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THE BRAND NEW ALBUM Recorded in Berlin, Athens & Paris – a nomadic & truly European record Produced by Jaakko Eino Kalevi & mixed by Renaud Letang (Feist, Gonzales, Connan Mockasin)

2 6 th FEBRUARY 2 0 2 1

CON T EN T S )

APRIL 2 0 2 1

BREDA Issue 3 2 9

FEATURES

2 8 CAPTAIN SENSIBLE As the original Damned dust off the cobwebs (Covid permitting) – an audience with their master of mayhem. But what’s this?

Method in his madness?

3 4 TEENAGE FANCLUB With one third of their storied tune-triumvirate now amputated, how will the Scots indie-classicists survive? The answer:somehow.

“That’s bands,” they tell Keith Cameron.

4 0 LONNIE HOLLEY Alabama’s 21st century sage survived kidnapping, modern slavery and more to make art out of trash and poetic space gospel with his friend Matthew E White.

“Steve Marriott was the realist of the band.

He always picked up more shirts than anyone else when we raided Carnaby Street.”

SMALL FACES, CHEEKY CHAPPIES, P5 6

4 4 COLONEL TOM PARKER The sinister Svengali who stole, and sold, Elvis Presley’s soul? “Nothing could be further from the truth,” writes the King’s great biographer, Peter Guralnick.

5 2 LITTLE FEAT Fifty years since their debut album redefined succèss d’estime, eyewitnesses recall the first steps of Lowell George’s Americana omnivores:“They had a sort of fearlessness.”

5 6 STEVE MARRIOTT How the Small Faces’ SuperMod was derailed by fame, money and the Mafia.

Hair-raising revelations and poignant reflections from friends, lovers and others.

Avalon.red

COVER STORY

6 6 LANA DEL REY Mammoth sales, stellar cool, and champions including Springsteen and Joan Baez. So why does the decade’s most remarkable songwriter feel so beleaguered?

“I was discredited for seven years,” she tells Victoria Segal.

MOJO 3

Lady Blackbird: black acid soul star,MOJO Rising,p24

REGULARS 9

ALL BACK TO MY PLACE Jane Birkin, Jason Williamson and Ivan Neville put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong.

1 0 6 REAL GONE Phil Spector, Tim Bogert, Mark Keds, Jesus Jellett, KT Oslin and more, so long.

1 1 2 ASK MOJO Transfer window:which big names joined existing bands?

1 1 4 HELLO GOODBYE They began as punk exploded. But disintegration was inevitable. Gareth Sager recalls The Pop Group.

WHAT GOES ON! 12

SYLVAIN SYLVAIN He was the beating heart of the New York Dolls who never gave up on their rock’n’roll promise. Marking his death, close conspirers David Johansen and Glen Matlock remember their friend Syl.

17

GRYPHON Hear the crumhorns calling? ’Tis Gryphon, returned Cult Heroes from the land of medieval prog, reformed and ready to go. “We’re dying to get out there,” they say.

18

Motor City Mainman: Alice Cooper, Albums,p84.

Arab Strap:the ambassadors will see you now,Lead Album,p78.

HALL AND OATES Whoah, here they come – Daryl and John, kings of song for over four decades, spill all about two-headed monsters, not being blue-eyed soul, and being on magazine covers with the Stones and Dylan.

19

MARTIN GORE Depeche Mode’s driver discusses his new mini-album The Third Chimpanzee, the DM mothership and lessons learned at the burning edge of electronic rock.

20

THE GOLDEN AGE OF RAP Janette Beckman photographed hiphop in its NYC crucible. Now she remembers the heady days of Kangols and fat gold chains in a new self-curated collection of iconic images.

MOJO FILTER 78

NEW ALBUMS Arab Strap return in dark days, plus Jane Weaver, Loretta Lynn, Chris Cornell, Israel Nash, Valerie June and more.

90

REISSUES Dylan in 1970 celebrated, plus Willie Dunn, Dusty Springfield and more.

1 0 2 BOOKS Don Letts, punky reggae scenemaker, plus Keith Jarrett, Bessie Smith and more.

1 0 4 SCREEN Neil Young and Crazy Horse

THIS MONTH'S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE...

4 MOJO

Peter Guraln ick

Pat Gilbert

Victoria Segal

Peter’s books include a prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley – of which Bob Dylan wrote, “Elvis steps from the pages. You can feel him breathe” – and acclaimed biographies of Sam Cooke and Sam Phillips. A chapter of his latest, Looking To Get Lost, is extracted on p4 4 : a personal insight into Elvis manager Colonel Tom Parker.

MOJO veteran Pat Gilbert was a 1 4 -year-old schoolboy when he first saw The Damned in 1 9 8 0 , Captain Sensible memorably signing his copy of Smash It Up with the words “Piss off!” Forty years later, Gilbert jousts once again with the loveable punk madcap for this month’s MOJO Interview, starting on p2 8 .

Victoria has been writing for MOJO since 2 0 0 3 , when she reviewed Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s Master And Everyone. She writes about music, books and TV and happily rose way before dawn on a winter’s day to speak to Lana Del Rey for the cover story. Share the experience on p6 6 ; she also reviews MOJO’s Album of the Month, p7 8 .

Borja, Jenny Risher, Christine Solomon, Mike Leahy

burning up in Santa Cruz.

CARGO COLLECTIVE

JANE WEAVER

FU MANCHU

JELLO BIAFRA

TENO AFRIK A

FLOCK

THE ACTION IS GO! DELUXE EDITION

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Newest albu m from th is Glasg ow collectiveis a h ypnotic& melodicindie/post-pu nk masterpiecewith u nderstatedh ook s th at h au nt you long after you ’ve h eardth em.

At times u pbeat andreassu ring andat times qu ietly contemplative, Th ePet Parademark s acou rag eou s next stepfor EricD. Joh nsoninh is 2 0 th year as Fru it Bats.

Th eTu cson, Arizonaartist’s follow-u pto2 0 1 7 ’s Hands InOu r Names is a4 0 -minu tedream-narrativeof rich ambient instru mentals & melanch oly Americanating edsong writing , as inth ealbu m-opener “ Reconstellated.”

Bornfrom accident bu t drivenforwardby instinct, Doylesh owcases au niqu eexplorationof pop, artrock , ambient & idiosyncraticcompositions, married with avoiceth at deftly g lides from tender restraint tosoaring peak s.

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Track ing new path s andreach ing new levels of excellence, Fire! arestill h onou ring th eir 1 2 year vow of presenting afresh approach toimprovisedmu sic.

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A barnstorming opener, plucked from one of the many messy passages of Marriott’s career. The turbocharged R&B of Get Down To It opened Humble Pie’s sixth album, Eat It, but this is a less cluttered, if no less intense, 1 9 7 3 version recorded by Marriott in his home studio. Note, too, the opening’s striking resemblance to the Minder theme tune.

Written by Steve Marriott. Published by SMLL/ Bucks Music. 1 9 7 3 . Licensed with kind permission from the Steve Marriott Estate.

while Marriott was living in

Mountain) and the ill-fated Humble Pie reunion.

Getty

Longtime Who compadre and man about town Billy Nicholls saw his Would You Believe album initially released in a run of only 1 0 0 copies before the label hit financial difficulties (copies are now worth around £1 0 ,0 0 0 ). Here’s a thrilling extract: baroque psychedelia blown apart by Marriott, who tore the neck off his guitar during the extraordinary solo.

Written by Billy Nicholls. Published by BMG. ᝈ1 9 6 8 Immediate Records © 2 0 2 1 Sanctuary Records Group Limited, a BMG Company. From Would You Believe (Immediate Records)

the forthcoming Definitive Edition

More confusion! Marriott’s Mod upstarts before he formed the Small Faces went by many names: The Frantiks, The Frantik Ones, The Wondering Ones, sometimes Steve Marriott’s Moments. And this rumbustious take on Leadbelly’s Good Morning Blues has often been called Blue Morning. At a 1 9 6 4 Moments gig in Rainham, Essex, Marriott met Ronnie Lane.

also be a showcase for his misogyny, too.

Written by Lomax, Ledbetter. Published by SMLL/Bucks Music. 1 9 6 4 . Licensed with kind permission from the Steve Marriott Estate. From Steve Marriott’s Moments EP (Acid Jazz Records)

com) From Some Kind Of Wonderful

6 MOJO

ROM THE WEST END STAGE TO SWINGING LONDON’S MOD hotspots and mob dens, from American arenas to pub backrooms, Steve Marriott’s musical journey was often as fraught and unpredictable as his personal one. This month, as a companion to Simon Spence’s revelatory story about the troubled singer, we’re proud to present Afterglow, a wide-ranging survey of Marriott’s remarkable music.

The highlights, as you’d expect, are many – but they don’t just come from the storied work of the Small Faces and Humble Pie. Rather, these 1 5 meticulously chosen cuts (thank you, Rob Caiger of Charly/Immediate Records), date from the early ’6 0 s to the late ’8 0 s and capture an artist perpetually trying to reconcile East End authenticity with a rowdy, instinctual understanding of soul and the blues. “I’ve never met anyone who loved life as much as he did,” says his second wife, Pam Marriott Land. “With money, without money, good times and scarier times.” That overwhelming energy, for good and evil, blasts out from every minute of Afterglow.

A-side written by Kenny Lynch, the single flopped; Marriott rapidly formed The Moments/Frantiks for a more recognisable tilt at fame.

Steve, God only knows,”

Written by Steve Marriott. Published by SMLL/ Bucks Music. 1 9 6 3 . Licensed with kind permission from the Steve Marriott Estate. (Decca Records).

; Shirley,

ᝈ1 9 6 9 Immediate Records and

Town And Country (Immediate Records)

Some sparkling acoustic fingerpicking to rival Bert Jansch here on this gruffly sentimental ode to parenting and Marriott’s son Toby, a toddler at the time. Marriott recorded this version in 1 9 7 7 – augmented by Toby’s mischievous presence – but the song would resurface a few years later as part of the Majik Mijits sessions with Ronnie Lane.

Written by Steve Marriott. Published by SMLL/ Bucks Music. 1 9 7 7. Licensed with kind permission from the Steve Marriott Estate.

The . “Jenny” is Jenny

The Autumn (Immediate Records)

The . The

And talking of mischievous presences… Marriott’s debut came on the 1 9 6 0 recording of Oliver!, in the role of The Artful Dodger.

Marriott was an understudy in the original West End production, alongside Tony Robinson. “He modelled himself on the 1 9 5 0 s London geezer, even as a 1 3 -yearold,” says Robinson. “He liked to see himself as quite tough, a wide boy.”

Written by Lionel Bart. Published by SMLL/Bucks Music. 1 9 6 2 . Courtesy of Steve Marriott Estate archive. (World Record Club/EMI).

Another nugget from those tempestuous late ’7 0 s, with Marriott tackling a song by one of his old East End contemporaries, Joe Brown. Instead of a fleeting band project, though, Marriott’s mighty bellow is juxtaposed against the epic sweep of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra; a formal setting that enhances, rather than dilutes, his raw emotional power.

Written by Joe Brown. Published by SMLL/Bucks Music. 1 9 7 6 . Licensed with kind permission from the Steve Marriott Estate.

A late incarnation of Humble Pie, who briefly assembled in Pyramid Eye Studios, Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1 9 8 2 . The location might have suggested a soul direction, but Poor Man’s Rich Man is a Cockney wide boy anthem, Marriott inhabiting the persona of an Artful Dodger grown up but not demonstrably more mature or trustworthy.

Written by Marriott/Leverton. Published by KOBALT MUSIC PUBLISHING LTD/BUCKS MUSIC GROUP LTD. 1 9 8 2 . Licensed with kind permission from The Store For Music. (www.thestorefor music.com). From The Atlanta Years (SFM)

The Small Faces and The Beatles came close to sharing the same management in 1 9 6 7 , when Don Arden agreed a deal to sell Marriott’s band to Brian Epstein; Epstein died before the contract was signed. Fourteen years later, Marriott responded to John Lennon’s death with this poignant reflection on his own life. “It’s tough out there,” he notes, before deciding, “If I had my time again, I guess I’d do it just the same.”

Written by Steve Marriott. Published by SMLL/ Bucks Music. 1 9 8 1 . Licensed with kind permission from the Steve Marriott Estate.

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Jane Birkin AKA MELODY NELSON. What music are you currently grooving to?

Etienne Daho’s album Surf, with bijoux like Moon River and My Girl Is Gone. Also John Barry’s We Have All The Time In The World and Dylan’s He Was A Friend Of Mine – schmaltzy and sexy, to dance a slow dance with yourself.

What,if push comes to shove,is your all-time favourite album?

Gainsbourg’s Melody Nelson. It hasn’t dated at all. It’s original, bold and beautiful, Jean-Claude Vannier’s arrangements, the sheer poetry of it… class.

What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?

Exodus, from the film, a little 45 from Woolworths… but Little Sister by Elvis is what [her brother] Andrew and I got as a prize for singing in a hotel.

Which musician,other than yourself,have you ever wanted to be?

Dylan.

What do you sing in the shower?

I never do, but should I, it would be songs from West Side Story – America, or I Feel Pretty.

What is your favourite Saturday night record?

Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, the Adagio, by [Leonard] Bernstein.

Gustav M’s last unfinished marvel… just tears your heart out. I was listening to this in my car and I was so elated, uplifted that I ran into a police van, I got all the policemen to get into my car and put the volume up, and this I thought explained all… it did.

And your Sunday morning record?

Billie Holiday’s Gloomy Sunday.

Serge’s version, Sombre Dimanche is even more miserable. Perfect to listen to en route for Sunday market shopping. Or Miserere (Allegri), the King’s College Choir. A little boy sings just so high it uplifts any spirit.

Jane Birkin’s new album Oh! Pardon Tu Dormais… is out now.

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

Jason Williamson MOD MAN What music are you currently grooving to?

The Universal Want, Doves:it’s brilliant. Training Day 3 , Potter Payper:I got the tip-off for this from a mate. It’s grim as fuck, really hard.

This bloke’s proper. Muthaleficent, Bbymutha:it’s hard listening in that it’s completely on its own.

Heels, Billy Nomates:she’s one of the most talented musicians in the UK right now.

What,if push comes to shove,is your all-time favourite album?

From The Double Gone Chapel, Two Lone Swordsmen. In terms of inspiring the formula of Sleaford Mods, this album is my all-time best. To listen to. To reference.

To study. Even now I find stuff in it.

What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?

Something Else on 7-inch, Sid Vicious [actually the Sex Pistols], from Dave’s Records in Grantham.

I bought this after being introduced to the Sex Pistols by my stepbrother.

Which musician,other than yourself,have you ever wanted to be?

Wendy O Williams, because she scared the shit out of me at age 11.

The early Plasmatics period is very, very good, creative and political in its presentation. Complete stereotype smasher.

What do you sing in the shower?

Looking Glass, The La’s. The La’s’ album is one of the most influential albums of my generation. It’s a tragedy that we never got more from Lee [Mavers]. This song is very much now as we live under this climate of hopelessness and hatred.

Nathaniel Goldberg, Starstock

What is your favourite Saturday night record?

Squirrel And G-Man…, Happy Mondays. It’s a work of art, this record. The loutish image they were given was a complete smokescreen for their abilities.

Amazing band.

And your Sunday morning record?

Party, Aldous Harding. I know Aldous a little. We got talking after we played a festival in Tasmania last year. Since then I’ve been her biggest fan. I can’t say enough about her, and I’m sure she gets fed up with me constantly talking about her. She’s the real deal.

Sleaford Mods’ Spare Ribs is out now.

Ivan Neville CRESCENT CITY SCION What music are you currently grooving to?

A friend of mine – myself and Mr Jon Cleary do a little playing together, I’ve been digging on some of those cuts. Also on my record player right now is Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book, which is an absolute classic, and I’ve also been checking out the Black Pumas. I kind of dig their sound a little bit.

What,if push comes to shove,is your all-time favourite album?

Oh man, I have several – Songs In The Key Of Life, Stevie Wonder, What’s Going On, Marvin Gaye, That’s The Way Of The World by Earth,Wind & Fire… If I had to pick just one, it would probably be Songs In The Key Of Life. A lot of beautiful songs and timeless music.

What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it?

The thing is, I had a lot of hand-medown records given to me by my dad and other family members – the early Specialty Records singles, Larry Williams, my mom’s sister had all the Beatles records… The first record I owned was Diana Ross Presents The Jackson 5. My mom

“I don’t sing in the shower, I pray.”

IVAN NEVILLE

bought it for me, I don’t remember which store it was.

Which musician,other than yourself,have you ever wanted to be?

