NoMeSigas_M_10_2020 by aquiaqui33

Kevin Rowland, his beauty explained. Reissues,p99.

REGULARS 9

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE Natalie Maines,Rat Scabies and Don Was dig deep in their musical treasure stashes.

REAL GONE Emitt Rhodes,Judy Dyble,Denise Johnson,Annie Ross,Tami Lynn and others,adieu.

1 1 2 ASK FRED Dellar speaks the truth about Gene Vincent in Doncaster in ’62.

1 1 4 HELLO GOODBYE Pauline Murray remembers the short but intense life of Durham punks Penetration. The Fall,their saving grace discussed. Eyewitness,p64.

WHAT GOES ON! 12

PETER GREEN Fleetwood Mac’s legendary guitarist – whose questing,emotional spirit and amp-driven tones and vibratos gave even B.B. King the shivers – left us last month. Friends and associates pay tribute to his genius, and recall him in all his troubled complexity.

MOSES SUMNEY Falsetto-voiced and genre-defying,the singular talent behind græ brings his Self Portrait,showing how he sees himself and sharing thoughts on watching too much TV,still buying CDs,and India.Arie.

HAWKWIND Dave Brock takes time out from strimming and chopping wood to talk about the new album he’s made at home in lockdown with The Hawkwind Light Orchestra.

Idles,latest report from the front line,Lead Album,p82.

DAN PENN He co-wrote The Dark End Of The Street and Do Right Woman,Do Right Man:now the Muscle Shoals soul legend is back with Living On Mercy,his first new album since 1994.We catch him in Confidential mood.

ELECTRONIC A fabulous new exhibition at London’s Design Museum,you say, suitable for synth-heads,ravers and vinyl junkies? Electronic:From Kraftwerk To The Chemical Brothers joins the dots and loops the loops.

MOJO FILTER 82

NEW ALBUMS Idles,on parade. Plus Bill Callahan,Afel Bocoum,Thurston Moore,Angel Olsen,Gillian Welch and more.

REISSUES Richard & Linda Thompson, when two were at one. Plus Kevin Rowland, Brian Eno,David Bowie,Little Steven and more.

1 0 8 BOOKS Annie Nightingale,DJ survivor.

THIS MONTH'S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

4 MOJO

Colin Irwin

Paul Du Noyer

Rob Sh effield

Colin Irwin’s been keen to interview James Taylor since seeing him at Lincoln Folk Festival in 1971. He’s broken bread with many heroes – Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, Dolly Parton et al– and finally cornered Sweet Baby James in pre-lockdown London.

Paul Du Noyer, who writes our Rubber Soulstory this month, was an NME staffer, Q’s editor, and in 1993 the founder of MOJO. Since then he’s written five books and updated the first in lockdown – The Complete John Lennon Songs 1970-1980 is published soon by Welbeck.

Rob is a longtime Rolling Stone writer and author of Dreaming The Beatles:The Love Story Of One Band And The Whole World. His next book is an ode to female rock stars, The Cat On The Cover Of Tapestry. Another ode – to the US Rubber Soul – is on p78.

Neil Edwards, Carole Segal, courtesy of Beggars Banquet

Plus Eddie Floyd,Genesis and more.

Zach Pigg, Kannetha Brown, Shawn Brackbill, Emily Sandy, Aubrey Trinnamen, Olof Grind, Rankin, Molly Matalon, Christopher Good, Alex Lovell Smith, Kylie Coutts, Constance Mensh

“I have a lot of paranoia and it always comes out in being followed by demons. It’s a personification of evil in my brain,” Sophie ‘Soccer Mommy’ Allison told MOJO earlier this year. The Nashville singer’s music, though, is not the goth you’d expect, but finely-wrought janglepop recalling Belly or Madder Rose.

Alison Crutchfield has been making raw, unmediated albums for nearly a decade now, calling herself Waxahatchee after a creek near her childhood home in Alabama. This year’s fifth album, Saint Cloud, polished her sound without diluting her lyrical punch;country-ish, Lemonheads-aligned songs about alcoholism and how to get straight.

A graduate of the same Philadelphia scene as Steve Gunn and The War On Drugs, Mike Polizze has concentrated more on grungy noise, fronting Purling Hiss. On his solo debut, however, he reveals a sweet, Beatlesy knack:Do Do Do ambles along like a slacker Here Comes The Sun. Listen out for Kurt Vile on guitar and harmonies.

The Salford singer’s career has been curious:teenage fame via MySpace (remember that?) derailed by a broken spine, a fractious label relationship and a compromised take on her music. Her 2020 comeback showcases the real Ren Harvieu:resilient, theatrical, and on woozy Teenage Mascara, channelling the chops of Rufus Wainwright at his most stylish and rococo.

Like Blake Mills, Meg Duffy is probably better known as a guitarist more than a songwriter: you’ll have heard them on tracks by The War On Drugs, William Tyler, Kevin Morby, Weyes Blood and, most recently, Angel Olsen. 2019’s Placeholder LP prodded Duffy out of the shadows, presenting a measured, affecting artisan in the same vein as Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker.

Anjimile Chithambo is a Sufjan Stevens fan, judging by the delicate resonances of Maker, but there’s a flicker of African music too, gifted by the records the trans artist heard growing up with Malawi-born parents. This restrained anthem of self-realisation is from his debut album Giver Taker, due in September.

Written by Allison. Published by Soccer Mommy Music (ASCAP) adm. Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd ᝈ&©2020 Loma Vista Recordings. From Color Theory (Loma Vista Recordings/distributed by Concord) www.lomavistarecordings.com/

license to [PIAS] From RevelIn The Drama. www.bellaunion.com

6 MOJO

Written by Chithambo. Published by Anjimile Music Publishing (ASCAP), Photocomfort (SESAC), Grapes Music (SESAC), ᝈ&©2020 Anjimile under exclusive license to Father/Daughter Records. From Giver Taker (Father/Daughter Records); www.fatherdaughterrecords.com

At 25, Los Angelean Bridgers has become a wry figurehead for a generation of singer-songwriters too self-aware and self-effacing to be construed as a scene. Chinese Satellite comes from her second solo album, Punisher. MOJO’s in-depth interview with Bridgers starts on page 42. Written by Bridgers, Oberst, Vore. Published by Whatever Mom Music (ASCAP), Bedrooms Bedrooms and Spiders (BMI), Pizza Money Music (ASCAP), ᝈ&©2020 Dead Oceans. From Punisher (Dead Oceans) phoebefuckingbridgers.com/

Conor Oberst hasn’t been idle since Bright Eyes released their ninth LP, The People’s Key, in 2011;a list of fine solo records and collaborations (like 2019’s Better Oblivion Community Center project with Phoebe Bridgers) testify as much. Still, it’s a joy to hear his trademark angst framed by Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott again – from the tenth Bright Eyes LP. Written by Oberst. Published by Bedrooms Bedrooms and Spiders (BMI), ᝈ&©2020 Dead Oceans. From Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was (Dead Oceans). thisisbrighteyes.com/

OW DO YOU MAKE A SONG LIKE AN INTIMATE conversation? Phoebe Bridgers, in this issue of MOJO, remembers discovering the knack as a 13-year-old. Listening to Elliott Smith’s music for the first time forced her to rethink how words could work:“I’d always heard lyrics that were like poetry, things you’d never say out loud,” she tells us. “Elliott would say something like ‘whatever’ or ‘oh well OK’, or talk about uglier, more day-to-day stuff.” Bridgers embodies an emerging breed of singer-songwriters whose artfulness comes dressed casually. Her songs, and those of many other artists on In My Life, have a conversational way with the classic tropes of the genre;a confessional style that was conceived at the dawn of the 1970s and refreshed by Elliott Smith’s generation in the ’90s. As you’ll find out, these 15 artists are diverse and idiosyncratic, but they mostly share a musical subtlety and lyrical directness. A sophisticated upgrade of soulbaring, where the craft of their forebears is given a new wit, and a radical honesty.

Mills’ reputation rests on inventive production work (for Alabama Shakes and Perfume Genius) and jobbing guitar virtuosity (that’s him all over the new Dylan album). Don’t underestimate, though, his own brilliant music. This ethereal wonder, possessed by the ghost of Elliott Smith, comes from his fourth solo album, Mutable Set.

Along with friend Aldous Harding and Courtney Barnett, Reid has represented the Antipodean singersongwriter renaissance in recent years. Get The Devil Out shows how elegantly her guitar and voice can meld with Spacebomb’s production grandeur. “I’ve started exploring my childhood, doing a lot of work on the inner child,” she says.

Break Mirrors Publishing adm by Big Deal Music (BMI), Die Sect Publishing (BMI), ᝈ2020 Verve Label Group. From Mutable Set (Verve/New Deal Records) www.ververecords.com

“People always talk about how making art has to come out of bad stuff,” says This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables. “I want that not to be the rule – I always want to make good stuff out of joy and feeling OK.” Hence this first taste of the fifth This Is The Kit album, Off Off On, due out on Rough Trade on October 23, following on from the Paris-based singer’s work with The National.

Australian by birth, and best known for writing the theme to the BBC’s Wallander adaptation, Emily Barker’s last album found her channelling Southern soul at the Sam Phillips Recording Service in Memphis. On her imminent fourth solo LP, she turns from Americana to a kind of contemplative British folk rock.

Written by Emily Barker, Ted Barnes. Published by Normal Music/Domino Publishing. Copyright Control 70 per cent and 30 per cent PRS/PRS ᝈ&©2020 Everyone Sang. From A Dark Murmuration Of Words (Everyone Sang/Thirty Tigers) www.emilybarker.com/

If Angel Olsen’s 2019 album, All Mirrors, privileged the baroque, orchestral potential of her songs, at heart they remained brittle, personal constructs – emphasised by her releasing early guitar and voice versions now as Whole New Mess. This title track was left off All Mirrors;the recording’s muffle and clang further pointing up a sense of spontaneous speech of the heart. Written by Olsen. Published by Horus Elder (BMI) adm. Ribbon Music, ᝈ&©2020 Jagjaguwar. From Whole New Mess (Jagjaguwar) angelolsen.com/

To wrap things up:a cover version. California-born, Nashville-based, Molly Tuttle brings her bluegrass picking skills to the Stones’ trinket. It figures on her second solo album, …But I’d Rather Be With You, with takes on songs by The National, the Grateful Dead, Cat Stevens, Karen Dalton, Arthur Russell and, unexpectedly, Harry Styles. Written by Mick Jagger/Keith Richards. Published by ABKCO Music Inc. (BMI) ᝈ&©2020 Molly Tuttle. Issued under license to Compass Records Group. From …But I’d Rather Be With You (Compass Records);compassrecords.com/

A relative old hand, Stevens has been toggling between intimate work – about love, family, religion – and widescreen art projects since 2000. His new album takes elements of both strains, adding a political dimension to a discussion of spiritual crisis:“We’re losing faith in society, government, leadership, basic social institutions, ourselves.” Written by Sufjan Stevens. Published by Sufjan Stevens Music/ASCAP adm BMG ᝈ&©2020 Sufjan Stevens Music. From The Ascension (Asthmatic Kitty Records).

Natalie Maines THE CHICKS’VOICE What music are you currently grooving to? The new Fiona Apple album,Fetch The Bolt Cutters. I’ve played it hundreds of times. I love the repetitive melodies and rhythmic lines. And I love Lana Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell. What,if push comes to shove,is your all-time favourite album? James Taylor’s Live. [He] was one of those artists our entire family loved. We saw him play in Dallas several times, so it puts me back in that audience. A lot of live albums,the singer isn’t as good as their recordings,but with James,he’s spot on. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? The soundtrack to Grease. My sister and I shared it. I have no idea where we bought it. I had zero money so I know I didn’t buy it. Which musician,other than yourself,have you ever wanted to be? It’s a tie between Olivia Newton-

John and [The Chicks’] Martie Maguire. It just looks so fun to rip on the fiddle and play solos. I’ve got some of her fiddles here,I pull one out occasionally and think,“OK,I am going to at least make a good sound on this thing”. It never happens. What do you sing in the shower? Lana again,and Miley Cyrus,I love Pablow The Blowfish from …Her Dead Petz album. What is your favourite Saturday night record? Lizzo’s Phone. She’s in a club and says, “Where the hell my phone… how am I ’posed to get home?” Another voice comes in and says,“You’re holding it.” And your Sunday morning record? The Best Of Carly Simon,especially That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be. It takes me back to childhood and seeing my mum – probably cleaning – while that was playing. The Chicks’ Gaslighter is out now on Columbia.

A LL B AC K TO MY PL AC E THE STARS REVEAL THE SONIC DELIGHTS GUARANTEED TO GET THEM GOING...

Rat Scabies DAMNED GOOD DRUMMER What music are you currently grooving to? The Urban Voodoo Machine are often playing in the kitchen while I’m cooking. I also have a soft spot for listening to bad jazz on the radio, mostly because I get a laugh out of some of the self-indulgence,but there’s nearly always a drum solo in every song. What,if push comes to shove,is your all-time favourite album? It would be a close call between Talk Talk’s The Spirit Of Eden and Slade Alive.

What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? They’re Coming To Take Me Away,Ha Haaa! by Napoleon XIV. I got taken to the local record shop by my grandmother after I had saved up my pocket money. I was completely addicted to this record. The B-side was the A-side but played backwards – I’m sure it pitched into my love of psychedelia. It’s the only time I played a 7-inch to the point where the vinyl actually wore away and eventually became unplayable. Which musician,other than yourself,have you ever wanted to be? All of them. What do you sing in the shower? Sing? I can barely speak…

Getty, Gabi Porter, Nadine Ijewere

What is your favourite Saturday night record? Deep Purple In Rock. I never understood Deep Purple before,I think it was because I had my head up my arse trying to be a ‘proper’ musician and they were regarded as ‘not Led Zeppelin’. But now I realise what a great band with great songs they were. On this album,they show a sense of humour which I’d never noticed before,but now I get it. And your Sunday morning record? Steve Hillage’s Motivation Radio. This has been a hangover favourite for a long time. I really like the way Joe Blocker plays drums and I love Hillage’s playing and tone. This album’s optimistic good vibes often soothe my aching head. Rat plays on Professor And The Madman’s Séance, out November 1 3 on Fullertone Records.

Don Was MADE MAN OF THIS MUSIC GAME What music are you currently grooving to? I’ve been blasting King Sunny Ade. Always loved the Juju Music album he did in 1982,but the records he made in Africa just prior to that are mindblowing! There’s one called Check “E” that he cut in ’81 with some very raw,deep grooves. What,if push comes to shove,is your all-time favourite album? Push doesn’t have to come to shove: Speak No Evil by Wayne Shorter. I bought it in 1969. This album has brought more comfort and touched my soul more deeply than any music I’ve ever heard! It can turn a bad mood around 180 degrees in 15 minutes. Makes you remember who you are and what you’re here for. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? When I was 11 years old in 1963,I walked over to Topps Discount Superstore in Detroit and bought a 45 on the VeeJay label by The 4 Seasons – Candy Girl b/w Marlena! Those Bob Gaudio-produced tracks are some of the best pop records ever made.

“I’ve been frying my eggs to Bill Frisell.” DON WAS

Which musician,other than yourself,have you ever wanted to be? When I grow up,I want to write like Bob Dylan,sing like Muddy Waters and play bass like Charles Mingus. That’s not asking too much,is it? What do you sing in the shower? I’m working on a wet,soapy version of Merle Haggard’s Sing Me Back Home that will create a new New World Order. What is your favourite Saturday night record? Fania All Stars Live At Yankee Stadium – Vol. 1 or 2 . Works really well most of the time. And your Sunday morning record? Lately,I’ve been frying my eggs and bacon to Bill Frisell’s trio album, Valentine – it’s an unrelentingly beautiful collection and the interplay between Thomas [Morgan],Rudy [Royston] and Bill is staggering. Blue Note Re:imagined, featuring new recordings of classic Blue Note tracks, is released on September 2 5 .

MOJO 9

Academic House, 24-28 Oval Road London NW1 7DT Tel:020 7437 9011 Reader queries:mojoreaders@ bauermedia.co.uk Subscriber queries:bauer@ subscription.co.uk General e-mail:mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk Website:mojo4music.com

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

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

THERE’S A GOOD QUOTE FROM THE

singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus in this issue of MOJO. She’s talking about her friend Phoebe Bridgers, and Bridgers’gift for making records that sound at once modern and timeless, that appeal to both her twentysomething contemporaries and to older music heads. “She’s a student of the greats,” says Dacus, “and actively tries to learn from people she admires.” If we were foolish enough to try and make up a mission statement for MOJO, maybe this is an attitude we’d try to articulate. Every month, we find new stories to tell about our heroes:hence, this issue, our first major pieces on Rubber Soul and Goats Head Soup;our fresh insights into Prince, James Taylor and The Fall; our cratediggers’guide to the late Ennio Morricone. But we’re mindful of how great music is a continuum, a canon which constantly renews itself. So Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens are here, too, along with a satisfying clutch of emerging singer-songwriters on our CD;the revolutionary ardour of Idles is our album of the month;and it’s why we filter so many fine new releases into our reviews section each month. History is vitally important to us at MOJO, but so

Thanks for their help with this issue:Keith Cameron, Fred Dellar,Russell Moorcroft, Ian Whent,Sarah Hampson Among this month’s contributors: Martin Aston,John Aizlewood, Mark Blake,Mike Barnes,Glyn Brown, John Bungey,David Buckley, Keith Cameron,Stevie Chick, Andrew Collins,Andy Cowan, Fred Dellar,Tom Doyle,Paul DuNoyer, Daryl Easlea,David Fricke, Andy Fyfe,Pat Gilbert,John Harris, Sophie Harris,Grayson Haver Currin, Will Hodgkinson,David Hutcheon, Chris Ingham,Jim Irvin,Colin Irwin, David Katz,Andrew Male, James McNair,Bob Mehr,Paul Myers, Chris Nelson,Lucy O’Brien, Andrew Perry,Jude Rogers, Jon Savage,Victoria Segal, Rob Sheffield,David Sheppard, Michael Simmons,Sylvie Simmons, Ben Thompson,Kieron Tyler, Charles Waring,Lois Wilson, Stephen Worthy

Among this month’s photographers: Cover photograpy:Robert Freeman/©Apple Corps Ltd. Cover retouching:Clayton Hickman; David Bailey,Adrian Boot,Andrew Catlin,Rick Clifford,Robert Freeman, Koh Hasebe,Jeff Katz,Andrea Morrison,Frank Ockenfels,Lera Pentelute,Abbey Rees,Paul Rider, Ferdinando Scianna,Norman Seeff, Carole Segal,Pete Smith,Rik Walton, Robert Whitaker

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10 MOJO

Wow, somebody’s suddenly got very cocky Enjoying Danny Eccleston’s Weller interview [MOJO 321] while listening to the new album on a grey Sunday morning. I’m loving this album. What a hot streak – Jawbone, True Meanings and now On Sunset. Mr Weller is notoriously reluctant at giving out his signature, but as a fan of five decades I’ve managed to get the great man’s signature twice, once by happenstance outside the 100 Club in broad daylight where he was about to film a video. The other was at the premiere of Johnny Harris’s great boxing movie, Jawbone, at the BFI Southbank. I timed it just right, waiting for Paul to finish a conversation with the actor Vicky McClure, and got his signature on the Jawbone soundtrack LP and the live double vinyl of one of The Jam’s last gigs at Wembley Arena on December 2, 1982, which me and my girlfriend, now wife, attended as teenagers. In my excitement I smudged the signature on Jawbone and, disappointed, took my seat in the cinema. Mr Weller sat directly behind me, so I built up the courage to ask him to sign Jawbone again. He did, but not without a brilliant riposte:“Fucking hell, mate. You’re really taking fucking liberties.”

Bruce Marsh, Newbury Park

It all turned out just fab At 12.15pm today my latest subscriber issue [MOJO 322] arrived and I took time out from painting the hallway to open it, only to be literally gobsmacked. I have never seen alternative Aladdin Sane photos, certainly not on the cover of a music magazine. It took me back to Saturday April 14, 1973, Brady’s Records, Preston. My dad with me and £5 pocket money. Left the store with Aladdin Sane for £2.08, and my policeman dad scratching his head in bemusement. The critics say it’s not his best album but I find, personally, that the first artist’s album you buy is, generally, your favourite – eg, Goats Head Soup, Can’t Buy A Thrill – regardless of the critical reception. So fantastic memories;for me, the greatest cover and gatefold ever.

Steve Farrington, via e-mail

I was born to serve the greatest musician of all time I’ve been a MOJO subscriber for about a decade and a reader for much longer. Thanks for everything, and in particular for being a tropical island in this sea of shit. Two issues in a row you’ve referenced the contributions of Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman: to T.Rex [MOJO 320] and Frank Zappa [MOJO

321] respectively. I can’t recall seeing a feature; please have one soon on these Zeligs of rock’n’roll. These guys are severely underrated. Tony Visconti mentioned their presence at the T.Rex recording sessions, but the importance of their levity to Bolan’s change was not underscored. Also, they were far more successful than Bolan at the time, and so their adoration of him went an awful long way. It’s no coincidence that Zappa’s “most fecund period” was with them around. They used a Moog to good effect very early in hit single-land (You Showed Me), were the lead singers on the first recording by Steely Dan, and had an album produced by Ray Davies. Please, some more love for Flo and Eddie.

Jon Schubert, Vancouver

That was one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard Lovely tribute to Warren Zevon and his album The Wind in MOJO 322. Jorge Calderón may have turned down the opportunity to sing Keep Me In Your Heart on the album, but he more than made up for it later on the Zevon tribute release Enjoy Every Sandwich. His version, sung with Jennifer Warnes, is sublime and in some respects just as good as Warren’s original. Jorge helped write it and it’s one of the most poignant songs you could hear.

Ken Ward, Crewe

The world is full of miracles Thirty-odd years ago, I asked a guy at a record fair if he had any David Blue albums. He looked at me in bewilderment. I subsequently tracked them down. Finding Shergar and Lord Lucan would have been easier. So imagine my astonishment and delight to find a David Blue article in MOJO 322. Thank you.

Edward Russell, via e-mail

A world without The Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse I thoroughly enjoyed the piece on The Clash’s Sandinista! [MOJO 322]. It has long been one of my favourite albums:I can’t think of any other band who attempted – and pulled off convincingly – so many different styles of music on one record. The only style conspicuous by its relative absence on the album is the speedy tempos and distorted loud guitars of punk. I remember one critic saying London Calling was The Clash’s Exile On Main St., while Sandinista! was their White Album. That’s a very astute observation. What Sandinista! loses in tautness and directness, it gains in sprawling ingenuity – although one difference with The White Album is that on Sandinista! there are about five Revolution 9s. James Dean Bradfield mentions playing a tour bus game of editing the album down to a single album – I’ve often played a similar game, but as a double album. It could have been one of the greatest double

albums ever. But so what? If ever I’m sent to work on an oil rig and only allowed to take one album with me, you know what my choice would be. While I’m here, let me take the opportunity to express my gratitude for the magazine. It has been a part of my life for 25 years now and has given me countless hours of absorption and stimulation – and many introductions to bands and singers who have also become a part of my life. The arrival of MOJO through my letterbox continues to be a highlight of my month – and I hope this continues indefinitely.

Dr Steve Taylor, Manchester

How come I’ve never heard it before? Thanks for the fine feature on Linda Ronstadt [MOJO 320]. Not mentioned, though, was Ronstadt’s participation in Paul Haines and Carla Bley’s magnum opus, Escalator Over The Hill from 1971. The young Ronstadt sings the part of ‘Ginger’ and does it remarkably well, even singing duet with Jack Bruce. Ronstadt’s contribution also shows her ability to sing difficult parts in diverse and challenging contexts. This album alone has a stellar cast of brilliant musicians like Bruce, John McLaughlin, Michael Mantler, Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and The Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. Ronstadt more often than not found herself in very talented company. A shame there won’t be more.

Jens Staugaard, Birkerød, Denmark

It’s a great, great work of art Re:The Style Council’s The Cost Of Loving sleeve art [MOJO 321]. A double page advert in the NME consisted only of yellow ochre, the band’s name and album title. Is that daring or not? There had been a study of colours, reported in the national press at that time, which said it was the most soothing to look at. The album was released following their Red Wedge tour and prior to Margaret Thatcher winning a third General Election. The Beatles and Prince had monochromatic album covers, numerous abstract expressionists and minimalists have filled a canvas with a single colour, and Derek Jarman’s film Blue was released six years later. But in 1987 few critics were buying that from The Style Council.

Robin Clarke, Worcestershire

This is the end of our long and winding road I was totally gobsmacked (I think in your language that means “blown away”) to see the review of Oneness Of Juju [MOJO 321]. I remember hearing Space Jungle Luv on KRE/KBLX radio when it came out and being transfixed by the funky, psychedelic band with the heavenly vocals. We were so lucky to have KRE in its heyday in the Bay Area. Thanx for your incredible efforts during the pandemic.

Bob Oberg, Aptos, California

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The ShowBiz Blues On July 25, myth-laden guitar titan Peter Greenleft us. Mark Blake looks back upon his troubled but inspiring legacy with Fleetwood Mac and beyond.

“Peter Green… was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.”

Men of the world:Peter Green with B.B. King, Olympic Studio,London, October 1971;(left) Green as Fleetwood Mac hit stride; (inset) a signature sound.

Alamy, Getty

“L

OSING PETER Green is monumental,” said the group’s drummer and co-founder Mick Fleetwood, after learning of his death. “No one has ever stepped into the ranks of Fleetwood Mac without a reverence for Peter Green and his talent.” Guitarist Green, who died on July 25 of causes unknown, was a pioneer of the ’60s British blues boom. His sublime touch on Fleetwood Mac’s hits Black Magic Woman, Man Of The World and Albatross influenced contemporaries and successors:from Jimmy Page and David Gilmour;to Gary Moore and Noel Gallagher. But hand in hand with Green’s singular talent came disillusionment. He rejected stardom and left Fleetwood Mac in 1970;his thought processes damaged by hallucinogenic drugs and mental health issues. Green resumed his musical career in the 1980s and ’90s, where his talent flashed brightly but briefly. “I took LSD and I still haven’t returned from it,” he told me in his last ever press interview, from April 2012. “You’re not allowed to return.” Peter Allen Greenbaum was born into a Jewish family in Mile End, east London, on October 29, 1946. Green often hinted at a childhood marred by anti-Semitism. “I felt a deep sadness with my heritage,” he said. When Peter was two years old, his father changed the family name by deed poll to Green. Peter began learning guitar aged 10, and met the blues via a friend’s 78rpm record of Muddy Waters’Honey Bee. He later flitted between several groups, including The Muskrats and The Tridents, usually playing bass. When guitar ‘god’Eric Clapton took a sabbatical from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in October 1965, 19-year-old Green took over for a handful of gigs. Clapton was impressed by his understudy:“He was a real Turk.

Fleetwood Mac,1969 (from left) Danny Kirwan,Jeremy Spencer,Mick Fleetwood, Green,John McVie;(inset) more Mac magic.

W H AT G O E S O N !

➣

By the end of the year, Green had joined keyboard player Peter Bardens and, fortuitously, drummer Mick Fleetwood in Peter B’s Looners (renamed The Peter B’s), and made his recording debut on their 45, I Wanna Be Happy. However, Green returned to the Bluesbreakers when Clapton quit for good in July ’66. “I first met Peter when he turned up with John Mayall,” says their former producer Mike Vernon, who later signed Fleetwood Mac to his Blue Horizon label. “My initial thought was, Where the hell is Eric?… Peter was easygoing and relaxed. Though he later told me it was only his second time in a studio.” When the Bluesbreakers began recording their next album, 1967’s A Hard Road, Vernon realised the scope of

Green’s talent. “It struck me at the time that he was very different from Eric,” he insists. “Peter was a languid player. The word I always use is ‘deft’.” Green claimed to have an aversion to those who played “7,541 notes a minute”, an unusual stance in the era of such lightningfingered contemporaries as Clapton and Ten Years After’s Alvin Lee. Green had learned from the same sources, namely Muddy Waters and B.B. King, but combined their style with, among others, the uniquely British influence of The Shadows’Hank Marvin. A Hard Road featured his spacey instrumental showcase The Supernatural. “He would create space and put together phrases other players wouldn’t use,” says Vernon. “He had a sweet

“He didn’t care about stardom. He just wanted to be heard.” MIKE VERNON

14 MOJO

sound.” B.B. King concurred:“Peter Green has the sweetest tone I ever heard. He was the only one who gave me the cold sweats.” Mayall’s Bluesbreakers was a musicians’ finishing school, and Green graduated after A Hard Road. Fleetwood Mac came about more by happy accident than any grand design. By October ’67, Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie were both playing in the Bluesbreakers. When Mayall fired Fleetwood for turning up drunk, he joined Green; McVie followed a few weeks later. It was Mike Vernon who suggested adding second guitarist, Jeremy Spencer. “I first met Peter at the Birmingham Metro Club,” Spencer told me in 2012. “He was a sensitive player, who synthesised the styles of B.B. King and Clapton, and also knew what to leave out. I auditioned and was surprised when he told me I had the job.” Green showed Spencer a notebook in which he’d written the words: “Please have Jeremy be good, please have him be good.” “It was like a prayer,” said Spencer. T WAS ALSO a sign of how Green’s great confidence could be undercut by even greater insecurity. “Peter wasn’t a natural bandleader,” says Vernon. “He never wanted the band to be called ‘Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac’. Even though that’s what we called the first album.” Fleetwood Mac’s debut arrived in February ’68, went to Number 4 and stayed on the UK charts for a year. In May, the

Robert Judge/Shutterstock, Getty (2), Avalon Red

Worried man blues:Green in 1969 and (right) 1996.

ANOTHER GREEN WORLD

Escape into 10 of Peter’s sweet spots. single Black Magic Woman crept into the Top 40, followed by an exquisite cover of Need Your Love So Bad, made famous by R&B singer Little Willie John. “People overlook how good a singer Peter was,” insists Vernon. “Peter was a natural singer. He didn’t become transatlantic, he retained much of his East End accent and used his voice in a beautiful way.” Fleetwood Mac returned from a US tour in January 1969 to discover their sleepy instrumental, Albatross, had gone to Number 1. They were pop stars. Not that Green wanted it. “Peter never wanted to hide behind anything,” says Vernon. “He didn’t care about stardom. He just wanted to be heard.” O MICK Fleetwood, the group’s next single, the wonderfully plaintive Man Of The World, sounded like “a cry for help.” Green had taken LSD in New York, and his behaviour became erratic during the making of their third album, Then Play On. Musically, he was on form;the nine-minute mini-symphony Oh Well pre-empting prog-rock and heavy metal. But by now Green had converted to Christianity and began wearing a crucifix and priestly robes, spending days on London’s streets trying to persuade passers-by to convert. In March 1970, Fleetwood Mac flew to Munich for a gig, and were met at the airport by the High-Fish Commune, a hippy collective espousing free love and drug use. Green joined them at their nearby mansion, where it’s believed he was spiked with LSD. Nobody knows for certain, though, including Green. When I interviewed him in his lawyer’s office in London’s Covent Garden, he flitted between lucidity, self-effacing humour and incomprehensible tangents. He claimed not to like his singing voice and thought his Fleetwood Mac hits sounded “corny”.

schizophrenia and slowly retreating from the music business. For a time, the only Peter Green news was usually bad, like the time he was arrested for threatening his accountant with a shotgun in 1977. Green recorded sporadically in the 1980s before forming Peter Green’s Splinter Group in the late ’90s, with variable results. His last live shows were in 2009. Since then, he spent some time in residential institutions using art as therapy, but, before his death, was living in Canvey Island, on the Thames Estuary. He was also at peace with his past and collaborating on an expansive book of photographs, handwritten lyrics and original artwork, due for publication by Rufus Stone Editions later this year. In 2016, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett purchased ‘Greeny’, Green’s 1959 Les Paul (previous owners included Gary Moore), an instrument whose unique tone defined Oh Well and The Green Manalishi. In February this year, just before a muso-studded Peter Green tribute concert in London, Hammett and ‘Greeny’paid Peter a visit. “I was very, very nervous,” admits Hammett. “Peter was sat on a couch and for the first 10 minutes we were just checking each other out.” Hammett showed him his old guitar, and Green insisted it wasn’t his. Green’s minder silently mouthed that the boss knew it was, and was winding him up. “You just had to tune into his wavelength,” says Hammett. “We talked about fishing and guitars and music…” The forthcoming book will also include a unique 7-inch single, containing Hammett’s rendition of Man Of The World, with Mick Fleetwood on drums, and a new version of Need Your Love So Bad featuring a previously unreleased Peter Green vocal from 1969, and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour playing guitar. In 2012, I asked Green why he’d left

THE SUPERNATURAL 1A Hard (on John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Road,Decca 1967) Green’s only LP with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers is flagged up by this sinuous instrumental, where guitar notes dangle as if suspended in mid-air.

BLACK MAG IC WOMAN

NEED YOUR LOVE SO BAD

MAN OF THE WORLD

OH WELL

(Fleetwood Mac single,Blue Horizon,1968) A harsh ringing note ushers in PG’s hymn to sexual frustration;a big hit after being given a Latin spin by Santana two years later. (Fleetwood Mac single,Blue Horizon,1968) Apparently,Green disliked Mike Vernon’s use of strings on this. But the embellishments never detract from his transfixing voice and guitar.

(Fleetwood Mac single,Immediate,1969) PG’s world-weariness found a home in this follow-up to the mighty Albatross. “I just wished I had never been born,” he sings before dispensing a chiming,understated solo. (Fleetwood Mac single,Reprise,1969) Split into two parts across both sides of the 45,Green welds flamenco,bowel-shaking blues and what could be an outtake from a lost spaghetti western soundtrack.

TEMPERATURE IS RISING 6Colossus, (on Otis Spann,The Biggest Thing Since Blue Horizon,1969) Mike Vernon used Fleetwood Mac (minus Mick) to back US blues pianist Spann on this sole long-player. Here,Green’s guitar bobs and weaves,landing punches,but never KO-ing the boss.

THE G REEN MANALISHI (WITH THE 7(Fleetwood TWO PRONG CROWN) Mac single,Reprise,1970) The riff stomps like a monster’s footsteps,though the Manalishi was Peter’s nickname for filthy lucre rather than a mythical beast. Truly,heavy metal.

and

IN THE SKIES

APOSTLE

(on In The Skies,Sanctuary,1979) The title track of Green’s comeback album paired him with future Thin Lizzy guitarist Snowy White and old keyboardplaying friend Peter Bardens,on a sultry Mac-esque blues. (on In The Skies,Sanctuary,1979) Snowy White did some of the heavy lifting on In The Skies,but this elegiac semi-acoustic

THE STUMBLE (on Peter Green Splinter Group,Snapper

1970’s Game

Little dreamer: Green in 1980, playing on.

Green’s late-‘90s return began with this long-player,and a sprightly live version of The Stumble,one of his calling cards on the Bluesbreakers’ A Hard album 30 years earlier.

MOJO 15

W H AT G O E S O N !

“I’ve never done drugs. Netflix is healthier.” MOSES SUMNEY

The art-soul metamorph in his own words and by his own hand. I’ d describe myself as… indescribable. Music changed me… It gave me the framework to both understand myself and be able to communicate who I really am. I started writing songs when I was 12, and when I was 13, I discovered the music of India.Arie, which certainly gave me a lot more context for what I wanted to do with my life. I do still listen to her, especially from time to time when I need to be reminded and to re-centre. I go back to it. I definitely have been all over the place since then. Away from music… these days, I’m finding I’m really enjoying film and television. Just watching it and thinking about it and analysing it. I’ve been obsessing over [BBC/ HBO show] I May Destroy You. Fantastic. Ten stars. Michaela Coel is a friend of mine and her voice is the last voice you hear on my album græ. So, it was really cool to be able to see her show and be able to identify a lot of those things that I feel like my record is winking at. My biggest vice is… I get distracted very easily. It is a vice for me. I find myself falling off track sometimes. I could watch Netflix for hours if left to my own devices. I don’t really drink. I’ve never smoked. I’ve never done drugs. Netflix is healthier… maybe. The last time I was embarrassed was… 16 MOJO

I don’t really think I’ve been embarrassed recently. I’ve tried to eliminate most shame from my life and I think embarrassment comes from a wellspring of shame. So, it’s quite difficult to embarrass me. The last big embarrassment I can recall would probably be when I was a teenager – in choir in high school and not singing the right note. I was pitchy and then the teacher stopped and was like, “Who was that?” Then everyone else kind of pointed, being like, “Hmm, I think it came from that direction.” My formal qualifications are… I went to university and I got one of the more informal degrees in creative writing with an emphasis on poetry. The last time I cried was… I cry so often. Probably two days ago, watching [ballroom culture TV drama] Pose. But I also cried last week because I made this film with [designer] Thom Browne, this fashion film that I directed. We made it in six days and just the process to make it was so crazy and stressful. I’m more likely to cry if I haven’t slept. At the end of that process, it was just such a huge relief and I was so proud of it that that made me cry as well. Vinyl, CD or MP3?… I love them all. I love vinyl records and looking at the packaging. I buy CDs pretty consistently for my car when

I’m driving. And I’m an internet kid, y’know, so I love MP3s. I love downloading songs still and being able to own them and change the songs very quickly. My most treasured possession is… my books that have all my songs. They’re probably the only material possessions that matter to me. When I’m travelling, I put them in my backpack and hope nothing happens. The best book I’ ve read is… there’s one by a British writer that I just loved – Olivia Laing, The Lonely City. She moves to New York and is incredibly lonely and so in order to deal with her loneliness she writes about famous New York artists and the different ways in which they dealt with loneliness. Is the glass half-full or half-empty?… it depends on the situation, but I like halfempty. ’Cos then you can fill it up further once you realise that. My greatest regret… getting an iPhone. When we die… shit, I don’t know. Hopefully we just do it again. I would like to be remembered as… a risk-taker and a troublemaker. Tom Doyle græ is out now via Jagjaguwar.

Eric Gyamfi

Work From Home: Moses Sumney by Moses Sumney.

MOJO WO R K I N G

“It’s meat’s revenge…” DAVE BROCK

THE HAWKWIND LIGHT ORCHESTRA DELIVER ECO-KARMA WITH MOTHERSHIP ALBUM 33, GIVE OR TAKE A FEW… HIS SUMMER, Hawkwind’s steadfast captain, singer, guitarist and synth player Dave Brock had two solo shows, festival appearances and the group’s annual Hawkfest scheduled. “Then it all came to a stop!” he says. But not entirely. Last December, he’d begun work on a new solo record, conceptualised around “being in love with an android, a replica that will last forever, whereas, you’re gonna die.” In preparation for the solo gigs, Hawkwind drummer Richard Chadwick and keyboardist/guitarist Magnus Martin came

A L SO WO R K I N G …unable to play gigs, DAVID CROSBY has been keeping busy. “I just finished working on a song with Donald Fagen,” he tells MOJO. “After a couple of years of me wheedling and begging, he sent me a good set of words, and me and James [Raymond, Crosby’s son]wrote the music to it

FACT SHEET Title: Carnivorous Due: October Songs: Human Behaviour (No Sex Allowed )/Lockd own (Keep Calm)/ Exped ition To Planet X/Void Of Wasteland/ The Virus The Buzz: “We live a pretty solitary existence anyway, so it hasn’t mad e that much d ifference. It wasn’t really a new way of working , it was, carry on as per normal!”

down to Brock’s farmhouse studio in Devon in January and February – bassist Niall Hone was off travelling – and did some recording. Rather than putting a stop, the coronavirus pandemic obliged Brock to carry on in isolation, prompting new tactics and ideas. “I thought, I may as well use some of Richard’s drumming,” says Brock. “I did a lot of drum programming as well. I sent stuff to Magnus – he’s living with about 10 other people in a farmhouse in Wales, when he did the vocals on the track Lockdown he

and it is killer-fucking-good. And then I got one that I wrote with James, that may be the most ‘up’ thing I’ve ever written. We have an album almost done, man” …speaking on What’s Up On E Street? – Monmouth University’s BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN (left) Archives online series – Nils Lofgren shared updates of the group’s new album, noting it’s “as great a record in the works as I ever heard

Bruce make and that’s saying a lot” … BIG THIEF’s Adrianne Lenker releases two solo albums in October: entitled song s and instrumentals, she recorded to analogue tape in a cabin and al fresco, including while walking on a frozen lake …OUTKAST’s hiatus has been long, but Big Boi has hinted that he will be collaborating with Kate Bush (right). Telling SiriusFM about when they met for a

cognac after one of her 2014 live shows, he said, “Stay tuned. Just stay tuned… I can’t even talk about it right now” …in October, FUTURE ISLANDS release their new album, As Long As You Are, which was recorded at home in Baltimore… Münster mag Jazzthetik reports that NORMA WINSTONE is recording a new album with New Jersey ace bass Steve Swallow…

Getty (2)

Brock of ages: Hawkwind’s skipper steers the ship to fresh waters from his Devon farmhouse HQ.

had to lock himself in his bedroom. He has a freakout, shouting for help, and I think they thought he was going a bit nutty! Richard hasn’t got a computer… or a drum kit. I think he practises on a pouffe, with his drumsticks.” So, via the odd Zoom meeting and swapped files – though as Brock says, “we’ve got terrible internet here, it takes about five hours to fucking download anything” – Carnivorous was built. Singers Trixie Smith, Candy Floss and KT, AKA Brock’s partner and Hawkwind manager Kris Tait, also appear, notably on overpopulation song Human Behaviour (No Sex Allowed). “I think you probably know what it’s all about,” he says. “Where does the virus come from really? From the blood of the animals. I’m sure people will be shocked, and horrified, in a few hundred years’time, about the killing of animals, and how we treat wildlife and the planet. It’s meat’s revenge…” As ever, the capacity to future-shock comes with a piquant space rock soundtrack, which he describes as, “weird orchestral bits, rock stuff, unusual avant-garde electronics, some nice acoustic pieces… it’s different, yeah. Or so one would hope.” The ‘Light Orchestra’suffix, previously used for 2012’s Stellar Variations, was adopted as the full line-up don’t appear. “It’s still Hawkwind,” he says. “Oh yeah. And when you play lead guitar it really is a wonderful thing to play bass as well, because you know exactly what’s happening.” He adds that the track Forgotten Memories will be a charity release for Alzheimer’s. It reflects on how sufferers can still be touched by music:in the background, as Brock speaks, Tait sings the lyrics, “I’m still here inside… not beyond repair.” Regarding the music industry’s long-term future, Brock is confident, saying, “I’m sure it will all get going again.” At press time, a one-day/five-band/300-capacity crowd mini-Hawkfest near Axminster was planned for late August, though a Wembley Arena show in December has been put back to 2021. “I said to Kris, fucking hell, I’m going to be 80 next year!” laughs Brock. “Quite weird. But I don’t feel it.” Ian Harrison

MOJO 17

Dan Penn:puppet master still pulling all the strings.

PIECES OF A DAN Penn’s five prime picks

Woman for Aretha Franklin – with American Studios producer Chips Moman. Why didn’t you write more together? When we wrote them, we were where I got hooked. When I was a The master soul songwriter having a real good time together. junior in high school, I wrote [a hit Then I produced The Box Tops and reflects on a life in the studio, for Conway Twitty] Is A Bluebird had some hits with them. Later, PARAMOUNT, 19 63) eminent peers and luck. Blue. That gave me some encourChips and I had a little trouble, just 5 Black Velvet agement. I went up to see Rick Hall Alannah Myles a difference of opinion I guess – but EEMS LIKE every 20 years or so I (ATLANTIC, 1989) in Muscle Shoals, he was walking I left American so we didn’t write get to feelin’froggy,and decide to around on the cement foundation together any more. The way I looked cut another record,” says Dan Penn, of [Fame Studio]. He said, “Why don’t you at it we were batting a thousand so we might in a cotton-soft drawl. An iconic figure in the come work for me?” There weren’t too many as well stop right there (laughs). I’m proud of history of both Muscle Shoals and Memphis kids running round Alabama writing songs every one of my songs. Even now, I feel good soul – he wrote classics including I’m Your at that point, much less ones that had a hit. about somebody cutting one of my tunes. Puppet,The Dark End Of The Street,and Do So that gave me a little leg up. Rick started It might be 50 years after I wrote it, but still Right Woman,Do Right Man – the Alabama producing all the black singers, and that they cut it. native has been a somewhat reluctant solo was right down my alley. artist. Now,at 79,he’s back with Living On You’ve spent most of your life in the studio Was your family convinced music was the Mercy,his first studio album in more than a – does that still hold the same appeal for path for you? you as it once did? quarter of a century. Cut in Muscle Shoals I’d gotten married and I told my daddy, “I’m and Nashville,with a crack crew of regional One time, Jerry Wexler told me he got offered fixing to move to Muscle Shoals.” He said, players,it’s vintage Penn,recalling his ornate a chance to [produce] The Rolling Stones, but “Son, I can get you on at the plant making as R&B/pop productions for The Box Tops. he’d just retired. I said, “Jerry, you couldn’t much as I’m making right now, that’s $40 a “Yeah,” he says. “I did my thing.” find it in your heart to cut The Rolling Stones week. You not gonna make but $25 [at Fame].” before you quit?” And he said, “Dan, baby, You’re considered one of the great Southern But I said, “Daddy I gotta try it.” To his credit, when the rigours of the studio finally get soul songwriters – how does he didn’t try to talk me out of to you, it’s time to go.” I am getting to the that happen to a white kid it. I struggled through for age where I finally understand what he from Vernon,Alabama? about five years until I meant (laughs). I was a singer as a child, I went had [the James & Bobby to church and I leaned on Tell us something you’ve never told an Purify hit] I’m Your Puppet. what I learned right there. interviewer before. After that I said, “I ain’t never When it came to R&B, I had gonna look back no more. I’ve had a lot of people cut my songs. I’ve my little radio and everyone I’m writings songs, that’s been lucky with some of the big ones – would go to sleep and I’d what I’m doing.” DAN PENN Aretha, Otis [Redding]. But I always wished listen to [disc jockey] John R that Tom Jones had cut some of my stuff. When you moved to on WLAC out of Nashville, and He’s got the power, you know? Memphis,you wrote two he’d be playing all that blues Bob Mehr stone soul classics – The and R&B – Ray Charles, Bobby Dark End Of The Street for Living On Mercy is out on August 2 8 via The Last ‘Blue’Bland, and James Music Company. James Carr and Do Right Brown, the big three. That’s

DAN PENN ‘‘S

Alamy

“I said, ‘I ain’t never gonna look back no more.’”

