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100 Articles

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

James McNair James has written for MOJO since 1996. He left London for the North East in 2015, and in no way misses the myriad cultural happenings and wealth of anchoring friendships he left behind, instead preferring clean air and sand between his toes. He writes about World Party from page 36. Alysse Gafkjen Alysse is an American portrait photographer whose work has served as the artwork for countless albums and promotional content for musicians of all genres. She photographed Sturgill Simpson on page 50. You can find more of her work at alyssegafkjen.com or follow her on Instagram @alyssegafkjen. Michael Jones Michael spent 10 years editing puzzle magazines, then 10 years writing about films for a TV guide. Music is just about the only other thing he knows, so…

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

James McNair James has written for MOJO since 1996. He left London for the North East in 2015, and in no way misses the myriad cultural happenings and wealth of anchoring friendships he left behind, instead preferring clean air and sand between his toes. He writes about World Party from page 36. Alysse Gafkjen Alysse is an American portrait photographer whose work has served as the artwork for countless albums and promotional content for musicians of all genres. She photographed Sturgill Simpson on page 50. You can find more of her work at alyssegafkjen.com or follow her on Instagram @alyssegafkjen. Michael Jones Michael spent 10 years editing puzzle magazines, then 10 years writing about films for a TV guide. Music is just about the only other thing he knows, so now he compiles MOJO’s crossword…

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

IDLES PRESENT ACTS OF RESISTANCE

THIS MONTH, WE’VE HANDED OWNERSHIP OF THE MOJO CD over to our friends in Idles. For the past few years, the Bristol quintet have earned a reputation as one of the most exciting punk bands in Britain, but their ambitious and enquiring music has always stretched further than hardcore genre confines – never more so than on their imminent fourth album, Crawler. Collected here, as Mark Bowen and Joe Talbot from Idles explain, “are some songs and artists amongst many that influenced the writing and recording process for Crawler. From the deep dark ‘60s pop of The Flamingos and The Rivingtons, to exploring violent sound in newer ways (Sophie and Suuns). Songs that taught us new elements we brought to our sound, in our vocal performances (Moses Sumney and Nick…

IDLES PRESENT ACTS OF RESISTANCE

IDLES PRESENT ACTS OF RESISTANCE

THIS MONTH, WE’VE HANDED OWNERSHIP OF THE MOJO CD over to our friends in Idles. For the past few years, the Bristol quintet have earned a reputation as one of the most exciting punk bands in Britain, but their ambitious and enquiring music has always stretched further than hardcore genre confines – never more so than on their imminent fourth album, Crawler. Collected here, as Mark Bowen and Joe Talbot from Idles explain, “are some songs and artists amongst many that influenced the writing and recording process for Crawler. From the deep dark ‘60s pop of The Flamingos and The Rivingtons, to exploring violent sound in newer ways (Sophie and Suuns). Songs that taught us new elements we brought to our sound, in our vocal performances (Moses Sumney and Nick…

IDLES PRESENT ACTS OF RESISTANCE

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Brian Wilson THE BEACH BOY What music are you currently grooving to? Currently I’m listening to rock’n’roll. I’ve been wanting to make a rock’n’roll album for years and years. I have some ideas, so hopefully I’ll be able to do that one next. My favourite rock’n’roll band to listen to are The Rolling Stones. They are always my go-to rock’n’roll band. I love them so much. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? I’d have to say Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Obviously, I love The Beatles and we have always had a mutual love and respect for each other. They say that it was birthed from hearing Pet Sounds… I don’t know… but I just love that album. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you…

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Brian Wilson THE BEACH BOY What music are you currently grooving to? Currently I’m listening to rock’n’roll. I’ve been wanting to make a rock’n’roll album for years and years. I have some ideas, so hopefully I’ll be able to do that one next. My favourite rock’n’roll band to listen to are The Rolling Stones. They are always my go-to rock’n’roll band. I love them so much. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? I’d have to say Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Obviously, I love The Beatles and we have always had a mutual love and respect for each other. They say that it was birthed from hearing Pet Sounds… I don’t know… but I just love that album. What was the first record you…

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Theories, rants, etc.

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk THE BUSINESS OF BEING IN LED ZEPPELIN was not a job for shirkers. What the various romantics, hedonists, mystics and virtuosi in the band shared was an often ferocious work ethic, albeit one that Jimmy Page felt obliged to enforce from time to time. Remembering the draughty conditions of Headley Grange, where they began their fourth album in January 1971, Page does concede it was “a bit austere”. But “We were there,” he says, “to work.” As the years pass – and it’s been 50 since Led Zeppelin IV first astonished the world – the stories evolve, and different perspectives come to the fore. Building a rock monolith sturdy enough to withstand a half-century takes serious graft, but this month’s new interviews with Messrs Page, Plant and Jones also…

Theories, rants, etc.

Let’s Make This Precious

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO WHEN MOJO calls Kevin Rowland in late September he’s quarantining in a hotel in Thailand, listening to new mixes of 1982’s Number 1 album Too-Rye-Ay. He’s conferring with mixing engineer Pete Schwier and returned violinist/bandleader Helen O’Hara: the current song they’re working on? The transcendence-chasing Let’s Make This Precious. Is the new version, as the lyric demands, crying pure and true? “A lot more than it was,” says Rowland. The journey to Too-Rye-Ay As It Could Have Sounded, as with most things in Rowland’s mercurial career, has not been simple. While the original LP and its classic single Come On Eileen both topped the UK charts in summer 1982, he says he was prevented by his label from mixing it to his satisfaction.…

Let’s Make This Precious

…BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD have recorded new album Ants From Up There at Chale Abbey Studios on the Isle Of Wight… KENDRICK LAMAR (right) dropped online hints that the follow-up to 2017’s DAMN. is imminent: “I continue to pursue my life’s calling. There’s beauty in completion.” In early September he registered new songs Driving Down The Darkness, Before The Hangman’s Noose, Pale Horse Apocalypse and more… NOEL GALLAGHER is recording the second side of his new High Flying Birds LP, having finished side one before the summer. He told the Life Goals football podcast that he keeps a cardboard cut out of Man City manager Pep Guardiola “in the studio overseeing the tactical analysis of the songs” …Klaxons leader and Abba’s new live band director JAMES RIGHTON has recorded a…

Theories, rants, etc.

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk THE BUSINESS OF BEING IN LED ZEPPELIN was not a job for shirkers. What the various romantics, hedonists, mystics and virtuosi in the band shared was an often ferocious work ethic, albeit one that Jimmy Page felt obliged to enforce from time to time. Remembering the draughty conditions of Headley Grange, where they began their fourth album in January 1971, Page does concede it was “a bit austere”. But “We were there,” he says, “to work.” As the years pass – and it’s been 50 since Led Zeppelin IV first astonished the world – the stories evolve, and different perspectives come to the fore. Building a rock monolith sturdy enough to withstand a half-century takes serious graft, but this month’s new interviews with Messrs Page, Plant and…

Theories, rants, etc.

DOWN THE transatlantic wire, Dave Gahan’s first words are, “It’s great to hear an English accent.” Yet, having had a New York zip code for over 20 years, the Essex-raised singer is so thoroughly integrated into American life that all but two of the songs on his new covers set Imposter were written by Americans. Spanning Bob Dylan to Mark Lanegan and P.J. Harvey to Elmore James, the sumptuous and bluesy Imposter is the third album he’s made with Anglo-American collective Soulsavers: within, the 59-year-old Gahan’s voice is so dark and imposing that it’s startling to reflect that he was once the cherubic frontman of synth-pop kids Depeche Mode. “I’m still the youngster in Depeche Mode,” he quips. What determined Imposter’s song choices? They’re all artists, and extraordinary vocalists, that I’ve been…

DAVID BOWIE’S TOY LP IS COMING. GUITARIST EARL SLICK EXPLAINS ALL

MORE THAN two decades after it was recorded – and 10 years since it mysteriously leaked onto the internet – David Bowie’s shelved 2001 album Toy is finally due for official release. Largely comprising re-recordings of undervalued Bowie songs from his 1964-71 catalogue, its many highlights include sturdy reworkings of 1966’s I Dig Everything and The London Boys, along with atmospheric takes on Silly Boy Blue (from ’67’s David Bowie) and Ziggy Stardust outtake Shadow Man. Initially, Toy will feature as part of the November release of new box set Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001), providing a full stop to the period spanning Black Tie White Noise and ‘hours…’. Then, on January 7, 2022 (a day before what would have been Bowie’s 75th birthday), it will be released as the stand-alone Toy:Box, along…

DAVID BOWIE’S TOY LP IS COMING. GUITARIST EARL SLICK EXPLAINS ALL

Let’s Make This Precious

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO WHEN MOJO calls Kevin Rowland in late September he’s quarantining in a hotel in Thailand, listening to new mixes of 1982’s Number 1 album Too-Rye-Ay. He’s conferring with mixing engineer Pete Schwier and returned violinist/bandleader Helen O’Hara: the current song they’re working on? The transcendence-chasing Let’s Make This Precious. Is the new version, as the lyric demands, crying pure and true? “A lot more than it was,” says Rowland. The journey to Too-Rye-Ay As It Could Have Sounded, as with most things in Rowland’s mercurial career, has not been simple. While the original LP and its classic single Come On Eileen both topped the UK charts in summer 1982, he says he was prevented by his label from mixing it to…

Let’s Make This Precious

Nathaniel Rateliff

I discovered The Basement Tapes at 17 when my friend’s mom showed me her bootleg. We never got a chance to listen to it, so I started digging, looking for it. When I was 20, around 1998, I bought a copy in Colorado. I didn’t have a TV or a phone then, and we’d sit and play rummy and just listen to it, and I spent a lot of time listening by myself. It made you feel like you were sitting with friends, and it taught me that songs can be a lot of different things. They’re not just built on beautiful prose – sometimes they’re matter of fact, funny, or just a story – and that you can capture a moment on your 8-track recorder. I remember one of the…