As a kid I really liked the presence and delivery of Sly Stone. Sly & The Family Stone had a huge impact on me. I wouldn’t want to be him for other aspects of his life – I ended up going down some of those roads anyway, luckily, I came out alive! And I really liked what Jermaine Jackson was doing.

What do you sing in the shower?

I don’t. I may pray, and try and strengthen my spiritual connection.

What is your favourite Saturday night record?

The Ohio Players, Skin Tight. Heheh!

And your Sunday morning record?

Aretha Franklin, Amazing Grace.

Something like that.

Dumpstaphunk’s Where Do We Go From Here is released on April 2 3 .

MOJO 9

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

Editor John Mulvey Senior Editor Danny Eccleston Art Editor Mark Wagstaff Associate Editor (Production) Geoff Brown Associate Editor (Reviews) Jenny Bulley Associate Editor (News) Ian Harrison Deputy Art Editor Del Gentleman Picture Editor Matt Turner Senior Associate Editor Andrew Male Contributing Editors Phil Alexander, Keith Cameron, Sylvie Simmons For mojo4music.com contact Danny Eccleston

Theories, rants, etc.

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication.

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk

I’M PROBABLY IN SAFE COMPANY HERE

when I admit I haven’t paid the closest attention to the charts for a good few years. The cut and thrust of contemporary pop music is all well and good;the vast majority of it just doesn’t interest me that much. But there’s always the odd exception, and none has been bigger in recent memory than Lana Del Rey. For a 21st century superstar, she has kept intriguing company:Joan Baez and Cat Power, Stevie Nicks and Courtney Love. But it is her music, and particularly the hazy California dreamstate conjured up on Norman Fucking Rockwell!, that separates her from her peers. That album, a MOJO favourite of 2019, showcased an artist equally at home in Hollywood noir and sunbaked Topanga;a modern Lady Of The Canyon, with the self-awareness to be candid about her Joni fixation.

It’s our pleasure, then, to formally welcome Lana Del Rey into the MOJO family this month, as her excellent new album Chemtrails Over The Country Club is readied for release. “It’s crazy to me, crazy to me, crazy to me that I could be on the cover of MOJO,” she tells Victoria Segal, in the course of a deep and fascinating interview. But it makes perfect sense to us – and hopefully to you, too.

Thanks for their help with this issue: Keith Cameron, Del Gentleman, Ian Whent Among this month’s contributors: Martin Aston, John Aizlewood, Mark Blake, Mike Barnes, Glyn Brown, John Bungey, David Buckley, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Stevie Chick, Andrew Collins, Andy Cowan, Max Decharne, Fred Dellar, Niall Doherty, Tom Doyle, Daryl Easlea, David Fricke, Andy Fyfe, Pat Gilbert, Stephen Gregory, Peter Guralnick, Grayson Haver Currin, David Hutcheon, Jim Irvin, Colin Irwin, David Katz, Andrew Male, James McNair, Bob Mehr, Kris Needs, Chris Nelson, Lucy O’Brien, Andrew Perry, Jude Rogers, Jon Savage, Victoria Segal, David Sheppard, Michael Simmons, Sylvie Simmons, Simon Spence, Ben Thompson, Kieron Tyler, Charles Waring, Lois Wilson, Stephen Worthy Among this month’s photographers: Cover:Charlie Grant; Janette Beckman, Frank Bez, Al Clayton, Henry Diltz, Jill Furmanovsky, Bob Gruen, Paul Harries, Andy Holdsworth, Donald Milne, Michael Putland, Mick Rock, Ben Rollins, John Spink, Stephen Sweet, Susan Titelman, Sally Wilbourn, Nurit Wilde

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10 MOJO

JOHN MULVEY, EDITOR You taught me a valuable lesson in life

Let’s go out into the crazy world

Fascinated to read Dave Ball’s article regarding the founding years and creation of Soft Cell [MOJO 327]. He mentioned Kraftwerk’s Autobahn as an influence, and “a guy who had a cassette of it” at an ice cream factory in Blackpool. Well, the ice cream factory was called Naventis, and I was that guy! I don’t remember working in an ice cream van together, maybe we did, but we certainly sat in a crappy staff room on wooden benches. I was playing Autobahn on a little portable tape recorder I used to take with me when I was working on the beach at Blackpool in the vans, selling the ice cream in the days when you had summer jobs. We got talking about music and discovered a lot in common. We even went to the same school, Arnold School in Blackpool, although he was slightly older than me.

He was blown away with Kraftwerk, but also loved Northern soul, and said he wanted to be a musician and form his own band. I think I remember smiling and saying to myself, ‘Yeah mate, course you will.’

And then as they say, the rest is history. He went on to form one of the greatest bands of the ’80s – and I went on to be a postman!

I can’t put into words, how elated I was to see a long-overdue appraisal on the Edgar Broughton Band [MOJO 328]. I cannot think of a band who deserve a feature more than they do. They were my greatest inspiration, and had it not been for them my tastebuds in music would never have flourished in the way they did.

When I was 12 years of age, I saw them second on the bill to Pink Floyd at a Hyde Park bash, circa July 1970. Up until that day I hadn’t heard of them, but seeing was believing! It was a lifeaffirming experience, as I bore witness to 50,000 souls freaking out vigorously, peace signs flashing everywhere, love beads jangling all around, as if some mass exorcism was taking place during Out Demons Out. From here onwards, I fiercely championed them and went to many of their gigs.

From a personal view, Rob, Art and Steve are the most personable and genuine people I have ever had the good fortune to know. And on the subject of the Freak Fraternity, it greatly saddened me to hear of the passing of William ‘Jesus’ Jellett, most likely the most famous gig-goer of all time, a unique character [see Real Gone, p109]. He will be sorely missed.

Doug Wilson, via e-mail

Barry Winton, via e-mail

Did I ever tell you that this here jacket represents a symbol of my individuality?

In brief, I’m 66 years old. I’m a lifelong Beatles fan. I’m son of a Coldstream Guardsman. Page 82 of The MOJO Collectors’ Series Beatles Omnibus shows a photo of John Lennon (seated) and Victor Spinetti (standing). Victor Spinetti is NOT wearing Coldstream regalia as stated, please check your facts.

That is a Scots Guards uniform;buttons in sets of three and thistle on collar. Coldstream Guards tunics have buttons in pairs and show a garter star on the collar badge. I hate to be petty, but you’ll be saying next that John Lennon was famous for wearing rings…

Geoff Parkes, via e-mail

By then people’ll probably be driving Buicks to the moon How encouraging to read in your Nana Mouskouri album review in MOJO 327 the phrase “the glory days of easy listening”. Back in the ’60s and ’70s when I was a soul music journalist, I, like my colleagues in rock journalism, had an unwavering attitude towards easy listening/MOR music. It was either to be ignored or it was to be vilified as not worthy of serious critical assessment. Such dismissive attitudes say far more about the prejudices of the editors and journos involved than about any understanding of the processes and disciplines of music making.

So it’s heartening that a magazine that gives insightful coverage to John Lennon and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard can also find space for a perceptive Nana Mouskouri review. At this rate, MOJO will get around to publishing quality pieces on Johnny Mathis or Daniel O’Donnell!

Tony Cummings, Stoke-on-Trent

That Johnnie is one clever detective. You know how clever?

I read with sadness John Mulvey’s editorial in MOJO 327 about John Lennon’s murder, and how he had vivid memories of that fateful time. I also remember that day as if it was yesterday. I was 22 years of age, and a Beatles fan since childhood. I was off work that day, and when I woke up mid-morning I shuffled into the kitchen to make a brew and turn on Radio 1. There was a John Lennon track playing – nothing unusual in that, until the next track that boomed out was also a Lennon song, then another, then another.

Finally a voice informed the listeners that the BBC was leading the tributes following John’s death the previous evening. I felt numb, and I’m not ashamed to admit I had a tear in my eye. I spent the next few months tracking down as many Lennon albums that I could to complete my collection, even Unfinished

Music No. 2 : Life With The Lions and the Wedding Album. Thanks for a wonderfully emotional cover story.

Gary Bragg, Chester …I was lying in hospital suffering from hepatitis, a souvenir from a short love affair. Seven weeks’ quarantine in a small room and the only visitors were doctors, nurses and the charwoman, who wore a mask and protective clothes.

When she entered my room on this cold winter morning, she asked me if I had heard the news that one member of The Beatles had been killed in New York City. I could not believe her words and turned my radio on. The radio station played a Beatles tune and then the newsman told me the whole sad story.

A day I cannot forget.

Peter Zontkowski, via e-mail

The way your head works is God’s own private mystery Reading the words, “With Reni you’ve got the greatest drummer who ever lived” [MOJO 327, Eyewitness:The Stone Roses], while coincidentally listening to a Tony Williams’ Lifetime album has been the funniest moment for quite a while.

But seriously:Thanks to all at MOJO for keeping up the good work and for sending out issue after issue to readers all over the world.

Chris Hundt, Marienheide, Germany

Rockin’ good news I’m a 17-year-old growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, and a massive Radiohead fan. I didn’t know about MOJO until I stumbled upon it recently because of my interests in Bob Dylan and Radiohead. I was pleasantly surprised reading the article on the making of Radiohead’s radical fourth studio album [MOJO 325]. The article captures the grungy and radical vibe Thom Yorke exudes in his interviews and performances that many editors fail to capture.

Learning about the many setbacks and “happy accidents” the band went through to complete this album was enlightening. I am very glad to have come across this article and hope you all plan to do more articles on Radiohead in the future. Thanks!

Andrew Adams, Louisville

What’s up, peanut?

As one of the collaborators on Kevin Godley’s new solo album Muscle Memory, I was delighted to see the fine review written by David Buckley in MOJO 327.

I’d like to make one small correction however:our collaborative effort is called The Bang Bang Theory, about a certain deranged leader and gun culture, and not The Big Bang Theory as printed in the review. No offence taken, and thanks again for the wonderful review.

Bob Beland, Mar Vista, California

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PRI MOJO 11

MOJO

Diamond In The Trash New York Dolls’guitarist and true believer Sylvain Sylvain left us on January 13. Friends and bandmates David Johansen and Glen Matlock pay heartfelt tribute.

“F

rom the first moment I met him, I loved this guy,” says David Johansen, whose sense of loss is tangible eight days after Sylvain Mizrahi lost his three-year battle with cancer. “If you’d taken Syl out of the New York Dolls it would have been crap. He had so much energy, passion and enthusiasm. It just went on and on and on.”

Sylvain was this inestimably influential band’s heart and soul, its rhythm guitarist, girl-group-loving backing vocalist and eternal cheerleader, fashion an essential passion. Lighting the fuse for CBGB’s punk explosion when they emerged out of New York’s Lower East Side in 1971, the Dolls directly motivated Malcolm McLaren into launching the Sex Pistols after his dry run as their de facto manager four years later, even promising Sylvain a place in the band.

“We were so far ahead of our time we didn’t even realise it,” Sylvain told this writer in 2006. “We never sat down and worked out a masterplan to dress up as girls and shit. It all just happened. We were young and screaming our generation’s next move. Everybody else took notes and took it to the bank, but we fell and broke our legs because we were running so damn fast. We were inventing it all, not even knowing what the hell we were doing.”

Born Sylvain Mizrahi in Cairo on Valentine’s Day, 1951, his family were forced to escape Egypt after the Suez crisis, spending two years in Paris before landing in New York through a Jewish resettlement scheme in 1961, eventually moving to the migrant melting pot of Jamaica, Queens.

The Beatles’invasion propelled Sylvain into teaching himself guitar, and by 1965 he and Colombian émigré school-friend Billy Murcia were checking out Greenwich Village clubs, jamming on Ventures tracks and dreaming of their own band. After Sylvain was expelled from school for hitting a sadistic gym teacher, the pair formed the short-lived Pox. Working at hip Lexington Avenue boutique Different Drummer through 1968 nurtured Sylvain’s interest in the fashion business, while The New York Dolls Hospital toy repair shop across the street provided a future band name.

Starting their Truth And Soul brand selling groovy sweaters sewn by Murcia’s sisters, the pair became teenage entrepreneurs. They still rehearsed in Queens, and in 1970 were joined by Italian-American Johnny Genzale – soon renamed Johnny Thunders – who Sylvain taught to play guitar, their T.Rex covers motivated by a punk-presaging hatred of stadium rock.

While Sylvain spent summer 1971 in Europe, Genzale and Murcia rehearsed with Village scenesters bassist Arthur Kane and guitarist Rick Rivets. Joined by charismatic singer-harmonica player David Johansen, the band played their first gig as the New York Dolls at a nearby welfare hotel’s Christmas party.

On returning, Sylvain was incensed to find his band name appropriated and soon replaced Rivets, clicking instantly with Johansen, who recalls, “It’s rare, but you know when somebody’s got good taste in music, rather similar to your own. When he was a kid in Paris he was into that yé-yé stuff. Maybe it’s kind of twee, but he got a kick out of it. Through his ears, I got to appreciate that.”

The Dolls’Mercer Arts Centre residency through 1972 started a serious buzz, attracting press, music business and a visiting David Bowie. Debuting in the UK that October, the band supported the Faces at Wembley’s Empire Pool.

Future Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock remembers it well;“It was such a sea-change moment for me. I’d just met Steve [Jones] and Paul [Cook] and there were the New York Dolls!

Sylvain, with his girlie hair and big bow tie, is roller skating around the stage! I thought, Who is this guy?”

Tragedy struck when Murcia accidentally perished at a London party. Sylvain never got over losing his childhood friend, who had already named Jerry Nolan as his replacement.

Promoting October 1973’s self-titled debut album, that November the Dolls played The Old Grey Whistle DAVID JOHANSEN Test. The appearance is often credited with igniting UK punk, abetted as it was by host Bob Harris disdainfully describing the group as “Mock Rock”. The Dolls’ ➢

“If you’d taken Syl out of the New York Dolls it would have been crap.”

Bob Gruen, Kris Needs

Lonely planet boys:New York Doll Sylvain Sylvain backstage in Ohio, June 1976;(above) at Biba’s Rainbow Restaurant, Kensington, November ’73 (from left) Sylvain, David Johansen, Johnny Thunders.

MOJO 13

“So many adventures”:(left) original New York Dolls in October 1972 (from left) Billy Murcia, Thunders,Johansen,Arthur Kane,Sylvain;(below) Sylvain on a high,1980,on promotional rounds for debut solo LP;(insets) the Dolls’classic debut; follow-up In Too Much Too Soon;Sylvain Sylvain.

“We didn’t have any plans beyond that show,” says Johansen. “I thought, ‘This’ll be fine,’ because I get to see Syl, who was living in Atlanta at the time. Then we just kept doing it. It wasn’t some masterplan;more like we hopped a freight train with no idea where it was going! We were having so much fun.”

By 2006, the new Dolls had recorded the robust One Day It Will Please Us To . In New York to

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➣

two shows at Biba’s Kensington High Street department store that month marked their UK peak, this writer’s teenage mind blown by the feral onslaught of hoodlum apparitions in six-inch platforms.

Sylvain pinballed around the stage, wrangling his Gretsch White Falcon in cowboy chaps and holster.

Yet drugs, internal ructions and music biz hostility were already gatecrashing their endless party, often leaving only Sylvain’s irrepressible pep binding the band together.

“Absolutely,” agrees Johansen. “Syl was such an integral part of it. He kept me happy. I don’t know how long I would have lasted in that conglomeration if it wasn’t for him.”

The Dolls entered 1974 with a second album to record. Sylvain felt his old hero George ‘Shadow’Morton, now washed up, was “a bad choice” of producer. Too rushed, with no time even allowed to record Sylvain’s title track, In Too Much Too Soon suffered, helping derail the momentum.

1975 saw a surreal turn when a visiting Malcolm McLaren attempted to resuscitate the Dolls, outfitting their doomed “red patent leather” phase. After a Florida tour, heroin habits sent Nolan and Thunders to New York and the Heartbreakers. Sylvain drove McLaren back to New York via New Orleans, the manager promising he would fly him to London to join the band gestating at his SEX shop as he took Sylvain’s guitar and Fender Rhodes piano. The plane ticket never came, leaving Syl believing, “The Sex Pistols were supposed to be my band.” McLaren’s seven-page letter declaring just that is in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Still, Sylvain still had unfinished Dolls business. “They were a pretty big part of his self-identity,” says Johansen. “After the band broke up, we still did a lot of stuff, including a stadium tour of Japan. There’s so many different episodes, you could write a new book about it every two weeks. There was never a dull moment with Syl.” Sylvain co-wrote and played on the singer’s two 1978 solo albums. “He wanted to do stuff even after that, but I was saying,

14 MOJO

After the Dolls finally rested after

with this stuff we’re doing until you figure out exactly what you wanna be doing,’” says Johansen. “I was always encouraging of his solo pursuits, so there was never a moment where we broke up.”

