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41 Articles

THE MEANING OF WITHIN

01 TIMOTHY LEARY Going Out (Extract) The LSD proselytiser published The Psychedelic Experience, a field guide to tripping based on The Tibetan Book Of The Dead, in 1964, and Barry Miles recalls handing John Lennon a copy on a visit to Indica Books in spring 1966. Soon, Lennon would draw direct inspiration from Leary’s instructions as The Beatles began creating the sound of The Void: Tomorrow Never Knows. Written by Timothy Leary. From The Psychedelic Experience (FW09701). Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. 1966. Used by permission 02 RAVI SHANKAR Raga Jog (Extract) Another part of Tomorrow Never Knows’ heady mix is the influence of traditional Indian music, with George Harrison prominent on sitar and tambura. As David Crosby says on page 74, he and The Byrds first turned on The…

THE MEANING OF WITHIN

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Marshall Allen 98-YEAR-OLD ARKESTRA PILOT What music are you currently grooving to? I groove to the sounds of nature – the sounds of life. What, if push comes to shove, is your favourite album of all time? I don’t have a particular favourite album. One day it’s this, the next day it’s that. Actually, I don’t think of music albums, I just hear sounds from yesterday, today and the future. What was the first record you bought and where did you buy it? It’s impossible to recall the first record I bought, but the first Sun Ra record I bought was part of a compi-lation demo I purchased from Joe Segals, a record store in Chicago. The record included several Chicago bands and included Sun Ra’s Super Blonde – that…

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE

Theories, rants, etc.

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk “I, FOR ONE, AM SICK OF DOING SOUNDS that people can claim to have heard before.” Here’s Paul McCartney in June 1966, charging headlong into the sonic unknown via the pages of NME. He is talking about a new track The Beatles have recorded with “electronic effects” and words from the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. The track, of course, will soon be unveiled as Tomorrow Never Knows, and its parent album, Revolver, will ultimately be understood as where The Beatles consolidated their songwriting brilliance while broadening their musical horizons. Now gifted and ambitious bands could go anywhere, try anything, without necessarily alienating their fans. This month we celebrate the arrival of a kaleidoscopic new, expanded edition of Revolver. And we also…

Theories, rants, etc.

In The Name Of Love

LAMONT DOZIER didn’t read or write music, yet such was his mastery of song he would co-compose some of the pop era’s true cornerstones. With sibling collaborators Eddie and Brian Holland, Dozier was responsible for a surfeit of poetically true and sometimes exhausting emotional journeys, all the while satisfying Motown’s MO of teenage dancing and singing along. Just a few of his soulful, cathartic works woven into music’s fabric include ’60s hits by The Supremes (Baby Love, Stop! In The Name Of Love), The Four Tops (I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch), Reach Out I’ll Be There), Martha & The Vandellas (Heat Wave, Jimmy Mack), and more recorded by Marvin Gaye, The Isley Brothers, The Miracles and many others. “I always considered myself an advocate for the woman’s…

In The Name Of Love

WELCOME BACK LOST SOUL PHENOMENON LEWIS TAYLOR

BY THE time he erased all trace of himself from YouTube and quit the music business in summer 2006, British eclectic polymath Lewis Taylor had cultivated a reputation for musical brilliance. He was skilled in all departments from writing to production, and able – if he so desired – to play guitar like Eddie Hazel and sing like Marvin Gaye, accumulating celebrity champions like Bowie, Elton and D’Angelo. But unsure how to behave when anyone noticed, he struggled to build on the opportunities his talents offered him. When he silenced himself, many fans assumed that like, say, Mark Hollis, it was a terminal full stop for Taylor as a solo artist. But last year an official Instagram account popped up, promising new music. Which arrived without fuss in July, when…

