the strings and harmonies of the eerie The Hour Glass and the brittle agonies of The Bell suggest Timony was no longer focused on the MTV crossover success Helium had briefly enjoyed. But while Mountains is a solitary, inwards-facing and occasionally traumatic collection, this introspection still delivered dark magic:see The Fox And Hound’s elliptical ruminations, and the bristling catharsis of Valley Of 1,000 Perfumes, which Timony has revisited with a full orchestra for this reissue.
Stevie Chick Beefheart) and Feifei Yang (singing Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower in Mandarin). His virtuosic solo performance on Bra Joe From Kilimanjaro reinforces Lucas’s rep as one of the mightiest – and overlooked – rock guitarists alive. Michael Simmons
Marcos Resende And Index
Mary Timony: still delivering dark magic.
synth adding atmosphere, until Magalhães’ sax raises the roof. The epic Praça Da Alegria starts in a similar vein before drifting into Love Unlimited territory, and Nergal is killer jazz-funk underpinned by Brazilian percussion. Superb arrangements override the few instances of audio deterioration. David Katz
Various
Marcos Resende And Index
★★★★
FAR OUT. CD/DL/LP
JAZZMAN. CD/DL/LP
A sampler of an avant-rock guitar champ.
Mythic Brazilian jazz-funk synth odyssey released at long last.
Subtitled Modern Sounds From The 21st century.
Guitarist Gary Lucas is a treasure chest of musical technique, adventurous experimentation and global diversity. A Captain Beefheart veteran and crucial in Jeff Buckley’s emergence, he has recorded 35-plus albums as a leader, blending metallic rock with Chinese, Indian and African musics and bursts of off-the-scale free jazz. He’s a master of fingerpicking and slide, and shredder of fluid electric clusters, all propelled by the raw energy of the downtown New York anything-goes scene. This extraordinary 2-CD anthology is divided between his early ’90s band Gods And Monsters and collaborations with Buckley, Alan Vega, David Johansen, Nona Hendryx (one of several tracks covering
After fronting Portuguese jazz outfits, keyboardist Marcos Resende returned to Brazil with several synthesizers, forming Index with drummer Claudio Caribé, bassist Rubão Sabino and sax player Oberdan Magalhães from Tim Maia’s band. This self-titled 1976 debut was earmarked by CTI but shelved, then restored four decades on by Resende from master tapes over the course of two years, before his death last November. Crossing jazz-funk, space rock and Brazilian rhythms, these lively, abstract instrumentals weave layers of keyboards through pulsating fusions. Nina Neném is furious sambajazz with Resende bashing arpeggios on a Prophet 5, a Fender Rhodes and string
★★★★ The Essential Gary Lucas KNITTING FACTORY. CD/DL
Spiritual Jazz 1 3 : Now!
The 24 tracks on this latest release in the excellent Spiritual Jazz series spotlights the last two decades, a fertile period bookended datewise by Italian saxophonist Carla Marciano’s saintly Trane’s Groove from 2001 and Finnish flautist Oiro Pena’s Nimeton, a variegated mood piece from 2019. In between, transfixing inclusions by Steve Reid and Idris Ackamoor bridge the intergenerational Coltrane disciples. The first-named, who worked with Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra in the 1970s, helms a three-reeds and keyboards enlightenment quest on 2005’s For Coltrane, the then 61-yearold still in his prime – he died just five years later. Ackamoor with The Pyramids, meanwhile, who debuted in 1971, hits peak transcendence on 2018’s An Angel Fell, his deeply stirring
Jackie Wilson
★★★★ Soul Galore DEMON. LP
BillStone
★★★ Stone DRAG CITY. LP
Psych-folk super-obscurity, from rural Maine.
★★★★
Gary Lucas
praise song. Nat Birchall and Shabaka And The Ancestors also provide healing sounds. Lois Wilson
The assumption that every rare psych-folk record from the cusp of the ’70s must be a lost classic is a risky one:many careers only stretched to a couple of hundred unsold private press albums for a reason. Nevertheless, labels like Drag City continue to have a decent hit rate at unearthing the good stuff, such as this 1969 set from Bill Stone, a singersongwriter with aspirations towards the more cosmic end of Greenwich Village. Initially, Stone seems akin to the buccaneering style of an Eric Andersen or Tim Hardin, burly acoustic strums offset with meandering electric leads. Gradually, though, the lo-fi mistiness becomes more evocative, and heads into the eldritch territory of Pearls Before Swine:Charlotte’s Town, with arcing feedback accents, unnerving female backing whispers and a tale of being bitten by a weeping man, is a real find. A happy ending, too: after 50 years of teaching, Stone is back making music. John Mulvey
First time vinyl reissue for 1966 album on Brunswick. Jackie Wilson began his transition from R&B shouter to classic soul man on this second-to-last album with producer Nat Tarnopol in New York – their swansong, 1968’s Manufacturers Of Soul with Count Basie, also gets a vinyl reissue this month. The exuberant title track, penned by Eugene Hamilton, provides a bridge between styles with its hard-edged vocal and ecstatic feeling;likewise Stop Lying, with its sophistication, swoon and swing. 3 Days 1 Hour 30 Minutes, meanwhile, is more tough testifier:“Lord have mercy, get down on bended knees,” he screams. But on Brand New Thing, he’s pushing forward, hollering, “Get with it don’t quit it,” over big band proto-funk. A flamboyant farewell to Tarnopol and the Big Apple (for the time being anyway) – with his next album, he was with Carl Davis in Chicago. Lois Wilson
MOJO 95
In a brown study: The Band (from left) Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson.
F I L E U N D E R ...
The shape it’s in HE LEGEND of The Band, the (mostly) Canadian interlopers who pioneered Americana, is a tall tale with a downbeat ending. After two epochmaking records that inspired a movement – two movements if you include their effect on British folk rock, three if you include their effect on Elton John – this unassuming band of brothers came unglued once fortune and fame paid them a visit. They even sing about it on the title track of the album where that story arc pivots, album three, Stage Fright (Capitol) ++++, the one with the rainbow cover, conceived as a live recording of new material to be captured during shows at the Woodstock Playhouse, a planned thank-you to the local community that had endured the Woodstock Festival. Said community, however, wasn’t interested. But The Band decided to use the Playhouse for the basic tracking anyhow, installing a mobile studio and Albert Grossman’s new wunderkind engineer, Todd Rundgren, with whom Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm had worked on Jesse Winchester’s debut LP. Robertson was impressed with Rundgren’s speed at finding sounds and confidence in committing them to tape. Rundgren, however, became increasingly frustrated by the pace dictated by Band time. Garth Hudson would invariably nod off at his keyboards, Levon Helm might roost under a pile of stage curtains where no one could find him. Robertson admired
T
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Rundgren’s skills, but also considered him “kind of bratty” and the rest of the band didn’t warm to him, meaning that, when it came to mixing, the esteemed Glyn Johns was contacted and a strange set-up ensued where Rundgren flew to the UK with the tapes and mixed flew home with two select from. cohesive. It underwhelmed. Its 50th anniversary presents the chance to address that. Someone,
new running order with fresh stereo and 5.1 remixes by the venerated Bob Clearmountain, who might seem a curious choice, given his signature sound is the opposite of the dry, ragged appeal of The Band’s bestloved work. And yes, he has employed the kind of ambience – and, if my ears don’t deceive, freshly triggered drum sounds – not usually associated with them, making it more like the live record initially
previously unreleased, mixed by
admired Rundgren, but considered him ‘kind of bratty’.”
Band’s prowess, and is the element that should cheer up any purists prickling at such a comprehensive recalibration of the original record. It ought to be released independently. It’s unlikely all this will reposition Stage Fright in the affections of posterity but, if nothing else, anyone interested in The Band now has two interpretations of this pivotal chapter in their story to choose from.
Norman Seeff
An undervalued Band album is yanked from its grave and reanimated. By Jim Irvin.
intended, effectively documenting a sharper, crisper Band from about 20 years into the future. So, instead of opening with the ramshackle blues Strawberry Wine, the album leads with the brassy, upbeat The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show and a lustier The Shape I’m In. A freshly uncovered batch of rehearsal tapes and run-throughs of songs not on the record – Get Up Jake, Calgary Blues,
F I LT E R R E I S SU E S you get an idea of the esteem in which he is held. For once, a tribute album actually makes its subject come alive. David Hutcheon
The Subliminals
★★★★ United State FLYING NUN. DL/LP
Various
★★★ Cafe Exil: New Adventures In European Music 1 9 7 2 -1 9 8 0 ACE. CD/DL/LP
Imaginary soundtrack to Iggy and Bowie’s favourite Berlin hipster hangout. Messrs Jones and Osterberg had long since left the cafe when some of these tracks were recorded, and although this set was compiled to show an overlap between European and UK artrock, Pony by Annette Peacock was recorded in the US with American musicians. But that aside, it’s a fascinating selection. Edgar Froese’s Epsilon In Malaysian Pale – on the vinyl version only – fed into Bowie’s music, and Brian Eno contributes No One Receiving, which joins the dots to Cluster’s Sowiesoso and Michael Rother’s Feuerland. Moving a little further away is the synthy jazz-funk of Toni Esposito and the gently rippling, jazzy moods of Rubba. Jennifer by Faust stands out, a lovely melody that gets consumed in a maelstrom of guitars before meandering to a close with honky tonky piano, a song structure so bizarre that even Faust neglected to pursue the idea further. Mike Barnes
Various
Lesser-spotted New Zealand treasure celebrates 20th anniversary. In terms of overseas interest, Flying Nun’s golden age was over by 1994, and the second coming didn’t start until around 2016 – a lengthy gap in which various jewels went largely unnoticed. None more so than United State, a union of ex-members of equally under-the-radar Flying Nun alumni (Loves Ugly Children, The Hasselhoff Experiment, Bressa Creeting Cake) who exceeded anything they’d made apart. Given that The Subliminals got going at the same time as Liverpool quartet Clinic, the similarity between the two bands is uncanny, though it’s clear both were channelling Can and Wire: metronomic swing, beatnik vocals, a balance between fluidity and regimentation. The Subs came at it from different angles, and the success rate was high:sultry motorik (Surface), shouty rock (Uh-Oh), eastern-tinged drones (Distance), golden-age Flying Nun psych-pop (Close Your Eyes). “A beautiful accident,” the band reckoned. One, sadly, never repeated. Martin Aston
★★★ Tokyo Dreaming
The Totale Of La Bande À Renaud
WEWANTSOUND. CD/LP
Stars pay tribute to a most French kind of superstar. Renaud Séchan was one of France’s biggest stars in the 1970s and ’80s yet is almost unknown beyond the border. A left-winger, he railed against the widest rage of bourgeois targets yet suffered a crowd walkout at a 1985 Moscow gig, and after battling alcoholism, he somehow hit a new peak of popularity in his fifties, with five chart-topping albums since the turn of the century. Intrigued? One gateway to his oeuvre is this 34-track collection (considerably expanded from its original 2014 release) interpreting his best-known songs. Some of the artists have made no more impact abroad than he has, but with the likes of Carla Bruni, Benjamin Biolay, Emily Loizeau and Louane aboard,
Double set of rare, funky ’80s pop selected by Japanese music expert Nick Luscombe. Granted exceptional access to the vaults of one of Japan’s oldest and most collectable labels, Nippon Columbia, Nick Luscombe has clearly had a ball, unearthing a slew of uncut gems from a time when Japan’s rapidly changing technology meant Tokyo musicians finally had the tools to soundtrack its futuristic cityscape. There’s something to sate most electronic tastes here. Whether it’s the staccato bass and fluttering flutes of Mariah’s classic synth pop, Ryuichi Sakamoto’s bountiful melodic touch, Yumi Seino’s slinky sultry cinemascope, Shigeo Sekito’s reflective ambient jazz, Kyoko Furuya’s slow-burning sadness or Colored Music gamely trashing a piano in lieu of a solo. If you can block out the occasional
It’s the way they do It:Becker & Mukai at synthguitar junction.