After forming the Criminals in 1977, Sylvain released his self-titled solo debut in 1979, its sprightly powerpop led by Teenage News, the last single he’d written for the Dolls, followed by ’81’s Syl Sylvain And The Teardrops, then 1997’s (Sleep) Baby Doll. His catalogue is full of one-offs, including 1984’s electro-pop single as Roman Sandals.

Sylvain’s good nature always allowed him to share stages with former bandmates, but he was overjoyed when the New York Dolls returned to play Morrissey’s Meltdown festival in 2004 (shortly before bassist ‘Killer’ Kane succumbed to leukaemia).

have been bitter, but he wasn’t.”

GLEN MATLOCK

and fashion. He talked about how the Dolls never had financial success, but said, ‘We had success in that we were groundbreaking, everybody thinks we were cool, looked great and started everything.’He could have been bitter, but he wasn’t, and that’s what attracted me to him, and him to me, because I could possibly be accused of being unhappy about the Pistols. But I’m not;you did what you did, and that’s how the cookie crumbles sometimes.”

Johansen overcame a social media aversion to see it light up with tributes to Sylvain.

“It’s amazing. I’ve been thinking how it’s a shame he didn’t get to see how loved he was.

“I couldn’t possibly pick one memory of Syl,” he concludes.

“We had so many adventures, so many laughs and wrote so many great songs. We animated each other. Most of the time we were totally non-judgmental about each other;we were there in the moment, and it was beautiful.”

Kris Needs

P U E K

A W TO C I S U M L A E R ON TH E

DAVE BERRY BREAKFAST SH OW

1 O5 .8 FM, SMART SPEAKER & MOBILE

MOJO WO R K I N G

“It’s super patronising being described as a ‘confessional songwriter.’”

LAURA MARLING

FACT SHEET Title: Animal Due: Summer Songs: Animal / We Cannot Resist / Gamma Ray / Red Snakes / Paradise The Buzz: “It’s not a joke – it’s serious.

I see this record as a miniature journey through LUMP’s parallel universe.”

Mike Lindsay

Like it or… LUMP’s Laura Marling and (above) Mike Lindsay channel the “whizz bottery”.

LAURA MARLING AND TUNNG’S MIKE LINDSAY REANIMATE THE “SONIC WONKERY” OF LUMP Y FAVOURITE is Paradise”, says Laura Marling of the songs on LUMP’s upcoming long-player Animal. “The lyric made me laugh. I’m doing a Masters in Social Theory and I had a dream I met [controversial French psychoanalyst Jacques] Lacan on a bus. He offered me a cucumber sandwich and asked me out. Did I go? No, that would be like dating my therapist!”

“M

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A L SO WO R K I N G

16 MOJO

…speaking on Instagram Live, drummer Matt Helders said the ARCTIC MONKEYS were in “the early stages of trying to write a record… we’re eager to do it.We would have been doing it by now in a normal time…” Method Man (right) gave Detroit journalist Jemele Hill an update on the new WU-TANG album, “We were working

A more visceral sequel to 2018’s surrealist, self-titled debut, Animal sees Marling re-teamed with Mike Lindsay of folktronica band Tunng. The title references the imaginary, yeti-like beast for which the duo is named, and which Marling describes as “this unconscious representation of the two of us.”

“It’s fun having this other member that has its own personality,” Lindsay agrees, the pair talking to MOJO via Zoom.

on something, I did two songs but I haven’t heard back in months… that’s how we work…” JOHN FOGERTY is working on new songs for his first all-new album since 2007’s Revival…

CHANCE THE RAPPER said he’s been working on music with Dionne Warwick after they gassed on Twitter:“We’re working, apparently, on a song,” he told Stephen Colbert.

“It’s a huge, immense honour…”

Recorded at Lindsay’s basement studio in Margate immediately pre-lockdown, Animal teems with what Marling calls Lindsay’s “whizz-bottery and sonic wonkery.” Lindsay says influences included veteran US composers Jon Hassell and Suzanne Ciani, the latter a one-time sound designer for Space Invader games. “There’s this other-worldly, new age element to Ciani’s music and personality,” he says. “I love her synthesis, but also her aura.” Gear-wise, the fantastical, low-twanging motifs on We Cannot Resist and Gamma Ray were processed using a treasured new gizmo. “When Tony Visconti brought an Eventide H949 [harmonizer] to the sessions for Low he told Bowie it ‘fucked with the fabric of space and time,’” says Lindsay. “It’s all over our record.”

Intriguingly, the lexicon employed in Marling’s field of study also impacted.

“Psychoanalysis is full of words that seem out of context” she says. “I had a nice little glossary of those.”

LUMP formed on a whim in 2016 after Lindsay met Marling at the London O2 while she was in solo acoustic mode supporting Neil Young. It was Marling’s [then] five-yearold goddaughter who named them, and Marling later fashioned LUMP – a 7ft tall hairy beast with a kind of totemistic power – from chicken wire and tulle. “I wanted people to see that it wasn’t artistic lunacy or some pretentious concept,” she says. “I’m invested in LUMP not being me so that I can transcend things I don’t get to transcend as Laura Marling, like defending my gender. It’s super-patronising being described as a ‘confessional songwriter’, but from this standpoint I can be a cultural critic rather than exploring people’s feelings.”

Both Lindsay and Marling are keen to tour Animal when circumstances allow, especially since shows in support of their debut were such a success. “I’d expected a nightmare,” says Marling. “Being from an acoustic background I didn’t know if I’d be able to sing over all of Mike’s stuff, but I can, and I enjoy it.”

James McNair

GARY NUMAN’s Intruder arrives in May. He describes its theme as, “If Earth could speak, and feel things the way we do, what would it say?”… the new OZZY OSBOURNE album will feature Metallica’s Rob Trujillo on bass, and drums by Foo Fighter Taylor Hawkins and Red Hot Chili Pepper Chad Smith… MANIC STREET PREACHERS’14th album continues apace.

Declaring, “still early days, more

writing and much more recording to complete,” they shared song titles including Blank Diary Entry, Orwellian, Still Snowing In Sapporo and Quest For Ancient Colour… NICK CAVE (left) revealed in his regular online update, “I did go into the studio – with Warren [Ellis] – to make a record.It’s called CARNAGE” …he’s no longer touring, but NEIL DIAMOND is working on songs for a new album…

C U LT H E RO E S

Middle Ages Against The Machine:(main) Gryphon in their heyday,with Brian Gulland (top right) and Richard Harvey (bottom left); (inset) the current band.

medievalry. The band toured internationally with Steeleye Span, The Mahavishnu Orchestra and, most of all, their good friends Yes (“I used to come out and play bassoon on their encore, Roundabout,” says Gulland, “not sure anyone could hear me…”)

But Gryphon were under pressure from their label Transatlantic to sound more commercial.

CRUMHORNY Their response, ’75’s DEVILS! Raindance, lacked clear direction, though it contains Gryphon’s merrie Harvey’s mighty Yes-meetstriptych.

Mike Oldfield epic (Ein Gryphon Klein) Heldenleben. Their (TRANSATLANTIC, 1973) last effort, the un-GryphonThe sound of the like Treason, hit the brick wall ’70s – the 1470s – with crumof punk in 1977. horns a go-go, After the split, Harvey medieval made a name as a first-call originals and skilful tributes – TV and film soundtrack comJuniper Suite a jaunty standout. poser. As talk of a reunion Midnight began to simmer, he was too Mushrumps occupied with The Da Vinci (TRANSATLANTIC, 1974) Code to commit fully.

The gorgeous Gulland, meanwhile, worked 19-minute title with Hans Zimmer, played track, written for a Peter Hall saxes for the Nolans and production worked on the mid-’80s of The Tempest, blends folk Hello Tosh Got A Toshiba ancient and modern with prog advert with Ian Dury. Now ambition. Sounds as good now he’s is delighted to be back as anything from the era. with the new six-piece Red Queen To Gryphon. “We were never Gryphon Three that big a band – a well-kept (TRANSATLANTIC, 1974) secret,” he says. “But people Four instrumentals loosely follow seem to remember us.”

F YOU THINK what modern music needs is more crumhorns and a vocalist who solos on bassoon, these are joyous times.

Gryphon, exotic medieval-folk outliers in the great prog boom of the early 1970s, are back and chomping at the bit. “We’re dying to get out there and play,” says founder member Brian Gulland. “We haven’t played north of Birmingham since 1976.”

The band has just released Get Out Of My Father’s Car! (named for a group in-joke dating back to 1972), which followed 2018’s well-received comeback Reinvention. The Gryphon that has risen from the ashes retains the group’s virtuosity on antique recorders, whistles, flutes, and, of course, crumhorns, while veering towards more modern folk influences. Of their four-decade recording gap, Gulland wryly observes, “a little reflection is always a good thing.”

The group began when two talented early

I

“If Henry VIII was in a band it would be Gryphon.”

music enthusiasts met at London’s Royal College of Music. Gulland and Richard Harvey wanted to celebrate and update the music of Olde England. Adding guitarist Graeme Taylor and Dave Oberlé on drums, the multi-instrumentalists recorded their self-titled debut in 1973, which caused enough stir to get them on Radios 1, 2, 3 and 4 in the same week. “If Henry VIII was in a band it would be Gryphon,” said their publicist.

Other influences soon emerged. “I saw Yes at the Roundhouse Dagenham just after [1971’s] The Yes Album,” says Gulland. “I was completely floored like I never had been with any rock outfit.” The growing influence of Jon Anderson and friends can be heard on the next two albums, much revered by prog fans today.

On 1974’s Midnight Mushrumps and Red Queen To Gryphon Three, electric keyboards and guitars increasingly overshadow the

a chess game with electronic textures dominating over acoustic.

Complex, clever, with the clout to satisfy a hall full of rock fans.

John Bungey Get Out of My Father’s Car! is released by Talking Elephant

Andy Holdsworth Photography, Getty

AFTER 4 0 YEARS, MEDIEVAL PROG BEASTS GRYPHON DECLARE THE REVELS OPEN

MOJO 17

creatively. But we have what we call ‘the kids’,namely our songs,and there’s never been a time when Hall and Oates were off the road.

OH, DARYL! Hall’s five gold bars 1 Love Don’t

Love Nobody The Spinners (ATLANTIC, 1 9 7 4 ) 2 I’m Still In Love With You AlGreen (HI, 1 9 7 2 )

3 What’s Going On

Marvin Gaye (TAMLA, 1 9 7 1 )

4 Can We Still

Be Friends Todd Rundgren (BEARSVILLE, 1978)

5 River JoniMitchell (REPRISE, 1 9 7 1 )

OATES’ NOTES John’s jumping jives 1 The Claw

Jerry Reed (RCA, 1 9 6 9 ) 2 Breaking The Rules Jack Savoretti (FULLFILL, 2 0 1 2 )

3 Breathe Again

Sara Bareilles (EPIC, 2010)

Your first meeting (in 1967) was eventful to say the least.

DH:It was the Adelphi Ballroom in West Philly. People would lip-sync records to a crowd,which was popular then,but a gang fight broke up. People were swinging clubs,so we got out of there fast, and first met in the elevator. We discovered we’d both grown up in the suburbs,close to each other, and we both liked Philadelphia music,which was mostly soul and R&B. John brought in the Americana folk thing that I didn’t know much about. We roomed together as friends before we ever collaborated musically.

Daryl,you’ve said you resent being called ‘blue-eyed soul’.

DH:I stand by that. What we do,I call rock’n’soul. I’m a soul singer,the fact I have blue eyes is irrelevant.

4 State Of The Art

After your first bout of Top 10 success in 1977,it took until 1981’s Kiss On My List to truly get going.

(COLUMBIA, 1 9 8 9 ) JO:With Sara Smile and Rich Girl, we’d gone out to California,where they had the best studios and players. But we wanted our own live band,and to produce ourselves. Back in New York,we already had 10 years of experience,and you gotta factor in the zeitgeist,New York’s kinetic street energy of the early ’80s – beatboxes, breakdancing,rap. Drum machines were changing the notion of rhythm. It wasn’t the organic ebb and flow of soul,but an unrelenting robotic,pulsing feel,so we went with that.

(A.E.I.O.U.) Jim James (ATO, 2 0 1 3 ) 5 Shotgun Down The Avalanche Shawn Colvin

DARYL HALL AND JOHN OATES Philly’s rock-soul duo talk gang fights, Live Aid and NY heat.

HO WAS the most successful singles act ofthe ’80s after Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince? And, says Billboard, the most successful duo ever? Daryl Hall and John Oates, both times. Yet such mega-success arguably obscures the pair’s musical prowess, from the folk-soul hybrid of 1973’s Abandoned Luncheonette and the pop acumen of Sara Smile and (’77’s debut US Number 1) Rich Girl on to big hits including Kiss On Your List, Private Eyes and Maneater. Separated by Covid, a nervy Hall is in upstate New York and prefers audio-only communication;in Connecticut, a more relaxed Oates chats via video. “We’ve always seen ourselves as two individuals working together,” explains the latter. “It’s always been Daryl Hall and John Oates on the covers of our records, never Hall & Oates.”

Mick Rock

W

Has lockdown inspired your songwriting, or the opposite?

18 MOJO

Daryl Hall:The opposite. I’m renovating an old house,which I find is a lot like making a record. I occasionally pick up a guitar and sing a little,but I’ve decided that these times are so tumultuous that whatever is valid after all this has passed,I’m not going to come up with it right now.

John Oates:Lockdown opened up opportunities I’d never have taken if I’d been on tour as usual. I’ve been writing,collaborating on Zoom,working on a movie project. Daryl and I had been preparing a new album,but it came to a grinding halt. I thought we could still try some stuff,but he felt we’d do our best work when physically together.

There hasn’t been an album of Hall and Oates originals since 2003 – what gives?

DH:We called our production company Two-Headed Monster,and we didn’t want to become a two-headed monster. As one matures, you become more yourself,

People magazine’s Live Aid cover featured The Rolling Stones,Dylan,Tina Turner, Madonna – and you. Was the level of fame overwhelming?

DH:Sometimes it felt like the eye of the hurricane,but I was never overwhelmed.

I always felt,what can I do with this?

Where can it take me?

JO:We enjoyed success and what came with it,but I’d missed out a lot on life. The only place left to go was down – no one can sustain that level of popularity. When it all ended,it also felt amazing. I remarried,had a kid,built a house in Colorado…

“We didn’t want to become a two-headed monster.”

DARYL HALL

Tell me something you’ve never told an interviewer before.

DH:My nickname on tour is Daryl-pedia. I’m a bookworm and I love history.

JO:Don’t judge me by our music of the ’80s,because you don’t know who I really am.

Martin Aston Daryl Hall and John Oates are celebrating their 1 9 8 0 song You Make My Dreams amassing one billion streams worldwide.

Alex Paterson The Orb’s Doctor vibes over Brian Eno’s Music For Films (EG,1978).

It was June 1980 and I was a roadie for Killing Joke. I was at a party in a high-rise tower block in the Ruhr, in a place called Neuss, which is a suburb of Düsseldorf.

Killing Joke were playing this club, the Okie Dokie – the very first place I ever saw a club of people robot-dancing!

EG, the label, was on my radar as Killing Joke had just signed to them.

Anyway, I discovered this very plain, grey-sleeved album and it was Music For Films. I have to say, I was very inebriated and I had done some LSD at the time. So I stuck it on the turntable and went out onto the balcony overlooking the Ruhr factories, and I had a vision of the future, basically! I’d never heard anything that was so sparsely beautiful. It was one of those moments where I really did get it, an epiphany, my version of seeing God. That pushed the boat out for me. I was lucky, I had the keys to the cupboard, so I went to EG and I got every ambient thing there was, Eno’s Ambient 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , and then Michael Brook, Frippertronics…

I became addicted. Those moments don’t happen that often. Another was when Run-D.M.C. started off when we were setting up for the Def Jam tour at the [Brixton] Academy, hearing an 808 bass drum for the first time. [1981 Eno and David Byrne LP] My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts wasn’t too far off as another album that changed my life.

In the early ’80s I worked at EG and did get the occasional nod from Eno. Later, he was sitting behind me at a bar and I had a [CD wallet] with me, so I opened it at the four Eno albums, stuck it behind his head and had a picture of the back of his head with this record! But I didn’t say hello, silly sod that I am. Way ahead of the game, he was. The older you get with Eno, the better it sounds.

As told to Ian Harrison

W H AT G O E S O N !