WELCOME BACK LOST SOUL PHENOMENON LEWIS TAYLOR

JOHN CALE BRINGS HIS FIRST NEW LP IN A DECADE

WHEN JOHN CALE was promoting M:FANS in 2018, a typically risk-inclined revamp of his 1982 masterpiece Music For A New Society, he told MOJO that 27 songs were already demoed for the official follow-up to 2012’s Shifty Adventures In Nookie Wood. Cale duly completed the album. Then, in early 2020, came you-know-what. “I was heading into the cycle of release, press, tour – the table was set!” says Cale, calling in from his studio in LA. “At first, I thought, OK, lockdown might be a good time to rest since I’d been going non-stop for over five years. My studio was in a shambles, since a full remodel was planned while my band and I were to be on tour – nearly every piece of gear was locked away in…

JOHN CALE BRINGS HIS FIRST NEW LP IN A DECADE

“I GREW UP with house parties and church,” Lee Fields tells MOJO. “The music I make reflects that. It makes you feel reverence to a higher power, but it makes you want to do the wild stuff too.” Inspired by James Brown on The T.A.M.I. Show in 1964, Fields started singing aged 14. At 17 he caught the bus from his home in Wilson, North Carolina to New York, where energetic shows and under-ground funk 45s in the mould of the Godfather earned him the sobriquet ‘Little JB’. Sidelined by disco in the ’80s, in 1996 he recorded scorching 45 Let Man Do What He Wanna Do with future Daptone Records founder Gabe Roth. Ever since, he’s been one of the soul revival’s most compelling voices. Your new album Sentimental…

ECO-FRIENDLY VINYL? COMPOSTABLE VINYL? PREPARE YOUR TURNTABLES

LAST MONTH, Michael Stipe’s Brian Eno-produced 2018 track Future If Future was announced as the world’s first ‘bioplastic’ 12-inch, pressed on non-fossil fuel produced vinyl. It’s an initiative of the Eno co-founded EarthPer-cent charity, which on September 2 released more than 100 tracks on Bandcamp by Peter Gabriel, Nile Rodgers, Big Thief and more. It seems vinyl production is waking up to the day that ‘landfill indie’, as well as everything else, actually does become landfill. On the same page are retailers Rachel Lowe and Simon Parker, who founded the Naked Record Club to re-press long-deleted or never-before-on-vinyl indie albums in small, eco-friendly runs. “When we were running shops we made sure everything we sold was produced sustain-ably and we recycled as much as we could,” says Parker. “But we…

ECO-FRIENDLY VINYL? COMPOSTABLE VINYL? PREPARE YOUR TURNTABLES

I can’t remember when I first heard it – Iremember being in my first flat in Queen’s Park in about 1994, it could have been earlier, it could have been in my bedroom in Dalston when I was 14, it could have been 1984, I have no fucking clue. Then, the other day, I was on an aeroplane listening to it, going through the sky on a beautiful evening. And I was just like, Fucking hell, oh my god, this is something else. You’ve always known this record, but at that moment I just sort of heard it in a very un-bridled way, forgetting all the narrative around him, just really listening. Of course, the music, the songwriting, the singing, the production, is just extraordinary. But there are all these…

PUB ROCK GODHEAD BAR NONE, MICKEY JUPP RETURNS FOR ONE MORE ROUND

ONCE HAILED as Southend’s answer to Chuck Berry, Mickey Jupp’s full-blooded performances and songcraft seemed likely to bring him major success in the early 1970s. John Lennon reputedly called Jupp the “best British rocker of all times”, Wilko Johnson said he was “the best white singer I ever heard”, and he became a major influence and inspiration to many of the bands who ultimately outflanked him – Dr. Feelgood, Ducks Deluxe, Eddie & The Hot Rods, Ian Dury et al. But the masses never held any attraction for the man affectionately known as Juppy. At 78, he’s spent 40 years living in a beauti-ful, remote village in Cumbria, limiting performances to two local pub gigs a year, basking in obscurity and with no wish to be rediscovered. Jupp readily admits…

