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100 Articles

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

Andrew Cotterill Andy has shot for MOJO since 2000, including an Arctic Monkeys cover complete with Floydian light show. This month he returns to Floyd territory, with candid rehearsal pics of Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets. Currently working with artists Sarah Brown and Carmody. Bob Mehr MOJO’s Memphis music maven Mehr has shared more than a few memorable conversations with Al Green over the years. On its 50th anniversary, he takes a look back at one of Green’s defining moments, Let’s Stay Together, tracing how the singer, producer Willie Mitchell and Hi Rhythm made their masterpiece. Keith Cameron MOJO’s Contributing Editor still hasn’t recovered from Pearl Jam’s 2013 Wrigley Field gig, when the band played ’til 2am after a thunderstorm delay. Keith’s interview with Eddie Vedder is on p26. An…

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

Andrew Cotterill Andy has shot for MOJO since 2000, including an Arctic Monkeys cover complete with Floydian light show. This month he returns to Floyd territory, with candid rehearsal pics of Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets. Currently working with artists Sarah Brown and Carmody. Bob Mehr MOJO’s Memphis music maven Mehr has shared more than a few memorable conversations with Al Green over the years. On its 50th anniversary, he takes a look back at one of Green’s defining moments, Let’s Stay Together, tracing how the singer, producer Willie Mitchell and Hi Rhythm made their masterpiece. Keith Cameron MOJO’s Contributing Editor still hasn’t recovered from Pearl Jam’s 2013 Wrigley Field gig, when the band played ’til 2am after a thunderstorm delay. Keith’s interview with Eddie Vedder is on p26. An updated edition of his book…

THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Lucy Dacus HOME VIDEO STAR What music are you currently grooving to? I’ve really been loving Dijon’s latest record, Absolutely. The songwriting is really heartfelt and clever, and the fidelity goes from low to high throughout the album, which is one of the coolest tricks. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? I used to say Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, but the record I listen to the most is Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill by Grouper. It resets me. It’s not a very lyrical album, but sometimes I just need music to wash over me. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? If we’re talking vinyl, I bought Pearl by Janis Joplin, Aladdin Sane by Bowie and The Animals’ The Best Of, from Deep Groove…

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Theories, rants, etc.

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk THE TALE OF THE MONKEES, AND MIKE Nesmith’s role in the band, has often been framed as a battle for authenticity; a great American songwriter struggling to articulate himself in the face of prefabricated commercial expediencies. This month, though, as we mourn Nesmith, who died at the end of 2021, and celebrate all aspects of his incredible legacy, it feels like we’ve reached a much more sophisticated place. David Fricke’s tremendous cover story doesn’t ignore Nesmith’s artistic frustrations. But it also grasps that The Monkees were a great American band: fed a diet of imperishable songs; blessed with a chemistry that transcended studio machinations, even as the quartet never fully understood how that chemistry worked. “Do me the gracious favour of not pointing me out as the most talented…

Theories, rants, etc.

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Lucy Dacus HOME VIDEO STAR What music are you currently grooving to? I’ve really been loving Dijon’s latest record, Absolutely. The songwriting is really heartfelt and clever, and the fidelity goes from low to high throughout the album, which is one of the coolest tricks. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? I used to say Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, but the record I listen to the most is Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill by Grouper. It resets me. It’s not a very lyrical album, but sometimes I just need music to wash over me. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? If we’re talking vinyl, I bought Pearl by Janis Joplin, Aladdin Sane by Bowie and The…

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Theories, rants, etc.

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk THE TALE OF THE MONKEES, AND MIKE Nesmith’s role in the band, has often been framed as a battle for authenticity; a great American songwriter struggling to articulate himself in the face of prefabricated commercial expediencies. This month, though, as we mourn Nesmith, who died at the end of 2021, and celebrate all aspects of his incredible legacy, it feels like we’ve reached a much more sophisticated place. David Fricke’s tremendous cover story doesn’t ignore Nesmith’s artistic frustrations. But it also grasps that The Monkees were a great American band: fed a diet of imperishable songs; blessed with a chemistry that transcended studio machinations, even as the quartet never fully understood how that chemistry worked. “Do me the gracious favour of not pointing me out as the…

Theories, rants, etc.

Everybody Digs Mal Evans

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO AS THE quiet star of the Get Back documentary series, interest in Beatles roadie-turned-personal assistant Mal Evans has never been greater. Nicknamed Big Mal or the Gentle Giant, Evans was the Liverpudlian former telephone engineer whose life was changed when he wandered into the Cavern club one lunch-time in 1962 and witnessed The Beatles performing. The next year he was employed by the band as a gofer and tech, devotedly working with them on the road and in the studio until their break-up. Now, the late Evans’ long-hidden archive of diaries, photographs and illustrations – along with the manuscript of his never-published memoir Living The Beatles’ Legend: 200 Miles To Go – has been handed over by his estate to US author Kenneth…

Everybody Digs Mal Evans

THE LOST TAPES OF MANC-PUNK NEXUS THE ELECTRIC CIRCUS, FOUND AT LAST?

NORTHERN PUNK crucible the Electric Circus, a grotty venue in Manchester’s Collyhurst, lasted a year but saw performances from the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, Ramones, The Jam, Banshees and every major act of the day. The best-known audio document of it remains the 1978 eight-track 10-inch Short Circuit – Live At The Electric Circus, recorded during the venue’s last weekend before it closed on October 2, 1977. With Joy Division (still known as Warsaw), Buzzcocks, The Fall, John Cooper Clarke, Steel Pulse and The Drones recorded on Virgin’s multitrack mobile studio, the high-quality recordings were thrilling, if few in number. So what happened to the tapes of the groups’ complete performances? And what of Magazine, The Negatives and others who appeared at the venue’s last hurrah? The online Electric…

THE LOST TAPES OF MANC-PUNK NEXUS THE ELECTRIC CIRCUS, FOUND AT LAST?

Everybody Digs Mal Evans

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO AS THE quiet star of the Get Back documentary series, interest in Beatles roadie-turned-personal assistant Mal Evans has never been greater. Nicknamed Big Mal or the Gentle Giant, Evans was the Liverpudlian former telephone engineer whose life was changed when he wandered into the Cavern club one lunch-time in 1962 and witnessed The Beatles performing. The next year he was employed by the band as a gofer and tech, devotedly working with them on the road and in the studio until their break-up. Now, the late Evans’ long-hidden archive of diaries, photographs and illustrations – along with the manuscript of his never-published memoir Living The Beatles’ Legend: 200 Miles To Go – has been handed over by his estate to US…

Everybody Digs Mal Evans

GIMME FIVE... CHICKEN SOUNDS

Jack DeJohnette’s Directions Cosmic Chicken (PRESTIGE, 1975) A buried fusion gem where the Coltrane-Miles-ECM percussionist swings as his band get wild and free. Apart from the woozy title track, it’s hard to glean where chickens come into it, though Eiderdown suggests ducks. Ronnie Spector Tandoori Chicken (APPLE B-SIDE, 1971) This rollicking George Harrison/Phil Spector oddity – which namechecks Mal Evans (see previous pages) – was cut in one take and makes a meal of the marinated dish “and a great big bottle of wine” sound like the ultimate feast. Thee Michelle Gun Elephant Chicken Zombies (TRIAD, 1997) A hit in Japan for the Tokyo garage rockers: the Odds & Sods-like LP sleeve finds them in American football helmets spelling out ‘F-U-C-K’. Songs called The Birdmen and Romantic (Broiler Dinner Version) keep things fowl. Dr. Alimantado Best Dressed Chicken In Town (GREENSLEEVES, 1978) The tip of…

GIMME FIVE... CHICKEN SOUNDS

THE LOST TAPES OF MANC-PUNK NEXUS THE ELECTRIC CIRCUS, FOUND AT LAST?

NORTHERN PUNK crucible the Electric Circus, a grotty venue in Manchester’s Collyhurst, lasted a year but saw performances from the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Clash, Ramones, The Jam, Banshees and every major act of the day. The best-known audio document of it remains the 1978 eight-track 10-inch Short Circuit – Live At The Electric Circus, recorded during the venue’s last weekend before it closed on October 2, 1977. With Joy Division (still known as Warsaw), Buzzcocks, The Fall, John Cooper Clarke, Steel Pulse and The Drones recorded on Virgin’s multitrack mobile studio, the high-quality recordings were thrilling, if few in number. So what happened to the tapes of the groups’ complete performances? And what of Magazine, The Negatives and others who appeared at the venue’s last hurrah? The online…

THE LOST TAPES OF MANC-PUNK NEXUS THE ELECTRIC CIRCUS, FOUND AT LAST?

INTERPOL TURN TO THE LIGHT ON LP SEVEN. PLUS, PROG?

AFTER SIX LPs, it’s well-established that lightening the mood isn’t one of Interpol’s core values. That might change with the follow-up to 2018’s elegant Marauder. “I’m a pretty doom-and-gloom kind of vocalist,” says frontman Paul Banks, “and that’s not what came out of me this time.” The band’s seventh album started to take shape shortly after Banks’s side-project Muzz released their album in June 2020. Guitarist Daniel Kessler began sending songs through to Banks and drummer Sam Fogarino, the singer “writing vocals sitting in a comfy chair next to the window in Edinburgh,” his billet for the first lockdown. Mindful of the neighbours, he kept his voice down, but remote working led to the different spaces he was seeking. “I think my voice does different things at quieter volumes,” he says.…

INTERPOL TURN TO THE LIGHT ON LP SEVEN. PLUS, PROG?