Various
★★★★ Two Synths, A Guitar (And) A Drum Machine SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP
Fresh dance sounds inspired by the ’70s/’80s no wave, punk-funk and noise genres. By choosing bands unified not by what they do but the way that they do it, this dudfree 15-track primer reminds us how chemistry and purity of intention can trump muso grandstanding. And while there are inevitable nods to underground New York, British industrial and German electronica, the startled innovations of New Fries’ frenetic tension-ratcheting (Lily) or Vex Ruffin’s shotgun marriage of punk and throwback hip-hop beats (The Balance) do much more than rake over the same old ground. Whether it’s Niagara’s warped excursion into Augustus Pablo dub (Ida), Tom Of England’s wobbly mix of PiL, Krautrock and Arthur Russell (Neon Green) or Automatic’s minimalist backand-forth over queasy Korg MS-20s (Too Much Money), the connective tissue between these acts lies strictly on the dancefloor. Andy Cowan
Curved Air
★★★★ The Albums 1 9 7 0 -7 3 ESOTERIC. CD
First four albums by Britain’s only female-fronted progressive rockers. Mike Barnes’ definitive prog rock history A New Day Yesterday paid its respects, but largely Curved Air have fallen into obscurity. This, despite two classically trained spearheads (violinist Darryl Way and multi-instrumentalist Francis Monkman), a singer (ex-folkie Sonja Kristina) by turns sultry, regal and playful, and a canvas stretched by folk, jazz and psych-pop as well as virtuosity. Unusually for a prog band, the short-form Curved Air were even better than violin-fests like Vivaldi:see such haunted beauty as Screw
or the flighty Phantasmagoria. Given that the first three albums were Top 20 hits, why the current low profile? Did Top 5 single Back Street Luv damage their credibility? Perhaps Kristina was an affront to prog’s boys’-own domain? Even after Way and Monkman left, a fourth, rockier album (Air Cut) didn’t disappoint. In other words, Curved Air are ripe for rediscovery. Martin Aston
VINYL PACKAGE OF THE MONTH
Various
★★★★ WRASSE/PANTHEON. CD/DL/LP
injection of over-exuberant slap-bass, many of these carefully sequenced, hi-gloss odes to modern living still sound like the future. Andy Cowan
Nirvana Songlife MADFISH. 6 -LP
Familiar for their classic single Rainbow Chaser, Nirvana were purveyors of delicate, melodic songs and emotional vocals that, in the person of Patrick Campbell-Lyons, remain constant throughout. This
Secrets
year, the ornate 1968’s All Of Us their early peak, containing the extraordinary
St. John’s Wood Affair. Leaving Island shortly afterwards, Dedicated To Markos III was barely issued on Pye, despite the intense quality of songs like Black Flower and Love Suite. Campbell-Lyons soldiered on with Anaesthetic (Vertigo, 1971) – the first side of which is an extraordinary cut-up of funk breakbeats,
and, at the end, a brief music hall song. 1972’s
Songs Of Love And Praise is more structured and upbeat, culminating in the extraordinary power ballad Stadium. The ‘lost’ sixth album, Secrets, is the soundtrack to a musical that never happened, and is best regarded as a bonus to a remarkably consistent, and
F I LT E R R E I S SU E S
Mad Professor
★★★★ 4 0 Years Of Dub! 1 9 8 0 -2 0 2 0
to The Rolling Stones, but they did have a tinny DIY production. And sometimes they had a drum machine. These 20 tracks collect their singles and assorted flotsam and jetsam. At their best, on the impossibly catchy Drums Over London and The Year Of The Sex Olympics (titled after a reality TV-predicting play), Disco Zombies had hooks and melodies to spare, while the witty Where Have You Been Lately, Tony Hateley pays wry tribute to the much-travelled ’60s-’70s centre forward. John Aizlewood
ARIWA. DL
Four decades of dub, Ariwa style. After an apprenticeship at Soundcraft, Guyanese immigrant Neil Fraser launched Ariwa from his south-east London front room, producing roots reggae and lovers rock with local performers. Dub was important from the start and this download-only retrospective allows us to chart the label’s dub progression, with Fraser in the producer’s chair as Mad Professor. Opening track Can You Dub It has Patrick Augustus’s steel pan melody duelling with a full horn section as Prof embeds a terrible crunching sound in the backbeat. Soon Ranking Ann is decrying the exclusionist policies of the Tory government’s Immigration Plan, sounding every bit as relevant now as it did 36 years ago. There are adaptations of Armagideon Time and Kunta Kinte Black Roots, and unusual elements appear throughout this enjoyable romp, such as snatches of opera on The Realms and sub-dub keyboard bass on Soft Drugs. David Katz
Disco Zombies
★★★ South London Stinks OPTIC NERVE. LP
Long lost Leicester/London punks compiled. Formed at Leicester University in 1977, Disco Zombies never came close to cracking anything other than a few John Peel plays for their indie singles, but they were first generation punks and spawned both Andy Ross, who went on to form Food (Blur and Jesus Jones’s label), and MOJO CD compiler Dave Henderson. They weren’t especially angry – Here Come The Buts out-lovelorns Buzzcocks – or sweary, and nor were they in covert thrall
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TP Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou
REISSUES EXTRA
Beachwood Sparks The Creation
Jon Gibson
★★★
★★★★
★★★★
Beachwood Sparks
We Are Paintermen
CURATION. CD/LP
DEMON. LP
Songs & Melodies, 1 9 7 3 -1 9 7 7
Good vibes galore on this 20th anniversary reissue – the debut of an LA country-rock band as schooled in Felt and Flying Nun as the Flying Burritos and 5 Dera Byrds. Has remastered vinyl, unreleased tracks, rare 45s and a 2000 live show on CD. JM
Unimpeachable 1967 debut of singles and covers from the psychedelic Mods on clear, 180gm vinyl. It only came out in Germany at the time but has achieved cult status for its blend of art-pop, gnarly guitars and uppers-crunching R&B. JB
A minimalist utility player who worked with Philip Glass, Steve Reich and Terry Riley, this 2-LP set reveals gorgeous, varied, often Glassy systems workouts, Arthur Russell, Julius Eastman among the musicians. JM
Madness
Various
Various
★★★★
★★★★
★★★★
Absolutely
For The Good Times: The Songs Of Kris Kristofferson
SUPERIOR VIADUCT. LP
★★★★ Segla ACID JAZZ. DL/LP
Iincredibly rare Benin funk and dancefloor groove. Very little is known about Segla, quite probably the rarest album issued by Cotonou, Benin’s TP Orchestre Poly-Rythmo De Cotonou – TP meaning “tout puissant” or “all powerful”. Recorded amid line-up upheavals at EMI Lagos in Nigeria, and rush released in 1978 without a sleeve as ALS059 on Adissa Seidou’s Albarika Store label, it nevertheless stands alongside their greatest work, transcendence arriving early on the first of three tracks, Mi Kple Mi De, a 16-minute plus celebratory mesh of funk and Beninese beat, where vivifying horns dance atop vodun rhythms and soulful chanting lifts you high. Dodji Lo, meanwhile, at nine and a half minutes, is all jittery plucked guitar and brisk syncopation, and the title track, a mere six minutes-plus, looks west to The Isley Brothers, Jimi Hendrix and Santana, and summons fire and shamanic psychedelic blues. Lois Wilson
ACE. CD
Oh! You Pretty Things: Glam Queens And Street Urchins (1 9 7 0 -1 9 7 6 )
Varied takes on Kristofferson’s canon. Of the less well known, Lloyd Charmers’ Loving Her Was Easier is a highlight, gently urging the song’s tempo from horse-walking country to a gentle reggae trot. JB
Get your epicene fop on – and your boots – with this 3-CD invite to hear Sparks, Lou Reed, Mott, the Dolls, Slade, Jobriath and lesser-known acts such as “raunchy and randy” Streak. IH
Various
Various
Various
★★★★★
★★★★
★★
COMING NEXT MONTH...
Our New Orleans
Pure Exotica
NONESUCH. LP
CHERRY RED. CD/DL/LP
Jane Weaver (below), Valerie June, The Anchoress, Osibisa, Teenage Fanclub, Alice Cooper, Altın Gün, The National, Cathal Coughlan, John Coltrane, Iggy & The Stooges, Lonnie Holley and more.
Double LP of 2005’s Hurricane Katrina benefit with Crescent City royalty Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, Irma Thomas (poignant on Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues) et al. Among side four bonuses:Buckwheat Zydeco & Ry Cooder’s foot-stomping Let’s Work Together. The original CD now goes for a fortune. JB
Subtitled:As Dug By Lux And Ivy. Further Cramps-inspired catalogue dipping:here, the yin and yang of late-’50s-into-’60s exotica on two discs, Lite and Dark. The former, instrumental sound of canoodling under coconut trees with Martin Denny;the second, cinematic noir like Les Baxter’s Despair. JB
Staring At The Rudeboys: The British Ska Revival (1 9 7 9 -1 9 8 9 )
BMG. LP
From 1980, the Nutty Boys’ second kicks off with Bash Street caper Baggy Trousers, but elsewhere the cheeky exterior contains adult ruminations on racism, poverty, prison and more: hidden gem Disappear reflects on the proposed demolition of the Alexandra Palace. IH
CHERRY RED. CD
CHERRY RED. CD
Original 2-Tone acts plus those they inspired, on three discs. Much formulaic oompah-ing, but dig the bit parts for Wayne Hussey and Kim Wilde, plus members of Sade, The Blue Nile and Animal Kwackers. IH
RATING S & 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
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MOJO CLASSIC
EXCELLENT
GOOD
DISAPPOINTING
BEST AVOIDED
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Lucinda Williams Live @ The Fillmore LOST HIGHWAY 2005,£1 0
You say:“It has every song I want. There’s an agony in her voice that touches my agony.” JonnyPoynton, via Facebook Williams’ eighth LP, a double, was recorded live over a threenight stand at the famed San Francisco music venue. “We’ve got the mojo working tonight,” she told the crowd – having been at two of those shows, I can confirm her view. This is not the usual crowd-pleasing, hit-the-ground-running, live album. The setlist included more songs from Essence and World Without Tears than from better-known Car Wheels On A Gravel Road and Lucinda Williams. CD1 begins with three ballads in a row before it gets down and dirty. CD2 takes the opposite approach, starting out rocking, ending with heartbreaker Words Fell. All are excellently played by her pared-to-the bone band.
Lucinda Williams
CAST YOUR VOTES… This month you chose your Top 1 0 Lucinda Williams LPs. Next month we want your Lovers Rock Top 1 0 . Send selections via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or e-mail to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy Lovers Rock’ and we’ll print the best comments.
or Joan Baez, preferably both. The Americana poet and punk rocker, She started writing poems when by Sylvie Simmons. she was six years old, taking F ALL THE Lucinda Williams concerts this after her father, the poet Miller writer has seen, the one that seemed to best Williams, whom Bill Clinton sum her up was in Austin, Texas, in 2001, at invited to read at his second an outdoor festival by the Cumberland River. Steve presidential inauguration. Miller Earle played a set, and Cheap Trick. When Lucinda Williams was also a literary professor and the family took the stage she started to sing in her sand-andlived wherever his work took him – from Macon, honey voice the songs from her new album Essence. Georgia to Mexico City – which prepared his Pretty downbeat for a festival, but that didn’t bother daughter for a peripatetic life. He also introduced her her. She dedicated one song to Joey Ramone;another at a very young age to the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins, to an Austin club owner who’d been jailed for dope; Mississippi John Hurt and Hank Williams. and a third to all the people in By her own description a “late Nashville who had put her down, bloomer”, it took Lucinda some time “You can kiss saying, “You can kiss my pretty to find her voice. Falling as she did white ass.” Lucinda Williams has between the cracks of rock and my pretty the lyrical skills of a poet and the country, she struggled to find a white ass.” attitude of a punk rocker. place to fit in until the Americana “America’s greatest songwriter”, movement took off. Not that Lucinda LUCINDA WILLIAMS as Time magazine called her, was showed any great desire to fit in anywhere. As she told MOJO some born in Lake Charles, Louisiana in years ago, “I’ve always done what 1953, got her first guitar at the age I wanted to do.” of 12 and wanted to be Bob Dylan
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Lucinda Williams Sweet Old World CHAMELEON 1992,£1 0
You say:“Best Southern gothic writing since William Faulkner. It made Southern music smarter.” Jesse Dayton, via Twitter After impressing with her selftitled album on Rough Trade, it was another four years before she followed it up with Sweet Old World. However good the songs on Lucinda Williams, this was in many ways better still. Co-produced by Williams and Gurf Morlix, who also played guitar, mandolin and steel, her band included Benmont Tench on Hammond and Jim Lauderdale on backing vocals. There’s something powerfully elegiac about songs like Sweet Old World and Pineola, and the closing cover of Nick Drake’s Which Will. As Steve Earle said, “All that sadness and anger directed towards a loved-one who has taken their own life is one of the bravest things I’ve seen an artist attempt to say.”