PUB ROCK GODHEAD BAR NONE, MICKEY JUPP RETURNS FOR ONE MORE ROUND

Secrets Of The Dead C90 Scrolls

“THE WHOLE thing is farming this stuff out to people who are interested enough to do it,” said Grateful Dead lodestar Jerry Garcia in a talk with the band’s chief ticketer Steven Marcus in 1989. “Because I don’t want to have to deal with it.” Garcia was referring to the Dead-endorsed practice of a secret army of dedicated tapers chronicling their every performance. From 1965 to 1995, with the official tapers section inaugurated in October 1984 at the Berkeley Community Theater, this obsessive subculture recorded and traded more shows than even seasoned Deadheads can categorically count. In new book After All Is Said And Done: Taping The Grateful Dead 1965-1995, West Coast artist Mark A. Rodriguez considers the phenome-non, bringing together more than 500 wild fan-designed J-card sleeves, documentary nuggets…

Secrets Of The Dead C90 Scrolls

INTRODUCING SOUL SCION LEAH WELLER. DON’T CALL HER THE MOD-DAUGHTER!

“I begged Dad to buy me a heart-shaped guitar.” IT WAS NEVER going to be easy for Leah Weller to be taken seriously as an artist. Having famous musician parents – her father is Paul Weller, her mother Dee C Lee – might open doors, but it’s hard to be respected on your own terms with that kind of family legacy. A successful decade-long modelling career complicates the story further, but Weller is doing a great job of transcending that narrative. Freedom, her debut album, is an easy-going and soulful beauty that recalls Erykah Badu and Amy Winehouse, while reflecting her current status as a new mother. “I guess it came down to confidence why it took so long to record my first album,” says Weller, from the west London…

INTRODUCING SOUL SCION LEAH WELLER. DON’T CALL HER THE MOD-DAUGHTER!

1 ARCTIC MONKEYS THERE’D BETTER BE A MIRRORBALL “Do you wanna walk me to the car?” Nuanced, string-dappled, grown-up return from Alex Turner’s evolving indie-beat combo. Think: Scott to Scott 4; Curtis Mayfield and Isaac Hayes; Pulp’s This Is Hardcore. Find it: YouTube 2 WEYES BLOOD IT’S NOT JUST ME, IT’S EVERYBODY This harp-wreathed ballad ruminates on emotional isolation. As ever, her uncanny songwriting nous scans lightly. Find it: streaming services 3 THE PARANOYDS FREAK OUT Third Man’s four-piece “eye-brow band” bring jangle, a hint of discord and a chorus to make you paranoid too. From LP Talk Talk Talk. Find it: streaming services 4 CHRISTINE & THE QUEENS ANGELUS Chris’s retro-R&B dream, transported to the top of a high mountain, where etheric vocalising floats above stick-fighting beats.…

BIG JOANIE, JOYFULLY DECOLONISING LONDON’S DIY PUNK SCENE

“I WAS GETTING interested in black feminism and intersectionality,” says Stephanie Phillips, lead singer and guitarist of Big Joanie. “But I was going to black feminist meetings and feeling like I couldn’t talk about punk, and then in punk spaces feeling I couldn’t be myself as a black woman. I knew I wasn’t alone in thinking this.” Phillips’ hunch was correct: Big Joanie and their compelling feminist punk have been building momentum since their debut album Sistahs was released in 2018. A self-confessed “teenage music nerd”, Wolverhamp-ton-born Phillips listened to everything from Destiny’s Child and R&B girl groups to Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Franz Ferdinand. She picked out Bikini Kill riffs on an acoustic guitar before moving to London and buying an electric guitar with her student loan. From there,…

BIG JOANIE, JOYFULLY DECOLONISING LONDON’S DIY PUNK SCENE

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

THERE’S NO ESCAPING THE PAST IN THE offices of Graham Coxon’s long-serving publicist. As the 53-year-old guitarist and songwriter takes a seat on Britain’s hottest day since records began, his younger self peers over his shoulder. Hanging on the wall behind him are four framed covers from the July 1999 issue of Dazed & Confused magazine, each one advertising an encounter with a different member of top pop group Blur: Damon Albarn, Alex James, Dave Rowntree and – looking wary and moody – Graham Coxon. Formed in London in 1988, Blur were a classic combination of distinct and contrasting personalities. Coxon was the Sensitive One, who struggled most visibly with fame. His scowl in the garish video to 1995’s UK Number 1 single Country House was a silent indictment of…