…the debut LP by WET LEG (right) arrives in April, with production by Dan Carey. “We want to be goofy and a little bit rude,” says singer Rhian Teasdale. “We want people to have a good time, even if that might not be possible all of the time” …NEIL YOUNG is already planning another album …announcing a European tour for 2022, THE CURE stated, ‘NEW 67’ ALBUM = NEW 135’ SHOW,’ suggesting a new record is also ready …BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD are having thoughts about their third album. “We’ve started writing some stuff,” says sax player Lewis Evans, “musical ideas, just little things.” Bassist Tyler Hyde adds, “This is where the next album comes about, just by us messing about and not having a plan” …DR DRE revealed that he…

GIMME FIVE... CHICKEN SOUNDS

Jack DeJohnette’s Directions Cosmic Chicken (PRESTIGE, 1975) A buried fusion gem where the Coltrane-Miles-ECM percussionist swings as his band get wild and free. Apart from the woozy title track, it’s hard to glean where chickens come into it, though Eiderdown suggests ducks. Ronnie Spector Tandoori Chicken (APPLE B-SIDE, 1971) This rollicking George Harrison/Phil Spector oddity – which namechecks Mal Evans (see previous pages) – was cut in one take and makes a meal of the marinated dish “and a great big bottle of wine” sound like the ultimate feast. Thee Michelle Gun Elephant Chicken Zombies (TRIAD, 1997) A hit in Japan for the Tokyo garage rockers: the Odds & Sods-like LP sleeve finds them in American football helmets spelling out ‘F-U-C-K’. Songs called The Birdmen and Romantic (Broiler Dinner Version)…

GIMME FIVE... CHICKEN SOUNDS

EMERGING FROM Leeds Poly and the same northern garage-electronics scene that gave us The Human League and Cabaret Voltaire, Soft Cell – AKA Marc Almond (voice) and Dave Ball (sounds) – combined sleaze, glamour and emotion on an early-’80s spree of gleaming hits. Worldwide fame was theirs with 1981’s Tainted Love, but they were too inflammable to last, and split in 1984 after four albums. While Ball continues to work with The Grid and beyond, and Almond’s solo LP tally is 25 and rising, the two have now reunited for new Soft Cell album Happiness Not Included, where sparse machine melodies and an undiminished voice in the spotlight communicate despair, tenderness and maturity. “Soft Cell has always been a bit of an electronic rock and roll band, really,” says Marc. Wasn’t…

INTERPOL TURN TO THE LIGHT ON LP SEVEN. PLUS, PROG?

AFTER SIX LPs, it’s well-established that lightening the mood isn’t one of Interpol’s core values. That might change with the follow-up to 2018’s elegant Marauder. “I’m a pretty doom-and-gloom kind of vocalist,” says frontman Paul Banks, “and that’s not what came out of me this time.” The band’s seventh album started to take shape shortly after Banks’s side-project Muzz released their album in June 2020. Guitarist Daniel Kessler began sending songs through to Banks and drummer Sam Fogarino, the singer “writing vocals sitting in a comfy chair next to the window in Edinburgh,” his billet for the first lockdown. Mindful of the neighbours, he kept his voice down, but remote working led to the different spaces he was seeking. “I think my voice does different things at quieter volumes,” he…

INTERPOL TURN TO THE LIGHT ON LP SEVEN. PLUS, PROG?

JANIS IAN’S ANNOUNCED HER DEFIANT FAREWELL LP. BUT IS IT REALLY GOODBYE?

NEW JERSEY-BORN veteran singer-songwriter Janis Ian is on the phone, explaining why her new album The Light At The End Of The Line is going to be her very last. “You know, I’m 70,” she says. “I’ll be 71 next year. I’m cramming three years’ worth of touring into one year to make up all the dates that Covid has cost me. I don’t like being on the merry-go-round you have to be on to be a huge success, in the eyes of the world anyway. It’s just become less important to me over the years.” Those years, to be precise, start with her aggressively topical 1967 hit Society’s Child, extend through 1975’s Grammy-winning, oft-covered At Seventeen, and continued through to the 1992 creation of her own label Rude Girl Records –…

JANIS IAN’S ANNOUNCED HER DEFIANT FAREWELL LP. BUT IS IT REALLY GOODBYE?

I want to talk about The Modern Lovers. It was 1990. I was between my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Texas. I had a part-time job delivering cheeseburgers, taking a Spanish class and trying to learn how to write songs. No band, no money, no girlfriend. It was super hot and I was in the back room of this little house that didn’t have any working AC, on a flight path with planes going by about 20 yards over my head every 10 minutes. I was into the Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, The Cure, and then I checked out The Modern Lovers’ record from the library one afternoon. It was a game-changer – great, post-Velvets, pre-punk, full-on rock’n'roll. But the thing that completely turned my head around was Jonathan Richman’s…

…the debut LP by WET LEG (right) arrives in April, with production by Dan Carey. “We want to be goofy and a little bit rude,” says singer Rhian Teasdale. “We want people to have a good time, even if that might not be possible all of the time” …NEIL YOUNG is already planning another album …announcing a European tour for 2022, THE CURE stated, ‘NEW 67’ ALBUM = NEW 135’ SHOW,’ suggesting a new record is also ready …BLACK COUNTRY, NEW ROAD are having thoughts about their third album. “We’ve started writing some stuff,” says sax player Lewis Evans, “musical ideas, just little things.” Bassist Tyler Hyde adds, “This is where the next album comes about, just by us messing about and not having a plan” …DR DRE revealed that…

EMERGING FROM Leeds Poly and the same northern garage-electronics scene that gave us The Human League and Cabaret Voltaire, Soft Cell – AKA Marc Almond (voice) and Dave Ball (sounds) – combined sleaze, glamour and emotion on an early-’80s spree of gleaming hits. Worldwide fame was theirs with 1981’s Tainted Love, but they were too inflammable to last, and split in 1984 after four albums. While Ball continues to work with The Grid and beyond, and Almond’s solo LP tally is 25 and rising, the two have now reunited for new Soft Cell album Happiness Not Included, where sparse machine melodies and an undiminished voice in the spotlight communicate despair, tenderness and maturity. “Soft Cell has always been a bit of an electronic rock and roll band, really,” says Marc.…

TOKYO HEAVY MOB BORIS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF NOISE

“IT’S FINE IF you call us metal or psychedelic or drone,” says Boris drummer Atsuo. “We’re in a space where all those genres connect... our genre is ‘heavy’, whatever you perceive that to be!” Chatting to MOJO via an interpreter over Zoom, the long-running Tokyo trio – completed by lead guitarist Wata and bassist/rhythm guitarist Takeshi, with all three sharing vocal duties – illustrate their eclectic creativity by nominating personal cult heroes. Wata cites the influence of David Gilmour, while Atsuo opts for the “methods and sensibilities” of canonical Russian art house director Andrei Tarkovsky. In no-frills contrast, Takeshi points to 1980s Hiroshima hardcore punk hellions Gudon – specifically their guitarist Zigyaku, who guested on Boris’s previous album No. Initially self-released in summer 2020, No combined elements of crust punk, doom and…

TOKYO HEAVY MOB BORIS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF NOISE

JANIS IAN’S ANNOUNCED HER DEFIANT FAREWELL LP. BUT IS IT REALLY GOODBYE?

NEW JERSEY-BORN veteran singer-songwriter Janis Ian is on the phone, explaining why her new album The Light At The End Of The Line is going to be her very last. “You know, I’m 70,” she says. “I’ll be 71 next year. I’m cramming three years’ worth of touring into one year to make up all the dates that Covid has cost me. I don’t like being on the merry-go-round you have to be on to be a huge success, in the eyes of the world anyway. It’s just become less important to me over the years.” Those years, to be precise, start with her aggressively topical 1967 hit Society’s Child, extend through 1975’s Grammy-winning, oft-covered At Seventeen, and continued through to the 1992 creation of her own label Rude Girl…

JANIS IAN’S ANNOUNCED HER DEFIANT FAREWELL LP. BUT IS IT REALLY GOODBYE?

Birth Of The Kool

“I WAS DEFINITELY at the right place at the right time,” says photographer, TV presenter/producer and writer Sophie Bramly of the archive of NY rap images collected in new book Yo! The Early Days Of Hip Hop 1982-84. “But you don’t know these things when you’re there. I don’t think anyone on the hip-hop scene had the feeling that it was going to change the world. It was a day-to-day thing, in a small community.” Consequently, hers is a view of a form in the process of becoming. Taken in rap’s streets, studios and venues, it stars the scene’s DJs and MCs (Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Run-DMC and many more) plus graffiti artists (Futura 2000, Zephyr) and breakdancers (the Rock Steady Crew, The Magnificent Force). As a…

Birth Of The Kool

LIGHTEN UP! MEET ERIN RAE, EASY-GOING MODERN WOMAN OF TRIPPY AMERICANA.

“It’s important to bring lightness to the stage.”ERIN RAE YOU KNOW your mom lives in the sticks when the local draw is the World’s Largest Cedar Bucket. “Only in America,” chuckles Erin Rae, whose mother’s current locale – near Oxford, Mississippi – has this honour. “You get these weird attractions. Like this summer, we were on our way to Red Rocks and stopped in Kansas to see the World’s Largest Ball Of Twine...” Supersizing might be a national pastime, but it’s far from Erin Rae’s aesthetic. The Nashville-based singer’s tunes have a simple beauty and her voice a pure clarity – a little bit country, a little bit Laurel Canyon. “When Erin opened her mouth and started singing I was hooked,” says Jonathan Wilson, the producer of her bewitching new album, Lighten…

LIGHTEN UP! MEET ERIN RAE, EASY-GOING MODERN WOMAN OF TRIPPY AMERICANA.

I want to talk about The Modern Lovers. It was 1990. I was between my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Texas. I had a part-time job delivering cheeseburgers, taking a Spanish class and trying to learn how to write songs. No band, no money, no girlfriend. It was super hot and I was in the back room of this little house that didn’t have any working AC, on a flight path with planes going by about 20 yards over my head every 10 minutes. I was into the Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, The Cure, and then I checked out The Modern Lovers’ record from the library one afternoon. It was a game-changer – great, post-Velvets, pre-punk, full-on rock’n'roll. But the thing that completely turned my head around was…

TOKYO HEAVY MOB BORIS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF NOISE

“IT’S FINE IF you call us metal or psychedelic or drone,” says Boris drummer Atsuo. “We’re in a space where all those genres connect... our genre is ‘heavy’, whatever you perceive that to be!” Chatting to MOJO via an interpreter over Zoom, the long-running Tokyo trio – completed by lead guitarist Wata and bassist/rhythm guitarist Takeshi, with all three sharing vocal duties – illustrate their eclectic creativity by nominating personal cult heroes. Wata cites the influence of David Gilmour, while Atsuo opts for the “methods and sensibilities” of canonical Russian art house director Andrei Tarkovsky. In no-frills contrast, Takeshi points to 1980s Hiroshima hardcore punk hellions Gudon – specifically their guitarist Zigyaku, who guested on Boris’s previous album No. Initially self-released in summer 2020, No combined elements of crust punk,…

TOKYO HEAVY MOB BORIS CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF NOISE

OUT OF THE LONDON MELTING POT: THE PAN-GLOBAL “ZING-ZANG” TWANG OF LOS BITCHOS!