Nathaniel Rateliff

…BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD have recorded new album Ants From Up There at Chale Abbey Studios on the Isle Of Wight… KENDRICK LAMAR (right) dropped online hints that the follow-up to 2017’s DAMN. is imminent: “I continue to pursue my life’s calling. There’s beauty in completion.” In early September he registered new songs Driving Down The Darkness, Before The Hangman’s Noose, Pale Horse Apocalypse and more… NOEL GALLAGHER is recording the second side of his new High Flying Birds LP, having finished side one before the summer. He told the Life Goals football podcast that he keeps a cardboard cut out of Man City manager Pep Guardiola “in the studio overseeing the tactical analysis of the songs” …Klaxons leader and Abba’s new live band director JAMES RIGHTON has recorded a…

VOICE OF COME, LIVE SKULL AND BEYOND, THALIA ZEDEK TURNS UP THE INTENSITY

AT HOME in Boston, MA, Thalia Zedek is preparing to take her guitar to Kingston in upstate New York, halfway between the two cities that have been the backdrop to her career: fronting post-punk touchstone bands like Boston’s Uzi, whose single blast of transcendent noise Sleep Asylum is still one of Zedek’s favourites (“if it came out now it would still sound cool”), New York’s Live Skull in the late ’80s, and back to Boston with Come in the ’90s, before embarking on a long and storied solo path. Several strands come together in Kingston this September night, when Zedek shares a bill with the reformed Live Skull. Her own set spans 20-year-old solo debut, Been Here And Gone (reissued this month by Thrill Jockey) to her newest release, the Thalia…

VOICE OF COME, LIVE SKULL AND BEYOND, THALIA ZEDEK TURNS UP THE INTENSITY

ZEDEK MINDWARPS

Come Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (MATADOR, 1994) Chris Brokaw quit Codeine to concentrate on Come’s second LP. After a series of recording mishaps, missed promotional opportunities and bassist Sean O’Brien quitting, the LP missed its mark. “A little bit of a bummer,” Zedek admits. Today, it sounds brilliant, with some of their strongest songs (German Song; Mercury Falls). Thalia Zedek Band Fighting Season (THRILL JOCKEY, 2018) A trio of great Bostonian guitarists meet on Zedek’s seventh solo album: J Mascis, Chris Brokaw and, of course, Zedek herself. “Don’t try to rescue me/You are not the one,” warns opening track Bend Again, which features all three, her voice soaring and swooping over the glowing, droning guitars. Thalia Zedek Band Perfect Vision (THRILL JOCKEY, 2021) Zedek’s latest album is a powerful, politically charged investigation of a chaotic time in America (Cranes: “The pride…

ZEDEK MINDWARPS

DOWN THE transatlantic wire, Dave Gahan’s first words are, “It’s great to hear an English accent.” Yet, having had a New York zip code for over 20 years, the Essex-raised singer is so thoroughly integrated into American life that all but two of the songs on his new covers set Imposter were written by Americans. Spanning Bob Dylan to Mark Lanegan and P.J. Harvey to Elmore James, the sumptuous and bluesy Imposter is the third album he’s made with Anglo-American collective Soulsavers: within, the 59-year-old Gahan’s voice is so dark and imposing that it’s startling to reflect that he was once the cherubic frontman of synth-pop kids Depeche Mode. “I’m still the youngster in Depeche Mode,” he quips. What determined Imposter’s song choices? They’re all artists, and extraordinary vocalists, that…

Trash Aesthetics

WHEN HE worked at the box office of the capital’s ULU 30 years ago, Suede drummer Simon Gilbert always kept tickets back from the choicer gigs to sell to touts. “When [Suede] do shows, they’re still the same touts as before,” he says. “They don’t recognise me now, but I know exactly what they look like.” The former toilet cleaner from Stratford-Upon-Avon has a talent for observation and recall. As a young punk, he was thrilled by Ray Stevenson’s 1978 scrapbook The Sex Pistols File. “That book fascinated me,” he says, “and, always in the back of my head, I wanted to do exactly the same if I ever got into a band.” Consequently, his new pictorial documentary So Young is a deeply immersive trip back to the Suede world of 1991-93,…

Trash Aesthetics

DAVID BOWIE’S TOY LP IS COMING. GUITARIST EARL SLICK EXPLAINS ALL

MORE THAN two decades after it was recorded – and 10 years since it mysteriously leaked onto the internet – David Bowie’s shelved 2001 album Toy is finally due for official release. Largely comprising re-recordings of undervalued Bowie songs from his 1964-71 catalogue, its many highlights include sturdy reworkings of 1966’s I Dig Everything and The London Boys, along with atmospheric takes on Silly Boy Blue (from ’67’s David Bowie) and Ziggy Stardust outtake Shadow Man. Initially, Toy will feature as part of the November release of new box set Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001), providing a full stop to the period spanning Black Tie White Noise and ‘hours…’. Then, on January 7, 2022 (a day before what would have been Bowie’s 75th birthday), it will be released as the stand-alone Toy:Box,…

DAVID BOWIE’S TOY LP IS COMING. GUITARIST EARL SLICK EXPLAINS ALL

Nathaniel Rateliff

I discovered The Basement Tapes at 17 when my friend’s mom showed me her bootleg. We never got a chance to listen to it, so I started digging, looking for it. When I was 20, around 1998, I bought a copy in Colorado. I didn’t have a TV or a phone then, and we’d sit and play rummy and just listen to it, and I spent a lot of time listening by myself. It made you feel like you were sitting with friends, and it taught me that songs can be a lot of different things. They’re not just built on beautiful prose – sometimes they’re matter of fact, funny, or just a story – and that you can capture a moment on your 8-track recorder. I remember one of…

Nathaniel Rateliff

BUFFALO NICHOLS BRINGS ANGER BACK TO THE BLUES

“Race is the reason blues exists.”BUFFALO NICHOLS FOR THE place that packaged up rock’n’roll’s early years inside the eternal optimism of TV sitcom Happy Days and The Fonz, Milwaukee has punched well below its musical weight ever since. Arrested Development’s Speech, the Violent Femmes and Bob ‘The Chicken Dance’ Kames are about as notable as it gets for Wisconsin’s most populous city. Add to the list, however, Buffalo Nichols (Carl to his mum), a 30-year-old guitarist and singer fast rising as part of a new vanguard of black musicians reclaiming the blues from middle-aged white guys and injecting it with a modern political and social voice. “People look at the blues very academically, like it’s something that only lives in the past,” Nichols says from his current home in Austin, Texas. “But it’s…

BUFFALO NICHOLS BRINGS ANGER BACK TO THE BLUES

VOICE OF COME, LIVE SKULL AND BEYOND, THALIA ZEDEK TURNS UP THE INTENSITY

AT HOME in Boston, MA, Thalia Zedek is preparing to take her guitar to Kingston in upstate New York, halfway between the two cities that have been the backdrop to her career: fronting post-punk touchstone bands like Boston’s Uzi, whose single blast of transcendent noise Sleep Asylum is still one of Zedek’s favourites (“if it came out now it would still sound cool”), New York’s Live Skull in the late ’80s, and back to Boston with Come in the ’90s, before embarking on a long and storied solo path. Several strands come together in Kingston this September night, when Zedek shares a bill with the reformed Live Skull. Her own set spans 20-year-old solo debut, Been Here And Gone (reissued this month by Thrill Jockey) to her newest release, the…

VOICE OF COME, LIVE SKULL AND BEYOND, THALIA ZEDEK TURNS UP THE INTENSITY

HOW ARUSHI JAIN FELL IN LOVE WITH MODULAR SYNTHS AND ENTERED THE “BETWEEN-WORLD”

IT’S THE middle of September and Arushi Jain is in her Brooklyn flat, packing for this year’s Sustain-Release festival in New York state. She moved to Brooklyn in April from San Francisco, where she had been creating music for the past four years. “New York is a more external city,” she says. “You’re always thinking, ‘What am I missing out on?’ San Francisco was…” she pauses to think of the correct expression. “A great place to write, a great place to be introverted.” The music Jain creates, previously as OSE, and more recently under her own name on her gorgeous 2021 album Under The Lilac Sky, is simultaneously introspective and expansive, blending the Hindustani morning ragas of her Delhi birthplace with the ’80s West Coast new age synth modulations of her…

HOW ARUSHI JAIN FELL IN LOVE WITH MODULAR SYNTHS AND ENTERED THE “BETWEEN-WORLD”

1 CAT POWER A PAIR OF BROWN EYES Chan Marshall kicks off another tranche of covers with this unsteadily ethereal Pogues rethink. Very much captures the spirit, if not the sound, of Shane MacGowan. Find it: streaming services 2 J MASCIS DEATH OF A DREAM Sweetness, guitar grind and self-realisation, from tribute set Highway Butterfly – The Songs Of Neal Casal. Within, Steve Earle, Bob Weir and more play for the late guitarist’s charity. Find it: nealcasalmusicfoundation.org 3 BITCHIN BAJAS OUTER SPACEWAYS INCORPORATED New Age Chicagoans expand on their Sun Ra fetish for a whole album of covers – including this electropop trinket: think cosmic ritual re-scored by Wendy Carlos. Find it: Bandcamp 4 GINA BIRCH FEMINIST SONG The Raincoats’ bass/voice’s first solo 45! Electronics and Spectorpop pulses with righteous rage: “To hell with powerlessness!” Find it: Third Man single 5 BAXTER…

ZEDEK MINDWARPS

Come Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (MATADOR, 1994) Chris Brokaw quit Codeine to concentrate on Come’s second LP. After a series of recording mishaps, missed promotional opportunities and bassist Sean O’Brien quitting, the LP missed its mark. “A little bit of a bummer,” Zedek admits. Today, it sounds brilliant, with some of their strongest songs (German Song; Mercury Falls). Thalia Zedek Band Fighting Season (THRILL JOCKEY, 2018) A trio of great Bostonian guitarists meet on Zedek’s seventh solo album: J Mascis, Chris Brokaw and, of course, Zedek herself. “Don’t try to rescue me/You are not the one,” warns opening track Bend Again, which features all three, her voice soaring and swooping over the glowing, droning guitars. Thalia Zedek Band Perfect Vision (THRILL JOCKEY, 2021) Zedek’s latest album is a powerful, politically…