MARTIN GORE ON MONKEYS, BEING BACK ON THE MUTE LABEL AND DEPECHE MODE OST MUSICIANS have found that sense to be on Mute,” he says. “Y’know the pandemic has affected their Daniel [Miller, Mute supremo] has been a creativity – some artistically turbofriend now for over 40 years, he’s still there charged, others left blocked. For Martin Gore, as, I don’t know what we’d call him… an Depeche Mode’s chief songwriter of 40 years, executive director or something. So he’s still it’s led to a lack of motivation to write lyrics. very omnipresent in our lives.”

“Possibly because I haven’t really been As for the band – after their most recent doing anything,” he says, talking to MOJO album, 2017’s Spirit, and a year-long tour in from his Santa Barbara home studio Electric support of it – they’re currently shut down.

Ladyboy. “I’ve been living the same day “When Depeche decides to do something, (laughs). Usually, I’m not the most sociable it’s like a big machine that has to get revved person, but the fact that you’re just stuck up,” he says. “And it’s very difficult to rev that at home and you see the same handful of up when everything’s so unknown. I think people, maybe it’s just not very inspiring.” it’ll be a while before we do anything.”

Consequently, Gore has focused his He doesn’t fancy remotely-recording an efforts on a five-track EP of brooding, ’80s LP either. “There’s something about going cinematic synthscapes, The Third Chimpan- into the studio and working as a band that zee, which features his voice electronically kind of solidifies the relationships and gets mangled beyond recognition. Each track is you ready for the next phase,” he says. named after a species of primate and its “I think it would be weird for us, working colourfully messy artwork was painted by remotely, if it was a whole album. Maybe an actual brush-wielding capuchin monkey, on a track – that could work.

Pockets Warhol, in an Ontario sanctuary.

“We stay in contact a bit,” he adds. “I’ve The EP’s name is lifted spoken to Dave and he’s fine from popular scientist Jared and Fletch is fine. Y’know, Diamond’s 1991 book I’ve been saying that I feel exploring the primate kind of guiltily fortunate, as origins of human behaviour. a band we don’t have to “I remember reading The panic. We just wait and see Third Chimpanzee back in what happens and make the ’90s,” says Gore, adding plans accordingly.” that his appropriation of its Has Gore gained any title, “made me kind of insight in his 40-years-plus laugh, first of all. But also, of being a songwriter and I felt that it was a slight musician to help him commentary on humans by through uncertain times?

“Depeche… calling it that, and then having “Oh God, I don’t know all the tracks named after it’s like a big really,” he laughs. “Maybe, monkeys. I like the idea of ‘never assume anything’.” machine that it blurring the lines, really.”

Tom Doyle The EP is out on Mute, has to get The Third Chimpanzee is out now Depeche Mode’s exclusive revved up.” on Mute home from 1981 to 2013.

“Whenever I decide to do a MARTIN GORE solo project it makes perfect

M

The Orb’s Abolition Of The Royal Familia – Guillotine Mixes is out on April 9 on Cooking Vinyl

Blurring the lines:Martin Gore and (inset) painting primate Pockets Warhol.

Travis Shinn, Courtesy Story Book Farm Primate Sanctuary

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

W H AT G O E S O N !

Kangol Horde:LL Cool J (hands on hips) and friends, Noho,New York,1987; (insets from top right) Chuck D outside Def Jam, Elizabeth Street,NYC,1986; boombox boy,Coney Island ‘Crack is Wack’concert,’86.

Janette Beckmanchooses her golden age hip-hop sure shots.

EWS THAT the Paris 2024 Olympic Games will embrace breakdancing proves what old rap heads knew anyway:the golden age of hip-hop exerts an unusually strong pull on the popular imagination.

One of its essential chroniclers was London-born Janette Beckman. Already a noted punk snapper when she saw the New York City Rap Tour in London in 1982,by 1983 she was resident in Gotham,capturing its exploding music scene on film. “There were some very serious things going on,but in the ’80s hip-hop was fun,” says Beckman down the line from NY. “It was still like punk in a way, before money changed everything.”

Her Hip Hop Years: New York 1982-1992, published by select photographic imprint Café Royal Books, presents her archival pick of images of those days.

Stars include Salt-N-Pepa, KRS-One and DJ Scott La Rock,and a young Busta

Credit in here

N

Rhymes,as well as the accompanying portraits of LL Cool J with posse and Public Enemy’s Chuck D. But there are also anonymous rap fans and unknowns among the images,some previously unpublished,revealing deeper detail, not least in its evocation of a vanished, pre-gentrified New York.

“The people I photographed really were not famous,” says Beckman. “It was the beginning of their careers,hip-hop was just starting to marinate. We didn’t have hair or make-up in any of the pictures,people just came with their own personal styles and hip-hop attitude. I’m grateful they trusted me.”

She’s also full of praise for publishers Café Royal, run from north-western English seaside town Southport by main man Craig Atkinson. The publisher specialises in British documentary photography,releasing around 70 word-free,A5 format “affordable, democratic,utilitarian” titles a year. The remit has taken in Madchester,Blitz Kids and ravers,while non-musical examples include holiday camps,

“Hip-hop was fun, like punk before money changed everything.”

football fans,druids and the 1997 Sensation Show. “You have complete freedom to put whatever you want in,as long as you follow the format,” says Beckman. “It’s curated by the photographers,which nobody really does. And I think [the books] are beautiful objects,I really do.”

Having put out collections of her portraits of punks,Mods and NY street life through Café Royal,Beckman is now working on a new set of her images of public protest,from Rock Against Racism onto the anti-Trump demonstrations of 2020. As MOJO calls,she says she recently spoke to Christopher ‘Kid’Reid from Kid ‘n Play,comedic hi-top fade kings of 1990’s House Party movie. “He was saying,‘I remember that photoshoot we did,it was so great,’” she says. “He said, ‘You let us be who we wanted to be.’

I guess that’s what happened.”

Ian Harrison Get Hip Hop Years: New York 1 9 8 2 -1 9 9 2 and much more from caferoyalbooks. com. Follow Janette on Instagram at janettephoto

Janette Beckman (3 )

Rap Of Ages

MOJO 21

MOJO R I S I N G

“There are no rules with me. I try to be as open as possible.”

LADY BLACKBIRD

FACT SHEET For fans of Billie Holiday, Chaka Khan, Gladys Knight ● “I grew up singing,” she says of a house that rocked to the soul greats.

Yet it was Dominik Hauser’s famous jingle, The Oscar Mayer Wiener Song, that proved her first obsession, aged four. ● While her ultimate collaboration would be with Elton John, Brittany Howard is not far behind: “She got me through the pandemic! I’m the biggest fan.” ● Black Acid Soul’s title harks back to the Twitter hashtags Chris Seefried posted after their initial sessions: “It was another piece of the puzzle.” ●

something with it. Chris played this weird-sounding bass key and we did a couple of demo takes. It instantly felt right. Like a rebirth.”

And while her vocal was later augmented by a band including Miles Davis pianist Deron Johnson and bassist Jonny Flaugher in Prince’s favourite Studio 3 at Sunset Studios, the rest of Black Acid Soul her teens, working on several was wrapped quickly from live albums by Christian hip-hopper takes. “That was amazing in itself,” TobyMac. But when a move to Los she gushes. “I had never recorded Angeles and an album deal with Epic like that. It was magical.” ended prematurely, with just one Covid-permitting, she’s eager slick R&B single, Boomerang, going to take the album on the road, to radio in 2013, she went back to the shedding her past for good. “There drawing board. “I tried different KEY TRACKS are no rules with me. I express what producers, different sounds and ● Blackbird I feel and try to be as open as styles. Just trying to crack the code.” ● Collage possible. Coming from such a small ● Beware The Things started falling into place Stranger/Black town and feeling like a black sheep, in late 2019, when producer Chris Acid Soul you try and conform to the point Seefried asked her to demo his where you almost disappear. But if late-night R&B/jazz hybrid Nobody’s you keep going you can break through that.

Sweetheart (“The reactions were wild!”) and As a blackbird you can fly away. You’re free.” she suggested they tackle Nina Simone’s stark Andy Cowan protest anthem Blackbird in a similar quiet storm style. “It’s one of my favourite songs,” Lady Blackbird’s Black Acid Soul is released in March on Foundation Music she says. “I always felt like I needed to do

MEET NEW JAZZ STAR LADY BLACKBIRD:SHE WAS ONLY WAITING FOR THIS MOMENT TO ARISE! AT IN FRONT of a giant Billie Holiday portrait, and with a tiny dog called Sir Reginald on her lap, Lady Blackbird is holding forth on her greatest passion. “I’m a real lover of music and I find my place in all the genres. I feel all of them,” says the singer born as Marley Munroe. “But Lady Blackbird is about stripping away everything. Going right back to basics and taking it raw.”

Rawness and emotion are at the crux of Black Acid Soul, a slow-burning debut from a jazz diva whose voice bridges Chaka Khan’s wildness with Roberta Flack’s expressiveness: “the Grace Jones of jazz”, according to BBC 6 Music tastemaker Gilles Peterson. Munroe escaped her small hometown of Farmington, New Mexico, after singing at all the “fairs, weddings, churches and funerals” it could offer. She took on professional singing jobs in

Christine Solomon

S

24 MOJO

”It was magical”: Lady Blackbird takes vocal flight.

MOJO PLAYLIST

LIMINAL POST-POSTPUNKS DRY CLEANING WRITE LISTS,DESTROY OUTH LONDONERS Dry Cleaning went met guitarist Tom Dowse a decade later. She to America in March 2020,just in time was getting over a “horrible” break up and for Covid to stop everything. “It was like working as a picture researcher and illustration the apocalypse,” says their singular voice lecturer when Dowse suggested she join in Florence Shaw of their last gig,at Los Angeles 2018. Taking early lyrics from Michael Bernard venue El Cid on March 12. “People running Loggins’list-‘zine Fears Of Your Life,she was down the streets with shopping carts full of soon augmenting her stash of piquant words food,torrential rain – which is not normal for and phrases from mass-market mags,the high LA. We had a massive turnout. It must have street,below-the-line YouTube comments been one of the last gigs on the planet.” and elsewhere. After 2019 EPs Sweet Princess Then,she says,a sudden and Boundary Road Snacks stop. Shaw,who admits to And Drinks,they signed to “Lockdown… indie 4AD and recorded New disassociating in anxiety-inducing situations anyway,has Long Leg in Rockfield Studios seemed an ambivalent attitude to the in Wales with John Parish to mirror general confinement. during the “first lockdown”.

“Lockdown has this weird Their debut is more what was combination of drama and focused and accomplished happening in dullness,” she says. “Somehow than the EPs,less driven by it seemed to mirror what was wayward energy. Now writing my mind.” happening in my mind.” more personal texts,Shaw FLORENCE SHAW The group’s ace new album says she adopts personas so New Long Leg manages many emotional themes aren’t “too perspectives. To tuneful-but-abrasive indie, traumatic to share. It’s interesting to think of Shaw free-associates hurt,alienation,food, myself as a character in the songs. Are you loneliness,body parts,fatbergs,the Antiques mysterious? Knowable? A friend? Or someone Roadshow,Brexit and more. “I love that list who’d tell you to fuck off? But your innermost format,” she says,“which is just being direct stuff,your subconscious,is still splattered out about the contents of your mind,in a way.” on a plate. Even though most of it’s in riddle Ripe with angst,humour and tenderness, form,you suddenly think,Oh Christ,I feel its humdrum exteriors illuminate interior quite naked,like an unhealed scab.” ambivalences. As MOJO discovers,she’s happy And like so many others,she would love to for her spoken,southern English delivery to start gigging again. “I would play to a bus be compared to Neil Tennant. “In daily life you stop queue right now,” she says of live do feel extreme emotions of anger or sadness performance’s cathartic benefits. “Disclosing or love,and you’re not screaming and losing things,I get a huge it,” she continues. “You have to repress them. vulnerability hangover.

FACT SHEET ● For fans of: Life So,it felt realer to me to talk about those But once I’m over that, Without Buildings, feelings in a kind of measured way.”

I want it again,like Pylon, Art Brut, Shaw knew drummer Nick Buxton and anything that gives Sleaford Mods ● Florence’s father bassist Lewis Maynard when they were art you a hangover.”

Phil was in mid-’8 0 s students in London in the late noughties,and Ian Harrison

Steve Gullick, Alamy

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synth-poppers Swimming To France and Maynard’s dad Pete is a soul DJ. ● Shaw likes the group’s name because it’s, “kind of an invisible name for a thing that not many people use.

And you go in one and it’s like a little, boring theme park with its own smells, machines and atmosphere. And they’re terrible for the planet, so it’s weird and problematic too.” ● The group’s taut, energised art rock rewards listening too, with Dowse’s guitar suggesting a meeting of John McGeoch and Ricky Wilson of The B-5 2 ’s.

KEY TRACKS Scratchcard Lanyard ● Strong Feelings ● Viking Hair ●

Extra spin doctors: Dry Cleaning (from left) Lewis Maynard, Nick Buxton,Florence Shaw,Tom Dowse.

Ready to transmit: the month’s best sou l, synths and jams.

1

JOHN FOG ERTY

WEEPING IN THE PROMISED LAND

Saying good riddance to the ex-Prez, Fog’s first new song in eight years pours oil on the waters with a hymnal for stricken America.

Find it: YouTube

2

BILLY NOMATES HEELS

First taste of the Emergency Telephone EP by Sleaford Mods pal/force of nature, Tor Maries.

Lyrical defiance, Numan-y beat and Dusty-level soul: still feels like punk rock.

Find it: YouTube

3

IMELDA MAY AND NOEL G ALLAG HER FT. RONNIE WOOD JUST ONE KISS

Noely G and the former rockabilly in a carnal duet for the lockdown blues. Rolling Stone Ronnie weighs in with a solo.

Find it: YouTube

4

XIU XIU FT. LIZ HARRIS

A BOTTLE OF RUM

From new duets album, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart recruits CA neighbour for pop both otherworldly and familiar (to ’8 0 s 4 AD fans).

Find it: YouTube

5

PINO PALLADINO & BLAKE MILLS

JUST WRONG

Spaced-out jam from superstar bassist, Rough & Rowdy Ways guitarist and friends. Like an ambient jazz-funk take on The Beach Boys’ Let’s Go Away For A While.

Find it: YouTube

6

CABARET VOLTAIRE

BILLION DOLLAR

More old skool acid-Cabs action, as a malfunctioning upright games console megaphones its madness by night. Off the Shadow Of Funk EP. Find it: streaming services

7

SQUID FT. MARTHA SKYE MURPHY

8

HAMISH HAWK CATERPILLAR

From Sussex, itchy funk becomes etherised- glide becomes screaming chaos. Nutzoid video, too. From the imminent Dan Careyproduced debut Bright Green Field.

Find it: YouTube

Prolix, post-punk-informed pop with whooping vocals and driving bass from Edinburgh artist. Video boasts black & white Escher visuals and David Byrne dance moves.

Find it: YouTube

9

BITCHIN BAJAS JAMMU

Your essential lockdown de-stress: an analogue bubblebath by Chicago’s new age synth emissaries, live in Brussels, 2 0 1 8 .

Find it: Bandcamp

10

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON

SUNDAY MORNIN’ COMIN’ DOWN

He officially retired in January, but he’ll always be with us in songs like this masterpiece of piercing, hungover melancholy.

Find it: streaming services

MOJO 25

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THE MOJO INTERVIEW

Transformed by acid, brainwashed by Crass, anointed by fame, spinning in The Damned’s revolving door – it’s all gravy to Croydon’s barmiest, now “sixty-fuckin’-six” years young.

“I don’t think I’ve ever grown up,” admits Captain Sensible.

Interview by PAT GILBERT • Portrait by JILL FURMANOVSKY

Getty

I

N AN APARTMENT BLOCK HIGH UP ON ONE OF being his forte, it is only fitting, then, that in 1982 he shot to UK Brighton’s hills, Captain Sensible is giving MOJO a tour Number 1 as a solo artist with a throwaway pop cover of Happy of his home. Its funky psychedelic décor, it transpires, Talk from the South Pacific soundtrack. Household fame ensued.

As a decades-in-the-waiting reunion of the original 1976 James/ is inspired by Austin Powers’ groovy shag-pad in the Sensible/Scabies/Vanian Damned line-up hoves into view this cryogenically suspended spy’s first film. summer, it seems timely for MOJO to peel away the complex layers “Like [Powers’creator] Mike Myers, my love of the ’60s that swaddle the man born Raymond Burns in Balham in July is tinged with regret that I wasn’t there,” he says, in cheery south 1954. Sporting a Crystal Palace football top and heavy-framed London tones. “I was at school when the Summer of Love was going specs, Sensible – so dubbed during an anarchic coach trip to the on and I used to read about it. Fucking hell – I want to go down the August 1976 Mont-de-Marsan punk festival – is nothing but Middle Earth and UFO club! But I was 12. If I’m lucky enough to upbeat, candid and entertaining for our two-hour encounter. meet any of the ’60s people, I always ask them, What was it like?!”