LOS BITCHOS’s lead guitarist Serra Petale was drumming with London indie-rockers Kid Wave when her eureka moment arrived. Playing a compilation album called The Roots Of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru, she came across the sashaying instrumental A Patricia by Los Destellos – a 1960s combo credited with introducing the electric guitar to Peruvian indigenous musics. The discovery sparked a life-changing realisation. “I was like, ‘Ah, right, of course you can do an instrumental band – why can’t you?’” Petale recalls today. She’d been playing guitar privately at home, but “lyricism never came to me”, and A Patricia showed her how she could express her tequila-bumping personality without the necessity for words. Petale, who grew up in Western Australia, shared her find with her friend Josefine Jonsson, who’d moved to London from…

OUT OF THE LONDON MELTING POT: THE PAN-GLOBAL “ZING-ZANG” TWANG OF LOS BITCHOS!

1 ALDOUS HARDING LAWN The queen of international auxiliary language lyricism makes her glorious return, singing something about B-sides in the style of a woman trapped in a helium balloon, in bossa nova. From new LP Warm Chris. Find It: streaming services 2 SISTER COOKIE AIN’T NO GOOD (BUT IT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME) The Lagos-London jazz/blues blaster states love’s imperfections with purifying candour. Find it: streaming services 3 DESTROYER TINTORETTO, IT’S FOR YOU Dan Bejar’s more than usually deranged on this teaser from 13th LP Labyrinthitis (due in March). Electro beats, pop synths and jazz piano duel as he hallucinates “palm trees stooping to kiss the bishop’s ring”. Painterly. Find it: streaming services 4 75 DOLLAR BILL BLACK TO COMM/9 TO 5 Gnarly dronepunk cut’n’shut of the MC5 and Dolly Parton. A crate-rattling, sax-honking, rabble-rousing skronk insurrection. Find it: Bandcamp 5…

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

“ONE SECOND...” Eddie Vedder gets up mid-question, leaving us with an unimpeded view of the music room in his Seattle home: a few amplifiers, a piano, the walls hung with photographs, presentation discs and some guitars. After a few moments’ off-screen clinking, Eddie reappears with a Corona, levering the top off with his cigarette lighter. “I’ll join you!” he beams, raising his bottle to MOJO’s pint glass, 5,000 miles away. Two weeks short of his 57th birthday, Vedder is the very model of the middle-aged mixed-up kid, with the beer and smokes in the afternoon, his jacket/shorts/baseball cap/Who T-shirt ensemble detailed with a PiL pin. During early summer, he began recording Earthling, his third solo album, with Andrew Watt, the Grammy-winning producer of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. In late September, he…

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

Birth Of The Kool

“I WAS DEFINITELY at the right place at the right time,” says photographer, TV presenter/producer and writer Sophie Bramly of the archive of NY rap images collected in new book Yo! The Early Days Of Hip Hop 1982-84. “But you don’t know these things when you’re there. I don’t think anyone on the hip-hop scene had the feeling that it was going to change the world. It was a day-to-day thing, in a small community.” Consequently, hers is a view of a form in the process of becoming. Taken in rap’s streets, studios and venues, it stars the scene’s DJs and MCs (Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, Run-DMC and many more) plus graffiti artists (Futura 2000, Zephyr) and breakdancers (the Rock Steady Crew, The Magnificent Force). As…

Birth Of The Kool

LIGHTEN UP! MEET ERIN RAE, EASY-GOING MODERN WOMAN OF TRIPPY AMERICANA.

“It’s important to bring lightness to the stage.”ERIN RAE YOU KNOW your mom lives in the sticks when the local draw is the World’s Largest Cedar Bucket. “Only in America,” chuckles Erin Rae, whose mother’s current locale – near Oxford, Mississippi – has this honour. “You get these weird attractions. Like this summer, we were on our way to Red Rocks and stopped in Kansas to see the World’s Largest Ball Of Twine...” Supersizing might be a national pastime, but it’s far from Erin Rae’s aesthetic. The Nashville-based singer’s tunes have a simple beauty and her voice a pure clarity – a little bit country, a little bit Laurel Canyon. “When Erin opened her mouth and started singing I was hooked,” says Jonathan Wilson, the producer of her bewitching new…

LIGHTEN UP! MEET ERIN RAE, EASY-GOING MODERN WOMAN OF TRIPPY AMERICANA.

OUT OF THE LONDON MELTING POT: THE PAN-GLOBAL “ZING-ZANG” TWANG OF LOS BITCHOS!

LOS BITCHOS’s lead guitarist Serra Petale was drumming with London indie-rockers Kid Wave when her eureka moment arrived. Playing a compilation album called The Roots Of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias From Peru, she came across the sashaying instrumental A Patricia by Los Destellos – a 1960s combo credited with introducing the electric guitar to Peruvian indigenous musics. The discovery sparked a life-changing realisation. “I was like, ‘Ah, right, of course you can do an instrumental band – why can’t you?’” Petale recalls today. She’d been playing guitar privately at home, but “lyricism never came to me”, and A Patricia showed her how she could express her tequila-bumping personality without the necessity for words. Petale, who grew up in Western Australia, shared her find with her friend Josefine Jonsson, who’d moved to…

OUT OF THE LONDON MELTING POT: THE PAN-GLOBAL “ZING-ZANG” TWANG OF LOS BITCHOS!

A LIFE IN PICTURES

1 The kid is alright: Eddie Vedder as a young man. 2 Mixed signals: Bad Radio, 1988 (from left) Dave George, Joey Ponchetti, Eddie Vedder, Dave Silva. 3 Reading the riot act: Eddie fights back against the war on terror, Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, February 18, 2003. 4 Five against the world: Ten-era Pearl Jam (from left) Eddie Vedder, Mike McCready, Dave Abbruzzese, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament. 5 People have the power: last night of the Vote For Change Tour, October 13, 2004 (from left) Jackson Browne, John Fogerty, Vedder, Bruce Springsteen. 6 Gonna see my friend: Vedder enjoys a cuddle with Pete Townshend after their set at the New York Supper Club, July 28, 1999. 7 No need to say goodbye: Vedder and Chris Cornell at the Bridge School Benefit Concert, October 26, 2014. 8 Closer…

A LIFE IN PICTURES

1 ALDOUS HARDING LAWN The queen of international auxiliary language lyricism makes her glorious return, singing something about B-sides in the style of a woman trapped in a helium balloon, in bossa nova. From new LP Warm Chris. Find It: streaming services 2 SISTER COOKIE AIN’T NO GOOD (BUT IT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME) The Lagos-London jazz/blues blaster states love’s imperfections with purifying candour. Find it: streaming services 3 DESTROYER TINTORETTO, IT’S FOR YOU Dan Bejar’s more than usually deranged on this teaser from 13th LP Labyrinthitis (due in March). Electro beats, pop synths and jazz piano duel as he hallucinates “palm trees stooping to kiss the bishop’s ring”. Painterly. Find it: streaming services 4 75 DOLLAR BILL BLACK TO COMM/9 TO 5 Gnarly dronepunk cut’n’shut of the MC5 and…

THE FUTURE-PROOFER Pearl Jam No Code ★★★★★ (EPIC, 1996) From amid Pearl Jam’s self-imposed lockdown came this stunning regeneration, driven by new drummer Jack Irons, who provided polyrhythmic space for the band’s experimental yearnings. The edgy quietude of I’m Open deployed post-rock austerity, while Present Tense bled grunge’s down-tuned gloom into a euphoric new dawn, with Vedder summoning a fresh voice for this lost youth elegy. Lukin, meanwhile, boiled the singer’s stalker hell into a 62-second hardcore tribute to Mudhoney’s bassist. THE OUTDOOR TROUBADOUR Eddie Vedder Into The Wild ★★★ (J/BMG, 2007) Vedder’s first solo album is ostensibly a soundtrack to his friend Sean Penn’s film about US adventurer Christopher McCandless’s fateful trek to Alaska, though Vedder delivered far more material than was used on-screen. Writing to someone else’s strict brief clearly gave the singer cause to reassess his craft, and…

Hi PRIEST of SOUL

THE OLD MOVIE THEATRE at 1320 S. Lauderdale Street in South Memphis is the site of Royal Studios, home to Hi Records. On this night, the usual soulful sounds have been replaced by raised voices and recriminations. It is the autumn of 1971 and Al Green is stood at his microphone, shaking his head at the figure in the control room above. Producer Willie Mitchell has been pushing Green to dub vocals on a new song they’ve written, and that the studio’s crack house band, the Hi Rhythm Section, has cut. Green is singing it one way and Mitchell is hearing it another. This battle of wills has been going on for days. The producer and singer have been working together closely for nearly three years, and have just recently scored their…

Hi PRIEST of SOUL

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

“ONE SECOND...” Eddie Vedder gets up mid-question, leaving us with an unimpeded view of the music room in his Seattle home: a few amplifiers, a piano, the walls hung with photographs, presentation discs and some guitars. After a few moments’ off-screen clinking, Eddie reappears with a Corona, levering the top off with his cigarette lighter. “I’ll join you!” he beams, raising his bottle to MOJO’s pint glass, 5,000 miles away. Two weeks short of his 57th birthday, Vedder is the very model of the middle-aged mixed-up kid, with the beer and smokes in the afternoon, his jacket/shorts/baseball cap/Who T-shirt ensemble detailed with a PiL pin. During early summer, he began recording Earthling, his third solo album, with Andrew Watt, the Grammy-winning producer of Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus. In late…