Getty (2)
Late blooming Lucinda Williams does as she pleases.
H OW T O B U Y
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Lucinda Williams Happy Woman Blues SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS 1980,£ 8 .9 9
You say:“It introduced me to her more country-style folky side.” Craig Gee, via Facebook Williams’ second album, like her debut Ramblin’ (1979), was released on the Folkways label. But as opposed to a collection of covers of old blues (Robert Johnson) and country (Carter Family) on acoustic 12- and 6-string guitars, these songs are Williams originals, and backed by a band with electric guitar and bass as well as fiddle and pedal steel. Among the players are two longtime Townes Van Zandt bandmates Wrecks Bell and Mickey White – the latter co-produced with Williams. It’s quite a leap in the space of a year, and the first indication of where her music would head:the mix of electric rock, blues, acoustic folk and country define Americana.
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LOST HIGHWAY 2007,£1 5
LOST HIGHWAY 2003,£6
HIGHWAY 20 2014,£ 2 0
You say:“Super underrated and has Bill Frisell on it.” WarHenRecords, via Twitter
You say:“Her band rocks and the songs are emotional whirlwinds. Also, some of her finest singing to date.” RegularHumanBassPlayer, via Twitter
Lucinda Williams Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone You say:“Crackling songs and some of her hardest rocking stuff.” AnEarful, via Twitter A 20-song double with 19 originals and one cover – JJ Cale’s Magnolia – Williams’ eleventh LP was the first to appear on her own label. She was done with record companies telling her what she ought to do. It opens slow and spare – soulful voice, acoustic guitar – with Compassion, a song based on a poem by her father, Miller. But there is no shortage of rock, more bare-boned than the credits might suggest. There are six guitarists besides Williams, including longtime compadre Doug Pettibone and Tony Joe White, plus Ian McLagan (keyboards) and Pete Thomas and Davey Faragher from Elvis Costello’s Imposters.
Lucinda Williams West
Written and recorded during a period that took in her mother’s death and the end of a serious love affair, if there’s an overall theme to Williams’ ninth album it is pain. And there are very few people who can sing about pain as eloquently as Lucinda Williams. Or as multifariously. There’s stoic country (Fancy Funeral);tough, vengeful rock (Come On);and the dark Unsuffer Me, a bit gospel, a bit Doors. Among her 10 accompanists are Jim Keltner, Bill Frisell, Dylan bassist Tony Garnier, The Jayhawks’ Gary Louris on backing vocals, and a string section. Hal Willner, credited with playing turntables, is behind the album’s polished production.
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Lucinda Williams World Without Tears
In some ways, the follow-up to Williams’ 2001 album Essence picks up where that LP left off. The songs are frank and personal and the theme, as often as not, is fucked-up love. In fact, the lilting melody, lap steel and intimate vocal of Ventura would have felt at home on Essence. But there the comparisons stop. Where there was a gentleness to Essence, World Without Tears rocks. Recorded near-as-dammit live in the studio with her road-honed band, it’s for the most part rough, raw, edgy, energised and very physical. It’s a punk version of Essence, rolled in dirt, sweat and blood, particularly on songs like Righteously and Atonement.
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Lucinda Williams Good Souls Better Angels HIGHWAY 20 2020,£1 2
You say:“’Cos Lu sings what needs to be said. Rage and Glory.” Johnny Borgan, via Twitter In Nashville with time on her hands, Williams visited Ray Kennedy at his studio where they worked on Car Wheels… in 1998. She’d been writing songs for the first time with husband Tom Overby, and figured Kennedy’s studio with its vintage equipment would be a great place to record a dozen of them with her longtime road band of Stuart Mathis, David Sutton and Butch Norton. There’s raging, politically charged blues (Man Without A Soul sounds like Trump);electric blues-rock (You Can’t Rule Me);Dylan-esque talking blues (Bad News Blues) and dark, Old Testament blues (Big Rotator). The slow Big Black Train is a powerful study of depression.
NOW DIG THIS
LU’S JUKEBOX
3
Lucinda Williams Lucinda Williams
2
Lucinda Williams Essence
ROUGH TRADE 1988,£1 2
LOST HIGHWAY 2001,£1 0
You say:“I bought her selftitled release in the early ’90s for £2. Played it to death.” Gary Raine, via Facebook
You say:“A smouldering little gem.” Alex Tobin, via Twitter
The title makes it sound like a debut and despite those two Folkways albums, in a way it is. After eight years and no record deals – too edgy for country, too classic a songwriter for cowpunk – Lucinda signed with the only label that made her an offer:Rough Trade in the UK. She was living in LA, initially with her longtime boyfriend. He left, she stayed and wrote this album. It would be her breakthrough, particularly as a songwriter:I Just Wanted To See You So Bad;Big Red Sun Blues;The Night’s Too Long; Passionate Kisses (which Mary Chapin Carpenter covered and won a Grammy). A 25th Anniversary edition of the LP, released by Thirty Tigers in 2013, contained a second disc of 20 live and bonus tracks.
“I feel this is kind of a woman’s record,” Williams told MOJO at one point during the three years between Car Wheels On A Gravel Road and its highlyanticipated follow-up. “It’s more of a mature record. Love songs and lust songs.” As she had done with Lucinda Williams, she wrote them immediately and quickly in the aftermath of another romantic break-up. Her template, she said, was Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind, for its relative quiet simplicity. Two Dylan sidemen, Charlie Sexton and Tony Garnier, join a line-up that includes Ryan Adams and Jim Lauderdale. The subtle, nuanced band and her upfront, yearning, achingly vulnerable voice single this out among some of her more hard rocking albums. A beauty.
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Lucinda Williams Car Wheels On A Gravel Road
MERCURY 1998,£7
You say:“Car Wheels… is a masterpiece, unrivalled in my opinion.” Paul Beard, via Twitter Making an album rarely came easily to Williams, and Car Wheels On A Gravel Road might have been the hardest of all to date. She signed with Rick Rubin’s American label in 1995, recording almost a whole album with longtime collaborator Gurf Morlix before shelving it and re-recording it in Nashville. Three years followed with other producers, including at one point Steve Earle. The two came to blows – Earle wanted to do it quickly;Williams wanted to take her time – but Earle still considers it “One of the best things I’ve ever been involved in.” It’s an Americana classic, unique and influential. It won her two Grammys, topped no end of critics’ polls, and made her name as one of the most important songwriters of her time, thanks to songs of the magnitude of the title track, Lake Charles, Drunken Angel (about fellow troubadour, the late Blaze Foley) and Joy.
Being an utter perfectionist in the matter of her own songs,maybe it comes as some relief to sing other people’s songs. There aren’t that many covers on her own albums,but you can find some really good stuff on various compilations and tribute albums. Among this writer’s favourites:her version – with David Crosby – of Return Of The Grievous Angel on Return Of The Grievous Angel:A Tribute to Gram Parsons (1999);You Don’t Have Very Far To Go on Tulare Dust:A Songwriter’s Tribute to Merle Haggard (1994);Whispering Pines on Love For Levon (2012);and – not to be missed – her absolutely heartbreaking cover of Rainer Ptacek’s The Farm on The Inner Flame:A Rainer Ptacek Tribute (2012). In recent months,“Lu’s Jukebox” – a series of themed virtual concerts – has included a night of Dylan covers and a tribute to The Rolling Stones.
MOJO 101
CREDITS
Eight legs good:JTQ in 1987 (from left) David Taylor, James Taylor, Simon Howard and Allan Cryockford.
morning-after, Formica-and-fags cover art, emerges from the grooves. Driven by lean Hammond, David Taylor’s jagged, piercing guitar and Howard’s combustible drums, the all-instrumental tracks were rich in association, variously evoking frugging Swinging Londoners in clubs, a secret assignation on a park bench, a high noon stop-off in Spain, and more. Setting the mood, the opening title track, whose cymbalom-like melody was created using a key inside a grand piano, transmits an Eastern Bloc frisson of espionage. “It’s that thing about being on the cusp,” says Taylor of these garage denizens playing jazzy film music. “You’re coming away from playing really explosive stuff and you’re trying to do something more.” Thirty-four years on, however, confusion remains about the track names. “The titles are mixed up,” says Taylor. “You say, ‘We’ll put it right’, but you never do.” (With Taylor playing the album down the phone to check, it seems the real running order transposes the titles of Mr Cool’s Dream and The Spiral Staircase on side But in Sweden Taylor had been writing one, while side two actually runs:The Onion original material, as had David. “I was Club, In The Park, Buzy Bee, “Los Cuevos collecting riffs and ideas and we were also Pablo”, Midnight Stomp (The NEW Rhumba) scouring around for film,” says James. and The Stroll). “Entertaining Mr Sloane, Alfie and Bedazzled The Money Spyder was released in October were big for us. We also plundered bits of ’87, and the group signed to Polydor. In 1988 soundtracks we found late at night on BBC2.” Wait A Minute, with its cover of the Starsky & Taylor came up with the idea of an Hutch theme, replaced the guts and grit with imaginary film soundtrack, whose title was a smoother production. The original quartet sparked when he saw one such web-spinner would splinter thereafter. in his mum’s garden in Strood, where he was Since then, Taylor has never stopped leading living in a six-berth ’50s caravan. “It could the band, through jazz, funk, library music and have been a combination of Harry Palmer and other organ-compatible grooves, on wax and Alfie, a bit of Bond, Get Carter too,” he says of on-stage. He still has a special fondness for his the concept. “I think Michael Caine featured Re-Elect The President days. “That remains quite a bit. But we never actually came up with the golden period for me, and I’m incredibly a proper narrative for a film.” proud of The Money Spyder,” he says. “Me and It was recorded intermittently and on a my brother were having an absolute blast. budget as May turned into June ’87, at several Once you get too much into the business and spots. Taylor’s mum’s spare bedroom was one. the money, you don’t half lose something.” Serendipitously, the organist has been The band’s poky, smelly rehearsal space they drawn back into that world. The week before called ‘the Hole’in a tunnel under Rochester MOJO made contact in December, he played Bridge was another. Here they used fellow Medway rocker Billy Childish’s Revox 4-track Hammond with Billy Childish’s son Huddie’s recorder to tape rough, ardent performances. band The Shadracks, on a cover of the theme Keeping the drums and bass, guitar and organ from Bedazzled. “It took me back to that were overdubbed at Woolly Studios, an Money Spyder period,” he says. “It felt exactly 8-track/£30-a-day set up in Sheerness, where like being in the JTQ 33 years ago.” Mission Impossible had been recorded. Needing Days later, the Audio Network got in another six tracks, Piller sent touch. “They approached me them to another studio to do ‘The Money Spyder 2’, in Forest Gate, which, using an orchestra and horns,” remembers Taylor, may have says Taylor. “It’s another filmic been owned by a disgruntled thing. I’m using that same former member of Iron zither sound. But what it Maiden. “We didn’t want loads doesn’t have is that punk, of mikes on the drums,” says 18-year-olds-on-a-bottle-ofTaylor of that last session. “We whisky kind of feel to it. I told come from Medway, we have the record company that’s our own musical identity. And what it needs. I even said, Can we knew the identity of what we put Huddie’s band on “…that punk, there? Or the other thing to we wanted to create, which was that kind of filmic, mostly is get the original band back 1 8 -year-olds- do on there. I’d absolutely jump British, Hammond-y on-a-bottleat the chance to do it again. background music-but-not.” These are my people.” A late-’60s British of-whisky Ian Harrison vibration, from the
Arachne in the UK From music’s rotating speaker of obscurity, instrumental Medway garage-jazz for an imaginary film.