Alluding, for the first time, to the childhood traumas that That The Damned’s guitarist is infatuated by the psychedelic era helped shape him, he will poignantly admit, “I don’t think I’ve ever to the extent he’s painted his flat with giant op-art spots and lurid grown up, because I’m still trying to make sense of those days…” candy stripes should come as no surprise to fans au fait with the pioneering punk group’s extraordinary late-’70s/early-’80s But mostly, he spends our conversation marvelling at the strange triptych of acid-dipped albums – Machine Gun Etiquette, and unpredictable path his life has taken – while ruefully admitting The Black Album and Strawberries. to being, at times, “a complete arsehole”.

But the Captain’s gift for psychedelic “The name Captain Sensible?” he WE’RE NOT WORTHY fretboard activity and serpentine prog rock chuckles. “It is ironic, you know…”

Psych pal Robyn Hitchcock arrangements is not – it’s fair to say – what the Your dad’s job was maintaining street lighting, lauds “sensible” Sensible. world best knows him for. His public image is but as a young man he’d occasionally worked as “The Damned were punks an extra alongside Bond star Roger Moore. Were that of punk rock’s grinning loon, possessed with a psych gene. Captain there acting ambitions in the Burns family? of a penchant for mayhem and an on-stage came on-stage with Soft No (laughs). He’d tell me stories about Roger and fashion sensibility that has, beyond his Boys, New Year’s Eve 1980; a few others sitting around playing cards and he grabbed my hair, fell over trademark red beret and plastic shades, drinking, then grumbling when they had to go on and was dumped outside in variously involved tutus, nurse’s uniforms or, set. My dad was very much part of south London the snow by roadies. He was even more alarmingly, nothing whatsoever a great collaborator:we’d sit up writing lyrics pub culture. Someone must have said to him, for his solo records. He’s shrewd, fair, a good (Cockney geezer) “Hey Tom, there’s a right old ➢ covering his modesty. Contrary behaviour old-Left Labour man:sensible, in a word.”

MOJO 29

➣

caper going down at Shepperton where they pay you loads of money to sit around and do fakk all.” (Laughs) The other job he had was a waiter at Raymond’s Revue Bar in Soho.

That’s why I’m called Raymond. I’m named after the strip club.

What was your childhood like? You’ve portrayed it in the past as being quite happy, trainspotting at Selhurst station, watching Crystal Palace, keeping rabbits.

I’d like to do my own book one day. But… it wasn’t all happy. You don’t get someone as wacky as myself who hasn’t had issues in childhood. (Pause) My mum had mental problems at a time when it wasn’t spoken about and was an embarrassment. She had paranoid schizophrenia, which came in unforgettable, traumatic episodes. She’d go completely berserk and get sectioned. She wouldn’t be around for a time, and me and my brother would end up in children’s homes. But when the family was running fine, it was great.

My mum and dad were lovely people.

When did music become important to you?

When I heard See Emily Play, You Really Got Me, and all those great Small Faces singles on the radio, there was only one thing I wanted to do – and that was play guitar for a living. I started playing in bands [before punk] with Johnny Moped and people like that, but I didn’t think I was that great on guitar – I’m a bit of a bluffer, really, I can’t do the really clever stuff. At school we all wanted to be bikers.

Psychedelia became a big part of the Damned sound – did you have your own psychedelic epiphany?

One night… it’s a bit hazy. But we were in a pub and nicked a car and drove down to Brighton. This was in [the early ’70s], when there were [LSD] microdots around, so I had a few trips. And it did change me. Before that I was more of a football hooligan, but acid made

me more thoughtful. It opened my mind to more interesting kinds of music. I got into Soft Machine, Egg, people like that.

Rat Scabies, your co-worker at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls in the mid-’70s, was your route into punk. Did you instantly get punk?

I cleaned the toilets and Rat cleaned the floors.

He went up to London one day to play with these guys and came back with his hair cut short. I couldn’t make sense of it. If you had short hair in 1975/76, no girl would look at you.

He said, “If you meet this guy Brian [James], you’ll understand. There’s going to be a revolution in music.” I had these long, corkscrew curls, no way was I getting my hair cut! But Brian saw it as a sign of commitment.

When you saw what Brian James and Rat were doing together musically in April 1976, did it seem as radical as history suggests?

The first time I was introduced to Brian, at his flat in Kilburn, he strummed me some of his songs on an acoustic guitar. New Rose, Fan Club… I could just imagine it with a full band.

He was doing something totally new on guitar, Chuck Berry on speed. His technique was glorious! I wouldn’t have played bass for just anyone… He was a visionary. There were a few in London at that time. Not me, but Tony James, Malcolm McLaren, a couple of the Pistols, Mick Jones. They knew what was coming.

Then Dave Vanian was added to the mix.

What did you make of him?

Dave’s a real gentleman. We rehearsed in a church hall in Lisson Grove. One day we discovered the switch that turned the church organ on. Dave was very interested in that, the noise it would make. It gave me an insight into what the future might be – his eyes really lit up.

Vanian recalls your Captain Sensible persona taking charge at the second Damned gig at St Albans School Of Art on July 8, 1976. You kicked the social secretary

A LIFE IN PICTURES

2

in the balls and poured beer over your head. Was that a conscious transformation into someone else?

No, I don’t remember that (laughs). I’m always getting told stories of terrible things I’ve done after large amounts of beverages. But I did twig very early on that I wasn’t the best-looking bloke in the world, and not the greatest musician, but that if I did something diabolical on-stage it would be me who had his picture in the press and not Brian or Dave. And I liked that (laughs). Dave once described me as an “incorrigible self-publicist”. Quite right!

What do you recall of that initial rush of being the first punk band to release a single, New Rose, and LP, Damned Damned Damned, and to tour the UK and US? It was hard work and it wasn’t glamorous. We had no money. We’d be carrying the drums up to the top deck of the bus on the way to pub gigs. Brian’s girlfriend would give him a lift to the gig and he’d say to us, “Get a taxi!” We’d say, “We can’t! You’re the one with all the money from the publishing advance, ’cos you write all the songs. We’re fucking skint, mate.” Also, I didn’t think we were doing anything important.

I was just doing something that wasn’t cleaning toilets. It was a way out for someone who was relatively uneducated with few skills.

Who were your favourites of the other early punk bands?

I used to slag off The Clash a lot, but secretly I really liked them. In fact, I would have liked to have been in The Clash. I always got on really well with them, and I rather liked the idea of changing the world through rock’n’roll. The Damned had a song called Politics that Brian wrote, but I didn’t agree with its sentiments [“give me fun not anarchy”, etc]. We got on great with The Stranglers as well.

The story was that for The Damned’s second album, Music For Pleasure, you asked for Syd

3

Courtesy of Dave Berk, Getty (2 ), Adrian Boot/Urbanimage.tv, Peter Gravelle/Idols/Avalon, Avalon (2 ), Shutterstock (2 )

The Captain’s log: acting Sensible.

1 2

Young Raymond Burns decides against a dip in the ponds, Clapham Common.

“I didn’t think I was great on guitar”:(from left) Sensible, Johnny Moped and Xerxes strike a pre-punk pose.

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“Quite a schizoid career”: Captain Sensible, The Damned’s best dressed bassist in town.

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“We went through with it”:(from left) Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian, Captain, Lu Edmonds, Lol Coxhill (in shades), Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason and Brian James ponder Music For Pleasure.

left). “She was mad enough to get in the water with me.”

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It’s the trainspotter in him: Sensible has a train engine named after him, Hove, 2007.

The Captain with (centre) Jimmy Page at A Night Of A Thousand Vampires, London Palladium, October 28, 2019.

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Making a meal of it:at the cover shoot for The Damned’s first album, 1977.

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Smash it up:Marc Bolan at a Damned soundcheck during his UK tour for Dandy In The Underworld, 1977.

6 7

The Damned, 1979, with new bassist Algy Ward (far right).

Happy Talk!

Captain promotes his hit 45 with Dolly Mixture, Rachel Bor (far

30 MOJO

1 4

Barrett to produce you but ended up with Nick Mason… Surely that can’t be true?

It is. Believe it or not, we shared the same publisher as Pink Floyd. So we were in the control room at their studio in Britannia Row and heard the buzzer go. And we fully expected Syd Barrett to walk into that room. When his ex-colleague appeared instead… (Sigh; long pause) But we went through with it.

The next thing, The Damned are on Top Of The Pops, performing Smash It Up… Smash It Up was heading for the Top 10, then that week the whole record plant went on strike. It could have been a Number 1. But it was The Curse Of The Damned again.

Whenever anything went right for us, something bad would happen. We’d get a new roadie and the next thing you know something terrible had happened to them. Really.

Why did Brian turn his back on the band in February 1978? You seemed to have such a good thing going…

I have to hold my hand up – I can’t have been easy to work with at the time. Me and Rat were fucking horrible. A couple of menaces. You’d walk in a room and people would try and hide, in case something happened to them. There was nothing we wouldn’t do. People would get covered with all sorts of stuff. Squeezy ketchup and mustard bottles were good fun;fire extinguishers;beer;anything you could throw at people. XTC had an album launch with a huge cake made in the shape of their name, and someone had the bright idea of inviting me along.

That cake didn’t last long (guffaws).

That MGE line-up with Algy Ward on bass – he seemed even more out of control than

No, we just didn’t like repeating ourselves.

Every album was different. We were on a musical adventure. Paul [who returned to the line-up in 2017] makes a huge difference. He really thinks about his parts. He’s quite an impressive bass player. If Paul and Algy are Number 1 in the list of Damned bass players, I’m third. Or even fourth, as there were other good players as well.

None other than [film music maestro] Hans Zimmer is credited on The Black Album.

I guess he worked on Curtain Call, the 17-minute punk-prog epic…

We wanted to get some really psychedelic noises on the middle section. There was a synthesizer in the studio, but no one knew how to use it. He came in as a synth programmer. He had a sweater with a keyboard on the front (laughs) and delusions of grandeur. He was German but spoke in a hoity-toity aristocratic English accent:“Hello gentlemen, I’ve never worked with a punk band before! But I’m getting paid, so let’s get on with it!” We’d be in hysterics – “Come on Hans, you fucking wanker! Program that synth or you’ll be out on your fucking ear!” He’d be behind a Prophet-5, sweating, and we’d be throwing apple cores at him. It sounded good, though.

“You don’t get someone as wacky as myself who hasn’t had issues in childhood.”

You re-grouped in 1979 without Brian for the Machine Gun Etiquette sessions, with you, Rat and Vanian the songwriters.

Was that an easy transition?

It went far more smoothly than anyone expected. There was a lot of booze and whisky around. You’d be unrecordable after two bottles of whisky. But all of the experiments on that record seemed to work – and Mike Shipley [who went on to work with Aerosmith and Def Leppard] was a great engineer. I felt really comfortable in the studio on those sessions and have ever since.

you and Rat. Why did he leave?

I wouldn’t say that he was more out of control… he was an amazing bass player. The sound on that album is great – he played the bass on Love Song with a coin. But when it came to his [behaviour], Rat would say, (gruff voice) “If you push it any further, I’ll take you outside for fisticuffs.” One day Algy said, “Yeah, fine. Let’s go.” So they did. And that was him out of the band.

When Paul Gray came in on bass for The Black Album (1980) and Strawberries (1982), the music became this extraordinary, eloquent mix of punk, psych and prog rock.

Was that planned?

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8 7

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Did it irk you that bands like The Clash were breaking in America with the might of Epic behind them, and The Damned, forever stuck on indie labels like Stiff and Chiswick, weren’t?

I never complained about anything, really.

It was fun, I was getting paid to play guitar and all the beer was free. It was blooming marvellous. Comparing yourself to bigger bands – that negativity has never appealed to me. I didn’t really think about it. ➢

“Me and Rat [Scabies] were fucking horrible.

A couple of menaces.

You’d walk in a room and people would try and hide.” ➣

Your song on Strawberries, Life Goes On: is that a reflection of a personality that can overcome adversity?

I have mood-swings, who doesn’t? And I must have been pretty down when I wrote that one, but writing it cheered me up. I’ve always managed to make sense of things through music. I remember vividly the day Marc Bolan died. I was still living with my mum and dad.

Mum said, “Your mate – Roley or Boley – he’s died in a car crash.” [The Damned toured with Bolan in March 1977.] I went and locked myself in my bedroom and wrote a piece of music, which ended up as Smash It Up Part 1. As in smash the car up. It’s quite a sad piece of music, a deep little piece.

You’ve said spending time at Dial House, Crass’s commune in Essex, in 1981 had a profound effect on you – you became vegetarian and, much later in 2006, would even form your own protest party, the Blah!

Party. Did they politicise you?

They were just very nice people. We’d sit round having discussions. I’d never done that with The Damned! “What are your politics, Captain?”

“I’m a socialist. I used to deliver leaflets for the Labour Party.” “But don’t you think the Labour and Tory parties are two cheeks of the same buttock?” And they’d explain it to me. “You say you’re compassionate about animals, but that’s a leather jacket you’re wearing…” It was a week’s brain-washing session, but I have to thank them for it, as it’s stayed with me for the rest of my life.

The solo EP you made with Crass, This Is Your Captain Speaking, led to your working with the pop producer, Tony Mansfield, and ultimately to your first solo album and a Number 1 with Happy Talk. How did you meet Mansfield?

My German girlfriend, Kirsty, introduced me to him. He was in the band New Musik. They were playing the Fairfield Halls and we ended up

The Captain in Jill Furmanovsky’s studio in Kentish Town, December 2020;The Damned (below, from left) James, band associate Don Letts, Scabies, Sensible, Vanian at Chalk Farm Roundhouse to announce their reunion tour, October 21, 2020.

and said,“This is Captain Sensible from The Damned. He’s got some songs and you should be his producer.” We put together my first album in studio downtime in Tooting,and he got me the deal with A&M. Next minute I’m being given a 40 grand advance in used fivers and driven back to Croydon in a Securicor van (laughs).

And then you’re top of the hit parade!

Unbelievable! [A&M] lied me to Number 1.

They said someone else was going to release a cover of Happy Talk,which had been a filler track for my album,if I didn’t. I’d been told to go home and pick something out of my mum and dad’s record collection. Happy Talk was ‘their tune’,if you like.

Tony Mansfield transformed your music into the slick pop of the ’8 0 s. What did you think of him?

He had the sound of the moment and the craziness to go through with it. He was an eccentric. You hear stories about Joe Meek hearing Phil Spector’s records and going, “That fucking cunt’s nicked my sound! Is he in London? I’ll fucking kill him!” Mansfield was like that with Trevor Horn. He’d say to the engineer,“Do you have his number? Give me the phone,I’ll fucking give him a piece of my mind!” If you listen to the Crass EP,that’s what Women And Captains First would have sounded like without Mansfield’s genius.

Did you feel remorseful about becoming a household name while The Damned slogged on playing clubs and theatres?

Well,I slogged with them for another two years. Seeing posters saying “Tonight:Captain Sensible & The Damned” as you drove into town didn’t go down well. It was quite a schizoid career for a time. But I got absolutely knackered doing both things. I ended up collapsing with exhaustion. I was fucked. So I chose the career that was making money.

Were you balancing all this with a home life and kids?

I ended up running off with one of the [solo band] backing singers,Rachel [Bor] from Dolly Mixture. After we’d performed on a TV show in Utrecht,we went swimming in the sea at 2am, and that’s when I fell for her. Not a pretty beach,the one at Utrecht. She was mad enough to get in the water with me.

Jill Furmanovsky, Paul Harries

Your solo career ended in 1 9 8 6 when the A&M label shelved a third album and you retreated from public view for a while.

What happened?

The Damned were on MCA and doing really well,and I had no discernible career. I was pretty penniless and then a huge tax bill arrived. I had bailiffs at the door,it was all pretty grim,I had a young family to support.

I’m not that good with money – I’m a crazy tunesmith dreamer,head-in-the-clouds person. But I don’t remember it being a problem for us. We just lived a very frugal lifestyle for years. We were a happy bunch, living a hippy-dippy lifestyle.

How did you get out of debt?

One day someone rang and said,“Do you want to meet the people from Golden Wonder to do an advert for them?” It changed our lives, drastically. We readapted [solo rap hit] Wot for Wotsits. That advert ran for three years.

I couldn’t believe what they paid me the first time,but when they took up the option for the second and third years I got the same again.

Fucking hell! We bought a house in the country,a posh one as well!

You, Dave and Brian got together for a reunion tour of the States in September 1 9 9 1 , but Brian left the tour after you

made a barbed comment on-stage about Guns N’Roses covering New Rose. Did you feel bad about it?