18 MOJO

1 Sad Eyes Robert

John (EMI AMERICA, 1981) 2 Danny Boy Ray Price (COLUMBIA, 19 67) 3 I Only Have Eyes For You The Flamingos (END, 1959) 4 Without Love (There Is Nothing) Ray Charles (ABC/

L A ST N I G H T A RECORD CHANGED MY L I F E

MichaelRother

MaxZerrahn, Peter Boettcher, Getty

loses it to The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Axis: Bold As Love (Track, 1967) In the mid ’60s I joined a band in Düsseldorf called Spirits Of Sound, and I was the guy for the melodies, so I became the lead guitarist. I had some guitar heroes like The Beatles, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck; people I tried to copy. Then in 1967 the guitar world really changed for me when Jimi Hendrix appeared on Beat Club on German television. My eyes popped out of my head. There were some great moments on the first album, Are You Experienced, but especially with Axis: Bold As Love. It must have been December ‘67 when I first heard it, because we were looking forward to the next album. The amazing thing he did on this record was let the whole studio become an instrument, and to make the guitar fly around backwards, forwards, sideways in the music. This is very important, really something some people would call ‘mind blowing’– it was the liberation of the guitar. It was more than just a simple instrument. He was a great technician but also had a lot of heart, which you can hear in Castles Made Of Sand and also Little Wind. This is when he started being not only aggressive – which also conveyed a lot of sincere emotion – but also on the softer side, in the delicacy of the melodies and the notes he played. When he played the national anthem of the US in Woodstock is still a moment of history for me, because of the Vietnam War. You could hear the bombs and the terror in the guitar, in the way he made the feedback. It made me a conscientious objector. In ’69 I was drafted – I refused, and had a court hearing, etc. It wasn’t easy, they really hated you for not going into the military in Germany at that time. If I could apologise to Jimi Hendrix for trying to be a bit like him then I would do that. He changed my view of music, and he has kept that significance for me. As told to Jenny Bulley

W H AT G O E S O N !

NEW! LIVE! EXHIBITION ELECTRONIC SPANS DANCE MUSIC’AUDIO AND VISUALS

“R

ALF HÜTTER came at the end Machine that get the currents flowing. of last year to see the space,” says Other stimulating elements include Design Museum curator Gemma specific sites for dance ground-zero cities Curtin of Electronic:From Kraftwerk To Detroit and Chicago, sleeve and club design The Chemical Brothers. “He wanted to make expositions, a Jimmy Cauty acid house smiley sure we were worthy to take on the exhibiriot shield, a giant skull-shaped glitterball and tion and were on the right track, because the US/UK vintage flyers. A 3-D Kraftwerk Kraftwerk experience is quite a big chunk of experience, 1024 Architecture’s ‘Walking it, and they’re such arch-communicators, Cube’(a robo-sculpture that dances) and with a very clear set of parameters.” tripped-out Aphex Twin films by animator As the newly reopened venue’s first show, Weirdcore add movement to the static. and first ever music-themed project, clarity “It’s about stepping inside,” says Curtin, of vision and communication was essential. A who selects Trevor Jackson’s F O R M A T version, entitled Expo Electro de Kraftwerk – 12 songs presented on 12 different formats à Daft Punk ran at the Philharmonie de Paris including vinyl, MiniDisc, VHS tape, cassette from April to August 2019:the new formation and 8-Track – as a particular favourite shares elements, such as from the Philharmoartefact. “It’s seeing where the roots are, and nie’s collection of instruments, but as Curtin the mechanisms, effort and collaborations explains, “bringing a music exhibition to the that go towards the end product. There is a Design Museum meant we wanted to bring huge amount of work and expertise that goes extra content, so it’s very different. There’s into putting these ‘effortless’things together.” more UK content and we wanted to show Notably for housebound times, there’s a that relationship between the presentation mini club space with LEDs and Laurent of the music, visually, and the music itself.” Garnier playlists for acid house flashbacks, Synth and dance music aficionados – who also found in the humid, loud and strobing should bring their own earphones to access Chemical Brothers room lit by the dancing the audio – will be impressed. Greeted by 16 glob-humanoids of their Got To Keep On. framed, aluminium-sleeved albums from “We wanted to create an experience, where Philips’avant-garde imprint Prospective 21e it felt like you were in a club, but we’re not Siècle, the room that follows traces a path trying to recreate that feeling,” says Curtin. “This is an alcohol-free zone, starting in 1901 of electronic carefully socially distanced!” instrument development Does the raving spirit “It’s about and the music it drove. belong in a gallery? “I think a A Buchla 200e, a synclavier stepping museum can step back and and Jean Michel Jarre’s inside, seeing take perhaps a longer view,” laser harp impress enough, says Curtin, “connect things but it’s the more exotic where the that are disconnected.” Gmebaphone 2, brass roots are.” Ian Harrison Theremin-a-like Croix GEMMA CURTIN, Sonore and a recreation of Electronic: From Kraftwerk To The CURATOR Radiophonic visionary Chemical Brothers runs to February Daphne Oram’s Oramics 1 4 , 2 0 2 1 at the Design Museum.

Michael Rother’s Solo II box set is out on September 4 on Groenland Records.

Pictures at an exhibition: Kraftwerk at work;(right, from top) Bruno Peinado’s sculpture Untitled (The Endless Summer);Daphne Oram at the controls.

MOJO R I S I N G

Something to really chat about:A. Swayze (second right) & The Ghosts have a lot to say.

“We made an album with my coke-dealer, it sounded rubbish.” ANDREW SWAYZE

FACT SHEET For fans of Richard Hell & The Voidoids, The Saints, Eddy Current Suppression Ring. ● Swayze says he spends months researching his songs’ subjects. “Suddenly is about the injustices women experience, and I spent days and days talking with [my wife] about the fears she feels when she’s on the street. I knew I had to write from a woman’s perspective, or I’d feel like an impostor.” ● Swayze’s sobriety hasn’t affected the band’s live experience. “There’s always blood on the stage, and I’m a great spitter. I spat on the ceiling during our Brighton gig last year, and it dangled down, like a metre-and-a-half, and I caught it on my tongue just as the next song began. Afterwards, no one mentioned our songs, they were like, ‘That fuckin’ gob you did, mate – awesome!’ I’d get arrested if I did that now, though…”. ●

TASMANIAN DEVILS A. SWAYZE & THE GHOSTS HEAD FOR A GARAGEPUNK REVOLUTION! CAN’T IMAGINE writing a song that was meaningless now, that didn’t engage with some issue,” says Andrew Swayze, from his home in Hobart. His band’s debut album, Paid Salvation, is a fusion of fevered garage rock, canny Strokes and Hives-style hooks, and socially-conscious lyrics. But Swayze admits they weren’t always so disciplined. “We started out as some hectic drug and alcohol-fuelled thing,” he says. “I’d misunderstood punk rock ideals, and lost sight of what I really believed in.” Swayze describes the Hobart of his youth as “really backwards:high unemployment, low education… Socio-economically it was the armpit of Australia.” Located on the island state of Tasmania, 150 miles from the mainland, touring bands never visited Hobart. But a tenacious local music scene caught the imagination of the young Swayze, who’d just discovered punk rock via Nirvana. “It was totally honest and DIY,” he remem-

Rick Clifford

“I

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to be considerate in what you’re writing.’That was an epiphany. Most of my lyrics had been throwaway. But when I was younger I was so influenced by punk musicians with strong, well-thought-out opinions. I’m opinionated, I’ve got a lot to say – why was I just writing throwaway filler?” bers. Duly inspired, he press-ganged Swayze’s epiphany resonates his housemates into forming a band, across the Ghosts’debut, as he writing and recording their first EP trains his ire upon religious that weekend. Thus, A. Swayze & The hypocrisy (Paid Salvation), Ghosts were born. ecological irresponsibility Chaotic, blood-splattered early (Beaches) and anti-abortion live shows quickly won them a protestors (It’s Not Alright). And if following in Australia. “Being from his social commentary puts him at Hobart, I never thought we’d get odds with fellow Antipodean punk anywhere, but at the same time I had exports The Chats and Amyl & The this insane drive and self-belief,” Sniffers, he’s fine with that. Swayze says. “But I was killing “That super-ironic punk rock is myself, doing drugs all the time. We KEY TRACKS cheap, I don’t see any longevity to ● Suddenly made an album with my coke dealer, ● It’s Not Alright it,” he says. “The Chats get so much but we were so fucked up, it ● Reciprocation attention, but it’s all so shallow. sounded absolute rubbish. We We’re not in this because it’s a chucked the whole thing.” fashion thing – we’re a punk rock band This humiliation served as a wake-up call because we have something to say.” for Swayze and his Ghosts’excessive Stevie Chick partying. Meanwhile, Andrew’s wife Olivia realigned his lyrical direction. “She said, Paid Salvation by A. Swayze & The Ghosts is out Aug 2 5 on Ivy League Records. ‘You’ve got a responsibility to your audience,

MOJO PLAYLIST

MEET JOACHIM COODER: RY’S SON BEATS HIS OWN PATH TO FAME

“I

“I’ll forget where I am, the music is so hypnotic.”

becoming the first star of the Grand Ole Opry in the 192 0 s. There’s a bridge named after him that crosses Cripple Creek, Tennessee. ● Joachim’s mbira is an American model, invented by Will Wesley and hand built by Array Instruments. Other satisfied customers include Sting, The Orb and Imogen Heap. ● Also on the album are Rayna Gellert (a Nashville-based fiddler) and Sam Gendel (bass). Ry adds guitar, mandolin and banjo.

KEY TRACKS Fuchsia Machu Picchu ● Come Along Buddy ● Elevated Boy ●

Ring them bells! For the month’s best rock, sou l and boogie.

ROBERT PLANT

LANA DEL REY

LA WHO AM I TO LOVE YOU?

LDR’s sunkissed noir shtick repurposed, effectively, as spoken-word poetry, over discreet Satie-isms:“Don’t be put off by my quick-wordedness…” Find it: streaming services

TONY ALLEN & HUG H MASEKELA 3WE’VE LANDED (REMIX) From Allen & Masekela’s Rejoice, remixed by Matthew Herbert. The mournful trumpet laments their absence. Find it: streaming services

BLACK PUMAS I’M READY

Unreleased from the Texan soul duo:on a circular soul/funk groove, singer/guitarist Eric Burton gives it Curtis-level hot city intensity. Find it: streaming services

PSYCHIC TEMPLE

WHY SHOULD I WAIT

Surging Californian motorikrock from Chris Schlarb, here with the actual Dream Syndicate as his superfried backing band. Find it: YouTube

JAMES WILLIAMSON & DENIZ TEK

STABLE

Where the Stooge and Radio Birdman crank up the guitars for a hardboiled brooding on time and cigs out on the endless highway. Find it: YouTube

G ARCIA PEOPLES

ONE AT A TIME

The young princes of American psych channel their energies into light-footed prog boogie. Groupthink jams to follow, inevitably. Find it: streaming services

WAILING SOULS FEAT. ALBOROSIE

SHARK ATTACK

The Kingston vocal heroes’1992 hit refitted with the Sicilian reggae envoy. Stay on guard against evil doers! Find it: YouTube

ALANAS CHOŠNAU & MARK REEDER CHILDREN 9OF NATURE (FKK REMIX) New Order associate Reeder and Lithuanian/Kurdish singer pile on pulsing techno tension, remixed from their Depeche-like LP of the same name. Find it: streaming services

10 He does his little thing:Joachim Cooder,bound for success.

CHARLIE PATTON HIGHWAY

The Mighty Rearranger returns to the Americana heartlands for a spectral heavy blues. Closest he’s got to Zep zones in years. Find it: streaming services

LIAR, FLOWER EVEN THOUGH THE

DARKEST CLOUDS

KatieJane Garside (Daisy Chainsaw/Queen Adreena) riffs on a standard and drenches it in her high-FX, end-of the-world entreaty. Find it: streaming services

Mads Perch

NEVER WANTED to be Ry Cooder’s in the world, was there, or Angá Díaz, who guitar-playing son. Why would he was a crazy, quadruple-conga-playing have me on stage with him?” Joachim madman, but you play with them and do Cooder is considering his new album, Over your little thing.” That Road I’m Bound, a celebration of the Drums may have been Joachim’s primary songs of Uncle Dave Macon, to which his instrument, but it is the mood created by his father contributes. Lest anybody think Junior mbira – an African thumb piano with plucked let dad hold the reins, though, Joachim metal keys – that sets Over That Road I’m declares it was his own daughter who was Bound apart and connects these century-old the driving force and “director”. vaudeville songs, played as trance-inducing “When she was three, I lullabies, to its predecessor, would take her to my parents’ 2018’s Fuchsia Machu Picchu. house and dad was playing “I have an electric mbira and these songs on the banjo at times it sounds African, sometimes Irish, but I love for her. I bought an Uncle playing Uncle Dave’s banjo Dave box set and she became music on it, slowing obsessed with disc five. everything down and making She wouldn’t allow us to JOACHIM COODER something almost ambient.” hear any other songs, so I However sui generis Over was playing them and adding That Road I’m Bound is, there’s a reassuringly lyrics about us. She got a kick out of that.” Cooderesque familiarity to it. Perfect Joachim, meanwhile, had grown up watching his father scoring films such as Paris, late-night listening accompanied by a tumbler of something strong. “I’ll be playing Texas – “One scene over and over again” – and it was another Ry Cooder/Wim Wenders and I’ll forget where I am, the music is so collaboration, Buena Vista Social Club, that FACT SHEET hypnotic. Each person’s ● For fans of Uncle put Joachim on the map at the end of the Dave Macon, Pete mind can go wherever they 1990s. He appears in Wenders’documentary Seeger, Thomas want to take it, I love that. and on the Ry-produced album, playing a Mapfumo, Ry Cooder That’s what I do, and I hope Nigerian udu drum and a Turkish dumbek. ● Uncle Dave the listener does, too.” Macon, who “Being a drummer, it’s a role that is would’ve been 15 0 David Hutcheon supportive – a guitar is like a spotlight, you on October 7, was in are The Thing – and I wouldn’t ask to play Over That Road I’m Bound is his fifties before he found fame, timbales when Amadito Valdés, the best guy released by Nonesuch on

MOJO 21

RE AL GONE Fresh as a daisy: Emitt Rhodes, before bade farewell to paradise.

THE LEG ACY

Cult songsmith and one-man bandmaster Emitt Rhodes left us on July 19. WAS real good at making mistakes,” the reclusive pop polymath Emitt Rhodes told me in the autumn of 2014, “but that’s one of those things in life that we’re all good at, aren’t we?” Rhodes’self-deprecating wit was the product of years of ill-health and crushing career disappointments, but as he talked up Rainbow Ends, his first new album since 1973, it was impossible to miss a twinkle of hope in his eyes. It was hard to parse this weathered-voiced, whitebearded man with the lean wunderkind on the sleeve of his 1970 solo debut Emitt Rhodes. Born in Decatur, Illinois, on February 25, 1950, Rhodes grew up in Hawthorne, California. After drumming with The Palace Guard, he first made waves

“I

with the Los Angeles band The Merry-Go-Round. Their 1967 A&M debut found a fan in Richard Thompson, who covered Time Will Show The Wiser with Fairport Convention in 1968. Before the band’s demise in 1969, Rhodes made one more album for A&M. When the label rejected it, he set about converting his parents’ garage into a recording studio, playing and singing every note on his prodigiously catchy first LP. Released by ABC/Dunhill in 1970, it entered the US Top 30, whereupon A&M promptly rushed out their own previously rejected tapes as a competing Emitt Rhodes solo album, The American Dream. From there, it all went wrong, and his next two Dunhill LPs, Mirror (1971) and Farewell To Paradise (1973), were released amid a cloud of litigation. As Rhodes retreated into decades of obscurity,

“All I know how to do is deliver a line.”

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depression, diabetes, and two divorces, his artistic legacy was kept alive by The Bangles’1984 cover of his 1967 song Live, Wes Anderson’s use of Emitt Rhodes’Lullabye in The Royal Tenenbaums, and Cosimo Messeri’s 2009 documentary about Rhodes, The One Man Beatles. In 2013, producer Chris Price coaxed Rhodes to return to his fabled shed to record Rainbow Ends with various LA musical acolytes including Susanna Hoffs, Jason Falkner and Aimee Mann. “Emitt told me he was proud of the record and pleased at the reaction to it,” says Price, who also credits Rhodes for his contributions to DIY recording culture. Rhodes died in his sleep at home, just steps away from the shed where he did his best work. It was in that studio that he summed up the toll his troubled life had taken on him. “I used to be able to do all that falsetto stuff, but I can’t do it no more,” Rhodes told me in 2014. “All I know how to do is deliver a line, and hopefully the line is important… you write a song because it means something to you, and you want to share it. That’s it.” Paul Myers

Alamy

Rainbow’s End

The album: Emitt Rhodes (ABC/Dunhill, 19 7 0 ) The sound: Performed and recorded alone in his shed, and remixed at Sound City by Keith Olsen and Curt Boettcher, the unimpeachable solo debut was packed with such falsetto-stacked piano pounders as Fresh As A Daisy and With My Face On The Floor. Bristling with Beatlesque charm, they earned Rhodes the nickname “the American McCartney”.

Denise Johnson, the voice of Primal Scream’s dance glories.

Judy Dyble Fairport’s progressive flyer BORN 1 9 4 9 Judy Dyble’s online bio read, “I sing and write songs. I had 35 years off in the middle.” It was a typically self-deprecating assessment by this professed “accidental musician”, who worked with artists as diverse as Mike Batt, The Incredible String Band and Martin Quittendon in her unpredictable career. A teenage singer in the mid-’60s folk scene, Dyble joined her north London school friends Fairport Convention in 1967, also providing recorder, autoharp and piano on their self-titled debut. Dismissed in 1968, an ad that she placed in Melody Maker united the prototype King Crimson;guitarist Robert Fripp would remain a life-long friend and collaborator. In 1970 she teamed up with Them’s Jackie McAuley in a psychedelic duo dubbed Trader Horne by John Peel, but soon left music behind to be a mother and run a business with husband, the writer and DJ Simon Stable. Unexpectedly widowed in 1994, her remarkable renaissance began in 2004. Dyble had felt “stuck with a folk tag”, but her open-minded creativity drew in trance DJ Mark Swordfish, modern progressive songwriter Tim Bowness and pianist-arranger Alistair Murphy and The Band Of Perfect Strangers, the latter the ideal conduit for her songs of heartbreak and humour. In 2016, she’d revisit memories of ’60s London with musician-producer Andy Lewis for their acclaimed neo-psychedelic album Summer Dancing. Although diagnosed with emphysema and suffering from stage fright, she also returned to live performance, most notably

with Fairport at several Cropredy Conventions. Guesting on prog act Big Big Train’s Grimspound in 2017 led to her final project, the upcoming album Between A Breath And Breath, with that band’s vocalist and multi-instrumentalist David Longdon. Diagnosed with lung cancer in November 2019, she never lost the eccentric wit that delighted her friends, but sadly didn’t live to see her last album be released. Looking forward to that record, she counted herself, she said, “a fortunate woman.” Mike Barnes

Eddie Gale Avant-garde trumpeter BORN 1 9 4 1 Eddie Gale’s relatively slim recorded legacy stands at odds with his progressive talent. The wild-edged Brooklyn trumpeter, famed for his boisterous abstractions, was first drawn to music at Rose Hill Baptist Church, transitioning from Cub Scouts marching band bugle player to trumpeter at 17 via lessons from neighbour Kenny Dorham. A super-fast learner, he was soon jamming with Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Stitt, Jackie McLean and Max Roach. Two life-changing meetings followed. The first was with John Coltrane, who gave him $35 to retrieve his trumpet from a pawnshop and let him sit in with his Quartet at village hangout The Half Note. The other was with cosmic outlier Sun Ra, starting a partnership that endured until Ra’s death in 1993. Gale also adopted Ra’s philosophy – embracing

Pete Smith, Getty, Georgette Gale

“Accidental musician”:Judy Dyble shrugged off her folk tag.

Egyptology, phonetics and hieroglyphics – and played on many Arkestra outings, pushing hard at the limits of tonality on 1965’s Secrets Of The Sun. His collaborative zeal and fiery flights of imagination also shot through Cecil Taylor’s 1966 classic Unit Structures and the freeform adventurism of Larry Young’s Of Love And Peace. As a leader, he cut a brace of underrated soul-jazz albums for Blue Note, enlisting Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones for 1968’s spiritually engaged, high-octane Ghetto Music, where astrology and street-corner funk combined with the marching-band rhythms and the gospel music of Gale’s youth. Those choral aspects were further accented on the following year’s Black Rhythm Happening, yet as ground-breaking as both were, they effectively sank without trace. Gale subsequently settled in San Jose, where he was named ‘The Official Ambassador of Jazz’by Mayor Norm Minetta, and committed most of his later life to teaching and community activities, bar the odd live foray with militant Oakland hip-hoppers The Coup. He died at home from prostate cancer. Andy Cowan

“I had 3 5 years off in the middle.” JUDY DYBLE ON THE

PATH OF HER CAREER

Denise Johnson Manchester Soul BORN 1 9 6 3 Singer Denise Johnson said that before her first audition with a group, she’d never actually sung in front of an audience. But the Hulme-raised pop fan was born to be behind the microphone. After lending her soulful combination of power and delicacy to local R&B act Fifth Of Heaven in the late ’80s, she began a word-of-mouth ascent. After singing on Electronic’s Get The Message in 1990, she was recommended to Primal Scream, her contribution making Don’t Fight It, Feel It a highpoint of 1991’s Screamadelica. She would record and tour with the band into the mid-’90s, becoming one of the recognisable voices of British music. Her longest association was with A Certain Ratio, who she sang with live and in the studio from 1990 until the forthcoming LP ACR Loco. As well as appearing on songs by Ian Brown, Michael Hutchence and Bernard Butler, Johnson released solo material including the Johnny Marr-guesting 1994 Number 45 hit Rays Of The Rising Sun. More recently she was performing acoustically, releasing stripped readings of 10cc’s I’m Not In Love and New Order’s True Faith as part of her upcoming album Where Does It Go. A lively presence on social media, her passing caused a flood of tributes from her peers. “She was a beautiful person with a huge talent,” said New Order, whose 2015 album Music: Complete she graced. “We will miss her dearly.” Ian Harrison

MOJO 23

RE AL GONE Annie Ross Real swinging singer BORN 1 9 3 0

TamiLynn Versatile soul-jazz voice BORN 1 9 4 2 Best known for the 1971 Number 4 UK hit I’m Gonna Run Away From You, New Orleans native Tami Lynn would never achieve anything like that prominence again, perhaps because the Northern soul dance hit was somewhat of an anachronism in the inventory of her much broader talent, as heard on her 1972 Cotillion album Love Is Here And Now You’re Gone. A gospelraised singer who grew to be as comfortable in jazz settings as she was in soul and funk, Lynn was spotted by local sax player Alvin Tyler and signed to AFO Records, where she worked with other local talents such as Harold Battiste and Allen Toussaint and featured on the A.F.O. Executives’LP A Compendium. She sang on jazz bills with Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ella Fitzgerald, and signed to Atlantic, where I’m Gonna Run Away From You, written and produced by Bert Berns in the mid-’60s, stayed in the can until 1971. The ’72 album that followed the single featured a beautifully delicate ballad reading

24 MOJO

of the Holland-Dozier-Holland title track, quite unlike The Supremes’ pop interpretation, plus a funky Mojo Hannah, a cover of Loretta Lynn’s Wings Upon Your Horn and other strong material such as That’s Understanding. Able to command such a broad range of styles on-stage, and helped by her sole hit‘s 1975 re-release, Lynn was in demand as a backing singer, recording with Dr. John on a regular basis, plus The Rolling Stones’Exile On Main St. and tracks by King Floyd, Sonny & Cher, Wilson Pickett and others. Lynn had moved to New York for many years, but in 2014 moved south again to Florida, where she died on June 26. Geoff Brown

“Tami Lynn commanded a broad range, recording with Dr. John and also on Exile On Main St .”

Born Annabelle Macauley Allan Short in Mitcham, child prodigy Annie Ross was once hailed in the US as “the Scottish Shirley Temple”. But she had jazz in her veins. Her aunt was Broadway singer Ella Logan, with whom, aged three, she moved to the States. A fine, interpretive singer, Ross was influenced by Billie Holiday, whom she heard singing Strange Fruit when she was just 15 years old. “It made my blood run cold,” she recalled. Making the grade as a nightclub singer, Ross’s 1952 breakthrough came with Twisted, a vocal version of an instrumental by saxophonist Wardell Gray. By 1954 she had become part of Lambert, Hendricks And Ross, a vocalese trio who notched a chart album with Sing A Song Of Basie. She became hooked on heroin during this period, eventually getting straight without recourse to rehab. Going solo in 1961, Ross returned to the UK and opened her Covent Garden nightclub, Annie’s Room, but was declared bankrupt soon after. However, she continued to sing in cabaret and on stage – her credits included productions of Side By Side By Sondheim and The Threepenny Opera – and worked as a film actress, appearing in Alfie Darling, Superman III and The Wicker Man, where she dubbed Britt Ekland’s speaking voice. Additionally, in 1991, Ross had a major role in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, performing most of the songs on the soundtrack. Her personal life was rarely without incident:in 1949 she had a son by bebop drummer Kenny Clarke, and later had an affair with the comedian Lenny Bruce. Her final album, released in 2012, was a Billie Holiday tribute, To Lady With Love. Having taken American citizenship in 2001, she was a

Annie Ross: jazz in her veins.

regular performer at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Room until it closed in 2017. She died in New York from emphysema and heart disease, shortly before her 90th birthday. Fred Dellar

Charlie Daniels Country, bluegrass, Southern rock BORN 1 9 3 6 Raised “among the longleaf pines of North Carolina”, singer, fiddler and guitarist Charlie Daniels grew up on gospel, bluegrass, country and R&B, and in his 60-year-plus career he’d make his mark in all of them. After playing with the Misty Mountain Boys and The Jaguars, he relocated to Nashville to write (he penned It Hurts Me for Elvis in 1964) and play sessions, including Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, New Morning and Self Portrait, and Leonard Cohen’s Going solo, from 1972 he moved into Southern rock territory with the Charlie Daniels Band, scoring hits including 1973’s Uneasy Rider and his calling card, The Devil Went Down To Georgia, a Grammy-winner and Number 14 UK hit in 1979 (song and band appeared in the 1980 film Urban Cowboy). With side gigs including The Marshall Tucker Band and President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inauguration, Daniels’charity Volunteer Jams featured Willie Nelson, James Brown, Little Richard and more. A Grand Ole Opry and Country Music Hall of Fame inductee, his canon included Christian, kids’and patriotic music; recording into his eighties, he had live dates booked until July 2021, while a memoir, Never Look At The Empty Seats, was published in 2017. Ian Harrison

Getty (3)

Tami Lynn: born to run.

Sean Tyla: he loved rock’n’roll.

C.P. Lee Rocker, writer, hu mou rist BORN 1 9 5 0

Sean Tyla Pu b rock eminence BORN 1 9 4 6 Yorkshire guitarist and keyboard player Sean Tyla’s early road experiences involved touring with Geno Washington and one-eyed piano-destroyer Freddie ‘Fingers’ Lee. In 1972 he founded spirited pub rockers Ducks Deluxe, who recorded two LPs before their 1975 demise. He went on to form the Tyla Gang, whose Styrofoam/Texas Chainsaw Massacre Boogie was a “double B-side” on Stiff Records. As

a solo artist, Tyla hit Number 27 in West Germany with his single Breakfast In Marin in 1981. Concurrently, he played in The Force with Man’s Deke Leonard and guested on records by Joan Jett, including 1981’s I Love Rock’n Roll, but was struck by stage fright in 1982 and retired from music in ’85. Later endeavours included pig farming, cricket coaching and web design. From 2007 he periodically reformed Ducks Deluxe and the Tyla Gang;his last project was Black Dog Station. He had been suffering from liver disease. Clive Prior

Raised in south Manchester, Chris Lee’s early obsessions were with Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Lenny Bruce. After playing folk nights in the north-west, he formed underground rockers Greasy Bear (whose 1970 album was finally released in 2016), and then Bonzos-esque parodists Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias. Wanting to make the band laugh as much as the audience – writer Neil Spencer called him a “berserk indulger” – in 1977 the band’s mordant Lee-penned musical play Sleak ran in London, while the same year’s Snuff Rock EP spoofed the Pistols and The Clash. Releasing three albums, the group crashed the real charts with Lee’s Number 47 Quo pastiche Heads Down, No Nonsense, Mindless Boogie in 1978,

and in 1982 he wrote their ITV show Teach Yourself Gibberish, after which the group disbanded. Attuned to new currents in Manchester, in 1979 he produced three songs on the inaugural A Factory Sample EP and collaborated on Gerry And The Holograms’ self-titled single, a possible forerunner of Blue Monday. Uninclined to do things he was not the author of, his other activities included performing a Lord Buckley tribute act, lecturing in film at the University of Salford, radio documentaries alighting on his esoteric cultural tastes, his solo ukulele act Just One Alberto and writing about comedy and music. His books included Like The Night (Revisited), which centred on a crowd member shouting “Judas” at Dylan during his show at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966, and his memoir When We Were Thin. “He was naturally funny,” said former bandmate, The Durutti Column’s Bruce Mitchell. “He made me laugh non-stop for 16 years.” Ian Harrison

THEY ALSO SERVED

26 MOJO

for many years, and was writing a memoir, due in 2021, with her friend, journalist Lyndsey Parker. TULSA DRUMMER JAMIE OLDAKER (b.1951) was playing with his group, Tulsa County when he was spotted by JJ Cale in the early ’70s.Cale introduced him to Leon Russell, who hired him as a session drummer at Shelter Records’ Church Studio.There, bassist Carl Radle brought Oldaker to the attention of Eric Clapton, who invited him to Miami’s Criteria studios to play on 461 Ocean Boulevard. Oldaker went on to play on several other classic Clapton albums and two albums with Peter Frampton.Both men appeared on Oldaker’s own 2005 compilation Mad Dog s & Okies along with Vince Gill, Tony Joe White and Willie Nelson. CARDIACS frontman TIM SMITH (below, b.1961) grew up in Chessington, where he and his brother Jim became the nucleus of the band whose career spanned nine albums and 30 years. Smith played his first live show with friend Adrian Borland (later of The Sound) in 1976 before his first cassette

release as Cardiac Arrest in 1977.The Cardiacs’ jerky, psychedelic punk-pop found its largest audience in the late ’80s with tracks like Tarred & Feathered and their aerated cover of The Kinks’ Susannah’s Still Alive. The band had a devoted following and played on until Smith’s health began to fail in 2008. BANJO and pedal steel player GORDON STONE (b.1950) played in Vermont groups including Pine Island, The Decentz and his eponymous bluegrass/jazz outfit.After giving Phish bassist Mike Gordon banjo lessons, Stone would appear on Phish’s A Picture Of Nectar (1992) and Rift (1993), and Gordon’s solo LP Inside In (2003). He also released five solo albums, and was working on a career-wide anthology at the time of his death. REGGAE crooner DOBBY DOBSON (b.1942) first found acclaim in Jamaica with his group The Deltas’ Cry A Little Cry in 1959.After performing with duo Chuck & Dobby, he went solo, working with producers including Sir Coxsone, Sonia Pottinger and Duke Reid, with whom he recorded his signature song I’m A Loving Pauper in 1967;he also had hits with Tom Jones’s That Wonderful Sound and Brook

Benton’s Endlessly.Later, he produced The Meditations and Barrington Levy, played oldies shows, recorded gospel, and received the Jamaican Order of Distinction in 2011. BANDLEADER JOHN GREGORY (b.1924) was an arranger at Philips and a BBC Radio Orchestra conductor before he began recording cheerful Latin-themed LPs in 1957, using the pseudonyms Chiquito and Nino Rico. From 1960 he cut easy listening albums with The Cascading Strings, The Mike Sammes Singers and others.He also worked with Matt Monro, Anthony Newley, Nana Mouskouri and Cleo Laine, while his screen work included the Electric Dreams movie, Ronnie Barker’s Hark At Barker TV show and the Lone Ranger cartoon series. MC MALIK B. (right, b.1972) was an early member of Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots, featuring on four LPs before leaving in 2001.As a solo artist he released 2005’s Street Assault and Unpredictable, 2015’s team-up with Mr. Green.He also appeared on The Roots’Game Theory (2006) and Rising Down (2008). Roots founder Black Thought said in tribute:“I always felt as if I possessed

only a mere fraction of your true gift and potential.” R&B voice REGGIE ‘PROPHET’HAYNES (b.1949) led The Escorts, forming the group in 1969 after being incarcerated for armed robbery at Rahway State Prison in New Jersey. Discovered at a talent show in 1971 by Motown man George Kerr, their 1973 debut album All We Need Is Another Chance was recorded on the facility’s psychiatric ward.Three Down, Four To Go followed in 1974. Their tracks would be sampled by Public Enemy, J Dilla and Jill Scott.Haynes was released in 1974, the same year the group played the Harlem Apollo, and continued to lead the renamed The Legendary Escorts. DANCER and singer ZIZI JEANMAIRE (b.1924) was a ballet star in Paris after World War II:her screen credits included the 1952’s Hans Christian Andersen with Danny Kaye, and Anything Goes with Bing Crosby in 1956.In 1969 she was referenced in Peter Sarstedt’s hit Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?, while in 1976 Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s Nothing Is Sacred also namechecked her. Jenny Bulley and Clive Prior

Getty (3), Steve Payne www.silvermagazine.co.uk, MCA/Photofest

DESIGNER KANSAI YAMAMOTO (below, b.1944) first showed his maximalist, synthetic designs in London in 1971:an early adopter was David Bowie, who would wear Yamamoto creations including the patent leather, op-art ‘Tokyo Pop’ jumpsuit, an asymmetric knitted outfit and ‘Hinuki’ cloak in his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane phases. The designer retired from the rag trade in 1992, thereafter producing large-scale international events, but returned to fashion in 2013. ZAPPA muse and member of the band Girls Together Outrageously, MISS MERCY FONTENOT (b.1949) was born Judith Edra Peters in Burbank, California. Aged 16 she left home for Haight-Ashbury, sharing a room at the infamous Landmark Motor Hotel with another future GTO, Miss Cinderella, and neighbours including the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin.Under Zappa’s patronage, The GTOs released the unhinged Permanent Damag e LP in 1969.Mercy later married and had a son, Lucky, with guitarist Shuggie Otis. Having overcome struggles with drugs she worked at vintage stores in Hollywood

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

Troubled folkie to dreamy pin-up and superstar singersongwriter: a daunting transition fraught by heroin and hospitalisation. But through the chaos, sanity and survival somehow took shape. “I never even had a Plan A,” shrugs James Taylor. Interview by COLIN IRWIN • Portrait by NORMAN SEEFF

Alamy

NNERVINGLY TALL AND SLIM AS A RAKE, homage on his most recent album, American Standard, putting his James Taylor is like an eccentric professor trying own distinctive stamp on classics including Moon River and My to make sense of the spectacular dramas of his Blue Heaven. They are, he says, “the songs I cut my teeth on, life and the bizarre quirks of musical fate that part of the family record collection. The music that informed have brought him to this point. Nothing should our generation. They are more sophisticated than songs these days. surprise him any more, but inevitably it does. I think they represent the high point of American popular song.” Peering out of his London hotel window, he surveys Hyde Park Many would argue that the singer-songwriter school of the early and reflects on the miracle that brought him here from New York ’70s represents another. Taylor was one of its biggest stars – with a in under five hours, a record for a sub-sonic commercial flight. gift for stark and powerful melody and a deceptively languid style. “There was this huge wind behind the plane the whole away… it Deceptive, because what seemed to come easily was dragged from a hinterland of addiction and institutionalisation, with unimagined was surreal.” He shakes his head and smiles with disarming warmth. success and romantic misadventures with Joni Mitchell and Carly Just another unfathomable event in a mad world that he barely tries Simon adding to the discombobulation. Subsequent induction to understand any more. A lifelong liberal, it looks at one point as if into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (in 2020), White House he’s about to curl up in a ball and sob as he reflects on the political recognition by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and situation in America. “And I felt so good about Obama…” he says. record sales of over 100 million attest to the enduring qualities His musical career has been a conundrum, too, a giddy mixture of his songs, but also an instinct for survival of huge success, commercial troughs, against the odds. unexpected twists and personal despair. WE’RE NOT WORTHY At 72, he insists he saw none of it coming. He planned none of it. The son of a brilliant Bonnie Raitt really rates “I never had a Plan B,” he says. “In fact I never doctor who had his own demons, he grew up trilling James Taylor. even had a Plan A…” with four siblings in North Carolina, but refers “As someone rooted in the to his mother’s insistence on frequent holidays So you grew up on show tunes,the music you folk tradition,Joan Baez played on American Standard? in the artistic climes of Martha’s Vineyard, got me playing guitar. But Yes. Mum and dad had a lot of show tunes as well Massachusetts, as the catalyst for his subsequent James Taylor was a whole as records by people like Nina Simone. Folk music, new style – so evocative, adventures in folk, blues, rock and many points too – The Weavers,Pete Seeger. And blues. My with a certain trill on the D beyond. That and the show tunes and standards chord or the G that’s father listened to Leadbelly a lot. This was a time beloved of his parents, which he first learned totally his own. And the voice,songs and when you really listened to music and read all lyrics! He’s very eloquent and cuts deep. to play on guitar – roots to which he pays the linernotes. ➢ Very personal but he touches all of us.”

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What was your relationship like with your father? He was a doctor. Very driven. He had a lot of personal power but got into trouble with alcohol eventually, though he was essentially self-medicating. His mother died giving birth to him and his grandfather, who was a family doctor, assisted in the birth and also died a couple of months later. He met my mother in Boston, where he had been a star at Harvard and moved the family down to North Carolina, which was a culture shock for my mother. He built a medical school there. And he volunteered to go to the South Pole and build the scientific base at McMurdo Sound, and he was gone for two years. What triggered you into making music? Different things at different times. We listened to a lot of Harry Belafonte. Nina Simone. When I started playing I wanted to emulate Tom Rush… and then Ry Cooder, Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Van Ronk. And Dylan. But the most important artist over time was Ray Charles. I also had an older brother, Alex, who took root in the South and brought soul music into our house. What was the first song you wrote? I was 14, and I wrote a little tune called Roll River Roll. Just a simple folky number with simple guitar chords. How did the folk connection begin? We had a summer place we always went to on Martha’s Vineyard island. A relative backwater. Our mother would drag us up the coast in the family station wagon to this exciting community of academics and lefties from Boston, Chicago and New York. It had a great musical culture while the folk music thing was happening. Were you part of that Greenwich folk scene? No, I was too young, but I was old enough to notice. My scene was Club 47 in Harvard Square. That’s where Dylan played in Boston,

and Joan Baez played, and Eric Andersen played. That’s where Kweskin’s Jug Band played. They were revolutionary and seminal. Maria Muldaur, Geoff Muldaur, Jim Kweskin, Bruno Wolf, Fritz Richmond. I think Bill Keith might have played banjo in that band. There was a club there called The Mooncusser, which had an open mike night, and when I was 14 or 15 I’d venture on stage and embarrass myself. And that’s where you formed Jamie & Kootch with Danny Kortchmar? I met him on Martha’s Vineyard and he said, “Come away from this folk music, and let’s play the blues.” I was in a group with my brother first, and then Kootch and I played together in New York City, and in that band was a guy named Joel O’Brien – Bishop O’Brien, who was almost a musicologist. He introduced me to Latin music and heroin. Was the band any good? It had a certain raw energy. I wrote this song Steamroller, which takes the piss out of it a bit because we loved the blues, but we were white kids from the suburbs. Martin Mull had a song: “Woke up this morning both my cars were gone/I felt so lowdown and nasty I threw my drink across the lawn.” Did you meet Dylan? I’ve only met him once, when we did a benefit together at the Apollo. The Apollo was another important moment for me. Myself and Kootch went to New York to help someone move and Kootch said, “Let’s go to the Apollo, there’s a matinée.” It was amazing. Lee Dorsey was on, Charlie And Inez Foxx played Mockingbird, Billy Stewart played Sitting In The Park, Carla Thomas was there… all these legendary acts playing a Sunday matinée. We were the only white kids there. And they showed a movie with a wagon train being attacked by Indians and every time an Indian stuck an arrow in the chest of one of the

A LIFE IN PICTURES

guys on the wagon train, the whole place applauded like crazy. Who did you aspire to be back then? During the folk phase I thought I’d be Tom Rush. During the phase in Greenwich Village I thought that it would be Lovin’ Spoonful or Buffalo Springfield. In the beginning I didn’t have any time for The Beatles, but as they continued to amaze us, I became a heavy Beatles fan and that’s what I aspired to after a while. And you went on to work with The Beatles when you came to London… I didn’t know that would happen. I wouldn’t have dared dream I’d get that chance. How did you get the chance? I came to London really just to visit. I was gonna make my way across Europe with my guitar, planning to play in the streets or wherever I could play my songs and make my way. Not a very well worked-out plan! So what happened? Soon after I arrived some people said if I made a demo they’d help me find a record deal. Kootch had previously backed Peter & Gordon so I called Kootch asking if he had a number for Peter Asher, thinking maybe Peter knows who I could talk to. It turned out that Peter had just joined Apple Records and was looking for people to sign, so it was perfect timing. He liked my music and he got me an audition with Paul and George. That must have been quite nerve-racking! It was terrible. I still get very nervous when a tour is beginning. So yeah, I was nervous, but I could see that this was my opening if I was going to get one. I knew how important it was. What did you play for them? Something In The Way She Moves. It was my best song.

Taylor’s times: James in the frame.

1 2 3 4

Don’t let me be lonely tonight:the young Taylor, aged 15, on-stage in Russia. Rainy Day Man:James in 1968, reclining for the cover of his debut album.

Courtesy of the Taylor Family Archives, Courtesy of US State Department, Getty (8)

Lo and behold! Taylor at a BBC TV studio, London, October 20, 1970. James with John Lennon, Yoko Ono and first wife Carly Simon arriving at a New York first night, 1977.

Country road:as The Driver in 1971 movie Two-Lane Blacktop with co-stars Laurie Bird (The Girl) and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson (The Mechanic).

“And I felt so good about Obama”:JT and his wife, Caroline, with the former US president in 2012.

Still got a friend:with Carole King, 2014. “Ah go ahead, take it, let it out,” King said after he’d covered her song which was inspired by his song.

“A lot of overwhelming things happened”: Taylor faces life, May 20, 1969.

With his ’70s band (from left) JT, Danny Kortchmar (guitar), Russ Kunkel (drums), Leland Sklar (bass).

Taylor and Joni Mitchell prepare to sing backing vocals on Carole King’s Will You Love Me Tomorrow for her Tapestry LP, 1971.

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They were obviously impressed. I don’t know how impressed they were, but they’d asked Peter to go out and find people to sign to the label, and they said, “Sure, go ahead, sign him.” Did you socialise with them? Here and there. Mostly in the context of Apple Records, in the offices, that concert on the roof, the opening of Yellow Submarine. I recorded in the same studio they were using at Trident Sound, which was the only studio in the country with an 8-track machine and so they block-booked it. When they left for the day, Peter and I would get started. So I was present for a lot of their playbacks of The White Album. Paul played on Carolina In My Mind and so I did see a fair amount of them. I sat in on a few of their sessions in the control room, stuff like that. How do you look back on your first album? It seems like it was a work in progress. Both Peter and I were learning how to make records. I cringe thinking about it. It took me a long time to learn how to record.

was such a counterculture then, the whole idea of success seemed bourgeois, a bad idea. What triggered your mental health problems? There’s a family predisposition to mental health issues, depression specifically. Also there’s a family predisposition to addiction. It’s definitely the family business, but what made mine seemingly so intense? I don’t know.

Yet you were becoming so successful… Yes, but I never trusted what it meant to be successful, and I was right not to trust it. It’s a red herring. You still have to learn how to live. The intersection of art and business has always been a bad fit. It’s a bad fit for the businessman and a bad fit for the artist.

“It’s not the sort of thing that the most popular guy in High School does – go off with a guitar somewhere.”

But you were on The Beatles’label,you must have thought you had it made? Two years previous to that I’d spent 10 months in a psychiatric hospital, which was how I broke free. I had a sort of stormy adolescence, and I didn’t have any sense of there being any future whatsoever. You had no expectations? I had no expectation of anything beyond a week ahead. I didn’t think of career or money. I was living in the moment. My only plan was to play in the streets and maybe some cafés or coffee houses and nightclubs if I could get good enough and somehow sell a record. It

Was being sent to boarding school a factor? Yes. I missed my family and I missed my home. I felt that particular school was preparing people for a life that nobody was going to live any more – an upper class that didn’t exist in America, had never really existed in America and certainly didn’t exist any more in 1966. I felt like a stranger in a strange land. My family also came apart. My folks divorced, my father’s drinking finally got out of control, my brother Alex also had a crisis, mostly to do with addiction, which eventually also killed him. So a lot of overwhelming things happened. How do you combat it? I self-medicated with opiates for about 20

6 7

years. Of course, eventually, that stops working. It did work really well for me, so did my father’s drinking for him. That’s one of the first warning signs. If you can find a substance that really works for you, then watch out.

Were there benefits from the mental institute – was it Belmont? McLean Hospital, Belmont. The main benefit was that I became free. When I left I’d spent all the money my parents had saved for me to go to college – those private psychiatric hospitals are expensive. But I played a lot of guitar, I learned to shoot pool and I started writing songs. But the main thing was that I got my freedom.

Did you write Fire And Rain then? No, I wrote Fire And Rain the second time I was institutionalised. When I came back from London I had a heroin habit and I went to an institution to clean up. I was there for five months, in a place called Austen Riggs. They weren’t supposed to do detoxes, so I was admitted as a psychiatric patient. I was there to get clean. That’s where I wrote the songs on Sweet Baby James, including Fire And Rain. And that song was based on a friend of yours dying? Yes, while I had been recording the Apple album, friends had learned of a friend from the New York days who’d been committed by her family and had thrown herself in front of a subway train. ➢

“I self-medicated with opiates for about 20 years. It did work really well for me. That’s one of the first warning signs.”

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Were you disappointed the James Taylor album on Apple didn’t sell? No, it was beyond my wildest dreams just to have my music recorded on a disc with a sleeve. I don’t know how well it did. The thing to remember is, for instance, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan initially in its first year sold 10,000 copies. In those days that was enough to pay for itself. But then came Sweet Baby James and it all took off… Yes, I went back to the States, got clean, wrote the songs on Sweet Baby James and Peter Asher called up and said Apple had closed down, and he was going to Los Angeles and proposed he’d manage me and look for a new record label. The fact he had faith in me is probably why we got signed by Warner Brothers and made a successful album. Which presents another set of problems… What sort of problems? You know, when you are as self-centred as I am… I’d developed my style basically in isolation. It’s not the sort of thing that the most popular guy in high school does – go off with a guitar, get obsessed and have pictures of himself as a troubadour or a folk singer. It makes

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it even more shocking to take it to market and turn yourself into a popular product.

as soon as I came out of the casts we cut Sweet Baby James.

Didn’t you have a bad motorcycle crash on Martha’s Vineyard around that time? Well, it was bad enough. I broke my left wrist, my right hand, my right ankle and my left foot. I broke all extremities. I was laid up for a while. This was 1969. A couple of weeks previous to it I’d played the Newport Folk Festival. I was actually on-stage when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon! George Wein, who ran the festival, interrupted my set in order to say, “Human beings have just stepped on the moon.” The moon was hanging right up there in the sky and everybody looked up.

So you didn’t really enjoy the trappings of fame and presumably the riches that came with it? It wasn’t riches. I did build myself a house, but I had to borrow the money to do it. I was making a modest amount performing, but it was a while before it felt like real money.

How did the crash happen? I was riding a stolen motorcycle that some friends of mine had found in the woods. I was just taking a blast on it in these fire trails that were in the state forest. It had no brakes to speak of and I didn’t realise the throttle stuck open. I came up over the top of a hill and in front of me was a stand of trees. I just rode into the trees. When I came to, I was pretty broke up. So I was out of commission for Woodstock. I was in plaster casts and basically,

Were you proud to see yourself up there on a billboard? I looked at it with a wry sense of humour. I felt like I was riding a bull.