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

Green Is Blues ★★★ (Hi, 1969) For his first collaboration with producer Willie Mitchell and the Hi Rhythm Section, Green does Motown (My Girl) Sam Cooke (Talk To Me) and Bobby Bland (I Stand Accused) with only the startling opening track, One Woman, pointing the way forward; a seductive, melancholy tale of moral duplicity in which Al plays both angel and devil. Gets Next To You ★★★★ (Hi, 1971) Two roads diverge. For much of Green’s second Hi effort he is tearing up standards (Light My Fire; Driving Wheel) and getting down to muscular Southern soul. But it’s the testifying rework of The Temptations’ I Can’t Get Next To You and Tired Of Being Alone’s sweet physical pleading that points towards a soul road less travelled. Let’s Stay Together ★★★★★ (Hi, 1972) Green’s first emotionally autobiographical work, caught between the personal…

ANAIS MITCHELL KNEW BETTER THAN TO TAKE another job. It was June 2020, three months since she and her husband Noah had fled New York for the sheep farm where she grew up in middle Vermont, five hours due north. A week after the move, she had given birth to their second daughter, Rosetta. So when the invitation arrived to join a long-distance consortium of songwriters who penned and posted a song a day, she already knew she was too busy. But she also somehow knew she had to say yes. “That’s not how I roll – I take years to write,” exclaims Mitchell. “But as someone who second-guesses and overthinks things, I found it wildly healing. The exercise of having to say ‘Yes’ to whatever idea you have and getting out…

A LIFE IN PICTURES

1 The kid is alright: Eddie Vedder as a young man. 2 Mixed signals: Bad Radio, 1988 (from left) Dave George, Joey Ponchetti, Eddie Vedder, Dave Silva. 3 Reading the riot act: Eddie fights back against the war on terror, Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, February 18, 2003. 4 Five against the world: Ten-era Pearl Jam (from left) Eddie Vedder, Mike McCready, Dave Abbruzzese, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament. 5 People have the power: last night of the Vote For Change Tour, October 13, 2004 (from left) Jackson Browne, John Fogerty, Vedder, Bruce Springsteen. 6 Gonna see my friend: Vedder enjoys a cuddle with Pete Townshend after their set at the New York Supper Club, July 28, 1999. 7 No need to say goodbye: Vedder and Chris Cornell at the Bridge School…

A LIFE IN PICTURES

ANAÏS MITCHELL Hadestown (Righteous Babe, 2010) Made on a budget long before Broadway, this intricate indie interpretation of Greek mythology hinges on a pair of simpatico voices – Mitchell and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The story’s romantic woes remain forever relevant, as power and politics still overrun the purest hearts. ANAÏS MITCHELL Young Man In America (Wilderland,2012) Lullabies that yearn, eulogies that sting, shuffles that twist: Mitchell’s fifth – and, for a decade, final – solo album is a cataract of audacious ideas that never quite cohere, as if built in a Hadestown hangover. The title track, though, is a wonder of gothic Americana. BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN Bonny Light Horseman (37d03d, 2020) This trio’s transfixing debut doubles as one of their generation’s most vivid re-imaginings of old Anglo-folk idioms. Whether on a narcotised Blackwaterside or a hymn for John Henry, Mitchell…

THE FUTURE-PROOFER Pearl Jam No Code ★★★★★ (EPIC, 1996) From amid Pearl Jam’s self-imposed lockdown came this stunning regeneration, driven by new drummer Jack Irons, who provided polyrhythmic space for the band’s experimental yearnings. The edgy quietude of I’m Open deployed post-rock austerity, while Present Tense bled grunge’s down-tuned gloom into a euphoric new dawn, with Vedder summoning a fresh voice for this lost youth elegy. Lukin, meanwhile, boiled the singer’s stalker hell into a 62-second hardcore tribute to Mudhoney’s bassist. THE OUTDOOR TROUBADOUR Eddie Vedder Into The Wild ★★★ (J/BMG, 2007) Vedder’s first solo album is ostensibly a soundtrack to his friend Sean Penn’s film about US adventurer Christopher McCandless’s fateful trek to Alaska, though Vedder delivered far more material than was used on-screen. Writing to someone else’s strict…

Reflected Glory

IN A REHEARSAL SPACE IN NORTH LONDON, NICK MASON SITS BEHIND HIS DRUM kit, listening to himself shouting 50 years ago. As he builds up a tom-tom tattoo to accompany a familiar echoing bassline, his mangled, pitched-down voice, recorded back in 1971 (and now sampled), dementedly barks through the PA: “I’m going to cut you into little pieces...” Around him, his Saucerful Of Secrets band – trading in ’67-’72 Pink Floyd since 2018 – kick into the proto-headbanger crescendo of One Of These Days, the opening track from 1971’s Meddle. After the song culminates in a flurry of cymbal and guitar noise, MOJO wonders aloud: isn’t Mason tempted to set up a microphone and re-enact his vocal role live? “Yes, I am tempted, and we have looked at that, and we might…

Reflected Glory

ON PAPER, the idea looked fairly ludicrous: the septuagenarian Nick Mason revisiting the early days of Pink Floyd with erstwhile members of Spandau Ballet and The Blockheads. But, through their attention to detail and on-stage verve, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets have been a resounding success. “It would sound too depressing to say I had very low expectations, because it was not really that,” Mason tells MOJO. “I just wasn’t sure whether it would interest people.” “What’s lovely is it’s Pink Floyd when they were a pop group,” states Guy Pratt. “Before it was this vast, faceless obelisk.” “We took the pomposity out of the music,” reckons Gary Kemp. “We gave it a little bit more fun, a little bit more edge, a little bit more anarchy here and there.” Even those who were…

Hi PRIEST of SOUL

THE OLD MOVIE THEATRE at 1320 S. Lauderdale Street in South Memphis is the site of Royal Studios, home to Hi Records. On this night, the usual soulful sounds have been replaced by raised voices and recriminations. It is the autumn of 1971 and Al Green is stood at his microphone, shaking his head at the figure in the control room above. Producer Willie Mitchell has been pushing Green to dub vocals on a new song they’ve written, and that the studio’s crack house band, the Hi Rhythm Section, has cut. Green is singing it one way and Mitchell is hearing it another. This battle of wills has been going on for days. The producer and singer have been working together closely for nearly three years, and have just recently…

Hi PRIEST of SOUL

Green Is Blues ★★★ (Hi, 1969) For his first collaboration with producer Willie Mitchell and the Hi Rhythm Section, Green does Motown (My Girl) Sam Cooke (Talk To Me) and Bobby Bland (I Stand Accused) with only the startling opening track, One Woman, pointing the way forward; a seductive, melancholy tale of moral duplicity in which Al plays both angel and devil. Gets Next To You ★★★★ (Hi, 1971) Two roads diverge. For much of Green’s second Hi effort he is tearing up standards (Light My Fire; Driving Wheel) and getting down to muscular Southern soul. But it’s the testifying rework of The Temptations’ I Can’t Get Next To You and Tired Of Being Alone’s sweet physical pleading that points towards a soul road less travelled. Let’s Stay Together ★★★★★…

THE LONGER FLOYD ONE Pink Floyd – Atom Heart Mother (23:44) (from Atom Heart Mother, Harvest, 1970) Pseudo-classical suite (nearly called The Amazing Pudding) with starring roles for Rick Wright’s organ, the brass section of the EMI Pops and John Aldiss’s long-suffering choir, barking nonsense, all marshalled by avant- composer Ron Geesin. Best bit: when Gilmour comes in at 10:36. DE THE POST-ROCK ONE Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Providence (29:02) (from F# A# ∞, Kranky, 1998) The Canadian soundscapers perfected their – and post-rock’s – blend of classical expansiveness, drone-rock repetition, Morricone twang, martial rhythms, found sound manipulations, obtuse references and grandstand dread as early as their first album. The glockenspiel of the apocalypse arrives, disingenuously, at 6:08. JM THE TECHNO ONE The Orb – The Blue Room (39:58) (Big Life single, 1992) Still-beautiful sub-pelagic trance assembled from a million…

FOUR MONTHS AFTER the release of Meddle and just four weeks since they’d introduced the work-in-progress Dark Side Of The Moon song-suite into their live set, Pink Floyd forgot about all of that and instead decamped to France to make Obscured By Clouds, the oft-overlooked tissue connecting those two landmark records. On February 23, 1972, 23 miles north-west of Paris, they took up residence at the Château d’Hérouville, the studio where the previous month Elton John had recorded his fifth album, Honky Château, its title immortalising the tumbledown charms of this hideaway facility behind ivy-covered 18th century walls. It was to prove a hugely creative setting for Pink Floyd, who wrote and recorded Obscured By Clouds there in an uncharacteristic 12-day sprint (broken up by a short Japanese tour). Seriously considering film…

ANAIS MITCHELL KNEW BETTER THAN TO TAKE another job. It was June 2020, three months since she and her husband Noah had fled New York for the sheep farm where she grew up in middle Vermont, five hours due north. A week after the move, she had given birth to their second daughter, Rosetta. So when the invitation arrived to join a long-distance consortium of songwriters who penned and posted a song a day, she already knew she was too busy. But she also somehow knew she had to say yes. “That’s not how I roll – I take years to write,” exclaims Mitchell. “But as someone who second-guesses and overthinks things, I found it wildly healing. The exercise of having to say ‘Yes’ to whatever idea you have and…

ANAÏS MITCHELL Hadestown (Righteous Babe, 2010) Made on a budget long before Broadway, this intricate indie interpretation of Greek mythology hinges on a pair of simpatico voices – Mitchell and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The story’s romantic woes remain forever relevant, as power and politics still overrun the purest hearts. ANAÏS MITCHELL Young Man In America (Wilderland,2012) Lullabies that yearn, eulogies that sting, shuffles that twist: Mitchell’s fifth – and, for a decade, final – solo album is a cataract of audacious ideas that never quite cohere, as if built in a Hadestown hangover. The title track, though, is a wonder of gothic Americana. BONNY LIGHT HORSEMAN Bonny Light Horseman (37d03d, 2020) This trio’s transfixing debut doubles as one of their generation’s most vivid re-imaginings of old Anglo-folk idioms. Whether…