I say any amount of extraordinary garbage on-stage,it’s my job. That’s part of my shtick.

Brian had every right to be upset,as if GN’R recorded his song,which they did,he’d end up with some decent dosh. Who can begrudge him that? And if I jeopardised that,that’s just my… stupidity.

Your solo concept album, 1 9 9 3 ’s The Universe Of Geoffrey Brown, is an overlooked gem. Did you think of taking it to the stage?

It got that close to being made into a film for [TV alternative comedy franchise] The Comic Strip. It was my way of making sense of the dark years of Thatcher… (sigh) She was nothing to what’s happening now. I tried to make sense of it by looking into space and thinking she means nothing in the timescale of the universe. It’s just merely a blip. But love and

OFFICER CLASS The Captain’s medals of honour, awarded

by Pat Gilbert.

THE PUNK-PROG ONE

The Damned

★★★★ Machine Gun Etiquette (CHISWICK, 1 9 7 9 )

When The Damned re-grouped without their original leader Brian James, few expected fireworks. But the Sensible-Vanian-Scabies axis proved an explosive creative combo,pimping the old MC5 punk template with clever prog,goth and classic rock embellishments. Sensible’s switch from bass to guitar revealed a gifted player,taking flight on Plan 9 Channel 7’s stratospheric heavy metal outro.

THE OVERLOOKED MASTERPIECE

The Damned

★★★★★ Strawberries (BRONZE, 1 9 8 2 )

It speaks volumes that Robert Fripp guested on the sessions for The Damned most eloquent intertwining of pop, prog and psychedelia. Fripp’s observation that Sensible was “one of the best guitarists around” is borne out in the stunning liquidity and melodicism of Under The Floor’s closing solo,while the Sensible-led,and sung,Life Goes On and Don’t Bother Me reflect the complex personality under the comical red beret.

THE ‘LOST’ CONCEPT ALBUM

Captain Sensible

★★★★ The Universe Of Geoffrey Brown (HUMBUG, 1 9 9 3 )

Regarded by Sensible as his finest work,this charming concept piece unfolds the story of an MOD civil servant who suddenly receives a salutary warning from aliens about our planet’s future. Tailor-made for the stage,and very nearly filmed by The Comic Strip team,its polished,pop-psych framework and exemplary arrangements and musicianship are an unmitigated delight.

decency will win in the end. It was pretty dark.

It’s the best thing I ever did.

Then, in the late ’9 0 s, The Damned came knocking again, this time with just you and Dave, a line-up which has continued to this day. Were you keen to go back?

Dave suggested it when we did a gig together, my band and his Phantom Chords. I’ve never had an issue with Dave. How he’s put up with being in The Damned for 40 years,I don’t know. He’s good with lyrics,I’m better with arranging,so it kind of works.

What did you make of Wes Orshoski’s 2 0 1 5 Damned film documentary, Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead?

I thought it was a missed opportunity. The world is full of bands who’ve split up and got back together again and have disgruntled members. I was out for a while and I was pissed off. Rat’s entitled to be pissed off – he created the thing. Bands always fall out and have fucking rows. The Mamas And The Papas, Fleetwood Mac – their films don’t dwell on that side of things,why should The Damned’s?

(Pause) You know,sometimes I think it may have been better if we’d only made Damned Damned Damned and died in a plane crash.

That would now be the punk album. People would be saying,“I wonder what they’d be doing now?” Well… getting back together to play Damned Damned Damned (laughs).

Why did fans have to wait 1 0 years for Evil Spirits, the 2 0 1 8 album The Damned made with Tony Visconti?

I’m always writing tunes. But you have to wait for your manager to get a budget for a studio together. Dave likes epic production – I do too.

So we thought Tony Visconti could sprinkle some magic dust. Some say there should have been more guitar – me included. I had those discussions with Mr Visconti. He’d said, “This song isn’t about the guitar,Captain.”

And I was like,“He knows what he’s taking about,he’s Tony Visconti!” (laughs) Who offered the olive branch to enable the reunion of The Damned’s original line-up later this year?

Dave has been behind a lot of it. Several times he’s mentioned it over the years,wanting to do it before one of us kicks the bucket. But for everything that’s gone on since those days, the sound of the original line-up – no one else sounded like that,it was very powerful.

Was there any apologising? There was lots of rancour between you and Rat at one point over him and Vanian buying The Damned’s Stiff catalogue, for example.

No… Just a case of moving on. That’s how I see it. Whether my colleagues do is another matter… I’m sixty-fuckin’-six. This stuff was a long time ago. I know I’ve behaved like a complete arsehole in the past and I have to admit it. I was an absolute liability – and so are my esteemed colleagues. They’re not saints, either. I’m not saying anything more than that!

So are you looking forward to playing?

The Curse Of The Damned… We patch up our differences,announce the gig and next thing we know a plague descends on the country…

Your old red beret is now in Croydon Museum and you’ve had a train named after you. What would you like your legacy to be?

Oh gawd. I don’t think like that. I’m just happy to get paid to play the guitar. That’s really all M I’ve ever wanted.

The Damned’s original line-up hope to tour the UK in summer 2 0 2 1 , beginning on July 9 at London Eventim Apollo.

MOJO 33

Donald Milne

ERRY, DON’T LEAVE ME!”

34 MOJO

Teenage Fanclub would have known what to expect once 2018’s four-city, three-gig residencies showcasing their classic Creation Records era turned into bassist Gerard Love’s farewell act with the band.

Audiences in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and London were mostly tactful in their vocal declarations to Love, torn between nostalgia for their younger selves and a regretful acceptance that, sans Gerry, things would never be the same again. The gigs’novel format helped lighten the mood:two albums performed each night with guest turns from former members Brendan O’Hare and Paul Quinn. It meant a crucial libero role for O’Hare, a camp Glaswegian vaudeville entertainer disguised as a drummer. When not required behind the kit, he flitted between percussion and a running gag as a clipboard-wielding health and safety jobsworth. Norman Blake breaks a string?

Enter Mr Clipboard, finger-wagging and fussing through his sheaf of protocols.

“It was good fun,” says O’Hare today. “But with this slightly strange edge, because a couple of days after they announced me and Paul were doing these shows, they announced Gerry was off. ‘Oh… fuck.’ I didn’t see that one coming. So you end up the party band at a wake. But that’s no bad thing!”

The presence during Love’s final shows of O’Hare (fired in 1994) and his successor Quinn (chose to leave in 2000), alongside current drummer Francis Macdonald – who, in keeping with the band’s peculiar chemistry, had both preceded O’Hare and succeeded Quinn – ought to have consoled Love-lorn fans that ‘ex-member of Teenage Fanclub’ needn’t be a terminal condition.

Some, however, just didn’t get it. Mr Clipboard’s decisive intervention came on November 11, during the second night at Birmingham Institute. As the Fanclub presented their gilded mid-’90s diptych Grand Prix and Songs From Northern Britain, with Quinn on drums and Love singing his indelible staples Sparky’s Dream and Ain’t That Enough, it became tediously clear that two punters were going to chant their adaptation of Haddaway’s What Is Love? (“Gerry, don’t leave me!”) after every song.

Spectacles steaming up and clipboard a-bristle, O’Hare went to the microphone. “On behalf of the band,” he barked, “could you shut the fuck up?!”

The crowd cheered, the on-stage cast smiled, and Teenage Fanclub continued the magisterial procession through their past. Four days later, at London’s Electric Ballroom, they played the final song of their final gig with Gerard Love: a nine-minute Everything Flows, the band’s debut single, a never-more-poignant meditation on time slipping away (“You don’t change/Or I don’t notice you changing”), ending with Blake on drums, O’Hare on guitar, Love waving goodbye, and audience members in tears. For fans of Teenage Fanclub, this represented the end of an era;for a fundamentalist few, The End. For Teenage Fanclub, however, a door was opening. Two months later, a new version of the band assembled at Clouds Hill studio in Hamburg, and began recording a new Raymond McGinley song. Its title:Everything Is Falling Apart. ➢

Wall of sound:Teenage Fanclub (clockwise from top) Raymond McGinley,Francis Macdonald,Dave McGowan, Euros Childs and Norman Blake,at Auchmithie,near Arbroath,November 2020.

Stephen Sweet, Murray Easton, Camera Press, Getty

Shadows he and Norman Blake formed the two-man

birthday, Raymond McGinley speaks to MOJO from his home in Pollokshields in Glasgow’s Southside. On the day Teenage Fanclub’s guitarist was born, The Beatles were at Number 1 with I Want To Hold Your Hand: a fact referenced in the lyric to Everything Is Falling Apart, and a serendipitous coincidence for a founding member of the band fondly regarded as the fabbest Scotland has ever produced. If you had to choose a Fanny-equivalent Dark Horse, it would surely be Raymond.

In its classic configuration, established on 1991’s Bandwagonesque, Teenage Fanclub were three songwriters in mutual harmony, a spiritual bond of melody, metre and rhyme. From 1995’s Grand Prix onwards, each album saw Blake, Love and McGinley providing four songs each, a complementary triangulation of distinct yet related styles and voices. As Blake told Rolling Stone in 1992, amid burgeoning Bandwagonesque fever in the US: “If you look at The Beatles, every member had something special… That’s the way we want people to think of us.”

In February 2019, Everything Is Falling Apart came out as a single. McGinley laughs at the suggestion there may have been a degree of mischief in releasing a song with that title at that particular moment.

“At the end of 2018, once we’d figured out our change of arrangements, we thought, ‘Things are different now, let’s go into the studio and make a record, establish something that is a new real thing.’Regardless of anything to do with Gerry, it was also wanting to cleanse our palates. The song has ‘everything is falling apart’as a chorus, but it’s also saying, So what? That’s life. Navigate positively

36 MOJO

joined in 2004, initially to play keyboards then expanding his remit to all-purpose auxiliary. In the broader Glaswegian music community he’s best known as a bassist, having held that role in Belle And Sebastian since 2011.

“I suppose we’ve taken advantage of Dave for years,” McGinley considers. “But we took a long time to think about the whole thing.

Because it’s maybe unusual where someone says they’re leaving a band and then the band do all these shows together. Which is what happened with us. So we hadn’t explicitly arranged anything because somehow it didn’t seem right. But after those Creation shows, we wanted to make some quick decisions. ‘Who are we gonna get to play bass?’You look around and Dave’s there…”

Coughing, persistently…? “(Laughs) ‘Should we get that bass player over there to play bass?’And Euros was already part of the family. So they seemed like obvious choices.”

CGINLEY’S OSTENSIBLY STRAIGHTFORWARD assertion that Love left the band is more contentious than it might seem. On August 20, 2018, Teenage Fanclub announced February 2019 tour dates in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, then added:“Gerard Love will not be with the band for these dates, nor any other shows beyond those we are playing this year.” Citing “a continuing and sadly unresolvable difference of opinion on whether the band should proceed with proposed touring plans”, the statement affirmed that after the final Electric Ballroom gig, “Gerry will be separating from the band, and Teenage Fanclub will be continuing without him.” The following

Bandwagoneering:(above) Blake at Glasgow King Tuts,May 1991;(above left, from top) Blake and ‘Clipboard’O’Hare, Glasgow Barrowland,October 2018;Blake with Kurt Cobain and Eugene Kelly,1991 Reading Festival;(far right,from left) Blake,McGinley,O’Hare,Gerard Love,’92.

day, Love posted on Facebook, confirming he didn’t want to do the the flying involved” (and their relative proximity to 2017’s world tour), but that he “didn’t want to stop anyone from making a living.” He then stated: “I didn’t leave the group and I wasn’t kicked out, the idea of this tour eventually became a fork in the road… It’s not ideal for any of us but it’s as amicable as it can possibly be… I feel very lucky to have met Norman and Raymond all those years ago.”

Love’s only subsequent public comment came in a November 2019 article in The Scotsman. “I don’t feel I was the victim, I had a part to play in it… The future that I saw for the band and the future that Norman and Raymond saw was different. The only thing that bugs me is the narrative that I left the band. That’s not the way it was.” He then told journalist Fiona Shepherd:“There was really no discussion on the whole business from day one until the end.”

One week after the Scotsman article appeared, Love played Glasgow’s Great Western festival, his solo project Lightships’ first gig since 2012. Alongside him, on guitar, was Dave McGowan.

Whatever they spoke about, the subject of Gerry separating from Teenage Fanclub seemingly didn’t arise.

“I don’t really know why it happened,” McGowan says. “Other than Gerry didn’t fancy doing that tour. And then he didn’t fancy being in the band at all. Nobody wanted him to leave. I’ve talked to him since, but I don’t think anybody fully knows what went on there. Apart from Gerry himself. He’s kind of a mysterious guy.”

MOJO suggests a non-nuclear option might simply have been for McGowan to deputise for Love on the February 2019 tour.

“Yeah, I don’t really know if that was suggested.” He laughs. “I’m not really part of the decision-making department in this group.”

The new model Fanclub made their public debut on February 1, 2019 at The Vine Centre in Hong Kong. Setlist rune-readers noted the opening and closing songs: It’s All In My Mind and Broken.

No Love songs were played.

“That was just a matter of respect,” says McGowan.

“For the songs and for the songwriter. It would have

this erry, we’re still friends and I love the Neither Blake or McGinley are eager to discuss the details of the issue, beyond reiterating the official statement. “Because that was something we all agreed on,” Blake says. He still appears bewildered about the whole business. Adversity appears to bring out the best in McGinley, however, as contemplative and rigorous in thought and speech as in his stealthily impressive songs. The band’s only original member actually from Glasgow – he grew up in a Maryhill tenement – as opposed to one of its Lanarkshire satellite towns, he’s been de facto manager for long stretches in their career, and points out that we are hardly in unfamiliar territory. Having evolved from Blake and McGinley’s previous band The Boy Hairdressers, the formative Teenage Fanclub underwent a line-up change even before finishing its first record, 1990’s A Catholic Education, as Francis Macdonald chose to focus on a university degree in marketing and biotechnology, and was replaced by Brendan O’Hare. (Two years later, writing a dissertation about landfill sites while Teenage Fanclub toured with Nirvana, Macdonald suspected he’d backed the wrong horse:“I’m like, ‘Who can I be angry at? Me. Oh bollocks.’”)

“That’s bands,” McGinley chuckles. “You just get on with it. You don’t want to say:‘Oh it’s great because they left.’ Y’know, ‘It was great after Brendan!’ Because I think, ‘It was great with Brendan!’

But on Songs From Northern Britain and Grand Prix, I hear a lot of Paul. And sometimes people who talk about records just talk about the songwriter – which is obviously really important, but the sonic identity of a record comes down to all the people. ➢ MOJO 37

➣

Whoever’s hitting the drums can make a big difference.”

MOJO approached Gerry Love for comment, but he declined, stating he “wouldn’t want to mess with the promotion of Norman and Raymond’s new album”, and adding: “I’m just the ghost of Teenage Fanclub past.”

HOSTS PAST AND PRESENT MOVE THROUGH THE songs on the tenth Teenage Fanclub album, Endless Arcade.

Bolstering the bittersweet lineage of some eternal touchstones – Big Star, Byrds, Velvets – with baroque’n’soul textures from Childs, it was mostly recorded over three Hamburg sessions in 2019, with finishing touches undertaken in Glasgow in spring 2020 when Blake and McGinley “bubbled up” at the latter’s

BO’H:In 1989, I’d dropped out of college. My mum said, “You need to get a job,” and I said, “I’ll get a job in six months.” Five months and three weeks in, I got the Fanclub tape. They had a show booked with The Pastels at London ULU, so they were kinda forced into having me due to time constraints. I’m like, “Mum, I did it!

Bye!” My main aim was:get out of here, grow my hair long, and wear tight-fitting corduroy flared trousers.

You can have worse ambitions. I found the trousers in a charity shop in Paris about a year later.

If I had to pick one highlight it would be recording Bandwagonesque. That month was amazing. A total team effort. It’s a bizarre thing to be doing, conjuring stuff, intricate things with your hands, in time with your pals. All rooting for each other in whatever bizarre ways that we had to. Intense. I was 21.

People would always want to

PQ:Me and Norman are from Bellshill;he’s always been the wee guy I met when he was 14. After [Quinn’s previous band] the Soup Dragons ended, late one night I’m watching telly at home, my wife Liz is in bed, and the phone rings. It’s Chas Banks [TFC manager] telling me Brendan’s left the band and would I join? I put the phone down and started dancing about the room! I loved them so much. Then I woke Liz up and the two of us were jumping around the bedroom. I genuinely believed I was joining the next R.E.M. I was lucky I was there when those three guys peaked at the same time.