How did you react to stardom? Being on a billboard on Sunset Strip with my picture on was an eye-opener. And being on the cover of Time magazine. That got my family’s attention.

There must have been pressure to maintain that level of success… No commercial presentation of myself by a record company had any chance of being satisfactory or accurate and I just didn’t trust it. I had relationships with people, and I also had

really great song and I ran to get my guitar to play it. We went into the studio a couple of weeks later and recorded a couple of songs that day – I think Kootch’s song Machine Gun Kelly and maybe Riding On A Railroad or something like that. And we had two hours of studio time left. We’ve recorded a lot of things because there was spare studio time – How Sweet It Is, Handyman, Up On The Roof. And that’s what this was. I knew the song and I taught it to Kootch and we took a run at it and Joni Mitchell sang the harmonies with me. What was Carole’s reaction? When we cut it I said, “Oh, Jesus I haven’t asked Carole, this is terrible – I’ll go talk to her about it.” Carole was going into the studio to make Tapestry. If someone had come to me and said – “That Fire And Rain is a nice song, mind if I cut it first?…” It’s unthinkable. So it was a great act of generosity from Carole… she knew what she had. But when she heard our version, she liked it too. And she said, “Ah, go ahead, take it. Let it out.”

TAYLOR MADE Three key albums, picked by Colin Irwin. THE STAR MAKER

James Taylor Sweet Baby James

★★★★★ (WARNER BROS, 1970)

Taylor’s landmark redemption album – a rare mix of melodic beauty and chastened lyricism. Like, is he waving or drowning? Fire And Rain remains its anguished, still-potent calling card, but his languid whimsy – not least the poignant take on Stephen Foster’s Oh Susannah, the desultory title track’s forlorn musing of a lost cowboy, and the mischievous blues pastiche Steamroller – creates a melancholic post-’60s view from the asylum. “It is very satisfying to have all that attention. I do still like it”:James Taylor,in the latter stages of the long process of getting better.

THE OLD PALS’ ACT

James Taylor That’s Why I’m Here

★★★★ (COLUMBIA, 1985)

a relationship with substance abuse, which can muddy the waters. But I had a manager and a champion in Peter Asher, who understood what it was like for me and protected me. I wrote a song to him:Hey Mister, That’s Me Up On The Jukebox.

Norman Seeff

You had your critics,too. In 1971 Lester Bangs wrote an essay titled James Taylor Marked For Death,suggesting you were the enemy of rock’n’roll. That must have hurt. Well I wished it wasn’t happening but basically I agreed with him. I could see his point. It could have been much worse. If you’ve worked hard to build yourself up, there will be energy spent tearing it down too. It can be cruel out there. Tell us about Carole King and her song You’ve Got A Friend. Carole and I were playing at the Troubadour in LA and one night she played a new song. She told me some years later that when I wrote Fire And Rain and she heard the line “I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend,” she was moved to write You’ve Got A Friend. Did you record it straight away? As soon as I heard it, I knew she’d written a

“Fortune and fame’s such a curious game/Perfect strangers call you by name/ Pay good money to hear Fire And Rain again and again,” he sings wryly on the title track. Incorporating enterprising arrangements of Bacharach & David’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Buddy Holly’s Everyday, and tilting confidently into country territory, it has a relish which suggests an artist finally at ease with himself, while Don Henley, Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash join the party.

THE RALLYING CALL

James Taylor Before This World

★★★★ (CONCORD, 2015)

Perhaps Taylor’s most surprising album – and, 45 years after Sweet Baby James, his first US Number 1. Long reliant on covers amid an extended dearth of original material, he isolated himself in Rhode Island, wrote his best songs for years, put a little band together with a strong rhythmic identity and came out stomping. Narratives range from the Boston Red Sox to war in Afghanistan, plus Wild Mountain Thyme’s dive into folk tradition.

You’ve always had a great feel for cover versions… The important thing with a cover is to take it some place new. You’re not going to do it as good as The Drifters or Marvin Gaye. To copy is madness. You want to do something new with it. Just apply your ear and instrument and voice to it and see what comes out. That’s what I’ve done. Sometimes not successfully. I did a version of Day Tripper by The Beatles that wasn’t enough of a change. You were married to Carly Simon – how do you look back on that time? With some regrets on how unready I was to be a husband and father. I was still an addict, so it was doomed, but that’s the way it goes. It’s hard in this business to have a stable family life. Fortunately – and I can’t take any credit for it – our kids Sally and Ben are really wonderful people. And are you on friendly terms with Carly these days? If you have kids and get divorced you don’t really get to be divorced, but when the kids grow up you finally can. So we don’t have much of a relationship. Was there a key point in your career you look back most fondly on? I did Rock In Rio, in 1985. It was the first show I’d done sober in front of a large audience. It was the first time I’d been to Brazil. And on the very day of the show it was the first free elections in Brazil for 20 years after being under this military junta. There were 300,000 people there – the most I’d ever played to – and to discover they knew my songs and to hear them singing them back to me in perfect time was amazing. It turned me around and put me back on my feet. For someone politically involved you haven’t done many political songs… I’ve done a couple. McCartney sang on Let It All Fall Down, which was about the Watergate days. And I wrote Slap Leather as Reagan was leaving office. Did you always have a belief in your own work? I knew what I liked but it’s healthy to doubt yourself. You wanna be right-sized if you can, but relative to the kind of narcissism given free rein that most celebrities exhibit. An overdeveloped sense of entitlement seems to be a requirement of being a celebrity and it’s not very appealing. You’re still doing this – do you still love it? What drives you? Well, it’s my work – I don’t always love it. My main experience has been a community of musicians that I work with, the music and the audience, and that’s as real as it gets in a very unreal business. I don’t belong to a church, but the music has a spiritual component – as fatuous as that sounds. It is very satisfying to have all that attention. I do like it still. So do you ever look back and think,Yeah, I did all right? The way I mostly look at it is as a long process of getting better. I wince at the early stages, but I do feel I’ve written some good songs and I think I’ve gotten pretty good at performing and recording. But mostly I’ve just been very very lucky. M American Standard is out now on Concord Records. James Taylor tours the US with Jackson Browne in May/June 2 0 2 1 .

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;Everything was moving so fastâ&#x20AC;?: Prince in 1987.

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, just turned 20, issued his debut album, For You. Then Prince phoned Matt Fink, a veteran on keyboards and syn-

Dirty Mind;he chose to

called Crystal Ball with 25 songs, including tracks from the brief Camille fixation and material from Dream Factory. The label handed it back, advising him to cut it down. At the same time, Prince was losing Susannah – a former member of one of his production projects, The Family;now his fiancé. By the end of 1986, she moved out of the Galpin house. In just six months, Prince Rogers Nelson, still only 28, went from universal acclaim and unlimited cachet to stunning reversals in critical favour, artistic control and love. But he did not stop working. “Albums were always coming together,” Rogers confirms. “Prince would listen to them and decide, ‘Is this the record I want to tour? Is this what I want to represent?’When it became clear The Revolution was over, that Susannah was not going to be around, the music reformed with a different kernel, a seed in the songs that represented his view – this

Sign ‘O’ The Times. down the band that had been integral to his 1984 film-and-album juggernaut, Purple Rain, and its rapid follow-ups, 1985’s Around The World In A Day and 1986’s Parade. “Maybe the signs were there,” Melvoin said in 1987, reflecting on the split. “And we just didn’t want to see them.” They were hard to miss. In July 1986, just as Prince completed Dream Factory, a new tworecord set with greater focus on Melvoin and Coleman as singers and writers, his second movie – Under The Cherry Moon, a tragicomic romance shot in black-and-white – was released to withering reviews and crickets at the box office. Then, in early August, The Revolution mutinied. Melvoin, Coleman and bassist Mark Brown – dubbed Brown Mark when he joined Prince in 1981 – threatened to quit, reportedly over pay and issues with an expanded lineup that included dancers and the singer’s girlfriend on backing vocals:Melvoin’s twin

INALLY ISSUED ON MARCH 30, 1987 and named after a song originally on Dream Factory, then buried on Crystal Ball’s side five, Sign ‘O’ The Times was Prince’s second double album in less than four years and his third masterpiece of the decade – a true successor to and Purple Rain in its ambitious sprawl and kaleidoscopic spin through bedroom kinetics, pure jump’n’shout and sumptuous introspection. Alone appeared to be working for Prince. “I miss nothing and no one,” he bluntly declared to a Nashville newspaper in 1997. “Attachment is stagnation.” But where the Purple Rain film flirted with the facts of his turbulent adolescence, Sign ‘O’ The Times was Prince’s first truly confessional work:a carefully sequenced account of trial, frolic, obsession and redemption based on scars and rejection. Prince then wrapped it all – the stark title track’s opening litany of hopelessness and

handing out pink slips.

alter ego of indeterminate gender.

Dream Factory’s first Parade – and all the Sign..., Prince whipped it up during the Prince,

ly and amorphous.

“He was aware of all of his material,” Rogers

Dream Factory but thought it ➢ 38 MOJO

Jeff Katz, Cavallo Fuffalo Fragnoli/Kobal/Shutterstock, Getty (4), Alamy

Sign ‘O’ The Times box set illuminates

Looking for a sign:(clockwise from left) Miles Davis; film flop;Prince touring Sign ‘O’The Times,Stockholm, May 9,’87;Sheena Easton; courting headlines with Susannah Melvoin;at the Oscars with the now-surplus Wendy & Lisa;on-stage with Cat Glover;Glover with Eric Leeds on sax;the 45.

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sounded “too 1979, that new wave pop stuff,” as Rogers puts it. “We kept the rhythm track; the tempos are the same. Then he added the guitar work,” including a pinched-fuzz rave-up solo. “That deepened it, moved it away from that happy-go-lucky feel into something more bluesy.” Matt Fink admits that he didn’t know there was a 1979 version of the song until it appeared in the reissue. Nor did he hear much of Camille, which got as far as an eight-song tracklisting in November 1986 before Prince tabled it, dragging Housequake, Strange Relationship and the roleplaying fantasy If I Was Your Girlfriend onto Sign ‘O’ The Times. “He would bring things to rehearsal,

hear it once and then it went back in the archive.” ’90s, claims he heard “70 per cent” of Sign ‘O’ The Times “in the early stages”. Seacer was then playing with the singer-percussionist Sheila E (née Escovedo) and another Prince invention, an instrumental jazz-funk group called The Flesh. “When Sheila and I were working with him, he would bring in things for us to hear:‘Hey, check this out.’I’d go, ‘Wow, what is that? What’s it for?’He’d be like, ‘I don’t know yet. Do you like it?’” OMETIMES IDEAS ARE COMING SO FAST THAT I have to stop doing one song to get to another,” Prince confessed to the New York Times in 1996. “But I don’t forget the first one. If it works, it will always be there. It’s like the truth:it will find you and lift you up. And if it ain’t right, it will dissolve like sand on the beach.” “I’d heard this about Jimi Hendrix, and it was true of Prince,” says Rogers, who worked as a studio technician for Crosby, Stills 40 MOJO

And Nash before Prince hired her in August 1983. “If he was awake, he wanted to have an instrument in his hands. And if he had an instrument in his hands, he was recording.” Prince, who could run on a couple of hours’sleep, spent the late morning on business calls. Rogers would come to work and find a note from him on the console directing her to set up the gear he wanted:acoustic drums, a piano, particular keyboards. “Once I’d routed everything,” she says, “his favourite way of working was to move from one instrument to the next without having to talk, to interrupt himself by issuing directives. Then he’d stop, get his vocals, and we’d finish the track with ornamentation and the mix.” Some outtakes in the box set reveal the extent to which Prince was willing to showcase Wendy and Lisa on Dream Factory. According to Duane Tudahl –the senior researcher for the Prince Estate Archives and author of 2017’s Prince And The Purple Rain Era Studio Sessions, the definitive telling of that landmark record – two songs, Visions and Colors, “were just them. Prince wasn’t even in the studio when Wendy and Lisa did those. But he figured their input was that important. He almost wanted them to have solo things on there.” Prince erased The Revolution from his life with the same resolution. On October 18, 1986, the day after a press statement announced the band was breaking up, he recorded the synth-funk blowout Housequake at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles. “The fact that he came in and did a dance track made no sense,” Rogers says. “Wendy, Lisa and Bobby were important as friends, musically. I kept waiting for the ballad that expressed the way I was certain he was feeling.” That came on December 28, at the Galpin house studio. Wally was a slow-jam thank-you to Wally Safford – a security guard on the Purple Rain tour and a dancer in the ’86 Revolution – for his loyalty and comfort as Prince went through the breakup with Susannah. “It was one of the greatest things I had ever heard him do,” Rogers says. “When we were done, he had me erase

“Prince was cutting ties with everything.” He wasted no time starting over. As the new year opened, on January 2, 1987, Prince stood in front of a new band at his Paisley Park comIRST DAY, HE SAYS, ‘HI, MY NAME is Prince,’ with his eyelashes going up and down real quick,” Seacer says with an affectionate laugh, running down that opening day as the singer launched his replacement for The Revolution:a 10-piece merger of survivors from that band – Fink, saxophonist Eric Leeds, trumpeter Atlanta Bliss – and the rhythm section from Sheila E’s group with featured roles for that drummer and Cat Glover, a relentlessly pneumatic dancer. Sheila would be Prince’s next paramour as well. Then the boss got down to business. According to Seacer, he told the musicians, “Here’s the first thing. If you’re not a genius, write down. And if you don’t know how to spell, get a tape recorder. I don’t like repeating things. After I give you certain parts, I have to concentrate on what I’m doing. If I remember I gave you something and you’re not playing it, it’s going to be a problem.” Fink says he did not hear Sign ‘O’ The Times – finished, in its entirety – “until Prince presented it to the new group.” But the band, which Prince briefly considered calling the New Revolution, soon had it all down and tight along with a fat bag of hits, older al-

Jeff Katz (2), Getty

Prince at the time of Sign ‘O’The Times;(below) Prince guitar men (from left) Levi Seacer Jr,Brown Mark and Miko Weaver; U Got The Look,with Sheena Easton.

bum tracks, B-sides and a separate repertoire for Prince’s infamous last-minute club dates with, Seacer says, “its own arrangements and covers and cues to every song, just like James Brown.” Ultimately, Prince rehearsed his new troupe for four months – 10 hours a day, six days a week – until the opening date on May 8, 1987 in Stockholm. Nine weeks later, on June 29, the tour ended in Antwerp, Belgium. There were no US shows. Sign ‘O’ The Times sold a million copies within three months of release;the title song and U Got The Look were US Top 5 singles. But for all of the critical rapture, the sales were nowhere near his expectations after Purple Rain, by then up to eight million copies. (It has since sold over 25 million worldwide.) Prince was especially disappointed by its reception at black radio, then coming to grips with the rising commercial force of hip-hop:“When we recorded Adore, he said, ‘This one’s for them,’” Rogers remembers. But the ballad’s pace and majesty were “black radio of another era”. RINCE RETREATED TO PAISLEY PARK TO RESHOOT scenes for a concert documentary – also called Sign ‘O’The Times, filmed in Europe – and returned to the frank, carnal thrust of his first records in a set of bleak, near-violent erotica, The Black Album, partially descended from the Camille experiment but withdrawn a week before its planned release in December 8, 1987. (Widely bootlegged, Prince finally released it in 1994.) And there was one more show that year. On December 31, Prince hosted a New Year’s Eve bash at Paisley Park, a benefit for the Minnesota Coalition For The Homeless. Well-heeled guests paid $200 apiece to see Prince’s band come out sounding like they had just walked off the stage in Antwerp. They also witnessed a miracle, now available to all on the DVD in the Sign… box set: Prince handing the spotlight to the Dark Magus, trumpeter Miles Davis, in their only live performance together. Walking out during the encore with no introduction, Davis, then 61, was in strong, engaged form:bleating curt phrases against the band’s groove;slipping, at one point, into a long, lyrical solo; even throwing in a pinch of So What. “I didn’t know Miles was in town,” Seacer says, recalling the night. “Prince says, ‘Come on down, we’re hanging out.’There was a piano on the soundstage, and I’m sitting there, doodling. Suddenly, there is someone sitting next to me – Miles Davis. He started

N JUNE 7, 1986, PRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION celebrated his 28th birthday with a triumphant show at Detroit’s Cobo Hall. Later that night, the singer – notoriously allergic to interviews – granted one, live on the air, to DJ Charles Johnson, a local R&B radio legend known as the Electrifying Mojo. “What’s a day like in the life of Prince?” Johnson asked at one point. “Work,” Prince swiftly replied. “I work a lot. I’m trying to get a lot of things done very quickly, so I can stop working for a while. Everybody’s afraid I’m going to die,” he added, laughing. Johnson misheard him:“You say you’re afraid?” “I’m not afraid,” Prince answered. “Everybody else is afraid. They think I work too much. I’m not afraid of anything.” Prince would need that fearlessness in the months ahead as he fought his way to Sign ‘O’ The Times – then in the next decades as his drive to succeed and need to control the terms of every initiative ran into the headwinds of rap, digital technology and the radically changing commerce of music. But in the ’80s, says Rogers, “He was at the height of his intellectual powers, a young man in his twenties on fire. Isn’t it astonishing that one man, not a Lennon-McCartney or a Jagger-Richard, could create two masterpieces – Purple Rain, then Sign ‘O’ The Times – in four years?” “You know what’s interesting? Sign ‘O’ The Times was my first project with Prince,” says Levi Seacer, “and everything was moving so fast that I didn’t really listen to the album. Now I’m listening to it without having to remember the show, the tunes. And you know what? I always liked it. But I love it now. My mind is blowing up.” M

+++++ Sign ‘O’The Times [Super Deluxe Edition] is due out

remembers riding in the car with

The Hits/The B ), but without

1986, is in the Sign

Sign ‘O’ The

on that.”

“There are no mistakes this time”:Prince gets ready to rehearse,1987.

the eight here accounted for. One more features B-sides and extended mixes;two more contain a live show from June 1987;a DVD has the December ’87 show with Miles Davis. The major draw here, though, is three discs of treasures from the Vault, tracing how Prince got to Sign ‘O’ The Times via Dream Factory, Camille, Crystal Ball et al. For all the solipsistic brilliance of SOTT, many of these 45 unreleased tracks show how Prince originally envisaged Parade’s follow-up as a more collaborative jam:jazzy big band workouts proliferate (Soul Psychodelicide;The Cocoa Boys;the borderline Zappa-ish It Ain’t Over ’Til The Fat Lady Sings). Adonis & Bathsheba is a fantasia that would have enriched Around The World In A Day. Four songs from the early ’80s are repurposed as lavish demos for an unrealised Bonnie Raitt project. Forever In My Life manifests as acoustic folk-funk, arguably superior to the SOTT take. But while other box sets provide alternate versions as a path to the finished article, Prince’s fecundity means the journey is mostly mapped with wonderful songs, mystifyingly abandoned. Witness 4 The Prosecution comes in two instructive versions. March ’86’s is a meaty Funkadelic-style workout;the second, recorded on October 6, is sleeker. A final aesthetic for SOTT is crystallising. Two days later, The Revolution was over. John Mulvey

Thriving at the centre of attention:Phoebe Bridgers,Los Angeles, February 2020.

MOJO PRESENTS

Radically honest singer-songwriter PHOEBE BRIDGERS is the Generation Z star whose Elliott Smithtinged music makes sense to her elders, too. “There’s a writing-off of us as buried in our phones,” she protests to VICTORIA SEGAL. “We’re tearing down Confederate statues!”

F PHOEBE BRIDGERS DOESN’T STOP running away from her heroes, they’re never going to be able to disappoint her. Last February, she played the Tibet House benefit at Carnegie Hall; one wave from Patti Smith, and she bolted. “I’ll probably be in a room with Patti Smith again,” she says boldly, “I don’t want her to remember me as the person who, first time, gushed. Just wait until the opportunity arises to say something, instead of being like, Hey, I need a picture of you, otherwise my mom won’t believe me.” Father John Misty, meanwhile, was perplexed when she didn’t say hello to him backstage in Belfast: “I did not assume he would remember me or know what I was up to. He was like ‘Hey, Phoebe?’ like he thought I was mad or something.” She laughs at herself. “You’re allowed to know people. I don’t know what kind of complex that is.” It’s not shyness, she decides:“I’m way more likely to say something out of

bounds or overly sexual that misfires as a joke, trying to be fun. My nervous brain is not my favourite brain, so I try to wait until I’m a little less nervous.” Bridgers is at home in east Los Angeles, the same neighbourhood where Elliott Smith – a core hero and the quiet presiding spirit of her second solo album Punisher – once lived. Here, the 25-year-old singersongwriter has spent the last few months becoming “addicted” to her treadmill and reading Margaret Atwood. She performed her song Kyoto from her bathroom for the Jimmy Kimmel Show, underlining how personal space has slowly become public through Zoom’s power. In conversation, though, she appears buoyantly unguarded, mentioning an embarrassing vibrator incident within seconds. “I think honesty is for me, at least, the easiest,” says Bridgers, “you don’t have to keep up some kind of façade.” Punisher, as with 2017’s predecessor Stranger In The Alps, draws on this honesty for its limpid, ➢

Frank Okenfels

Photography by FRANK OCKENFELS

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“I was a depressed teenager… then I found something I would do forever”: Bridgers,LA, February 2020.

On-stage with The National’s Matt Berninger for a Tibet House benefit,New York,February 2020.

“SHE’S FINDING SOMETHING TRUE ABOUT HERSELF AND LETTING US IN ON IT. IT’S NOT FEARLESSNESS. SHE HAS ALL THE FEAR BUT SHE GOES IN ANYWAY.” Matt Berninger ➣ Frank Ockenfels, Getty (2), Lera Pentelute, Nik Freitas

reflective songs, but it also shows what happens when life gets too complex to hold in your head all at once, spilling out in cracked images, suspicions you might be an alien, or a ghost (the sleeve has Bridgers in a skeleton costume, apparently about to be beamed up, X-Files style). It fuses Generation X aesthetics with Generation Z mores – Bridgers, as she points out, was born the year Kurt Cobain died, right on the millennial-zoomer faultline – and contains blurry romantic friendships, family trauma and violent death, a final blast of apocalypse and lines that shock at first hearing. “I hate your mom/I hate it when she opens her mouth” on I See You;or Moon Song’s “We hate Tears In Heaven/But it’s sad his baby died” – a line that, she admits, was almost too much, almost cut. The National’s Matt Berninger, who recorded Walking On A String with Bridgers for Zach Galifianakis’s Between Two Ferns: The Movie, believes she has “really good instincts when it comes to self-expression. She has an ability to sense when something is worth scratching at, uncovering and showing to other people. She’s finding something true and useful about herself and letting us in on it. It’s not fearlessness. She has all the fear but she goes in anyway. That’s bravery.”

S A TEENAGER, BRIDGERS PASSED THE AUDITION and attended Los Angeles County High School For The Arts. Gospel choir was a positive; opera class less so. “I went into the delinquent squad in music technology for the last two years;I learned how to use Logic but mostly got the teacher snacks and wrote songs.” She was accepted at Boston’s Berklee College Of Music but eventually declined to go, deciding “being around people” would be more useful than “taking a Sheryl Crow writing class from somebody who’s not Sheryl Crow.” Her mother, Jamie (her parents divorced when she was 20), supported her daughter’s ambitions, pushing her, for example, to say hello to Richard Thompson at a San

44 MOJO

Yet Punisher’s title refers to the kind of fan Specifically, it refers to the punishment Bridgers

and he’s such a great guitar player,” she explains. “I’d always heard lyrics that were like poetry, things you’d never say out loud – and Elliott would say something like ‘whatever’or ‘oh well OK’or talk about uglier, more day-to-day stuff like Kiwi Mad Dog 2020.” On the track Punisher, she sings “And here everyone knows you’re the way to my heart/I hear so many stories of you at the bar.” It’s all true, she admits. “There was an A&R guy when I was about 15 who sent me some unreleased Elliott demos,” she laughs. “I became, Oh my God, the world of the music business is beautiful.” Unfortunately, uglier discoveries followed. Bridgers was one of the women who spoke publicly about Ryan Adams’abusive behaviour after a brief business and personal relationship when she was 20. Yet the idea of true collaboration has remained vital to her work. In 2018, she formed Boygenius with fellow singer-songwriters Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. Last year, she united with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst as Better Oblivion Community Center. She should have spent spring touring with The 1975 after singing on Notes On A Conditional Form. “Phoebe just wants to make the best, most interesting thing and can actually set her ego aside to take input from the people around her,” says Dacus. “She may not even agree with me – I feel like she makes fun of herself for thriving at the centre of attention. She’s a Leo, after all. But she’s able to get out of the way of herself, which is a remarkable and humble skill.” Dacus also pinpoints her ability to cross generational boundaries. “She’s a student

Wheel good time: with Better Oblivion Community Center partner Conor Oberst.

Collaboration shuffle: with Boygenius (from left) Bridgers,Julien Baker,Lucy Dacus

“Whoa! People like me in Fargo!” Bridgers on-stage with BOCC,2019.

BRIGHT PHOEBE! Solo revelations, auspicious collaborations… the Bridgers story so far. By Victoria Segal.

PHOEBE BRIDGERS Stranger In The Alps

of the greats and actively tries to learn from people she admires.” “I hang out with a lot of the generation before and I end up in a lot of arguments about the internet where I end up being the internet’s advocate,” laughs Bridgers. “It seems like there’s a writing-off of Gen Z as buried in their phones and stupid and believing anything, and I’m like, We’re tearing down Confederate statues and trolling Trump rallies.” That generation gap was highlighted recently when she self-directed a photo-shoot for Playboy, influenced by “camming”. A lot has changed since P.J. Harvey caused an indie meltdown by appearing topless, back turned, on NME’s cover in 1992. “I think there’s more of an open conversation,” says Bridgers, pondering her demographic, “and I don’t mean I think my generation invented sex at all. My management makes a lot of fun of me because of how excited I was to be topless – I was like, Why won’t anybody let me be topless? Seriously, I spent years being, Who wants to see my boobs?, because I just want to be a person whose boobs you can see and have it not be, like, people undressing me in their minds.” In her late teens, Bridgers – then playing with performance art band Sloppy Jane – appeared in commercials for Apple and Taco Bell, a welcome songwriting subsidy. Yet there were less pleasant consequences. “My mom found this page of people drawing porn of me and there was something so fucking gross – everything fucking gross – about that. Like, you don’t get to do that. I get to do that. For my hipster Los Angeles friends, [the Playboy shoot] was a no-brainer, but I definitely had some weird DMs of people saying ‘what the

(Dead Oceans, 2 0 1 7 ) Touched with grungeera atmospherics and folkish dying falls, Bridgers’exceptional debut comes with a conversational clarity and a brittle, lucid wit, not least on the heartbreaking Funeral (“Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time”) and Motion Sickness, the track inspired by her unhappy relationship with Ryan Adams.

BOYGENIUS Boygenius

(Matador, 2 0 1 8 ) A collaboration between Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, the wryly named trio were united, says Dacus, by common concerns – “feeling estranged from home because of touring, feeling uncomfortable and confused about how to navigate having fans, relationship dynamics that felt unbalanced and unfixable”. Fastrecorded, self-produced, multi-faceted.

BETTER OBLIVION COMMUNITY CENTER Better Oblivion Community Center

(Dead Oceans, 2 0 1 9 ) The Bright Eyes frontman and Bridgers met at a 2016 showcase hosted by Conor Oberst, before he duetted with her on her debut’s Would You Rather. This collaboration doubled down on their shared gift for the dazzling image, Oberst’s ragged boho intensity mellowed by Bridgers’ watchful modern melancholy.

PHOEBE BRIDGERS Punisher

(Dead Oceans, 2 0 2 0 ) Traces of her hero Elliott Smith come through strong on Garden Song and Halloween, but Bridgers’second album showcases her increasingly distinctive ability to turn a startlingly sharp image – a murdered skinhead, an ambulance siren, a wild dream – into a universal emotional knockout.

fuck are you doing?’But I don’t really care.” Unsurprisingly, the idea of belonging to some great tradition faintly horrifies her. “I feel my version of going against the grain is rejecting the idea that being a white woman in music is revolutionary,” she continues. “The amount of lists I have seen which are like ‘Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus – breaking every boundary’ and I’m like, what is similar about all these people?” Instead, she wants “a good healthy way to have conversations of how men have dominated for a long time and not make it like the answer is just liking these five white girls with guitars.” WANTED TO SEE THE WORLD/ Then I flew over the ocean/And I changed my mind,” sings Bridgers on Kyoto, a song that expresses the touring musician’s burnt-out ambivalence. Those days might seem distant but, for Bridgers, that careful-what-you-wish-for quest is a “big theme” of Punisher. “I’m a touring musician, this is what I ask for, but I still have days when I can’t leave the hotel room because I’m taking depression naps all day.” Yet there’s reward along with the punishment. “My favourite parts of my life have been on tour being surprised by something. I played in Fargo and the show was sold out and I was like, Whoa! People like me in Fargo! I was such a depressed teenager – I’m so surprised I didn’t bail out of high school because I just felt I couldn’t be bothered to do the work at all. And then I found something that I would do forever.” If you can’t meet your heroes, join them. M

“I

MOJO 45

ENNIO MORRICONE, who died last month, was the ultimate soundtrack auteur –

©Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos, Getty, Alamy

influencing all corners of music, from Metallica to Massive Attack. Overleaf, MOJO writers celebrate the work. But first, JAMES MCNAIR remembers the man… NNIO MORRICONE DIDN’T romanticise his art form. Perhaps that’s why he was so prolific. “Other people see the moment of creativity as magical, but it is not,” he told me in 2004. “For me it’s simply, ‘I have to get from A to B – how am I going to achieve this?’” We’d met at his 17th century apartment in Rome, which had views to the Forum. Short, dressed in a sky blue cardigan, an intense stare through tortoiseshell glasses, the maestro was all smiles when patting the chaise longue and encouraging our translator Roberta to join him there, but also plain rude. I quizzed him about The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. He jabbed Roberta’s leg with a toothpick. Afterwards, I took playful revenge in print, but with hindsight perhaps the maestro’s froideur was a statement. All I knew then of his vast body of work were the spaghetti westerns and Cinema Paradiso, so why should he have taken me seriously? Morricone was born in Rome in 1928 and rarely left it. He studied composition at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, and became an arranger at RAI and RCA-Italy in the late ’50s, by night moonlighting as a jazz trumpeter under the pseudonym Don Savio. His formal training attuned him to the genius of Bach, Monteverdi and Stravinsky, and he was passionate about the atonal melodies of the “absolute” chamber music he composed outside of cinema. But it’s for the 450-plus movie scores he wrote between 1960-2016 that Morricone will best be remembered. Though his productivity rivalled that of Fiat Motors, each bespoke score was potent, perfectly realised. Directors from

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Leone to Pasolini to Almodovar to Polanski learnt that a movie without a Morricone soundtrack was only half a movie. The maestro was musically omnivorous, often innovative, and no kind of Luddite, snob or prude. Psychedelia, musique concrète, bossa nova, baroque, jazz-rock, electronica, lounge and traditional Spanish and Italian folk motifs all found a place in themes that might be outlandish or musicbox pretty, brazenly erotic or chastely divine. He did horror for Dario Argento and John Carpenter, pop songs for Françoise Hardy and Paul Anka, was sampled by Jay-Z and The Orb, and had the hat tipped to him by The Sopranos and The Simpsons. When Morricone died on July 6 aged 91 after complications arising from a fall, the vast spread of his influence echoed. Alison Goldfrapp acknowledged the debt Felt Mountain owed him, posting a Morricone playlist on Spotify, and tributes came from Metallica, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, The Flaming Lips, Massive Attack, Yo La Tengo, Jean Michel Jarre, and Morricone’s fellow film-scorer Hans Zimmer. In Rome, La Repubblica reported that attendUgly meets Good: Eli Wallach (left) and Clint Eastwood talk soundtracks; (above) the young Ennio and his work.

farewell.

wife Maria.

A FistfulOf Dollars (1964)

Shot for pesetas in Almería by an Italian crew, Sergio Leone’s first ‘spaghetti western’is characterised by the director’s lean style and long takes, the latter stretched to provide a suitable canvas for Morricone’s inventive, budget-busting score. His kitchen-sink approach combines Hank Marvinindebted guitar, military snare, chanting (“We can fight!”), whistling, hoedown and mournful mariachi trumpet. A bell is struck, tympani rumble, an ocarina appears. A laconic Clint Eastwood kept shtum rather than compete, thus finding his onscreen brand. AC

L’Uccello Dalle Piume DiCristallo

Shutterstock

(1970)

Morricone’s trippy title theme for what Anglophones call The Bird With The Crystal Plumage employs atonal chimes, hand-bells, and a baroquesounding choral section, but this diverse score also packs transporting bossa nova and some breathlessly erotic, freak-out jazz (Corsa Sui Tetti, AKA Black Glove Underground Part One). There’s a claustrophobic feel that’s perfect for director Dario Argento’s stylised thriller about an American who witnesses a woman being murdered in a Rome art gallery. JMcN

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For A Few Dollars More

The Battle Of Algiers

The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

IlGiardino Delle Delizie

Second bowlful of prairie pasta from Leone, with Il Maestro incorporating diegetic footsteps, humming and six-gun recoil, but built, narratively, around two eerie musical pocket-watches belonging to Lee Van Cleef’s bounty-hunting ex-Colonel Mortimer and Gian Maria Volonté’s psycho-killer El Indio. Morricone plays it minimal and tense, bags of white space amid chiming church bells and a rationed jaw harp. The climactic road to El Paso is lined by a male chorus and insistent electric guitar, but it’s the duelling timepieces that count. AC

Director Gillo Pontecorvo’s lyrical indictment of imperialism – personified in Jean Martin’s cadaverous Colonel Mathieu – is matched by a brutish and beautiful score. Theme Of Ali – after a melody of Pontecorvo’s – uses isolated woodwinds to summon the voices of Arab resistance. The battering snares and martial brass of Algiers, November 1, 1954 – calling up swarms of French paras – was quoted in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds soundtrack, a patchwork of steals from QT’s favourite movie music, much of it Morricone’s. DE

“Leone wanted more from music,” Morricone recalled, and his Promethean score for TGTBATU gave Leone more, expanding and defining the spaghetti western’s sonics. That unforgettable ‘Coyote call’ motif was deployed on ocarina, flute and voices, while Pino Rucher’s psycho-surf guitars reached a zenith of posturing twang. Interviewing Morricone, I ventured that Alessandro Alessandroni’s whistling prowess was a dying art. “Perhaps in England,” he replied. “It’s so cold there nobody feels happy enough to whistle.” JMcN

Silvano Agosti’s Catholic symbolism-rich film finds the groom of a shotgun wedding meditating upon Bosch’s titular painting before cheating on his new bride. Enter Morricone with Adonai, a freakbeat tune with ecstatic female voices, harpsichord, and a demonic guitar riff. Elsewhere, Primo builds on otherworldly strings, tympani and Edda Dell’Orso’s wordless vocals. The film was not fêted and the Italian censor cut 20 minutes, but its spare score is exemplary. Find it on Le Musiche Di Ennio Morricone Per Il Cinema Di Silvano Agosti (GDM, 2004). JMcN

Maddalena

A FistfulOf Dynamite

IlFiore Delle Mille E Una Notte (Arabian Nights)

The Thing

(1965)

(1971)

Lisa Gastoni plays the titular succubus, a witchy stripper-siren intent on defrocking vulnerable priests and fishermen in Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s religious parable that never truly makes sense. What gives it shape and weight is Morricone’s proud and dramatic score which moves from the nine-minute breakbeat organ’n’choir groove of Come Maddalena to the keening lament of Chi Mai, later recycled in less-thanriveting 1981 BBC drama The Life And Times Of David Lloyd George, resulting in a Top 5 chart hit for Il Maestro. AM

(1966)

(1971) For a film that found Sergio Leone reworking his operatic western template to tell a story of Irish gun-runners in the Mexican revolution, Morricone turned in a similarly reconstructed work, shuffling the elements of his earlier western scores (wordless female choirs, whistling, a rhythmic ostinato and reverby electric guitar jangle) into something simultaneously strange, haunting and pleasingly off-kilter. An automated score heralding the dawn of a sad, new, mechanical age. AM

(1966)

(1974) Morricone wrote several scores for Pier Paolo Pasolini – including one for the horrific Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom – and while much of the music on this retelling of the Arabian Nights is solo organ, there are also sumptuous orchestral pieces – not least Tema Di Dunja, its haze of strings drizzled with harp arpeggios. Tema Di Aziza, meanwhile, sounds like Charles Ives’The Unanswered Question transported to the shimmering desert night.DS

(1967)

(1982)

At the time of its release, many criticised Morricone’s score for John Carpenter’s sci-fi body-horror thriller for sounding too much like the score for, well, a John Carpenter sci-fi bodyhorror thriller. Using a full orchestra where the director – known for scoring his own films – might have employed a lowly synth, Morricone remains in tune with the movie’s relentless icy dread. Like “the thing” itself, Morricone is imitating and mutating, taking the droning, pulsing fear-notes of Carpenter’s earlier films and transforming them into something vast, terrifying and unknowable. AM

IlGrande Silenzio (1968)

Set in Utah during the Great Blizzard of 1899, Sergio Corbucci’s 1968 western is a slow-burn snow-bound tone-poem, an allegorical tale of murder, revenge and defeat starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as a mute gunslinger and Klaus Kinski his deranged nemesis. Fittingly, Morricone’s score dispenses with the grandiose drama of his ’60s spaghetti western work, instead delivering a noble and elegiac score of resplendent melancholy, rich with the slow melodic sweep of heroic failure. The anxious, one-note piano intro to the climactic duel scene is beyond genius. AM

Once Upon A Time In The West (1968)

Charged with writing a definitive elegy to the Old West, with themes of deception, revenge and time, Morricone turned to harpsichord, harmonica and guitar, with Edda Dell’Orso and Alessandro Alessandroni returning. Then he handed over the score early so Leone could shoot scenes to fit (call an ambulance if your heart doesn’t swell like the orchestra as the camera pans from Claudia Cardinale arriving at the frontier town then travelling on to Monument Valley). This soundtrack sold 10 million copies. DH

Metti, Una Sera A Cena (1969)

If God has his own airport lounge, Morricone’s breezy, ever-modulating title theme – all blissed-out wah wah and heavenly voices – must surely loop there on repeat. Uno Che Grida Amore, too, is most elegant; like Delibes’Flower Duet slowly morphing into a molto sofisticato swingers’ party. Retitled Love Circle for English-language release, Giuseppe Griffi’s film centered upon the glamorous bed-hopping undertaken by a bourgeois playwright and his wife in chic Italian villas. As ever, Morricone’s music magnified the mood. JMcN

Vergogna Schifosi

Burn!

(1969)

During much of the ’60s and ’70s you could count on an Ennio Morricone score to bring emotional coherence or groovy forward motion to unintelligible art thrillers and chaotic cop dramas. Nowhere is that more in evidence than in his 24-minute collaboration with the otherworldly vocal talents of Alessandro Alessandroni’s I Cantori Moderni and star vocalist Edda Dell’Orso. Suddenly, Mauro Severino’s sub-Antonioni, Generation ’68 thriller has a swirling romantic narrative and a symphonic jazz drama – plus, in Guardami Negli Occhi, a dash of cod-Mersey Beat. Money well spent. AM

Morricone’s cohesive, rhythmic response to the call-up from Italian Communist firebrand-turnedauteur Gillo Pontecorvo for this Caribbean-set anti-colonial history lesson is crowned by a chanted neo-psychedelic anthem that’s part Fifth Dimension, part 14-Hour Technicolor Dream, which serenades an African slave revolt led by Marlon Brando’s English carpet-bagger. Constant bongos fight sweeping strings, choral heralds and church organ, though the film’s muddy sound mix does Morricone no favours. Here’s a score that is definitely heard at its best on the long-player. AC

(from left) A Fistful Of Dollars,For A Few Dollars More,The Good The Bad And The Ugly,The Battle Of Algiers,L’Uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo,Il Grande Silenzio,Burn!,Malena,Once Upon A Time In America,The Mission,The Thing.

Once Upon A Time In America (1984)

Sergio Leone’s long-gestating passion project, and swansong, transplants the romanticism and mannish morality play of his spaghetti westerns to the gangster milieu of early 20th century New York. Once again, Morricone’s richly orchestrated, soaring yet melancholy music adds extra emotional patina to the tale of star-crossed Jewish gang members, leavening symphonic eye-moisteners (Deborah’s Theme) and tension-builders (Poverty) with poignant instrumentation – not least Cockeye’s Song’s wistful pan pipes. DS

The Mission (1986)

“There was a theft!” Morricone told The Guardian newspaper in 2001, when asked about the Academy Award they didn’t give him for his music to Roland Joffe’s film, before adding:“Of course, if it was up to me, every two years I would win an Oscar.” An insatiable musical appetite pays dividends here, blending a symphony with choirs and South American instruments, the results both romantic and violent. If you saw Morricone live, he seemed to grow a little taller during selections from The Mission, as if acknowledging it to be his masterpiece. DH

Canto Morricone Vol1-4 (1998-99)

Don’t trust anyone who refuses to embrace the histrionic in Morricone’s music. Back in the late ’90s, the great Bear Family label trawled through his 300-plus scores to assemble four volumes of nothing but his deranged, theatrical pop hits (eg. Funny World: the theme to risqué 1964 doc Malamondo) and shouty ballads. Volume 4, covering the ’80s and ’90s, is possibly too tasteful but the other three CDs laugh melodramatically in the face of restraint (“A-hahaha!”) and ride off into a ludicrously immoderate sunset. AM

Malena

Morricone Pops

The constant torrent of work from Palermo wingman Giuseppe Tornatore here offers a ’40s Sicily-set adolescent fantasy in an almost sarcastically picturesque Italian town, nostalgically serenaded by the Accademia Musicale Italiana under aquamarine Mediterranean skies. Much appraisal of actress Monica Bellucci’s charms occurs to a comical blend of lilting violin, clownish trumpet and clanky piano. Things can only get worse, and Morricone summons the film’s inevitable tragedy with ease, letting pan pipes do the talking as warplanes buzz overhead. AC

Like John Barry, Morricone was a trumpeter with a gift for arranging, as heard on these singles and scores covering 1959-62, recently compiled by UK label, él. Beneath the surface of his takes on canzone Napoletanas, pop ballads, twists and cha-cha-chas, the strings and brass all hint at greater goals. Peter Tevis may be long forgotten, but his 1962 7-inch of Woody Guthrie’s Pastures Of Plenty is a crucial cut. The backing track became A Fistful Of Dollars’ M main-title theme.DH

(2000)

(2013)

Men with no name: Andrew Collins, Danny Eccleston, David Hutcheon, Andrew Male, James McNair, David Sheppard.

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ECENTLY, SUFJAN STEVENS RETURNED from a visit to the tractor store. It’s his new thing. After 20 years of hustling his way through an independent career in New York City, the Detroit-born singer, multi-instrumentalist, label boss and visual artist decamped to the mountains upstate, where he has been learning how to do many things not normally associated with sensitive singer-songwriter types. “I’ve started gardening,” he says. “I’ve built some beds and I’m growing squash and sugar snap peas. I mow the lawn, and I’ve got a quad with a trailer and a chainsaw. I have to cut down the dead trees. There is a lot of lawn work to do. There is no takeout any more, no Uber. There is actually no cell service. I had to bring in cable because I live up in the mountain. It is a far cry from New York City.” In Brooklyn, Stevens was part of a vibrant indie rock community that included The National and Annie Clark of St. Vincent. Since moving up here, living on his own but with his brother nearby, conversations with new neighbours have been less about life on the road and more about seed catalogues. He says he’s been too busy even to read. “My life is simple,” he says. “My intellectual life has been pushed to the wayside because I’m usually on my hands and knees, pulling up weeds.” LOOK BACK AT HIS MULTI-HUED CAREER suggests Stevens has always been searching for something:a sense of belonging, a spiritual purpose, somewhere to call home. In 2005, he released his breakthrough album: Illinois. It was the second – and, currently, the last – chapter in his absurdly ambitious attempt to make an album about each of the US’s 50 states. A chamber folk epic covering aspects of the Prairie 50 MOJO

State from serial killers to UFO sightings, it set Stevens up as the ultimate liberal arts indie guy:versed in everything from Appalachian folk to modern classical, given to calling his touring band names like the Magical Butterfly Kite Brigade and making them wear wings made of coloured paper. As it turned out, that was just one of many sides to an artist as complex as he is productive. A decade later Stevens went deep inside himself for Carrie & Lowell: an emotional open wound of a record that documented his childhood relationship with a distant, troubled mother and a supportive stepfather. Now, with The Ascension, he is poised to release an 80-minute electronic suite on death, rebirth, faith, hope, charity, the Second Coming and the meaning of life itself. “The dove flew to me like a vision of paranoia,” Stevens sings, in a voice so light it sounds in danger of taking spirit form, on the 12-and-a-half minute America. “I’ve lost my faith in everything,” he laments on Tell Me You Love Me. On Make Me An Offer I Cannot Refuse he pleads, “Lord, I need deliverance,” like a Christian mystic in a baseball cap and cut-off T-shirt. It is a lot to take in. “I’m just asking the listener to take stock of themselves and recognise their own powerlessness,” says Stevens, in a self-effacing but purposeful tone, on his intentions for The Ascension. “I’m trying to encourage people to live with an eagerness for truth and transformation. I know this sounds like a bunch of platitudes, but the album is a friendly reminder to the world that we can’t go on with business as usual, so maybe we need to challenge our way of life. We need to eradicate our former consciousness and move in the direction of rebirth. We need to die and be born again.” Or maybe Stevens is simply having a mid-life crisis. He ends his sermon with a clap of laughter at the suggestion. “I’m 45 years old and crisis is all around me. I hadn’t thought of it like that, but it’s a great way to frame the whole thing!” ➢

Courtesy of Sufjan Stevens (3), Shutterstock

UFJAN STEVENS HAS ALWAYS BRIDGED THE GAP between playfulness and profundity, and he has done it while carving out a career that operates entirely outside of the mainstream. When you learn of his conflicted, religiously informed background, it all begins to make sense. His unusual name comes from his parents’involvement with Subud, an interfaith spiritual movement based on divine surrender, but after they split when he was one he grew up with his father and stepmother under a traditional Christian belief system, something he has been consumed with – and troubled by – ever since. “I’m pretty orthodox in my beliefs as a Christian, but the way that manifests itself in my music is constantly in flux,” says Stevens. “I’ve been singing about loss of faith for years, but today that loss has become universal. We’re losing faith in society, in government, in leadership, in basic social institutions, in ourselves. Because of my spiritual practice it is ordinary for me to be struggling with belief, from everyday routines to bigger questions like whether there is a higher power, or a spiritual road map bringing substance and meaning to the universe.” Christian themes have emerged throughout Stevens’ output, most notably on 2004’s Seven Swans, a banjo-led indie-folk interpretation of tales from the Bible, but never with as much weightiness as this. The Ascension

the latter until he was nine. “Steiner wanted to free us from human authority, which has been really important for me recently,” he explains. “I want to take full responsibility for myself and I don’t want to be subordinate to the exterior authorities of the world, the institutions, the corporations, the governments, even the religions that are enforcing realities on us. For this album I wanted to rebuild what I feel and want as an individual. It is a master cleanse of consciousness.” Alongside an early grounding in spiritual recorder at the Detroit Waldorf school. He went on to learn oboe, while an introduction to the world of rock and folk came from the three summers in the early ’80s he spent in Eugene, Oregon with his mother Carrie and his stepfather Lowell Brams, her husband of five years, plus his brother and two sisters. “Lowell would play us all these great records by The Beatles, the Stones, Nick Drake, Judee Sill, Love and Jimi Hendrix, and it was magical,” says Stevens. “At an early age I was obsessed with it, and secretly wanted to do it, but I didn’t tell anyone because I didn’t think it was viable. Even when I went to college, even after I learned guitar, joined a band, and started writing songs, I was still studying English literature and holding down a day job. I was suspicious of the record industry and certainly never intended to make money from music. It was a happy accident.” When Stevens left Marzuki, the band he formed at Hope College – a Christian liberal arts university in Holland, Michigan – and came to New York in 2000, it was not in a headlong rush toward success. He studied creative writing, worked for a children’s publisher and as a graphic designer, and put out two solo albums on Asthmatic Kitty, the label he and Brams launched in 1999, which sold very little indeed. Only in 2003, when he printed 1,000 copies

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Should have known better:(above) Stevens sets the mood in New York,2015,for the album Carrie & Lowell;(left,from top) with his stepfather Lowell Brams,2005;with mother Carrie on part of the 2015 LP sleeve.

Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lake , an acoustic baroque portrait of his

“I was in the right place at the right time,” he

over cause I never knew when it might fall apart, but it worked.” ICHIGAN WAS THE FIRST ALBUM TO GIVE A glimpse of Stevens’ fractured childhood, with a song called Romulus offering a hazy memory of his mother. Over a gentle guitar strum he sings in his wistful way:“Our grandpa died in a hospital gown, she didn’t seem to care. She smoked in her room and coloured her hair. I was ashamed of her.” Twelve years later on Carrie & Lowell, against an acoustic backing with a sketchy, unfinished quality that added to its air of veracity, Stevens painted a more detailed picture. He sang about dealing with Carrie’s passing in 2012 on Death With Dignity, and her less than orthodox approach to child-rearing on Should Have Known Better, on which he recalls a time when he was three, “Maybe four, she left us at that video store.” Carrie suffered from schizophrenia, alcohol-

“I had constructed my own reality”: Stevens in August 2016 at the Outside Lands festival,Golden Gate Park,San Francisco; (below) new LP The Ascension.

ism and depression. The album is less an angry, kill-your-parents tirade than a plaintive lament on the limitations his mother was dealing with, alongside an attempt to make sense of his own feelings about her. “When I made that album I was clinically depressed, so I don’t think I had the discretion or objectivity to understand the impact it could have,” says Stevens now. “I talked about it with Lowell and he was OK with most of it, but he reminded me that experience is subjective and there were things I was singing about that weren’t necessarily true… like being abandoned outside a video store. Lowell pulled me aside one day and said:‘You know, your mother was actually a saint.’I failed to communicate that in the album, simply because it is so self-absorbed.” Within the linernotes for Carrie & Lowell is a photograph of a young Sufjan, staring mournfully at the camera as he eats a banana, his mother preoccupied with other concerns behind him. It certainly drives home the album’s theme of a little boy lost, but as Lowell Brams later pointed out, there were three other children under 10 years old at the table. She was dealing with more than just him. “I found it touching that, years after Carrie’s death and long after the end of his marriage to her, Lowell wanted to make sure I knew she wasn’t a bad person,” says Stevens. “That’s why I feel that record is more about my own bullshit than it is about Carrie and Lowell.” You wonder what it must be like to confront such intimate and emotional material in song form and then to put it out on an album and perform it before thousands of strangers the world over. “Just to make that music was incredibly painful. To make it public was even more painful. To tour those songs for a year and a

half was… an experience. My way of handling it was through disassociation. I changed names and places to protect the innocent, and I realised I had constructed my own reality so I categorised it as fiction. That’s how we deal with trauma. We repress it and fictionalise it.” It doesn’t sound like there will ever be a Carrie & Lowell 2 . “I will never make a record like that again,” he says. “Unless it’s from a psychiatric hospital.” TEVENS ALWAYS SEEMS TO BE working on something very different from what came before. In 2009 there was The , a symphonic ode to the Brooklyn-Queens

Music For and 2020’s Aporia. There are the ballet The Decalogue, a cerebral The Age Of Adz, which abandoned the banjo-led indie-folk of the acclaimed early LPs for fuzzy electronics. There is Mystery Of Love, Futile Devices and Visions Of Gideon, the delicate ballads he contributed to the soundtrack of gay coming-of-age movie Call Me By Your Name in 2017. And let’s not forget the Christmas EPs he has been releasing intermittently since 2001. He never seems to just write a bunch of songs. You could be tempted to think Stevens comes up with a concept and then finds a musical style and a series of lyrics to fit. “I know it seems like I do everything thematically but the truth is, I work in a bubble,” he claims. “I’m only doing what I’m motivated to do at any one time, and I’d rather be in a constant state ➢ MOJO 53

+++++

+++ (Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 0 3 ) Not Stevens’first concept album – that was 2001’s zodiac-themed electromuddle Enjoy Your Rabbit – Michigan is the first from his short-lived 50 States Project, honouring his beleaguered home state. Touching on unemployment, religion and family, Michigan’s story-songs are unsparing, but also delicate – from bleak, bare-bones opener Flint (For The Unemployed And Underpaid) to the album’s warm, rousing finale Vito’s Ordination Song.

++++ (Sounds Familyre, 2 0 0 4 ) Albums across Stevens’discography reveal his enviable talent for playing numerous instruments with virtuosic flair, gliding between genres, and generally pulling off some really weird shit. Seven Swans, however, reveals Stevens’gift for straight-up songcraft via its exposed, affecting songs of devotion for voice and banjo – his

(Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 0 5 ) Stevens’most astonishing, theatrical record, Illinois gathers local historical figures and urban lore in its poetic, quirky embrace, and features a string section and choir (the Illinoisemakers) alongside Stevens, who plays everything else – bells and whistles included. Its musings on puberty, longing and memory move deftly from intimate and elegiac to heart- flutteringly exciting – as on Stevens’biggest ‘hit’, Chicago.

+++ (Asthmatic Kitty, 2006) Twenty-two songs not enough for ya? The Avalanche picks up where Illinois left off, essentially a compilation of the album’s outtakes and B-sides. Highlights include a quietly stirring contemplation of Chicago writer Saul Bellow, fairground-style trot The Henney Buggey Band, and three different versions of Chicago. On tour, Stevens and his “Magical Chinese Butterfly Brigade” wore butterfly wings and sunglasses.

+++ (Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 0 9 ) Stevens turned his gaze from honouring America’s storied states to honouring

Expressway. Composed as an orchestral suite to accompany an impressionistic film Stevens wrote and directed (which features a troupe of hula-hooping ladies), the real surprise is that it’s a romantic, expansive listen, with nods to Messrs Ravel, Glass and Gershwin.

++++ (Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 1 0 ) Don’t be fooled by delicate album opener Futile Devices, which is stylistically a world away from the rest of the record. Inspired by schizophrenic outsider artist Royal Robertson, The Age Of Adz features glitchy electronica, ricocheting percussion and a good deal of robo-squelching. And yet? Its Technicolor songs are brilliantly constructed, confoundingly hooky and emotionally raw. The album’s anthemic 25-minute closer, Impossible Soul, is a dazzling gem.

+++++ (Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 1 5 ) So resonant are the expressions of unfulfillable longing on Carrie & Lowell, it can be a challenge to revisit, even as a listener. Stevens’grief is twofold:the death of his troubled mother in 2012, and the loss of his relationship with her as a child. The album’s sparse, luminous songs paint dream-like memories of a few precious summers spent in Oregon with Carrie and her partner Lowell Brams.

+++ (Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 1 2 ) Listeners need to either really love Christmas or really love Stevens (preferably both) to fully embrace this 59-track collection of festive songs and stocking gifts – itself a follow-up of sorts to 2006’s Songs For Christmas. Stevens’hip carolling ensemble includes pals from The National and Danielson, and the tone ranges from mildly hysterical to hushed

+++ (Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 1 9 ) Crisp and complex, Stevens’solo piano score for Justin Peck’s 2017 ballet is inspired by the Ten Commandments. Performed by pianist Timo Andres, its pieces move from quickfire precision to rippling, cascading movements. In the absence of his voice or hands on the keys, it is certainly harder to hear the artist at work – but not impossible.

+++ Expressway to your heart:Stevens at a section of the Brooklyn-Queens, October 8,2009.

(Asthmatic Kitty, 2 0 2 0 ) Carrie & Lowell may have been his mother’s record, but Aporia is a living, breathing collaboration with stepfather Lowell Brams – the pair now run Asthmatic Kitty Records. Born of easy-going jam sessions, these warm, ambient soundscapes range from glistening, Vangelis-like Glorious You to gamelan-doodle Ataraxia, via the ethereally huge Climb That Mountain and Kraut-wigout Captain Praxis.

Winged messenger:Stevens at Sasquatch Music Festival, Washington,May 30,2016; (right) performing Mystery Of Love with St. Vincent at the Oscars,LA,2018;Sufjan tunes into the music of the spheres,LA,2010.

Michael Scott Berman/Guardian/Eyevine, Getty (2), Shutterstock

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of discovery and surprise than go about business as usual, which I have licence to do because I’m self-generating. I record, mix and arrange it all myself. My fingerprints are on ever ything. Whether it’s a drum machine or a banjo, it is the same thing and a lot of it just happens. I didn’t set out to make all those Christmas records. They started out for family and friends and became a bigger thing.” But surely, nobody just ‘happens’ to set about making a 50-album series about every state in America? “OK, full disclosure:that was self-promotion,” he confesses. “At the time I didn’t have a career, I was making Michigan on the weekends, and thought: maybe if I say I’m going to do all 50 states, people will pay attention. I had a much bigger ego than I do now, but by the time we got to Illinois I knew it was futile.” Michigan and Illinois turned out to be modern classics of heartfelt, poetic Americana, so what started as a publicity stunt took on lasting value. Will he ever pick up where they left off? “I’m not saying it still couldn’t happen. But perhaps America isn’t such a healthy subject any more.” HE ASCENSION, LIKE THE AGE OF ADZ BEFORE IT, is bedded in electronica. Stevens claims this is more a product of necessity than choice. Three years ago he was kicked out of his old office and recording studio in Brooklyn after his landlord renovated it while he was out on tour, resulting in his instruments being stuck in storage. “All I had left was my computer, my Prophet synthesizer and a drum machine, so that’s what I made The Ascension on,” he says. “And I did it all alone.” By the time Stevens’collaborators Casey Foubert, James McAlister and Bryce Dessner of The National came on board, most of the album had been completed. Coming out amid a pandemic and the chaos of Trump’s America,

The Ascension, with its Biblical language of rapture, deliverance and releasing the beast within, could be viewed as Stevens’ vision of the end times. As it turns out, he’s far more hopeful for the future than you might expect. “Humankind has always been living in its own apocalyptic moment and that stems from self-absorption, like we’re the centre of the universe,” he says. “It might also be related to fear of death. The apocalypse gives us meaning, but the higher road to travel here is that maybe it isn’t so meaningful after all. Maybe life is cyclical, and nature continues onward, and minds its own business.” Stevens has found his own self-absorption achieve healthier proportions since he swopped the BQE for the boondocks. And there have been other benefits. “For the last few years of living in Brooklyn I was struggling with the constant feed of information, and besides,” he smiles, “the hangovers were getting too intense for me to go out drinking like I used to. This album is a reflection of that process:leaving the city, moving to a wholesome place, being surrounded by nature. I mean it’s all a cliché, right?” EFORE HE RETURNS TO HIS SUGAR SNAP PEAS, Sufjan Stevens takes a moment to reflect on everything the past 20 years have brought him. The depth, delicacy and thoughtfulness of his music has brought him fervent cult adoration, and that can do strange things to one’s head, even for someone as self-aware as Stevens. “I feel like making music is my job. I have a duty to show up for work, and I should take myself, my ego and my ambitions out of it entirely,” he concludes. “There is strength in hearing other people’s narratives, but I’m older and I’m tired of myself. My problems aren’t personal any more. My problems are global.” M MOJO 55

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Getty (2), Adrian Boot (2)

UESDAY JUNE 26, 1973 was the day when the Law finally caught up with Keith Richards. The tax-exiled guitarist was back in London helping to sprinkle lastminute fairy-dust on The Rolling Stones’ eleventh UK studio album, Goats Head Soup, when he, his Italian-German girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and their Swiss drug buddy Prince Stanislaus ‘Stash’ Klossowski were busted in a crack-of-dawn raid at Richards’flat on Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The arresting officer, DI Charles O’Hanlon, charged them variously with possession of cannabis, Mandrax and residual amounts of Chinese heroin, while Richards attracted a further rap for unlicensed possession of a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver, a shotgun and 110 rounds of ammunition. According to records released by the National Archives in 2011, O’Hanlon noted that Richards, then aged just 29, had attempted to stir a couple of drinks for himself and Pallenberg with the scorched spoons they’d used to shoot up heroin, but was hastily ordered not to tamper with the evidence. Today, on the phone with MOJO, Richards is dismissive of the affair:“Oh yeah, the famous one – 26 charges! It was just another of those turnovers…” But in 1973, the risk to his liberty was real. It had been six years and three days since Richards had been sentenced to 12 months at Chichester crown court, following February ’67’s infamous bust at his Sussex pile, Redlands. On that occasion, both he and Mick Jagger had had their sentences quashed, but the Stones remained persons of interest and their flight from Britain in April 1971, chiefly for tax reasons, had the added benefit of removing them from the sights of the native constabulary. After cutting their first record at large, the ramblingly magnificent Exile On Main St., amid dissolute sessions at Nellcôte in the south of France, and taking it to America in summer ’72 on one of the most notoriously debauched rock tours ever, more storm clouds were gathering. That December, the Public Prosecutor in Nice issued a warrant for Richards and Pallenberg’s arrest – the couple’s chef had told French police they’d been trafficking heroin. By then, the Stones had already quit the Côte d’Azur to commence work on their next album in Kingston, Jamaica. Out of the frying pan? “We didn’t know where to go to record, because Keith was in so much trouble,” says Jagger now. “We couldn’t go to America because

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of visa problems, for both Keith and myself. So Jamaica sounded like a fun option, a different thing to do, but it was a rough place in those days. Downtown Kingston wasn’t like Negril – the idyllic north coast of Jamaica that one might imagine.” The album they ultimately finessed has gone down in rock history as a signifier of darkness and excess, whose disparate and often melancholy moods reflected the toll the band’s decadent lifestyle was taking. But Goats Head Soup is more than that. As a new deluxe reissue underlines, it’s a snapshot of creative evolution on the hoof and home to some of their most heartbreaking songs, while three extraordinary unreleased tracks shine fascinating new light on the band they thought they were, and wanted to be. All this, plus the first affordable physical release for the Brussels Affair live bootleg from October ’73:more evidence of their undimmed on-stage potency. No wonder Jagger and Richards – in a rare moment of engagement with a Stones reissue project – are so keen to talk about it with MOJO. However, if you throw in Jagger’s embroilment in the Managua earthquake of Christmas 1972, the mysterious Redlands fire that threatened the lives of Richards and his family, and the whiff of brimstone and bad karma that enveloped the Stones on a seemingly daily basis, it’s amazing that they came out with anything at all. HARACTERISTICALLY BLASÉ IN HIS ASSESSMENT of Rolling Stones lore, Keith Richards describes the whole period as “very foggy all round”. Yet he went into Goats Head Soup with good intentions. At the end of the Stones’’72 tour he and Pallenberg had moved into a chalet in Villars-sur-Ollon, an elite Swiss skiing resort, and were making a first attempt to quit heroin. While withdrawing, Keith reputedly turned blue, and almost died on his way to hospital. He was subsequently checked into a treatment centre in nearby Vevey, and it was there that he began writing some of Goats Head Soup’s key tracks. “Yeah, I was in confinement, so to speak,” he recalls, with a blast of throaty laughter. “I mean, what else do you do in Switzerland? You go to a clinic. An interesting experience, but not to be repeated. It was an early form of rehab, and writing songs was just how to kill the time and get out of there. You get on with it.” But Richards’poor health was not the only factor in play. Lack-

Escape to victory:(from far left) Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg arrive at Great Marlborough Street,June 27,1973; Richards and (right) Mick Jagger with seated Mick Taylor,settle in at Dynamic Sounds,Kingston, Jamaica,December 9,1972;(insets left) gun and Goats Head Soup.

ing a geographical focus had put unprecedented pressure on the Stones’inner workings. “Although Exile… was our first out-of-England experience recording-wise, we were just across the road, really,” says Richards. “By the time we got to cut the next one, we’d been exiled for another year or two. Also, in those two years, Mick and I had not seen as much of each other as we usually did, so I guess we were figuring out a new way of how the hell to work together.” In creative terms, the rift had probably originated at Nellcôte, as Richards and his heroin côterie – producer Jimmy Miller, sax player Bobby Keys and a visiting Gram Parsons – dictated the lurching, spasmodic schedule with bursts of wee-hours hyperactivity yielding warts-and-all takes, followed by stretches of nodding inertia. Ever since, Mick Jagger has rarely masked his unease with Exile…’s ragged aesthetic and lack of scrubbed-up pop hits, and at the time he talked excitedly of their next album being “much more varied than the last one – I didn’t want it to be just another bunch of rock songs.” Was Jagger looking to smooth off Exile…’s rough edges? “I don’t know about Mick and his rough edges, quite honestly,” says Richards today with another cavalier roar. “That don’t mean shit to me. To me it was important that we kept our team together – Jimmy Miller and [engineer] Andy Johns – I thought that was vital. We were determined to say, ‘Hey, we can keep this band together, even though we can’t actually be at home.’” In 2020, Jagger is clear on his determination to find a new direction for the Stones. “We obviously didn’t wanna remake Exile…,” he says, “any more than we wanted to go to Jamaica to make a reggae record. We didn’t do that either.”

to move onwards and upwards.”

Over the years, the

tions were narrowing by the week. island had begun in 1969, when he ➢

WHILE NUMEROUS Rolling Stones offcuts from the early ’70s have surfaced on reissues and bootlegs, Scarlet – a putative 1974 team-up with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page – has accrued near-mythical status… until it was revealed online in July as the reissued Goats Head Soup’s star bonus track. A mesmerising groove, propelled by three interlocking guitar riffs, this bafflingly-shelved gem points towards the crunching ’80s Stones of Start Me Up. “Jimmy was someone I knew from years back,” Mick Jagger tells MOJO. “I’d worked with him back when I used to produce these records for Andrew Oldham, like Chris Farlowe’s Out Of Time – real ancient history! Those tracks

“Someone I knew from years back”: Jimmy Page,1973, had been on Jagger productions (right).

Richards, in particular – have been a bit sniffy about Led Zeppelin. “As a band, I thought they were aptly named – they never took off musically for me,” Richards told Rolling Stone in 2015, while adding Page was “a brilliant player” – as well he might, because Page also played on early Stones sessions including a 1964 recording of Heart Of Stone later released on 1975’s Metamorphosis compilation, and subsequently guested on 1986’s One Hit (To The Body). Page first revealed the existence of Scarlet in a Rolling Stone interview in 1975, describing it as “similar in style and mood to those Blonde On Blonde tracks,” and confessing that, after an all-night session, he’d applied his solos at “eight in the morning of the following day”. “I remember it as this song I’d been knocking around, demoing,” says a rather vague Jagger today. “I know I did a version with Charlie and some other people at Olympic, but I’m told this version we’re releasing now was recorded in Ronnie Wood’s basement. “I spoke to Jimmy about it,” Jagger goes on, “and we thought it may have been Ginger Baker playing drums, but it turned out to be me, Keith and Jimmy, with [sometime Fairport Convention sticksman] Bruce Rowland on drums, Ian Stewart on keyboards, and Ric Grech from Traffic [and Blind Faith] playing bass.” As to the inspiration for the song title, Jagger is again uncertain – although Page’s photographer daughter Scarlet, born in 1971, would seem the likeliest candidate. In an e-mail to MOJO, Scarlet herself says, “I can’t confirm it but over the years legend has reported it” – so even she doesn’t know for sure. Andrew Perry

Adrian Boot (2), Shinko Music, Getty, Rolling Stones Archive

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holidayed at Frenchman’s Cove on the north-east coast. But Jagger is at pains to point out that interest in the island’s music was shared by them all, including drummer Charlie Watts. “Charlie and I had been listening to a lot of reggae during the recording of Exile…,” he explains. “One of the reasons was because [Island Records supremo] Chris Blackwell used to send me these piles of singles, so I would go through them all and listen to them. A lot of them were quite hard to come by. Charlie liked it all because of the different kinds of beats, and that’s how I got into it – Chris dealing me out all these records.” At that point in 1971-72, Blackwell, who owned substantial property on the island as part of his family’s Crosse & Blackwell fortune, was investing heavily in its music. Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Island debut, Catch A Fire, would be released in the UK in December ’72 while the Stones were holed up in Kingston – specifically, in the same poky room at Dynamic Sounds where Jimmy Cliff sang the theme tune of the 1972 movie manifesto of outlaw reggae culture, The Harder They Come. Stones bassist Bill Wyman later described the studio, owned by Chinese-Jamaican musician-entrepreneur Byron Lee, as “a low building, little bigger than an outhouse… just this side of claustrophobic”, while Richards remembered it as “built like a fortress”. Says Jagger, “Byron Lee had this big band, Byron Lee & The Dragonaires, who were famous for playing every style of Caribbean music – reggae, calypso, ska, everything. Kingston was pretty hairy at the time, and a lot of the hotel-to-studio stuff was hard work, but Byron Lee was very nice and made our life easy there.” In a further Island connection, on arrival in mid-November ’72, the Stones were installed at the Terra Nova Hotel, a palatial empire manor that had once served as the Blackwells’family home. Jagger laughs off the notion that it was a swanky place – “More like a posh motel,” he says – but the journey every evening to Dynamic at 15 Bell Road in Kingston 11, AKA East Downtown, would have been, indeed, “pretty hairy”. As at Nellcôte, however, the Stones worked intensively, from dusk till dawn, seven days a week, and Richards says that the city’s energy, rather than its music per se, fuelled them. “Yeah, because outside is Jamaica, man!” he enthuses. “There’s Kingston happening all around you, and you’re trying to concentrate on making a rock’n’roll record. Jamaicans have an automatic feel for sound. What I loved about that room was the guys who worked there knew everything about it. You walked in, and they even had a spot where they’d literally nailed down the drums, because that was where the drums sounded good.”

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For Richards, one of the problems that would increasingly plague him over the coming years – the procurement of hard drugs in an unfamiliar environment – wasn’t an issue in Jamaica. “At that time, I wouldn’t’ve dreamt of doing any of that,” he claims with a knowing giggle, “because I was on a clean slate. But as soon as I got out of there…” Making Dynamic even more claustrophobic, the five-man Stones were swollen by auxiliaries from their ’72 touring line-up. Stalwart Ian Stewart was joined by fellow pianist Nicky Hopkins for the opening fortnight, while organist Billy Preston flew in for the final week. The presence of three world-class keyboard players would have a bearing on how Goats Head Soup turned out:an album where half the tracks or more could be described as ‘piano-led’. “That’s an interesting observation,” muses Richards today. “Maybe we should’ve turned them down a bit!” ECEIVED WISDOM HAS JAGGER AS THE STONES’ shapeshifter, ever alive to pop-market trends, while Richards anchors the band to their blues/R&B roots, and the push-and-pull between them – still perceptible to this day in the stiff and occasionally hostile manner in which they discuss each other’s work – generates its vital energy. Goats Head Soup is often described as Mick’s Album, with Jaggerled nods to the singer-songwriter sounds of the West Coast. And true enough, the first exchanges on day one at Dynamic saw Jagger at the mike with an acoustic guitar, strumming the chords to the bittersweet Winter. You could be fooled into thinking that Angie, the album’s better-known weepie, was a chip off the same compositional block, but no. “Keith was the prime writer of that one,” says Jagger. “I obviously wrote a lot of the melodies and lyrics, but the chorus and the music, he wrote. Credit where it’s due.” Says Richards, “One could say that kind of thing for just about every song we’ve written, one way or the other. Who did what? That’s why we’re Jagger-Richards. I always gave Mick the framework, and hopefully the title. I’d say, ‘Mick, it’s called Satisfaction, and it goes like this,’ then maybe… ‘I’m riding in my car… Bum bum bum.’Other times, he’d fling me one and say, ‘Hey, it goes like this, but how do we finish it?’It’s called collaboration.” On release, there was huge conjecture about the true identity of the eponymous heroine, the loss of whose affections Jagger lamented so wretchedly. Theories ranged from Angie Bowie (because Jagger was rumoured that year to have bedded her husband, David), to the screen actress Angie Dickinson (because… well, just because).

Can you hear the music:(from far left) Richards is interviewed at the Terra Nova Hotel,December 1972;Bill Wyman in Dynamic with engineer Carlton Lee;Jagger with producer Jimmy Miller;(below) Chris Blackwell;a Jamaican classic;the Angie single;a promo can of the soup that nourishes.

“It was just a name,” says Jagger today. “Keith made it up. People always say all kinds of things when they write songs. Half of the time you don’t know when you write a song what you’re really writing about. And girl’snames titles are easy to write, you know? I’ll always go for one of those:if someone says, ‘This is called Angie,’ I’ll go, ‘OK, I can run with that – that’s easy!’” As Richards insists, not for the first time, “My daughter Angie was born at that time, so that’s why it’s called that.” Dandelion Angela Richards entered the picture in April ’72, fresh in her father’s mind as he marked time at the clinic in Vevey, writing similarly downtempo material. Coming Down Again, a blissful ode to narcotic/romantic/ existential flatlining, has a sad, end-of-party feel (“All my time’s been spent/Coming down again… Where are all my friends?”) – Richards digging deep into his soul and striking gold. A basic track of another Vevey composition – Waiting On A Friend – was recorded at Dynamic, but the song itself had to wait until ’81’s Tattoo You to be finished. Jagger’s 100 Years Ago, a piano-swirling, medium-paced song that actually predated Exile On Main St., was more evidence of the singer’s determination to deliver something other than “another bunch of rock songs”. Elsewhere the pace was zipped up:Silver Train was another pre-Exile relic (shelved because every-

Thus were the tracks they brought

HE KINGSTON SESSIONS wound up without drama. Some band members flew home for

“I’d gone back to England,” Richards recalls, “and [ie. arrested her] while I was away, and it was a real problem trying to deal with it from London. I over there were saying, ‘No, no, we’ve got a lawyer.’ There were stories that Pallenberg had been smoking with local rastas and rowing with neighbours. And darker rumours that the Stones had had contact with practitioners of Jamaican voodoo, known as obeah. Wittingly or not, the band’s refer-

“But it’s very tongue-in-cheek, isn’t meant the grooves were a little different, unique.” The guitar sounds on Goats Head Soup At the end of 1972, however, Jagger was

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Winter? The Stones,sweltering in February 1973 at the Kooyong Tennis Stadium,Melbourne,Australia, on the Pacific leg of their tour.

received worrying news from her homeland of Nicaragua:an earthquake in the capital, Managua. “We didn’t know if her parents were alive or dead,” says Jagger. “You had no way of knowing in those days – so we had to fly straight out there to find them. Very weird.” Luckily, they were quickly found, and Jagger, newly bestowed with a US visa, flew to Los Angeles to organise a benefit concert on January 18. After playing that show, the Stones’ album sessions continued at LA’s Village Recorders, but cracks were appearing in their ranks after many stressful months on the run. “Jimmy Miller was going through a hard time in his life,” says Jagger. “Too many drugs and I don’t know what else – and he kind of went off the boil there. It was a bit sad, and we had to finish the album without him.” “Yeah, Jimmy unravelled,” adds Richards, with more evident regret. “He was the best producer I ever worked with. He had a great empathy for the band – we were a little bit loose, and he made us focus. But towards the end of this album he was carving swastikas into the mixing board. He became unravelled, unfocused. I thought six months in a Swiss clinic might do a damn good job for him, but he got… carried away.”

N THE PACIFIC TOUR IN EARLY ’73, AUSTRALIA almost joined Japan in refusing the Stones admission but eventually relented. At Honolulu airport, a customs official turned Bobby Keys’ saxophone upside down and a syringe fell out. Richards was pulled over on principle, but, though probably back off the wagon by now, wasn’t caught in possession. Concluding sessions for Goats Head Soup ran through May and June of ’73 at Island’s studios in Notting Hill, and at Olympic in Barnes, suburban south London, applying Nicky Harrison’s strings to Winter and, more subtly, Angie, as well as Jim Price’s brass arrangement to Heartbreaker. They’d just about got the album over the line, when Richards and Pallenberg awoke at Cheyne Walk on June 26 to a room full of 15 police officers. Each was remanded on bail the next day for £500 apiece, but a few weeks later, having driven down to Redlands in the interim, the two of them plus their two children were almost killed when the entire roof went up in flames – the blaze caused, it seems, by a mouse nibbling through the wiring. The Redlands fire capped another 12-month stretch of living dangerously for Richards, and some of the details still beggar belief. What use did he have, for example, for 110 rounds of ammunition in awfully civilised Chelsea?

Rolling Stones Archive (2), Getty (3)

(Universal CD/DL/LP) If any Stones album can be said to have flown under the radar, it’s Goats Head Soup. Yet here’s Keith Richards’genius with a ballad (Angie;Coming Down Again);Mick Taylor incandescent (100 Years Ago);Jagger’s voice and pen turned to more diverse and thoughtful moods; and overall a sense of the Stones discovering that it felt good driving their juggernaut at something other than full pelt. Plus, here are three ‘new’songs that by no means disgrace the legend. Criss Cross – described by Jagger as “in the area in the middle of funk and rock” – hangs on a riff reminiscent of Brown Sugar’s. Scarlet is seductive and menacing all at once, while All The Rage – with lyrics, vocals and percussion retrofitted by Jagger during early

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★★★★

lockdown, but with greater attention to 1973 period detail than was applied to the extras on Exile On Main St.’s 2010 reissue – flat out rocks. Of the alternate versions, a rousing, embryonic 100 Years Ago features both Jagger and Richards hammering away on piano, while a bottleneck-blues instrumental jam on Dancing With Mr D is a stomping highlight. Perhaps the only disappointment is that some 12-15 other titles associated with the Jamaica sessions, from promising (After Muddy And Charlie;Fast Talking, Slow Walking;Zabadoo and others) to less auspicious (You Should Have Seen Her Ass) have yet to show up. But these omissions are more than made up for by the ‘Brussels Affair’live material. Recorded across two shows on the same day at the Belgian capital’s Forest National Arena on October 17, 1973, this was the European tour’s penultimate stop and its 15 newly scrubbed-up tracks represent probably the Mick Taylor line-up’s finest live document, as an augmented group – bursting at the seams with brass and keysmen – cook at max intensity, exemplified by a by-turns feral and fluid 13-minute Midnight Rambler. Andrew Perry

shrouded in chiffon. Although investigating fans would eventually encounter a demonic-looking goat’s head bubbling away in its evil brew, the front cover shot of a feminine-looking Jagger gave a softfocus effect that contrasted with the hard-hitting and/or risqué If this was strategic repositioning, it worked, as Goats topped the charts transatlantically, and in six

Pre-release, there’d been

“Well, it was an even number!” he cackles today. “They had actually just arrived – where was To its author’s mind it “I don’t recall meeting I supposed to put them? Disperse them – where? him”:Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw break bread ‘Look – people send me bullets, all right?’” with Jagger;(above) Your plea was that the revolver had been given to ‘Starfucker’tape;with then-wife Bianca and you, so you could protect yourself in Jamaica? you/For givin’head to Steve McQueen”, had Atlantic’s boss Ahmet “No, no, no. Actually, it was sent to me by an old Atlantic legal department in a sweat. Jagger denies that a tape Ertegun;with Bobby Keys. bodyguard from New York, or at least from America, was sent to McQueen’s people for clearance, but an but I had left it with him. Then for some reason he thought he assurance was secured that the actor wouldn’t sue. “I don’t recall should send it to me, so I was stuck with it. I didn’t want the bloody ever meeting him,” Jagger adds. “Maybe I did, but I don’t rememthing! Try and tell that to the judge… Anyway, I got away with it ber it. (Pause) I met Ali McGraw – she was very nice!” because they’d tried to stitch me up.” Arrests, tax exile, earthquakes, conflagrations:there’s a reason ITH STAR STAR STIRRING UP THE TABLOIDS, contemporaries wondered if the Stones were cursed. But somehow the Stones hit the road around Europe for seven weeks. they soldiered on. In Innsbruck, Richards learnt that his friend Gram Par“You don’t know until you’ve been there,” says Richards, sons had passed away from a heroin overdose in Joshua Tree. Near philosophically. “I was used to working under this cloud of the end, Keys was fired by Jagger in almost parodically rock’n’roll oppression and doom, and I would just get on with it. What circumstances. Bathing in a tub filled with Dom Perignon and was hopeful about Goats Head Soup was that the band was still groupies, the saxophonist refused to climb out for the lobby call to together and managed to survive. But we had to learn on the run – the next show. Game over. what else is new?” In the days following that jaunt, the case from the Cheyne Walk bust came to court at central London’s Great Marlborough Street. When the prosecution described the shotgun he’d been found with HE FIRST HARBINGER OF THE SHIFT IN THE as ‘sawn-off ’– a weapon that carried a minimum sentence of a year Rolling Stones’aesthetic, Angie was released as a single on – Richards pointed out that it was actually a hunting miniature August 17, 1973, and it divided opinion. Leading with dating back to 19th century France. The judge, acknowledging the Richards’ mournful acoustic guitar, but soon weaving in Nicky prosecution’s efforts to pile on spurious accusations, threw out the Hopkins’ piano and Nicky Harrison’s achingly spare 14-piece case, ordering Richards to pay £10 per charge, minus the shotgun orchestration, it presented Jagger singing from a position of rare one – a grand total of £250. vulnerability. Some established fans were confused but, as it rockSo, the swashbuckling, nomadic Rolling Stones lived to fight eted to Number 1 Stateside, it served its purpose, reconnecting the another day, and the legend of their indestructible guitarist only Stones with the widest possible audience. intensified. But still Goats Head Soup has been pegged at times as a “For the Stones to put out a ballad as a single was unusual,” says downer record, mired in its backstory of addiction, indolence and Richards. “But we’d put out Little Red Rooster years before, which looming darkness. was the most unlikely single ever. I think that’s one of the things that But that theory has at least one notable dissident… I really liked about the band, especially in the early days – you know, “I don’t think of it in that way at all,” says Mick Jagger. “That’s toss it on a dime and say, ‘Yeah, that’s a damn good record, and it more Exile… for me. I don’t think this is a depressing album, and makes a change – let’s do it!’” there’s nothing very dark about it. There’s good songs on it, but you “Obviously,” adds Jagger, “we’d had ballads before that had been might say there’s only 10 of them, and maybe with the three extra successful, like As Tears Go By, which was tuneful, with strings. songs that you could’ve put on there – if you’d’ve been bothered to Angie was a very big hit – huge in France, Italy and all that – and it finish them! – maybe it would’ve been a more interesting album?” drove the album.” He laughs archly, ever the indefatigable salesman for Stones When the long-player arrived two weeks later, it came in a gateproduct:“But here it is now!” M fold sleeve plastered with David Bailey portraits of each Stone MOJO 63

MOJO EYEWITNESS

THE FALL DECLARE THIS NATIONâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SAVING GRACE

In a field of their own: The Fall,1985 (from left) Craig Scanlon,Karl Burns, Mark E. Smith,Brix Smith, Simon Rogers,Steve Hanley.

Spitting and snapping, autonomous and perverse, MARK E. SMITH’s north-west gassers had a been a thorn in the side of normality and fashion since punk year ’77. But in September 1985, serendipitous new light struck the marbled edifice of their mighty eighth album, revealing a previously unseen gateway to their antimatter world. “Mark was firing on all cylinders,” they assert. “There was nothing like the sheer force of it.” Interviews by IAN HARRISON • Portrait by CAROLE SEGAL

Steve Hanley:Things were going well. We were on Beggars Banquet, absolutely the best label for The Fall. They were involved without being interfering, there were better studios, John Leckie was a great producer, and with Brix it was becoming more open, more like a band. But This Nation’s Saving Grace is a weird album for me because I’d been out of the band for four months [taking parental leave] when we did it. I’d been replaced by a much better musician – the “classically trained” Simon Rogers! – and in that time, they toured Britain and America, recorded two singles and wrote pretty much all the album. Them carrying on without me was painful.

Brix Smith Start:Simon’s musicianship was brilliant – L.A. is my riff, compare that simplicity to the technique in Simon’s for Spoilt ➢

Carole Segal

Simon Rogers:I’d been talking to Mark about arranging [’82 Fall epic] The Classical for [dancer] Michael Clark. He said, “I don’t know anything about music, cock. Do you play bass?” No audition. The US tour in March ’85 was quite a few dates in fairly grimy clubs in quite a short time, with an exciting hour on-stage. They always had that weird fanbase that turned up. I didn’t fit in really. It was sort of a chemistry experiment. I was ribbed about being in [South American ethno-folkers] Incantation, but who wouldn’t be? We’d dressed up in knitted ponchos and woolly hats. I mean, Ronnie Barker took the piss out of us on Pebble Mill At One.

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Method actors:(clockwise) Mr and Mrs Smith,1986; MES,brain always working; Mark and Brix aboard the Royal Viking Sky ocean liner,late 1984.

“MARK WOULD GO, OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE, GET ON WITH IT.” John Leckie

Camera Press, Anderw Catlin, Carole Segal, Shutterstock, courtesy Chris Bigg, courtesy Steve Webbon, Courtesy Brix Smith, Fotex/Rainer Drechsler (3)

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Victorian Child – it was the extra impetus the band needed to get to the level of this album. It was part of my mindset to get The Fall crossed over, without losing integrity. People don’t like me for it but I don’t care. My gift is a hook and riff:I really tried to put the light into the dark, to give it some kind of balance. Jesus, of course I’m pro-hits, 100 per cent. Mark Smith wanted it too. We were plotting all the time. Would he check chart placings? Absolutely! It was all very exciting and fun. SR:It was kind of a culture shock, going from this quite nice home in London to spending nights with Mark, in his back room in the house in Prestwich. We’d listen to William Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart and Nervous Norvus, and drink Holsten Pils, with various lines of speed and a mouldy fish tank in the corner, and he’d rummage around in his plastic bag, rustling though papers, getting tapes out. He had a megaphone in the bag at that point, to annoy the soundman. He was always messing about with those recording Walkmans. There was a cat, Frau. John Leckie:It was all tracks, I wasn’t booked to do an album. It started with [June ’85 45] Rollin’ Dany and Couldn’t Get Ahead, which we did at this converted chapel in Hereford. We never rehearsed, there was no pre-production or demos. We also did Brix’s stuff there [for her Adult Net side project], bashed it out after dinner. After we did Cruiser’s Creek [released October ’85] they called me up again, and we went to Music Works, a big sort of cold, purpose-built warehouse off Holloway Road.

Craig Scanlon:I don’t recall all the minutiae of recording This Nation’s Saving Grace – that’s a bass-player’s job – but I remember it as a fairly stress-free session, no major tantrums. It was John Leckie’s second time with us and his purple pantaloon-ness always brought a calming effect.

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Simon Rogers fitted in well, he’d assimilated the Mancunian world-weary, sarcastic traits quite well. I did notice he kinda edged out John at times and, after we’d finished for the night, he’d overdub guitars and keyboards. JL:Some of the riffs they were quite together with, and Craig seemed to be in control a lot more. [Drummer] Karl Burns, what an animal! We immediately got on. He had a lot of energy, could play anything and was totally positive in all respects. Brix was great too, and Simon Rogers was a genius. Mark would go, “Oh for fuck’s sake, get on with it.” CS:There’s a lot of nonsense about The Fall being a complete dictatorship where we’re all locked in the cellar, only allowed out to play. We had total freedom musically. Mark obviously had the final say on the recorded music but that worked, most times, without five people chipping in “turn me up… him down”, etc. BSS:When Steve came back, during the recording, it was my doing. I was really wedded to his sound, and when he left I felt my heart rip out. So I nagged and prodded Mark to bring him back. He was listening to me at that time, a lot. It was a really good point in our marriage, everything was working. SH:Simon had to show me the songs. I got on great with him actually, he was a breath of fresh air. He got on really great with Mark as well. He wouldn’t put up with any of his shite, that’s why. SR:You listen to the songs, and they’re just fleeting things that Mark saw out the side of the van or something. Paintwork’s a bizarre thing about driving round Holland, in some service station. He had it on cassette but sat on it while watching a documentary, so in the song there’s some funny flute music and someone talking about stars. It gets your brain working.

CS:I remember finishing recording Paintwork, one of my tunes, then heading into the night. The next day in the studio, Mark and Simon were keen to play what they’d overdubbed on it. They played the track, watching my reaction. I think they thought I’d be appalled at all the extra tape ‘glitches’, but when it finished, I just said, “It’s beautiful – I love the ‘Hey Mark’s. Really poignant.” Mark, flustered, just muttered “Yeah, all right, all right, jeez.” The Fall were not huggers, we never paid compliments to each other. Result! JL:I hardly spoke to Steve, but he was watching. His book [The Big Midweek, 2014] really captured the vibe, but I didn’t have a robe on. Nothing got past Mark. Very often some of the mixes were a bit wonky because he’d go, “Turn that bit right up and turn those bits off.” A little bit destructive, really. We had a lot more ideas which he wouldn’t have on the record. He didn’t want anything that interfered, decorative musical motifs or melodies. I’m not sure he was into Zen simplicity, it was just rock’n’roll – he wanted to hear the bass, the drums and the riff. He’d never say, “Turn the voice up.” SR:I loved the sound of his voice back in those days, when it was like a young fox. It was high, it would get into your earholes and really send something through you, down the back of your spine. There’s a picture, I think it was an Aubrey Beardsley engraving, a young fresh- faced thing [it appeared on the inner sleeve of 1986’s Bend Sinister], he used to play up to that. He used to fantasise about who we were – I remember him in Paris saying to me, “You’re Lord Byron!” He used to say, “We’re British Army”, quite a lot, when we were pissed – we’re going out there, we’re gonna sort everything out. ’Cos we’re made of stern stuff… I didn’t really like it when he sounded more incoherent, later, because that’s the sound of him destroying himself. BSS:He believed he needed a drink, a line and a

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Steve Hanley (bass, backing vocals)

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Craig Scanlon (guitar, backing vocals)

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TV aye:The Fall channel bombastic wrath for the benefit of Channel 4’s The Tube,November 8,1985; (insets) This Nation’s Saving Grace art and Couldn’t Get Ahead y45 master reel. Brix Smith Start (guitar, vocals)

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fag and that would get his juices flowing and he’d stay up all night, writing, writing, writing. It was his muse. He made his choices, and here, he was firing on all cylinders. SR:When we did WOMAD in July, you know his famous opening lines, don’t you? “We are The Fall, we’re from the first world.” That created a hell of an atmosphere. There was a smiley, happy party crowd who want to see King Sunny Ade, and then, heh, I guess they had some acid poured into their beer. But the gig afterwards… there was nothing like the sheer force of it. On-stage in front of thousands of people, it felt extraordinary. Chris Bigg:Mark’s approach was really loose but there was such a vision there. For the album sleeves he’d do drawings on a bit of paper, and say, “That’s what I want, don’t fuck it up.” I was quite star-struck because I’d followed The Fall since ’78, but he was always interested, creative in his feedback and very gracious when he didn’t like something. They did a video for Cruiser’s Creek when they walked around Wandsworth roundabout, by the Beggars’office, which is the place where the guy gets beaten up in A Clockwork Orange. CS:[On the video] the people hanging about with The Fall at that time were kinda accrued via Simon and Brix’s attempts to blag some free [modish fashion label] BodyMap clobber. I don’t recall Mark giving any ‘dance instructions’unless it was “walk/dance awkwardly towards the camera. Brix, throw a few rock shapes.” If that was the case, we nailed it. In the office scene, we were

all drinking real booze. Steve was bladdered, at one point you can see him staring out the camera, thinking, “Who let a fuckin’ camera crew into our office!?” A Method Acting masterclass! BSS:We did The Tube that November. I’m sure I convinced Mark to wear the mascara. It was kind of a gothy time and his eyes were so big and so blue. We were both into Little Richard, and he’d said, “You’ve got to make eye contact with the audience,” and his technique was to look at the top of the crowd’s heads and make your eyes as big as you can. That was part of my plot on TV, to connect, powerfully, through the cathode rays! SH:Nick Cave was a comparison, then. We were on the same level for years, played the same venues, bumped into each other all the time, all over the world. He managed to take it further, didn’t he? I don’t remember Mark ever turning anything down, he was just unable to be that popular, I think. Steve Webbon:I think chart success for us would have been the icing on the cake, but it certainly wasn’t the be-all and end-all. Sales of Fall albums were very healthy, 15-20,000 initially. Our press department had a good relationship with the NME and Melody Maker, and Mark was a very interesting

Simon Rogers (keyboards, guitar, bass, drum machine, backing vocals)

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John Leckie (producer)

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Steve Webbon (art director, Beggars Banquet Records)

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Chris Bigg (design assistant, Beggars Banquet Records)

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person to interview. So from our perspective, it was great. But, ultimately, The Fall are not a mainstream act and they never would be. CS:Of course it was fun. I was in the best band in the world and we travelled the world showing people how music can be challenging, rewarding and fun, that it needn’t be bland vowelstretching power ballads or dreary dirges to love. BSS:This Nation’s Saving Grace was pretty much the pinnacle. But when it felt too good, Mark would fuck it up. There were times when he said, “I don’t wanna walk around like some smiling fool, happy all the time.” The consistent use of amphetamine erodes clear thinking and does all kinds of chemical shit to you, and if you love someone it’s very, very hard to watch… on [closing song] To Nkroachment:Yarbles, when he sings, “All the good times are past and gone/Wipe the tears from your eyes, son,” I just think it’s haunting and beautiful and heavy. SR:I don’t know what a genius is really, but I think Mark was more of a genius than a lot of people who are called geniuses. But you don’t know what he was a genius at, really. SH:Mark always had that attitude that the singles were supposed to be fun, but the album is your diary of the year. They’ve got an amazing way of showing how the band was at the time. You can hear it – This Nation’s Saving Grace was as close to harmony as M we ever got.