ZEDEK MINDWARPS

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

“AM I A HIPPY?” PONDERS JORMA Kaukonen, one-time guitar kingpin of Haight-Ashbury poster children the Jefferson Airplane: along with their Grateful Dead pals, the hippy-est of hippy bands. “The answer’s no, I don’t think I was.” Kaukonen turned 80 last December and is counterintuitively more loquacious than he was at 30. “I’ve never been a communal person,” he continues. “The Airplane made money, we bought cars, houses. That being said, if there’s a freedom of spirit to generic hippy consciousness, then we shared that spirit.” It’s nearly 55 years since Kaukonen helped define the San Francisco sound and its psychedelic milieu on 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow, Jefferson Airplane’s stratospheric second album. That record’s Top 10 hits – Somebody To Love and White Rabbit – both featured Kaukonen’s piercing, snaking lead guitar, additions to…

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

Trash Aesthetics

WHEN HE worked at the box office of the capital’s ULU 30 years ago, Suede drummer Simon Gilbert always kept tickets back from the choicer gigs to sell to touts. “When [Suede] do shows, they’re still the same touts as before,” he says. “They don’t recognise me now, but I know exactly what they look like.” The former toilet cleaner from Stratford-Upon-Avon has a talent for observation and recall. As a young punk, he was thrilled by Ray Stevenson’s 1978 scrapbook The Sex Pistols File. “That book fascinated me,” he says, “and, always in the back of my head, I wanted to do exactly the same if I ever got into a band.” Consequently, his new pictorial documentary So Young is a deeply immersive trip back to the Suede world…

Trash Aesthetics

BUFFALO NICHOLS BRINGS ANGER BACK TO THE BLUES

“Race is the reason blues exists.”BUFFALO NICHOLS FOR THE place that packaged up rock’n’roll’s early years inside the eternal optimism of TV sitcom Happy Days and The Fonz, Milwaukee has punched well below its musical weight ever since. Arrested Development’s Speech, the Violent Femmes and Bob ‘The Chicken Dance’ Kames are about as notable as it gets for Wisconsin’s most populous city. Add to the list, however, Buffalo Nichols (Carl to his mum), a 30-year-old guitarist and singer fast rising as part of a new vanguard of black musicians reclaiming the blues from middle-aged white guys and injecting it with a modern political and social voice. “People look at the blues very academically, like it’s something that only lives in the past,” Nichols says from his current home in Austin,…

BUFFALO NICHOLS BRINGS ANGER BACK TO THE BLUES

HOW ARUSHI JAIN FELL IN LOVE WITH MODULAR SYNTHS AND ENTERED THE “BETWEEN-WORLD”

IT’S THE middle of September and Arushi Jain is in her Brooklyn flat, packing for this year’s Sustain-Release festival in New York state. She moved to Brooklyn in April from San Francisco, where she had been creating music for the past four years. “New York is a more external city,” she says. “You’re always thinking, ‘What am I missing out on?’ San Francisco was…” she pauses to think of the correct expression. “A great place to write, a great place to be introverted.” The music Jain creates, previously as OSE, and more recently under her own name on her gorgeous 2021 album Under The Lilac Sky, is simultaneously introspective and expansive, blending the Hindustani morning ragas of her Delhi birthplace with the ’80s West Coast new age synth modulations of…

HOW ARUSHI JAIN FELL IN LOVE WITH MODULAR SYNTHS AND ENTERED THE “BETWEEN-WORLD”

A LIFE IN PICTURES

1 Badges of honour: young scout Jorma keeps his eyes peeled for danger. 2 “I’d never met anybody like that”: Jorma accompanies Janis Joplin, 1962. “She took her place in the universe as a blues singer seriously.” 3 Cover stars: Jefferson Airplane become the faces of the new Californian rock, Life magazine, June 1968. 4 Airplane, circa 1970 (from left) Marty Balin, Jack Casady, Paul Kantner, Jorma, Grace Slick, Spencer Dryden. 5 Hot Tuna, 1972: (from left) Casady, Papa John Creach, Kaukonen, Sammy Piazza. 6 The Chet Baker years: Jorma at the Automatt studios, San Francisco, June 1980. 7 “Grace was a maverick. She had no verbal boundaries whatsoever” Jorma gets a grip on Slick. 8 “We’re not telepathic, but we read each other well”: childhood friends Casady and (right) Kaukonen, their Hot Tuna is still tasty…

A LIFE IN PICTURES

1 CAT POWER A PAIR OF BROWN EYES Chan Marshall kicks off another tranche of covers with this unsteadily ethereal Pogues rethink. Very much captures the spirit, if not the sound, of Shane MacGowan. Find it: streaming services 2 J MASCIS DEATH OF A DREAM Sweetness, guitar grind and self-realisation, from tribute set Highway Butterfly – The Songs Of Neal Casal. Within, Steve Earle, Bob Weir and more play for the late guitarist’s charity. Find it: nealcasalmusicfoundation.org 3 BITCHIN BAJAS OUTER SPACEWAYS INCORPORATED New Age Chicagoans expand on their Sun Ra fetish for a whole album of covers – including this electropop trinket: think cosmic ritual re-scored by Wendy Carlos. Find it: Bandcamp 4 GINA BIRCH FEMINIST SONG The Raincoats’ bass/voice’s first solo 45! Electronics and Spectorpop pulses with righteous…

AIRPLANE AT THE LIMIT Jefferson Airplane ★★★★ Volunteers (RCA VICTOR, 1969) The Airplane’s fifth LP serves as the Woodstock Nation’s sonic manifesto, covering radical left-wing politics, the environment and the band’s sui generis lysergic worldview. Some of Kaukonen’s finest studio work is here: his fuzzed, sizzling lead on Kantner’s We Can Be Together is quintessential ’60s rock guitar. He’d been singing and performing the traditional Good Shepherd since the early ’60s (and still does) – here it’s rock’n’roll. JACK & JORMA BRANCH OUT Hot Tuna Burgers (GRUNT, 1972) ★★★★ Volunteers Tuna’s third album has a thrilling opener: the re-tooled traditional True Religion opens with Kaukonen’s masterful acoustic hand gymnastics; after an instrumental verse he comes in singing with full rhythm section and violinist Papa John Creach’s bowed blue notes. The tempo then shifts and Kaukonen re-enters on wall-melting electric. The rest of…

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

“PAY, YOU WILL PAY TOMORROW”, warned World Party’s debut single Ship Of Fools. Its soulful, perfect pop was a Trojan Horse for a stark environmental message, and in April 1987, it was the minor US hit no one saw coming. Industry suitors were quick to react, though, and high-tailed it to Bedfordshire, England. It was there, in a dilapidated rectory, that Karl Wallinger had made World Party’s Private Revolution almost single-handedly, pseudonymously crediting his guitars to “Rufus Dove”, and his harp-playing to “Martin Finnucane”, a character in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. “They’d heard there was a dumb kid in Woburn writing hits,” says Wallinger today. “There was this beauty parade of visiting managers.” Among them was Steve Fargnoli, then already employed by another, rather more famous multi-instrumentalist. “I was a…

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

IS IT TOO LATE? Prince’s influence was clear in the beatbox and vari-speed guitars. “It was one of the songs where people in the biz said, ‘Oh, he’s not pinpointing his market, ’” says Karl. “But I’m not into pinpointing my market – I’m into enjoying my music.” GOD ON MY SIDE An outstanding piano ballad “partly influenced by [John Lennon’s] Mind Games”, God On My Side “is a plea for tolerance,” says Wallinger. “I’m singing about all the religions of the world, but I need your God on my side, you know?” WHEN THE RAINBOW COMES Pop gold up to and including Sophia Ramos’s melting backing vocals at the fade, this joyous evocation of World Party’s utopian vision offers hope. “All I can remember about Sophia is that she was from New York and…

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

“AM I A HIPPY?” PONDERS JORMA Kaukonen, one-time guitar kingpin of Haight-Ashbury poster children the Jefferson Airplane: along with their Grateful Dead pals, the hippy-est of hippy bands. “The answer’s no, I don’t think I was.” Kaukonen turned 80 last December and is counterintuitively more loquacious than he was at 30. “I’ve never been a communal person,” he continues. “The Airplane made money, we bought cars, houses. That being said, if there’s a freedom of spirit to generic hippy consciousness, then we shared that spirit.” It’s nearly 55 years since Kaukonen helped define the San Francisco sound and its psychedelic milieu on 1967’s Surrealistic Pillow, Jefferson Airplane’s stratospheric second album. That record’s Top 10 hits – Somebody To Love and White Rabbit – both featured Kaukonen’s piercing, snaking lead guitar,…

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE

THERE IS SOME-THING ineffable about Carpenters, that sugar-frosted Trojan Horse filled with longing. Their apparently sunny and unthreatening music shimmers between euphoria and sadness, diaphanous enough to see through to some other possibility, one perhaps unintended and yet transmitted loud and clear. Siblings Richard and Karen were born in 1946 and 1950 respectively, and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, the children of printer Harold and his wife Agnes Carpenter. Richard was a quiet, interior child, fixated on all kinds of pop music. Karen was outdoors, playing sport and being gregarious. Richard taught himself piano by ear and Karen would bring home school friends to join him in the basement and listen to records. Carpenters’ 1973 album, Now & Then, the one with a side of oldies linked by a fake ’60s…