When we were recording [2000’s] Howdy!, our daughter Sophie had been born, and I felt this absolute longing to be home. I knew I wasn’t happy. Once the record was done, I met Norman at his house and over a cup of tea I told him I was leaving. He was shocked, but no big deal was made about it. Typical Fanclub. So I got a job as a postman for a year!

The fact that there’s no drama with Teenage Fanclub is as intriguing as the drama in other bands. They’re

say I don’t miss beast than it As told to

Pre-teen spirit:(above) The Boy Hairdressers’Raymond McGinley and Norman Blake,Bedford Horse & Groom, 1987;(right) McGowan,McGinley, Blake,Macdonald and Childs during the Endless Arcade sessions at Clouds Hill Recordings,Hamburg,January 2019.

home studio. Blake’s lyrics were the final element to be added.

“I’ve always found lyrics difficult,” he says. “I don’t see myself as a great lyricist, or even a good one. In the past, I’ve just given up on lyrics halfway through. I look back on some songs and think, I really wish I’d persevered because I could have written a better lyric. I’ve become more conscious of that on the last couple of records, and I’m working harder at it.”

Less typically, however, Blake’s six songs on Endless Arcade are quite transparently autobiographical, a series of beautifully crafted miniatures showing scenes from a broken relationship. “Without going into too much detail, they’re a reflection of my life over the last few years,” he says. “It’s been a bit up and down. I’m sure people can read into the lyrics and see that I’ve not had the best time.”

The detail is all there on the record, starting with motorik opener Home’s meditative lament to displacement (“Endless lonely hours saw you drift away”). Warm Embrace obsesses over the banal details of a breakup (“I dress myself from a plastic case”), The Sun Won’t Shine On Me attempts to comprehend the rupture (“We had love that I thought was forever/But it travelled one-eighty degrees”), while Living With You holds onto hope that “one day the tide will turn/I love you ’til I cease to be.” On the writing form of his life, Blake floored even his fellow band members with Back In The Day, a shattering bittersweet contemplation of age and experience.

“That’s your classic Blake right there,” says McGowan. “He just made it up on the spot, we joined in and there was the song.”

By way of some context, in 2009 Norman moved to Kitchener, Ontario with his Canadian wife of 13 years, Krista, and their teenage daughter Rowan. Today, Blake is back in Glasgow, close to Rowan, who returned in 2016 to study at university, and his Hewing artistic triumph from personal despair is a traditional

Well above par:Paul Quinn and (inset) Brendan O’Hare,TFC rhythm kings in action.

“I just felt like I had to,” he says. “I didn’t really have anything

“Right now, though, I’m in a pretty good place. And the

emotions when you’re singing them. I’m not Edith Piaf! They become songs – there for anyone to use and maybe relate to.”

Donald Milne, Alamy, Avalon.red, Getty

RENDAN O’HARE NOW lives in Essex with his wife and family, waiting for the successful live sound engineer. Whenever he returns to Glasgow, he stays chez McGinley. “Me and Raymond have always been really well connected, but we’ve got really close over the last five or 10 years. He’s like my brother.”

To this day, O’Hare doesn’t know why he was fired from Teenage Fanclub. No one has told him. Nor, in 27 years, has he ever asked.

“I can make assumptions,” he says.

“Possible scapegoatery, because things were getting tricky. Probably me being tricky to get on with. Fuck knows. Much as they are brilliant, they do make some unilateral moves that then just don’t get discussed.

I think we were pissed off with each other at first, just because you’re meant to be, but as soon as I saw any of them I was like, ‘Hiya!’

And they went, ‘Hiya!’”

Given that he was destined to study molecular biology until heeding the call of the Bellshill Beat, you might think O’Hare would have some theories about this condition, this Lanarkshire Male Communication Syndrome.

“Quite unusual behaviour,” he acknowledges, “but it’s an unusual blend of people. Quite similar in a lot of ways. Normally ways that can slightly repel each other. But they’ve got a magnetism.

Some new age voodoo.”

Likewise, as the first drummer in Teenage Fanclub, the first member of Teenage Fanclub to leave the band, and the band’s current drummer, as well as a BAFTA-winning film and TV composer, Francis Macdonald ought to have a well-rounded perspective on the group’s internal dynamic. He really ought to.

“I don’t know, there’s no big loquacious discussions about what’s going on,” Macdonald ponders. “Even when we were recording the new album – you’re waiting to hear what the song idea is. Or what’s the song about? Or the lyrics? You’re communicating musically, but you’re not really communicating. There’s this kind of

be its own form of communication. Maybe it’s a Scottish thing. We’re not great at pouring our hearts out to each other. ‘Get me drunk and I might sing you a song’– that explains it.”

Instead, Teenage Fanclub work things out

“Raymond’s a very decent guy,” Blake says. “He’s 4-track cassette recorder. We’ve been together the longest of anyone in the group, we’ve had a good relationship all these years, and it’s still going strong. That’s really been at the foundation of the group ultimately.”

For his part, McGinley, a self-professed “pragmatic optimist”, tells it the way he plays:deceptively simple, the dark horse leading the way.

“I consider ourselves to be absolutely, completely, totally lucky.

Almost everyone that tries to do this thing that we do, doesn’t manage to do it. We’ve managed to do it for a long time. Years ago when we were working with Sony, people were saying:‘You need to do this.’ And I’d be like:No, we’re not doing that. ‘But don’t you want to be successful?’ Yeah, we do want to be successful – that’s why we’re not fucking doing it!

“It’s funny, over the years, I think we’ve been quite blessed with a perception of us as a band that should have been more successful than we are.” He laughs. “Which is a lot better than it being the M other way around.”

MOJO 39

The Sandman is coming:Lonnie Holley in his studio workshop; (inset opposite) Matthew E White.

MOJO PRESENTS

Kidnapped, half-killed, LONNIE HOLLEY survived all that modernity and the American South could devise to make epic music like Van Morrison in space. And now, with cosmic country-soul man MATTHEW E WHITE on his team, there’s no stopping him. “We’re heading way out into the future,” he tells ANDREW MALE.

L

ONNIE HOLLEY IS LAUGHING AT my phone. We’ve been talking about his new album, a five-track collaboration with Matthew E White (below) titled Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, a mix of jittering On The Corner electric jazz and the 70-year-old Alabama-born artist’s improvisatory Afro-futurist lamentations and mournful space gospel, centred on the loss of the real in the digital age.

“Now we don’t have that many mirrors in our homes,” Holley says, through the Zoom screen from his Pulp Arts studio space in Gainesville, Florida. “[Instead] we depend on Computer Technology Management which I call ‘Cold Titty Mama’, to give us that reflection of ourselves.”

MOJO holds up our own cracked iPhone to the Zoom screen.

“The Broken Mirror!” replies Holley, with a chuckle, before explaining where he and White are headed on this new album. “Way out into the future,” he says, “but I’m also returning to let everybody know we’re not caring enough for the planet, which I call the

Mothership. We’ve got to treat her like paradise, even though we may be living in the ghetto.”

This is how Holley does an interview, taking MOJO’s simple enquiries and stretching them into extended riffs of high, tangled lyricism – like John Coltrane’s deep explorations of light Broadway standards. It’s not dissimilar to how he conjures up his own songs, these exquisite tapestries of improvised ideas drawn from his dark past, our collective deranged present and a thousand possible futures.

We’re talking at the end of 2020, what Holley rightly describes as “a rough time on Earth for a lot of humans”.

And while the apocalyptic percolating funk of Broken Mirror… perfectly encapsulates a year of Covid and Trump insanity the album was finished before the pandemic even began. Holley was doing what he always does: tracking what he calls “our future footsteps” in the detritus we create.

“I was in New York at 9/11 for a book launch and I went to Ground Zero as close as I could, inspecting the run-off of soot, dust, and ash that had fell,” he recalls. “If we take that as a picture, we’re in one of the meanest ➢

© Ben Rollins/Guardian/Eyevine, Getty

Photography by BEN ROLLINS

MOJO 41

The mirror crack’d:(clockwise from above) Holley with Jane Fonda and (left) author/collector William Arnett,2001; Holley’s piece Eye Have The Hand That Holds The Staff For The Ancestor’s Sake, 1989;at work on Sloss Historic Furnace; still from 2019 film I Snuck Off The Slave Ship;on-stage in 2014;(bottom) his work 9-11 The Cable That Snapped Before They Saved Me,NYC,2005.

➣

atmospheres that has ever been on the planet. And that run-off, I have been there from the start, down in the creeks and ditches, touching what others would refuse to touch. I was doing that at five years old. I was crawling around in that as a baby.”

MITHOLOGIES JUST BEFORE MUSIC ★★★★ (Dust-To-Digital, 2 0 1 2 ) For his first official release, recorded over 2 0 1 0 and 2 0 1 1 with help from Black Lips’ Cole Alexander and Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, Holley digs deep into his past, his primal gospel vocals and minimal keyboard rhythms summoning up imagistic ghosts that flicker hypnotically like old movies in a darkened cinema.

KEEPING A RECORD OF IT

MITH ★★★★ (Jagjaguwar, 2 0 1 8 ) Right from its bold opening statement – “I’m a suspect in America” – hovering over glistening keyboards and Dave Nelson’s

and purgatory.

NATIONAL FREEDOM ★★★★ (Jagjaguwar, 2 0 2 0 )

★★★ (Dust-To-Digital, 2 0 1 3 ) Recorded during the same sessions as Just Before Music, Holley’s second album is more sinuous and more collaborative than its predecessor, as Alexander and Cox play off Holley’s raw-throated vocals with percussive patterns that continually brighten the path of his dark narrative journey. Key statement: “We makin’ a joyful noise for people that don’t suppose to be dying yet.”

At nine, Holley hopped a train to New

growl guitar.

Getty (3 ), Alamy, Capital Pictures (2 ), Bridgeman Images

A Lonnie Holley discography.

By Andrew Male.

U

NDERSTANDABLY, HOLLEY’S CHILDHOOD HAS tended to dominate writings on the artist. Born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1950, the seventh of 27 children, when Holley was one and a half he was snatched from his mother by a burlesque dancer who took him on the road, a life of sideshows and fairgrounds. Then, when he was four, he was brought back to Alabama and handed to the keepers of a whiskey house – traded, Holley has said, for a pint of liquor. The establishment stood next to a drive-in theatre that young Lonnie accessed through a sewer pipe.

“That’s part of my childhood,” says Holley, in his distinctive plaintive rasp. “I snuck into the sewer pipe. I’d crawl through the muck and dirt. I’d picked up other people’s trash at the drive-in but I also picked up concepts. I didn’t pay my way like everybody else. I

Being there:Holley performs at David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival,Queen Elizabeth Hall,London, August 24,2015.

“I’M NO MORE THAN THE STUFF OTHER PEOPLE LEAVE BEHIND, STUFF THEY DIDN’T GET A CHANCE TO USE.” Lonnie Holley

Miraculously, he was rescued from there by his paternal grandmother, and reunited with his extended family in Birmingham, Alabama. His grandmother dug graves while the family scavenged items at the local dump to sell at flea markets. It was from these harsh worlds of mortality and poverty that Holley’s art was born.

In 1979, following the deaths of his niece and nephew in a house fire, Lonnie carved their gravestones out of discarded sandstone from the local steelworks. Gradually, he began to work on sculptures hewn from the garbage that had surrounded him all his life: junkyard sculptures built from wooden ladders, burnt tyres, rusted oil drums, broken computers, a half-melted television set from the fateful fire. These Anthropocene fairground skeletons for a postapocalyptic America soon caught the attention of William Arnett, the late Atlanta-based collector of vernacular African-American art.

Arnett said of Holley, “If he’d been white, and living in the East Village 30 years ago, he’d be famous now.”

Holley always sang while he created his art, music remembered from his patchwork past:the Hollywood soundtracks of the drivein theatre;the Motown hits of the fairground;the gospel music and work songs beloved of his grandparents. However, it wasn’t until he found a beat-up Casio keyboard in a Goodwill store that he started recording the songs on tape.

“I cry about how long it took me to get into the music world,” says Holley. “My grandparents’musical offerings to us were moaning, singing every day as they did their daily work, or singing in church. I’m no more than the stuff other people leave behind, stuff they didn’t get a chance to use. We’ll never all get an opportunity to be on Broadway, but we can be on our way, each and every day.”

H

OLLEY RELEASED HIS FIRST RECORD, THE haunting and graceful Just Before Music on the Dust-ToDigital label in 2012. Working with manager/collaborator Matt Arnett (son of William), Holley has also teamed up with such eager fans as Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox (on 2013’s Keeping A Record Of It), the late Richard Swift (2020’s National Freedom) and, since 2019, Matthew E White. “We played this show together in Richmond, Virginia in April of that year,” explains White. “It was an exceptional show.I mean, he’ll write down a phrase he’s gonna riff on, and next to it, it says, ‘black’or ‘white’, and that’s the key, and then sometimes an adjective, like, ‘fast’, ‘slow’or ‘dark’. And that’s it.”

White already had a series of loose jams in an “Electric Miles kind of vibe” that he’d assembled while working on his forthcoming studio album. So when Holley invited White to join him for a concert in Durham, North Carolina a few months later, White brought some along for a try-out recording session.

“We got it all down in four hours,” says White. “It was incredible. You’d play him, like, 15 seconds of a track and he picks up on a vibe, and has a notebook containing hundreds of one-line phrases that he’s working into the music. He said, very early on, ‘This is space music.’ Then he walks into the vocal booth and does it all in one take.”

White admits that there was some cleaning and editing done afterwards but he focused on Holley’s repeated phrases – “I cry space dust”, “this here jungle of modernness” and “get up, come walk with me” – strange cosmic broadcasts about the breakdown of human thought in the age of technology.

“I wanted to make sure you heard his mantras,” says White.

“Lonnie is drawing on deep, powerful, painful heavy experiences and I wanted this to come through. In 2020, as a white artist I felt like I didn’t want to write anything, didn’t want to say anything. I wanted to move out of the way and let another voice be heard.”

“I’m just telling the truth,” says Holley, when MOJO asks what, ultimately, his Broken Mirror reflects. “I don’t want nobody to get angry at me and say, ‘He talks sad about humanity.’But we were put on Earth to grow and right now we’re like the flower that has been battered by hurricanes, tornadoes, trampled in the mud, dried up, pounded in the clay. We are humans. We must allow ourselves to continue to grow stronger, and stronger and stronger. That’s what this album is about.”

He pauses.

“Can I ask you to do something for the future? Create a Door Number One, a Door Number Two and a Door Number Three in your home. Door Number One is whatever you want from today.

Door Number Two is between Door Number One and Door Number Three but Door Number Three should be a primitive door. It should be a strong structure but it should have just candles or an oil lamp in the room there. There should be nothing of the future in it.”

MOJO asks if Lonnie Holley’s own house is laid out in this fashion. He laughs.

“The possibilities are there.”

M MOJO 43

I was sitting with Sam and Knox Phillips and the rest of the like to go over to say hello to his old adversary, Tom Parker (never “Colonel” – “He ain’t no damned colonel,” Sam declared on this and many other subsequent occasions), probably for the first time in close to 30 years. Being the opportunistic soul that all writers are meant to be, I tagged along, and in the aftermath, I wrote to the Colonel, saying how much I had enjoyed our meeting

The upshot – well, the upshot of our first

➢

CBS Photo Archive/Getty, Photograph by Sally Wilbourn

Hound dog:Colonel Tom Parker (left) listens to TV host Ed Sullivan’s opinion while Elvis Presley prepares for his second appearance on the show, October 28,1956,New York City; (below from left) Peter Guralnick, Parker,Sam Phillips,at a party to mark the Colonel’s 80th,June 1989.

MOJO 45

➣

in June of 1989, a wonderful occasion in and of itself at which I met many luminaries in the Elvis world. At the end of the evening I went up to thank him. He was sitting on a throne-like chair surrounded by various images of elephants, including a giant ice sculpture behind him, tusked and trumpeting, with Sam Phillips standing just to his left. The two of them were engaged in a spirited discussion that had to do with the events that had occurred between October 29 and midnight on the night of November 15, 1955, essentially the sale of Elvis’s contract by Sam’s Sun record label to RCA. memory accompanied by a steel-trapped intellect unprepared to concede the possibil-

different point of view. tragically, I had a plane to catch.

OW, LET ME BACK UP A LITTLE. Actually, quite a lot. One of the most common myths about Elvis is that he was always a pawn in somebody else’s game. In other words, that he was little more than a raw, instinctive talent, a “natural”, to use the term that people so often assign to great athletes, too, when they want to dismiss the intelligence and sense of direction that allowed the artist or athlete to find their way. another, more sinister role. He is said to have been the person who swooped in and devoured that talent. He is not infrequently painted as the man who stole Elvis Presley’s soul.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The

“ You must definitely set up a new

stardom never before imagined in the world of country music and unmatched in popular success until Garth Brooks came along.