THE MOJO INTERVIEW

REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT

ON THURSDAY, JUNE 7, 2001, JOE Strummer paid a visit to the MOJO office. Or, more accurately, the office paid a visit to him. Interview with the magazine done, the former Clash frontman had pitched up in the Coach & Horses pub in Poland Street, just a short hop from MOJO’s then HQ. Tickled that most of the staff had turned up to raise a glass with him, he ordered several rounds of tequila slammers, expounding on the benefits of agave-based liquors. During the interview, Strummer had been on zealous form, flip-flopping between the combative and the contrite (“I should never have sacked Topper and Mick!” he admitted). But in the pub, drinks flowing, and Joe’s throaty chuckle melting into the background music, his Grand Seigneur Of Punk carapace dropped.…

REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT

WHEN DRY CLEANING STOP AT A HERTFORDSHIRE PUB EN ROUTE TO A festival one skin-blistering July Sunday, they seek shade in the beer garden’s darkest corner, where they tenderly pick flies off one another and enjoy a good heavy meal. Wearing factor 50 and shades of monochrome, the four-piece would be your archetypal goths in hot weather were they not immensely friendly and clearly charmed by the vicissitudes of new-band life. One day you’re playing a US talk show; then a family festival where you clock UK kids’ TV stars Dick & Dom by the tea urn. This is the switchback of Dry Cleaning’s last 12 months – making up for lost time after their debut album, 2021’s New Long Leg, struck a chord amid pandemic restrictions. Vocalist Florence Shaw’s…

♠ HERE ♥ BE ♣ MÖNSTERS

IT’S SUMMER 1970 AND A LONG Island band has to reboot or die. Surf-rockers as kids; then, as college students in Potsdam, NY, a knock-off of Al Kooper’s Blues Project named The Travesty; since 1967 they’ve been trading as Soft White Underbelly, having pivoted to the West Coast sounds of Jefferson Airplane with a drizzle of Doors and Dead. Thanks to their well-connected manager-producer, Crawdaddy journalist Sandy Pearlman, the group have a record deal worth $20,000 with the prestigious Elektra label, based on its boss Jac Holzman’s hunch that their handsome lead singer Les Braunstein could be the next Jim Morrison. But Braunstein has itchy feet; he’s had a song recorded by Peter, Paul And Mary, while the band he fronts look increasingly stranded in hippy squalor. Frontmen have long…

♠ HERE ♥ BE ♣ MÖNSTERS

LIFE AFTER DEATH

THE IDEA OF DOING A BOOK OF CONVERSATIONS WITH NICK CAVE CAME TO me after we had spoken on the phone several times in early 2020 just prior to, and during, the early weeks of the Covid pandemic. Like everyone else, we suddenly found ourselves with time on our hands and a chance, amid the anxiety and uncertainty, to reflect. Though I had known Nick for a long time – since 1989, when I helped host an unruly NME summit between him, Mark E Smith and Shane MacGowan – and we had kept in touch intermit-tently, the pandemic phone chats were of a different order: longer, deeper and stranger. Around the same time, I’d also been re-reading some of the classic long-form interviews with writers that had been published in…

LIFE AFTER DEATH

THE SINGULAR ROAD

1 SKELETON TREE (Album, 2016) If 2013’s PushTheSkyAway trialled a new palette for Bad Seeds music – open-ended dynamics, swerving of rock orthodoxy – Cave’s 16th album doubled down on electrostatic texture as his revised MO. Cave talks to Seán O’Hagan about the uncanny prescience of Skeleton Tree’s lyrics, but the music also exists in that spectral zone: a place where Cave’s diverse writings, soundtracks, films and Bad Seeds records come together into a holistic, deeply personal work of ongoing art. 2 ONE MORE TIME WITH FEELING (Film, 2016) Cave’s past six years have been character-ised by a candour that never undermines his music’s allusive strengths. But much of that candour has been mediated by trusted intimates. Exhibit A: One More Time With Feeling, with director/friend Andrew Dominik charting the…