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Robert Whitaker/Camera Press, Retouching by Sarah Hampson

HE OMENS WERE NOT GOOD. “We’ve written some funny songs,” said Paul McCartney to a reporter. “Songs with jokes in. We think that comedy numbers are the next thing after protest songs.” Were The Beatles about to abandon all the glorious promise of their last three singles (I Feel Fine, Ticket To Ride and Help!) and reposition themselves in the lineage of Max Bygraves, Bernard Cribbins and Charlie Drake? Happily they were not. McCartney’s remark was not entirely flippant, for the group really were creating strange new songs with elements of humour. But it was twisted humour that might involve a saucy starlet hiring a chauffeur, or a bloke on the pull who ends up in the bathtub. Or else a lovesick young tourist who wishes he’d passed that French O-level. On Rubber Soul The Beatles were having fun, more fun than they would ever have again. At the same time they were pushing their music – and, in effect, almost everyone else’s – towards some vividly colourful future. In Britain they were national mascots, “our boys”, but in making Rubber Soul, these boys became their own men. HE SECOND HALF OF 1965 OPENED WITH A London premiere for the second Beatles film, Help! This, with its hit single and soundtrack LP, was the lens through which everyone pictured The Beatles at the time. It was received as a light entertainment, not much more, but the

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world loved it. Nobody was feeling bored. Except maybe The Beatles. In the middle of all this, on August 1, they travelled back to their native Lancashire for a TV show at the Blackpool ABC. It was a “variety” programme hosted by the London comics Mike and Bernie Winters. It featured family favourites like Lionel Blair and his dance troupe. It was both a relic of the English music hall and a swansong for the holiday entertainments of the fading British seaside. The Beatles were still game and gave it their utmost. But the rules were old-school showbiz and it was only two summers before the Summer of Love. In hindsight, it was The Beatles’last paddle in that particular pool. After that they made their third tour of North America and stepped into craziness way beyond Lancashire’s brown ales and candy floss. In the course of this new jaunt they dropped acid with Peter Fonda (who said, “I know what it’s like to be dead”), extraordinary gig at Shea Stadium in New York. It was a triumph but, for The Beatles, curiously unsatisfying. At the very zenith of Beatlemania, as musicians they hankered for those rough club gigs of the early days, when they’d played so much better and could connect with each audience member. That kind of communion had given way to something much bigger, but somehow emptier. As a child that summer I was taken to see Help! at our local cinema in Liverpool. Others in the audience must have remembered seeing The Beatles play live, on that very stage, less than four years earlier. Back then they were still a teddy boy rock group, with Pete Best on drums, and were low on the bill beneath local comedian Ken Dodd. Incredibly, since then they’d become the biggest act ➢

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Paul gets comfy, Abbey Road Studio 2,June 15,1965; (below) Help! movie promo;recent Fabs 45s;McCartney in rehearsal for Blackpool Night Out.

Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re having a laugh: (from left) Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney,John Lennon and George Harrison in 1965.

NE QUESTION HAS long swirle ed around e the time The Beatles spent a kingham Palace on October 26, 19 being ceremonially honou as Members Of T Most Excellent Ord The British E Elizabeth II, did they get at least mildly stoned in the Gents? Yes, said John Lennon in 1970: the four of them were “giggling like crazy because we had just smoked a joint in the loos of Buckingham Palace;we were so nervous.” No, said George Harrison, subsequently agreeing that the Fabs were feeling anxious enough to retreat to the lavatory, but insisting, “in there, we smoked a cigarette. We were all smokers in those days.” The consensus has long since settled in George’s favour, though the probable untruth of the weed story hardly detracts from the allure of an episode that spoke volumes about politics, hierarchy, and how much Britain changed in the 1960s. The investiture, announced that June, was the brainchild of Harold Wilson – in terms of his PR

“How nice”:The Beatles with gongs,Buckingham Palace,October 26,1965; (above) with Prime Minister Harold Wilson;(insets) ‘butcher’sleeve;Sgt. Pepper detail;Lennon’s Cold Turkey single.

skills, arguably the first modern Prime Minister, and someone who seemed to see The Beatles’potential for reflected glory in much the same way that Tony Blair would later perceive Britpop. In the spring of 1964, the Labour leader and Merseyside MP had presented the four of them with Variety Club awards;just over a ye later, he put them on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in recognition of their “services to exports”. In retrospect, the cast of people who publicly objected suggests characters from a satirical novel about post-war England. According to The Times, Colonel F. W. Wagg (“of Old Park Avenue, Dover”) resigned from the Labour Party in protest and cancelled a £12,000 bequest he had made to the party in his will. The Mayor of Poole, the gloriously named Councillor L. Drudge, asked his local Tory MP to make “strong recommendations… to ensure there would never again

N THE TH CONTEXT of The B Beatles’story, the whole le occasion now sug uggests a climactic examp ple of the necess ssity to meet mayors, ambassadors rs and monaarchs, before the group drifted off elsew ewhere. e. W Within a year, the music on Revolverr would deci de ecisively push them away from the demands of s wbiz, as Lennon’s bigger-thanJesus quote a famous ‘butcher’LP photo served no e intent, and the end of tourin the obligation to d good. In 1967, en was heard to express the opinion that “The Beatles are turning awfully funny” – as in strange, rather than haha. The MBEs, meanwhile, went on to form a small part of their legend. Paul and George wore their medals on the cover of Sgt. Pepper; two years later, John insisted his Aunt Mimi remove his from her mantelpiece in Dorset, so he could return it in protest at British foreign policy and “Cold Turkey slipping down the charts”. A quarter-century later, two years before McCartney received a knighthood and 23 before Ringo got his, George Harrison uttered what probably deserves to be the last word:“After all we did for Great Britain, selling all that corduroy and making it swing, they gave us that bloody old leather medal with wooden string through it. But my initial reaction was, ‘Oh, how nice, how nice.’And John’s was, ‘How nice, how nice.’”

John and first wife Cynthia at home in 1964;(below) Lennon publishes;a Valentine’s gig,“free gifts for the first 500 ladies…”

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in musical history, the conquerors of Shea Stadium. That’s how telescoped time was in the tale of The Beatles. Help! was a cartoon-like name for a film. And as a film, it reduced its four stars to cartoon status. They were mop-topped Keystone Cops, playing silly buggers for the camera. It’s true they co-operated in the process. The previous film A Hard Day’s Night, while it was a far sharper piece of work, had already simplified their diverse personalities into cardboard cutouts. “Our boys” indeed. As the song Help! had semaphored (albeit so obscurely that even the other Beatles never noticed), John Lennon was not a happy Fab that year. He would call it his “fat Elvis” period. He’d moved to suburban Weybridge seeking peace and privacy with his wife Cynthia and their boy Julian. But the move left him brooding in isolation. In 1964 he’d done a TV interview that gave him pause

And then, of course there were the drugs. FTER A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, MOVIEmaking’s novelty wore off, but the boredom of shooting Help! was eased by two things.

have come across reefers in their time. But it was

Rubber Soul they were writing under

“The main thing,” McCartney told me of

Robert Whitaker, Getty (2)

giddy surrealism, might he try the same in his songwriting?

to lyrics he seemed to operate by rules of his own making. Paul McCartney also felt the need for change. George Harrison and Ringo Starr, like Lennon, had de-camped to far suburbia, but he stayed in central London. Lodging with his girlfriend Jane Asher and her cultured, well-connected family, he moved among the most stimulating salons of the capital. Via Jane’s brother Peter, these connections led to an avant-garde clique of beat poets, gallery owners, freethinkers of doubtful personal hygiene, and the sort of folks who would soon be called hippies. Being McCartney he could somehow

] ‘Oh! What’s that then? What d’you mean?’ You can’t really put it down to anything else, unfortunately. It would be nice to have a clean little cover story, but we haven’t. That’s what it was, literally.” Pot to The Beatles was “bohemian”, meaning artistic and antibourgeois, but also civilised. You moved away from uncouth youthful nights of beer and ciggies and pills and whisky. Pot was not grubby or aggressive. Nowadays one drank a little wine and passed a joint. There might be a spot of dinner: even the food was probably ➢ MOJO 73

Back when they could work it out:Lennon and McCartney during a break in filming for Granada TV;(opposite) John publishes again.

Robert Whitaker, Getty/Popperfoto

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foreign. Pot was a gateway drug to sophistication. You had new sorts of conversation, with new types of music in the background. You began to form opinions about art. Somebody might recommend an interesting new book. Pot was reflective. Pot believed it was rather deep. In these ways, Rubber Soul is every inch the child of its parent narcotic. However, it was still a pre-psychedelic album. Lennon and Harrison had recently discovered LSD at a London dinner party, and Ringo tried the drug in America soon after. But McCartney, despite moving in the most experimental circles, kept his distance for a long time. Not until 1966 would LSD begin to colour their collective creativity. It was Revolver that they would call their “acid album”. Cynthia Lennon looked back on these high times with a sceptical eye. “As far as I was concerned,” she wrote, “the rot began to set in the moment cannabis and LSD seeped its unhealthy way into our lives.” Whereas to The Beatles themselves, and to “beautiful people” in prosperous postcodes, drugs at this point were all promise and no threat. They offered a primrose path to perfumed gardens, where peacocks wandered and sweet ripe fruits fell noiselessly from bough to picnic rug. No one imagined that, for some, the same road led to traffic-poisoned high streets and a life spent squatting by cash points.

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IMED WITH DUE REGARD FOR SANTA CLAUS AND HIS North Pole-based fulfilment operation, Rubber Soul was made in a hurry. The Beatles entered the studio on October 12, just six weeks after the US tour. An LP in those days was understood to need 14 tracks. Oh, and two more songs for a single, please. To be in the shops for the Christmas build-up, they had barely one month. Yet they did it. And the single would be a double A-side, Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out. Their album spurned the easy option of throwing in a few old cover versions. It was all-original. The Beatles’sheer efficiency in recording 16 first-rate tracks in less than five weeks confirms that dope had not made them dopey. To get them over the line, they got in the habit of all-night recording sessions. It was a necessity but also a foretaste of the new way. As playing live began to feel grotesque, so the studio started to feel like home. Their producer George Martin recalled Rubber Soul as a turning point in his relations with the band, who’d begun to assert themselves and explore every avenue. As Lennon told Rolling Stone: “We were just getting better, technically and musically… Finally we took over the studio. In the early days, we had to take what we were given, we didn’t know how you can get more bass. We were learning the technique on Rubber Soul.”

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Only two interruptions were permitted:once, for a Lennon & McCartney TV special in Manchester, and on October 26 to receive their MBEs at Buckingham Palace. It’s now believed unlikely that they smoked pot in the Queen’s toilets that day, but the idea had probably crossed their minds. A stoner’s giggles are one thing, but did The Beatles really intend to make a comedy album? After all, they were funny guys. The American press corps regarded them as the new Marx Brothers. Both their film director Richard Lester and record producer George Martin had solid Goon Show connections. But it seems likelier that McCartney’s remark about comedy songs was really an idea about story-telling and inventing situations. The LP opener, Drive My Car, is the best example:a crunching rocker with a tight, witty narrative that wouldn’t have disgraced its writers’ idol Chuck Berry. McCartney had reported for duty at Lennon’s house with a lyrical hook about “diamond rings”. He knew it was no good. After an unusually laboured session, Lennon came up with a new theme where the girl wants the boy to drive her car (“and maybe I’ll love you”). All the rest, beep-beeps and everything, fell quickly into place. They took it to Abbey Road where Harrison picked up the bass and took his cue from Otis Redding’s Respect. Soul music was much on The Beatles’ minds that winter. McCartney was awed by the bass-playing of Motown’s James Jamerson. They also taped an instrumental, 12-Bar Original, which evoked the Memphis groove of Booker T. And The M.G.’s. McCartney’s pretty ballad Michelle struck some as a comedy number, too. He’d played around with the tune in his teenage years, when he thought it might impress the posh girls at Lennon’s art school. “I’d do Michelle,” he says. “’Ello, welcome to mah French club… You had a few sort of party pieces.” The finished lyric was more recent, with a scent of Gauloises in a boulevard café. Again Lennon came to his aid, adding a middle eight inspired by Nina Simone (“I love you, I love you, I love you…”) that injects the emotional urgency that was lacking. Even Norwegian Wood is witty, in its own murky way. Lennon returns to the rolling, shanty-like folk guitar he’d essayed in early ’65 on You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away. His new song was equally secretive, the near-confession of an extra-marital encounter. (His biographer Philip Norman makes a case for the unnamed lady being the wife of Beatle photographer Robert Freeman, who had lived downstairs from John and Cynthia in Kensington.) McCartney assisted with the writing in various places, and the spirit of Dylan is hovering, but the real ghost in this machine is George Harrison. George had famously noticed Indian musicians playing sitars on the set of Help! that year, and via some Ravi Shankar records, his interest in the instrument led to a spiritual makeover that lasted all his life. The sitar lines he gave to Norwegian Wood bore no special relevance to the song: it was simply a sign of the whole band’s hunger for new musical colours. If one had to nominate the pivotal moment of Rubber Soul, it’s this. As on the previous album (with I Need You and You Like Me Too Much) we saw the guitarist become a true songwriter. This time around, Harrison brought If I Needed Someone, a sign of the emerging love-in between mid-period Beatles and America’s West Coast, particularly The Byrds. And the excellent Think For Yourself (“Paul on fuzz bass” explained the back cover credits) struck a combative note (“I left you far behind…”) – even if, as Harrison later wrote, he’d no idea who the song was aimed at. Ringo, of course, had to be accommodated and by adding some words to What Goes On, a hillbilly skit they’d tried recording back in ’63, he shared a rare writing credit with Lennon & McCartney. (Mark Lewisohn has aptly described it as “one of The Beatles’best Rutles cover versions”.) Like Michelle, it was perhaps a case of easing deadline worries by searching for something they might have dropped behind the sofa. Indeed another Rubber Soul track, Wait, had been held over from Help! All three songs serve their purpose here quite honourably. ➢

IF, BY THE END of 1 65, people were only just discov hat there was somethin e Beatles, h John Lennon’s books. Here, amid the harmlessly Goonish gobbledegook and daft drawings there was plenty of darker stuff:despised fathers;lampooned MPs;dead dogs;a harshness to the humour that startled and disturbed. In his introduction to ’64’s In His Own Write, McCartney had written that “there are bound to be thickheads who wonder why some of it doesn’t make sense, and others who will search for hidden meanings.” But it’s hard not to, even now. Full disclosure:I grew up on the Lennon books. My aunt, who had worked, glamorously, in Foyle’s book shop, had a signed first edition of In His Own Write, and family banter was swollen with Lennonisms. BBC’s investigations prog Panorama was always “Panorasthma”. Britain’s Labour Prime Minister would ever be “Harrassed Wilsod” and the catchphrase of Lennon’s Sherlock Holmes simulacrum, Shamrock Womlbs – “Ellifitzgerrald my dear Whopper” – displaced that of Conan Doyle’s original at every opportunity. Some of it, needless to say, was not to be repeated in a decent household. Lennon was liberal with the word “spastic” – not a cancelled word

world – one in which the second volume’s titular S , Jesus El Pifco, “was a f knew it” value to subsequent students of Lennonology, in how unfiltered his writing was. “They are spontaneous,” he said, looking back on his books in a BBC interview in 1968, on the eve of a theatre adaptation of In His Own Write. “And I hardly ever alter anything because I’m selfish about what I write or big-headed about it. Once I’ve written it, I like it.” Reviewers, particularly of the first, liked it too, and noted what we note today, that these were unexpectedly gritty glimpses inside one quarter of the biggest thing in showbiz. “It’s all in Lennon’s favour,” said the Observer, “that despite the adulation and soft soap, he has remained as tough, arrogant and uncompromising.” The Lennon of A Spaniard In The Works, the Lennon who wrote, “It wasn’t long before old dad/Was cumbersome – a drag”, or Last Will And Testicle – a story about a girl obliged to live in a wooden box, until she burns to death in it – was exorcising an anger that, during the course of the decade, he learned to acknowledge, on the road to becoming the Lennon of Getting Better, who knew he was mean but was changing his scene, and was able to accept Yoko Ono as an equal. “I just hate things less strenuously than I did,” he told the BBC in that 1968 interview. “I haven’t got as big of a chip about it, because maybe I’ve escaped out of it a bit. I think our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. And I think that’s what I sussed when I was 16 and 12, way down the line. But I expressed it differently all through my life.” But in 1965, as Ringo Starr later reflected, we were still seeing Transitional Lennon. “John’s inscription on my copy of A Spaniard In The Works says it all:‘To Ringo with love, you dwarf bastard.’”

“My dear Whopper”: Lennon signs In His Own Write.

Robert Whitaker (4), Getty

OBODY IN THE BEATLES WAS OLDER THAN 25 AT this stage but there is a clear intention to move beyond conventional boy/girl plotlines. John was always likelier than Paul to bare his soul (Beatles For Sale’s I’m A Loser, for instance). Now McCartney proved that he too could tackle problems of real life. Two of his Rubber Soul songs, I’m Looking Through You and You Won’t See Me, signal a shift in subject matter from Romance to Relationships. Both songs (and probably the single We Can Work It Out) date from a time of tensions with Jane Asher. In pursuit of her well-established acting career she asserted herself by accepting a place with the Bristol Old Vic – rather against McCartney’s wishes. Still, it’s to Lennon we look for Rubber Soul’s claim to maturity. Not, admittedly, to its inconsequential closing track Run For Your Life, an unpleasant sub-Elvis swagger. Possibly written with his brain switched off, he disowned it later. Let’s admire instead the writer of Girl, its breathy sighs and yearning a hymn to love’s complexity and some woman’s uniqueness. Its arrangement, too, shows Rubber Soul’s embrace of the unexpected (a Berlin nightclub? The steppes of Mother Russia?) that turns potential gimmicks into moments of authentic beauty. One might easily take against Nowhere Man, which can sound like a sneery hipster’s dismissal of the squares in suits, who do squalid things like work for a living. But the real target of Lennon’s contempt was himself. It’s a weather-vane song that points to his emotional drought in those years between The Beatles’ euphoric breakthrough and the arrival of Yoko Ono. It’s said that Nowhere Man was the first Beatle track that wasn’t some sort of love song. Instead, the absence of love is its propelling force. There is a similar suspicion around The Word. Being a Beatle performance, it’s enjoyable enough. But all the same:“Now that I know what I feel must be right,” sings John, “I’m here to show everybody the light.” The “word” in question being love, who could object? Love was pop music’s stock-in-trade. The troubling difference is that The Word meant a great deal more:it was love on some elevated, quasi-religious level. Lennon was delivering a sermon – one of the very earliest invocations, in pop culture, of universal love, man. America’s flower children had dipped into their parents’trust funds and were on the march. Within two years of Rubber Soul’s release, love was all around. Even The Troggs said as much. They felt it in their fingers, they felt it in their toes. It must have been lovely. The Beatles’ saving grace, even as proto-hippies, was their sardonic Scouse inheritance with its sacred duty to take the piss. They undercut each other’s pretensions and never forgot that pop is short for popular. More than that:now they’d climbed to the top of pop’s mountain (Shea Stadium et cetera) they could finally pause for breath. They turned around to survey the view on all sides. That meant, for the first time, looking back at Liverpool. N THE MIDDLE OF RECORDING RUBBER SOUL, PAUL McCartney told NME’s Keith Altham that “we have always wanted to write a number about the places in Liverpool where we were born. Places like Penny Lane and the Docker’s ➢

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Ringo,John,Paul and George face the US press in Minneapolis, August 21,1965.

John (top),Paul (left) on-stage,and both walking out at Comiskey Park,Chicago, August 20,’65;(centre) the band found Shea Stadium a “curiously unsatisfying” gig on August 15,but the fans clearly didn’t.

Production line at EMI’s factory in Hayes, Middlesex as Rubber Soul is manufactured, November 24,1965.

Rob Sheffield is the author of Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story Of One Band And The Whole World (Dey Street).

Umbrella [an overhead railway] have a nice musical sound, but when we strung them all together in a composition they sounded so contrived we gave up.” Penny Lane was saved for another day; the Docker’s Umbrella got lost. But the song they were struggling with sur vived as In My Life, and it’s a diamond in the crown of Rubber Soul. This was Lennon’s project at first. He was living in Nowhere Land, otherwise known as Surrey, while every night Paul was out in Soho or Belgravia. The Beatles now belonged to the whole world, but where did John belong? That summer

home at Mendips and moving Aunt Mimi to quiet repose in Dorset. In giving up touring, as they would in nine months’ time, The Beatles were not so much renouncing the world as looking for worlds within themselves. They were also reflecting on the world they’d lost. In My Life began as John’s detailed memory of a trip from Mendips to central Liverpool;but as he and Paul both concluded, this was a bus timetable not a pop song. So Lennon remade the lyric as a dream that everyone can dream. Paul sat at John’s mellotron, thought about Smokey Robinson and began to work up a tune. The result was a musical poem of worldwide appeal. Like George Harrison’s sitar on Norwegian Wood, George Martin’s piano solo (sped up to resemble a baroque harpsichord) has no special relevance to In My Life. The song had begun with a little boy being taken by his mum to feed seagulls by the River Mersey – and look what it turned into. Again it speaks to that Rubber Soul joy in sheer elaboration. We can do it! Why not? We can do it! Why not? Nobody in those days wrote on the runoff grooves of a vinyl record. But if they had, that should have been Rubber Soul’s mantra. Fine. But Santa’s elves were still on call and that Christmas Number 1 slot wasn’t going to fill itself. Fear not, The Beatles had a solution. John Lennon wrote Day Tripper, a song he’d struggled with slightly, and as with I Feel Fine before it, he copped some

Avalon, Getty, Robert Whitaker

Just seen some faces: The Beatles arrive in the US;(insets) the UK and US (bottom) versions of Rubber Soul.

have Nowhere M n. Lou Reed’s copy had It’s O e at the top of side t ubber-er Soul was even more influential than the real thing. The US LP begins with the sublime one-two punch of I’ve Just Seen A Face and Norwegian Wood – two acoustic songs in four minutes, boldly announcing the Fabs were making a defiant creative about-face. So paradoxically, by sheer accident, it’s more of a unified folk rock statement than the original. It also adds It’s Only Love, giving some dignity to a ditty John couldn’t even sing without giggling. (“Very bright,” indeed.) I’m Looking Through You has a great false start, with Paul busking a few practice strums. Somehow, the song feels incomplete without it. So it’s an eternal dilemma. In my heart, I know the UK original is the one true Rubber Soul. But when I slap on my battered old vinyl, I’ve Just Seen A Face always triggers that Pavlovian rush of adrenaline. Sure, the US version may be a crass scam, making a mockery of the artists’intentions. But in my life, I love it more.

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FOR AN AMER CAN fan, there’s no thrill like th ng fanfare of Rubbe ond acoustic ripple that kicks off I’ve Just Seen A Face. What an album-starter. What a statement of purpose. There’s one problem. This isn’t how Rubber Soul is supposed to begin. We got the wrong one. All my life, Rubber Soul has been my favourite album – but I’m not even sure which Rubber Soul. Strange but true:like all of The Beatles’early LPs, this one was butchered for the US market by Capitol, who never dreamed these records would someday be revered as sacrosanct artistic units. No, Capitol just wanted to squeeze more funny paper out of the mop tops before their bubble burst, so they cut up the first seven LPs into 11 US versions. Inferior rip-offs, most of them. But Rubber Soul – that’s different. It lost Drive My Car and three other tracks, adding a couple of strays sliced off Help! Yet this is the one case where the butchered version, fraudulent and downright sacrilegious as it is, might actually be (say the word) better? It’s understandable to put your canonical foot down and write off the phoney edition. But in so many ways, the Rubber Soul that changed the world was the US one. The one Brian Wilson heard and decided to top with Pet Sounds. The one Bob Dylan aimed to beat with Blonde On Blonde. The soundtrack to every Haight-Ashbury house party. The concept album that inspired Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye and Carole King. All these American artists who heard it as a challenge – they were responding to the ‘wrong’Rubber Soul. Brian Wilson’s copy didn’t have Drive My Car. Smokey Robinson’s copy didn’t

Ticket to ride:McCartney and Lennon take a break in filming their Day Tripper promo,November 23,1965;(insets) Bobby Parker’s influential single Watch Your Step;the double A-side.

inspiration from Bobby Parker’s 1961 soul stomper Watch Your Step. A hypnotic riff. Marvellous harmonies. And for those in the know, a bit of rudeness: “She’s a As Lennon would later tell Jann Wenner, “was Paul’s title. It was like Yer or weekend hop-head, or uncommitted disciple of the new wisdom. And the ascending “aah-aahs” were novel too, a self-reference to that defining Beatle moment in Twist And Shout. Even so, despite John’s objections, the band and their advisors thought Paul’s B-side might be a better bet. We Can Work it Out was undoubtedly strong:John himself admired the way his “impatient” middle eight (“Life is very short…”) countered the “optimism” of Johnson, reviewing for the NME, said that Day Tripper was “not one of the boys’ strongest melodically.” We Can Work It Out, he suggested, was “much more startling… I’ll stick my neck out and tip it for a hit!” In the end it was decreed this single would be The Beatles’first double A-side. And the North Pole elves were put on overtime.

UBBER SOUL WAS THE FIRST BEATLE ALBUM NOT to carry their name on the cover. This in itself was a small act of self-assertion. True, they had the four most famous faces in pop. But in 1965 record sleeves were still viewed as commercial packaging, not as artworks in their own right. The marketing apparatchiks at EMI had to concede the balance of power was changing; if the precocious young masters wanted “moodily enigmatic” then so be it. All the same, what did “Rubber Soul” actually mean? It’s arguably a slightly crap title. But then, “The Beatles” is arguably a slightly crap name. You just absorb the fact and move on to the magic. It was a cute pun, conflating casual footwear with the black American R&B that continued to excite them.

Nevertheless, the album cover was freighted

Revolver. But on the front Rubber Soul they are there already. The shot uniformity, without sacrificing a collective aesthetic. Only this time, they looked like visionaries. The photograph’s famous ‘stretched’ effect arose when Freeman showed it to the band on a slide projected to a square card. The card accidentally slipped and the image was distorted. At any other moment such a trivial mistake would have been fixed and forgotten. But this was late 1965. An imp of the Zeitgeist whispered in everybody’s ear. Whoo, man! Weird. All four Beatles loved it. The effect is vaguely unsettling:a little mystical, like a reflection on water. But Harrison had no reservations: “I liked the way we got our faces to be longer on the album cover. We lost the ‘little innocents’ tag, the naivety… Rubber Soul was the first one where we were fully fledged potheads.” It seems they already had the album title in mind, so the stretchiness was serendipitous. The logo lettering, itself with an elastic quality, was psychedelic before that word was widely used. Its creator Charles Front, no acid head himself, was only trying to evoke the ooze of sap from a rubber tree. In so doing, he gave us a trope of “trippy” artwork that endured for years to come. ➢ MOJO 79

George,Ringo,Paul and John,backstage during their final UK tour,Birmingham Odeon,December 9,1965;(inset) McCartney’s Michelle goes Number 1 via an unexpected route.

whose demarcation had previously been clear-cut. The Sunday broadsheets were suddenly paying attention. Oxbridge graduates grew their sideburns and thoughtful chins were stroked. Clever folks spoke of “albums” now, not LPs. Simultaneously a rift occurred between pop and rock. Serious “heads” preferred rock. New DJs and new kinds of music magazines came into being. The good old single, at 45rpm, ceased to be quite so central. I was a Beatle fan, but I didn’t hear Rubber Soul until the 1970s. This was common. In 1965 an LP cost around £2, a tenth of the average family’s weekly wage. Singles were cheaper but the wireless was free. I heard Michelle on Radio Caroline in

Getty

1 for a group called The Overlanders. I’d

UBBER SOUL WAS A RECORD THAT EVERY serious musician felt obliged to study. Even Bob Dylan appeared to acknowledge its importance with 4th Time Around on his next album, Blonde On Blonde. Its melodic similarity to Norwegian Wood is unmissable. On the other hand, Dylan has claimed (to his sometime keyboardist Al Kooper) that he’d already played that tune to The Beatles back in ’64. So who was copying whom? The Beach Boys were definitely listening. Brian Wilson said years later:“We prayed for an album that would be a rival to Rubber Soul. It was a prayer, but there was some ego there… and it worked. Pet Sounds happened immediately.” Many others were also inspired, not least The Byrds. At the same time, influence was a two-way street. In Britain, The Kinks, the Stones and The Who had all made powerful music by the end of 1965;they must be acknowledged as spurring The Beatles on, not as passive recipients of the Fab Four’s instructions. By their very existence these bands made The Beatles better. This interchange was possible because Rubber Soul arrived in a time of curiosity and confidence, of belief that marvellous things would be discovered. As Harrison put it: “The most important thing was that we were suddenly hearing songs that we weren’t able to hear before… We were being more influenced by other people’s music and everything was blossoming at that time, including us.” Not everyone bought into it. The Beatles’Cavern contemporaries, like The Searchers and Gerry Marsden, rather fade from our view at this point. Some went cabaret and Cilla Black became the new Vera Lynn. Only The Hollies, from Manchester, rode the changes with panache. (One of them, Graham Nash, helped spread the virus to California.) There have been dissenting voices. The writer Nik Cohn, who mourned the loss of pop’s innocence, said of Rubber Soul, “Musically, this was the subtlest and most complex thing they’d done and lots of it was excellent… but there were also danger signals, the beat had softened and the lyrics showed traces of fake significance. One song at least, The Word, was utter foolishness.” Poet (and jazz reviewer) Philip Larkin also weighed in:“Their fans stayed with them, and the nuttier intelligentsia, but they lost the typists in the Cavern.” Right or wrong, Larkin and Cohn had both identified something. Doubts about The Beatles did creep in amid the rapture. Elvis Costello, who was 11 at the time, admits he was initially baffled by Rubber Soul. He soon got over it but many did not. People rarely used the word “weird” in those days, but it was a word whose time was coming. Some approved of weirdness very much;others sought solace in Tom Jones or Lulu. The original Beatles had been a combo hired by club-owners, so that crowds might dance. Nowadays their music, rather like pot, was best enjoyed sitting down. Rubber Soul blurred the boundary between high culture and pop,

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Rubber began it. The whole situation had created a re-enacting the zaniness of Help! In Swinging England snobbery returned, only this time it was wearing flared trousers. Genres seen as “singles music” were accorded second-class status. As well as ska, MOR and bubblegum, this applied to the black popsoul of Stax and Tamla-Motown – the very music that had made Rubber Soul possible. Later on, as an underage drinker in the dingy pubs around Liverpool Art School, I was told by old cronies of The Beatles that Rubber Soul was not, in fact, a dazzling new direction for the group, but a rediscovery of their bohemian roots. It was John and Paul’s craving for the days before Beatlemania, for the cool days of Stuart Sutcliffe, Juliette Greco, Hamburg existentialists and black poloneck jumpers. I had no opinion. I only noticed that, underage as I was, these wise men expected me to pay for the drinks.

UBBER SOUL WAS RELEASED ON DECEMBER 3, 1965, along with the single Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out. The same date saw the band in Glasgow for the start of their lastever UK tour. The NME reported John as being in a happy mood. The tour was done as a duty, but it was done properly. There was support from The Moody Blues, Merseybeat star Beryl Marsden and Procol Harum’s forerunners The Paramounts. The Beatles’ own entourage ran to just five people:Brian Epstein, two roadies, a PR and Alf the driver. For nine nights they played two shows each evening, in old-fashioned venues that included the Liverpool Empire, whose stage door they’d hung around as boys. Apart from an NME Pollwinners concert the next year, and the famous Apple rooftop gig in ’69, they would never again perform in Britain. Still to come was a 1966 world tour, which proved so unnerving that the band drew a line under live work altogether. This move might deny fans some nights of happy delirium, and it’s the reason that I never got to see The Beatles. But it did turn them into a pure recording act, and thereby left to posterity a greater body of timeless art. We are all the beneficiaries of that decision. With Rubber Soul under their belts, The Beatles must have ended 1965 aware that they had become an entirely new entity. In a little over three months’time, they would re-enter Abbey Road to record a noise even more revolutionary than anything on Rubber Soul. It was called Tomorrow Never Knows. M

F I LT E R A L B UM S

Anger is an energy The Bristol raging squad put steel in their mettle and laugh in the face of adversity. You’ll love the smell of Idles in the morning, says Keith Cameron. Illustration by Neil Edwards. production. The most telling of Launay’s credits (Public Image Ltd, Killing Joke, Nick Cave) is his work with To Hell With Poverty-era Gang Of Four: marrying funky agit-clang to a pliable bottom end is Ultra Mono’s bedrock. Exhibit A:the high-stepping Ultra Mono punk rock aerobathon Mr Motivator, its riff a tuffer PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP/MC upgrade on Joy standout NFAMWAP. Talbot relishes the extra space to spew his pop-cultural jingles, UTURE ROCK pub philosophers might look fantasising “Kathleen Hanna with bear claws back on Ultra Mono as the moment Joe Talbot grabbing Trump by the pussy/Delia Smith after 10 connected with his inner Bono. The clues were Chardonnays baking me a nice cookie.” out there. Idles gigs are as notable for Talbot’s Remarkably for an album precision-tooled to earnest political sermons or soliloquies on respect take all-comers in today’s patriarchal post-truth for others as the music’s moshpit fuel. Talbot has the “Idles have dogma scrap, the predominant mood is jolly. ability to irk fellow travellers, much as most bands rationalised Brutalism and Joy had grievous personal subtexts, over the past 40 years have taken a pop at U2. And the singer in Idles, like the singer in U2, can thank their fury into whereas Ultra Mono plays the exhortation game on a universal stage. Model Village, a splenetic twist on his bandmates for ennobling his gobby chutzpah a single giant There’ll Always Be An England were it rewritten to with their staunch abilities. Now, it seems Talbot soundtrack one of Jimmy Cauty’s dystopian and Idles have identified album number three as bullethead.” dioramas, posits Talbot delivering a breathless possibly the most important record they will ever commentary to getting chased through the titular make:the optimum moment to go to war. “Do you twitchy-curtained hellhole. “I see a lot of gammon in the village/I hear that thunder?” Talbot intones amid the martial grime punch don’t see a lot happen in the village/Just give them an anthem and of Grounds. “That’s the sound of strength in numbers.” they’ll sing it/Still they don’t know the meanings in it.” The blend In 2019, a year after second album Joy As An Act Of Resistance, of Talbot’s grotesque satire with Mark Bowen and Lee Kiernan’s Joe Talbot said he had the third act worked out. 2017’s Brutalism hyperventilating downstrokes – think Devo do Wire – is perfectly had been “pure catharsis”;Joy was “a pragmatic reaction”. “Next,” pitched. As is the sequel:the twin guitar-army’s precision chops he decreed, “you act. You do. The next album is about the do.” propel the feminist fightback anthem Ne Touche Pas Moi, with Ultra Mono is the almighty sound of the do getting done. Talbot’s yelping indignation (“This is a pistol/For the wolf Hitherto a ragged peasant army charging at the forces of evil whistle”) bolstered by a magisterial Jehnny Beth. armed only with pitchforks, fists and righteous indignation, Idles The other guest turns are equally eye-catching:Jamie Cullum have rationalised their fury into a single giant bullethead, a contributes the melancholic wee hours piano prelude to Kill Them Wagnerian reduction of riffs, beats, melody and lyrical maxims. With Kindness, a pummelling drool exchange between Talbot and Both its predecessors had standout The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow. Then Adam Devonshire and Sex moments, but for every Mother (“The best Swing’s avant-jazz saxophonist Colin Webster enjoy a sub-bass duel way to scare a Tory is to read and get rich”) on Reigns, a pitch-black slab of distorted synthetics. Dev’s JJ or Danny Nedelko (“My blood brother is an Burnel-worthy malevolence is a reliable power source throughout, immigrant”) there were gear-grinding leading the melodic line on Carcinogenic’s jaunty class-hate singpassages where the ensemble thrash sapped along (“Getting minimum wage whilst your boss takes a raise/As momentum. Ultra Mono sees a decisive shift he lies through his brand-new teeth is – carcinogenic!”) away from wassailing rabble-rousery, Never shy about over-sharing, the relish with which Talbot narrowing its focus onto key pressure confronts and transcends his violent impulses is undiminished, but points:unison playing and repetitive here his spiel is sharper and more nuanced. On penultimate track structures, minimising input to magnify BACK STORY: A Hymn, he even adopts an Ian Astbury croon for opaque asides UNE ENTENTE impact. With five distinct elements, this CORDIALE (“Hot Zumba classes at the new church”;“Janine held the flag with must have tested Idles’ collective ego. But it ● Idles recorded at La white knuckles”) to the recurrent mantra “I want to be loved/ seems their philosopher soul had a Frette, the Paris studio Everybody does”. Stealthily layering slow-burn emotion, A Hymn where the Bad Seeds readymade flash-card:both pre-album made Skeleton Tree with would have made a logical finale. Except our nimble battalion has tasters Mr Motivator and Grounds use the producer Nick Launay. one final surprise:Ultra Mono closes on a euphoric high with phrase “I am I”, presumably akin to the One day, Warren Ellis Danke, the tribal revel showcase for Jon Beavis, Idles’ indomitable visited Launay and Idles Rastafarian I and I concept of spiritual unity invited him to guest. human drum machine, as Talbot quotes the opening lines from under God, only much louder. If there isn’t Ellis simply barked a Daniel Johnston’s True Love Will Find You In The End. single “Hey!” on already an official Idles church or flag, it’s Thus, war is over, I am I prevailing over the haters and the Grounds. A greater surely only a matter of time. contribution came from “stone-faced liars” – for the duration of this record, at least. One Back in the bunker, Ultra Mono’s opening Jehnny Beth (above) on reason for Idles’ rapid ascent is it hasn’t been rapid at all. Over 10 Ne Touche Pas Moi, but song, War (of course), delivers a bass/ years, much of that time slogging at the periphery, this band have not before correcting drums/guitar slash-up of Dead Kennedys’ earned their stripes the hard way. New tests await:previous LPs Talbot’s French. “She California Über Alles and Shellac:hysteric said, ‘That’s not how you have served as primers for the band’s live show, but Ultra Mono’s say, Don’t touch me. It’s, melodrama undercut by ascetic rock skills. level of brute sophistication is such you wonder how they might do Ne Me Touche Pas.’ I Although hip-hop producer Kenny Beats’ it performative justice. For now, though, it’s enough to enjoy this asked if she would mind “programming assistance” reflects the singing our bad French. sound of thunder and savour that sweet scent of victory. She said, ‘It’s a very album’s less-is-larger strategy, more honest and primal way instructive is Joy mix-team Nick Launay and JOE TALBOT ON THE UNIFIED SELF, A BIG BALL of saying it – it works.’” IN THE FACE AND THE JOY OF JAMIE CULLUM… Adam Greenspan’s shift up to full

Idles

★★★★

Johnny Hostile

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IDLES TALK!

AUGUST

Â£1 WA R

S TOR IE S

MU S IC

Disclosure

★★★ Energy

AngelOlsen

★★★★ Whole New Mess JAGJAGUWAR. CD/DL/LP

Monomaniacally yours:Joe Talbot enjoys a moment of acceptance.

“Jamie Cullum sums up what Idles is about” Idles’Joe Talbot talks to Keith Cameron. When we spoke in May 2019,you had no songs,but the title, artwork and manifesto for this album were already conceptualised – has it all come to pass? “They’re all exactly the same. The album was written around the title. I remember,we were driving towards Switzerland and I was just like,‘Ultra Mono’,and I pictured this thing:the cupboard,a great metaphor for self-containment,the unified self,the momentary acceptance of the self. My dad did a sculpture for the back cover:a sculpture within a cupboard. To embody the notion that ‘Ultra Mono’ is to accept all of your mess inside and just be strong and unified to contain that.” The front cover is pretty striking too. “It’s a Russell Oliver painting of a guy getting hit in the face with a ball. Exemplifying momentary acceptance of the self. Also,it sums up our music:a big pink soft thing smashing you in the face.” That’s certainly what the record sounds like. Where does a song as angry as Model Village come from? “I was livid. (Sighs) I was fucking livid. It’s just everything that seems to be happening with politics. You have everyone on the left repeating themselves. Everyone on the right repeating themselves but seemingly growing in numbers by the fucking millions,managing to vote Brexit and for Trump,vote for Boris. And people on the left saying,‘Democracy isn’t working.’ What? Because of Brexit?! You mad cunts! It’s just like all these villages repeating cyclical behaviours,and it’s never anyone’s fault but the other villages,and everyone’s stupid except for their village. And this isn’t working. Capitalism is obviously not working for the poor. It’s working beautifully for the billionaires. Can no one see that?” How did you achieve the ultimate bizarre album guestpairing:Jamie Cullum and The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow? “It’s unreal. David Yow came to our shows in Los Angeles,and obviously it’s like,‘Oh fuck,David Yow is here.’ So I did my best impersonation of not impersonating David Yow on-stage. We met him for lunch and we stayed friends. Then we realised that [Idles bassist] Dev’s voice is fucked:he smokes way too many cigarettes, drinks alcohol and does cocaine. He used to be able to properly scream,now he can’t and he’s going to get worse. On the record, we can’t have that. When Dev could sing,he was like a shit David Yow. So why not ask David Yow to replace the shit David Yow? He was game,and it was magic. Jamie Cullum,I love his radio show, I’m a genuine fan. Met him at the Mercurys,and then he got in contact – ‘If you ever need any piano…?’ He sums up what Idles is about:only working with people that work hard,do what they love,and mean it. Jamie Cullum is that guy. It’s like the most polite BBC Radio 2 middle finger I can give to everyone.”

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Skeletal early version offers new perspectives on 2019’s All Mirrors. Having penned the songs that would comprise last year’s All Mirrors,Angel Olsen ditched her 4-track and repaired to a former Catholic church in Washington,overlooking the ocean,recording her first swing at the album with longterm collaborator Michael Harris. She would ultimately radically reconceive the record with producer John Congleton,adding a stirring emotional undertow via stark, impressive strings and synth parts. But while the ambitious orchestrations of All Mirrors aren’t yet in the picture,these songs – encompassing love, despair and the rejection of youthful illusions – are well served by the sparse guitarand-vocal arrangements and intimate,reverb-y ambience. The album also rescues two songs Olsen left on the shelf. With the sublime Waving, Smiling sounding like Tanya Donnelly crooning torch songs in a 1940s Voice-O-Graph booth,it’s the equal of anything on All Mirrors. Stevie Chick

Bright Eyes

ISLAND. CD/DL/LP

Glitzy dance pop from Surrey siblings served with brio. Reigate – the kind of genteel Home Counties town portrayed in 1980s sitcoms –also spawned prodigiously-gifted, Grammy-nominated brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence. Their bold formula pairs established vocalists and greenhorns with lustrous pop house. Whip-smart collaborative choices remain a key asset of their third album – the product of a writing blitz that produced 200 songs after a year-long sabbatical. Energy is bookended by contributions from Kelis and Common,but real value lies elsewhere. On Douha, Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara’s ebullient vocals snake around a wandering bass line and filtered house stylings reminiscent of the great French touch producers. The languorous Alabama rapper Mick Jenkins is made for the Burial-ish,gauzy twostep of Who Knew. Occasionally, you yearn for Disclosure to take a rasp to Energy and roughen its edges,but their knack for canny hooks guarantees they won’t be retiring back to Surrey any time soon. Stephen Worthy

★★★

The Killers

Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was

Imploding The Mirage

DEAD OCEANS. CD/DL/LP

Omaha indie stalwarts return with 10th album. “Cut a rug,let’s throw a party,” sings Conor Oberst on Just Once In The World,and while there are good reasons to celebrate Bright Eyes’ return – this is their first album since 2011’s The People’s Key – the core trio of Oberst,Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott are again writing songs that appear to dance on the brink of disaster. Informed by loss and illness, they mainly unfold in the personal sphere – medical lament Forced Convalescence; double-edged love-song Hot Car In The Sun;Calais To Dover’s “remorse and apprehension” – yet there’s also a global subtext,Mariana Trench zooming in and out like a manic rolling news story, personal tragedy punctuated by crashing markets. These are

★★★ ISLAND. CD/DL/LP

Midas-shaming Nevadan showmen total 14 producers over six albums. There’s blameless pleasure in The Killers’ sheer art attack of heartland anthem and parents-are-Cure-fans attitude. Amid the flattering Anglophile bombast,Vegas’s jackpot-

snaffling quartet (actually a trio while co-founder Dave Keuning sits this sixth batch out) still seem dedicated to proving they’re not U2. With 28 million units sold,Brandon Flowers’ commercial appeal holds steady on Imploding The Mirage under producers 13 and 14 Shawn Everett (Weezer, Beck) and Jonathan Rado (of duo Foxygen),who lather fidgety single Caution and When The Dreams Run Dry in fine ’80s studio-wash. Flowers channels everyone from Tom Petty to The Blue Nile (evoked in Lightning Fields),with a dab of Dire Straits in Running Towards A Place and funky Queen on Fire In Bone. Flowers experiments with restless lyrical memoir about “what pretty girls do” in the desert. Statistically? They listen to The Killers on their phones. Andrew Collins

Gillian Welch & David Rawlings

★★★★ All The Good Times ACONY. DL

American folk’s first couple rush-release their lockdown covers session. Lockdown,it seems,stirred even the most reticent of perfectionists into spontaneity. While contributing significantly to two David Rawlingsfronted records,Gillian Welch hasn’t put her name on an album cover since 2011’s extraordinary Harrow And The Harvest. A set of homebrewed folk covers,sung by both Welch and Rawlings,the vibe here is scruffier and more spontaneous than the pair’s usual micro-managed beauty; five of the 10 tracks are even first takes. It isn’t,though, throwaway. Rawlings fronts a filigreed version of Dylan’s Senor,comparable to his 2009 take on Cortez The Killer,but the five Welch leads are the big draw,none better than a poignant Hello In There that brings all her commanding tenderness to the John Prine song. A harbinger,too,of an imminent Welch glut:Boots No. 2 ,the first of three volumes of unreleased songs from the early 2000s,is also just out, also essential. John Mulvey

First impression: Angel Olsen in reflective mood.

Kylie Coutts, Tom Ham

precarious songs,Oberst’s voice as fragile as an egg,yet when it comes to songwriting, Bright Eyes remain a safe pair of hands. Victoria Segal

Droll and reserved: Bill Callahan,looking for role models and father figures.

Home truths A master storyteller goes divining for father figures. By JohnMu lvey.