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE

A LIFE IN PICTURES

1 Badges of honour: young scout Jorma keeps his eyes peeled for danger. 2 “I’d never met anybody like that”: Jorma accompanies Janis Joplin, 1962. “She took her place in the universe as a blues singer seriously.” 3 Cover stars: Jefferson Airplane become the faces of the new Californian rock, Life magazine, June 1968. 4 Airplane, circa 1970 (from left) Marty Balin, Jack Casady, Paul Kantner, Jorma, Grace Slick, Spencer Dryden. 5 Hot Tuna, 1972: (from left) Casady, Papa John Creach, Kaukonen, Sammy Piazza. 6 The Chet Baker years: Jorma at the Automatt studios, San Francisco, June 1980. 7 “Grace was a maverick. She had no verbal boundaries whatsoever” Jorma gets a grip on Slick. 8 “We’re not telepathic, but we read each other well”: childhood friends Casady and (right)…

A LIFE IN PICTURES

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, NASHville’s Dream Hotel was The Climax Saloon, a whiskey-soaked gambling parlour and bordello in the heart of the red light district. These days, it’s just one more of the city’s upscale boutique hotels. And on a sticky August evening, near its lobby elevators, seven bachelorettes in matching glitter tank tops glance at Sturgill Simpson for a moment, then go back to planning their party weekend. While they surely register his rugged good looks and tattooed Navy vet physique, they don’t recognise him as a Grammy-winning artist or one of the most complex characters in American roots music since Merle Haggard. “My wife says, ‘You’re such a G-list celebrity,’” Simpson says with a laugh, as we head to his room for our interview. “I do get recognised, but…

AIRPLANE AT THE LIMIT Jefferson Airplane ★★★★ Volunteers (RCA VICTOR, 1969) The Airplane’s fifth LP serves as the Woodstock Nation’s sonic manifesto, covering radical left-wing politics, the environment and the band’s sui generis lysergic worldview. Some of Kaukonen’s finest studio work is here: his fuzzed, sizzling lead on Kantner’s We Can Be Together is quintessential ’60s rock guitar. He’d been singing and performing the traditional Good Shepherd since the early ’60s (and still does) – here it’s rock’n’roll. JACK & JORMA BRANCH OUT Hot Tuna Burgers (GRUNT, 1972) ★★★★ Volunteers Tuna’s third album has a thrilling opener: the re-tooled traditional True Religion opens with Kaukonen’s masterful acoustic hand gymnastics; after an instrumental verse he comes in singing with full rhythm section and violinist Papa John Creach’s bowed blue notes. The…

Pulling Up ROOTS

METAMODERN SOUNDS IN COUNTRY MUSIC ★★★★ (Loose, 2014) “Marijuana, LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT/They all changed the way I see,” admits Simpson on his second solo album, framing himself as a psychedelic Merle Haggard. But beyond a little acid rock trim (the Beatlesy reverse guitars on It Ain’t All Flowers), Metamodern showcases a questing, open-minded craftsman, with classical songwriting chops that could transcend their settings. A SAILOR’S GUIDE TO EARTH ★★★★ (Atlantic, 2016) Intended as an instruction manual to his firstborn son, A Sailor’s Guide marries intimate wisdom with a radically expanded sound; the Dap-Kings horns, most notably, add a Staxy kick. A take on Nirvana’s In Bloom is bold, but it’s the Simpson originals you’ll come back to, where muscular country-funk never obscures the poignancy. SOUND & FURY ★★★★ (Elektra, 2019) The premise reads like a provocation to country traditionalists: a…

Pulling Up ROOTS

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

JOE TALBOT IS UNWELL. SOMEWHAT UNNERVINGLY, HE MENTIONS this only after a very 2019 handshake, explaining that his return to live performance has been marred by a raging bout of Norovirus. While the Idles singer is now on the mend, sipping water in a hotel bar in Kingston-On-Thames, it was a shakier story a couple of nights ago when the band played two hometown shows at Bristol’s 140-capacity Louisiana. “We haven’t played in a room that size for a long time, so post-Covid or not it was a bit alien,” Talbot admits. “But I was so super-ill I just felt vulnerable – like, I shouldn’t be up here. I want to be in bed. Or on the toilet. It was rank.” Time off, though, is not an option for Idles right…

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

“PAY, YOU WILL PAY TOMORROW”, warned World Party’s debut single Ship Of Fools. Its soulful, perfect pop was a Trojan Horse for a stark environmental message, and in April 1987, it was the minor US hit no one saw coming. Industry suitors were quick to react, though, and high-tailed it to Bedfordshire, England. It was there, in a dilapidated rectory, that Karl Wallinger had made World Party’s Private Revolution almost single-handedly, pseudonymously crediting his guitars to “Rufus Dove”, and his harp-playing to “Martin Finnucane”, a character in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. “They’d heard there was a dumb kid in Woburn writing hits,” says Wallinger today. “There was this beauty parade of visiting managers.” Among them was Steve Fargnoli, then already employed by another, rather more famous multi-instrumentalist. “I was…

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

IS IT TOO LATE? Prince’s influence was clear in the beatbox and vari-speed guitars. “It was one of the songs where people in the biz said, ‘Oh, he’s not pinpointing his market, ’” says Karl. “But I’m not into pinpointing my market – I’m into enjoying my music.” GOD ON MY SIDE An outstanding piano ballad “partly influenced by [John Lennon’s] Mind Games”, God On My Side “is a plea for tolerance,” says Wallinger. “I’m singing about all the religions of the world, but I need your God on my side, you know?” WHEN THE RAINBOW COMES Pop gold up to and including Sophia Ramos’s melting backing vocals at the fade, this joyous evocation of World Party’s utopian vision offers hope. “All I can remember about Sophia is that she…

PROFITS OF RAGE

MEAT EP ★★★ (Balley, 2015) After the dour interpolations of 2012 debut EP Welcome and a long period of recalibration, here Idles sounded like a band locking into a voice of their own, the call-and-response of the Monks-inspired The Idles Chant and the while-Rome-burns violence of Queens putting the flesh on their post-punk bones. BRUTALISM ★★★★ (Partisan/Balley, 2017) A concrete monument to grief – Talbot’s mother died during recording - Brutalism sometimes echoes the blasted mood of PiL’s similarly bereft Death Disco. Anger is also an energy, especially on Well Done’s dark sardonic class analysis (“Mary Berry’s got a job/So why don’t you get a job?”), Exeter’s male-pattern punch-up and the Tory-scaring Mother. JOY AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE ★★★★ (Partisan, 2018) Triggered by “seeing a country fall apart”, their second album sharply amplified Idles’ key concerns. Colossus and Samaritans mined…

PROFITS OF RAGE

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE

THERE IS SOME-THING ineffable about Carpenters, that sugar-frosted Trojan Horse filled with longing. Their apparently sunny and unthreatening music shimmers between euphoria and sadness, diaphanous enough to see through to some other possibility, one perhaps unintended and yet transmitted loud and clear. Siblings Richard and Karen were born in 1946 and 1950 respectively, and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, the children of printer Harold and his wife Agnes Carpenter. Richard was a quiet, interior child, fixated on all kinds of pop music. Karen was outdoors, playing sport and being gregarious. Richard taught himself piano by ear and Karen would bring home school friends to join him in the basement and listen to records. Carpenters’ 1973 album, Now & Then, the one with a side of oldies linked by a fake…

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE

Used to play in a rock’n’roll band,But they broke upWe were young and we were wildIt ate us up.Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield Again “YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY about journalists,” Stephen Stills is telling MOJO. “If the myth is more interesting than the truth, print the myth.” But what about a band where the truth outweighs the myth? A band whose truth is a litany of hearses, jail cells, battles, seizures, defections and deportations, go-go girls dancing in cages and cops busting heads on Sunset Strip? A mightily influential band that existed for just 19 months, destroyed by what made it great? The Buffalo Springfield, says Neil Young, “was a great band. We were really discovering a lot of new things and experimenting, and the music that we played in that band…

GO AND SAY HELLO

“I WAS IN Fort William, Ontario, now called Thunder Bay, with [folk group] The Company, the remnants of the cast of The Au Go Go Singers. God, I was looking for a job, and we got jobs across this little circuit of folk clubs called the Fourth Dimension. We played our first night and it was OK. It’s Canada, which is a world unto itself: the hockey finals are on, or the playoffs which last forever, and the people are very plain-spoken and drink a lot of beer and tend to fight later, so I would make myself scarce. Then Saturday night comes round and the owner of the club says, ‘There’s a guy who’s going to do a set between your sets, OK? He’s not very well-known, he’s a…

GO AND SAY HELLO

A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, NASHville’s Dream Hotel was The Climax Saloon, a whiskey-soaked gambling parlour and bordello in the heart of the red light district. These days, it’s just one more of the city’s upscale boutique hotels. And on a sticky August evening, near its lobby elevators, seven bachelorettes in matching glitter tank tops glance at Sturgill Simpson for a moment, then go back to planning their party weekend. While they surely register his rugged good looks and tattooed Navy vet physique, they don’t recognise him as a Grammy-winning artist or one of the most complex characters in American roots music since Merle Haggard. “My wife says, ‘You’re such a G-list celebrity,’” Simpson says with a laugh, as we head to his room for our interview. “I do get recognised,…

Pulling Up ROOTS

METAMODERN SOUNDS IN COUNTRY MUSIC ★★★★ (Loose, 2014) “Marijuana, LSD, Psilocybin, and DMT/They all changed the way I see,” admits Simpson on his second solo album, framing himself as a psychedelic Merle Haggard. But beyond a little acid rock trim (the Beatlesy reverse guitars on It Ain’t All Flowers), Metamodern showcases a questing, open-minded craftsman, with classical songwriting chops that could transcend their settings. A SAILOR’S GUIDE TO EARTH ★★★★ (Atlantic, 2016) Intended as an instruction manual to his firstborn son, A Sailor’s Guide marries intimate wisdom with a radically expanded sound; the Dap-Kings horns, most notably, add a Staxy kick. A take on Nirvana’s In Bloom is bold, but it’s the Simpson originals you’ll come back to, where muscular country-funk never obscures the poignancy. SOUND & FURY ★★★★ (Elektra,…