THE SINGULAR ROAD

FAITH, HOPE AND CARNAGE ★★★★★ Nick Cave & Seán O’Hagan (Canongate, £20) NICK CAVE HAS largely avoided interviews in traditional media since the tragedy that overtook him in 2015, but he has found other ways of communicating. To fans on his Red Hand Files web site and to audiences in venues across the globe, he has been generous in sharing his learnings at the frontiers of grief. And that’s not even to mention the brave and beautiful records. Even so, the degree of candour in this book – presented as a series of Q&A interviews with writer Seán O’Hagan – is staggering. If your jaw does not sag open or your eyes not well with tears at least once a chapter, you are, to borrow Cave’s words, “made of sterner…

THE EQUALS INTEGRATE POP WITH BABY, COME BACK

John Hall: I had been in Johnny And The Walkers, named after the whisky, and when they split in early 1965 I put an ad in the local paper. I told the girl who ran the Co-op record bar in Archway that I was on the lookout. She managed a band and knew Eddy Grant, and told him to come to my mum’s house off Hornsey Road. Eddy Grant: There were loads of guys in Mrs Hall’s room jamming. A fantastic atmosphere. I said to John one night, “This is all well and good, but it ain’t going nowhere. Do you want it to be a group?” “Yeah.” “Well let’s put it together, let’s look for a singer and guitarists.” Derv Gordon: I was the worst guitarist, so I sang.…

THE EQUALS INTEGRATE POP WITH BABY, COME BACK

FROM OVER THE HORIZON, FOUR long-haired young men stroll into view, through the heat shimmer of the Califor-nian desert. They are dressed in colourfully odd get-ups: stovepipe hats, striped trou-sers, flowery bell bottoms, like hippyfied Dr Seuss characters. It looks like the sum-mer of 1967 or ’68, an outtake from The Monkees’ tripped-out film, Head. But it is in fact 1990, and the video for the first single, The King Is Half-Undressed, by Jellyfish. The song itself motors along in a distinctly Beatles-esque direction, souping up the beat from Tomorrow Never Knows and dipping into the dreamy harmonies of Because, its soaring chorus belted out by gutsy-voiced frontman Andy Sturmer. A joyful anachronism caught between the demise of hair metal and the rise of grunge, Jellyfish appeared to be a…

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

AHEAD OF PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON AND OCTOPUS’S Garden on the playschool playlist, Yellow Submarine has become a Kindergarten classic. A nursery-rhyme sea-shanty designated as Ringo Starr’s song on The Beatles’ seventh album, it was released as the flipside of Eleanor Rigby on August 5, 1966, six weeks after the band had finished recording the LP at Abbey Road Studios. In sunny contrast to Paul McCartney’s sepulchral vignette, it flew a flag for community and new adventures, a blossoming psychedelic vision of The Beatles’ cute collective lodgings in the movie Help!. It’s unlikely, though, that Yellow Submarine would have become a Sesame Street standard if it had stayed close to its original form – aversion included on Sessions Two, the second disc of extras and outtakes that accompanies a Revolver…

THE SHOCK OF THE NEW

Björk ★★★★ Fossora ONE LITTLE INDIAN. CD/DL/LP IN ROBERT Macfarlane’s 2019 book Underland, a study-cum-travelogue exploring the subterranean, he writes of the discovery of an “underground social network” in forests, involving the web-like strands or “hyphae” sent out by fungi that appear to provide a support system linking trees. If one tree is ailing, the others supply nourishment. It’s a head-spinning idea but one that Björk appears to reference nine tracks into her tenth album, in Fungal City, as she sings, over a skipping electronic kick drum and flitting woodwind shapes, of “Trunks bursting through the moss from our love,” and wonders, “Should I soften the blow of life on him?” The fact that she uses “him”, blurring the distinction between trees and humans, is telling and underlines the main…