BillCallahan

★★★★ Gold Record

Hanly Banks Callahan

DRAG CITY. CD/DL/LP/MC

IT IS COMFORTING, after a fashion, to discover that Bill Callahan is lying again. In 2019, the artist formerly known as Smog returned from a five-year break with Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest, mostly abandoning his old unreliable narrators in favour of something akin to lived truth. Callahan had got married, become a father and lost his mother, it transpired, and he wrote about all these things – and the creative challenges of writing about them – with a radical candour very nearly as unnerving as what had preceded it. Gold Record, though, begins with a reassuringly demonstrable falsehood. The first song on Callahan’s seventeenth album is called Pigeons, and its first line is “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash,” a striking declaration that isn’t even true to the fictional logic of what ensues. Instead, Callahan’s protagonist is a Texan limo driver, who picks up a couple of newlyweds and proceeds, gently, to tell them the meaning of marriage. He is wary of being “preachy”, but also of his heartfelt civic duties:“When I see people about to marry,” he half-sings, halfintones. “I become something of a… plenipotentiary.” The song ends with the lyrical equivalent of an author’s signature, but Callahan doesn’t use his own name or stick

with that of Johnny Cash. Instead, he borrows the last line from Famous Pigeons is a great story and an even better song – a sort of diffident, silvery extrapolation of country closer in spirit to Willie Nelson than Cash or Cohen, with horn trim that places the drama close to the Mexican border. But the appropriation of baritone heroes, and the young couple asking their mature chauffeur for advice, establishes a key theme of this vivid, thoughtful, funny, quietly moving and all-round exceptional album. If Shepherd… was filled with true-ish stories about becoming a parent – “The panic room,” lest we forget, “is now a nursery” – then Gold Record pivots on tales of role models and father figures. Some of these, like Cash and Cohen, are musical. A janky song named after Ry Cooder merely lists the great man’s glories, provable or otherwise:“Those licks he plays on Chicken Skin”, whereupon Callahan and his fellow guitarist Matt Kinsey loosely shoot for the Chicken Skin Music vibe;Cooder’s apparent mastery of a yoga pose called Omkarasana. The Mackenzies, meanwhile, is an astonishing landmark in a career full of them. A short story with the allusive minimalism of Raymond Carver and surreal twists of Donald Barthelme, it details how the narrator’s car breaks down and he is helped out by a friendly older guy, who also invites him into his home for a drink. Inside, he discovers a place has

been set for him at dinner, bonds with the man – he’s called Jack – over “Mel Tormé and the early movies of Kid and Play”, and is eventually shown to his bed by Jack’s wife, Brenda;in a room, he realises, that belonged to the couple’s dead son. Strange enough, but the plot is made stranger by the fact that Callahan’s next door to Jack and Brenda, and occasionally wonders about his own wife and children on the other side of the fence. “I’m the type of guy who sees a neighbour outside/Stays inside and hides,” he admits. The narrator of The Mackenzies is a droll, reserved Callahan type, similar to many who’ve populated the singer’s catalogue these past 30 years, and Gold Record is peppered with such throwbacks. There’s a stripped-down reprise for 1999’s mission statement Let’s Move To The Country, and some more of Callahan’s beloved equine and riverine metaphors to add to the collection. But where once he seemed to articulate sociopathy, perhaps even misanthropy, Callahan’s cast on Gold Record are notable for their kindness, and for the dignity of their discretion. Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest made for a scrappy and compelling document of how Callahan, in his early fifties, had learned to take pleasure in the responsibilities of adulthood. Gold Record tells stories about what we need and what we can learn from those who’ve long accepted such obligations:the hard-earned wisdom and possible consolations of those who could, just about, be our fathers and mothers. Like Jack and Brenda say at the end of The Mackenzies, “Son, it’s OK/It’s OK/Son, son/We’re OK.”

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Ed Harcourt

★★★ Monochrome To Colour POINT OF DEPARTURE. CD/DL/LP

Enduring songwriter doesn’t sing a rainbow.

Bob Mould:he’s angry and ready to go to war.

Rejoice,fans of angry Bob – those black sheets of rain have returned.

is covered in ash and flames/Keep denying the winds of climate change”, Bob’s fiercest set since Beaster is unapologetically political, lead single

A VIOLENT mood-change from last year’s hazy, harmony-drenched Sunshine Rock, Blue Hearts swaps Beach Boys homages for walls of angered noise. Opening with the apocalyptic couplet “The west coast

nation address channelling early Hüsker Dü and aiming at the “evangelical ISIS”. It’s not just the Trump-era that’s got his goat – but where romantic misery typically moves Mould to melancholic

Bob Mould

★★★★ Blue Hearts MERGE. CD/DL/LP

Stevie Chick

The Allman Betts Band

Various

Dan Penn

Emma Swift

★★★

★★★★

★★★

Angel Headed Hipster:The Songs Of Marc Bolan & T.Rex

Living On Mercy

Blonde On The Tracks

Bless Your Heart BMG. CD/DL/LP

Blake Little

however, with even American Crisis’s bleak predictions that “We’re going to war/We’re going to die” sweetened by his trademark anthemic punk rock.

BMG. CD/DL/LP

Sons of famous Southern rockers actually have fun with that pedigree.

Grand double tribute bangs a gong for Bolan.

The very existence of The Allman Betts Band feels like the premise of, or punchline to,jokes concerning Southern rock in 2020 – middle-aged men with daddy issues,vestigial pride in a complicated past,cashing in on familial heritage. From their ABBgenuflecting name to the Brothers And Sisters font they use for the cover of Bless Your Heart,their septet’s second LP, Devon Allman and Duane Betts don’t duck for cover. Still, the 13 tracks of this marathon double-album offer surprising rewards,from the wonderfully spiralling instrumental Savannah’s Dream to the harmonised hymn Magnolia Road. You might scan the linernotes for Patterson Hood during Rivers Run or suspect a Chris Robinson co-write on the mighty Carolina Song. No,this ABB isn’t trying to redefine what Southern rock can be, but they do delight in the sounds of that inheritance. Grayson Haver Currin

Maybe it’s because of his fragile decline, but there’s always a sense Marc Bolan fans must practise constant vigilance,defending and polishing his reputation. This compilation should assuage fears,a herald of T.Rex’s November induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Produced by Hal Willner,who died in April,it feels doubly elegiac,a mood best caught by Nick Cave’s tremendous Cosmic Dancer. Even so,there’s fun to be had as a tigerish Peaches has her electronic way with Solid Gold Easy Action,Kesha rampages through Children Of The Revolution,and Gavin Friday turns in a fine cabaret nocturne version of The Leopards. Julian and Sean Lennon appear in separate musical berths,while U2 stick close to Get It On’s hairpin bends with Elton John reprising his 1971 Top Of The Pops cameo on piano. Bolan fans can breathe: he’s still their main man. Victoria Segal

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LAST MUSIC CO. CD/DL/LP

TINY GHOST. CD/DL/LP

A veteran hitmaker steps from the background to reckon with time.

Nashville-based Aussie visits Bob Dylan’s back catalogue.

Even if the name Dan Penn doesn’t ring a bell,the songs he’s written since he sold Is A Bluebird Blue? to Conway Twitty in 1960 should – I’m Your Puppet,The Dark End Of The Street,and Aretha’s Do Right Woman,Do Right Man to name but three. A critical element in the South’s homespun answer to California’s Wrecking Crew,Penn offered downhome wisdom from the crossroads of country, soul and rock for six decades. At 78,Penn returns with a rare album,mightily played and poignantly sung. He grapples with ageing out of an industry he helped fashion,speak-sings lessons on making love last, and ponders his increasingly pressing mortality during powerful bookends. “Yes,I know there’ll come a time/ When the Lord will draw the line,” he foretells above comforting gospel harmonies for the finale,his brawny but tender voice sporting the grain of a remarkable life. Grayson Haver Currin

After 2018’s instrumental album Beyond The End,Ed Harcourt has clearly decided that words are unnecessary. Monochrome To Colour strives to create its own emotional spectrum through piano,violin and cello,Portishead drummer Clive Deamer providing the necessary strikes and slashes of charcoal. The results are gently evocative,Harcourt raising a range of ghosts with his music,from the haunted music-box Mogwai of Childhood and chain-rattling beats of After The Carnival to First Light’s Warren Ellis-bearded phantoms. So Here’s To You, Hally,meanwhile,is a pure cricket-flannels English elegy, all fond farewells and gathering storms. There are less overt hauntings – King Raman is a Ken Burns soundtrack in search of some poignant Americana – but the predominant tone is of looming trouble and seeping regret. Victoria Segal

With only one previous EP under her belt, a debut album of Dylan covers seems an odd move for Emma Swift. Produced by Wilco’s Pat Sansone and with Robyn Hitchcock adding guitar,for the most part Swift doesn’t stray far from The Great Dylan Songbook,with Planet Waves’ Going,Going,Gone about as far off plot as she gets. Blonde On The Tracks,however,isn’t about Bob-bragging. Swift says she’s always liked Dylan lyrics sung from a female perspective,a point she emphatically underlines on One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later),replacing grudging self-recrimination with a softer, more generous fondness, repeating the same trick alongside a Byrds-like jingle jangle on Queen Jane Approximately. Cover versions of Dylan may be two-a-penny, but it’s obvious Swift knows her subject very well and empathises deeply with the underlying emotions and struggles of the songs. Andy Fyfe

Metallica

★★★★ S&M 2 BLACKENED RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP

Metal grandees’second live set with San Francisco ork. Mindful of maximum impact,Metallica filmed 2019’s S&M2 performance for a cinema release that grossed $5.5 million last year. A 20th anniversary celebration of S&M,their earlier band-plus-San Francisco Symphony link with late conductor Michael Kamen,this second chapter was recorded at the city’s Chase Center,with Edwin Outwater and Michael Tilson Thomas conducting and material from 2016’s Hardwired… To Self Destruct added,plus a take on Alexander Mosolov’s Soviet futurist work,The Iron Foundry. Though the battering-ram thrust of Sad But True takes some beating,other highlights are James Hetfield solo with orchestra on The Unforgiven III,and on (Anesthesia) Pulling Teeth,SFS principal bassist Scott Pingel paying tribute to Metallica’s Cliff Burton, who died in 1986 aged 24. James McNair

JAZZ B Y A N DY C O WA N

Benjamin Biolay

★★★★ Grand Prix BLUE WRASSE. CD/DL/LP

Hook-laden ninth from the French superstar. The album comes with stickers! Benjamin Biolay is at his best when playing desperate characters,losers who believe the next roll of the dice will change everything. Alarm bells rang with the rumour his latest outing consisted of hymns to fast cars and faster women… but the character in flames on the sleeve – ignored behind the racing cars – should be reassurance that this is no midlife crisis. The fast cars are stolen and the women are stealing away,yet the singer’s gift for turning loss into defeat never deserts him,while his mastery of melding memorable guitar and keyboard lines to dad-disco rhythms hits some sort of apotheosis on Virtual Safety Car. It’s almost 20 years since his debut,Rose Kennedy,but – one last roll of the dice – Grand Prix has just given Biolay his first French chart-topper. Perhaps it’s time the rest of the world caught up. David Hutcheon

Brad Mehldau

★★★★ Suite:April 2020 NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP

Jazz pianist’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Brad Mehldau was on tour when The Netherlands, where he lives, went into lockdown. Like the rest of us, the Florida-born pianist was thrust into a strange new world and,in an attempt to

Jérôme Witz, John Marolakos

Sophie Hunger: beset by fever dreams.

make sense of it,composed a suite for solo piano. It consists of a dozen short vignettes; each one reflecting Mehldau’s different moods,thoughts, and emotions. Though the pianist is renowned for his technical brilliance,his pieces here are mostly defined by simplicity and elegance. Most striking of all is the ballad, Remembering Before All This, a bittersweet evocation of nostalgia. Three covers round off the album,including Neil Young’s optimistic anthem, Don’t Let It Bring You Down. A limited edition signed LP is available in addition to standard vinyl and CD versions,with 90 per cent of the proceeds going to a charitable jazz foundation. Charles Waring

Motorpsycho

★★★★ The All Is One RUNE GRAMMOFON. CD/DL/LP

Heavy Norwegian psychout,anchored close to the edge by a 42-minute suite. Motorpsycho are dedicated to the long reach. Singerbassist Bent Sæther and guitarist-singer Hans Magnus Ryan – the founding axis – have steadily evolved over three decades from the,raw power of their 1990s records to a thundering radiance of progressive-metal dynamics and West Coast-’60s dreaming. Now they bring the connected energies and thematic,dystopian ambition binding 2017’s The Tower,a double CD,and the three Yes-length essays on 2019’s The Crucible to a fitting climax:two discs of winding composition,hard-rock battle stations and choral-vocal spires suggesting Blue Öyster Cult in Live Dead dimensions. The five-part N.O.X. is an LPlength trip in itself,with one mighty span (Night Of Pan) of synth-pulse hypnosis and jungle-telegraph turbulence. But Motorpsycho can jam a lot into a crevice. At five minutes each,the Who-throttlesGenesis action in The Magpie and the thundering-hymn finale Like Chrome are tight reward on an epic ride. David Fricke

Osees

★★★ Protean Threat CASTLE FACE. CD/DL/LP

Twenty-third studio album from the artistes formerly known as The Oh Sees A change is as good as a rest for John Dwyer’s prolific West Coast shape-shifters, whose latest missive forsakes the lengthy drone workouts of last year’s Face Stabber for 13 shorter,punchier excursions. Indeed,this hectically enjoyable LP’s title might serve as a motto for Dwyer’s constantly evolving enterprise,wherein the relative longevity of the current two drummer line-up (Paul Quattrone joined Dan Rincon in the percussive harness in 2017) has been the exception rather than the rule. “I drink 7-Up! I smoke CBD!” proclaims the frontman amid Red Study’s jaunty bass swirl, and the restless vigour of Protean Threat – one minute crushing Can into Clinic,the next plugging Wire into Atari Teenage Riot – testifies to the invigorating properties of that breakfast of champions. Ben Thompson

Gregg August

★★★★ Dialogues On Race, Vol. 1 IACUESSA. CD/DL/LP

THE ABILITY TO flit between worlds comes naturally to Gregg August – a commanding bassist equally at ease playing superswinging hard bop (with the JD Allen Trio),Afro-Latin jazz (Arturo O’Farrill) and classical (Orpheus Chamber Orchestra). Elements of all three percolate through a suite he’s been refining since 2009,as a brass-dominated decet’s artfully fluid,Mingus-like evocations animate the poetry of Maya Angelou and Langston Hughes. Added emotional heft comes from the velvet vocal tones of Wayne Smith,Forest VanDyke and Shelley Washington, although it’s the trauma of Emmett Till’s mother’s raw testimony (recounting her son’s 1955 lynching) that hits with heart-breaking force. August’s ability to bridge worlds and a dramatic gift for pacing shine throughout this penetrating,prescient double album that shrewdly balances melody with pulse.

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Sophie Hunger

★★★★ Halluzinationen CAROLINE INTERNATIONAL. CD/DL/LP

Berlin-based Swiss polymath’s seventh LP,recorded in consecutive live takes. Across Europe,but still not the UK,Sophie Hunger is renowned for her jazz and film soundtracks as much as rock and pop;a superb pianist and guitarist with a rangy,smoky voice. Her closest comparison would be Feist,or Sharon Van Etten’s rhythmic revamp Remind Me Tomorrow. Like Hunger’s 2018 LP Molecules, Halluzinationen is produced by rhythm king Dan Carey (Black Midi,Kate Tempest). His Krautrocking inclinations are responsible for the electrogliding beauty Alpha Venom, but Halluzinationen also embraces delicate hip-swaying (Liquid Air) and after-hours ballads (Stranger). Everything Is Good might be bouncy Europop but the lyric is sarcastic,slotting alongside Halluzinationen’s theme,a mind fractured by loneliness and fever-dreams in the wake of a broken relationship, against a backdrop of nocturnal Berlin,where the likes of Hunger seek solace and escape. Martin Aston

Dave Milligan

Krononaut

★★★

★★★★

Momento

Krononaut

BIG BASH. DL

TAK:TIL. CD/DL/LP

Scottish pianist/ arranger Milligan’s roots are as deep in folk as they are in jazz. While explicit on The Colin Steele Quartet’s fresh delve into the Joni Mitchell songbook (Joni),it’s more artfully camouflaged on this collaboration with Italian rhythm section Danilo Gallo and U.T. Gandhi. Be it Going Nowhere’s lilting progressions,There’s Always Tomorrow’s restrained melancholia or the Satie-like solo piano of Sandy’s 70th,Momento is intimate and impactful.

An air of eerie disquiet pervades Krononaut’s first outing. A meeting of minds between Brian Eno guitarist Leo Abrahams and Spin Marvel drummer Martin France,it’s a place where jazz intersects sparse,spacious ambience à la Jon Hassell or Nils Petter Molvær. Pensive meanderings,cursive drones and askew grooves are offset by Arve Henriksen’s flute-like trumpet and Matana Roberts’ ghosting sax on this slow-burning oddity.

Maria Schneider

Idris Ackamoor & The Pyramids

★★★★

Data Lords

Shaman!

ARTISTSHARE. CD/DL

STRUT. CD/DL/LP

Schneider has few peers in orchestral jazz. The epic sweep of this double-CD – about finding space amid the digital world’s endless chatter – hits bracing highs on the Google-mocking Don’t Be Evil and Wagnerian dystopia of Sputnik,with Ben Monder’s slithering electric guitar particularly prominent. Other singular personalities – Gary Versace,Frank Kimbrough, Donny McCaslin – shine throughout the second disc’s richly textured,panoramic celebration of the natural world.

Idris Ackamoor and his lively septet of Afro-futurist voyagers are in high spirits as their millennial comeback gathers pace. But while shuffling rhythms and extra-terrestrial soundscapes stay firmly in place, Shaman! strays from predecessor An Angel Fell’s dark politics to explore more sprawling, introspective territory – hymning mentor Cecil Taylor and mourning lost loved ones – with the leader’s energetic saxes and Dr Margaux Simmons’ dovetailing flutes leading the way. AC

MOJO 87

F I LT E R A L B UM S one to take that often. Smith, though, is in her element, a committed interpreter and proselytiser for history’s wilder talents. John Mulvey

You ups the ante:a mellow, intricate jam in the best traditions of ’77-era Dead. John Mulvey

JuniAta Sault

★★★★

FLYING ON FIRE. CD/DL/LP

Saudade

Untitled (Black Is)

Susanna

★★★★

Baudelaire & Piano SUSANNASONATA. CD/DL/LP

Stellar French poetry here complemented by a Norwegian musical setting. The pantheon of those putting the poems of Baudelaire to their music is dominated by his countrymen Claude Debussy and Serge Gainsbourg, whose 1964 adaptation of Le Serpent Qui Danse was titled Baudelaire. Now, Norway’s Susanna Wallumrød reframes 10 of the Symbolist pioneer’s verses on an album opening with The Dancing Snake, her reading of Le Serpent Qui Danse. With Susanna And The Magical Orchestra in the distant rear-view mirror, Baudelaire & Piano is spiritually akin to her last album, the Hieronymus Bosch-inspired Garden Of Earthly Delights made with the Brotherhood Of Our Lady. In this solo setting, though, Wallumrød’s intensity is so foregrounded the best benchmark is Judee Sill at her most wracked – especially on the creepy Burial. Its coiledsnake restraint means Baudelaire & Piano isn’t instant, but it lingers like a vivid dream. Kieron Tyler

Soundwalk Collective With PattiSmith

★★★

Peradam BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP

Nicole Loucaides

Patti channels the spirits for Himalayan odyssey. Forty-six years after Piss Factory, Patti Smith remains rock’s great spoken-word artist:regal, incantatory, attuned to the rhythms of speech and poetry. For this third collaboration in a year with the New York-based sound artists, her texts mostly come from René Daumal’s Mount Analogue, a metaphysical mountaineering novel that inspired, among other things, Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. As with their previous collaborations dedicated to Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud, Peradam mixes readings and field recordings (Himalayan wind, Ganges ripple etc) with diverse guests (Anoushka Shankar, Charlotte Gainsbourg, a veteran Sherpa) to create a blend of impressionistic travelogue and abstract theatre piece:an immersive trip, if not

FOREVER LIVING ORIGINALS. CD/DL/LP

Pacific Range

Precision-timed, empowering album of retrofuturist soul and Afrobeat.

★★★

The internet age of course abhors a mystery, and so while purposely-anonymous outfit Sault managed to maintain the ruse upon their emergence in 2019 – with two albums, titled 5 and 7, of artful dub-flecked funk – it was clearly not to last. When an excitable Gilles Peterson took the unusual step of playing this, their third album in its entirety on his 6Music show in June (physical copies arrive this month), he unmasked Sault as Michael Kiwanuka and Little Simz producer Inflo and neo-soul singer Cleo Sol. Not that the reveal strips any magic from their music, in this instance an immersive 20-tracker with Black Lives Matter fire in its soul. Kiwanuka turns up on the rousing Fela Kuti-flavoured Bow, and Sol’s achingly lovely, resigned yet determined voice shines on Wildfires (“Take off your badge/ We all know it was murder”). Beautiful and potent stuff. Tom Doyle

Not what you’d expect from Morrissey’s former tour manager.

High Upon The Mountain CURATION. CD/DL/LP

LA’s cosmic canyons revisited,once again. Since Beachwood Sparks emerged out of some meticulously preserved canyon in the late ‘90s, Los Angeles has been fertile ground for indie groups resurrecting the cosmic country-rock sound of the later Byrds, Flying Burritos et al. The latest aspirants to don the fringed buckskin jackets are Pacific Range, who have the good vibes, chops and decent tunes – Whitney might be a useful non-LA analogue – down to a tee. Consequently, Comin’ After You focuses on “Laying in the grass/Everybody’s getting high”, while guitarist Duane Betts (son of Dickey) adds virtuosity to the choogle. Dan Horne, a veteran of this scene thanks to shifts with the Sparks, Cass McCombs and The Skiffle Players, produces crisply, and his Grateful Dead affiliations also prove valuable. If Comin’ After You has a pleasant tang of Tennessee Jed, the closing Nothing After

Fenne Lily

The nom de artist of singersongwriter and one-time Morrissey TM Jesse Daniel Edwards, the soaring choruses and blazing kitchen sink production of Juni Ata’s debut album is staggeringly confident. After a deeply religious SoCal upbringing, Edwards landed in Nashville but shunned a performing career. Cajoled into a studio by friend and producer Jake Rosswog, the album took on a life of its own, eventually including additional production and guitar from Steve Cropper. Although it charts the deaths of friends, family and relationships, there’s not a lot of “Nashville” in Saudade:this is glorious big balls-indie meets blue collar rock that Jim Steinman might occasionally consider a little OTT. By album’s end you may be wishing for a little less is more – only All My Tomorrows (Are Mondays) offers sustained quietude – but Edwards and Rosswog’s ambition is, in all senses, a roaring success. Andy Fyfe

Various

★★★★

Blue Note Re:Imagined BLUE NOTE. CD/DL/LP

New voices explore Blue Note’s mosaic identity. The opener on this set of reworkings by new artists of tracks from the Blue Note catalogue is by Jorja Smith, who takes St Germain’s Rose Rouge from 2000 then strips it down and infuses it with a ’70s soulfulness using elegant strokes of horns and synths. The vocal refrain “I want you to get together” on the original was sampled from a Marlena Shaw 1974 live album, but sung here by Smith it takes on a more pointed meaning – coupled with a promo film of images from the recent BLM protests, the song has become an unofficial anthem for the movement. Elsewhere, EmmaJean Thackray re-sculpts Wayne Shorter’s Night Dreamer as a complex flurry of trumpet, keys and protest, while on her rewrite of Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man, Poppy Ajudha combines ebullient improv with a history lesson on black injustice. Powerful stuff. Lois Wilson

Fenne Lily: loneliness, with a scathing undertow.

★★★★ Breach

DEAD OCEANS. CD/DL/LP

Dorset songstress’s quietly angry second set. Brian Deck and Steve Albini contribute.

ON HOLD, Fenne Lily’s debut of 2018, dwelled on failed relationships and social anxiety (she was home-schooled) with a first-timer’s openness. Second time around, she spent a month in (pre-coronavirus) isolation in Berlin to craft a set slightly mistitled in honour of her breech-birth. It’s loosely based around loneliness, albeit with a sometimes scathing undertow (“I hear you live at home with your parents, now,” she trills maliciously on I Used To Hate My Body But Now I Just Hate You). Elsewhere, Alapathy deals with the medication for her mental health issues, while the twangsome Laundry & Jet Lag and the irresistibly catchy Someone Else’s Trees are heartstoppingly beautiful. She’s expanded her musical palette too:nu-folk traces remain, but a restrained Steve Albini adds layered guitar. It’s early days yet, but Fenne Lily might just be a major talent in the making.

John Aizlewood

MOJO 89

Thurston Moore (centre),at his revelatory best.

Hot fuzz Drawing in the loose strands of his career delivers Moore’s finest postYouth statement. By Stevie Chick.

Thurston Moore

★★★★ By The Fire DAYDREAM LIBRARY SERIES. CD/DL/LP

IN THE YEARS since Sonic Youth’s 2011 split, Thurston Moore has released a dizzying slew of records, including song-based albums hewing close to the Youth’s late-period groove, improvisational collaborations with avant luminaries, and fearless trips into freeform noise. By The Fire, however, feels

★★★★

different, a concerted effort on Moore’s part to channel these myriad haywire impulses into a unified whole, broad enough to encompass his wandering muse, but focused enough to cohere across two discs. With its nine tracks ranging from five to 17 minutes in length and segueing between conventional songs and more abstract pieces, much of By The Fire finds Moore drawing on his past to sketch out the future. The erotic drug dream of Hashish channels the motorik chug of Sonic Youth’s Sunday and its feel for tension and release, build and pay-off. Acoustic guitar duet Dreamers Work would easily fit Moore’s solo space-folk album Demolished Thoughts. By The Fire is no simple retread of past glories;instead it infuses familiar territory with fresh ideas. Cantaloupe apes the devious

chimes,strumming,moaning (“Spend my days on motorways”) and idle fantasy (“Stay until it’s late in the house by the lake”) is sandblasted by threat (“Oh, I’m gonna take you down”). Regular producer Dan Austin teases atmosphere,buries mysterious sampled speech and navigates the piano-led title track back into Haçienda territory. What kept them? Andrew Collins

The Universal Want VIRGIN/EMI. CD/DL/LP

Jacqueline Schlossman

Cheshire’s high-flying birds return after 10 years. The Doves hiatus ended in June with hold-my-beer single Carousels – Lynchian prelude, octopus drums,dirty sequencing,wounded midnight howl – the Cheshire trio’s first peep since 2010, when a Best Of wedged open the door for what turned into an entire decade. Comprising twins (Jez Williams,vocals; Andy,drums) and a schoolmate (Jimi Goodwin, bass),Doves emerged from dance success and a studio fire fitter,happier,now rivalling pals Elbow for 21st century northern soul glory. Goodwin’s solo album kept the light on, but it’s airborne Doves the world needs now. There’s

90 MOJO

Emily Barker

★★★★ A Dark Murmuration Of Words

distinctive voice upfront in the mix. Recorded in Wales with a live band,it’s a reflection on her home in Bridgetown, Western Australia,on the devastation of climate change and what connects us as humans. The Woman Who Planted Trees,for instance, is a tribute to Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai,while Machine is about Confederate statues and structural racism, an extraordinary track driven by percussive clicks,a gospel chorus and juddering noise guitar. Most moving of all is Sonogram,where Barker’s voice,almost a disembodied echo,sings to the past and an uncertain future. Lucy O’Brien

THIRTY TIGERS. CD/DL/LP

Australian singer/composer creates an album of spare, striking beauty. Emily Barker composed the haunting theme music to BBC dramas like Wallander and The Shadow Line,and has recorded with Americana trio The Red Clay Halo,but it’s her solo work that is most striking. This follow-up to 2017’s Sweet Kind Of Blue moves away from bluesy Americana to incantatory folk,with her silvery,

Marcos Valle

art-metal moves of his Chelsea Light Moving project but advances the concept with James Sedward’s Steppenwolf-like biker-rock soloing, a brilliantly jarring counterpoint to Moore’s trademark detuned guitar skronk. Jon Leidecker, of U2-baiting anarchists Negativland, rewires the spook-rock of They Believe In Love (When They Look At You) with malevolent electronics, while Siren’s 13 minutes swing from meditative guitar chime to fiery noise freakout, echoing Moore’s notorious Elegy For All The Dead Rock Stars, but using its form for purposeful drama rather than bloody-minded statement. Indeed, it’s the lengthier pieces here that are the most breathtaking, in both their ambition and how Moore stitches together multiple modular passages of song and instrumental into satisfying wholes. Breath swaps between calm chiming meander, cyclones of mutant Dick Dale shred and bruised tunefulness, as Moore and bassist Deb Googe (formerly of My Bloody Valentine) promise to “drink and fight for the noises in your head”. Locomotives, meanwhile, is like nothing else in Moore’s catalogue, a shifting 17-minute narrative where Glenn Branca-esque multi-guitar symphonies pass into ghostly song and are then swallowed up by artilleries of clattering drum and percussive guitar, mimicking the infernal din of trains in motion. You’ll reel at the audacity of it, then skip back to experience it all over again. By The Fire is located firmly within Moore’s pre-existing universe of sound but its marriage of his divergent impulses – not to mention the high standard of these new songs, and the sharp, thundercrack thrills of its maverick instrumental questing – are little short of revelatory. The result isn’t just his best album post-Sonic Youth, but some of the best music he’s ever released.

Wanderley’s US hit,Summer Samba (So Nice). Having recorded for the UK’s Far Out label for the past 20 years,the 76-year-old bossa nova doyen now follows fellow veteran Roy Ayers by signing to producers Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s new Jazz Is Dead label. Valle’s eight songs, featuring whispered vocals over jazzy chords and sensuously textured woozy grooves, recall in places the singer’s early 1980s collaborations with US soul man,Leon Ware. Though the overall ambience is deliciously laidback,Valle shatters the prevailing languor with a breezy samba called Our Train and Viajando Por Aí, a lively duet with his wife, Patricia Alvi. A charmingly seductive album. Charles Waring

★★★★ Marcos Valle JID 003 JAZZ IS DEAD. CD/DL/LP

Brazilian bossa nova legend is rejuvenated on his 30th long-player. Briefly a member of Sergio Mendes’s Brasil 66 before they hit big,Rioborn Valle signed to Verve in 1967 after co-writing compatriot Walter

The Sons Of The SoulRevivers

★★★★ Songs We’ll Always Sing – A Tribute To The Pilgrim Jubilees LITTLE VILLAGE FOUNDATION. CD/DL

Gospel quartet-styled first studio album from Jim Pugh’s label. The Soul Revivers were a Bay

Area gospel quartet who were led by Walter Morgan Sr and operated in the 1960s. Unsurprisingly,the Sons are Walter’s offspring – Walter Jr, James and Dwayne Morgan. Formed in 1970,they developed their craft in the Friendship Baptist Church in south San Francisco and only broke out of the sanctified circuit when Jim Pugh,of non-profit record company Little Village Foundation, discovered them on YouTube. Impressed,he put out 2017’s stirring Live! At Rancho Nicasio. Of course,gospel quartets stand and fall by their ability to harmonise,and Jr and co are masters,borne out on this set of songs of salvation – some animated covers of The Pilgrim Jubilees,others equally captivating self-penned numbers – that perfectly balance precision with fervid expression. Lois Wilson

UNDERGROUND BY ANDREW MALE

Less Bells

★★★★

Mourning Jewelry KRANKY. CD/DL/LP

Sunburnt strings,gentle banjo,seraphic harmonies shape this sad-eyed smile. The 47 minutes of orchestral splendour that shape the second album from Julie Carpenter’s Less Bells end in a glorious instrumental glow,as though watching the sun spectacularly rise over the Mojave Desert that the violinist and composer calls home. Strings swell to the point of rupture, floating like balloons over soft keyboard sequences and the gorgeous chords of a patiently strummed guitar. It’s affirming, a long hug from an old friend after quarantine ends. And it is also the restorative balm that follows so much bittersweet beauty here – the lachrymose strings and sighing synths of Queen Of Crickets,the anxious rhythms that click inside Fiery Wings,the noisy quakes that beset the gentle elegance of Plait. Like Kranky predecessors The Stars Of The Lid,Less Bells pirouette slowly along the enticing divides between disappointment and redemption,worry and wonder. Grayson Haver Currin

Matmos

★★★★

The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form THRILL JOCKEY. CD/DL/LP

Pioneering sound explorers, with guests Oneohtrix Point Never,Yo La Tengo and more.

Camille Blake

M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel’s twelfth album as Matmos finds the Baltimore electronic experimentalists asking 99 different musicians to contribute anything they wanted,as long as it’s at 99bpm. It’s another extraordinary episode in a 25-year sonic quest that’s included sampling washing machines,liposuction procedures and live shows bordering on performance art. The Consuming Flame… is rich,

Staying open to new possibilities: Matmos get a 99.

intense and deftly woven into three hour-long suites,broken down into 44 tracks from contributors including Yo La Tengo,Mouse On Mars, Oneohtrix Point Never and Giant Swan. Helpfully,there’s an accompanying Gantt chart. The kaleidoscopic results encompass spoken word, drone,found sounds,noise, avant-garde jazz,motorik, dub… often just on one track. This thought-provoking music is shot through with humour and an underlying message of keeping your ears,mind and heart open to new possibilities. Stephen Worthy

Tricky

★★★★

Fall To Pieces FALSE IDOLS/K!7. CD/DL/LP

Amid imponderable grief, a creative triumph. “Right now,I’m in fight mode,” asserts armour-plated Adrian Thaws,now 52. Last year’s autobiography detailed a life of embattlement:maternal suicide,childhood deprivation, violence;then,after getting himself on track,in May 2019 his daughter’s passing. In that light,Fall To Pieces is a terrifying title,and certain lyrics (“I miss my baby… what a fucking game” from Hate This Pain) tap into his private agony with excruciating transparency. Yet Tricky’s fourteenth long-player somehow matches anything in his catalogue – 1995’s Maxinquaye included – for minimalist invention,its nocturnal synth/beats mastery serving as a reminder of who initiated that sound currently dominated by Kanye and Drake. At a happier extreme, Fall Please showcases latest chanteuse Marta Zlakowska riding a DC go-go beat to breezy effect. I’m In The Doorway is equally infectious, melodically near-echoing Shaggy’s It Wasn’t Me,while Running Off juxtaposes Nancy

Sinatra-esque chamber-pop with bass-quaking portent. Regardless of backstory,it’s extraordinary music. Andrew Perry

Native Harrow

★★★

Closeness LOOSE. CD/DL/LP

Fourth album from the east Pennsylvania folk rock duo. A year after their first album for UK label Loose, former ballerina and classical singer Devin Tuel and multi-instrumentalist Stephen Harms return with 10 new songs. Though recorded prepandemic (once again in Chicago with Alex Hall),it has an unsettled feel compared to the graceful,lady-of-theCanyon drift of 2019’s Happier Now. The “closeness” the LP is named for seems to be quite an emotional battle in songs such as opening number Shake and, later,Same Every Time. There’s more musical variety this time – elements of ’60s and ’70s pop and soul;and,in Carry On, a church-like choir. But mostly Tuel’s voice remains serene, though at its finest on folkcountry ballads Smoke Burns, Turn Turn and Even Peace. Sylvie Simmons

Young Knives

★★★★

Barbarians

Lucrecia Dalt

★★★★

No Era Sólida RVNG INTL. CD/DL/LP

Former geotechnical engineer mines her own substrata. OVER THE past 12 years,the creative has moved down,not forward,beyond the bright surfaces of electronic pop and deep into the core of a surreal cavernous meditation on sound and the body. For her seventh studio album (her second for the RVNG label),Dalt expands on the vocal experiments and narrative techniques of 2018’s Anticlines, drawing us into a world of language and communication simultaneously seductive and disturbing. Inspired by griot singer Fanta Damba,Dalt uses tape delay,percussive effects and organic analogue oscillations to summon up a series of sonic wraiths and spirits,her voice an airborne communication inhabiting different sensory states. At times the effect is sinister, at others soothing and hypnotic,like fog-borne siren songs,or the ghosts of liturgical choirs caught high in the cathedral vault.

GADZOOK. CD/DL/LP

Febrile Midlands duo return with dystopian epic. Take the red PiL! It’s been seven years since Young Knives’ last album,Sick Octave. Since then,Henry Dartnall and House Of Lords’ jaundiced outlook,lately whetted on philosopher John Gray’s Straw Dogs (takeaway: humans are just beasts who kid themselves otherwise),has been justified by events. Their response:this bug-eyed, nightmare song cycle,with stentorian echoes of PiL’s Album on opener Swarm,a kind of sui generis assault-prog on the title track,and all of the above and more on thrilling end-times operetta Sheep Tick. Found sounds – a Missa Luba-type choral interlude; ghastly strains of a bare-knuckle boxing bout – add Adam Curtis vibes and flashes of black humour (“Dinner ladies kept me in the basement!”) hark back to their breakthrough Voices Of Animals And Men. Mostly,however,Young Knives think we are beyond comedy now. “There is nothing I can offer you,” sings Dartnall, desolately,on Only A God; only the angry power of the music demurs. Remarkable in very many ways. Danny Eccleston

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Richard Skelton

Sarah Davachi

★★★★

These Charms May Be Sung Over A Wound PHANTOM LIMB. DL/LP

For nearly two decades,this rural English musician has perfected a sound synonymous with the haunted 21st century countryside,reverberating steel strings summoning ancient unseen prospects. Now employing more distorted electronic effects,his current sound suggests the monolithic factory that dominates the overcast landscape,sonic hexes that feel simultaneously cursed and curative.

Ytamo

★★★

Cantus, Descant LATE MUSIC. CD/DL/LP

An extraordinary 80-minute concept album concerning the relationship in early music between the single voice and polyphonic structures,but also the individual and society. The Canadian sound artist utilises pipe,reed and electric organ and solo voice to conjure a mirage of suspended sound,an interior space of sacred hallucinations; a trip;a church.

Bronius Kutavičius

★★★★

Last Pagan Rites. From The Yotvingian Stone

Vacant

MUSIC INFORMATION CENTRE LITHUANIA. DL/LP

SOMEONE GOOD/ROOM 40. CD/DL

The sounds made by this 88-year-old Lithuanian composer may have come from the 13th century or the future;a hypnotic minimalism rooted deep in choirs and drones. Performed with the Aidija Chamber Choir these are multilayered,repetitive oratorios that suggest Terry Riley writing shamanic folk songs for the impious gods of Samogitia. AM

Composed while the Kansai-based composer was pregnant with her first child,this is an album of quiet,yearning lullabies,caught between hopes for her unborn child and memories of her own youth. It’s spare,nocturnal,cyclical,like songs sung in the dead of night to help you reach the dawn.

MOJO 91

F I LT E R A L B UM S album is huge in ambition and impressive in execution. Lois Wilson

this handcrafted item sounds thoroughly 3D,maintaining the high standards of musicianship,mixing and mastering that have graced earlier releases. David Katz

Stick In The Wheel

★★★

★★★★ The Tragedy Of Dirk Munro CROOKED BEAT. LP

Debut partly inspired by The Kinks’The Village Green Preservation Society. Dirk Munro was an English actor who had success in Hollywood in the ’60s,but after succumbing to fame’s trappings he ended up on life’s scrap heap. He’s the creation of Pat Gilbert,Clash biographer,MOJO writer and guitarist in now defunct punk band Night Of Treason. Munro’s story is used here as a springboard to explore more far-reaching matters of history, family,legacy,memory, sexuality and myth. Told in Gilbert’s half spoken,half sung vernacular – part Mick Jones, part Lawrence in Denim – it unfolds in a soundscape that spans orchestral pop to chanson and scratchy folk. It’s produced and arranged by Gilbert’s musical partner Mike Williamson,bassist in Kent group The Mighty Olafs,and despite being recorded in the pair’s individual homes,the

Rick Wakeman

FROM HERE. CD/DL/LP

★★★

Third album by English folk’s experimental missionaries. Missionaries for the expansion of English folk music, Stick In The Wheel haven’t stopped in recent years. They’ve recorded Richard Dawson and Becky Unthank in their kitchens,released experimental mixtapes,and explored Englishness with artists like Nabihah Iqbal at traditional music HQ Cecil Sharp House. Their third album is more musically diverse than 2018’s Follow Them True,but you sense variety is there to push social commentary,an approach which sometimes dilutes its power. Budg & Snudg,a 17th century prisoner’s song,falters a little under a Chumbawumba-like gait. Possible Reasons For Eventual Admission To The Asylum aims for electronic eeriness,but in attempting to be accessible isn’t foreboding enough. Delivered straight and raw,Fake Away,adapted from a slang-filled Victorian play,and their setting of Rudyard Kipling’s Soldier Soldier are better,bringing the past startlingly into the present. Jude Rogers

Nat Birchall Meets Al Breadwinner

★★★★ Upright Living TRADITION DISC. DL/LP

The latest instalment of elegiac dub instrumentals. Mancunian saxophonist/multiinstrumentalist Nat Birchall began buying reggae in 1972 and discovered jazz in ’79; Al Breadwinner stocked his studio,The Bakery,with vintage analogue equipment, including similar units to those at Lee Perry’s Black Ark. Their latest collaboration is slow, deep,and contemplative, providing a meditative antidote to the chaotic Covid era. The veteran Jamaican trombonist Vin Gordon is back for the delightful opener,Man From Jones Town,the rhythm a passing nod to None Of Jah Jah Children No Cry,and his soloing counterbalances Birchall’s melodica on Mystical Dawn. Wise Man Style shadowboxes Yabby You’s Jah Vengeance in a conga-driven extended mix,and a Jamaican sax giant is saluted on Tribute To The Great Tommy McCook. Despite being issued in mono,

Molly Tuttle

The Red Planet SNAPPER. CD/DL/LP

The veteran keyboard king turns Mars explorer. It’s an alien, dry,dusty world 40 million miles away,but in Rick Wakeman’s telling at least,Mars turns out to be cosily familiar. Earth’s little brother is revealed as a refuge of vintage English prog rock,where Henry VIII’s six wives would feel quite at home. The opener,Ascraeus Mons,sets the scene as choir and wailing guitar supercharge Wakeman’s majestic cathedral organ. The English Rock Ensemble add stolid support on tunes that tip their hat to Jean Michel Jarre and Mike Oldfield. On the closing Valles Marineris,the drum pattern from Holst’s Mars makes a refreshing change from the foursquare rhythms that predominate – it’s the best track of the lot. If your musical clock is proudly set at 1973 and believe that what’s wrong with modern music is the lack of burning Hammond organ solos,there’s fun to be had here. John Bungey

More touching than is allowed: Molly Tuttle connects.

★★★★ ...but I’d rather be with you

QUARTO VALLEY. CD/DL/LP

British blues pioneers’solid follow-up to 2019’s City Night. With founder Kim Simmonds still at the helm,Savoy Brown have never strayed far from their British Blues Boom roots and their 41st album doesn’t mess with that. Recorded at Showplace Studios in Dover,New Jersey with Simmonds producing and bandmates Pat DeSalvo (bass) and drummer Garnet Grimm (the longest running consistent line-up in the band’s history), song titles include Devil’s Highway and Rocking In Louisiana,the former a showcase for Simmonds’ fluid guitar soloing,the latter for his steel dobro skill. There’s more slide on River On The Rise,a raga blues inspired by George Harrison,while Jaguar Car pays homage to John Lee Hooker. A distorted boogie,it captures Simmonds at his best,his growly vocals and wild blues harp-playing both spirited atop the raw rhythms. Lois Wilson

Grant-Lee Phillips

★★★★ Lightning, Show Us Your Stuff Former Grant-Lee Buffalo man ups game on solo album 10.

Tennessee virtuoso spreads her wings on LP of diverse covers.

NOTED FOR her mind-

92 MOJO

Ain’t Done Yet

YEP ROC. CD/DL/LP

COMPASS. CD/DL/LP

27, already trails awards. Her Americana-dappled debut was understated, but this year, with a Nashville tornado followed by the lockdown, she’s looked beyond her bluegrass background to songs that have moved her and, reinterpreting their wild diversity, taken flight. In The National’s tender, worried Fake Empire, Tuttle’s pure voice breaks as she tries to escape what feels like a world in meltdown, slide guitar making shadows on every corner. The Stones’ She’s A Rainbow yelps with exuberant picking, and Rancid’s Olympia, WA approaches a zydeco hoedown. Alongside beauties from Karen Dalton, Cat Stevens and FKA Twigs,

★★★

Arthur Russell’s socially distanced A Little Lost is desperately moving, the yearning “I hope your feeling isn’t diminished” saying it for everyone. Standing On The Moon,

the Grateful Dead track from which the album title comes, slows things thoughtfully. In all, far more touching than we’ve been allowed.

Glyn Brown

Named for a gauntlet laid down by his then-five-year-old daughter as thunder rolled closer,Phillips’ latest beguiles with all the wiles of a master songwriter. “Don’t size me up so soon,” he tells circling vultures in opener Ain’t Done Yet,and elsewhere the poetic classicism of The Band-like Mourning Dove and rubbleshifting heft of the gospelinfluenced Gather Up remind us Phillips,too,still contains multitudes. With Eric Heywood on heat-haze pedal steel, Danny Levin blowing tender brass,and telepathic husbandand-wife rhythm section Jay Bellerose and Jennifer Condos stitching the sweetest of pockets,our host is freed to attend other business with relaxed surety,singing up a quiet storm on close-miked jewel Lowest Low,and savouring all that’s wonderful about bijou ballad Drawing The Head. A late-onset triumph. James McNair

Zach Pigg

GilbertWilliamson

Hold Fast

Savoy Brown

Juanita Stein: finding a gain from the loss.

Juanita Stein

★★★★ Snapshot Various

NUDE. CD/DL/LP

★★★

Third solo album from Howling Bells singer.

HORTON. CD/DL/LP

Oklahoma rockers pay tribute to their roots. Of the countless icons credited with Americana parentage,the late Oklahomaborn Leon Russell would rank high in a paternity suit. The Master Of Space And Time also liked assembling recording studios. This past February,20 contemporary Tulsa musicians covered songs by artists with hometown connections at the Russell-built,newly restored Paradise Studios. Tribute is paid to JJ Cale,Dwight Twilley, Steve Ripley,The Gap Band and Russell himself. The participants capture that seemingly contradictory combo of high-energy with a laid-back,loping groove that makes Okie rock so distinctive. Standouts include three contributions from powerful bluesy shouter John Fullbright and the gorgeous Tulsa County, sung by Jesse Aycock,written by Pamela Polland and waxed by many,including Tulsan guitarist Jesse Ed Davis. The collection evokes a Saturday night at a Sooner State roadhouse:warm,boozy,soulful. Michael Simmons

Max Richter

WHEN JUANITA Stein’s father died of acute myeloid leukaemia last year, the pain was deep, but it spawned a creative reunion with the Brighton-based Australian’s brother, Howling Bells guitarist Joel, and a torrent of creativity. Produced by the commercially savvy Ben Hillier (Depeche Mode, Blur, Elbow), Snapshot is a sometimes harrowing listen (“There’s no spell to ease the pain,” she laments on the title track), but for all that Stein evokes Mary Margaret O’Hara as much as Laura Marling, her pop heart beats strongly, so the hook-laden 1,2,3,4,5,6 rattles along in surprisingly upbeat fashion. Resisting the temptation to wallow, Lucky celebrates the bigger picture of a life well-lived, the spartan Hey Mama is balm for her mother, and the closing folk strum In The End (“We all lose someone in the end”) is a whistle-along heartbreaker, overflowing with circle-of-life optimism. Death has rarely sounded quite so life-enhancing.

John Aizlewood melody much in evidence. Fans of Rachel’s not dissimilarly predicated,post-9/11 meditation Systems/Layers should certainly investigate. David Sheppard

★★★★ Voices

DECCA. CD/DL/LP

Composer salutes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by the United Nations in 1948,the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights addressed its era’s major geopolitical challenges,urging a compassionate global reset in the wake of world war. Taking as its text lines from the original proclamation,spoken by myriad,international voices crowd-sourced by composer Max Richter,his opus posits the original entreaty as a conduit through which to address current pan-global dystopias. In the wrong hands, the laudable but potentially grandiose concept could seem glib,but the sanguine readings,blended with Richter’s versatile musical settings – ranging from electronic daubs (Hypocognition) and lyrical violin and piano études (Mercy) to soaring,Arvo Pärtlike works for wordless choir (All Human Beings) and double bass-heavy ‘upside-down’ orchestrations (Little Requiems Pt 2) – are rarely less than poignant,with the composer’s gift for aching earworm

Liv.e

its rule-breaking creator’s rookie confidence. Andy Cowan

Girls In Synthesis

★★★

★★★★

Now Here’s An Echo From Your Future

IN REAL LIFE. DL/LP/MC

Two-thirds male London agit trio’s shock to the system.