Pulling Up ROOTS

NO NUKES AWAKENS ‘POLITICAL’ SPRINGSTEEN

Jackson Browne: My [activism] was a natural outgrowth of becoming more interested in the world. I’d read a book called Eco-Catastrophe, by Dr Paul Ehrlich. That, and a book that Linda Ronstadt gave me about the firebombing of Dresden. It became clear to me that a society without justice was not tenable. The people in the civil rights movement were involved in the anti-war movement, and when the environmental movement emerged it was the same people – all of whom were concerned with justice, in this case environmental justice, and building a sustainable future. I started doing benefits with [activist/concert promoter] Tom Campbell. Sometimes it was about preserving the forests, or focusing on Native American concerns, as well as environmental things. Tom’s the one that introduced me to the issue of nuclear…

NO NUKES AWAKENS ‘POLITICAL’ SPRINGSTEEN

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

JOE TALBOT IS UNWELL. SOMEWHAT UNNERVINGLY, HE MENTIONS this only after a very 2019 handshake, explaining that his return to live performance has been marred by a raging bout of Norovirus. While the Idles singer is now on the mend, sipping water in a hotel bar in Kingston-On-Thames, it was a shakier story a couple of nights ago when the band played two hometown shows at Bristol’s 140-capacity Louisiana. “We haven’t played in a room that size for a long time, so post-Covid or not it was a bit alien,” Talbot admits. “But I was so super-ill I just felt vulnerable – like, I shouldn’t be up here. I want to be in bed. Or on the toilet. It was rank.” Time off, though, is not an option for Idles…

THE SOUND AND THE FURY

PROFITS OF RAGE

MEAT EP ★★★ (Balley, 2015) After the dour interpolations of 2012 debut EP Welcome and a long period of recalibration, here Idles sounded like a band locking into a voice of their own, the call-and-response of the Monks-inspired The Idles Chant and the while-Rome-burns violence of Queens putting the flesh on their post-punk bones. BRUTALISM ★★★★ (Partisan/Balley, 2017) A concrete monument to grief – Talbot’s mother died during recording - Brutalism sometimes echoes the blasted mood of PiL’s similarly bereft Death Disco. Anger is also an energy, especially on Well Done’s dark sardonic class analysis (“Mary Berry’s got a job/So why don’t you get a job?”), Exeter’s male-pattern punch-up and the Tory-scaring Mother. JOY AS AN ACT OF RESISTANCE ★★★★ (Partisan, 2018) Triggered by “seeing a country fall apart”, their…

PROFITS OF RAGE

“THERE WAS A MAGICAL CURRENT RUNNING THROUGH THAT RECORD”

IN NOVEMBER 1830 THE HAMPSHIRE COUNTRYSIDE WAS SHAKEN BY AN ACT OF violent civil disorder. Several hundred labourers ransacked two workhouses as a protest against the local gentry exploiting the poor. The establishments looted and set ablaze included Headley Grange, near Lindford. Two men would hang for their part in these riots. Among those who tried to quell the disturbance was the High Sheriff of Hampshire, one John Bonham-Carter. Almost a century and a half later, Led Zeppelin drummer John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham would attempt to raze Headley Grange a second time. Bonham’s seismic beats on their fourth album’s When The Levee Breaks - recorded in the pile’s resonant stairwell - sound loud enough to have crumbled stone and, who knows, maybe rouse the ghosts of Headley’s martyrs. “It’s like there was a…

“THERE WAS A MAGICAL CURRENT RUNNING THROUGH THAT RECORD”

GOOD TIMES GOOD TIMES?

THOSE STILL awaiting a follow-up to Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert movie The Song Remains The Same need wait no more. Becoming Led Zeppelin, the band’s first official documentary, is imminent, having enjoyed its premiere at September’s Venice Film Festival. As the title suggests, it focuses on Led Zeppelin’s rootsand early years. “When [director] Bernard MacMahon and [co-producer] Allison McGourty first approached me, I thought. Gosh, they’ve got it, they really understand what happened,” Page tells MOJO. The film’s first 60 minutes, however, explore the band members’ lives growing up in post-war Britain. “Showing how Led Zeppelin came together and what elements dictated it,” says Page, whose time as a ‘60s session musician comes under particular scrutiny. “I DON’T REMEMBER A THING. I HAD TO GET MY COPY OF HAMMER OF THE GODS OUT…

GOOD TIMES GOOD TIMES?

Used to play in a rock’n’roll band,But they broke upWe were young and we were wildIt ate us up.Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield Again “YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY about journalists,” Stephen Stills is telling MOJO. “If the myth is more interesting than the truth, print the myth.” But what about a band where the truth outweighs the myth? A band whose truth is a litany of hearses, jail cells, battles, seizures, defections and deportations, go-go girls dancing in cages and cops busting heads on Sunset Strip? A mightily influential band that existed for just 19 months, destroyed by what made it great? The Buffalo Springfield, says Neil Young, “was a great band. We were really discovering a lot of new things and experimenting, and the music that we played in…

“I THOUGHT I’D ENTERED THE MOST AMAZING, HYPNOTIC WORLD”.

“PLANT’S WAIL SOUNDS LIKE A 10-FOOT WEREWOLF HOWLING AND REELING FOR BLOOD”ETHAN MILLER ON ROCK AND ROLL SIDE ONE BLACK DOG Paul Major (Endless Boogie): “The riff is so audacious – it almost makes a mockery of everybody else’s riffs. I’m very visual with stuff and to me this song is like a methedrine rollercoaster ride, with traffic lights! The lights are green and the riff starts and you’re swerving around like crazy. Then red light, the riff stopsand Robert Plant pops up: ‘I don’t know, but I’ve been told...’Then the light changes back and you’re off on the rollercoaster again! In high school, with me and my friends, this was one of our ‘car party’ songs. Put on the 8-track, get really stoned, drive out of Louisville. No destination, just turn left,…

“I THOUGHT I’D ENTERED THE MOST AMAZING, HYPNOTIC WORLD”.

GO AND SAY HELLO

“I WAS IN Fort William, Ontario, now called Thunder Bay, with [folk group] The Company, the remnants of the cast of The Au Go Go Singers. God, I was looking for a job, and we got jobs across this little circuit of folk clubs called the Fourth Dimension. We played our first night and it was OK. It’s Canada, which is a world unto itself: the hockey finals are on, or the playoffs which last forever, and the people are very plain-spoken and drink a lot of beer and tend to fight later, so I would make myself scarce. Then Saturday night comes round and the owner of the club says, ‘There’s a guy who’s going to do a set between your sets, OK? He’s not very well-known, he’s a…

GO AND SAY HELLO

NO NUKES AWAKENS ‘POLITICAL’ SPRINGSTEEN

Jackson Browne: My [activism] was a natural outgrowth of becoming more interested in the world. I’d read a book called Eco-Catastrophe, by Dr Paul Ehrlich. That, and a book that Linda Ronstadt gave me about the firebombing of Dresden. It became clear to me that a society without justice was not tenable. The people in the civil rights movement were involved in the anti-war movement, and when the environmental movement emerged it was the same people – all of whom were concerned with justice, in this case environmental justice, and building a sustainable future. I started doing benefits with [activist/concert promoter] Tom Campbell. Sometimes it was about preserving the forests, or focusing on Native American concerns, as well as environmental things. Tom’s the one that introduced me to the issue…

NO NUKES AWAKENS ‘POLITICAL’ SPRINGSTEEN

BEFORE THE FLOOD

MEMPHIS MINNIE cut heads, she cut throats, she cut hits. Perhaps not throats, but Robert Johnson’s travelling partner Johnny Shines had this to say: “Any men fool with her, she’d go for them right away. She didn’t take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket-knife, pistol, anything she got her hands on, she’d use it. Memphis Minnie used to bea hell-cat.” Born Lizzie Douglas and raised in rural Mississippi, she was always drawn to the bright lights of Memphis, leaving home for good in 1910 at age 13, establishing herself on Beale Street, home of the blues. She didn’t do that uptown Ma Rainey and Mamie Smith orchestrated stuff; she played her six strings like a six shooter. She didn’t mind the occasional talented partner, though, and the few times she wanted…

BEFORE THE FLOOD

“THERE WAS A MAGICAL CURRENT RUNNING THROUGH THAT RECORD”

IN NOVEMBER 1830 THE HAMPSHIRE COUNTRYSIDE WAS SHAKEN BY AN ACT OF violent civil disorder. Several hundred labourers ransacked two workhouses as a protest against the local gentry exploiting the poor. The establishments looted and set ablaze included Headley Grange, near Lindford. Two men would hang for their part in these riots. Among those who tried to quell the disturbance was the High Sheriff of Hampshire, one John Bonham-Carter. Almost a century and a half later, Led Zeppelin drummer John ‘Bonzo’ Bonham would attempt to raze Headley Grange a second time. Bonham’s seismic beats on their fourth album’s When The Levee Breaks - recorded in the pile’s resonant stairwell - sound loud enough to have crumbled stone and, who knows, maybe rouse the ghosts of Headley’s martyrs. “It’s like there…

“THERE WAS A MAGICAL CURRENT RUNNING THROUGH THAT RECORD”

Damon Albarn ★★★★ The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows TRANSGRESSIVE. CD/DL/LP DAMON ALBARN insists that he doesn’t make solo albums, just ones with his name on the cover. In that sense, this still counts as his second, after the brilliant, slow-burning, mid-life reflections of 2014’s Everyday Robots - or possibly his third, if one includes the bolder, tricksier Elizabethan shapes of 2012 opera soundtrack Dr Dee. Whatever the tally, if for Albarn the former’s concept involved “empty club music” and the latter saw him testing his audience with his penchant for lutes and pump organs, The Nearer The Fountain… locates a satisfying midpoint somewhere between the two. In some ways, it marks the full realisation of the English pastoral strain of Albarn’s writing that can be traced back to Last Song, co-written…

GOOD TIMES GOOD TIMES?