The Cult ★★★★ Under The Midnight Sun BLACK HILL. CD/DL/LP IN 2009, three years into his band’s latest re-formation, Ian Astbury predicted that The Cult wouldn’t make another album. Dropped by their record label after just one LP, Astbury didn’t fancy “spending a year and a half in the studio arguing over agendas” on a format he considered “dead”. But perspectives change. The third Cult album since the singer’s doomy prophecy opens with Astbury whispering “Forget what you know” and Billy Duffy unfurling a hallmark display of sensuous riff calligraphy. This is Mirror, a song where “nature runs low”, “shadows are long”, “nightbirds croon”, and Ian Astbury helpfully signposts his new record’s location in heartland Cult territory by howling “Love! Love! Love!”. Rock’s unquenchable melodramatists have the fire in their…

Lift To Experience

Bill Callahan ★★★★★ DRAG CITY. CD/DL/LP/MC IN A statement accompanying this, his eighth ‘solo’ album, Bill Callahan talks of his explicitly collectivist motivation this time out, as mankind emerges from Covid’s shadow. “It felt like it was necessary to rouse people,” he avers, “…I wanted sounds and words that made you feel, and that lifted you up.” From one of popular music’s most acute existential worriers, these words register as genuine yet a touch surreal, perhaps chiming with Reality’s titular ass-backwardsness. As with 2000’s masterpiece as Smog, Dongs Of Sevotion, Callahan tends to get playful when he’s making his very best music. This one really is of that extraordinary calibre, and at times very approachable, too – Natural Information, in particular, is little short of feelgood pop, on a par…

Lift To Experience

Courtney Marie Andrews ★★★★ Loose Future FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP UPSTAIRS, IN an anonymous Red Roof Inn hotel, somewhere along a stretch of American asphalt, some people are having loud sex. Their television is blaring, their feeble attempt to mask the apparent shame of simply being human. A floor below, the singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews – stopping for the night en route into exile from her own relationship, an air freshener dangling on her rear-view mirror again – can hear them, anyway. The failed concealment reminds her of the way people lie about everything. “That’s just like this world we’re in,” she sings, recalling that moment in the transfixing On The Line, strings tightening like a hand on a headboard. “We cover up each truth with a void.” But there is…

Brian Eno ★★★★ FOREVERANDEVER NOMORE UMC. CD/DL/LP IN AUGUST of last year, Brian and brother Roger Eno accepted an invitation to perform live at Athens’ Epidaurus Festival, nominally in support of their 2020 collaboration Mixing Colours. The city was melting in 45-degree heat, the surrounding hills aflame, and while the dystopian backdrop may have rendered the duo’s hypnagogic aquatint instrumentals somewhat incongruous, it certainly reinforced the message behind a brace of Brian’s new songs also debuted that evening: Garden Of Stars and There Were Bells. Both feature on what is officially his 22nd solo album, and are, like everything here, predicated on feelings about the climate emergency and “our narrowing, precarious future”. This is the first album of Eno songs (more accurately, eight songs, one instrumental and an extended semi-vocal…

Yeah Yeah Yeahs ★★★★ Cool It Down SECRETLY CANADIAN. CD/DL/LP THEY MIGHT have emerged from the hipster crucible of millennial New York, their reputation assured by their badge on the lapel of a member of The Strokes when such a thing was the rock’n’roll equivalent of a diplomatic passport, but the Yeah Yeah Yeahs have never quite fitted the standard concept of cool. Aloof nonchalance wasn’t their thing; instead, they tended towards the excitable, even the exuberant, frontwoman Karen O exploding across the stage like an exothermic reaction between beer and spit. Their hectic, wild-eyed 2003 debut was called Fever To Tell; even their dreamiest love songs tended towards the full-body swoon. They don’t love you like I love you. You suddenly complete me. Cool It Down is the trio’s…