THERE ARE MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO pride themselves on their anonymity – their ability to disappear into the background and observe, the proverbial fly on the wall. Mick Rock was the opposite: a massive personality who lent his own energy to the people and events he recorded. On the occasions he would appear in the MOJO office – his attire never complete without an extravagant scarf – he would call everyone ‘darling’, regardless of their gender, like a star of the stage fresh from an excellent lunch at the Garrick. Rock discovered photography and drugs simultaneously, in the rooms of a “well-heeled friend” at Cambridge University In the course of a trip on blotter acid he picked up his host’s Pentax camera. “At the height of the lunacy, I started to point…

VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR

REACH ENDGAME WITH PAWN HEARTS “SOMEONE SHOUTED, ‘FUCK OFF WITH YOUR MUSIC!’ …ONE OF OUR CATCHPHRASES FOR A WHILE.”Hugh Banton John Anthony: In 1969, I was DJ-ing at [London club] the Speakeasy. There were three bands that could empty the place: Egg, Jody Grind and Van der Graaf Generator. But I loved that. VdGG were far out and not trying to be rock’n’roll and groovy, ploughing their own path. Peter Hammill: There hadn’t been a line-up like ours, with lead saxophone and organ, and an almost complete absence of guitars. Like a late-’60s soul band, but warped by the spirit of Stockhausen and Messiaen, sci-fi, Catholicism and Icelandic sagas. Big stories, moral rights and wrongs, the ‘What if?’ world. I think we wanted to make things difficult for ourselves by creating music that…

VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR

Reflected Glory

IN A REHEARSAL SPACE IN NORTH LONDON, NICK MASON SITS BEHIND HIS DRUM kit, listening to himself shouting 50 years ago. As he builds up a tom-tom tattoo to accompany a familiar echoing bassline, his mangled, pitched-down voice, recorded back in 1971 (and now sampled), dementedly barks through the PA: “I’m going to cut you into little pieces...” Around him, his Saucerful Of Secrets band – trading in ’67-’72 Pink Floyd since 2018 – kick into the proto-headbanger crescendo of One Of These Days, the opening track from 1971’s Meddle. After the song culminates in a flurry of cymbal and guitar noise, MOJO wonders aloud: isn’t Mason tempted to set up a microphone and re-enact his vocal role live? “Yes, I am tempted, and we have looked at that, and…

Reflected Glory

ON PAPER, the idea looked fairly ludicrous: the septuagenarian Nick Mason revisiting the early days of Pink Floyd with erstwhile members of Spandau Ballet and The Blockheads. But, through their attention to detail and on-stage verve, Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets have been a resounding success. “It would sound too depressing to say I had very low expectations, because it was not really that,” Mason tells MOJO. “I just wasn’t sure whether it would interest people.” “What’s lovely is it’s Pink Floyd when they were a pop group,” states Guy Pratt. “Before it was this vast, faceless obelisk.” “We took the pomposity out of the music,” reckons Gary Kemp. “We gave it a little bit more fun, a little bit more edge, a little bit more anarchy here and there.”…

The Cat In The Hat

ON JUNE 1, 1968, MICHAEL NESMITH WALKED into the RCA Victor studios in Nashville with an idea foi a tune – no lyrics yet, just some chords – that, as the day progressed, became a mission statement for him as a musician, songwriter and, at that moment, a member of one of the biggest and most divisive groups in pop Nesmith called the song Listen To The Band. The year before, Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Peter Tork – The Monkees – had wrestled control of their records from the Hollywood producers and label executives who brought then together in 1965 to play a fictional combo in a television series. Gifted singers and players with varying degrees of studio and gig experience, the four proved themselves with the folk rock…

The Cat In The Hat

THE LONGER FLOYD ONE Pink Floyd – Atom Heart Mother (23:44) (from Atom Heart Mother, Harvest, 1970) Pseudo-classical suite (nearly called The Amazing Pudding) with starring roles for Rick Wright’s organ, the brass section of the EMI Pops and John Aldiss’s long-suffering choir, barking nonsense, all marshalled by avant- composer Ron Geesin. Best bit: when Gilmour comes in at 10:36. DE THE POST-ROCK ONE Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Providence (29:02) (from F# A# ∞, Kranky, 1998) The Canadian soundscapers perfected their – and post-rock’s – blend of classical expansiveness, drone-rock repetition, Morricone twang, martial rhythms, found sound manipulations, obtuse references and grandstand dread as early as their first album. The glockenspiel of the apocalypse arrives, disingenuously, at 6:08. JM THE TECHNO ONE The Orb – The Blue Room (39:58)…

A Swingin’ Affair

The Monkees (Colgems, 1966) Heralded by the exquisite Paperback Rewrite of Last Train To Clarksville, The Monkees’ debut introduced Nesmith as a fully-fledged singer-songwriter, his countryish nasalese captured perfectly on the selfpenned Brit-Invasion-meets-Texas twang of Papa Gene’s Blues plus Sweet Young Thing, his captivating co-write with Goffin and King. More Of The Monkees (Colgems, 1967) Mary Mary introduces Nesmith the intuitive producer who brings grit and gusto to his song, sung here by Micky Dolenz, but first recorded by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (it was later covered by Run-DMC in 1988). The garage-poppy The Kind Of Girl I Could Love (authored with Roger Atkins) provides another Nesmith thrill. And then there’s I’m A Believer. Believe! Headquarters (Colgems, 1967) The group seize creative control and write and play the majority of their 1967 third album. The result? Their…

A Swingin’ Affair

FOUR MONTHS AFTER the release of Meddle and just four weeks since they’d introduced the work-in-progress Dark Side Of The Moon song-suite into their live set, Pink Floyd forgot about all of that and instead decamped to France to make Obscured By Clouds, the oft-overlooked tissue connecting those two landmark records. On February 23, 1972, 23 miles north-west of Paris, they took up residence at the Château d’Hérouville, the studio where the previous month Elton John had recorded his fifth album, Honky Château, its title immortalising the tumbledown charms of this hideaway facility behind ivy-covered 18th century walls. It was to prove a hugely creative setting for Pink Floyd, who wrote and recorded Obscured By Clouds there in an uncharacteristic 12-day sprint (broken up by a short Japanese tour). Seriously…

Through The Looking Glass

Fairy Tale (1968; The Monkees TV series) They could do comedy alongside the best of them – and this episode, Nesmith’s favourite, proved it. A zany and hilarious fractured Grimm fairy-tale featuring Nesmith in dual roles as a cobbler and, better still, in drag as Princess Gwen. Bonus points for concluding with a performance of Nez’s psychedelic masterwork, Daily Nightly. The Monkees Blow Their Minds (1968; The Monkees TV series) The title says it all. But this second-to-final episode remains most notable for its opening sequence which features Nesmith impersonating Frank Zappa, a longtime champion of the Prefabbers, and vice versa before they destroy a car with a sledgehammer to the strains of Mother People. Pretty hip ‘teenybopper’ fare for 1968! Head (1968; feature film) The scene of The Monkees’ symbolic “image suicide” (as creator Bob Rafelson still…

Through The Looking Glass

Magnetic South (RCA, 1970) A statement of intent recorded for RCA Nashville, Nesmith’s solo debut utilised crack Monkees session players to craft a series of softly philosophical ‘cosmic country’ ballads, defined by the keening pedal steel of OJ ‘Red’ Rhodes, Nesmith’s own easy-flowing lyrics, and a voice that slides from soothing croon to lonesome Jimmie Rodgers yodel. Loose Salute (RCA, 1970) Buoyed by the commercial failure of Magnetic South, the second First National Band LP is more defiantly eclectic and playful, moving from exquisite covers (I Fall To Pieces) to curious Latino funk (Tengo Amore; Hello Lady) goofy rockers (Dedicated Friend) and a handful of plaintive, metaphysical love songs (Conversations; Lady Of The Valley). Nevada Fighter (RCA, 1971) Recorded while The First National Band and Nesmith’s own personal life were falling to pieces, this is a surprisingly coherent…

THERE ARE MUSIC PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO pride themselves on their anonymity – their ability to disappear into the background and observe, the proverbial fly on the wall. Mick Rock was the opposite: a massive personality who lent his own energy to the people and events he recorded. On the occasions he would appear in the MOJO office – his attire never complete without an extravagant scarf – he would call everyone ‘darling’, regardless of their gender, like a star of the stage fresh from an excellent lunch at the Garrick. Rock discovered photography and drugs simultaneously, in the rooms of a “well-heeled friend” at Cambridge University In the course of a trip on blotter acid he picked up his host’s Pentax camera. “At the height of the lunacy, I started to…

VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR

REACH ENDGAME WITH PAWN HEARTS “SOMEONE SHOUTED, ‘FUCK OFF WITH YOUR MUSIC!’ …ONE OF OUR CATCHPHRASES FOR A WHILE.”Hugh Banton John Anthony: In 1969, I was DJ-ing at [London club] the Speakeasy. There were three bands that could empty the place: Egg, Jody Grind and Van der Graaf Generator. But I loved that. VdGG were far out and not trying to be rock’n’roll and groovy, ploughing their own path. Peter Hammill: There hadn’t been a line-up like ours, with lead saxophone and organ, and an almost complete absence of guitars. Like a late-’60s soul band, but warped by the spirit of Stockhausen and Messiaen, sci-fi, Catholicism and Icelandic sagas. Big stories, moral rights and wrongs, the ‘What if?’ world. I think we wanted to make things difficult for ourselves by…

VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR

“Life On Earth is a delicate, tender record full of gentle empathy, of lines that ring with the truth of shared experience.” Hurray For The Riff Raff ★★★★ Life On Earth NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP THERE WAS a moment during the recording of Hurray For The Riff Raff’s seventh album when Alynda Segarra realised that they might not be able to save the world. As the pandemic raged and the US elections tumbled into Capitol-trashing anarchy, the singer looked out from the joyful creativity of producer Brad Cook’s North Carolina studio and had a revelation. “I just felt, I’m an artist and I’m in the exact place I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I should do,” Segarra tells MOJO. “I think I needed to be humbled – I was taking on a little too much and…

The Cat In The Hat

ON JUNE 1, 1968, MICHAEL NESMITH WALKED into the RCA Victor studios in Nashville with an idea foi a tune – no lyrics yet, just some chords – that, as the day progressed, became a mission statement for him as a musician, songwriter and, at that moment, a member of one of the biggest and most divisive groups in pop Nesmith called the song Listen To The Band. The year before, Nesmith, Micky Dolenz, Davy Jones and Peter Tork – The Monkees – had wrestled control of their records from the Hollywood producers and label executives who brought then together in 1965 to play a fictional combo in a television series. Gifted singers and players with varying degrees of studio and gig experience, the four proved themselves with the folk…

The Cat In The Hat

“There’s powerful plant life in New Orleans.”