THOSE STILL awaiting a follow-up to Led Zeppelin’s 1976 concert movie The Song Remains The Same need wait no more. Becoming Led Zeppelin, the band’s first official documentary, is imminent, having enjoyed its premiere at September’s Venice Film Festival. As the title suggests, it focuses on Led Zeppelin’s rootsand early years. “When [director] Bernard MacMahon and [co-producer] Allison McGourty first approached me, I thought. Gosh, they’ve got it, they really understand what happened,” Page tells MOJO. The film’s first 60 minutes, however, explore the band members’ lives growing up in post-war Britain. “Showing how Led Zeppelin came together and what elements dictated it,” says Page, whose time as a ‘60s session musician comes under particular scrutiny. “I DON’T REMEMBER A THING. I HAD TO GET MY COPY OF HAMMER OF…

GOOD TIMES GOOD TIMES?

“Then I joined in the naked breakdancing.”

The first phase of this record, pre-pandemic in Iceland, involved you looking out at the landscape and the changing weather patterns, and improvising. But later on, some of the songs felt prescient? “Yeah. Very little was prepared beforehand. It really all just started from looking out the window. You’re staring out at such a vast landscape that is kind of an expression of our environment in every aspect. Y’know, from the brightness of the sun, to the darkness, to the violence and unpredictable nature of when storms come in and you just can’t really gauge how intense the experience is going to be... all of that was just going on. That was the daily soap opera outside the windows. So it’s in this state of flux, and I suppose, in a…

“Then I joined in the naked breakdancing.”

“I THOUGHT I’D ENTERED THE MOST AMAZING, HYPNOTIC WORLD”.

“PLANT’S WAIL SOUNDS LIKE A 10-FOOT WEREWOLF HOWLING AND REELING FOR BLOOD”ETHAN MILLER ON ROCK AND ROLL SIDE ONE BLACK DOG Paul Major (Endless Boogie): “The riff is so audacious – it almost makes a mockery of everybody else’s riffs. I’m very visual with stuff and to me this song is like a methedrine rollercoaster ride, with traffic lights! The lights are green and the riff starts and you’re swerving around like crazy. Then red light, the riff stopsand Robert Plant pops up: ‘I don’t know, but I’ve been told...’Then the light changes back and you’re off on the rollercoaster again! In high school, with me and my friends, this was one of our ‘car party’ songs. Put on the 8-track, get really stoned, drive out of Louisville. No destination,…

“I THOUGHT I’D ENTERED THE MOST AMAZING, HYPNOTIC WORLD”.

Slowly but surely

Courtney Barnett ★★★★ Things Take Time, Take Time MARATHON ARTISTS. CD/DL/LP THE VIDEO for Before You Gotta Go, a sweet, self-lacerating love song from Courtney Barnett’s third album, shows the singer roaming around with a tape machine, field-recording trees, a dog, the sea, her own sprouting head. Since her 2015 debut Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett has displayed a gift for picking up the buzz and whirr of everyday life. Her slow-release songs aren’t so much ripped from the headlines as rolled from bedsheets or brushed from kitchen counters, her phrasing conversational, her guitar missing a buttonhole or two. That ability to record what’s going on inside and out has unsurprisingly been tested to its fullest extent in the last year. Things Take Time, Take Time, written alone in…

Slowly but surely

Out on the tiles

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss ★★★★ Raise The Roof WARNER MUSIC. CD/DL/LP MORE THAN most, Robert Plant knows the value of a good myth. In his telling, one suspects, even a trip to the supermarket can become an epic quest across the Welsh Marches. There will be ancient paths retraced, mystical scholarship indulged and, ultimately, redemption - though what Plant returns with might not be what those at home were expecting. He can bring a certain nobility to career choices both capricious and expedient, and romantic gravity to the most pragmatic decisions. So it is with this second album in the company of Alison Krauss and producer T Bone Burnett, and its artful wrangling of country, folk, blues and R&B into a misty recalibration of Americana. On one level, it can be framed as a…

Out on the tiles

BEFORE THE FLOOD

MEMPHIS MINNIE cut heads, she cut throats, she cut hits. Perhaps not throats, but Robert Johnson’s travelling partner Johnny Shines had this to say: “Any men fool with her, she’d go for them right away. She didn’t take no foolishness off them. Guitar, pocket-knife, pistol, anything she got her hands on, she’d use it. Memphis Minnie used to bea hell-cat.” Born Lizzie Douglas and raised in rural Mississippi, she was always drawn to the bright lights of Memphis, leaving home for good in 1910 at age 13, establishing herself on Beale Street, home of the blues. She didn’t do that uptown Ma Rainey and Mamie Smith orchestrated stuff; she played her six strings like a six shooter. She didn’t mind the occasional talented partner, though, and the few times she…

BEFORE THE FLOOD

About blooming time

Curtis Harding ★★★★ If Words Were Flowers ANTI-. CD/DL/LP THE BLACK-and-white video for his recent single Hopeful depicts Michigan-born, Atlanta-based singer/songwriter Curtis Harding accessorising his vintage polyester duds with a Covid mask. He slides behind the wheel of a late-’60s Chevy Nova 350 and drives past murals dedicated to the late civil rights activist John Lewis, on to a parking lot where he delivers his gospel to a simmering Black Lives Matter protest. The clip’s blurring of eras is an act of deliberate anachronism. It infers that we’ve not progressed from 50 years ago, that a continuum of oppression, violence and hatred still prevails - but also, more optimistically, that the spirit to resist, by any means necessary, is equally inextinguishable. The video serves as a smart metaphor for the magic Harding works throughout his…

About blooming time

Damon Albarn ★★★★ The Nearer The Fountain, More Pure The Stream Flows TRANSGRESSIVE. CD/DL/LP DAMON ALBARN insists that he doesn’t make solo albums, just ones with his name on the cover. In that sense, this still counts as his second, after the brilliant, slow-burning, mid-life reflections of 2014’s Everyday Robots - or possibly his third, if one includes the bolder, tricksier Elizabethan shapes of 2012 opera soundtrack Dr Dee. Whatever the tally, if for Albarn the former’s concept involved “empty club music” and the latter saw him testing his audience with his penchant for lutes and pump organs, The Nearer The Fountain… locates a satisfying midpoint somewhere between the two. In some ways, it marks the full realisation of the English pastoral strain of Albarn’s writing that can be traced…

Jamael Dean ★★★★ Primordial Waters STONES THROW. DL/LP Los Angeles’ pianist’s sprawling full debut explores the Yoruba creation story and much more. CLOCKING IN just shy of 100 minutes, there’s much to unpack on this future-facing sweep through the spiritual jazz cosmos from the 22-year-old grandson of Les McCann drummer Donald Dean. Traditional Orisha and Yoruba stories guide highlights Akoda and Overstood - Sharada Shashidhar’s wordless coos, Carlos Niño’s pattering percussion and Jamael Dean’s loose, fluttering harmonics allowing saxophonist and trombonist Zekkereya El-Magharbel to build a head of steam - while the massed brass outer-space feel of Galaxy In Leimert nods to Galaxy Around Olodumare by Alice Coltrane (a touchstone throughout). Having displayed estimable instrumental chops, the final third morphs into a leftfield jazz-rap set that illuminates the catch and crackle of Dean’s grits-and-gravy voice.…

Orquesta Akokán ★★★★ 16 Rayos DAPTONE. CD/DL/LP Second outing from Daptone’s “giant Cuban rhythm machine”. IT WOULD be ridiculously easy to dismiss Orquesta Akokán as retro, but at a time when looking back is often a greater sin than being competent, the big band makes no concessions to the streamlined modern age in which we live. Having paid their dues playing with the illustrious likes of Compay Segundo, Chucho Valdés and Arturo Sandoval, José Pepito Gómez et al were never going to dumb down their mambo. If their self-titled debut was a convincing calling card, the second album, recorded at Egrem Studios in Havana, has had to up the game: the horn arrangements are old school, the strings cinematic and the rhythmic interplay seductive. True, that declamatory, Ben Moré- style vocal hasn’t aged particularly well,…

“Then I joined in the naked breakdancing.”

The first phase of this record, pre-pandemic in Iceland, involved you looking out at the landscape and the changing weather patterns, and improvising. But later on, some of the songs felt prescient? “Yeah. Very little was prepared beforehand. It really all just started from looking out the window. You’re staring out at such a vast landscape that is kind of an expression of our environment in every aspect. Y’know, from the brightness of the sun, to the darkness, to the violence and unpredictable nature of when storms come in and you just can’t really gauge how intense the experience is going to be... all of that was just going on. That was the daily soap opera outside the windows. So it’s in this state of flux, and I suppose, in…

“Then I joined in the naked breakdancing.”