Couldn’t Wait To Tell You… Free-ranging flights of fancy abound on debut from cosmic R&B chanteuse. LA-based singer/producer Liv.e comes from Dallas but sounds as if she’s beamed in from a far more esoteric galaxy. This homespun sequel to 2018’s ::hoopdreams::EP – each song a page from a different character’s diary – is awash with ideas,alive to the unforeseen possibilities of a lo-fi production aesthetic and the gift of a golden voice. As deeply soulful as Erykah Badu or Jill Scott – yet far from in-your-face – Liv.e’s multitracked harmonies knit seamlessly with a blunted bedrock of old soul and jazz samples; warped pianos,spaced-out organs and elastic bass figures weaving between clicks, glitches and typewritten percussion. Something of a sonic lucky dip,these 20 short, super buzzy,impregnably titled tracks often switch beats or cut-off abruptly,underlying

HARBINGER SOUND. CD/DL/LP

Britain’s years of austerity and Brexit division may seem almost quaint,midpandemic,but this fiercely noisy unit were about to drop their bracing debut just before COVID hit. In deference to the heightened mood of panic, they opted to postpone release of its furious,postpunk/anarcho broadsides. Now lockdown’s easing,Now Here’s An Echo From Your Future actually feels doubly relevant: when The Images Agree lambasts governmental misinformation in our ‘posttruth’ era,it’s hard not to think of Matt Hancock’s daily briefing graphs,while They’re Not Listening’s mood of political futility has surely only deepened. The stampede of jagged Bitch Magnet riffs and Crassstyle polemics duly jolts the listener from self-isolation inertia. Human Frailty and the dubbed-out Set Up To Fail offer a modicum of respite – sonically,if not lyrically. Not everyone will be in the mood

for GIS,but for a hardenedpunker minority they’ll totally hit the bullseye. Andrew Perry

Yusuf/Cat Stevens

★★★

Tea For The Tillerman 2, Reimagined UMC. CD/DL/LP

More tea,Tillerman? Yusuf remakes his 1970 classic. Though artists re-recording a hit album rarely seems wholly necessary to anyone but themselves,this is a whole other cuppa. The bold environmental and humanitarian themes of Stevens’ classic 1970 landmark resonate urgently as he marks its 50th anniversary, while the re-engagement of producer Paul Samwell-Smith and key guitar foil Alun Davies speaks of a tangible conceptual integrity across these beefier,richly detailed new versions lovingly tracked at La Fabrique Studios,southern France last summer. Stevens’ voice,still wonderfully rich in timbre,distinguishes fabulous takes on Hard-Headed Woman and Miles From Nowhere,but for all its exquisite clarinet,the ragtime version of Wild World is perhaps a re-imagining too far,Stevens delivering the verses part-parlando. Having survived a Boyzone coverversion and much more besides,Father And Son

remains monumental and intensely moving,however. James McNair

Blitzen Trapper

★★★★

Holy Smokes Future Jokes YEP ROC. CD/DL/LP

Imaginative Americana vets author the Oregon Book Of The Dead. From their Pavement-ish beginnings, Portland’s Blitzen Trapper spent the past 15 years or so juggling classic rock tropes in mostly creative, only occasionally moribund, ways. This tenth album – their finest since 2010’s Destroyer Of The Void – sees them concentrating on what they do best: songs that sound like The Beatles at Big Pink;songs that sound like Dylan gone powerpop. Frontman Eric Earley’s inspiration this time is George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo,the perfect text to view Americana through a surrealist,mystical filter. So Dead Billie Jean finds Michael Jackson’s stalker protagonist hanging out in the afterlife’s waiting room with Abe Lincoln and Brian Jones,while Masonic Temple Microdose #1 mixes trippy philosophising,suburban hi-jinks and a tune worthy of Jeff Lynne or Cheap Trick. Exuberant,baroque rootsrock:if you love Wilco’s Summerteeth,give this one a go. John Mulvey

Rob Loud

Back To Paradise: A Tulsa Tribute To Okie Music

MOJO 93

F I LT E R A L B UM S E X T R A

★★★

★★★★

★★★

★★★★

Dinner Party

Yesterday Is Gone FULL TIME HOBBY. CD/DL/LP

Every Feeling On A Loop

Captured Spirits

SOUNDS OF CRENSHAW. CD/DL/LP

An easy chemistry between Terrace Martin,Robert Glasper, Kamasi Washington and producer 9th Wonder on this R&B supergroup’s debut – with soul singer Phoelix to the fore. Glasper and Washington fans may rue their idols merely playing in the back. AC

Like Julia Holter or Aldous Harding,Dana Gavanski has a precise yet unplaceable accent,lending experimental pop songs a distinctive edge. Whether Nico solemn (“The flowers have gone brown”) or Weyes Blood perky (Catch),it’s a varied,promising debut. JB

ANTI-. CD/DL/LP

Ex-The Head And The Heart man signals recovery from substance-fuelled breakdown with warm songs elevated by mariachi brass and low-key arrangements. The odd sappy lyric is mediated by a resonant, Jim James-ish baritone. JB

Norfolk nomads dive fathomdeep where jazz meets minimalism:Nick Smart’s mesmeric piano motifs and Jesse Barrett’s tabla-detailed rhythms allow Jordan Smart’s emotive sax shadings to scale heights of propulsion. Progressive and vital. AC

★★★★

★★★

Happy Birthday

To Feel Embraced

Alterity

Unbecoming

★★★

MERGE. CD/DL/LP

TEMPORARY RESIDENCE. CD/DL/LP

HOUNDSTOOTH. CD/DL/LP

AMERICAN DREAMS. CD/DL/LP

Who You Calling Slow?

Astrology-aware,electrogroove logic from DC beatpunk Eva Moolchan. Great punk-funk (Faith),but the real triumphs are her alliance of Le Tigre-level sass and superior tunes with rave samples (Do You Want To Go Out Tonight) and hip-hop (Sanity). JB

Unexpected but stylish remodelling for ambient outlier and Disintegration Loops auteur William Basinski, working with studio assistant Preston Wendel on this lounge jazz/glitch disco hybrid. A playful digital makeover for some vintage noir vibes. JM

Companion to 2016’s Tessellations shows London’s Houndstooth evolving into an eclectic global electronic haven. While Debit,E-Saggila and 33EMYBW toy with techno, trance,gabba and rave,their disquieting creations also impact off the dancefloor. AC

Second album from the US underground’s latest guitar savant unfurls with a ravishing longform acoustic odyssey (cf Jack Rose,Daniel Bachman), plus a first electric band effort, closer to Steve Gunn’s zones, and a tentative live improv. Mighty promising. JM

Nils Petter Molvær

★★★★ SulaMadiana MODERN/BMG. CD/DL/LP

Groovy France/Norway union between percussionist Cinelu (Miles Davis’s early-’80s sextet) and trumpeter Molvær. Upbeat chants and Afro rhythms meld with ruminative melodies. AC

Workshop Singers BANDCAMP. DL

My Life by Grace highlights this project by producer Ian Brennan,whose sister Jane features alongside other developmentally disabled artists. Moving in its Jandeklike rawness and diversity. JB

GONDWANA. CD/DL/LP

EXTENDED PLAY

FOR BANDS looking to earn some money in a time of no gigs, the Bandcamp website has proved a handy tool. Canny artists have been flooding the digital site with rarities and live albums, providing income for them, and unheard music for fans. New York’s 75 Dollar Bill, whose last ‘proper’ album made MOJO’s 2019 Top 20, have recently released three sets of their exhilarating, downtown take on desert blues:two live albums from London (Live At Café OTO) and upstate New York (Live At Tubby’s); plus a collaged marvel of superior outtakes (Power Failures). The ruse is especially suited to jammers and improvisers whose shows change every night. Hence Chris Forsyth taking his flaming psych into jazzier territory (a touch of Mahavishnu this time) on the superb First Flight with a new line-up in NYC last September. Live At Nublu captures the indestructible free choogle of Endless Boogie, as does Basement Jam Ritual, a collection of offcuts:esoteric marginalia, invaluable to heads.

John Mulvey

94 MOJO

Chris Forsyth: this one’s for the heads.

★★★★ Point UNIVERSAL. CD/DL/LP

Playboys walking the midnight megapolis on album 14. Boris Blank’s precise electro-pop does the rhumba while gravelvoiced Dieter Meier narrates romance and secrets. Waba Duba recalls big hit The Race; Rush For Joe goes the full Lalo Schifrin score. Wundervoll! CP

★★★★ We Have Amnesia Sometimes MATADOR. DL/LP

The indefatigable Hoboken trio present five lockdown jams:the percolating drone improvisations,pitched between La Monte Young and Cluster,act as an instrumental coda to 2018’s superb There’s A Riot Going On. JM

Constance Mensh

Basement Jam Rituals

F I LT E R R E I S SU E S

Pot of gold All six studio albums plus singles, B-sides, demos, and 31 previously unreleased tracks from the storied folk-rock duo. By Andrew Male. acoustic performance of the title track from Marc Ellington’s Scottish TV series Marc Time, plus the shimmering version of A Heart Needs A Home that first appeared on 1984’s now out of print Guitar, Vocal. Recorded at Chelsea’s Sound Technique just before the pair’s Hoxne retreat, Pour Down Like Silver is unique in the Richard and Linda catalogue, a lean, Hard Luck Stories (1972-1982) intense album, a ruthless stripping back before the UMC/UNIVERSAL. CD/DL pair’s monastic retreat. The 2004 CD remaster AY 1, 1977. Richard and Linda Thompson featured four 1975 live cuts, which Disc 4 reduces to unveil their new band at London’s Theatre three but adds country-folk prison ballad Wanted Royal, Drury Lane. An item since 1969, Man, tough-edged Linda entreaty Last Chance and a married in 1972, the duo had already released three Dimming Of The Day demo superior to the original. “Stiletto-knife critically acclaimed folk rock albums. But there’d been As well as the Drury Lane tracks, Disc 5 has six anti-love songs acoustic a two-year hiatus after 1975’s Pour Down Like Silver, cuts from Queen Elizabeth Hall, 1975. For during which the couple had bidden goodbye to those who never saw Richard and Linda live, this is with a brittle Hampstead life, and converted to Islam. While raising the next best thing;harmonies honest, defenceless on edge.” their son Teddy in a Sufi community in Hoxne, desolate versions of Beat The Retreat, Never Again, Suffolk, amid “misogyny and [mental] hardship” and a haunting cover of Dark End Of The Street. (Linda), Richard began creating songs derived from Disc 6 jumps to 1978. The Thompsons left their Arabic spiritual verse with fellow Hoxne musicians Ian Whiteman, Muslim community and moved back to a transformed London. Roger Powell and Mike Evans, of psych-freak rockers Mighty Baby. Punk and new wave had changed the musical landscape, and all At the time, the Drury Lane performance was described as dull looked black for two ancient folkies in their late twenties. Richard’s and misguided;even Richard dismissed the songs – The Madness old producer Joe Boyd offered him a gig playing guitar on Julie Of Love, Bird In God’s Garden, Layla, The King Of Love – as Covington’s 1978 LP and the duo retained the US rhythm section “half-baked”. But heard here in non-bootleg form for the first – Andy Newmark and Willie Weeks – for their Chrysalis debut. time, they’re anything but. Tense, droning, hypnotic, and, as on First Light came in for a fair degree of criticism but in 2020 it The King Of Love, possessed of a lazy JJ Cale groove, they point to sounds pretty incredible;a steely, existential Fleetwood Mac more a path not taken but also reveal a tension and uncertainty at the concerned with the coming apocalypse than their own petty heart of this union. That, above everything, is the pleasure of this squabbles. Even better are two previously unreleased demos, box, and the answer to whether you should pay £70 for 8-CDs if Drunk and The Dust Of Your Road, which Linda sings with the you already own 1974’s I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, raw commitment of a lost soul with no further to fall. 1975’s Pour Down Like Silver and 1982’s Shoot Out The Lights:There Sadly, 1979’s Sunny Vista does not withstand scrutiny. Energised are new routes and untold stories here. by what he’d witnessed on the London live scene and reunited with Admittedly, no one will be too excited ex-Fairports Dave Pegg, Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks, Richard about Disc 1’s outtakes from Trevor Lucas’s appears to have attempted some sort of impassioned conceptual 1972 rock’n’roll covers project, The Bunch, satire of a sci-fi suburbia. It doesn’t work, but the extras include a but Linda duetting with Sandy Denny on a bloodily raw Traces Of My Love and two tracks written “for an demo of the Everlys’ When Will I Be Loved autism project” (Richard), of which the second, Speechless Child is beguilingly forlorn. Also rescued from should carry a trigger warning for all parents. obscurity are three exquisitely melancholy You also get the first of three tracks – The Wrong Heartbeat, BACK STORY: renditions of Brian Patten’s slightly pervy For Shame Of Doing Wrong and Back Street Slide – from LAST ORDERS poems, recorded with Richard and Martin ‘Rafferty’ s Folly’, the now infamously demanding and wearying ● “Nobody wanted me Carthy in Holland Park in 1972. Sadly, no to go on that American attempt by the Paisley-born songwriter to secure a new record tour after Shoot Out The live recordings exist of Richard and Linda’s contract for his unanchored pals. Two more tracks, Walking On Lights,” says Linda. “But 1972 folk club tour but their developing A Wire and I’m A Dreamer, appear on Disc 8, alongside the pair’s I was stubborn. The tour relationship, the soaring melancholy and was liberating. I drank, final LP, Shoot Out The Lights. Gerry Rafferty’s multitracked had a fling or two. After bone-sad lyricism in voice and guitar can be productions sound muffled, crowded. “There was no air in the years of repression it heard in demos of The World Is A music,” Richard tells Mick Houghton in faultless linernotes. And was at once cathartic Wonderful Place and Restless Boy, both and exhausting. At one while that’s not to say Joe Boyd’s eventual production is perfect, point I went missing for composed for an abandoned musical based it lends these stiletto-knife anti-love songs a suitably brittle edge. a couple of days. I stole on the parable of the prodigal son. By the time the album came out, of course, the duo were no a car, got arrested (in Niagara). I had to be Centred around the deep euphoric more, Richard having left the pregnant Linda for California-born slaughtered to get sadness of 1974’s I Want To See The Bright Nancy Covey whom he’d met on a solo US tour. through the tour. I was Lights Tonight, Disc 2 has alternate takes living on vodka, orange The American tour they did for Shoot Out The Lights has since juice, and antiincluding a knife-deep solo Linda rendition become infamous (see Backstory) and surviving tapes should be depressants. There was of The End Of The Rainbow that will leave a disaster, but they’re not. Listen to Linda sing the startling a lot of screaming and you on the floor, and an outtake, Mother shouting, throwing and Pavanne, from First Light, and you hear a woman angry, defiant, smashing things. I did And Son, which is a treat for anyone who but most of all, free. It’s liberating. A realisation of the brilliance kick Richard in the shins found End Of The Rainbow too uplifting. they created together and why it was right for them to part. on-stage; I hit him with a Disc 3 revisits the disparate folk-horror Coke bottle at an airport After all, everybody loves a happy ending. (in Buffalo). I was too music-hall delights of 1975’s Hokey Pokey, annihilated to care about songs from the rousing nightmares of a ABOUT PRIDE IN HER WORK, HER singing so I was free.” VOICE, LIBERATION, AND ISLAM… lovelorn roustabout now with a rough

Richard & Linda Thompson

★★★★

Andy Horvitch

96 MOJO

LINDA SPEAKS!

Coloured Balls

Gene

★★★★

★★★

Liberate Rock:Singles And More 1972-1975

The Albums

JUST ADD WATER. LP

Britpop contenders’five LPs on coloured vinyl;fleshed out on 9-CD career box.

“Intense but insouciant”: Linda Thompson, proud really.

“Richard’s a fool for love.” Linda Thompson talks to Andrew Male. How important were those early dates touring as Hokey Pokey for forging yours and Richard’s musical relationship? “I guess it was somewhat of a honeymoon period,emotionally and musically. My strongest memory of that period was that just after I had Muna we were doing a gig in a London suburb. Richard sang End Of The Rainbow for the first time. Simon [Nicol] and I were side-stage with our jaws on the floor. Some people would mind such a dark and slightly resentful lullaby for their first born. I loved it.” What is it like to hear your voice on this record and how it changes over the years? “I will never know. Who listens to their own work? I’d rather drink ink. All that said,I did listen to everything when the record was being compiled. It was a bit of a cursory listen. I had Richard to listen intently. My voice is in and out. Bad or good. It’s better than being constantly mediocre,I believe. I would say that,wouldn’t I? I may have nixed some stuff earlier in life,but vanity seems churlish in old age.” How did being a Sufi change your approach to your music? “I think the only recordings we did as Sufis were on the First Light album. I think! The patriarchy in the music biz was strong in those days but there is no patriarchy like Islam. I mostly ignored the other musicians. Women and men were not supposed to fraternise,except with their spouses. I ignored him most of all. Ha! I remember being quite happy in that period though. We were after all making music again.” As a singer of Richard’s songs,are there qualities that you think he doesn’t get enough credit for? “I think that these days Richard gets a lot of credit for his songs. They’re consistently good. He’s a born songwriter and unlike most old folk he’s a fool for love. That is food and drink for writing.” You sound amazing on those live Shoot Out The Lights tracks. Despite the chaos of that tour,was it also kind of liberating? Vocally freeing? “Very liberating. After a decade of self-denial and repression, I went bonkers on the vodka and pills. So I don’t remember a lot. Good times!” What are you most proud of about those years and all the work collected on this compilation? “The whole of this boxed set is a good memory. Distance enchants the view. I think I’ve said before,I was brought up in Scotland. We don’t do proud. We’re a bit dour. Well,I am proud really. Proud of being part of an amazing stable of musicians. Amazed at how intense but insouciant we were in music and life in general. I’m half-arsed about almost everything these days.”

Formed around ace guitarist Lobby Loyde, Coloured Balls released two classic hard rock LPs in 1973 and ’74 – Ball Power and Heavy Metal Kid – and this welcome compilation scoops up all their singles and off-cuts. If you like ’70s raunch, these 16 tracks are for you: some blues,rock’n’roll and boogie,lots of attitude and heavy riffs – and underlying it, a deep belief in music’s potential. The hyperactive Flash says it all:the power and life force of absolutist rock. With skinhead haircuts and mullets, Coloured Balls were tagged by association with the violent Sharpie subculture,and life became difficult – resulting in their 1975 end. It would have been easy to miss their transcendent element,heard here on an extraordinary GOD (Guitar Over Dose),live at Sunbury in 1973:a 16-minute,speedy psychedelic instrumental that builds and builds for the first 11 minutes,then explodes into serial feedback. Whew! Jon Savage

DanielJohnston

★★★★ The End Is Never Really Over

Part of the mid-’90s’ colourful fabric, Gene were the Britpop scene’s urbane, eloquent outsiders,arriving in summer 1994 with a plangent For The Dead 7-inch (on future MOJO writer Keith Cameron’s Costermonger label),an enchanting mixture of Strangeways… Smiths and Sticky Fingers Stones. Vocalist Martin Rossiter’s voice was far too Mozzer-imbued for some, but the group’s run of early singles oozed class – Sleep Well Tonight,Be My Light Be My Guide,Olympian – before their sound toughened up for 1997’s brash Britpop biggie, Drawn To The Deep End,and later drew on influences spanning Springsteen,soul and The Style Council for their uneven meditation on merrie England, Revelations. Curiously,having been dropped by Polydor, 2001’s self-released Libertine saw them freed to be the band they’d perhaps always wanted to be,the beautiful A Simple Request and indie-dub We’ll Get What We Deserve genuine ‘lost’ gems. Pat Gilbert

Global Communication

★★★★ Transmissions

FERALTONE. LP

EVOLUTION. CD/DL/LP

Box trove of lo-fi originator’s first two proper studio LPs

Chillout milestone and shoegaze-y reworkings from ambient house kingpins.

Johnston’s passing last September slipped by less noisily than many a rock giant’s,but this extraordinary singer-songwriter was as influential as any of them. Through the ’80s,his self-recorded DIY cassettes defined ‘lo-fi’ and wowed the US underground – Kurt Cobain famously listed ’83’s Yip/Jump Music in his Top 50 albums. Johnston’s drive to make music was inseparable from his mental illness,making its romantic obsessions and haunted visions often too truthful to bear. His two most satisfying LPs,both long unavailable,are collected here: 1 9 9 0 and ’91’s Artistic Vice saw Johnston transitioning from Texas bedrooms/garages to an NYC studio,aided by producer Kramer,and occasionally some of Sonic Youth. With definitive versions of True Love Will Find You In The End, Tell Me Now and Laurie,the package adds a 16-page book of Johnston’s art,a T-shirt, stickers and a Jeremiah The Frog pin,for a full picture of this visionary artist. Andrew Perry

Any opportunity to get reacquainted with Global Communication’s 7 6 :1 4 – Mark Pritchard and Tom Middleton’s landmark ambient beats album from 1994 – is welcome. But there’s much more to this weighty 7-LP/3CD retrospective,in particular their re-imagining of Blood Music,1993’s second album from curtain-haired shoegazers Chapterhouse. Originally a bonus CD (retitled Pentamerous Metamorphosis)

MichaelRother

★★★ Solo II GROENLAND. CD/DL

Neu! maestro’s synth-based oeuvre,boxed. With a set of new songs titled Dreaming. Rother’s renown for triumphantly sustained guitar tones has escalated across the past three decades, notably since showcasing them via Neu!-based postmillennial Hallogallo live shows. Anthologising albums the Krautrock legend has cut concurrent with that influence, Solo II proves he long since packed away his six-string/FX artillery in favour of synthesizers tootling out stately melodies. On 1983’s Lust,the eraspecific Fairlight CMI synth, primitive sampling and beatboxing made for a pristine, borderline-anodyne set of instrumentals which haven’t dated well. By Süßherz Und Tiefenschärfe two years later, Rother’s experiments were more sophisticated,occasionally guitar-tinged and intriguing to contemporary ears,and since then he’s drifted ever deeper into pure electronica, right up to a brand-new collection,Dreaming,which was completed this year under confinement and hastily included here. For the first time embracing vocal input, some tracks evoke Björk (Fierce Wind Blowing),others (Quiet Dancing) Julee Cruise’s surreal glacially-paced pop. Andrew Perry

Too truthful to bear:visions of Daniel Johnston.

Shutterstock, Brian Schutmaat

Double vinyl of the absolutist Aussie rockers’ singles,plus extras.

DEMON MUSIC GROUP. CD/LP

accompanying the Reading outfit’s valedictory release, within its five extended, somnambulant voyages are the DNA of future GC productions. To wit,Gamma Phase (an unrecognisable melding of two Chapterhouse originals, There’s Still Life and Deli) is a conversation with the sun gods through the medium of pillowy layered pads,syncopated footsteps and drowsy guitars that form a gorgeous reverie. An extra collection of selected remixes highlights not just Global Communication’s housier leanings but tracks like their reworking of 5:23,by beats maven Lone,suggest their influence remains pervasive nearly three decades on. Stephen Worthy

They can’t take away my dignity: Kevin Rowland, painful honesty.

F I LT E R R E I S SU E S

Johnny Cash

★★★★ The Mercury Years MERCURY/UCM. CD/DL/LP

Cash 1987-1991:The Prolific Years in a six-disc box set.

Alan Wakeman

★★★★ The Octet Broadcasts GEARBOX. CD/DL/LP

Two one-take BBC LPs catch alternate sides of the jazz tenorist,10 years apart. Hailed as British jazz’s ‘next young generation’ by Melody Maker in 1970,the sax-playing cousin of synth wizard Rick quickly built on his apprenticeship with London Youth Jazz Orchestra drummer Paul Lytton. On the Beeb’s Jazz Workshop in 1969,Wakeman’s compositions tap into the avant-garde,peaking on Merry-Go-Round,whose feedbacking brass above gongs, castanets and sleigh bells captures these prime scenemovers in full delirious effect. Wakeman had enjoyed stints with Soft Machine and David Essex’s band by 1979’s second session – a more cultured affair that riffed off Indian ragas and Bach chorales,grounded by Gordon Beck’s artful keys and lifted by Art Themen’s delicate tenor. Brief,context-heavy notes by Brian Priestley and Charles Fox fill out the picture. Andy Cowan

John Lee Hooker (Featuring Earl Hooker)

★★★★ If You Miss ’Im… I Got ’Im ELEMENTAL MUSIC. LP

The Hooker cousins keep their blues rockin’and raw. Contemporary blues musicians are often slick to a fault but there’s nothing overpolished in this 1969 gathering. John Lee was a giant of the genre,known for his playfully carnal baritone and lyrics. (His cackling laughter in I Wanna Be Your Puppy,Baby is especially lubricious.) Primarily revered as a lean-of-tone guitar god,cousin Earl was an expert slide player and here adds light touches with a wah wah pedal. The loose arrangements are held together by the ensemble’s groove – both Hookers and sidemen all contributing to the group sound with no showing-off. John Lee’s strutting boogie served as one rhythmic template,while his one-chord,slo-mo hypnotic drone is another,both trademarks equally relentless. Michael Simmons

Ditched by Columbia, Johnny Cash pulled out all the stops for Mercury, recording six long-players in five years,often packing them with stellar names. The Class Of ’5 5 brought a reunion with former Sun labelmates Jerry Lee Lewis,Carl Perkins and Roy Orbison;Johnny Cash is Coming To Town featured June,Anita, Helen and Carlene Carter plus Waylon Jennings,while Water From The Wells Of Home employed half of Nashville, along with Paul and Linda McCartney. Additionally,there were vintage hit reruns on Classic Cash and Boom Chicka Boom,which also included songs by Elvis Costello and Harry Chapin. The Mystery Of Life proved to be the final album and something of a mish-mash. Add to those a disc of early mixes,some previously unmissed items,including an extended rendition of The Wanderer with U2,and the result is an often uneven but rarely less than entertaining survey of a period during which none of Cash’s albums bothered the US Top 100. Fred Dellar

Fresh revelations Dexys leader’s soul- and underwear-baring covers LP is ripe for reappraisal. By Pat Gilbert.

Kevin Rowland

Various

★★★★

★★★

My Beauty

Roots Rock Reggae

CHERRY RED. CD/DL/LP

DOCTOR BIRD. CD

Odds-n-sods 1978 reggae compilation,now heavily expanded. After running Harlesdenbased Venture Records with David Tyrone, Jamaican immigrant Phil Mathias launched Revue to house his productions and material by Jamaicans who lacked their own labels. Mathias’s longstanding relationship with Creole,established by former Trojan personnel,helped his output reach larger audiences, and this 1978 compilation mixed roots tracks by Cornell Campbell,Sugar Minott and Leroy Smart with deejay cuts by Jah Stitch and Ranking Joe and lovers rock from The Main Attractions and Fil Callender; the latter’s Baby My Love one of Venture’s biggest hits. This massively expanded edition gets upgraded with obscure and mighty roots tracks from Bim Sherman,Freddie McKay and future Gorillaz bassist Junior Dan. Six previously unreleased numbers sweeten the deal;extended mixes of Sherman’s Why Won’t You Come On and Dan’s Red Green And Gold alone are worth the price of admission. David Katz

TWENTY YEARS ago, in September 2000, this writer collared Kevin Rowland at Creation boss Alan McGee’s 40th birthday bash at Notting Hill Arts Club, and told him that his version of The Greatest Love Of All, the opening track on My Beauty, was a revelation. When George Benson or Whitney Houston had sung the line, “I decided long ago, I didn’t want to walk in anyone’s shadow…”, I didn’t entirely believe them, I explained;but Kevin, I did. In his hands the whole song gained an otherwise absent truthfulness. Rowland eyed me extremely quizzically – and as well he might. Twelve months earlier, when My Beauty was released on Creation, it had been met with ridicule, its 11 cover versions largely dismissed as unnecessary and its artwork, showing Rowland in drag that revealed his underwear, met with schoolboy sniggers. Performing The Greatest Love at that year’s Reading Festival, the singer, wearing a white dress, was jeered and pelted with missiles. My Beauty went down in history as one of rock music’s great disasters, with sales said to be in their hundreds. Such a public car-crash might not have been so

wounding for Rowland were it not for the fact that My Beauty was his first new record since 1988’s The Wanderer. His ’90s had been spent overcoming cocaine addiction – My Beauty was a cleaned-up Kevin’s re-entry into the world, his past substance abuse confronted and put to rest via a selection of others’ songs, many of them – Rag Doll, Concrete And Clay, Daydream Believer, It’s Getting Better, Reflections Of My Life – the ’60s pop hits of his youth. A new album of original material was to follow. My Beauty’s brilliance – for a few – and repulsion – for many – was its unguarded therapy-session feel, the lyrics of timeless classics adapted to address Rowland’s personal issues after Dexys’ split in 1986. From the off it wasn’t easy listening, Rowland imploring, “Mum, mum… it’s over…”, even before The Greatest Love begins, and on Reflections… crying, “I don’t want to die!” Some lyrical changes were dramatic – Squeeze’s Labelled With Love rewritten as a drug addict’s tale – in other places even more arresting for their specificity, such as the peculiar swap of the word “happy” for “human” in Daydream Believer. A powerful reinterpretation of Thunder Road, left off the original LP due to issues with Bruce Springsteen’s publishers, is reinstated, expunged as it is of “dirty hoods” and “Chevrolets”. Rowland’s painful honesty has been his defining trait as an artist, and My Beauty, as exquisitely played, arranged and sung as any other Dexys or Rowland record, is long overdue acceptance into his canon. My beauty, indeed.

MOJO 99

Odd couples:(from left) Brian Eno, John Cale and Jah Wobble,when three went into twos.

F I L E U N D E R ... short story with most of the narrative removed, beginning, “Juan was sleeping under a tree. He wrote to me from Cordoba.” and ending “I leave the parcel on acid house, Madchester and the like were the top deck…” as if an act of terrorism has gripping the popular imagination, with our just taken place. heroes left somewhat preaching to the choir, On the closer, The River, Eno reveals a and it soon faded away. But in fact, it deep, moody vocal tone we didn’t know he contains some of the best work either possessed, singing a surreal Lee Hazlewood choochy face has done. kind of western tune over a looping Opener Lay My Love is curiously Casiotone keyboard pattern and what mesmerising and Wicker sounds like autoharp. Man spooky. “I am the What emerges is the termite of temptation… sound of these two wary I am the wheel, I am colleagues finding common returning and I will lay my ground in a hinterland, a love around you,” sings record that, now removed layers of Eno as the track from its original context, – loops of clattering drums, sounds sweetly eccentric clucking guitar and clavs and full of intriguing and perky viola – dances curio-stuffed corners. round a maypole. In 1995, Eno’s cues for One Word, the most the Derek Jarman film dated thing here, is not Glitterbug were passed unlike something Eno might along to John Wardle have done with Talking AKA Jah Wobble, who Heads, with Cale cast as put his warm, dubby imprint on them and David Byrne. Empty Frame invited the great Can has a similarly jaunty, daddrummer Jaki Liebezeit at-a-wedding-disco lope to to provide his pushing, late-period OMD. Africanaccented thing on a few flavoured Spinning Away tracks too. The results, sounds like a forgotten hit. released as Spinner (All Footsteps finds Cale in a Saints) +++, were room full of loops indulging “Two wary partly ambient, partly in a bit of psychogeography. propulsive, almost entirely “Somebody make me an colleagues instrumental, and wholly offer, I gotta get away from finding of their time. It’s engaging here.” On the pretty enough but sometimes Cordoba, Cale sings random common betrays its aimless origins. phrases Eno took from a ground.” Both albums are back on Spanish/English phrase expanded CD and vinyl. book, forming an enigmatic

Ambience chasers Two forgotten corners of the Eno catalogue dusted off. By Jim Irvin. EADING UP ON Brian Eno and John Cale making their 1990 collaboration Wrong Way Up (All Saints) ++++, I was reminded of that scene in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang where Baron Bombast of Vulgaria and his wife cavort around singing, “You’re my little choochy face…”, while he tries to murder her. There seemed to be something of the same curdled affection beneath outward harmony in the relationship between Eno and Cale. Both could come across as an imperious oddball who knew best. Eno called them “neighbouring principalities”, an uneasy alliance involving “constant sorties across the frontier, occasional truces and treaties and occasional coincidences of purpose.” The album, marking a return to singing for Eno for the first time since 1977’s Before And After Science, was made at his “state-of-the-art, 1979” home studio in Suffolk. This one was to be on Eno’s terms after their spiky participation on Cale’s Words For The Dying the previous year. According to Eno, Cale displayed “flashes of genius between oceans of inattention.” According to Cale, things became so tense that Eno came at him brandishing a chopstick in a clenched fist like a knife. Eno says that never happened. Whatever the tensions, the music turned out better than it’s remembered, if you can excuse Eno’s fallible sound choices:the so-dated-sounding-it’s-surely-due-a-revival DX7 keyboard and the ever-clumpy Linn drum machine. The album dropped just as

100 MOJO

F I LT E R R E I S SU E S porting vocals are supplied by Jolly’s nephews – Aaron,Art, Charles and Cyril Neville – at the light-bulb moment they realised that they could become a band. Andy Cowan

reined in his adventurous urges but this fascinating recording gives us a glimpse of what might have been. Charles Waring

Bob James

The Upsetters With Vin Gordon

★★★★ David Bowie

★★★★ Ouvrez Le Chien (Live Dallas 95) PARLOPHONE. DL

Bowie’s 1995 live set plus two bonus songs from Birmingham NEC gig. In the mid ’90s,David Bowie ran to the shadows of the musical margins once again. The Outside tour of 1995 began in America that autumn with a series of concerts with Nine Inch Nails,who would play their set before performing a segue of five songs with Bowie (not included here). The man himself looked the part (suits out,eyeliner in),but his selfdenying ordinance of 1990 meant anything played on the greatest hits Sound+Vision tour was banished from the setlist,a challenge too far for some. The then new material, such as I’m Deranged and We Prick You,was his first genuinely innovative music for 15 years,while the old – Look Back In Anger and Teenage Wildlife – got reanimated, guitarist Reeves Gabrels and pianist Mike Garson releasing the strange out of the originals with their stream-ofconsciousness playing. Proof that Bowie was always so much more than his pop hits. David Buckley

Wild Tchoupitoulas

Once Upon A Time: The Lost 1965 New York Studio Sessions

★★★★ Musical Bones

RESONANCE. CD/DL/LP

Jazz pianist reveals a revolutionary side on unearthed early album. Not many people would regard Bob James as an avant-garde pioneer. After all,his name is synonymous with smooth jazz,that muchmaligned,ultra-polite,radiofriendly offshoot of fusion that came to prominence in the 1990s. But back in 1965,James was leading a trio that was breaking new ground in experimental jazz. This discarded session captures James just before he cut an album for Bernard Stollman’s ESP-Disk label. There are eight tracks and although the first two are orthodox post-bop trio offerings,by the third and fourth tunes,Lateef Minor 7th and Variations,the music is mutating into something altogether more daring and outré,characterised by dissonances,weird percussive effects and random spoken words. Sadly,James later

STUDIO 16. LP

Fairuz Maarifti Feek (Our Encounter) WE WANT SOUNDS. LP

Sketches of Beirut from a singer in transition. Having split with her manager/ husband in the late 1970s,the Lebanese superstar handed her career over to her son, Ziad Rahbani,with startling results. Their second album together,recorded in 1983-4, but not released for a further three years,Maarifti Feek is a stylistic melting pot (loungebar ballad Khaleek Bil Beit is followed by a synth-led disco instrumental,not what you expect on a long-player by one of the greatest Arabic singers, but there are three here) and conceptual curiosity (titles such as Overture and Reprise, or Version 1 and Version II), held together by that soaring melancholic voice and the way the strings and keyboards play off each other. The standout

McCarthy The Enraged Will Inherit The Earth

Wild Tchoupitoulas

1989 album by the C86 generation’s militant tendency,remastered with second disc of singles and B-sides.

“Wild Tchoupitoulas gonna stomp some rump!” roared this all-star cast. Named after a riverside Indian tribe and overseen by producer Allen Toussaint,they sought to marry deep-rooted carnival traditions and indigenous New Orleans music with the freeform vocal flow of Big Chief Jolly and swampy funk of local legends The Meters. It’s a singularly convivial,assured sound – from the soft-shoe calypso of Meet De Boys On The Battlefront (a laidback riff on Lord Invader’s Rum And Coca-Cola) to the Iko Iko-like clickety clack of Big Chief Got A Golden Crown,massed vocal showcase Indian Red or high harmony remake of Hey Pocky A-Way. Mellifluous sup-

An Alpha Boys School alumnus, Vin Gordon became Don Drummond Jr at Studio One,where his landmark Heavenless was miscredited to Drummond. Musical Bones was one of the first long-players recorded at Lee Perry’s Black Ark;issued in sparse number in a blank sleeve,it was long wrongly attributed to Rico. The album utilises a relaxed jazz format with understated drumming, subdued wah wah guitar and melodic interjections from Wailers keyboardist Wire Lindo,as Gordon blows the expressive lead. There are roots reggae updates of choice ska scorchers,with CocoMacca drawing on Green Island,Fly Away transforming Real Rock and Raw Chaw riffing on Addis Ababa and Eastern Standard Time. Gordon tests the limits of the

trombone on originals such as Labrish and Quinge Up, while Licky Licky finds Lindo channelling Booker T. as Gordon drifts in and out of the bass-heavy mix. David Katz

Brian Protheroe

★★★ The Albums 1974-76 7TS/CHERRY RED. CD

Trio of playful albums by the narrator of First Dates! Protheroe was a young actor and musician from Salisbury whose dual careers got in each other’s way. His witty, down-at-heel 1974 Top 30 hit, Pinball,pegged him as an erudite singer-songwriter with a wide stripe of humour. The subsequent album was a tossed salad of pop cultural references – nods to Bowie,Viv Stanshall,Warhol and others – well-executed soft rock and tight but often-gimmicky arrangements. The following year’s Pick-Up was even more whimsical,the title track a confused mini-musical and its jaunty single,Good Brand Band,celebrating a team of cleaners,though the brilliant Enjoy It might have served him better. In 1976,I/You slipped Shakespeare and Little Richard among its deftly crafted originals. By this time,a West End career took precedence. These days,Protheroe narrates Channel 4’s First Dates,but still gigs occasionally. Jim Irvin

McCarthy: enraging against the ruling right.

★★★★ OPTIC NERVE. LP

Limited vinyl repressing of 1976 good-time New Orleans party funk standard.

Atmospheric Black Ark trombone instrumentals.

★★★★

★★★ JACKPOT. LP

cuts,however,are Li Beirut, wrenching Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concerto De Aranjuez back from Miles Davis,and the traditional (yet somehow Massive Attack-like) Oudak Rannan. David Hutcheon

agitpop, Essex quartet McCarthy eschewed polemic for satire. Their lyrics read like an absurdist draft of the 1987 Tory election manifesto, Malcolm Eden’s wan choirboy swooning over Tim Gane’s verdant guitar chimes – pure Brechtian technique that delivered jangle hegemony on We Are All Bourgeois Now, a 1988 B-side now on this handsome expanded edition of the band’s second album. Heightened production values didn’t benefit every song on The Enraged Will Inherit The Earth, yet there’s a bitter prescience to the likes of The Home Secretary Briefs The Foreign Secretary, while a bonus 7-inch offers unreleased songs from 1990’s final recordings: Who Will Rid Me Of These Turbulent Proles ranks with McCarthy’s best, while You Had To Go And Open Your Big Mouth features Laetitia Sadier, with whom Gane would soon form Stereolab – an ongoing vehicle for Marxist subversion.

Keith Cameron

MOJO 101

F I LT E R R E I S SU E S Freeez

Eric Andersen

★★★★

Southern Freeez

Woodstock Under The Stars

BEGGARS ARKIVE. CD/DL/LP

John Rocca’s Britfunk indie landmark hits 40th birthday. The vibed-up,can-do spirit of post-punk led music into previously uncharted territories, but none perhaps as strange or superficially straightforward as Britfunk. One of its key driving figures was congaplayer-turned-singer and producer John Rocca,who assembled north London’s Freeez and self-funded and released Southern Freeez on his own Pink Rhythm label. Filled with African and Latino chants, slap bass and wig-out virtuosity,it yielded a wistful funk hit in its title track and spawned many imitators,not least Wham!,who tweaked the formula for full commercial potential. If,even remastered, its DIY production remains a touch lightsome,its reissue is timely,with dancefloor-friendly,jazzy grooves currently once more all the rage. To mark its fourth decade,Rocca has coupled it with a new seven-track companion album, including a slick,housey reworking of Southern Freeez, underlining his continuing relevance in the here and now. Tom Doyle

Y&T MUSIC. CD/DL

One of the ‘60s folk scene’s most poetic singersongwriters in concert.

Little Steven

★★★ RockNRoll Rebel – The Early Work WICKED COOL/UMC. CD

The mutha-load:six reissues,four discs of rarities,plus three DVDs from a rock chameleon. Steven Van Zandt has waged his career as if a 12-inch single, constantly remixing himself – as Springsteen’s guitarist Miami Steve,agitprop synth rocker Little Steven,TV consigliere Silvio Dante and again as Little Steven,garage rock sage. Rarities here stretch from a 1973 blues with Southside Johnny to a recent acoustic toast to aging friendship. Between them stand a busload of live cuts,rehearsals,adverts, and extended mixes,including five of 1984’s Vote (That Mutha Out) that feel like a caucus of Ghostbusters and Rapture. If Steven’s voracious appetite is admirable,he’s always best on Stax-y R&B turf,like live takes here of I Don’t Want To Go Home and This Time It’s For Real,classics he penned for Southside. Both remind us he’s not just an A+ arranger, but also a deft,if unconventional,soul singer,undercutting surface bravado with vulnerability. Chris Nelson

Along with Dylan and Phil Ochs, Eric Andersen was one of the leading young troubadours of the early ’60s folk movement and his deeply personal lyrics made him a natural fit among the sensitive singer-songwriters of the 1970s. Dubbed the Songpoet,his romantic worldview encompasses love and love-lost ballads,but his songs also rhapsodise travel,history and literature. These three discs collect 1991-2006 concert recordings from the oncebohemian town of Woodstock, New York,Andersen’s former residence. His classics are here: Thirsty Boots,Close The Door Lightly,Violets Of Dawn,Blue River and Is It Really Love At All, making a well-rounded career retrospective. Collaborators include Woodstock neighbours John Sebastian,Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Happy and Artie Traum. Andersen’s sui generis hushed and impassioned vocal delivery perfectly complements the intimacy of this timeless material. Michael Simmons

VINYL PACKAGE OF THE MONTH

Jonathan Richman I, Jonathan CRAFT RECORDINGS

CROWNED Richman’s best album in last month’s MOJO How To Buy, 1992’s I, Jonathan technophobe (he who sang You Can Have A Cell Phone That’s OK But Not Me) would surely prefer. This is like being in the room with him – almost unbearably so on a stark reworking of That Summer

102 MOJO

For he’s a Jolana good fellow: Rüst m Quliyev.

Feeling (“Do you long for her or the way you were?”). Mostly, Richman’s appreciation of life’s simple pleasures – the beach, parties, conversation – feels like an antidote to the clutter and distractions of modernity. Yet there’s

magical trance of A Higher Power, where he doesn’t neglect to mention that first kiss “so stingy and so spare”, and a critique of The Velvet Underground (“Kind of faraway, kind of dignified”) that’s smarter than any rock journalist’s.