Life On Earth is a vast title. “I like to push myself!” You have different voices on the album – writer and poet Ocean Vuong on Nightqueen, an asylum seeker on Precious Cargo, even a New Orleans oak on Kin. Why did you need them? “I actually wanted a lot more, but I needed to edit myself. I have a collection of a lot of different speeches. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve gotten so into listening to podcasts while I walk because there’s just so much loneliness. It felt really important to listen to conversations and hear ideas. I wanted to add these little snippets of what helped me. I really like just having voices around. Sometimes I have just TV on but I feel podcasts are less brain-killing. I love this one called…

“There’s powerful plant life in New Orleans.”

A Swingin’ Affair

The Monkees (Colgems, 1966) Heralded by the exquisite Paperback Rewrite of Last Train To Clarksville, The Monkees’ debut introduced Nesmith as a fully-fledged singer-songwriter, his countryish nasalese captured perfectly on the selfpenned Brit-Invasion-meets-Texas twang of Papa Gene’s Blues plus Sweet Young Thing, his captivating co-write with Goffin and King. More Of The Monkees (Colgems, 1967) Mary Mary introduces Nesmith the intuitive producer who brings grit and gusto to his song, sung here by Micky Dolenz, but first recorded by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band (it was later covered by Run-DMC in 1988). The garage-poppy The Kind Of Girl I Could Love (authored with Roger Atkins) provides another Nesmith thrill. And then there’s I’m A Believer. Believe! Headquarters (Colgems, 1967) The group seize creative control and write and play the majority…

A Swingin’ Affair

Big Thief ★★★★ Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You 4AD. CD/DL/LP IN ONE OF two free-form band biographies accompanying Big Thief’s fifth album, their friend Mat Davidson, a guest here on fiddle and more, summons a certain Austrian poet. “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as criticism,” he writes, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke. “Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.” It’s unintentional, perhaps, but Davidson’s citation feels like a disclaimer. An amorphous, stylistically diverse record you must savour and digest slowly, like a python eating a deer, the mystically-titled Dragon… was recorded in four different locations with four very different engineers, its 20 questing songs culled from a possible 45 and speaking enigmatically of death, infinity and the celestial. Four Berklee…

Through The Looking Glass

Fairy Tale (1968; The Monkees TV series) They could do comedy alongside the best of them – and this episode, Nesmith’s favourite, proved it. A zany and hilarious fractured Grimm fairy-tale featuring Nesmith in dual roles as a cobbler and, better still, in drag as Princess Gwen. Bonus points for concluding with a performance of Nez’s psychedelic masterwork, Daily Nightly. The Monkees Blow Their Minds (1968; The Monkees TV series) The title says it all. But this second-to-final episode remains most notable for its opening sequence which features Nesmith impersonating Frank Zappa, a longtime champion of the Prefabbers, and vice versa before they destroy a car with a sledgehammer to the strains of Mother People. Pretty hip ‘teenybopper’ fare for 1968! Head (1968; feature film) The scene of The Monkees’…

Through The Looking Glass

It’s only rock’n’roll?

Imarhan ★★★★ Aboogi CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP ARE YOU READY for the country? The further we get from the initial surprise that the ‘desert blues’ exist, the more each album reveals about the lives of the protagonists. Rather than setting up the music as a scene in which competing yet complementing bands joust for a hearing – à la Britpop, or whatever – the Tuaregs’ records coalesce to form a single narrative, different parts of one story delivered in varying voices yet, ultimately, unified. A Mahabharata or Ramayana for the Tamashek people who once reigned unchallenged across northern Africa. “We give space to the wind, the sun and the sand,” says Sadam, the band’s nominal leader. “We want to express their colours through music.” That this synaesthesia is the goal will be no surprise to anyone…

It’s only rock’n’roll?

Magnetic South (RCA, 1970) A statement of intent recorded for RCA Nashville, Nesmith’s solo debut utilised crack Monkees session players to craft a series of softly philosophical ‘cosmic country’ ballads, defined by the keening pedal steel of OJ ‘Red’ Rhodes, Nesmith’s own easy-flowing lyrics, and a voice that slides from soothing croon to lonesome Jimmie Rodgers yodel. Loose Salute (RCA, 1970) Buoyed by the commercial failure of Magnetic South, the second First National Band LP is more defiantly eclectic and playful, moving from exquisite covers (I Fall To Pieces) to curious Latino funk (Tengo Amore; Hello Lady) goofy rockers (Dedicated Friend) and a handful of plaintive, metaphysical love songs (Conversations; Lady Of The Valley). Nevada Fighter (RCA, 1971) Recorded while The First National Band and Nesmith’s own personal life were…

★★★★ Once Twice Melody BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP Baltimore duo transcend dream-pop with 18 tracks of mesmerising digital psychedelia. WHILE 2018’S 7 saw incoming producer Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember draw Baltimore duo Beach House’s hazy pop confections into tighter focus, follow-up Once Twice Melody marks a return to fuzz, but is no mere retread of past glories. Running 85 minutes and composed of 18 tracks, it’s Beach House’s grandest vision yet, favouring glacial, digital psychedelia as Giorgio Moroder may have imagined it. Electronic pocket symphonies like Pink Funeral, Hurts To Love and the graceful Through Me are scored by swirling synths and hypnotic arpeggios. Victoria Legrand croons with impassive beauty, like O Superman-era Laurie Anderson serenades, or as if someone programmed AI to sing like Judee Sill. These bewitching lullabies from the uncanny valley are…

Black Country, New Road ★★★★ Ants From Up There NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP ANYONE AS YET undecided about Black Country, New Road would have to concede that the Cambridgeshire post-rock/jazz explorers have triumphed in extraordinarily adverse circumstances. To wit: their initial lifespan as Nervous Conditions was cut short by their original singer’s online ‘cancellation’. Then, once they’d embarked upon their ‘new road’ with guitarist Isaac Wood stepping up to the mike unplanned, their excellent debut For The First Time dropped in January 2021, depriving them of the missionary touring that ordinarily would have ensued. This follow-up lands one year later: however hampered by 2021’s restrictions, they’ve not stood idly by. BC,NR were among the first to live-stream a show online, and the audio of that memorable coming-of-age performance at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall is included in deluxe…

“Life On Earth is a delicate, tender record full of gentle empathy, of lines that ring with the truth of shared experience.” Hurray For The Riff Raff ★★★★ Life On Earth NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP THERE WAS a moment during the recording of Hurray For The Riff Raff’s seventh album when Alynda Segarra realised that they might not be able to save the world. As the pandemic raged and the US elections tumbled into Capitol-trashing anarchy, the singer looked out from the joyful creativity of producer Brad Cook’s North Carolina studio and had a revelation. “I just felt, I’m an artist and I’m in the exact place I’m supposed to be, doing exactly what I should do,” Segarra tells MOJO. “I think I needed to be humbled – I was taking on…

★★★★ Laurel Hell DEAD OCEANS. CD/DL/LP Back from hiatus, Mitski shares what she learned gazing into the abyss. WITH THE high-impact drama of her 2018 breakthrough Be The Cowboy, New York singer/songwriter Mitsuki “Mitski” Laycock graduated from underground cult to mainstream-adjacent phenomenon. She didn’t enjoy the experience, announcing a hiatus she’s only now breaking with Laurel Hell. A more intimate, introspective set than Be The Cowboy, her sixth album is less about interpersonal relationships, tackling instead the tumult within Laycock herself. Translating this turmoil into soaring anthems, Laurel Hell perfects the overcast synth-pop Angel Olsen hinted at on All Mirrors, delivering an exercise in minor-key majesty, even when the tempo is upbeat (Should’ve Been Me, all Motown rhythms and piano flourishes from Dancing Queen, or the Scandi-pop throb of The Only Heartbreaker). Laycock’s quest…

“There’s powerful plant life in New Orleans.”

Life On Earth is a vast title. “I like to push myself!” You have different voices on the album – writer and poet Ocean Vuong on Nightqueen, an asylum seeker on Precious Cargo, even a New Orleans oak on Kin. Why did you need them? “I actually wanted a lot more, but I needed to edit myself. I have a collection of a lot of different speeches. Throughout the pandemic, I’ve gotten so into listening to podcasts while I walk because there’s just so much loneliness. It felt really important to listen to conversations and hear ideas. I wanted to add these little snippets of what helped me. I really like just having voices around. Sometimes I have just TV on but I feel podcasts are less brain-killing. I love…

“There’s powerful plant life in New Orleans.”