The James Taylor Quartet The Money Spyder RE-ELECT THE PRESIDENT, 1987
T THE END of The Prisoners, I felt quite defeated,” says organist James Taylor of the Rochester psych-revivalists’August 1986 split. “I still wanted to play and do gigs though. I just needed to find a format to be able to do it.” For Taylor, born in ’64 and a Hammond obsessive since seeing his uncle’s band as a six-year-old, that format would arrive via a circuitous route. A month after his old group’s demise, he speculatively recorded a Hammond-punk version of Herbie Hancock’s theme to the 1966 thriller Blow Up, with Prisoners bassist Allan Crockford, Taylor’s guitarist brother David and the latter’s bandmate in The Daggermen, drummer Simon Howard. Though its principal had moved to Sweden, in spring 1987 the track would be released on Taylor’s manager Eddie Piller’s Re-Elect The President label. Piller would also name the band. Soon, the 45 was getting airplay by John Peel. Taylor, who’d spent a brutal winter in Stockholm, duly returned to London in April, reassembling the team to play the Limelight club, do a Peel session and record more tracks for May’s movie theme set Mission Impossible. “We had hardly anything prepared,” says Taylor of that mini-album’s raw versions of Goldfinger, Mrs Robinson, Alfie and more. “We were trying to take things and Hendrix-ify them, he was the master for us. That explosiveness was our thing.”
Steve Double/Camera Press
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Tracks: The Money Spyder / One Way Street / Car Chase / The Spiral Staircase / Mr Cool’s Dream / A Real Mean Time / The Onion Club / The Stroll / “Los Cuevos Pablo” / Midnight Stomp (The NEW Rhumba) / Buzy Bee / In The Park Personnel: James Taylor (Hammond organ), David Taylor (guitar), Allan Crockford (bass), Simon Howard (drums) Producer: Samuel J.Bronkowitz, Jr. (sic) Released: October 19 8 7 Recorded: Woolly Studios, Sheerness/ The Hole, Rochester/ James’ mum’s house, Strood/unidentified studio, Forest Gate Current Availability: 19 8 7 (BGP/Ace, 2 0 0 7 )
feel…”
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F I LT E R SC R E E N
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Joni Mitchell and Roger McGuinn, here’s Sharon Stone pretending she’d been a teenage witness whose Kiss T-shirt inspired Dylan to wear make-up on-stage. The Revue’s essence is reaffirmed in other bonus extras, including tour reporter Ratso Sloman humorously recalling off-stage incidents, and three never-seen peak-Dylan performances, particularly a sizzling Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You. Special kudos to the booklet with tour memories by playwright Sam Shepard and poets Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. Michael Simmons
★★★★
highlights the dramatic impact it made in the colonial ‘Mother Country’. The testimony of artists such as Dandy Livingston, Marcia Griffiths, Freddie Notes, The Pioneers, and producer Bunny Lee helps us understand what happened and why, with Don Letts and Pauline Black providing cultural context, along with label staffers Rob Bell and David Betteridge. Although recreated scenes of the 1960s lack credibility in places, and there is nothing of the label’s rebirth after an initial mid-’70s collapse, the music, and the stories behind it, carry the film, highlighting that reggae broke down race barriers. David Katz
Stardust
★★★ Dir: Gabriel Range VERTIGO. C/ST
Dir. George C. Wolfe NETFLIX:ST
Sound Of Metal
Black American culture under the microscope in this powerful adaptation.
★★★★
You can never really disguise those theatrical roots so sometimes it’s better not to even try. That’s the approach adopted by Tony-awardwinning playwright and director Wolfe in his powerful adaptation of the late August Wilson’s 1984 play, centred around an afternoon recording session by “the Mother of the Blues” in a Chicago studio in 1927. Wilson’s dialogue is intentionally musical, the play layered in a manner similar to the Georgia Jazz Band’s playing and given over to two soloists, Ma and her volatile horn player Levee, played respectively here by Viola Davis and the late Chadwick Boseman. It’s in Davis and Boseman that the film finds its intense power, but all the performances are strong. And while weighted with serious themes (commerce, racism, religion, the Black experience) the film never feels didactic or inert but rather a tense, lyrical and often painful rumination on the deep and complex meaning of the blues. Andrew Male
cast are deaf, while likeable actor Paul Raci, who plays the group guru, was raised by deaf parents. A technical miracle, Ruben’s journey – partially subtitled – proves redemptive, but never over-tidily. Ahmed himself embodies commitment – his role in a previous film, Mogul Mowgl, was as a rapper disabled by autoimmune disease. Meanwhile, anarcho punk-spotters will enjoy his character’s Rudimentary Peni T-shirt. Andrew Collins
Dir. Darius Marder VERTIGO. C/ST
Rudeboy: The Story Of Trojan Records
★★★★ Dir: Nicolas Jack Davies PULSE FILMS. BR/DVD
The iconic British reggae label and its legacy documented. Spinning off from Island Records in the late ’60s, Trojan quickly became the home of reggae in Britain, helping Jamaican music to become an accepted part of popular culture during a time of fraught racial tension. This thoughtful film traces its origins in Jamaica and
Rolling Thunder Revue:A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese
★★★★ Dir: Martin Scorsese THE CRITERION COLLECTION. DVD/BR
The mock’n’doc of a landmark event in rock history. Many were put off by actors portraying faux participants in what is primarily a documentary of Dylan’s legendary 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. But as director Scorsese explains in the accompanying bonus interview, the idea was to “get to the truth through a fabrication” and transcend the predictability of ordinary documentaries. Amid the cast of dozens, notably Joan Baez, Are we rolling yet?: Bob Dylan hears a sound like thunder.
Life on the road disrupted by drummer’s sudden hearing loss makes a winning drama. With bristling commitment, busy British actor/MC Riz Ahmed mastered the drums to play shirtless, American grunge-metal sticksman Ruben in this on-the-hoof, low-budget directorial debut from Darius Marder. A free-asa-bird lifestyle with vocalist partner Lou (Olivia Cooke) in a studio-cum-tourbus, and sober for four years, Ruben wakes up with almost no hearing. Threatening relationship and livelihood, Ruben fixates on pricey cochlear implants (not covered by insurance), but Lou urges him to join a rural retreat for deaf recovering addicts. Resistant, terrified and disruptive, he’s gradually inspired by a classroom of deaf children and learns American sign language. Many of the
Bowie biopic with no Bowie music makes the grade, just. Is Stardust as bad as they’re saying? Spoiler alert:it’s not. In fact, it’s not a great deal less good than Bohemian Rhapsody – another gaudy panto of rock’n’roll fantasy and reality, rife with bad wigs but redeemed by a fine central performance. Johnny Flynn’s Bowie is in his post-TMWSTW dip:starved of success; preoccupied with his brother Terry’s madness and his struggle to balance artistic authenticity and his penchant for mime. Flynn has Bowie’s seductiveness to a ‘t’ (there are sideways glances that make you catch your breath:“It’s him!”) but the script is heavyhanded with its themes and you feel a film that embraced its unauthorisedness more fully could have been weirder, more true to Bowie’s art. The score – by Ann Nikitin, weaving in as many Bowie echoes as legal formulae will allow – is actually interesting, but the real stars are Flynn’s Bowie teeth. They’re uncanny. Danny Eccleston
The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart
★★★ Dir: Frank Marshall UNIVERSAL PICTURES/SKY. C/ST
Sibling triumph and tragedy doc by Spielberg pal and Laurel Canyon co-exec. Frank Marshall’s clear-eyed, sanctioned but melancholic Bee Gees biopic begins at LA’s 38,000 capacity Oakland Coliseum in 1979;from a limo emerge three Manchesterraised siblings – two twins, two bearded, one not, one vibrato, two falsetto – on the sold-out Spirits Having Flown tour. Forward to Miami 2019, where sole survivor Barry, 74, reflects “I’d rather have them all back here and have no hits at all.” Dad-managed, skiffleforged, they emigrated to Australia in 1958, returning to exploit the British invasion, doing the northern clubs to pay off taxes. The move to Miami and Saturday Night Fever’s success unlocks global potential, preceding drugs, drink, rehab and the lifestylerelated death of “fourth Gibb” Andy at 30. Marshall’s film only loses authority when wheeling on voices such as Chris Martin and Noel Gallagher. Andrew Collins
WHAT WE’VE LEARNT Following an unhappy life of insecurity, guilt and paranoia, Gilbert Harding chose to end his autobiography, Along My Line, with the utterly bleak sign-off, “I do wish that the future were over.” ● One of Larry Parnes’ least successful protégés was Simon Scott, who lost the impresario thousands of pounds. For Scott’s utterly weird second single, My Baby’s Got Soul, Parnes commissioned a sculptor to create hundreds of plaster facsimiles of Scott’s head which were sent to DJs and journalists. ● Prior to his death, Jacobs’ professional behaviour became increasingly erratic. In one correspondence with a client, he sent a letter containing a large red pill and a note that read, “This is the unceasing source of my unquenchable vitality. Take it and see what happens to you.” ●
Are you being served, with a writ:(from left) Larry Parnes, John Kennedy, David Jacobs arrive at court, 1960.
Up against it The interlinked stories of the gay men who helped to shape the Swinging ’6 0 s. By Andrew Male
The Velvet Mafia ★★★ Darryl W. Bullock OMNIBUS PRESS. £ 2 0
N THE spring of 1967, 34-year-old playwright Joe Orton received a brown paper package in the post. It was his screenplay for The Beatles’third film, Up Against It, submitted in January at the request of the group’s manager Brian Epstein and returned, rejected, with no covering letter. “No explanation of why. No criticism of the script,” wrote Orton in his diary. “And apparently Brian Epstein had no comment to make either. Fuck them.” Orton’s already low opinion of Epstein was not affected:“a thoroughly weak, flaccid type… an amateur and a fool.” Orton is a supporting player in Darryl Bullock’s book, which chiefly focuses on the relationships between Epstein, pop impresario Larry Parnes and “solicitor to the stars” David Jacobs. However, his story, and many more like them, gives the truth to the myth of a “velvet mafia”.