Esther Phillips

★★★★ Brand New Day SOULMUSIC. CD/DL

Five-CD,cross-label collection of the singer’s recordings spanning 1962-1970. Like Aretha and Etta, Esther deserves one-name status,such was her distinct skill to imbue songs with a bruised emotion and intensity. But Atlantic never quite knew what to do with her over their five years together. From Beatles covers (1965’s And I Love Him) to big band settings (1966’s Esther Phillips Sings), they threw everything at her to see what stuck. It took 1970’s Burnin’,a live album, to capture her at her best. On-stage at Freddie Jett’s Pied Piper club in LA,she was restricted by nothing,delivering a jazz set with class,sass and terrific verve. Bolstered on this box set – that covers her time at Lenox,Atlantic and Roulette – by previously unissued outtakes from the show (including a sublime Feel Like I Wanna Cry),it makes the world momentarily feel all right again. Lois Wilson

Joe Bonamassa

★★★ A New Day Now – 20th Anniversary PROVOGUE. CD/DL

The high-flying bluesrocker’s debut album revisited. Twenty years ago,guitar guru Joe Bonamassa headed into New York's Pyramid Recording Studios to cut A New Day Now,his debut album with producer Tom Dowd. Released on the Okeh label,it seemed no big deal,though some thought it strange that a chunk of blues-rock should take its name from a song by Jethro

dust had settled,that selfsame album made its Top 10 debut in the Billboard Blues Albums listing. Since then, every Bonamassa release has made the grade chartwise. This re-run,a remix of the original tracks with fresh, stronger vocals added,will doubtless add to that achievement,sparked by the opening, high-octane cover of Rory Gallagher’s Cradle Rock. Three bonus tracks produced by Steve Van Zandt provide an additional incentive. Fred Dellar

Rüst m Quliyev

★★★★ Azerbaijani Gitara BONGO JOE. CD/DL/LP

Surf vibes from the shores of the Caspian Sea. It’s one of those flukes upon which all rock history depends, but the Czechoslovakia-built Jolana electric guitar – as played by George Harrison in his youth – was perfectly suited to the string-bending,toneshifting conventions of Azerbaijani folk music;by the late ’60s,scores of young men were shredding for hours on end at weddings,able to both satisfy conservative audiences and make believe they were Hank Marvin. Recorded in the six years before Quliyev’s death in 2005,these nine instrumentals highlight his magpie eye for a tune – Afghan songs,Iranian street melodies,Bollywood soundtracks,mugham praise songs,he borrowed the lot and played them like a demon over traditional rhythms. Hear the frenzied distortion of Yaniq K r mi for a full wig-out – and you can bet the house on 75 Dollar Bill being fans. David Hutcheon

REISSUES EXTRA singer-guitarist John Lees’ apocalyptic lyric. The Poet is pastoral bliss;Little Lapwing highlights the CSN flavours of bassist Les Holroyd;Harry’s Song is perhaps prog’s only ode to a dead parrot. Among the bonuses are two demos and five BBC recordings but the bulk is a new stereo mix,a 5.1 surround mix and a handful of mono mixes. Martin Aston

Johnny Clarke

Lemonheads

Pete Rodriguez

★★★★

★★★

Spoon

Strickly Reggae Music

Lovey

I Like It Like That

★★★

PATATE. DL/LP

FIRE. LP

CRAFT RECORDINGS. LP

A diligent 12-track scoop of the JA singer’s 1976-86 recordings with producer Rodguel ‘Blackbeard’ Sinclair (Tapper Zukie’s brother), spanning roots and digital eras. Clarke’s easy vibrato sounds great throughout:’76 classic African Roots,an update of ’74’s Everyday Wondering,or ’84’s take on Junior Byles’ Fade Away. Go vinyl for ace pics of Johnny and his Merc. KC

Hardbacked RSD edition of the Bostonians’ 1990 major label debut which sharpened commercial instincts while maintaining the core dialectic of lazy sunniness/ punk impatience. LP2 adds a 1991 Aussie radio set of LP highlights like Stove,a gorgeous Ride With Me and ’88’s heartsore thrash finale Die Right Now. JB

1967 Fania smash for Rodriguez, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican US marine-turned-self-styled King Of Boogaloo who scored his biggest hit with title-track (A Mi Me Gusta Asi). If each track sounds similar,that’s the point. Like ska,it’s the groove that’s impossible to resist. JB

Telephono MATADOR. CD/LP

Debut full-length by Austin quartet leads series of eight albums and EP reissues. When Spoon assembled 2019’s best-of,Everything Hits At Once, they left early recordings on the shelf. Maybe they agreed with initial sceptics who said 1996’s Telephono had been stencilled from Pixies records. Fair enough,though this album is more than Britt Daniel’s influences. Before Daniel earned renown as a precise pop craftsman,he and his bandmates were champing at the bit to break loose. Daniel is strongest when he hyperventilates the refrains – on The Government Darling, or Don’t Buy The Realistic – as if he’s screaming in the streets at midnight or rocking himself for comfort in the corner. On Not Turning Off,an insomniac TV watcher pleads,“Oh honey, oh please,it’s just a machine”; today he’d be decrying the social media addiction that keeps him from looking in his partner’s eyes. Some of that early work was prescient. Chris Nelson

Barclay James Harvest

★★★ …And Other Short Stories ESOTERIC. CD

Three-CD edition for Brit-prog Harvest label dark horses. Time again to wheel out the “poor man’s Moody Blues" critique (later borrowed for a self-mocking song title) to provide some context for a band that lacked the hit singles or lofty conceits of their peers but still made a handful of orch-rock landmarks,including 1971’s … And Other Short Stories. Album bookends Medicine Man and After The Day are perennial fan-faves,the former expanding in concert (check the double-length BBC session version),the latter’s arrangement almost matching

Etta James

★★★★ Queen Of Soul ELEMENTAL. LP

First vinyl reissue for a 1964 set – it’s aged well thanks to James’s timeless voice. Ten tracks recorded for Argo/ Chess between 1962 and ’64 and released in the wake of her powerful 1963 live album Rocks The House,James invests everything from light pop ballads (Bobby Is His Name) to Irma Thomas’s tear-stained soul ballad I Wish Someone Would Care with real blues power. She lives the lyrics. The punchy Breaking Point brings side one to a tight finish at just under 14 minutes. Side two is a minute longer and also opens with two ballads with James’s bluesy grit offset by the pop arrangements of Flight 101’s tale of separated lovers and Loving You More Every Day, which welcomes her man back. At under two minutes, Do Right is a punchy correctional to a philanderer; Ed Townsend’s Mello Fellow gives James a rousing full band send-off. Etta’s in terrific voice throughout,but didn’t have an R&B Top 50 hit between May ’63 and January ’67. Geoff Brown

COMING NEXT MONTH... Matt Berninger, This Is The Kit, Thin Lizzy, Kevin Morby, Laura Veirs (below), Fleetwood Mac, P.J. Harvey, John Lennon, new romantics and more…

Mercury Rev

Ethiopians

★★★

★★★★

CHRYSALIS. CD

CHERRY RED. LP

MUSIC ON VINYL. LP

Orange 180gm vinyl of a great late’60s album by the JA harmony group. Features oddly pertinent Hong Kong Flu (“it’s terrible and dreadful man”). Non-vinyl purists should seek Doctor Bird’s 2018 CD two-fer with Woman Capture Man for a boss reggae double-hit. JB

Fleetwood Mac

Marbled blue vinyl edition of NY band’s 2006 score for Robinson Savary’s film about circus performers in late 19th century France. Autumnal orchestrations and music box Victoriana conjure a bleakly romantic atmosphere, perfect for singing bearded ladies and starry-eyed trapezists. JB

★★★★

MorwellUnlimited & Prince Far I

Then Play On

★★★★

BMG. CD/DL/LP

A.1 Dub/Cry Tuff Dub Encounter IV

The Mac’s third and finest album under Peter Green (his last with the group) gets the half-speed double-vinyl,deluxe anniversary treatment. The Celebration Edition follows the original UK tracklisting plus early takes on Mac landmarks Green Manalishi and blues-pop epic Oh Well Pts 1 & 2. JB

★★★★ Two Tone:The Albums

Hello Blackbird

Reggae Power

Various

The Midlands Motown’s eight original-era albums in a box with 24-page booklet. As well as the Specials and Selecter classics,note both Rico LPs,1983’s This Are Two Tone comp and era-defining Dance Craze live album,with added Madness,Beat,Bodysnatchers and Bad Manners ska wars. KC

Billy Wright

★★★★ Billy’s Boogie Blues JASMINE. CD

CHERRY RED. CD

Twofer of Morwell (1980) and Prince Far I & The Arabs (’81). Sweet spatial explosions followed by The Arabs going deep. Disc two plunges deep into Attack’s catalogue with Roots Radics,Scientist,et al. IH

The late-’40s to ’50s R&B singer whose look and style influenced Little Richard,Wright’s 28 tracks here,the A- and B-sides of his time at Savoy Records,reveal a bluesy tone and jump band swing on Blues For My Baby,You Satisfy and more. An ‘out’ gay man in the ’50s South,his influence transcended music. GB

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

DEPLORABLE

MOJO 103

B U R I E D T R E A SU R E unpredictable. Bruce and I thought we had to record him before someone killed him or he killed himself. But we left it at that because he wasn’t the kind of person you pursue.” True to himself, O’Shea waited almost a year before turning up, on July 7, 1981. “Michael came in,” remembers Lewis, “and he played the tune No Journeys End for five minutes then stopped. That was what we dreaded, but he had a herbal cigarette and then sat down and proceeded to play 17 minutes straight. It was done, there it was.” No Journeys End, in Lewis’s words, is “the core of what he did, the distillation of everything” and in it you can hear O’Shea’s life story:the rhythms of Irish life, traditional music and dance, giving way to the traveller’s odyssey, into North African, Middle Eastern flavours, with swelling psychedelic overtones, and jazz, blues and folk. It sounds like the work of a griot who knows the road, but once they are in the moment have little say in their destination. “After that we asked CREDITS Michael if he wanted to record some more Tracks: No Journeys and by the end of the next day five tracks End / Kerry / Guitar were finished and mixed.” No. 1 / Voices / Anfa Dásachtach Little attention was paid when the Personnel: Michael eponymous LP was released in 1982, “He wasn’t the kind of O’Shea (Mó Cará, however. “The whole thing was about person you pursue”: guitar) Michael O’Shea,outside originality,” reflects Lewis. “That was Producers: B. C. “boring” Ronnie’s. Gilbert, G. Lewis what Bruce and I liked, we liked to be Engineers: Eric surprised, we liked to surprise ourselves. Radcliffe, John Fryer Whether or not anybody else liked it, Released: autumn we really didn’t give a shit. I knew people 19 8 2 who’d appreciate good work, I knew Recorded: Blackwing Studios, they’d like it.” London If O’Shea was disappointed, he Chart peak: n/a wouldn’t let the setback derail him. With Current money from publishing, he set about availability: AllChival LP building more instruments. There was talk of another album with Matt Johnson of the metal tips of hairless paint brushes). In its The The, though the latter thinks this may essence it had the Moyen-Orient exoticism of have been just pub talk after a few pints. a John Barry score;once effects were added, O’Shea definitely appears on 1983’s Content using guitar pedals, it took on the depth of a To Write In I Dine Weathercraft, by fellow symphony orchestra tackling Wagner. Irishman Stano (also recently reissued by O’Shea was spotted busking in London, AllChival). In December 1991, however, resulting in a European tour with Don Cherry, O’Shea was hit by a van while crossing the a meeting with Alice Coltrane and a support road in London. He died five days later. slot with Ravi Shankar. Separating facts from Was he aware that his album had taken fiction is difficult, however. There were, on a life of its own at the end of the 1980s, apparently, sessions with Rick Wakeman that discovered by club DJs and coveted for its came to naught, and a stint at trance-like grooves and outRonnie Scott’s. “They gave there explorations of time and him a two-week residency,” space? O’Shea was certainly an enthusiastic participant in the says Wire’s Graham Lewis, early days of rave culture, so who first saw O’Shea playing it’s not impossible – and today in a doorway in Covent original pressings on Dome’s Garden. “I think he lasted classical-weight vinyl have a two nights. He said:‘It was definite cachet. fucking boring so I didn’t go “It’s absolutely extraordiback.’Fair enough.” nary,” muses Lewis. “I came In 1980, Lewis and back from touring the States in bandmate Bruce Gilbert were 2017 and some people said, running the Dome label and “The whole ‘Oh we love this album, we’d spending much of their time thing was like to put it out.’I talked to in Blackwing Studios near Bruce about it and he said, London Bridge. They invited about ‘That’s fucking weird… 35 O’Shea down. originality.” years, though – that’s a bit “Michael lived a very slow, isn’t it?’” spontaneous life and was quite GRAHAM LEWIS David Hutcheon excessive in lots of ways, very

This month’s lost musical chimera preserved in amber: transcendental DIY busking, further to elsewhere.

MichaelO’Shea Michael O’Shea DOME, 1982

T WAS A FRIDAY night in 1980 when viewers of the Irish TV variety show The Live Mike were treated to a burst of music that seemed to come from another world entirely. Sensing he was in the presence of a comic novelty act, the host, Mike Murphy, introduced the musician sitting behind his home-made instrument with the memorable question:“Why did you want to play a door?” “If you’re Irish,” replied Michael O’Shea, sitting there with a paint brush sticking out of each ear, “you’ve got to do something different.” Having learnt sitar in Bangladesh, Newry-born O’Shea was busking around Europe at the end of the ’70s when he climbed into a Munich skip, rescued the soon-to-befamous door, cut out the central panel and added 17 strings, two bridges, an amp and his custom-built “black hole space echo box”. Christening it Mó Cará (Irish for “my friend”), he played it like a hammered dulcimer (with

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For more on Michael O’Shea go to:tinyurl.com/y2hv6h9u and tinyurl.com/y5ju8ffk

Up through the in door

Edwin Starr Soul Master

TAMLA MOTOWN 1968, £3 .4 9

You say:“Quality soul …get the 2014 BBR edition for bonus goodies.” Christopher Grant,via e-mail An album to exhibit Gordy’s growing business acumen. Although 1970’s War is Starr’s biggest and best-known hit, club-land had already been dancing to his tunes for half-adecade. Much of this debut album was recorded for a rival Detroit indie,Ric-Tic,which Gordy bought in 1968. Starr’s co-written hits such as Agent Double O Soul,Stop Her On Sight (S.O.S.) and Headline News,all included here,fit snugly into Motown’s uptown soul template. Once at the label,Starr covered Smokey’s Way Over There more forcefully than The Miracles’ original, while My Weakness Is You and Time Is Passing By both bounce along brightly,and Starr’s own Oh How Happy will become a hit for him as a duet with Sondra ‘Blinky’ Williams.

’6 0 s Motown

CAST YOUR VOTES… This month you chose your Top 1 0 ’6 0 s Motown LPs. Next month we want your Oasis and solo albums Top 1 0 . Send your selections to www. mojo4 music.com or email your Top 1 0 to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy Oasis’ and we’ll print the best comments.

talent at such a small centre of excellence, and its work ethic, never fails to astonish. For T’S ONE OF THE laziest yet most persistent views: example, the many treatments a until the extraordinary ’70s flowering of Marvin Smokey Robinson song can sustain Gaye (What’s Going On et al), Stevie Wonder testifies to both the writer and the singer – few find (Talking Book etc) and Norman Whitfield’s such delicacy in a melody as Smokey, but Edwin Starr’s productions (The Temptations, primarily), Motown muscular reading gives Way Over There a new energy. did not know how to put together quality albums, the Finding a Top 10 from such a massive catalogue only five-star LPs being their excellent Greatest Hits rammed with artists who’re now part of pop’s fabric packages. Complete nonsense, of course. While it is has been a testing distillation. And we’ve limited the true that for most of the ’60s the focus of the Tamla, choices to one album per artist – thus The Motown, Gordy and Soul labels was on singles – a Temptations’ Wish It Would Rain and Cloud Nine, and sales and marketing decision rather than an artistic Marvin Gaye’s That Stubborn Kinda Fellow all just miss one – that didn’t stop the artists and out, as does Jr. Walker And The All their producers, arrangers and Stars’ shoo-in Shotgun, which songwriters creating albums that are appeared as recently as MOJO 320’s “A learning ’60s Mod How To Buy. as enjoyable and fulfilling today as process… Most of these albums comprise they were six decades ago. To listen the A- and B-sides of three recent to the albums from, say, The moving at singles plus half-a-dozen other covers Marvelettes’ Please Mr. Postman – the improbable of Jobete catalogue songs. When the 1961 title track was Berry Gordy’s first US Number 1 – is to hear a producers attempted to broaden the speed.” learning process on the job moving range – The Supremes’ Sing Rodgers at improbable speed. & Hart or A Bit Of Liverpool, Marvin’s Hello Broadway – it gets a bit messy. The concentration of superlative

The young long-playing Sound Of Young America. By Geoff Brown.

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n Gaye How Sweet It Is 4To BeMarvi Loved By You TAMLA MOTOWN 1965, £1 2 .9 8

You say:“Had he stopped here he’d still be a Motown great… consummate.” Michael O’Neill,via e-mail A wholly different prospect to his ’70s masterpieces of social, political and personal engagement,Gaye’s ’60s solo LPs customarily featured a shower of hits,a dribble of covers and a splash of the ballad treatments he favoured. Only voted this low in the 10,one suspects,in deference to those ’70s glories. How Sweet It Is… nonetheless offers the full magisterial sweep of H-D-H songwriting from the title track’s easy pop swing (and just listen to James Jamerson’s bass!) to the R&B muscle of Baby Don’t You Do It. Jazzy Gordy original Try It Baby swings – even the trumpet solo is muted – while Need Somebody’s pretty guitar figure and final ballad Forever’s sentiment are utterly winning.

Getty (2)

Calling out around the world:(front,from left) The Supremes,The Vandellas; (centre row,from left) The Temptations and two Miracles;(back) The Miracles, London,October 1964.

H OW T O B U Y

Martha And The Isley Gladys Knight The Contours The Supremes 9Dance 7 The Vandellas Brothers This & The Pips 5Everybody 8(NowDo That You Love Me 6LoveWhere Did Our Old Heart Of Mine Party Needs I Can Go TAMLA MOTOWN 1965, £1 2 .9 1

Dance)

TAMLA MOTOWN 1966, £5 .9 5

STATESIDE 1964, £1 1 .3 5

Love

You say:“Does what it says on the tin. The H-D-H production line at full pelt.” Cath Berry,via e-mail

ORIOLE 1963, £3 .4 9

You say:“Marvellous takes on songs by The Supremes, Vandellas and Marvin Gaye.” Dave Gross,via e-mail

You say:“Pop soul greatness… an essential Motown album.” P Gilman,via e-mail

TAMLA MOTOWN 1968, £6 .0 0

Martha Reeves once said The Marvelettes “paved the way for Motown’s girls,The Supremes, everybody”,and her group’s third album has indeed pipped the Marvs’ Please Mr. Postman and Playboy. By 1964 Motown’s Hit Factory was a sharper prospect. In the UK the Vandellas’ first two singles,Dancing In The Street and Wild One,were issued on Stateside;by third single Nowhere To Run in March ’65,Tamla Motown in the UK had been set up. This third Vandellas LP had some of Mickey Stevenson’s best work as a co-writer and producer, and was a peak for Martha,too. As its title suggests,dancers dominate – The Miracles’ Mickey’s Monkey,Marvin’s Hitch Hike,those three hits and Mobile Lil The Dancing Witch.

You say:“One of the loudest shouts of joy on any soul list.” Will Fitzsimmons,via e-mail It’s impossible to explain The Contours’ place among the cool steppin’ and neatly tux’d groups. Hyperactive R&B shouters and screamers,onstage they were untameable, slipping and sliding,leaping and hiding. This fantastically untypical Motown LP matches that image – it’s a crazed crash of Detroit dance and The Coasters at their loosest. Writer Berry Gordy had earmarked the title track for The Temptations. They couldn’t be found,so he used The Contours. It was their only US Top 40 hit and a ’60s beat group setlist staple. Berry song Shake Sherrie is another terrific dancer;1961 single and group co-write/ballad Funny is a rare rest from the wildest sounds Gordy ever produced.

The vocal trio’s earlier hits like Shout and Twist And Shout – much favoured by British bands of the ’60s – and long history with Wand,RCA Victor and United Artists before they joined Motown in late 1965 made them an interesting signing but an awkward fit. This was the first of two LPs on Tamla. Stuffed with HollandDozier-Holland songs,Ronald Isley gives an edge to songs associated with The Supremes (I Hear A Symphony,Stop! In The Name Of Love),the Vandellas (Nowhere To Run) and The Elgins (Put Yourself In My Place) while owning H-D-H tunes Behind A Painted Smile, I Guess I’ll Always Love You and the crazed Take Some Time Out. Their post-Motown success,of course,was huge.

Motown had had Number 1 45s,it’s true,but this is where the R&B/soul indie became an unstoppable pop juggernaut. Three US Number 1s between July and November 1964,a time when The Beatles and other UK bands were dominant, catapulted Gordy’s enterprise to unforeseen (outside Hitsville) heights with The Supremes at the forefront. The title track,which the group famously hated,footstomps and all,is joined by Baby Love and Come See About Me, earlier singles like Run,Run, Run and the sizzling energy of When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes – the track that suggested HollandDozier-Holland had found the key – and two Smokey songs,A Breath Taking Guy and Long Gone Lover.

You say:“Love,loss and love again. Fabulous singing and songwriting. Solid gold.” Michael Collins,via e-mail An experienced group before they joined Motown in 1966, Knight was the most accomplished and expressive female singer on the label,but as she’d feared their records didn’t get the promotional attention they deserved (the label’s priorities lay elsewhere). Still,their Motown years brim with Knight’s dramatic lead vocals exuding tenderness,hurt and defiance,as on the first hit version of I Heard It Through The Grapevine. Uptempo thrills like Just Walk In My Shoes and Take Me In Your Arms And Love Me balance a strong reading of Barbara Mason’s Yes I‘m Ready. Like the Isleys,Gladys and the Pips later had greater success elsewhere.

NOW DIG THIS

The Miracles The Four Tops 3Go-Go Going To A 2 Reach Out TAMLA MOTOWN 1968, £1 0 .5 1

TAMLA MOTOWN 1965, £1 4 .4 1

You say:“From when every 45 was a greatest hit and the ‘filler’was all ‘killer.’” Phil Castiglione,via e-mail Like many Motown albums of the mid-’60s,this plays like a Best Of – four Top 20 US hits in under a year – and top quality ‘fillers’. Here,exquisite Smokey leads on rarely bettered ballads such as The Tracks Of My Tears, My Girl Has Gone and his unsurpassed Ooo Baby,Baby are matched by pounding dancers like the title track and the sprightly Head To Toe,lifted by that infectious handclapping. His enjoyment of word-play leaps out of the gentle reveals in the beautiful A Fork In The Road,with Choosey Beggar distinguished by its lovely chorus. My Baby Changes Like The Weather,the doo-wop throwback of Since You Won My Heart and poppy Let Me Have Some are much more than mere filler.

You say:“A series of amazing soul TKOs:their take on Walk Away Renee,enough said!” John Barrett,via e-mail Another ‘ordinary’ LP that feels like a greatest hits. To Reach Out’s title track,add Tops hits 7 Rooms Of Gloom,I’ll Turn To Stone,Bernadette,Standing In The Shadows Of Love,and their strong covers of The Left Banke’s Walk Away Renee and Tim Hardin‘s If I Were A Carpenter,and you get a series of commanding lead vocals from the magnificent Levi Stubbs. Not all covers are sublime:The Monkees’ Last Train To Clarksville is trite,the Tops taking the weight as a group with minimal Levi input;ditto The Association’s Cherish. If he seems more engaged by I’m A Believer,the Funk Brothers do not. The Tops finish with songs by Smokey and Stevie Wonder. Equally prized,Second Album (1965) almost solely comprises Holland-Dozier-Holland songs.

The Temptations The Temptin’Temptations

TAMLA MOTOWN 1965, £6 .4 7

You say:“Was there ever a better singing group on the label? …perfect moments.” L Sutherland,via e-mail It was the laziest of truisms:as writer/producers Smokey Robinson favoured Eddie Kendricks’ flutey leads while Norman Whitfield put his trust in David Ruffin’s rougher tenor. This mid-’60s gem pops that theory in a blender. Opening track Since I Lost My Baby is a Smokey song quietly gripped by Ruffin’s moody sincerity;next, Kendricks’ co-write (with Whitfield and Eddie Holland) The Girl’s Alright With Me is all melodic fizz;third track Just Another Lonely Night is led by second tenor Paul Williams. As a collective,the Tempts were the best resourced set of voices at the label:Ruffin’s My Baby,Kendricks’ You’ve Got To Earn It,Williams’ Don’t Look Back – they play tag-team with the leads. The first vinyl LPs read: “Produced by Bill ‘Smokey‘ Robinson”;later versions give Whitfield four credits,Mickey Stevenson/Ivy Jo Hunter two. Also in ’65 came ‘songbook’ concept The Temptations Sing Smokey.

The Motown editing suite is awash with artist biogs, label documentaries, and live mementoes;the library is stuffed with books on same. From the ’ 60s, the Ready Steady Go! Motown Special was defining. 2019’ s Hitsville: The Making Of Motown is ’ 60s-focused from its Detroit roots to its LA move. Benign, but it will suffice until someone does a six- or eight-part series. The relationship it shows between Berry and Smokey opens a window on how it must have been. The 1981 theatre production Dreamgirls, based on The Supremes, became a 2006 Hollywood movie;TV miniseries The Temptations was based on Otis Williams’biog; Standing In The Shadows Of Motown introduced unsung studio musicians the Funk Brothers and started a backroom doc genre of its own.

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Steadily subversive: Annie Nightingale, on a constant mission to find the new.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNT The DJ was invited to Eric Clapton’s wedding to Pattie Boyd, but missed the reception – a performance that included three ex-Beatles, David Bowie, Elton John and David Bowie – when her car broke down. ● On “unprofessionally” asking John Lennon to sign her copy of The Wedding Album, he admitted: “Don’t be embarrassed. I used to do this all the time. Ask for autographs… outside the Liverpool Empire!” ● A conversation with Roger (then Jim) McGuinn of The Byrds about LSD ended up at confusing crosspurposes as Nightingale thought the letters stood for predecimalisation pounds, shillings and pence. ●

Mod, one of that 20th century breed who were carried away from the dark ruins of post-war Britain in a swirl of optimism, position she achieved when she finally people on a constant overturned the BBC establishment’s firm mission to find the new, conviction that radio DJs’real role was as the exciting, the transdaytime “husband substitutes” for bored formative. Yet while Hi housewives. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose your Hey Hello – the title fem-in-nin-it-tay?” inquired the wife of one comes from her distinctive BBC executive. greeting to her audience Instead, Nightingale believed in the power over the introductions of of shared enthusiasm for music:“Hi, have you songs – should provide an heard this new one? Let me play it to you… unimprovable bird’s-eye It’s really that simple.” She steered the view of pop culture, the student-friendly Request Show – big hits book’s focus is fuzzy and indistinct. Interview included Patti Smith’s Dancing Barefoot, The transcripts – even with Nightingale’s modern Passions’I’m In Love With A German Film interjections – aren’t that illuminating;her Star and Fishheads by Barnes And Barnes – anecdotes tend towards the digressive, and and, for five years, The Old Grey Whistle Test, there’s often a surprising lack of telling detail a decisive rebuttal to Variety’s crushing or analysis. There’s also a slight ragbag feel, assessment of her presenting skills at the stories about Uri Geller or Theresa May 1965 British Song Festival (“the girl’s a looker leading nowhere exciting. Even so, it is fitting that on not a sayer”). The curtains the day Nightingale was opened on another act in her “Aren’t you career when she adopted awarded her MBE in 2002, dance music and club culture. she was caught up in a May afraid you’ll And it adopted her right back, Day riot. There’s a lot of dead lose your despite a nasty incident when air in Hey Hi Hello – odd for a she was thrown off the decks professional who has only ever fem-in-ninin Pacha 10 minutes before been late for one show in nearit-tay?” a live broadcast. ly 50 years – but Nightingale’s steadily subversive voice still As she says, she was always BBC EXEC’S WIFE comes through loud and clear. a modernist rather than a

Spirit of radio Britain’s first female DJ spins her side of the story. By Victoria Segal.

Hey HiHello ★★★ Annie Nightingale WHITE RABBIT. £2 0

Getty

URING HER time as pop columnist for the Daily Sketch, Annie Nightingale would sometimes receive a surprise phone call at her Brighton flat. “McCartney,” the voice at the other end of the line would say. “Which one?” Nightingale would answer, knowing full well it was one of the “four most famous people in the world” calling for “some pop mag chat”. Over 50 years of broadcasting, this ability to act as both trusted insider and irreverent maverick has served Nightingale well and her third run at a memoir – after 1981’s Chase The Fade and 1998’s Wicked Speed – is full of close-quarters encounters with a dizzying array of stars, from John Lennon and Bob Marley to Marc Bolan and Jimmy Page (when he informed her his new band were called Led Zeppelin, she sighed that he wouldn’t get very far with that name). She was the first – and for 12 years, only – female DJ at Radio One, a

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F I LT E R B O O K S such as this. The Italian author Mario Giammetti has written no less than 15 books on the musicians of Genesis,so he knows his Hogweed from his Harold The Barrel. The story is told in straightforward,albumto-album fashion with a list of every gig,good photos and much band comment (gripes and tensions unexpurgated). Beautifully presented,it’s probably the best primer out there for anyone wanting to learn how five serious young gents with scarcely a rock’n’roll bone between them scaled the charts. John Bungey

Knock! On Wood:My Life In Soul

King Tubbys: The Dub Master

★★★★★

★★★★

Eddie Floyd With Tony Fletcher

Thibault Ehrengardt

BMG. £2 2 .9 9

Novelistic account of the enigmatic dub architect. During the early 1970s,Osbourne Ruddock became dub’s primary creative force, turning incidental B-sides into works of art with technically limited equipment at his studio in Waterhouse, western Kingston,Jamaica. But little has emerged about this private individual,who was tragically murdered in 1989. This idiosyncratic biography by former Natty Dread editor Ehrengardt was written with the blessing of Tubby’s widow and daughter,who provided incredible archive photos and some personal details, revealing a driven perfectionist who mentored many,despite antisocial tendencies and alleged miserliness. Ehrengardt provides a strong political context for Waterhouse’s endemic instability as well as testimony from close associates like Yabby You, Scientist and Anthony Red Rose (though U Roy,Jammy and Bunny Lee coldshouldered Ehrengardt for financial reasons). The musical analysis thoroughly explores Tubby’s evolution,with speculation on miscredited mixes. Although his murder remains unsolved,this book is a must for all Tubby fans and dub devotees. David Katz

An absorbing memoir from the Stax singer-songwriter. Eddie Floyd learned to sing at Mount Meigs,an Alabama reform school where from the age of 13 he spent three years for hitting his schoolteacher. “The best goddamn thing ever happened to me,” he writes about the experience in his superb autobiography, penned with Tony Fletcher. Fletcher previously authored Wilson Pickett’s biography In The Midnight Hour,and the Pickett and Floyd stories are intertwined. Both Alabama transplants in Detroit,they sang together in R&B group The Falcons and then,after Pickett went to Atlantic as a solo artist,Floyd went to Stax and,teaming with Steve Cropper,penned several hits for Pickett before singing his own Knock On Wood. Written with Cropper with Otis Redding in mind,the song gave Floyd an R&B Number 1. He stayed at Stax until its fall, then returned when it was reborn in the 2000s. “I have no regrets,” the octogenarian says at the end of this gripping read. Lois Wilson

Genesis – 1967 To 1975:The Peter GabrielYears

★★★ Mario Giammetti

Getty

recounts how the US chat show host David Letterman didn’t know who Sonny Boy Williamson was when Jimmy Page mentioned him in a TV interview (“Sonny Boy Williams?”). He marvels at how Britain introduced America to its own music and lets the likes of former King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford (who contributes a brisk foreword) and members of The Yardbirds and Small Faces explain how life-changing it all was. For former Yes raconteur Rick Wakeman,the music was a blessed relief from a post-war world of “thick smog,a miserable little piece of roast beef and mushy vegetables”. It’s a familiar tale,but Tow’s US-centric take offers fresh angles,and his interviewees always deliver. Mark Blake

London, Reign Over Me:How England’s Capital Built Classic Rock

Savage Impressions: An Aesthetic Expedition Through The Archives Of Independent Project Records And Press

DREAD EDITIONS. £2 5

KINGMAKER. £1 9 .9 9

From Charterhouse school to chart fame – the band’s loon-pants years. Like the aliens in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories who prefer the director’s “early funny ones”,a hardcore of Genesis fans prefer the early prog ones. This has led to bemusement from some band members now convening for one last arena blast;it has also reignited the career of guitarist Steve Hackett,faithfully recreating the older days,and maintained a healthy demand for histories

Hoople fan club secretary and Jimi Hendrix performing at New York’s Fillmore East on New Year’s Eve. As with Part One,this isn’t a straight pop history. Instead,Needs maps the second half of 1969’s major musical,political and social events through personal touchstones and his own interviews with key players from the time. In another writer’s hands this approach could easily become selfindulgent,but Needs is adept at balancing enthusiasm and first-person anecdotes with knowledge and analysis. For instance,his own thrill at discovering Nina Simone and Buffy Sainte-Marie provides a springboard for discussions on gender inequality and the lack of female leaders in the civil rights movement,both then and now. Lois Wilson

Just A Shot Away: 1969 Revisited Part Two

★★★★ Kris Needs NEW HAVEN PUBLISHING. £1 5 .9 9

Further charting one of pop music’s pivotal years. This second volume begins on July 3,1969, the day that the author turned 15 and his hero Brian Jones died. It ends,some 200 pages later, with him becoming Mott The

★★★★ Stephen Tow ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD. £1 2 .7 9

American writer explores Brit rock’s roots. Author Stephen Tow teaches rock’n’roll history at a university in Pennsylvania,and his fascination for London’s pivotal role in ’60s music comes across in this warm-hearted study. In his opening address,Tow

★★★★ Bruce Licher P22 TYPE FOUNDRY. £8 0

Rebel music for the eye in a lavish,illustrated account of the post-punk Hipgnosis. In the 1980s,the Los Angeles band Savage Republic was

Fusing his passions for philately and letterpress printing,guitarist and graphic designer Bruce Licher created exotic,promotional stationery and stamps so convincing they made records like 1982’s Tragic Figures feel like avant-rock mail from an army of desert guerrillas. Through his Independent Project label and workshop,Licher extended that aesthetic – a hand-tooled dynamism of elegant typography,arresting images and tactile sensation – in museum-worthy album art and special-package commissions for such as Camper Van Beethoven,Stereolab and R.E.M. (their coveted Christmas fan club mailings). Savage Impressions is a magnificent large-scale history of Licher’s music for the eye:Savage Republic’s strange reign; startling commercial detours (a Hank Williams Jr box set); even stranded beauty such as Licher’s rejected covers for a CSNY album,1999’s Looking Forward. Deluxe editions of Impressions come with an LP of Licher’s recordings across the years,including Savage Republic demos. David Fricke Eddie Floyd: the Falcon who landed on Soul Street.

T I M E M AC HIN E

Avalon Sunrise:(clockwise from left) festival poster;Michael Eavis, dreamer of dreams;roadies get it together on-stage;freaks and funny things enjoy the sun (and free milk) down on Worthy Farm.

SEPTEMBER 1 9 7 0 …the Glastonbury festival is born It was pretty good for a pound. According to its poster, this sunny Saturday’s Pop Folk & Blues Festival at Worthy Farm in Pilton, Somerset offered entertainment from The Kinks, Steamhammer, Duster Bennett, Alan Bown, Wayne Fontana, Stackridge and Amazing Blondel, plus local talents Marsupilami, with future Folk Roots editor Ian A. Anderson and his guitar-playing friend Ian Hunt, and Originn. As well as a light show and films, there were “Freaks and Funny Things” promised, and free milk. The plan had been hatched on the previous June 28, on the second day of the Bath Festival of Blues And Progressive Music, five miles down the road at the Bath & West Showground. In attendance to see Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention was Michael Eavis, 34, a dairy farmer, Methodist and former merchant seaman who loved Elvis, Dylan and The Kinks, and his lady friend Jean. “I’d never seen anything like it in my life before,” wrote Eavis of the “lovey-dovey, emotional” bash, in last year’s official history Glastonbury 50. “It just hit me for six… I

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turned to Jean and said, ‘I’m going to do one of these on the farm!’If I remember rightly, her reply was, ‘Don’t be silly, you’ve no idea how.’” The next day he called Bristol’s Colston Hall and obtained the number for The Kinks’ management. They agreed the group would play for £500. Planning a show which would run from 2pm to 2am, Eavis set about assuaging the police and local authorities;he also wrote a reassuring piece in local parish magazine Pilton Link saying, “I wish to give the image of a Festival to celebrate the incoming of the Harvest.” Disaster almost struck when, apparently believing the festival would be too small and amateurish, The Kinks

“There’s a kind of euphoria down here…” MICHAEL EAVIS

pulled out, blaming laryngitis. However, dissuaded from cancelling by his daughter Juliet, Eavis negotiated with The Kinks’agent to book Tyrannosaurus Rex instead. The day began mistily and in pensive mood, the death of Jimi Hendrix the previous day weighing on attendees’minds. But it soon grew sunnier. A local BBC crew were on hand to film a light-security scene of barechested groovers and bongo players, with tents and vehicles parked around the field. “There’s a kind of euphoria down here,” Eavis told a BBC interviewer that day, “away from the awful realities of life. It’s a nice place, the Vale Of Avalon, and Glastonbury, and all the mystique surrounding it…” There was a single tarpaulin-covered stage built from scaffolding and plywood, lashed to two apple trees in case of winds, and a similarly constructed mixing desk. Compère and DJ was Bath’s ‘Mad’Mick Ringham, who recalled the first record he played being It’s All Over Now by The Valentinos (he also remembered spinning The Teddy Bear’s Picnic and watching an on-stage limbo contest). Bristol prog-folkers Stackridge were there to fill in should any bands fail to show – Wayne Fontana didn’t make it, but Sam Apple Pie, Al Stewart and Keith Christmas did – and, legend has it, Stackridge opened the festival with their song, Teatime. The Central Somerset Gazette sent a reviewer, who detailed “24 very adequate

ALSO ON! toilets”, DJing from 10am and a crowd whip-round to pay a reduced entry fee for a party from London who thought it was free. The anonymous Gazette scribe enjoyed Quintessence, Duster Bennett and Steamhammer, and noted the words ‘Hendrix Lives’painted on the side of a van. Preceded by a minute’s silence for Jimi, Tyrannosaurus Rex took to the stage late in the evening. “I have to say that he was wonderful, easily the highlight of the festival,” said Eavis, who recalled Bolan sat on a haybale while singing Debora. “The sun was going down behind the stage, a red sun. There were only 1,500 people there to see it, but you knew this was music that was going to last. To this day, I reckon it’s one of the best things that ever happened here.” Needing to sell 5,000 tickets to break even, Eavis lost money, and had to pay Bolan’s fee in five monthly instalments. But something had taken root at Worthy Farm. Renamed Glastonbury Fair, it returned in ’71 with David Bowie, Joan Baez and Traffic on the bill, lay fallow until 1979, and from 1981 grew to become the greatest festival on the planet, where revelry, consciousness-raising and charitable works meet in harmony. Eavis remains at the helm, co-organising with his daughter Emily. But 50 years ago, all that was to come. Organising this Pop Folk & Blues Festival had been a tiring business, he told the BBC:“I’ll be very glad to get back to the cows again, I must say.” Ian Harrison Glastonbury 50:The Official Story Of The Glastonbury Festival by Michael and Emily Eavis is published by Trapeze.

TOP TEN 8 -TRACK CARTRIDGES ( US ) SEPTEMBER 5 COSMO’S 1CRE FACTORY EDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL FANTASY

Never mind the Baltics:Jimi at the Open Air Love & Peace festival,Fehmarn.

Hendrix’s last show Hendrix plays SEPTEMBER 6 Jimi his final, reportedly lacklustre gig at The Open Air Love & Peace festival on the Baltic island of Fehmarn. The bash is planned as a European answer to Woodstock and is co-funded by German sex shop chain Beate Uhse. Sly & The Family Stone, Mungo Jerry, the Faces and more play, but foul weather, cancellations and violent bikers blight the three-day event. On September 11, Hendrix conducts his last press interview (on the subject of free gigs, he tells Keith Altham, “we have time… there’s no big rush”). He jams with Eric Burdon and War on September 16 at Ronnie Scott’s, but is found dead in girlfriend Monika Dannemann’s flat in Notting Hill on September 18.

Easily Led:Robert Plant and Jimmy Page (right) hold a celebratory press conference at Madison Square Garden.

FAREWELL, BLIND OWL Alan ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson, (above) co-founder, voice, harmonica player and songwriter with Los Angeles blues rockers Canned Heat, is found dead aged 2 7 in the Topanga Canyon backyard of bandmate Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite. He died from an overdose of barbiturates. Wilson had been due to join the group on a European tour.

STARR WAR War by Edwin Starr is Number 1 in the US. Two weeks later it is replaced by Diana Ross’s Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.

GLOBETROTTER A-GO-GO The Hanna-Barbera/CBS Productions’ animated 12cartoon Harlem Globetrotters debuts. Neil Sedaka writes for its accompanying Jeff Barry/Don Kirshnerproduced album.

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THE EAGLE LANDS club co-founder Roger Eagle promotes 19his firstEric’s gig – Free, Mott The Hoople, Bronco and Trees at Liverpool Stadium. “The next one will have a really good lightshow, and more exciting food,” Roger promised the Liverpool Echo.

HARDIN ASKS And Music Echo publish an appeal by 19EddieDisc Hardin of Hardin & York. A book with eight new songs was stolen from his Rolls-Royce in Waterloo the previous week: he asks the culprit to return it to 41 Wardour Street, London W1.

Baez of glory: Joan,present at Woodstock,at 3.

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ZEPPELIN DETHRONE THE FABS The Melody Maker Readers Poll Awards reveal that Led Zeppelin have been voted Most Popular Group, the category won by The Beatles for the previous eight years. Robert Plant calls it “a shock, and very elated” (sic). On September 19, the group play 2pm and 8pm concerts at Madison Square Garden, the latter

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show recalled as one of their best. Record Mirror report that Lord Sutch watched the gig but didn’t appear backstage, as “it isn’t too matey right now,” after Sutch took what Jimmy Page and John Bonham thought were demos recorded for “a laugh” and released them as Lord Sutch And Heavy Friends earlier in ’70. In two weeks, Led Zeppelin III will be released.

Travelling at supersonic speeds? You’ll need a fine watch,as worn by JFK,Steve McQueen or Che Guevara,to work out all the time you’re saving.

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Did Gene sing from the stalls? worked for the same agency, I got the job.” Speaking on Isle of Wight Radio, he added, “Robert Blackwell,

A friend of mine reckons his dad once went to a rock’n’roll show in Doncaster during the ’60s and, to his surprise, someone in the same seating area suddenly got up and started singing. The someone proved to be Gene Vincent, who, for some reason was not allowed to perform on-stage. Could you confirm this story? Clive Roberts, via e-mail Fred says:All true. It happened during the opening show of Little Richard and Sam Cooke’s first UK tour in 1962. The two were due to appear at the Doncaster Gaumont on October 8, heading a package that included Jet Harris. Little Richard, whose band included a teenage Billy Preston, reportedly tore the place apart, but Sam Cooke failed to show because his plane was delayed due to poor weather. To negate the audience’s disappointment, it was arranged for Gene Vincent to perform Be-Bop-A-Lula. He was unable to appear on-stage as his UK work permit had expired, and the only way for him to contribute was by singing from his seat in the stalls, something he did at several other venues on the Don Ardenpromoted tour.

handed me a music sheet. I told him, I can’t play this – I don’t read music and, anyway, my harmonica has only got 10 holes in it… He said, ‘All right, just see what you can do.’” Hogman says he was also impressed by guitarist Ernest Ranglin playing a black Gibson Les Paul, “the first I had ever seen.”

WHO PROVIDED THE LICKS ON MILLIE’S LOLLIPOP? I was sorry to hear of Millie Small’s passing. Was it true that Rod Stewart played harmonica on her My Boy Lollipop hit? David Tags Taylor, Thurnscoe, South Yorks Fred says:Millie said it was Rod, but the harmonica player on the Lollipop date was actually Pete Hogman of Jimmy Powell And The 5 Dimensions. Hogman says Cyril Davies was initially pencilled in for the session, “but Cyril died, and because I

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DID SANDY GET THE BLUES? Re that Sandy Denny-Muddy Waters query (MOJO 319):I have no idea about that get-together, but I did see Fotheringay (or possibly The Sandy Denny Band) in ’73 or ’74 playing in a hangar at RAF Cosford, near Wolverhampton. One of the support acts was Sonny Terry And Brownie McGhee, so maybe Sandy/ Muddy wasn’t such an unlikely billing as Joe Boyd thinks? Ian Gilmore, via e-mail Fred says:All I can add is that Sandy recorded Muddy’s You’re Gonna Need My Help with the Fairports as early as February 1969. Joe Boyd, by the way, was tour manager for Muddy Waters in the mid-’60s.

SLEEVE IT OUT Wrong band on the sleeve? Well, Lo Mejor De The Who (The Best Of The Who) released by Polydor Spain in 1974 has a rather nice picture of Golden Earring on the cover. Richard Evans, via e-mail That mystery group on the cover of Spirit’s Dark Eyed Woman (MOJO 319) is The Byrds, in the line-up that recorded Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. Bengt Undstrom, Sweden There’s a Peter Green compilation called Legend that appeared in the UK on Rhino (1995) that has a rather well-known black Gibson Les Paul

certainly isn’t Peter Green and (though his head isn’t shown) is by a guy whose name starts with ‘Neil’and ends with ‘Young.’ Martin Schreiber, via e-mail Fred says:So many readers contributed to this discussion that you wonder if the industry was being guided by Mr Magoo. Reader Tim Ginn wonders why Piero Umiliani’s 1974 library music LP The Folk Group pictured The Rolling Stones, while Marc Miller mentioned the Skydog Records’ Flamin’Groovies 45 of I Can’t Explain/Little Queenie with the MC5 on the sleeve. But it was Andreas Schmitz of San Francisco, who came up with the absolute doozie (above, bottom) that, bootleg or not, sweeps the floor with all contenders!

WERE DYLAN’S DOGS INTERPLANETARY? Is there really a secret message hidden amid Bob Dylan’s If Dogs Run Free? L.C. Freeman, via e-mail Fred says:It was dustbin Dylanologist A.J. Weberman who, in 1970, drew attention to the lyrics:“Oh winds which rush my tail to thee, suh it me clone be (sic).” Weberman alleged that “When the last five unintelligible syllables are played backwards at a slower speed, one hears:‘If Mars invades us.’” When Weberman brought up the subject during an interview with Dylan, the author responded, “What drugs are you on, Al?” By the way, Bob’s official lyric, heard more easily in live versions of the song, is “so it may flow and be.”

CONTACTFRED To get your questions answered, conundrums clarified or help untangle a puzzle, e-mail: Fred Dellar direct at fred.dellar@bauermedia.co.uk

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Prepare to meet thy gob-iron, cover-art goof and Dylan lyric queries…

HELLO

Stare it up:the band in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne,1977 (from left) Pauline Murray, Robert Blamire,Gary Smallman,Gary Chaplin.

Pauline Murray and Penetration County Durham’s punk contingent were supercharged but green. Then penury and exhaustion peaked… in an Angus steakhouse.

Rik Walton/ArenaPAL, Ebet Roberts/Getty

HELLO SUMMER 1 9 7 6

Gary took to Virgin records in Newcastle, and the manager sent it to London. We were getting interest – Miles Copeland sent someone up really early on. We were absolutely green, you know, absolutely clueless about the music business. I think we were The Points for one gig [in October 1976 at Middlesbrough Rock Garden]. My boyfriend had a poster on the wall, the fanzine Penetration, so it was, “That’ll do.” The name was almost a barrier to success when you think about it. Then we started to get more attention and you can’t really change it. But we didn’t think too much about anything, we just wanted to do it, in the moment. That’s youth though, isn’t it? It was just a big laugh to start with.

I’m a ’70s person, and I’d been through the whole glam rock thing. I saw Bowie, Lou Reed, the New York Dolls. [In October 1974, guitarist] Gary Chaplin booked a coach to go and see Roxy Music at [Newcastle] City Hall. I hadn’t really met him by that point. But it was seeing the Sex Pistols [at Sayer’s, Northallerton, May 19, 1976] that made people like us think, yeah, we could do that. I had done a couple of acoustic things with this other lad, and Gary, a serial putter-ofG OODBYE NOVEMBER 1 9 7 9 bands-together, said did I want to sing. I said, “I’ll have a go.” Gary Smallman [drums] and It’s difficult to see where you’re at, when Rob [Blamire, bass] came in at Christmas 1976, you’re in it. We’d done like, three years, full early ’77. We rehearsed all over the place, in on, and it was high pressure. You’re totally the local scout hut in Ferryhill, the local pub, exhausted, you’re still really young, and we anywhere that would have us. When we first were totally skint. We’d been to America for got together, we were just five weeks, with two shows a doing cover versions. We did night, travel in between, not Pills, Roadrunner, never live eating properly… thankfully, though, and we realised we there were no drugs. When needed to get our own we came back, we had to material together. And record the second album when we started to get [Coming Up For Air, September asked to support people ‘79], writing half of it in the [like] The Stranglers at the studio. A UK tour was booked, City Hall when we’d hardly and we were supposed to go done any gigs, we had to back to America. up our game. I remember sitting in an Someone we knew had a Angus Steakhouse in reel-to-reel and we set up London and Neale [Floyd, billiard tables around guitar] saying that he didn’t ourselves in the local youth want to carry on. That was club, and we did a really the point when I said, “Oh rough live cassette, which I’ve had enough as well.” We PAULINE MURRAY

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“We probably did break up too soon.”

used to co-write, and I don’t think Fred [Purser, guitar] was particularly a writer. So, you have to get another member in? It’s like starting again each time. I wasn’t really planning to say what I said [on October 14 at Newcastle City Hall, Pauline announced from the stage, “This is the last gig that this line-up is ever going to do here”]. That just came out of my mouth. Paul Morley was there, and we were being recorded, so maybe I felt like I just had to say it, because we were going to split up after the tour. Honestly, we were really at the top of our game, live, then. I’m not sure we realised we were doing the last gig at the Nashville [in London on November 5, ’79]. I don’t remember much about it really. I felt a sense of relief that we didn’t have to worry about it after that, but it was quite sad. We drove back to Ferryhill and dropped everybody off and literally never saw them again for about 10 years. Me and Rob stayed together and started to write together on a 4-track. We probably did break up too soon. If someone had sat us down and said, “You’ve done all this work, is there any way we can work this out?” …I wouldn’t have done the [1980 Martin Hannett-produced] Invisible Girls album if that had happened. If you paced yourself differently, it would be a different outcome. We did very intensely go for it, and if you go for it like that, there’s going to be some sort of fall out. As told to Ian Harrison Pauline Murray’s Elemental is out on September 2 5 on Polestar Records.

The last line-up,with Neale Floyd and Fred Purser,right;(inset left) Pauline today.