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio

★★★ Cold As Weiss COLEMINE. CD/DL/LP Soul-jazz group’s cool, retro-flavoured grooves. BACK IN THE late ’50s and early ’60s, organ trios were the hippest combos in jazz, led by Hammond heroes such as Jimmy Smith and Big John Patton. Taking their stylistic cue from those pioneers, this Seattle-based trio combine cool Blue Note-influenced sounds with funk elements that reverberate with echoes of The Meters, The JB’s (minus the horns) and Booker T. & The M.G.’s. The band’s new drummer Daniel Weiss is the inspiration for this third LP, where his snare drum’s crisp crackle locks in with Jimmy James’s scratchy guitar filigrees and Lamarr’s booming organ bass. From the funky Pull Up Your Pants to the slow-grinding Big TT’s Blues and more upbeat Get Da Steppin’, the DLO3 serve up a decidedly old school-sounding…

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio

GAS ★★★★ Der Lange Marsch KOMPAKT. CD/DL/LP Cologne’s ambient techno trailblazer marches on with purpose. Wolfgang Voigt’s third GAS album in four years after a 17-year absence finds the German producer, now into his seventh decade, setting a rigid, military tempo from the get-go – less 4/4, rather the 2/4 march time of the album title. Those cornerstones of GAS albums past – irresistible ambient loops and a drone deluge, manipulated samples and the absence of such fripperies as song titles – remain intact. But while opener Der Lange Marsch 1 sways like marram grass in the breeze, there’s a relentlessness to the album’s overall progress. Is Voigt, whose interest in Romanticism particularly manifests itself in a love of nature, marking Earth’s admission into intensive care? The chief source of Der Lange Marsch 4’s emotional…

Big Thief ★★★★ Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You 4AD. CD/DL/LP IN ONE OF two free-form band biographies accompanying Big Thief’s fifth album, their friend Mat Davidson, a guest here on fiddle and more, summons a certain Austrian poet. “Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing to be so little reached as criticism,” he writes, quoting Rainer Maria Rilke. “Only love can grasp and hold and fairly judge them.” It’s unintentional, perhaps, but Davidson’s citation feels like a disclaimer. An amorphous, stylistically diverse record you must savour and digest slowly, like a python eating a deer, the mystically-titled Dragon… was recorded in four different locations with four very different engineers, its 20 questing songs culled from a possible 45 and speaking enigmatically of death,…

★★★★★ Forfolks INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM. CD/DL/LP LA-based Tortoise guitarist spins filigree patterns of folk-jazz mystery. A linchpin member of Tortoise and Isotope 217, Jeff Parker defined Chicago’s ’90s post-rock sound as much as John McEntire, Bundy K. Brown or David Grubbs, his intricate, loop-driven minimalism occupying a bright new colour within the Venn diagram of jazz, folk, blues, funk and drone harmonics. On this, the follow-up to 2020’s rich and multilayered Suite For Max Brown, he is alone with just his guitar and effects and the results are mesmerising. Much like the late free improv guitarist Derek Bailey, Parker can unpick a standard with meticulous style, taking a classic like My Ideal and revealing its grand inner workings. Yet while his cover of Thelonious Monk’s Ugly Beauty reveals a kinship with a fellow master of unadorned…

It’s only rock’n’roll?

Imarhan ★★★★ Aboogi CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP ARE YOU READY for the country? The further we get from the initial surprise that the ‘desert blues’ exist, the more each album reveals about the lives of the protagonists. Rather than setting up the music as a scene in which competing yet complementing bands joust for a hearing – à la Britpop, or whatever – the Tuaregs’ records coalesce to form a single narrative, different parts of one story delivered in varying voices yet, ultimately, unified. A Mahabharata or Ramayana for the Tamashek people who once reigned unchallenged across northern Africa. “We give space to the wind, the sun and the sand,” says Sadam, the band’s nominal leader. “We want to express their colours through music.” That this synaesthesia is the goal will…

It’s only rock’n’roll?

★★★★ Once Twice Melody BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP Baltimore duo transcend dream-pop with 18 tracks of mesmerising digital psychedelia. WHILE 2018’S 7 saw incoming producer Pete ‘Sonic Boom’ Kember draw Baltimore duo Beach House’s hazy pop confections into tighter focus, follow-up Once Twice Melody marks a return to fuzz, but is no mere retread of past glories. Running 85 minutes and composed of 18 tracks, it’s Beach House’s grandest vision yet, favouring glacial, digital psychedelia as Giorgio Moroder may have imagined it. Electronic pocket symphonies like Pink Funeral, Hurts To Love and the graceful Through Me are scored by swirling synths and hypnotic arpeggios. Victoria Legrand croons with impassive beauty, like O Superman-era Laurie Anderson serenades, or as if someone programmed AI to sing like Judee Sill. These bewitching lullabies from…

Mark Lockheart ★★★★ Dreamers EDITION. CD/DL/LP Quartet set from under-sung saxophonist, an exemplar in the art of mood building. After working with a 30-piece orchestra for 2019’s Days On Earth, Dreamers marks a partial return to Lockheart’s eccentric roots in Loose Tubes and Polar Bear. A jagged, otherworldly feel percolates through this four-way with Dinosaur keyboardist Elliott Galvin, long-term bassist Tom Herbert and drummer Dave Smith – relatively gentle as it weaves around Lockheart’s raga- like two-bar sax riff on Jagdish before careening off the rails on Gangster Rat and Mingle Tingle, with Galvin wreaking havoc from his Frankensteined box of tricks. The Kraftwerk-inspired title track and longing tour-de-force Weird Weather better display Lockheart’s contrasting spare and feathery tones, shades of Wayne Shorter and Michael Brecker brushing up against spaced- out counter-melodies. The ever-shifting rhythmic…

FILTER ALBUMS EXTRA

Blood Red Shoes ★★★ Ghosts On Tape VELVETEEN. DL/LP The current Zeitgeist for ‘80s goth rock (see QOTSA, Fontaines D.C., etc) falls in step with Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell’s sound: inky black, sharp-edged pop. Their sixth LP is an accomplished study in post-punk boom, synth whoosh and creepy-crawl vocals. Group Listening ★★★★ Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol. 2 PRAH RECORDINGS. DL/LP Clarinettist Stephen Black and pianist Paul Jones’s second LP of covers. Suffused with subtle electronics, they re-imagine Neu!’s Seeland as an exercise in aural hypnosis, while their take on the Camberwick Green TV theme is pure nostalgia. Boulevards ★★★★ Electric Cowboy: Born In The Carolina Mud NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP Jamil Rashad’s fourth corrals left-field all-stars (from Black Pumas, Twin Peaks and Durand Jones’ Indications) to slay demons over modern country-funk jams packed with slick guitar licks, springy basslines and endless hooks. Dieter…

FILTER ALBUMS EXTRA

Black Country, New Road ★★★★ Ants From Up There NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP ANYONE AS YET undecided about Black Country, New Road would have to concede that the Cambridgeshire post-rock/jazz explorers have triumphed in extraordinarily adverse circumstances. To wit: their initial lifespan as Nervous Conditions was cut short by their original singer’s online ‘cancellation’. Then, once they’d embarked upon their ‘new road’ with guitarist Isaac Wood stepping up to the mike unplanned, their excellent debut For The First Time dropped in January 2021, depriving them of the missionary touring that ordinarily would have ensued. This follow-up lands one year later: however hampered by 2021’s restrictions, they’ve not stood idly by. BC,NR were among the first to live-stream a show online, and the audio of that memorable coming-of-age performance at London’s Queen…

★★★★ Laurel Hell DEAD OCEANS. CD/DL/LP Back from hiatus, Mitski shares what she learned gazing into the abyss. WITH THE high-impact drama of her 2018 breakthrough Be The Cowboy, New York singer/songwriter Mitsuki “Mitski” Laycock graduated from underground cult to mainstream-adjacent phenomenon. She didn’t enjoy the experience, announcing a hiatus she’s only now breaking with Laurel Hell. A more intimate, introspective set than Be The Cowboy, her sixth album is less about interpersonal relationships, tackling instead the tumult within Laycock herself. Translating this turmoil into soaring anthems, Laurel Hell perfects the overcast synth-pop Angel Olsen hinted at on All Mirrors, delivering an exercise in minor-key majesty, even when the tempo is upbeat (Should’ve Been Me, all Motown rhythms and piano flourishes from Dancing Queen, or the Scandi-pop throb of The…

(YOUTUBE/STREAMING SERVICES) “I’m not the season I’m in” sings Robin Pecknold towards the end of this solo acoustic set, recorded in December 2020 in a Brooklyn church and livestreamed to those stuck at home. While Pecknold excels at such archaic, elemental wisdom, the seasons seem, conversely, critical to his deeply grounded folk aesthetic. The same month this set was recorded, Fleet Foxes released a career-high LP, Shore, exactly on the autumnal equinox. For karmic balance, then, film of this show and its accompanying soundtrack manifest digitally on the winter solstice; the day of the longest shadows making a perfect backdrop to Pecknold’s shy virtuosity. Anyone who saw Robin roar into the rafters during his off-mike, solo acoustic spots at early Fleet Foxes shows, will remember how well Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, from…

Dwellers on the threshold

Broadcast Reissues WARP. CD/DL/LP BROADCAST NEVER belonged to the present. From such early recordings as the ghostly waltzing lullaby of 1996’s Accidentals or The Book Lovers’ cimbalom spy-theme drama, it was clear Trish Keenan and James Cargill’s spectral pop sound existed beyond their urban Birmingham origins, somewhere between half-remembered folk and psych pasts and an unrealised incorporeal future. As such, their music – eerie, elegiac, yet imbued with a working-class science-lab optimism – has aged in a very different way from their late- ’90s contemporaries. Broadcast don’t so much define the early noughties as slip free from it, inhabiting instead a tense, unverifiable between- world, surreal and mundane, absurd and malign, yet almost always conveyed via the genre structure of ’60s psychedelic pop. Listening to these three reissues, which take us from their…

Dwellers on the threshold

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio

★★★ Cold As Weiss COLEMINE. CD/DL/LP Soul-jazz group’s cool, retro-flavoured grooves. BACK IN THE late ’50s and early ’60s, organ trios were the hippest combos in jazz, led by Hammond heroes such as Jimmy Smith and Big John Patton. Taking their stylistic cue from those pioneers, this Seattle-based trio combine cool Blue Note-influenced sounds with funk elements that reverberate with echoes of The Meters, The JB’s (minus the horns) and Booker T. & The M.G.’s. The band’s new drummer Daniel Weiss is the inspiration for this third LP, where his snare drum’s crisp crackle locks in with Jimmy James’s scratchy guitar filigrees and Lamarr’s booming organ bass. From the funky Pull Up Your Pants to the slow-grinding Big TT’s Blues and more upbeat Get Da Steppin’, the DLO3 serve up…

Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio

Shades of glory

True West ★★★★ Kaleidoscope Of Shadows: The Story So Far BRING OUT YOUR DEAD. CD FOR A FEW hot minutes in the early ’80s, True West were the most psychedelic band in the American underground. Named after the Sam Shepard play, they came from those exact coordinates: Davis, California, a college town in the farm country north-east of San Francisco, forming in 1982 after a local student combo called the Suspects broke up after one peppy new wave single. Two members, guitarist Steve Wynn and singer (soon bassist) Kendra Smith, went to LA and started The Dream Syndicate. Two other Suspects, guitarist Russ Tolman and drummer Gavin Blair, debuted as True West with an indie 45 cover of Pink Floyd’s Lucifer Sam, then added guitarist Richard McGrath for a 1983 self-titled EP – co-produced…

Shades of glory

GAS ★★★★ Der Lange Marsch KOMPAKT. CD/DL/LP Cologne’s ambient techno trailblazer marches on with purpose. Wolfgang Voigt’s third GAS album in four years after a 17-year absence finds the German producer, now into his seventh decade, setting a rigid, military tempo from the get-go – less 4/4, rather the 2/4 march time of the album title. Those cornerstones of GAS albums past – irresistible ambient loops and a drone deluge, manipulated samples and the absence of such fripperies as song titles – remain intact. But while opener Der Lange Marsch 1 sways like marram grass in the breeze, there’s a relentlessness to the album’s overall progress. Is Voigt, whose interest in Romanticism particularly manifests itself in a love of nature, marking Earth’s admission into intensive care? The chief source of…

★★★★ Sacred Soul: The D-Vine Spirituals Records Story Vol. 1 BIBLE &TIRE. CD/DL/LP Great Memphis gospel spanning 1972 to ’86. IN 1970, Pastor Juan D Shipp and hillbilly bandleader Clyde Leopard got together in a Memphis coffee shop to form D-Vine Spirituals Records. With the company brief “to sing like you’re making love to God”, the label’s 1972 debut I Heard The Voice by Elizabeth King captures the ne plus ultra of soulful artistry, with King sounding soft and sweet but also delivering an impassioned rasp when necessary. Bridging the earthly and divine, the 45 did well locally and, until 1986 when it folded, the label became home to some of the finest Southern testifiers. King begins this first of two volumes mapping the label’s varied approach to worship. It also takes in revival…

★★★★★ Forfolks INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM. CD/DL/LP LA-based Tortoise guitarist spins filigree patterns of folk-jazz mystery. A linchpin member of Tortoise and Isotope 217, Jeff Parker defined Chicago’s ’90s post-rock sound as much as John McEntire, Bundy K. Brown or David Grubbs, his intricate, loop-driven minimalism occupying a bright new colour within the Venn diagram of jazz, folk, blues, funk and drone harmonics. On this, the follow-up to 2020’s rich and multilayered Suite For Max Brown, he is alone with just his guitar and effects and the results are mesmerising. Much like the late free improv guitarist Derek Bailey, Parker can unpick a standard with meticulous style, taking a classic like My Ideal and revealing its grand inner workings. Yet while his cover of Thelonious Monk’s Ugly Beauty reveals a kinship with…

Mark Lockheart ★★★★ Dreamers EDITION. CD/DL/LP Quartet set from under-sung saxophonist, an exemplar in the art of mood building. After working with a 30-piece orchestra for 2019’s Days On Earth, Dreamers marks a partial return to Lockheart’s eccentric roots in Loose Tubes and Polar Bear. A jagged, otherworldly feel percolates through this four-way with Dinosaur keyboardist Elliott Galvin, long-term bassist Tom Herbert and drummer Dave Smith – relatively gentle as it weaves around Lockheart’s raga- like two-bar sax riff on Jagdish before careening off the rails on Gangster Rat and Mingle Tingle, with Galvin wreaking havoc from his Frankensteined box of tricks. The Kraftwerk-inspired title track and longing tour-de-force Weird Weather better display Lockheart’s contrasting spare and feathery tones, shades of Wayne Shorter and Michael Brecker brushing up against spaced-…

Black Forest Chateau

IN 1958, the co-owner of the German electronics manufacturer SABA, Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer, an expert in sound equipment, accomplished pianist and knowledgeable jazz fan, built a recording studio in his villa in Villingen-Schwenningen in the Black Forest region. When Oscar Peterson came to Zurich to perform a concert in 1961, Brunner-Schwer invited him to his home studio, promising him the best sound he’d ever heard. Peterson was indeed impressed by HGBS’s crystalline recording of the performance he gave at the house: “I never heard myself like this before...” He returned every year for similar events, making recordings which couldn’t be released commercially while Peterson was under contract to Verve, but which circulated nonetheless among connoisseurs. In 1968, Brunner-Schwer left SABA to start his own jazz label, MPS, standing for Musik Produktion Schwarzwald,…

Black Forest Chateau

★★★★ Life Between Islands: Soundsystem Culture: Black Musical Expression In The UK 1973-2006 SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP Expansive comp highlighting the enduring impact of Black British soundsystem culture. PRODUCED TO accompany the Tate Modern’s acclaimed exhibition, Life Between Islands provides shuffle – mode snapshots of the more important musical forms that evolved from the soundsystem culture pervasive in diverse Black British communities. As explored in Lloyd Bradley’s insightful notes, the roots reggae of Black Slate, proto-jungle of Ragga Twins and rumbling dubstep of Digital Mystikz all draw from the soundsystem experience, the compilation emphasising the distinctive niches carved out by pioneers. Thus, Pebbles’ toasting cut of Errol Dunkley’s A Little Way Different, expertly produced by Dennis Bovell, conjures the community centres and blues parties where soundsystems flourished, and lovers rock is returned to at key…

FILTER ALBUMS EXTRA

Blood Red Shoes ★★★ Ghosts On Tape VELVETEEN. DL/LP The current Zeitgeist for ‘80s goth rock (see QOTSA, Fontaines D.C., etc) falls in step with Laura-Mary Carter and Steven Ansell’s sound: inky black, sharp-edged pop. Their sixth LP is an accomplished study in post-punk boom, synth whoosh and creepy-crawl vocals. Group Listening ★★★★ Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol. 2 PRAH RECORDINGS. DL/LP Clarinettist Stephen Black and pianist Paul Jones’s second LP of covers. Suffused with subtle electronics, they re-imagine Neu!’s Seeland as an exercise in aural hypnosis, while their take on the Camberwick Green TV theme is pure nostalgia. Boulevards ★★★★ Electric Cowboy: Born In The Carolina Mud NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP Jamil Rashad’s fourth corrals left-field all-stars (from Black Pumas, Twin Peaks and Durand Jones’ Indications) to slay demons…

FILTER ALBUMS EXTRA

(YOUTUBE/STREAMING SERVICES) “I’m not the season I’m in” sings Robin Pecknold towards the end of this solo acoustic set, recorded in December 2020 in a Brooklyn church and livestreamed to those stuck at home. While Pecknold excels at such archaic, elemental wisdom, the seasons seem, conversely, critical to his deeply grounded folk aesthetic. The same month this set was recorded, Fleet Foxes released a career-high LP, Shore, exactly on the autumnal equinox. For karmic balance, then, film of this show and its accompanying soundtrack manifest digitally on the winter solstice; the day of the longest shadows making a perfect backdrop to Pecknold’s shy virtuosity. Anyone who saw Robin roar into the rafters during his off-mike, solo acoustic spots at early Fleet Foxes shows, will remember how well Tiger Mountain Peasant…

Hector ★★★ Demolition RADIATION. CD Junk shop glam cults from Portsmouth, Hector’s early ‘70s revisited, with unreleased tracks, outtakes and more. For obsessives-only, rough in parts, but 45s Wired Up and Bye Bye Bad Days (which appears in three versions) are top-drawer Slade-style pre-punk boogie. Magnetic Fields ★★★★ The House Of Tomorrow MERGE. LP First time on vinyl for excellent, 30-year-old EP. Stephin Merritt was, he says, in thrall to JAMC at the time. East Kilbride’s exotic adopted son emerges from tinny, mechanised sounding riffola in a rich, lachrymose baritone (Alien Being). While Young & Insane has a whiff of early Bunnymen. U-Roy ★★★★ Version Galore DOCTOR BIRD. CD Treasure Isle producer Duke Reid was Jamaica’s late-’60s king of rocksteady, so when he joined up with the era’s premier deejay U-Roy, it was musical dynamite. This 1970 debut (plus 30 extra tracks) from ‘The…

Pudding too hard

The Cake The Cake DECCA, 1967 MAMAS & THE PAPAS singer Michelle Phillips wasn’t expecting any pushback when she refused to let a young female vocal trio called The Cake backstage at Monterey Pop in June 1967. But as founding member and songwriter Barbara Morillo recalls today, their friend Eric Burdon was not pleased: “He said, ‘You’re going to give passes to The Cake – or we’re pulling The Animals and Jimi Hendrix off the show!’” The Cake gained entry, talked to their pal Hendrix and marvelled at the “unbelievable spread of food”. Bronx-raised Morillo didn’t see much music that day, however, distracted as she was by the festival’s forest setting and communal tripping. “In the Bronx,” she says, “there wasn’t even a tree on my block. It was just pavement… and assholes.” The androgynously-styled…

Pudding too hard

Dusty Springfield

IN 1966 DUSTY Springfield was the world’s biggest- selling female artist. If that reads like an unlikely statement in 2022, it’s some indication of how her star and her reputation have waned in recent years. The woman born Mary Isabel Catherine O’Brien in West Hampstead in 1939, grew up in a dysfunctional if musical middle-class family and started singing with her brother Tom in folk clubs and holiday camps, eventually forming their own folk-pop trio. It was with the release of her first solo single, I Only Want To Be With You, in November 1963 that her identity began to emerge: a bouffant and mascara’d British reboot of the Brill Building girl group sound with a perfect pitch mezzo-soprano who could find joy and liberation in songs of heartbreak and despair;…

Dusty Springfield

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