Erland Cooper Never Pass Into Nothingness Last seen burying an album master tape in the soil of his Orcadian homeland (it’s due to be exhumed in 2024), singer-composer Cooper’s first offering for Universal imprint Mercury KX is a ruminative instrumental EP with a short accompanying film by photographer Alex Kozobolis. Inspired by film-maker Margaret Tate’s vision of beauty emanating from quotidian environments, and with a nod to John Keats’ Endymion in the title and Kathryn Joseph’s hushed recitations, Never Pass Into Nothingness is an almost Zen-like hymn to timeless, transporting quietude. “Peace can be found in exploring a poetry below your feet or just above your eye,” avers Cooper in the film’s introductory commentary, while the footage, shot in monochrome, follows the composer as he perambulates a drizzle-marinated City of London, pausing…

Slowly but surely

Courtney Barnett ★★★★ Things Take Time, Take Time MARATHON ARTISTS. CD/DL/LP THE VIDEO for Before You Gotta Go, a sweet, self-lacerating love song from Courtney Barnett’s third album, shows the singer roaming around with a tape machine, field-recording trees, a dog, the sea, her own sprouting head. Since her 2015 debut Sometimes I Sit And Think, And Sometimes I Just Sit, Barnett has displayed a gift for picking up the buzz and whirr of everyday life. Her slow-release songs aren’t so much ripped from the headlines as rolled from bedsheets or brushed from kitchen counters, her phrasing conversational, her guitar missing a buttonhole or two. That ability to record what’s going on inside and out has unsurprisingly been tested to its fullest extent in the last year. Things Take Time,…

Slowly but surely

Out on the tiles

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss ★★★★ Raise The Roof WARNER MUSIC. CD/DL/LP MORE THAN most, Robert Plant knows the value of a good myth. In his telling, one suspects, even a trip to the supermarket can become an epic quest across the Welsh Marches. There will be ancient paths retraced, mystical scholarship indulged and, ultimately, redemption - though what Plant returns with might not be what those at home were expecting. He can bring a certain nobility to career choices both capricious and expedient, and romantic gravity to the most pragmatic decisions. So it is with this second album in the company of Alison Krauss and producer T Bone Burnett, and its artful wrangling of country, folk, blues and R&B into a misty recalibration of Americana. On one level, it…

Out on the tiles

David Crosby ★★★★★ If I Could Only Remember My Name RHINO. CD/DL/LP CONTRARY TO popular opinion, the most stacked supergroup of the early 1970s was not Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. CSNY were not even, in fact, the most auspicious collective to include David Crosby, Graham Nash and Neil Young at the time. That honour went to a bigger, wilder, albeit less-heralded amalgam known briefly as The Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra. Its discography was sketchy, its personnel fluid, but PERRO pivoted around Crosby, Nash and most of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, with auxiliary memberships for Young and Joni Mitchell, among others. Named by Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, they convened for his late 1970 album, Blows Against The Empire; a baroque psych gang show that recast the counterculture’s desire to escape…

About blooming time

Curtis Harding ★★★★ If Words Were Flowers ANTI-. CD/DL/LP THE BLACK-and-white video for his recent single Hopeful depicts Michigan-born, Atlanta-based singer/songwriter Curtis Harding accessorising his vintage polyester duds with a Covid mask. He slides behind the wheel of a late-’60s Chevy Nova 350 and drives past murals dedicated to the late civil rights activist John Lewis, on to a parking lot where he delivers his gospel to a simmering Black Lives Matter protest. The clip’s blurring of eras is an act of deliberate anachronism. It infers that we’ve not progressed from 50 years ago, that a continuum of oppression, violence and hatred still prevails - but also, more optimistically, that the spirit to resist, by any means necessary, is equally inextinguishable. The video serves as a smart metaphor for the…

About blooming time

Little Ghost Songs

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ★★★★ B-Sides And Rarities Parts I & II BMG. CD/DL/LP A RARITIES compilation isn’t about fullblown, album-sized perfection; at best it’s a strange shadow cabinet of curiosities, throwing light on the past and the future. Nick Cave has declared his fondness for the 2005 version of this compilation, assembled by (now former) Bad Seed Mick Harvey and reissued here as Part I, and it’s easy to see why. Here’s the chance to revisit the oddities and the misfits (Where The Wild Roses Grow with Blixa Bargeld taking the Kylie Minogue role, maybe), to see the sketches and blueprints, to hear what might have been. The acoustic version of Tender Prey’s leprous spree-killing Deanna, for example, runs into the spiritual O Happy Day, the Bad Seeds black-lighting their song’s original…

Little Ghost Songs

Jamael Dean ★★★★ Primordial Waters STONES THROW. DL/LP Los Angeles’ pianist’s sprawling full debut explores the Yoruba creation story and much more. CLOCKING IN just shy of 100 minutes, there’s much to unpack on this future-facing sweep through the spiritual jazz cosmos from the 22-year-old grandson of Les McCann drummer Donald Dean. Traditional Orisha and Yoruba stories guide highlights Akoda and Overstood - Sharada Shashidhar’s wordless coos, Carlos Niño’s pattering percussion and Jamael Dean’s loose, fluttering harmonics allowing saxophonist and trombonist Zekkereya El-Magharbel to build a head of steam - while the massed brass outer-space feel of Galaxy In Leimert nods to Galaxy Around Olodumare by Alice Coltrane (a touchstone throughout). Having displayed estimable instrumental chops, the final third morphs into a leftfield jazz-rap set that illuminates the catch and…

The Beatles ★★★★ Let It Be APPLE. CD/DL/LP FOR WHAT was intended as a back to the roots exercise, Get Back became the most tortuous project in The Beatles’ history. In the 16 months between the first day at Twickenham and the May 1970 release of Let It Be, they racked up well over 100 hours of recorded music and ran through four separate assemblies of the material: three by Glyn Johns that adhered to the documentary concept and the final controversially-finessed album. As it happened, an idea with potential was overtaken by events. Between its inception and its completion, The Beatles squabbled over business, pulled Abbey Road out of the bag, began their solo careers, and publicly split up in April 1970. Started as an intended regeneration, it became a valediction: instead of Get…

Man of the World

IN 1958, teenaged Nigerian musician Fela Kuti enrolled at London’s Trinity College Of Music as a trumpeter. He was a keen student, both at college and in the capital’s jazz clubs, where he spectated and took part. That’s where local boy Ginger Baker met him. “Fela used to come to sit in at the all-nighters in the Flamingo,” Baker said in 2012. “He was playing trumpet then and he was good.” Fela started his own band, Fela Ransome Kuti & His Highlife Rakers, then returned to Nigeria in 1963 with a new band, Koola Lobitos, who signed to EMI. In 1967 he began developing Afrobeat, the blend of funk, jazz, calypso and traditional Yoruba rhythms that would make his name. A trip to Los Angeles in 1969, where he encountered the…

Man of the World

Orquesta Akokán ★★★★ 16 Rayos DAPTONE. CD/DL/LP Second outing from Daptone’s “giant Cuban rhythm machine”. IT WOULD be ridiculously easy to dismiss Orquesta Akokán as retro, but at a time when looking back is often a greater sin than being competent, the big band makes no concessions to the streamlined modern age in which we live. Having paid their dues playing with the illustrious likes of Compay Segundo, Chucho Valdés and Arturo Sandoval, José Pepito Gómez et al were never going to dumb down their mambo. If their self-titled debut was a convincing calling card, the second album, recorded at Egrem Studios in Havana, has had to up the game: the horn arrangements are old school, the strings cinematic and the rhythmic interplay seductive. True, that declamatory, Ben Moré- style…

Erland Cooper Never Pass Into Nothingness Last seen burying an album master tape in the soil of his Orcadian homeland (it’s due to be exhumed in 2024), singer-composer Cooper’s first offering for Universal imprint Mercury KX is a ruminative instrumental EP with a short accompanying film by photographer Alex Kozobolis. Inspired by film-maker Margaret Tate’s vision of beauty emanating from quotidian environments, and with a nod to John Keats’ Endymion in the title and Kathryn Joseph’s hushed recitations, Never Pass Into Nothingness is an almost Zen-like hymn to timeless, transporting quietude. “Peace can be found in exploring a poetry below your feet or just above your eye,” avers Cooper in the film’s introductory commentary, while the footage, shot in monochrome, follows the composer as he perambulates a drizzle-marinated City of…

The Replacements ★★★★ Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash RHINO. CD/DL/LP FOR A few minutes, on the way to its release on August 25, 1981, The Replacements’ debut album was called Unsuitable For Airplay – which it was, starting with side one, track one. “The light was green/So was I/The radio’s blastin’/Turn that shit off!” singerguitarist Paul Westerberg bellowed in Takin’ A Ride, two minutes and 23 seconds of death-race frenzy with a necksnapping hook. Another title on the table was Power Trash, coined by Westerberg, the band’s songwriting captain, to describe the motley character of The Replacements’ noise and mission. As he put it to me later over a few cold ones in a Minneapolis bar, “We take the best parts of punk, pop, rock’n’roll and blues without really having a…

Radiohead ★★★★★ Kid A Mnesia XL. CD/DL/LP THE CHORUS of dismay that greeted Radiohead’s Kid A on release in 2000 seems passing strange now its hybrid of electronic and traditional rock aesthetics is so ubiquitous. But at the time it offended two camps: those invested in the band’s soaring anthems, and electronica aficionados irked by rock stars encroaching clumsily on their niche. And there was another problem for those who had seen Radiohead live earlier in the year: the most affecting and immediate new songs they were playing weren’t on it. Fans were confronted with the ghostly glitching groove of Everything In Its Right Place and many were left scratching their heads. Twenty years on, Everything… is now one of Radiohead’s most popular live bangers and we know that those lost songs from 2000 weren’t…

David Crosby ★★★★★ If I Could Only Remember My Name RHINO. CD/DL/LP CONTRARY TO popular opinion, the most stacked supergroup of the early 1970s was not Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. CSNY were not even, in fact, the most auspicious collective to include David Crosby, Graham Nash and Neil Young at the time. That honour went to a bigger, wilder, albeit less-heralded amalgam known briefly as The Planet Earth Rock And Roll Orchestra. Its discography was sketchy, its personnel fluid, but PERRO pivoted around Crosby, Nash and most of the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, with auxiliary memberships for Young and Joni Mitchell, among others. Named by Jefferson Airplane guitarist Paul Kantner, they convened for his late 1970 album, Blows Against The Empire; a baroque psych gang show that recast…

Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt ★★★★ The Fascinating World Of Electronic Music WE ARE BUSY BODIES. LP From 1959, early electronics from Netherlands sound lab atomsmashes exotica, oscillator-wibble, cosmic drift, and more. Features earliest synth-pop-tune candidate Song Of The Second Moon. Sam Lee ★★★★ Old Wow+ COOKING VINYL. CD/DL An extension pack for last year’s set of resonant folk, fusing ancient traditions with modern climate crisis dread. Of six additional tracks, Awake Awake Sweet England and John Barleycorn are both relocated to Stonehenge for Lee’s recent project for English Heritage, Songs Of England. Pretenders ★★★★★ Pretenders RHINO. CD/DL/LP Chrissie Hynde-curated 3-disc edition of their textbook radio rock debut from 1979 (1981’s great Pretenders II gets the same treatment). Adds B-sides, demos BBC sessions and a previously vinyl-only live set from the Paradise Theater, Boston, 1980 (oddly, no Brass In Pocket here or on the…