London’s Burning

Creedence Clearwater Revival ★★★★ At The Royal Albert Hall CRAFT. CD/DL/LP/MC “PEOPLE HAVE been on to me to put out a ‘live’ album by the group but so far I have refused,” declared Creedence Clearwater Revival’s singer, songwriter, lead guitarist, bandleader, record producer and manager John Fogerty in April 1970. He was talking to the late Roy Carr, on walkabout in London on their first European tour as documented in Travelin’ Band: Creedence Clearwater Revival At The Royal Albert Hall, the film co-released with this album. “To me most live albums are a shuck… a cheap way of turning over a lot of money. Of all the many concert albums available there have only been three that have been worthwhile, one of which was by Ray Charles.” Fogerty did, however,…

London’s Burning

What Dreams May Come

The Cure ★★★★ Wish UMC/FICTION/POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP VIEWERS BLEARILY switching on UK breakfast TV around 7.50am on May 12, 1992 might have been confused to find Lorraine Kelly introducing three black-haired men playing deck quoits and discussing summer currents with a sea captain. Claiming fear of flying, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Simon Gallup and Perry Bamonte were on the QE2, sailing out to their US tour. It was a curious way to start the day, but this preposterous item indicated The Cure’s escalating status as they promoted their ninth album, Wish. Cruising on the stadium-filling impact of 1989’s Disintegration, they would soon release their ultimate pop standard, Friday I’m In Love. Over time, though, their lone Number 1 album has struggled to emerge from its predecessor’s monumental shadow. Disintegration, despite its…

What Dreams May Come

The Road to Joniville

THE JONI MITCHELL Archive series arrives at the second box of remastered studio albums, The Asylum Albums (1972-1975) (Rhino, 5-LP/4-CD), ★★★★★ with a booklet essay by Neil Young. On 1971’s Blue, she had declared, during River, that she was “gonna make a lot of money and quit this crazy scene”. When her relationship with fellow star, and a muse for Blue, James Taylor crumbled, Mitchell retreated to Canada to consider her future in a cooler climate, and returned with the material and the cover images for her fifth album, For The Roses, her first for David Geffen’s Asylum label. While it may seem, on the surface, like a disillusioned record, it’s really Mitchell edging away from the limelight and steeling herself to work in a new way. Enthusiastically received…

The Road to Joniville

Wham Bam Thank You Man!

Ron Davies Silent Song Through The Land A&M, 1970 AS BOWIE-philes will know, side one of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Star dust…. closes with It Ain’t Easy; a compelling, if a little out of place, white blues written by one ‘R. Davies’, according to the original credits. ‘R. Davies’ was assumed by many to be The Kinks’ Ray Davies, given Bowie’s affection for storytelling UK songwriters. But It Ain’t Easy came from a much less familiar location and author – from Louisiana, and the pen of a rootsy craftsman called Ron Davies. Bowie wasn’t the first to cover It Ain’t Easy: Three Dog Night and Long John Baldry’s versions were the title tracks of their respective albums in 1970 and 1971. Other major players would also cover Davies’…

Wham Bam Thank You Man!

OF ALL THE MOJO How To Buys, this has been one of the hardest to compile. That’s partly to do with Don Cherry’s genius as a trumpeter, arranger and collaborator, meaning that the 10 records opposite could have easily been swapped out for 10 others and there would be no dip in brilliance, invention or quality. But it’s also down to his mercurial nature and his collaborative, communal approach to music making. Thirty-seven years after first hearing his sharp, slippery sound, the heart of his uniqueness remains elusive. Growing up in 1940s Los Angeles, with a pianist mother of Choctaw descent and an African-American trumpeter father who ran the Plantation Jazz Club on Central Avenue, Cherry was surrounded by music but received his major education from neighbourhood friend, Jayne Richardson,…

Fingers Crossed ★★★★ Miki Berenyi NINE EIGHT. £22 IN SUMMER 1976, Miki Berenyi drove 1,000 miles across Europe in a clapped-out Ford Capri with her Hungarian father Ivan and grandmother Nora. The gruelling trip from suburban north-west London to Budapest is funded en route by nine-year-old Miki on the streets of various cities hawking a compendium of tat bought on Willesden High Road. “Unbelievably, the shower fittings are a hit, as are the make-up sets and Top Of The Pops cassettes.” The trio’s progress is delayed after Ivan detours to the apartment of “a ‘pussy’ from his past”. Later, weary from his exertions, he falls asleep at the wheel on the autobahn, disaster averted only by the screams of his mother and daughter. This remarkable episode is just one of…