Mirrorpix
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behind Liberace’s famous libel case against the Daily Mirror in 1959, Jacobs acted as legal expert for Epstein, Harding, Bart and Admittedly it’s a great hook on which to Parnes, as well as the likes sell a book, this idea of an interconnected of Jimi Hendrix, Judy group of gay men, working together in ’60s Garland and The Move. London to further their careers and the careers of others. However, it’s a concept that A towering figure of 6ft 3ins with dyed black hair bares little scrutiny, and Bullock knows this. and white pancake Beyond the cover flash, the author is instead make-up, who arrived at here to tell a story of how, thanks to the court in a chauffeur-driven dangerous consequences of being openly gay pink-and-maroon in ’60s London (both legal and otherwise), Rolls-Royce, there was these men developed a way of operating that was necessarily mutual, clandestine, and often a period during the ’60s when this flamboyant existed outside of the law. legal expert seemed Those MOJO readers who already know untouchable. However, their Parnes and Epstein histories will find the high-profile cases little here that feels new or revelatory, but Jacobs defended gradually became more what Bullock excels at is showing how these dangerous and peculiar. Bullock recounts the grander trajectories resulted in so many solicitor’s bizarre downfall with forensic but smaller yet significant encounters, giving moving, miniature life-sketches of incidental never salacious detail, and you’re left characters such as Lionel Bart, wondering how much more Robert Stigwood and TV fascinating The Velvet Mafia “A weak, panellist Gilbert Harding, and would have been if it had made recreating the world of fear, the chief object of the flaccid type… Jacobs paranoia and distrust that they research and focus. Yet, given an amateur Jacobs’high-profile connecoften operated in. tions and the dark rumours As such, by far the most and a fool.” that still surround his death, interesting character in PLAYWRIGHT JOE Bullock’s book, and the one it is perhaps a project that ORTON ON BRIAN who ties all the others together Bullock considered, then EPSTEIN left wisely alone. is David Jacobs. The brains
F I LT E R B O O K S
Hear My Train A Comin’:The Songs Of Jimi Hendrix
★★★★ Kevin Le Gendre EQUINOX. £ 2 5
A fascinating, meticulous study of Hendrix the composer. Most analyses of Jimi Hendrix concentrate on his guitar playing, but Kevin Le Gendre brings a fresh lens to the subject by focusing on his songwriting craft. The author of Don’t Stop The Carnival: Black Music In Britain Vol 1 and Soul Unsung, Le Gendre has a vast knowledge of black music and views Hendrix as an ever curious and evolving creative, rooted in the blues but drawing parallels with the jazz greats. He describes the 15-minute Voodoo Chile as “a fabulously intense dialogue between the guitarist and organist Steve Winwood”, noting how Hendrix follows “[jazz’s] guiding principles of interaction and spontaneous composition”, while The Wind Cries Mary is discussed in terms of its “Dylanesque” imagery. Eloquent discussions on race, gender and sexuality elevate Le Gendre’s subject beyond rock’n’roll cliché, locating his legacy not in Stratocaster heroics but the sexual energy of Prince. Lois Wilson
Reggae And Politics In The 1970s
★★★ Thibault Ehrengardt
Getty
DREAD EDITIONS. £ 2 5
Guns, ganja, ideology and greed in 1970s Jamaica. As has been-well documented, Jamaican music has endured a strangely symbiotic
relationship with the island’s political figures. Musicians lampooned a corrupt, divisive system while professing neutrality for religious reasons, even as their material was co-opted by the very politicians they criticised, and who sometimes curried favour with them. This self-published exposé by the former editor of the French music magazine Natty Dread, takes a closer look at the origins of these problematic relationships and the music that erupted during Jamaica’s Cold War struggles. Ehrengardt is at his best when integrating first-hand testimony from luminaries such as Max Romeo, Alton Ellis, Dennis Alcapone, Linval Thompson, Kiddus-I and Tappa Zukie, though much of the text is dominated by the author’s musical analysis, supplemented by third-party material and song lyrics. Written in a conversational style, this accessible read allows for a deeper understanding of how roots reggae evolved under the pressures of partisan violence. David Katz
They Just Seem A Little Weird
Odyssey” – might be the best line in a music book for quite some time. Mark Blake
night, that floats me off again into the past time.” Lois Wilson
Monolithic Undertow:In Search Of Sonic Oblivion
Bedroom Beats & B-sides
★★★ Laurent Fintoni
★★★
VELOCITY PRESS. £1 4 .9 9
A history of instrumental hip-hop and electronic scenes begins at home. Whether in dingy basements, graffiti-covered street corners or sweaty warehouses, most post-war popular music movements had a certain grimy glamour. Even so, is there a more prosaic setting for musical insurgency than the bedroom? Reflecting on three decades of electronic beat culture, Laurent Fintoni joins the breakbeat dots from hip-hop to techno before examining a musical revolution forged in tiny rooms from Bristol to Brooklyn. Culled from the writer’s interviews and comprehensive data-mining, he details a serendipitous collision of advancements in technology and communications with a disparate collection of sonic envelope pushers. Full of idealists, weirdos and visionaries, tales from the creative bubbles that blew up around Richard ‘Aphex Twin’ James and James ‘Jay Dee’ Yancey are particularly revealing. If it’s sometimes tough keeping track of the dizzying number of genres – see illbient, bruk, juke – Fintoni’s extensive, forensic approach makes sense of it. Stephen Worthy
Harry Sword WHITE RABBIT. £ 2 0
Muse,Odalisque, Handmaiden
★★★★ Rose Simpson STRANGE ATTRACTOR PRESS. £ 2 0
Insightful and beautifully written recollections of the Incredibles’singer/bassist. Between 1968 and 1971 Rose Simpson was integral to The Incredible String Band, singing and playing bass guitar, violin and percussion. Her writing style in this captivating memoir, subtitled A Girl’s Life In The Incredible String Band, is like her musical contribution; deeply stirring, it ripples with a quiet power and beauty. It also brings sharp focus to the struggle of finding space in a male-dominated world, both musically and personally, the joy of succeeding and the sacrifices in so doing. There are stories of Swinging London, New York’s Chelsea Hotel with Andy Warhol and Woodstock ’69, but it’s those that concern domesticity and the everyday that reveal Simpson’s magic. “The children have gone to bed and the house is all locked up,” she writes, “it is the enchantment of one of those evenings, in an oasis surrounded by
Good vibrations:an ambitious history of drone. Sound is the vibration of matter, and all matter vibrates. In Hindu philosophy that vibration is regarded as God, AKA the meaning of it all, and this is journalist Harry Sword’s startpoint for his discussion of the drone:a changeless yet changing low-frequency tone that forms the background chord of life and that many of us seek out in music, as either soothing ambient hum or high-volume consciousaltering somatic presence. Structured as historical sonic journey, from the sound chambers of Malta’s Neolithic Hypogeum to the heavy subbass physicality of SunnO))), with enjoyable interviews (Brian Eno, Manuel Göttsching) along the way, Sword’s book is always entertaining but rarely enlightening. Thanks largely to a heavy metal lexicography where “teeth cavities rattle” and “sweat drips from the ceiling”, Sword’s analysis appears as guileless hyperbolic screed in which this mysterious and ancient harmonic force is repeatedly eulogised but never adequately explained. Andrew Male
★★★★ Doug Brod HACHETTE. £ 2 1
The glory (and not-so glorious) days of American hard rock revisited. Subtitled ‘How Kiss, Cheap Trick, Aerosmith And Starz Remade Rock And Roll’, former Spin editor-in-chief Doug Brod zeroes in on the A, B and C-list of the mid-’70s US rock boom, while noting how the groups remain inextricably linked and later influenced acts as “diametrically opposed” as Bon Jovi and Nirvana. Brod’s love of the music will send readers digging deep into the back catalogues, but he also acknowledges the absurdity and fuck-ups with knowing humour, not least when Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley gatecrash a Kiss Expo where Starz’s down-onhis-luck ex-guitarist Richie Ranno is flogging Kiss merchandise. Meanwhile, Brod’s description of the production on Cheap Trick’s wretched 1986 album The Doctor – “simulates the experience of being in an MRI machine operated by the ape-men of 2001:A Space
Spontaneous composition: Jimi Hendrix, ever evolving.
RE AL GONE Adios amigo:“I had thought that I was alone,” Harold Budd in bloom.
THE LEG ACY
Californian ambient pioneer Harold Bu dd passed away on December 8 after suffering Covidcomplications following a stroke. HAT HAROLD Budd’s surname is found in ‘Buddhism’seems entirely apt, given the Zen-like calm that defined his deeply contemplative, gossamer piano signature. Rather than being a monkish aesthete, however, the Los Angeleno was actually something of a bon viveur, with an appetite for art, wine, clothes and laughter. Born on May 24, 1936, and raised on the edge of the Mojave Desert, Harold Montgomery Budd worked in a local aircraft factory before being drafted into the army, where he played drums in the regimental band alongside saxophonist Albert Ayler. His compositional career began in 1962, while studying music at the University of Southern California. His initial style was a dense, droning minimalism, inspired by Morton Feldman and the wind in desert
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telephone wires. His 1970 LP debut, The Oak Of The Golden Dreams, an unyielding étude for the capacious Buchla modular synthesizer housed at the California Institute for the Arts, gave little hint of the airy mellifluousness to come. Disenchanted with modernist dissonance, however, Budd took up piano and, inspired by Renaissance music, began exploring melody. “The prettiness of my music was very much a political statement at the time,” he later recalled, and when a live recording of his dolorous, harp-dappled 1972 composition Madrigals Of The Rose Angel found its way to Brian Eno, a future career trajectory materialised. Recorded in London, Budd’s album The Pavilion Of Dreams would appear in 1978 on Obscure, Eno’s boutique imprint, ushering the composer onto the high table of newly defined ambient music. “I had thought ’til then, in naïveté, that I was alone… It’s a treasure I will never forget,” Budd told me. Collaborating with Eno on
“The prettiness of my music was very much a political statement.” HAROLD BUDD
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1980’s Ambient 2 : The Plateaux Of Mirror, as well as later ’80s benchmarks like The Pearl and The White Arcades, consolidated his reputation, while The Moon And The Melodies, his empyrean 1986 set with the Cocteau Twins, and collaborations with the likes of Bill Nelson, Andy Partridge and Hector Zazou, cemented Budd’s credentials with the art-pop cognoscenti. 1980s solo albums such as The Serpent (In Quicksilver) and Lovely Thunder further evinced his facility for music of minimalist, immersive consonance that skirted but never surrendered to the banality of new age – a label he abhorred. Exquisitely polished gems like Luxa (1996) and The Room (2000) followed, but after 2005’s strings-embraced meditation Avalon Sutra, Budd announced his retirement. It didn’t last and further recordings slipped out, including a brace of albums in 2013/14 kindled by artist-muse-collaborator Jane Maru, on which he returned to the pared-toa-quintessence tropes of his ’80s output. A final album, Another Flower, a collaboration with Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie, appeared in December. “His last words to me were ‘adios amigo’… They always were,” Guthrie recalled. “He left a very large ‘Harold Budd’-shaped hole whichever way we turn.” David Sheppard
Barry J Holmes/Guardian/Eyevine
Golden echoes
Album: Ambient 2: The Plateaux Of Mirror (E.G., 19 8 0 ) The Sound: With Eno synthetically framing Budd’s reverb-soaked improvisations, The Plateaux Of Mirror is a thing of deep beauty, not least the tremulous, aqueous title track, eliding from eeriness to radiance at the touch of a key. This is ambient music as emotional expression as much as it is environmental tincture or aural perfume.
“Jammers have no fear”:Howard Wales, off on a hooteroll.
Charley Pride Country trailblazer BORN 1 934 When the owner of a segregated Texas nightclub in the ’60s refused to let a pre-fame Charley Pride perform, his outrageously bold friend Willie Nelson kissed Pride on-stage – on the lips. Once Charley opened his mouth to sing, the stunned white audience forgot he was black and met his mellifluous, soulful, and authentically downhome baritone with unconditional applause. From 1966 to 1987, Pride overcame Nashville’s racism and conservative politics to have 52 Top 10 country hits, with 27 Number 1s including All I Have To Offer You (Is Me), Is Anybody Goin’To San Antone, Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’and Mountain Of Love. He also popularised others such as The Snakes Crawl At Night, Just Between You And Me and Crystal Chandeliers. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000 and received the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award last November at a mostly-unmasked event where he may have contracted the Covid that killed him. The native Mississippian grew up picking cotton and later played semi-pro baseball before embarking on a singing career. Billed early on as ‘Country Charley’ Pride to emphasise his Southern roots, he explained, “I’ve been singing country music since I was 5. This “I’ve been singing country since I was 5”:Charley Pride, with Hank Williams.
is why I sound like I sound.” In the 1970s he became the first international black country star. A favourite in Britain, he also retained a loyal following in Ireland, where playing shows during the Troubles endeared him to audiences on both sides of the sectarian divide. Across his career, he retained an admirable humility, with a genial warmth and self-effacing humour. “I realise I’ve got a permanent tan,” he joked to reactionary white audiences, easily disarming them, but he was no pushover. When honky-tonker Webb Pierce said to him, “Charley, it’s good for you to be in our music,” Pride bristled and calmly responded, “Webb, it’s my music, too.” Michael Simmons
Kenny Jeremiah Blue-eyed soul BORN 1 942 Born in Ozone Park, Queens, Kenny Jeremiah formed his doo-wopinspired band The Quotations in 1964. Relocating to Philadelphia in 1965, they became The Soul Survivors and signed to the Crimson label, linking up with songwriters/producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff. In summer 1967, Expressway To Your Heart, sung by Jeremiah and brothers Richie and Charlie Ingui, would become the band and the
production team’s first hit, selling gold and going Top 5 on the Billboard pop and R&B charts. Its immediate follow up, Explosion In My Soul, was their last Top 40 entry, stalling at 33. After much TV exposure and sharing stages with the likes of Janis Joplin and The Beach Boys, in 1969 the original group split. Continuing as a performer, Jeremiah played with Scorpion and Roman Candle, sang alongside Shirley Goodman in disco act Shirley & Company, and later became a successful radio host in New Jersey. Jenny Bulley
Howard Wales Dead-affiliated jazz keys man
Gordon James image makers courtesy Robison Godlove,Getty (3)
BORN 1 943 Milwaukee-born Howard Wales spent much of the ’60s as a jobbing keyboardist, backing Freddie King, Ronnie Hawkins, Lonnie Mack, The Four Tops and, briefly, James Brown, and playing on the soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo. By 1969, he had settled in San Francisco and was running a Monday night jam session at the Matrix club, where he struck up a rapport with one regular participant, Jerry Garcia. Wales’fearless jazz experimentation gelled with Garcia’s insatiable appetite for music-making, coalescing into a wild and funky duo album, Hooteroll (1971). Wales also guested on the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty, and was
“It’s my music, too.” CHARLEY PRIDE
considered for a permanent seat in the band. Post-Garcia, he recorded eight solo albums and a clutch of records with another Monday night habitué, Harvey Mandel. “To this day, I don’t play with anybody unless they’re jammers,” Wales told Aquarium Drunkard in 2017. “Jammers are the people that have no fear.” John Mulvey
Chad Stuart British invader BORN 1 941 Born in Windermere, David Stuart Chadwick met Jeremy Clyde while studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Having taught Clyde to play guitar, the two formed harmonising duo Chad & Jeremy in 1962. Discovered by John Barry, their first and only UK chart entry was the clean-cut Stuartpenned Number 37 Yesterday’s Gone in December 1963. Yet, perfectly timed for the British invasion, it hit US Number 21 the following summer. Follow-up A Summer Song reached Number 7 that October, and they had five more US Top 40 singles. Their short, intense American success included appearances on the TV shows of Dick Van Dyke and Patty Duke, and memorably, Batman. Stuart also voiced one of the vultures on Disney’s The Jungle Book. A tilt at psychedelia with Of Cabbages And Kings did not take off, and the pair split in 1968. Stuart remained in the US, working as a producer for A&M. He reunited with Clyde from the ’80s onwards, touring and recording new albums, the most recent being 2013’s Rien Ne Va Plus. Clive Prior
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RE AL GONE Bonhomie and evergreen talent:rock titan Leslie West.