Little Ghost Songs

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds ★★★★ B-Sides And Rarities Parts I & II BMG. CD/DL/LP A RARITIES compilation isn’t about fullblown, album-sized perfection; at best it’s a strange shadow cabinet of curiosities, throwing light on the past and the future. Nick Cave has declared his fondness for the 2005 version of this compilation, assembled by (now former) Bad Seed Mick Harvey and reissued here as Part I, and it’s easy to see why. Here’s the chance to revisit the oddities and the misfits (Where The Wild Roses Grow with Blixa Bargeld taking the Kylie Minogue role, maybe), to see the sketches and blueprints, to hear what might have been. The acoustic version of Tender Prey’s leprous spree-killing Deanna, for example, runs into the spiritual O Happy Day, the Bad…

Little Ghost Songs

THE THEME of Herbie Hancock’s solo career is one of constant reinvention. The super-smart Chicago-born son of a lower middle-class family, raised in a multi-cultural neighbourhood, Hancock studied classical piano from the age of seven, with harmonic ideas influenced by vocal quartet The Hi-Lo’s and arranger Gil Evans. After graduating from Grinnell College, Iowa in 1960, aged 20, with degrees in electrical engineering and music, he effectively combined both disciplines, approaching his piano playing with an analytical curiosity, rearranging and dissecting standard elements to produce different results. After moving to New York with jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd and releasing his first solo album, 1962’s Takin’ Off, featuring the eternal funk groove of Watermelon Man, he caught the attention of everyone from Freddie Hubbard and Roland Kirk to Eric Dolphy and…

The Beatles ★★★★ Let It Be APPLE. CD/DL/LP FOR WHAT was intended as a back to the roots exercise, Get Back became the most tortuous project in The Beatles’ history. In the 16 months between the first day at Twickenham and the May 1970 release of Let It Be, they racked up well over 100 hours of recorded music and ran through four separate assemblies of the material: three by Glyn Johns that adhered to the documentary concept and the final controversially-finessed album. As it happened, an idea with potential was overtaken by events. Between its inception and its completion, The Beatles squabbled over business, pulled Abbey Road out of the bag, began their solo careers, and publicly split up in April 1970. Started as an intended regeneration, it became…

The Very Things The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes REFLEX, 1984 ‘SHEND’ IS an Old English word meaning to put to shame, ruin and confusion. Redditch youngster Chris Harz first heard it on word-based TV panel show Call My Bluff, and adopted it as his artistic alter-ego. “I added the definite article ‘The’,” he explains, “as I was the only one.” This striving for uniqueness would extend to The Cravats, the Beefheart/Pere Ubu-charged punks formed the day after bassist-voice Shend and his guitarist-vocalist neighbour Rob Dallaway saw The Stranglers play Brum punk nexus Barbarella’s on June 1, 1977. Recording two albums, seven singles and four John Peel sessions, Dallaway characterises their time as, “five years of bloody-mindedness, noise and weirdness… and spectacular career mismanagement. We didn’t stop doing stuff, we just needed a…

Obviously for believers

WHAT WE’VE LEARNT • Turning up for his first gig on bass with The Wake – supporting labelmates New Order, at Bristol’s Trinity Theatre in February 1982 – without a bass guitar, Gillespie asked Peter Hook if he could borrow his. After much ribbing, the debutant plugged in and was almost floored by Hook’s “thunderous Thor-like Viking bass sound”. • After trying out singing alongside Jim Beattie in a proto-Primal Scream, the pair advertised locally for a ‘proper’ singer. After one hopeless audition, they decided Gillespie should stick at it, but later found out that the JAMC’s Jim Reid had seen the ad and wanted to apply, but was dissuaded by his brother William, then writing the songs for Psychocandy. • Before touring Screamadelica, Gillespie asked Creation’s Alan McGee for funding to buy…

Obviously for believers

Man of the World

IN 1958, teenaged Nigerian musician Fela Kuti enrolled at London’s Trinity College Of Music as a trumpeter. He was a keen student, both at college and in the capital’s jazz clubs, where he spectated and took part. That’s where local boy Ginger Baker met him. “Fela used to come to sit in at the all-nighters in the Flamingo,” Baker said in 2012. “He was playing trumpet then and he was good.” Fela started his own band, Fela Ransome Kuti & His Highlife Rakers, then returned to Nigeria in 1963 with a new band, Koola Lobitos, who signed to EMI. In 1967 he began developing Afrobeat, the blend of funk, jazz, calypso and traditional Yoruba rhythms that would make his name. A trip to Los Angeles in 1969, where he encountered…

Man of the World

The Replacements ★★★★ Sorry Ma, Forgot To Take Out The Trash RHINO. CD/DL/LP FOR A few minutes, on the way to its release on August 25, 1981, The Replacements’ debut album was called Unsuitable For Airplay – which it was, starting with side one, track one. “The light was green/So was I/The radio’s blastin’/Turn that shit off!” singerguitarist Paul Westerberg bellowed in Takin’ A Ride, two minutes and 23 seconds of death-race frenzy with a necksnapping hook. Another title on the table was Power Trash, coined by Westerberg, the band’s songwriting captain, to describe the motley character of The Replacements’ noise and mission. As he put it to me later over a few cold ones in a Minneapolis bar, “We take the best parts of punk, pop, rock’n’roll and blues…

Fire Music ★★★★ Dir: Tom Surgal SUBMARINE DELUXE. ST A thrilling portrait of the free jazz revolt; Thurston Moore, Nels Cline produce. At 87 minutes, Fire Music isn’t much longer than saxophonist John Coltrane’s full-hour marathon through My Favorite Things in Tokyo, 1966. But Tom Surgal’s virtuoso documentary on the radical, improvising music that shattered post-bop orthodoxy in the ’60s – branded ‘free jazz’ after saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s landmark 1961 album – is as propulsive and cathartic as the art itself. The prime movers – Coleman, pianist Cecil Taylor, saxophonist Albert Ayler – mark turning points via archival interviews and performances (Taylor whipping from ballad filigree to full-blown fury; Sun Ra’s Arkestra in an auto-destruct frenzy like The Who at Monterey.) Collaborators and eyewitnesses (composer Carla Bley, the late drummer Rashied Ali) reflect on the…

Fully Qualified Survivor

THE LEGACY The Album: Fully Qualified Survivor (EMI Harvest, 1970) The Sound: The difficult second album turned into Chapman’s masterwork as he tempered his more jagged inclinations with bruised, melancholic songs of enduring intrigue like Postcards Of Scarborough and Kodak Ghosts. A sprinkling of strings adds haunting beauty, with Mick Ronson, Rick Kemp and drummer Barry Morgan providing steel. MICHAEL CHAPMAN took no prisoners. An uncompromising Yorkshireman, he pursued his own individuality - both in music and personality - and felt more at home with farmers, miners and labourers than a music industry that never understood him and which he came to despise. Riding high on the cusp of a breakthrough with 1970’s Fully Qualified Survivor, he came back off tour to discover incomplete tracks were being released by his EMI Harvest label under…

Fully Qualified Survivor

Radiohead ★★★★★ Kid A Mnesia XL. CD/DL/LP THE CHORUS of dismay that greeted Radiohead’s Kid A on release in 2000 seems passing strange now its hybrid of electronic and traditional rock aesthetics is so ubiquitous. But at the time it offended two camps: those invested in the band’s soaring anthems, and electronica aficionados irked by rock stars encroaching clumsily on their niche. And there was another problem for those who had seen Radiohead live earlier in the year: the most affecting and immediate new songs they were playing weren’t on it. Fans were confronted with the ghostly glitching groove of Everything In Its Right Place and many were left scratching their heads. Twenty years on, Everything… is now one of Radiohead’s most popular live bangers and we know that those…

Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt ★★★★ The Fascinating World Of Electronic Music WE ARE BUSY BODIES. LP From 1959, early electronics from Netherlands sound lab atomsmashes exotica, oscillator-wibble, cosmic drift, and more. Features earliest synth-pop-tune candidate Song Of The Second Moon. Sam Lee ★★★★ Old Wow+ COOKING VINYL. CD/DL An extension pack for last year’s set of resonant folk, fusing ancient traditions with modern climate crisis dread. Of six additional tracks, Awake Awake Sweet England and John Barleycorn are both relocated to Stonehenge for Lee’s recent project for English Heritage, Songs Of England. Pretenders ★★★★★ Pretenders RHINO. CD/DL/LP Chrissie Hynde-curated 3-disc edition of their textbook radio rock debut from 1979 (1981’s great Pretenders II gets the same treatment). Adds B-sides, demos BBC sessions and a previously vinyl-only live set from…

THEY ALSO SERVED

BASSIST ROGER NEWELL (b.c.1948) was a founder member of Rick Wakeman’s English Rock Ensemble and played on Wakeman albums and tours including 1974’s Journey To The Centre Of The Earth and ’75’s The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur And The Knights Of The Round Table, on which he played a triple-necked instrument. He also played with Marty Wilde’s Wildcats for 30 years, worked as a journalist, and, in 2016, reunited with his late ’60s psychedelic group Rainbow Ffolly. SOUSAPHONE PLAYER BENNIE PETE (above, b.1976) co-founded New Orleans’ iconic Hot 8 Brass Band aged 18. An advocate for the city’s brass tradition from a young age, he learnt tuba at school, playing in bands whose members combined to form the Hot 8. Keen to uphold and update their marching band heritage,…

THEY ALSO SERVED

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