Thoughts And Prayers

Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song ★★★★ Dir: Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller SONY PICTURES CLASSICS. C/ST “I FEEL I HAVE career ahead of me,” says Leonard Cohen in one of the well-chosen a huge posthumous clips from old interviews that turn the late singer-writer-poet (who declined to be interviewed) into the narrator of this two-hour film. It was probably said with irony, referring to how little respect and attention he got during much of his music career in the US, where he lived. But he was right about having a busy afterlife. Since passing away in 2016 – at the top of his game thanks to those remarkable late-life tours – he’s released a posthumous hit album, a poetry collection and a novel, and been the subject of…

Thoughts And Prayers

IN 1994, promo box set Mo’s Songs! saluted music executive Mo Ostin’s long career at the Warner Bros and Reprise labels. The contributors showed the remarkable scope of his musical life, with Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Prince, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, the Sex Pistols, Madonna and many more appearing. George Harrison sang loving tribute Mo, asserting, “Whatever that it takes, I know/You have it and it shows.” Ostin had “it” in abundance. Born on March 27, 1927 in New York, but a Los Angeleno from 13, he worked at jazz label Verve before moving, at Sinatra’s invitation, to run Reprise from 1960. After Reprise united with Warner Bros, the modest Ostin espoused an artist-centric, music-first ethos, with significant early signings being The Kinks and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. As president…

OCTOBER 1982 …Musical Youth Pass The Dutchie OCTOBER 2 In 1981, The Mighty Diamonds released Pass The Kouchie, a catchy Rasta salute to smoking a cannabis pipe. Despite being condemned by the Jamaican government, it became a hit. The following year, Birmingham reggae young team Musical Youth re-recorded it as Pass The Dutchie. Which, this autumn week, was an ebullient UK pop-reggae Number 1. Musical Youth’s story began in 1979 at Duddeston Manor School in Nechells, central Birmingham. Jamaican friends George Grant and Freddie Waite, a music teacher and former member of ’60s vocal outfit The Techniques, both had musically inclined sons. By 1979, Grant brothers Kelvin (guitar) and Michael (keyboards), plus Patrick (bass) and Freddie ‘Junior’ Waite (drums) were playing together in all-singing reggae band Musical Youth – with…

Who mixed business with music?

I was listening to Belle And Sebastian’s Seymour Stein, about a missed dinner date with the aforementioned Sire Records boss. It’s a bit like breaking the fourth wall in a movie. Who else has named industry luminaries like this in song? I can feel a playlist coming on. Eric Anderson, via e-mail MOJO says: Where to begin? Ex-Sony boss Tommy Mottola has several shout-outs on record – appear-ing by name in Cherchez La Femme by Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, and indirectly in Hall & Oates’ Gino (The Manager) and Petals by his ex-wife Mariah Carey; likewise, Berry Gordy Jr is mentioned on Erykah Badu and Big Sean’s Story as well as on tracks by Jay-Z, Nas and others. Further examples include Aerosmith’s song No Surprize, which name-checks Arista boss…

Who mixed business with music?

Keith Morris and Black Flag

HELLO 1976 Greg Ginn [Black Flag guitarist] and I started out as like best friends. My friend Michael [Piper] owned the Rubicon record store on Pier Avenue on Hermosa Beach in LA, and Greg’s younger sister was dating Michael. So she would come to the store with Greg. Then her and Michael would take off to go eat sandwiches and smoke cigarettes on the pier. Michael listened to a lot of prog rock, so while he was gone, I would break out Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Iggy & The Stooges’ Raw Power… anything that was abrasive, anything that was loud. It was before we’d heard any kind of punk rock rumblings. Then Michael talked me into going with him to see Journey at the Santa Monica Civic, and on the…

Keith Morris and Black Flag

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