Masked rap supervillain BORN 1 971
Leslie West Mountain’s hard rocker BORN 1 945 Leslie Weinstein was 11 when he enjoyed his first musical epiphany. Taken by his grandmother to watch the filming of a TV show, he saw Elvis Presley perform live in early 1956. The impact, he said, was “electrifying”. Two years later he bought a ’56 Strat, with the money he’d received for his bar mitzvah. By 1964 he’d begun to forge his own rich playing style, joining his brother Larry in high school garage band The Vagrants in his native Forest Hills. The Vagrants became local heroes, their ability to blend rock and soul evident on the version of Respect which they released a month before Aretha Franklin’s defining interpretation. West’s mind was blown further in September ’67 when, while tripping on LSD, the 21-year-old saw Cream play at the Village Theatre in New York. He elected to put together a new project and – assisted by former Vagrants and Cream producer Felix Pappalardi on bass – he wrote material for a solo project he called Mountain, a moniker based on his own commanding physique and which he would use for his next band, changing his own name in the process to Leslie West. Mountain’s third show came at the Woodstock festival in the summer of ’69, leading to their first career-defining, cowbell-heavy hit, Mississippi Queen, the following year. An undisputed rock classic, it
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showcased West’s ability to combine seismic riffs with his roaring, soulful vocals. West’s style, however, was more varied than that ubiquitous track suggests – his use of vibrato and his distinctive tone on the likes of Theme For An Imaginary Western and Nantucket Sleighride (To Owen Coffin) inspiring the next generation of guitar players, Eddie Van Halen and Michael Schenker among them. Mountain’s flame burned brightly for four years, while Leslie also found huge success with supergroup West, Bruce And Laing. His own addictions, however, took hold for much of the ’80s, but his bonhomie and evergreen talent allowed him to remain a player admired by fans and fellow musicians alike. The latter point was borne out with his final string of impressive solo albums – Unusual Suspects (2011), Still Climbing (2013) and Soundcheck (2015) – which saw the likes of Billy Gibbons, Slash, Brian May and Joe Bonamassa queueing up to play with him. West’s death, aged 75, on December 22 at his home in Florida silenced a man who can rightfully be viewed as a true titan of American hard rock. Phil Alexander
“Billy Gibbons, Slash and Brian May all queued up to play with West.”
One of hip-hop’s most influential and idiosyncratic MCs, MF DOOM’s life was marked by triumph and tragedy. Born in London, raised in Long Island, Daniel Dumile won instant acclaim for 1991’s restlessly inventive debut Mr. Hood, as part of KMD with younger brother DJ Subroc. That buzz was silenced when caustic sequel Black Bastards was shelved the week Subroc was killed crossing a freeway. Down and nearly out, a stay at DJ Stretch Armstrong’s apartment yielded 1999’s Operation: Doomsday, his unmistakably raspy delivery and wonky beats allied to a distinctive masked image styled on Marvel supervillain Dr Doom. DOOM embodied many personas to carry his cerebral, allusive, novelistic storylines, before 2004’s Madvillainy – an immaculately stoned duet with California producer Madlib – moved him beyond cult status, into collaborations with Avalanches, Gorillaz and Radiohead. He died just three years after losing his teenage son Malachi Ezekiel. Andy Cowan
Gerry Marsden Merseybeat Pacemaker BORN 1 942 Toxteth-born Gerry Marsden formed his band – initially called The Mars Bars – in 1959. Schooled alongside local rivals The Beatles on the Reeperbahn, they signed with manager Brian Epstein in 1962, and the following year scored UK Number 1s with How Do You Do It?, I Like It and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s You’ll Never Walk Alone. Further successes followed in ’64, including Marsden’s UK/US Top 10 compositions Don’t Let The Sun Catch You
He never walked alone: Gerry Marsden, Liverpool son.
Crying and Ferry Cross The Mersey, which spawned a film, though the group split in 1967. Thereafter Marsden appeared in West End stage shows and TV, and played the oldies circuit from 1973. In 1985 he sang on a charity re-recording of You’ll Never Walk Alone for the Bradford City stadium fire disaster, and in ’89 reprised Ferry Cross The Mersey in aid of the Hillsborough Justice Appeal:both reached Number 1. In June 2019, he joined Take That on-stage at Anfield to sing You’ll Never Walk Alone to mark Liverpool’s Champions League win. Clive Prior
Steve Brown Versatile producer BORN C.1 958 Steve Brown’s early musical endeavours included playing bass in Archangel with his schoolfriend Steve Lilywhite and working as drum roadie for Elton John. By the early ’70s he was engaged at Phonogram’s London studio, where his engineering credits included hits for Wizzard, Thin Lizzy and The Boomtown Rats. As a producer in the ’80s, he found pop success with ABC, Haysi Fantayzee and Wham!’s debut album Fantastic. Later in the decade he moved into rock, producing LPs like The Cult’s 1985 breakthrough Love, plus LPs by Then Jerico, The Godfathers and Balaam And The Angel. In 1992 he produced Manic Street Preachers’debut Generation Terrorists, and in 1994, contributed to their third album The Holy Bible. He also worked with Bobby Tench, Alison Moyet, King Kurt, Freddie Mercury, The Pogues and Mansun, and ran the BeHive International music education programme. “(1992 hit) Motorcycle Emptiness was his masterpiece with us,” wrote the Manics’Nicky Wire in tribute, “he taught us so much.” Ian Harrison
Getty (2),Alamy,B+ – Brain Cross
MF DOOM
“Wild agent of love and peace”: Love As Laughter’s Sam Jayne.
Andrew White Sax, bass, Coltrane scholar BORN 1 942 Raised in Nashville, Andrew White studied music theory and oboe in Washington and Paris, before beginning a jazz career in the early ’60s that saw him play alto sax with The JFK Quartet, Kenny Clarke, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones and others (he later refuted the possibility of influence by his contemporary Eric Dolphy). White also sustained a career outside jazz into the ’70s, playing bass and horns with, variously, Stevie Wonder, Weather Report and The 5th Dimension, and as oboist with the American Ballet Theatre. A live player of considerable stamina, releases on his imprint Andrew’s Musical Enterprises, Inc. included more than 40 original recordings and 14 volumes of transcriptions
of John Coltrane’s solos. With a ripe sense of humour and an uncontrollable urge to mug for the camera, his other books included 1981’s Trane ’N Me and 2001’s 800-page, typewritten memoir Everybody Loves The Sugar. Clive Prior
Sam Jayne Love As Lau ghter principal BORN 1 974 A cult figure in the US underground, Sam Jayne’s idiosyncratic overhaul of classic rock, garage and post-punk showcased a sly wit and affecting, poetic vulnerability. Jayne first surfaced as frontman of Olympia post-hardcore band Lync, subsequently serving in a fledgling Modest Mouse and lending vocals to Beck’s 1994 folk set One Foot In The Grave. But he was best known as singer/guitarist with Love As Laughter, recording albums of romantic, chaotic and often inspired indie-rock for Sub Pop and K Records, the haunted Crazy Horse moves of 2005’s Laughter’s Fifth
being perhaps their finest. Described by friends as “a wild agent of love and peace”, Jayne had just finished a solo LP, and was planning to record a new Love As
Laughter album, when he passed away suddenly in December of an undiagnosed health condition while road-tripping across the US. Stevie Chick
THEY ALSO SERVED
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GLADIATORS vocalist ALBERT GRIFFITHS (below, b.19 4 5 ) was a session guitarist for producer Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd when he founded the Kingston roots reggae harmonisers in 19 6 7. The following year they found success with the Dodd-produced Hello Carol. Further recordings with Coxsone led to The Gladiators, now a crack octet, signing with Virgin for five albums including the highly-regarded Trenchtown Mix-Up (19 7 6 ) and Proverbial Reggae (19 7 8 ). The group weathered changing styles, recording and gigging regularly, but in 2 0 0 6 , Griffiths retired from touring and was replaced in the group by his sons Al and Anthony. AVANT-GARDE pianist ‘BLUE’GENE TYRANNY (b.Bob Sheff, 19 4 5 ) was a piano prodigy in Texas where he programmed new music events with composer Philip Krumm. He later moved to Ann Arbour, Michigan, where he played with blues rockers The Prime Movers, whose ranks also included Iggy Pop and in 19 7 3 he briefly played keyboards with The Stooges, when he reputedly earned his nickname. As well as working in music education, he recorded and
toured solo – 19 7 8 ’s Out Of The Blue is an avant-chamber pop favourite – toured with Carla Bley, played on albums by Laurie Anderson, John Cage and Peter Gordon, wrote for film and the stage, and penned incisive music appreciation.
for the Memphis Flyer before moving to New York to art direct and write for The Village Voice and The Long Island Voice. As multiinstrumentalist and singer he recorded several albums as Flare, and one of avant-folk pop as LD And The New Criticism for US indie Darla.
RASPBERRIES drummer MICHAEL McBRIDE (b.19 4 9 ) played on Starting Over, 19 74 ’s final album by the Ohio powerpop originators. McBride had known Raspberries singer Eric Carmen and guitarist Wally Bryson since their days in Cryus Erie and The Quick. McBride also played on Carmen’s solo debut, which spawned 19 7 6 hit single All By Myself. Formerly a frontman, McBride was celebrated for his Keith Moon-influenced drum attack on Starting Over. He was later lead drummer with Cleveland’s North Coast Pipe Band.
BASSIST PIERRE KEZDY (b.19 6 2 ) played in Strike Under and Trial By Fire before joining influential Chicago art punks, Naked Raygun in 19 8 5 . With writing credits on every Naked Raygun album from 19 8 5 ’s All Rise, including singles Vanilla Blue (19 8 7 ) and Home (19 9 0 ), he had a parallel career as a plumber. When Naked Raygun split in 19 9 2 , he joined Pegboy, rejoining Raygun for their 2 0 0 6 reunion.
MUSICIAN, ARTIST and writer LARRY ‘LD’BEGHTOL (below, b.19 6 4 ) was best known for his contributions to The Magnetic Fields’ 19 9 9 masterpiece of miniatures, 69 Love Songs, writing and singing the tender, witty All My Little Words and others. Born in Kentucky, he wrote about art and music
Snake River Conspiracy, whose industrial rock debut, Sonic Jihad, was released in 2 0 0 2 . He also formed Revenge Of The Triads with Queens Of The Stone Age guitarist Troy Van Leeuwen and NiN’s Charlie Clouser and produced four albums for Seattle’s Queensrÿche, beginning with 2 0 0 5 ’s cyber-metal concept album, Operation: Mindcrime II.
BLUES scion JOSEPH ‘MOJO’MORGANFIELD (b.19 6 9 ) carried on the Chicago blues tradition of his father Muddy Waters, leading his band The Mannish Boyz. He debuted in 2 0 18 with the Mojo Risin’ EP: his first album was planned for early 2 0 21.
SHETLAND-BORN bassist RON MATHEWSON (b.19 4 4 ) studied classical piano before jazz entered his life. By the early ’6 0 s he was ensconced in the London scene, and would play with the Kenny Clarke/Francy Boland Big Band, Tubby Hayes, Philly Joe Jones, Ben Webster, Oscar Peterson, Kenny Wheeler, Dick Morrissey, Roy Eldridge, Ian Carr, Ronnie Scott, Tony Levin, Tony Oxley, Joe Henderson and many more.
BASSIST JASON SLATER (b.19 7 1) was the original bassist in San Franciscan pop-rockers Third Eye Blind, playing on the group’s original demo but leaving before they signed with Elektra in 19 9 6 . He continued as bassist and producer for
ROCKABILLY voice, guitar and pianist CARL MANN (b.19 4 2 ) had a Number 2 5 US hit with his frisky version of Mona Lisa in 19 5 9 , released on Sun just as the label was being eclipsed, and which beat a rival cover by Conway Twitty. The same year Pretend was Mann’s last chart entry, and
after playing with Carl Perkins’band, he left music to work at his family’s lumber business in Huntington, Tennessee. He returned in the ’7 0 s, first singing country and then getting back to the roots on the revival circuit in Europe and the USA. He was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall Of Fame on 2 0 0 6 . A biography, The Last Son Of Sun, was published in 2 0 10 . SHOREDITCH-born entertainer DAME BARBARA WINDSOR (below, b. Barbara Ann Deeks, 19 3 7 ) was talent scouted when dancing with Stoke Newington troupe Madame Behenna And Her Juvenile Jollities. Following her stage musical debut in 19 5 2 ’s Love From Judy, her first screen role was in 19 5 4 ’s The Belles Of Saint Trinians. Enduring fame as star of the Carry On films and EastEnders followed. She also had seven album credits to her name, including the original cast recording of Sing A Rude Song, a musical based on the life of Marie Lloyd, co-starring Bee Gee Maurice Gibb, whom she briefly dated. 19 9 9 ’s pop album You’ve Got A Friend (featuring Steve McFadden and Mike Reid) and Smile, a 2 0 0 2 album of jazz covers, followed. Jenny Bulley,Clive Prior and Ian Harrison
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T I M E M AC HIN E Counting down:(clockwise from main) Fugees in the fiery flush of success (from left) Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill and Pras;(insets) Lauryn live on-stage;the album.
FEBRUARY 19 96 …Fugees release The Score Mariah Carey, Hootie & The Blowfish and the soundtrack for romance flick Waiting To Exhale were big on the US charts. As for hip-hop, the wind was still blowing in gangster rap’s direction. Today, Tupac would release AllEyez On Me, his last album before his murder in September. Eight days later, Snoop Dogg was acquitted of the 1993 shooting of gang member Philip Woldemariam in Los Angeles. Having succumbed to AIDS the previous March, ex-N.W.A man Eazy-E’s lurid, posthumous Str8 Off Tha Streetz Of Muthaphukkin Compton was at Number 3 on the Billboard listings. Yet just as spring was on its way, alternative rap flavours were coming in. On February 13, the Fugees’ second long-player, The Score, was released. The group – vocalists/MCs/producers Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean and Prakazrel ‘Pras’ Michel – had its origins at Columbia High School in New Jersey in the late ’80s. Recording as Fugees Tranzlator Crew, the trio’s 1993’s debut Blunted On Reality hadn’t ignited, but their Ruffhouse label kept faith. The group set up their Booga Basement studio in Wyclef’s uncle’s home, and recorded in unhurried style over the second half of 1995. Assisted by Salaam Remi, DJ Red Alert,
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Sly And Robbie, Rah Digga and many more, the results were prescient, soulful and eclectic, taking in old soul, golden age rap, reggae, Pras and Wyclef’s Haitian ancestry and more as it blended covers and samples with bewitching alchemy. Incorporating The Delfonics’1968 single Ready Or Not Here I Come (Can’t Hide From Love), for example, Ready Or Not sampled The Headhunters and, with permission only obtained post-facto, Enya. Killing Me Softly rewired the Roberta Flack hit, and sampled Rotary Connection, The Moody Blues and Little Feat, while No Woman, No Cry was the Marley song refracted through a hip-hop lens. Speaking to MOJO writer Cliff Jones for
“I’m the biggest muthafucking threat the establishment could ever imagine.” LAURYN HILL
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The Face later in the year, Hill explained the group’s consciousness worldview. “Hip-hop isn’t just entertainment. It determines how you dress, how you act and how you live your life. You gotta be responsible, tell the truth,” she said. “The truth makes you enemies but I will not support a liberal lie. I’m young, female, black, articulate and educated. I’m the biggest muthafucking threat the establishment could ever imagine.” The establishment seemed helpless to resist. Lead single Fu-Gee-La was already in the US Top 40. Their stage show, with electric guitars, live breakbeats and turntablism, was seen two days after the album’s release at the Palladium in New York;a week later they recorded their second John Peel session, complete with namecheck and punky visa vignette Haitian In England. The Score duly entered the UK albums chart on February 24, at Number 87. From June until February 1997 it was a fixture in the Top 20, spending all but five weeks in the Top 10. Killing Me Softly would reach Number 1 in America and Britain, where Ready Or Not would do likewise. The Score would top charts globally, selling an estimated 15 million copies. Yet there were already questions. Touring
ALSO ON! and promotional pressures, plus the demands of a mainstream audience, had, Hill believed, made it harder for her to write. In his 2012 memoir Purpose:An Immigrant’s Story, Wyclef reflected on his soon-to-end love affair with his bandmate, which had continued after he married. He likened The Score to, “a tragic Shakespearean romance… it’s easy to listen to the music and hear the romance and love… the rest of it wasn’t smooth at all. We were either deeply in love or fighting;there was no middle ground.” After European dates in May 1997, the group disbanded to work on solo projects, one of which was Hill’s neo-soul masterpiece The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill, released in 1998 to even greater success than The Score. But 2002’s poorly-received voice-and-guitar live long-player, MTV Unplugged No. 2 .0 , would be her final album release to date. The trio reformed to tour Europe in 2005, but reactions were mixed and in-band relations strained, allegedly due to Hill’s aloof attitude. In 2007, Wyclef told Blues & Soul, “I think [Lauryn] needs a psychiatrist… the state that she’s in, no one should be letting her do shows.” Though Wyclef has been the most productive of the three, it’s Hill who has retained custody of the mystique. In 2016 she excused a late, short live show in Atlanta by saying, “The challenge is aligning my energy with the time… I am at my best when I am open, rested, sensitive and liberated.” Those who marvelled at The Score continue to live in hope that one day, she’ll get there again. Ian Harrison
TOP TEN SWEDISH ALBUMS FEBRUARY 2 4
1INGENMANSLAND NORDMAN MURDER BALLADS 2 NICK CAVE AND (SONET)
THE BAD SEEDS
YOO HOO, BABYLON ZOO Bog standard: Ewan McGregor as Rent Boy in Trainspotting.
Having been used on a Levi’s ad, Spaceman by Wolverhampton band Babylon Zoo (above) is at UK Number 1. Some buyers are nonplussed that only a segment of the song resembles what they heard on the advert.
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Trainspotting hits the screen 9 FEBRUARY 2 3 Based on Irvine
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Welsh’s 1993 novel, director Danny Boyle’s film Trainspotting is released. The scabrously entertaining story of heroin, friendship and betrayal is also celebrated for its soundtrack, which captures popular taste in flux with its juxtapositions of druggy ’70s music from Iggy Pop and Lou Reed (Eno’s Deep Blue Day memorably accompanies a disgusting/magic-realist passage during which a character dives into a toilet to recover some opiate suppositories), Britpoppers Pulp and Blur and exuberant techno by Underworld and Leftfield. Released in July, the soundtrack album will sell in platinum quantities, though legend has it that Noel Gallagher refused a request to include Oasis because he thought the film was about trainspotters.
At 6 pm on Channel 4 , music/chat show TFI Friday debuts, with Shed Seven, Skunk Anansie, Ocean Colour Scene, Cher and Count Indigo. Chris Evans hosts, Danny Baker scripts, it lasts until December 2 0 0 0 .
BOYS FOR 6AMOS PELE TORI (WHAT’S 7MORNING THE STORY)
PRINCE HITCHED
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Prince marries dancer Mayte Garcia. She later recalls a $ 5 0 0 ,0 0 0 flower bill, a white-and-gold paint job at Paisley Park and a wedding programme that reads ‘Coincidence Or Fate?’ “I’m so in love with love now,” Prince tells writer Sylvia Patterson.
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HELLO, SFA! Hometown Unicorn, the first non-EP single by 26 Super Furry Animals, is released on the Creation label. Former vocalist Rhys Ifans stars in the video.
GOODBYE, RAMONES? What’s reported as the last-ever US Ramones 29 gig happens at New York’s Academy. In truth, they’ll play another 3 8 North American shows before the last one in Los Angeles on August 6 .
Porky prime cut: at Number 10, it’s Ministry!
Getty (5), Shutterstock, Alamy, Advertising Archives
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On This Jarvis Moon:Pulp pugilist pastes complacency.
COCKER INVADES JACKO’S STAGE At Earl’s Court, the 16th Brit Awards hands out gongs to acts including Oasis, Annie Lennox and Take That, who announced their split a week earlier (the Samaritans set up a phone line for fans in despair). But greater even than David Bowie and Pet Shop Boys uniting to play Hallo Spaceboy is Jarvis Cocker’s stage invasion during Michael Jackson’s pompous,
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messianic performance of Earth Song. As seen on YouTube, Cocker shook his bottom, pulled up his top, and ran across the stage while being pursued by security;claims that he jostled a child actor are proved baseless. “The hypocrisy of the whole thing was really getting me down,” Jarvis told the BBC in 2005. “When in doubt, wiggle your bum about.”
This Millennial tome on UFOs, Hitler, Crowley, the Pyramids, THE END OF THE WORLD etc is out via Creation Books, publishing arm of Oasis’s label.
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ASK
What’s on Stevie’s tapes? In All Back To My Place in MOJO 325, I was interested to hear about Stevie Nicks’Road Tapes. Can you tell us any more about them? Steve Robertson, via e-mail Fred says:Stevie told us, “I’ve been making them since 1978. Whatever tour I’m on, we pick two or three tapes, and we stay with them. I play them from 5 o’clock in the afternoon when I get to the show until 8.15 when I walk on stage. I have all my cassettes of my Road Tapes in a drawer in my pantry. Did I draw covers for them? Oh yeah!” The first of three volumes of Beats, she says, includes Lady Gaga’s Applause, Adele’s Rolling In The Deep, Fleetwood Mac’s Seven Wonders and Call Me Maybe by Carly Rae Jepsen, among others. “They all have specific names – there’s also Beautiful Girls 1, 2 and 3, Rock & Roll Fantasy 1 and 2… they have 20 to 22 songs on them. Sequencing is one of my favourite things – that’s how I make my tapes, as if they were Hotel California or Rumours, or any of those really big albums that you’d never have thought of skipping a song.” But shouldn’t she put them out? “I agree!” says Stevie, who these days uses an iPod. “I think people would love my tapes.” Are you listening, Cassette Day organisers?
IS THIS GENUINE VIV? I recently came across a rather nice copy of the Ronco double album 4 0 Smash Hits Based On The Film That’ll Be The Day. There’s a track entitled Real Leather Jacket, which it states is sung by
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Viv Stanshall, yet it sounds like nothing he did before. Is it in fact by another artist? Kevin Rawlings, via e-mail Fred says:Viv wrote the song specially for the film and recorded it, probably at Willesden’s Morgan Studios, with the aid of Ronnie Wood, Graham Bond, Jack Bruce and Keith Moon. But it was nixed from the film and made its sole appearance on the Ronco release. So it’s a rarity, if a track on a 600,000-selling album can be claimed as such.
CAN ROD BE HEARD ON A BOWIE LP? Re:Canned applause (Ask Fred 314). The crowd noise at the beginning of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs is taken from the Faces’Coast To Coast: Overtures And Beginners album:just as the guitar comes in, Rod Stewart can be clearly heard shouting “woah”. As for the Boiling Point question about Let’s Get Funktified, I bought the 12-inch when it came out in 1978. It must surely be the great lost funk track. David Lynch, via e-mail Fred says:I’ve attempted to track down Boiling Point, who, like Peabo Bryson, started out on Atlanta’s Bullet label. But apart from their main man and producer being named Clyde Howard, and a Number 41 UK Dance Chart placing in May 1978, they elude discovery. Can anyone assist?
WHERE DID THE OTHER GENE GO? I’ve long been puzzled by Gene Pitney’s That Girl Belongs To Yesterday. When I bought it in 1964 it had two vocal tracks on it, superb Everlys-type
The Very Best of Gene Pitney (Ace, 1985) it only had one, and now whenever it gets played on the radio this is the version we hear. What happened? Philip, via e-mail Fred says:Over to Roger Armstrong at Ace Records to explain:“This is almost certainly a case of an under dub not being spotted. I think that the second vocal was added by bouncing the original master across to another tape. This single-tracked version was on our 1985 Best Of from a tape provided by the label at the time. It should have been picked up then, and it was in fact picked up for our (’61-73 45s set) Big 2 0 in 2004. I would say that the one-vocal-track version is a lot cleaner, but loses some of the drama that the harmony vocal brings. Apologies to Philip.”
HELP FRED Me and some friends were talking on Zoom about how Rainbow singer Graham Bonnet fell out with Ritchie Blackmore because he insisted on a neat parting rather than a heavy metal haircut. This led to speculation about Sex Pistol Steve Jones having curly, not punk, hair. Then we remembered when Dexys Midnight Runners were wearing smart suits and had long-haired Vincent Crane in the line-up. Can readers please suggest their favourite bands with incompatible haircuts? Barry Jones, via e-mail
CONTACTFRED To get your questions answered, conundrums clarified or help untangle a puzzle, e-mail: Fred Dellar and his assistants direct at fred.dellar@bauermedia.co.uk
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Attention! For Dellar’s Stanshall, harmony and hair-don’ts nuggets.
MOJO C OM PE T I T I O N ANSWERS
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HIS MONTH, Audioengine, specialists in active/powered loudspeakers for high-quality digital music playback, are offering a pair of flagship HD6 premium powered speakers along with their S8 subwoofer to create a superbly punchy, dynamic and detailed recreation of your favourite albums. The HD6 system offers wired or wireless connections, including aptX-HD Bluetooth for high-quality streaming from your phone or tablet, digital optical for your TV, and noble analogue for turntable loyalists. The S8 subwoofer delivers a low, tight and smooth bass response perfectly 1
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suited to all types of music. Truly a system built for the 21st century, this HD6 system delivers everything that was great about traditional hi-fi and updates it for the streaming age – giving you the best of all possible (sound) worlds. Together they’re worth more than £800! Be in with a chance to win them by filling in the crossword of Grandmaster and Sage Fred Dellar, and send a scan of it to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk, making sure to type CROSSWORD 328 in the subject line. Entries without that subject line will not be considered. Please include your home address, email and phone number. The closing date for entries is March 2. For the rules of the quiz, see www.mojo4music.com. https://audioengineusa.com 4
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Across: 1 Lambada, 2 Sargasso Sea, 12 Era, 13 Zeus, 14 Airport, 15 Randy Newman, 16 Vox, 17 Ilian, 18 Cleopatra Jones, 22 Nas, 24 Toyah, 27 Lard, 29 Orangutan, 31 Emo, 32 Im, 33 Nirvana, 38 Jitters, 39 Amen, 40 Civil, 41 Electric City, 45 Alf, 46 USA, 47 Jimmy Giles, 50 LFO, 52 Al, 53 Dirge, 54. Austin, 55 Slime, 57 Abba, 58 Oram, 60 Ze, 61 Eden Dub, 64 Wood, 66 Rubycon, 67 Ana, 68 Ashtrays, 71 Peace, 72 Me And The Boys, 73 RSO Down: 1 Leaving On A Jet Plane, 2 Ariola, 3 Marxist, 4 Acorn, 5 Aztec, 6 Surrealistic Pillow, 7 Asa, 8 Goddard, 9 Senor Coconut, 10 Sam, 11 Annie, 19 JeanJacques Burnel, 20 Negativland, 21 Songs Of Free Men, 23 Damn, 25 Yeah, 26 Hoax, 28 Ami, 30 The Blazers, 34 Rite, 36 Cast, 37 Em, 42 CTI, 43 Roman, 44 Yesterday, 47 Josie, 48 Gas, 49 Cramps, 51 Fu, 56 Moonage, 59 Zydeco, 60 Zo, 62 Novum, 63 Basin, 65 Oar, 69 TNT, 70 Soo Winner: Owen Woodward of Blackwood wins a DM 101 sound-deck, a Smart Soundbox 3 and a Smart Sub 8 subwoofer from Canton.
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1 Anger is his energy (4,5) 6 Fleetwood Mac’s now-you-see-it album (6) 9 The Police’s post in a pint (7,2,1,6) 1 0 Weather Report’s goodbye guy (2,4) 1 2 See photoclue A (7,6) 1 5 Gallagher, Storm or More? (4) 1 6 Green Day’s fifth album (6) 1 7 Basement Jaxx offer pain relief (6) 1 8 Bryan Ferry’s Arthurian hit (6) 2 0 Free jazz drummer Rashied --- (3) 2 1 See 41 2 2 You’re The One For Me chart-busters (1-5) 2 3 Rockin’ Ritchie (6) 2 6 She was Little and did The Loco-Motion (3) 2 7 ---- MacColl (4) 2 8 See photoclue B (4) 2 9 It transported The O’Jays up the charts (4,5) 3 0 Stringed instrument (4) 3 1 --- Dorsey (3) 3 2 Bolan banged one (4) 3 4 Heart’s 1987 success (5) 3 5 Just the river for Chic’s Rodgers (4) 3 7 Banjo-pickin’ Fleck (4) 3 8 /4 3 American guitarist, once part of The Cryan’ Shames (5,8) 3 9 Black Flag’s was loose (3) 4 0 Clannad’s 1990 album (4) 4 1 /2 1 She’s sung of Peter Pan, Delius and Houdini (4,4) 4 2 k.d. lang’s innocent young woman (7) 4 5 Label of Nick Cave, Depeche, Laibach etc. (4) 4 7 Could be Astbury, could be Curtis (3) 4 8 Spandau Ballet’s 1983 chart-topper (4) 4 9 --- Gees (3) 5 0 Play was his biggest LP (4) 5 1 Remembers The ----- (Asleep At The Wheel) (5) 5 2 A massive album for Slim Dusty (11) 5 4 Just the river for singer-songwriter Willie (4) 5 5 How Sepultura’s blood was secured (6) 5 6 She’s a Zydeco Queen (3) 5 7 Duran Duran had her dancing on the sand (3) 5 8 - -- Kloot (1,2) 5 9 ---- & The Sniffers (4) 6 0 Record label (1.1.1.) 6 1 Springsteen was born to do it (3) 6 2 Bananarama’s 1983 blushing fellow (3,3)
DOWN
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19
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21
20
19
14
ACROSS
77
1 Lizard King in leather strides (3,8) 2 See photoclue C (6,2) 3 The Shangri Las’ biggest hit (6,2,3,4) 4 Wanted ----- & Alive (Peter Tosh album) (5) 5 Her baby just cared for her (4,6) 6 Dublin band headed by Kevin Shields (2,6,9) 7 Their 1981 album was titled Animal Now (4.1.1.) 8 Martin Simpson’s 1976 folk album (6,6) 1 1 Bob Marley’s colourful success (7,7) 1 3 M.I.A’s 2007 album (4) 1 4 Reprazent man Size (4) 1 7 Hot Chip’s 2008 Grammy nominated hit (5,3,3,5) 1 9 Tubular Mike (8) 2 4 Mark King’s was numbered 42 (5) 2 5 A Yes album or an Erasure single (5) 3 1 Steal My Sunshine was their lone UK Top 20 hit (3) 3 3 Abba repeated it three times for a hit title (5) 3 6 Survivor’s tiger optic (3) 3 7 New Order’s monster 12-inch (4,6) 4 3 See 38 Across 4 4 Big R&B singer born Mabel Louise Smith (8) 4 6 Think Joe Meek and The Tornados (7) 4 7 Pet Shop Boys’ song of shame (3,1,3) 4 9 Ms Streisand, of course (6) 5 2 ---- Minor (Kokomo hit) (4) 5 3 Brothers In ---- (Dire Straits) (4)
MOJO 113
H E L L O G O O D BY E If you answer this riddle you’ll never begin:ISB as one (clockwise from top) Rose Simpson, Robin Williamson, Licorice McKechnie, Mike Heron.
on, because that’s what was happening. It was super-exciting. You play an instrument and sing, and everyone claps? No one told me what to do. And I was totally in love with Mike. It was the most amazing fun, like living in a kaleidoscope.
G OODBYE J ANUARY 19 7 1
Rose Simpson and The Incredible String Band They began by building a new psychedelic world. But repression ended the dream.
Getty,Courtesy of Rose Simpson (2)
HELLO WINTER 19 6 7 It wasn’t a case of joining the group, it was a lifestyle. How long was it from first setting eyes on them to actually living with them as my life? You could say it was the day that Robin [Williamson] came to see me, when I was studying in York, and then I came to London. I was already fairly cut off from mainstream society, so it was easy to fall into another free-floating life. Robin and Mike [Heron] made a hell of an impression. They were the most wonderful thing I’d ever seen – they looked so fantastic, the way that they spoke, that ability to just pick up an instrument and sing and make music, it was so entirely different from
anything I could imagine. I was quite a serious girl, I sort of lived through books – you know, with the sort of Jane Austen heroines that get carried off because they’d read about it in a gothic novel. I now tend to see myself a bit in that light. And Licorice [McKechnie] was amazing, a total enigma to me. I never had a discussion with Licorice in my life, and we Rose Simpson’s memoir Muse, Odalisque, were virtually living together for three years. Handmaiden: A Girl’s Life In The Incredible String It was a new world. Band is published by Strange Attractor Press. Suddenly there was all this possibility, where no one cared – you could do Before and after what you liked, you could Scientology:ISB wear bright colours, you prepare for auditing; could, I dunno, you didn’t (left) Rose today. have to wear socks and shoes. It was complete, total freedom. They blew my mind, the people, without the drugs, but of course, the drugs helped it on the way. I was definitely and publicly a member of The Incredible String Band, playing music, at the Royal Albert Hall [June 29, 1968]: I genuinely did just wander
“It was amazing fun, like living in a kaleidoscope.” ROSE SIMPSON
114 MOJO
I thought Scientology [which the group were introduced to in New York in 1968] was another new thing. We moved through them pretty fast, usually – we’d read Aleister Crowley, the Maharishi, did all the meditating, read about Buddhism and Dao, on a very superficial level, I’ve got to say. I couldn’t see what attracted them to it, why it was a good idea to move from a life that had been all about freedom and loveliness into something that looked like repression, repression, repression. Money doesn’t motivate me but I’m not that keen on giving it away either. I thought it was daft. But if you’re with people, you lose yourself in their ideas to some extent, particularly if you’re enjoying the lifestyle. The last shows [in North America] were fun. Off-stage it was a bit stressy occasionally, but I think we all enjoyed that time on-stage. Though coming back from that tour was just not nice. It was that feeling that, somehow, I didn’t belong there any more. I’m sure we did all the things you do at Christmas, but very much without any joy in it. It wasn’t a plan. I was intending to do the next tour. I can feel myself standing in my cottage in the Glen [their communal base in the Scottish Borders], and thinking, I can’t do it. I’ve got to go, I’m going. I just went, to London, and left all my stuff there. I suppose it might have been nice if we’d had a discussion, but maybe it was irretrievable. I went to see them in Croydon 18 months later, which was weird. I felt I had to, to face it again. It didn’t feel quite real. I went backstage and it was peculiar. It was very polite – “Oh, hello,” “I enjoyed the gig,” “Thank you” – and you just got out as quick as you can. I never saw them perform as a band again. It was like a dream, but wasn’t I lucky to have had it? All of it was a golden moment. It probably went very, very fast. We were trying to live a timeless life, and to some extent it worked. It never stopped being fun for me. If I could be on-stage with them tomorrow, I’d be there. As told to Ian Harrison
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