It was during his time with Arnold that the Colonel first got his sobriquet. It was, of course, an honorary title, awarded as something of a carny’s quid pro quo by Louisiana’s singing Governor Jimmie Davis (Davis is credited as the composer of one of the great pop-country classics of all time, You Are My Sunshine), and Colonel, whom Elvis in later years would not infrequently address as Admiral, took it, I’m sure, in the spirit in which it was offered. But, as someone who never failed to recognise with a certain degree of amusement that the height of your chair can determine your status in the world, he also took it one step further.

“In the future,” he told Eddy Arnold’s bass player, Gabe Tucker, “you will make sure that everyone addresses me as the Colonel.”

And by and large everyone did.

It wasn’t all just smoke and mirrors, though. It wasn’t even mostly smoke and mirrors. Colonel took his role as manager, promoter, and one-man band altogether seriously. For example, when Elvis appeared at the 12th Annual White River Water Carnival in Batesville, Arkansas, on August 6, 1955, just as Colonel was about 46 MOJO

a couple of hot records in a certain territory to become a big-name artist, [you must be] level-headed, courteous, and carry the responsibility that goes with being a star as Elvis wants to be…”

Not long afterward he got permission from Elvis’s parents, Vernon and Gladys, to assume much of the burden of responsibility himself, and just three months later he managed to convince RCA to pay the unheard-of sum of $35,000 to purchase Elvis’s contract from Sun, putting up $5,000 of his own money at the start of that two-week sequence that he and Sam Phillips would still be debating 33 years later.

NE OF THE OTHER THINGS IN WHICH HE resolutely believed, and which he had gained for Elvis as a contractual guarantee from RCA, was the power of national television exposure, something which much of the industry saw as being of highly dubious value because of the way it was feared it would undercut the value of personal appearances. In the aftermath of the signing, RCA, despite their commitment to obtain a minimum of three national television engagements, did nothing.

Nor did the William Morris Agency, to whom Colonel next

To the grand high poobahs of Hollywood, as

Courtesy of Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc., Getty, Alamy, Avalon.red

Playing for keeps:Elvis at the piano before The Steve Allen Show,New York,1956,with Parker (right) and TV executives;(left, from top) the young Parker;key client Eddy Arnold;Presley signs with the William Morris Agency, NYC,1956,watched by the Colonel (standing right);(insets,right) Elvis’s early path on record.

hands, and within three weeks of the signing had gotten Elvis a four-appearance booking on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s Stage Show, with an option for two more. To a scathing rebuke for his old friend Harry Kalcheim, head of William Morris’s New York office, Parker replied, “If I waited for someone to call me with deals all the time, I would have to start selling candy apples again. Nuff said.”

He worked on Elvis’s movie deal some four months later in much the same way – pretty much on a wing and a prayer. Once again he saw the movies as integral to broadening his act’s appeal.

But Hollywood almost universally – I think you could amend that to universally – saw Elvis as a novelty act, and had it been up to them, the Hollywood moguls would have cast him in one of the numerous one-shot, low-budget exploitation pictures, like Rock Around The Clock, that were springing up. This was not for Colonel – nor, he felt, for Elvis Presley.

Instead, he approached Hal Wallis, one of the most successful independent movie producers of the day, and after what Wallis somewhat patronisingly described as “one of the toughest bargaining sessions of my career,” signed a one-picture deal with options at the producer’s election for six more, paying just $15,000 for the first, $20,000 for the second, up to $100,000 for the last. It was a terrible deal, in other words, but one which the Colonel made, as so often in his career, with the idea that, once he got his foot in the door he could improve it almost immeasurably by relying on his own wits and Elvis Presley’s boundless talent.

He did. Over the years, whatever you may think of Elvis’s cinematic oeuvre, he turned Elvis into the

One time, when they were shooting Blue Hawaii, Colonel

was beginning to catch on. “You know, if Elvis provides his own clothes, he gets $10,000 more.” Wallis surveyed the scene, in which Elvis was wearing nothing but a bathing suit and riding a surfboard, and arched his eyebrows. “He’s wearing his own watch,” declared the Colonel without batting an eye. And the scene did not proceed until he took off the watch.

OLONEL HAD LONG SINCE established his own club, the Snowmen’s League, a W. C. Fieldsian celebrity roll without meetings or reality outside of the Colonel’s sardonic imagination, which cost nothing to join but $10,000 to get out of (“We’ve never lost a member yet,” Colonel boasted) and into which he had by now managed to enlist virtun Hollywood. It was nothing

Unquestionably Colonel’s biggest snow s by now,

to sell their wares at local fairs and markets throughout the country. After his father’s death he entered the US illegally on a freighter from Rotterdam, joined the Army, probably as André van Kuijk, and served with the 64th Regiment, an anti-aircraft unit of the Coast Artillery, at Fort Shafter, just outside of Honolulu.

At some point, around the time of his hon- ➢ MOJO 47

Alamy, Shutterstock, Getty (2 )

➣ including a pet cemetery that included provisions for perpetual care.

From there it was just a short leap into show business, where the Colonel’s natural talent for promotion in the Florida area was enlisted by, among others, 1920s and ’30s pop superstar Gene Austin (Austin’s 1927 version of My Blue Heaven sold over five million copies and was the biggestselling single of all time up until Bing Crosby’s White Christmas), with whom he continued to

48 MOJO

1944, that he saw the opportunity he had been In all this time no one ever seems to have ques-

Colonel valued loyalty above all else. Toward the

That was the underlying basis for his relationship

Elvis’s post-Army career has been both much

Elvis album sessions of spring 1960 and the fulfilOW MUCH DOES IT COST IF It’s Free?” was the title that Colonel always assigned to his unwritten autobiography. As sardonic and impenetrable as nearly all of the Colonel’s public pronouncements, it masked a serious point:nothing was worth anything, you could not properly respect the effort or achievement that had gone into it, if some value were not placed on it. The Colonel’s measure of value appeared to be primarily pecuniary.

But not always. Chris Hutchins, the British music reporter, in Hollywood for a New Musical Express profile of the Colonel, sat in on a merchandising conference in 1965. There were, Hutchins wrote, a couple of big-shot businessmen from New York who were there to make an $80,000 merchandising deal.

“Just before the businessmen arrived, an old friend of the Colonel’s from his carnival days showed up. The friend had fallen on hard times and had with him a box containing several hundred balloons, which he offered to sell the Colonel for 40 dollars.

To help the man keep his pride, the Colonel bargained with him for half an hour, and finally bought the balloons for 38 dollars.

“As he closed the deal, the Colonel invited in the tycoons who had been waiting in an outer office.

When the man had gone, one of them stormed at the Colonel:‘You kept us waiting 20 minutes to buy 38 dollars’worth of balloons when we have a deal worth

that became His Hand In Mine, but by his notable success as a song interpreter, a song stylist, particularly with the beautifully crafted ballads of Don Robertson and Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman over the next few years.

O WHAT WENT WRONG? WITH both Elvis – AND Elvis and the Colonel?

This clearly is not the place to recount the whole story – but suffice it to say, I don’t think Elvis ever got over the death of his mother, or the sense of confusion that this introduced into the sure purposefulness with which he had his march to success. For two and a half years, from 1964 to mid-1966, he got lost in his spiritual studies (he at one point declared to the head of the Self-Realization Fellowship, founded by Autobiography Of A Yogi author Paramahansa Yogananda, that he wanted to become a monk in the religious order), and neither the Colonel nor RCA nor anyone else was able to lure him into the studio for a non-soundtrack session, not even to fulfil his contractual obligations.

Finally, in desperation, and because it was, really, the only thing he knew to do, the Colonel hit on the strategy of negotiating an almost unimaginable upgrading of his RCA contract (unimaginable, because Elvis’s records were at this point in a steady spiral of decline) and then, using the contract as a wedge, inducing Elvis to go back into the studio to record the one thing that, in the absence of external pressure or persuasion, he might have chosen to record at ➢ MOJO 49

➣ Getty (3 ), Alamy

this point:another gospel album. Which became How Great Thou Art – and which led in turn to the last great renaissance (stretching through the 1968 television Comeback Special, the magnificent 1969 sessions at the American studio in Memphis, and the only slightly less successful 1970 and 1971 Nashville sessions) of Elvis’s music.

If he had differences with his manager over this or any other matters, Elvis never raised them. Eddy Arnold, for example, wrote Colonel a letter in August of 1953 essentially stating that he had reached a point where he was no longer happy, did not agree with Colonel’s brusque manner of doing business, and was convinced that further association would be in neither of their interests, concluding with the age-old bromide:“We started as friends, Colonel, let’s end the same way.”

Which, after a time, they did. But Elvis could never bring himself to that kind of confrontation. Instead, he seemingly became more and more uncertain about the direction he wanted his life to take until, in the spring of 1967, depressed about starting yet another movie and under the influence of a variety of medications, he fell in the middle of the night, postponing the start of a picture, Clambake, banish Elvis’s spiritual adviser, Larry Geller, from the entourage, along with the books that Colonel felt had fuelled his confusion. It was around this same time, too, that he redefined their business relationship as a kind of modified shared enterprise, in which for

50 MOJO

cent of some of the non-guaranteed moneys (profit participation, for example, in the movies), based, I’m sure in his own mind, on the extra duties and extra-motivational requirements that had been forced on him.

Still they went on to new heights and new triumphs, with Elvis’s Las Vegas opening on July 31, 1969, marking a culmination of Elvis’s broad-scale ambition to incorporate all of the strands of American music that had influenced him into a single

ONE OF THIS WAS ENOUGH TO STAVE off the inevitable effects of drift and depression from which Elvis was suffering more Elvis’s spirits (and, not coincidentally, line both their pockets) with a live satellite telecast from Hawaii in January of 1973. This was advertised as the first entertainment event to approach anything like instant global dissemination and had come to the Colonel in a flash

Comeback King:Presley revisits Heartbreak Hotel on the 1968 TV Special;(far left) negotiations have broken down,early ’60s;(insets,from top) a postcard from the Colonel; Parker at a Frank Sinatra gala,1980; the art of the deal – Elvis in Las Vegas, at great expense;from Hawaii,Presley rocks around the world,1973.

from watching President Nixon’s live broadcast from China the previous February. It did indeed inspire Elvis for a brief time – he lost a lot of weight and dedicated himself momentarily to the challenge – and when it was over Colonel wrote to him at three in the morning, in as emotional a communication as survives from their years together. They had no need to hug each other to show their feelings, Colonel wrote, because they could tell just by looking at one another from the stage and from the floor how each one felt. “I always know that when I do my part,” Colonel wrote, “you always do yours in your own way and in your feeling in how to do it best. That is why you and I are never at each other when we are doing our work in our own best way possible at all times.”

Six months later Elvis fired Colonel, in an incident that might have been a replay of the 12th Annual White River Water Carnival in Batesville, Arkansas, 18 years earlier. On-stage at the Hilton in Las Vegas, Elvis delivered an out-of-control, stream-of-consciousness diatribe against the Hilton hotel management for firing his favourite waiter. The Colonel was understandably upset, but when he remonstrated that this was no way to behave, that Elvis should always remember that he was a professional, Elvis fired him in front of everybody, and Colonel, 64 years old now and tired of it all, responded with the classic comeback, “You can’t fire me, I quit.” In the end he didn’t stay fired, Elvis owed him too much money in deferred commissions, and, perhaps more to the point, lost his nerve. So they continued in an uneasy alliance that did credit, really, to neither one. It was like a marriage gone bad, a folie à deux, in which neither could be the first to say goodbye.

But I’m not going to dwell on that now. (You can read Careless Love for all the sad details.) The way I like to think of the Colonel is as a man caught up in what he always called, what always was for him “the wonderful world of show business”, a world in which he

remained surrounded by images of elephants and windmills to the end. The way that Elvis and he chose to think of each other in better times was as an unlikely and unmatched team – not Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exactly but possessed of no less impossible a dream, sallying forth into a world that refused to take them seriously at first but that was eventually won over by the illimitable talent of the one, the indomitable resourcefulness of the other. Each in his own way approached life con brio, and their marriage was based for many years on a combination of mutual respect, mutual trust, and a finely honed sense of boundaries that were never to be crossed.

In fact, in all their years together, Colonel never encroached on Elvis’s musical territory, except on one occasion when he recommended a song that had long been his wife Marie’s favourite in his first client Gene Austin’s rendition. He knew it was old-fashioned, he wrote to Elvis almost delicately in March of 1960, it was a ballad with a dramatic recitation that had first been a hit in 1927, but he thought the song, Are You Lonesome Tonight?, could be right for Elvis’s “new” post-Army style, and he had a hunch that it could be a hit all over again. Elvis listened to it carefully, and when he recorded it, he turned out all the lights in the studio, delivering the recitation in the dark. He apologised to A&R man Steve Sholes after flubbing the first take and said, “Mr Sholes, throw that tune out, I can’t do it justice.”

But Sholes refused to listen to him, engineer Bill Porter recalled, and they finished the song successfully with Elvis’s customary vocal quartet, The Jordanaires, providing the perfect, hushed backdrop.

N HIS LAST FEW YEARS, COLONEL WOULD CALL ME from time to time, volunteering information even as he insisted that while he wished he could help me, his hands were, somehow, inexplicably tied. In 1995 I had a wonderful visit with him and his wife, Loanne, which was accompanied by a good deal of helpful advice about things I needed to look out for in the making of the motion-picture adaptation of my book. (He never mentioned the greatest danger of all:that, after the expenditure of what would seem to anyone but a Hollywood habitué like vast sums of money for film scripts and rights, the movie might never get made.)

That was the last time I saw Colonel, who died 18 months later.

Eddy Arnold, his first superstar, once said of Colonel, “He lives and breathes his artist. I said to him… ‘Tom, why don’t you get yourself a hobby – play golf, go boating, or something?’He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re my hobby.’”

Which was certainly true as far as it went, but I think Colonel Tom Parker might have appended to that the delight he took in putting on, and matching wits with, the world at large, ready to take on anyone who might emerge from the crowd, fully confident of his ability to turn whatever might be directed at him to his M and his client’s advantage.

Extracted from Looking To Get Lost: Adventures In Music & Writing

by Peter Guralnick, published by Little, Brown. Peter Guralnick is author of the definitive two-volume Elvis Presley biography, Last Train To Memphis and Careless Love.

MOJO 51

Looking for snakes on everything:Little Feat, 1970 (from left) Richie Hayward,Roy Estrada, Lowell George,Bill Payne.

MOJO EYEWITNESS

LITTLE FEAT’S FIRST STEPS After serving in Frank Zappa’s Mothers Of Invention, LOWELL GEORGE – an all-rounder and prime mover from Hollywood – resolved to sample every flavour in the roots songbook. Cue the rolling, smoking Americana of LITTLE FEAT and their self-titled “stream of consciousness” 1971 debut. After much serendipity, “vicious” studio fights and emergency help from Ry Cooder, the group’s path was set. “It was this amalgam of throwing things against the wall,” remember principals and friends, “looking at it and saying, ‘Yeah, I like that…’”

Van Dyke Parks:The thing you must realise about Lowell George is he was a sponge. He absorbed Western music, Eastern music, classical music, the blues, he played the piccolo. He was into absurdism. He was like a goat – he just ate up everything!

Fred Tackett:When I first met Lowell he was studying sitar and shakuhachi [Japanese flute] at Ravi Shankar’s Kinnara School of Music in LA. He’d already played in [Hollywood garage rock band] The Factory. But he told me, “I only ➢

Susan Titelman/Courtesy of Rhino

Interviews by BOB MEHR • Portrait by SUSAN TITELMAN

MOJO 53

Takin’my time:George awaits his call;(centre,from top) The Mothers Of Invention circa 1968 (from left) George,Estrada,Frank Zappa;Little Feat members join Peter Tork (right) in the studio,December 1969-January 1970;(opposite page) outtake from the Little Feat cover shoot,1970; (insets) early flyer and on vinyl.

“I WAS NAÏVE ENOUGH TO THINK, MAYBE WE’LL BECOME THE BEATLES.” Bill Payne ➣

play Indian music now.” Then the next thing I know he’s singing in The Standells… and then he was playing with Frank Zappa and the Mothers [in 1968]. (Laughs) He was all over the place. But that was Lowell.

Russ Titelman:I met Lowell at the Shankar school. We just started talking and hit it off right away. I saw him play with the Mothers at the Shrine once,and they were so great. He was one of those guys;he just had it. He could play anything he picked up. He played slide guitar,he played the flute,he picked up the shakuhachi.

He was a good drummer. And he had such a curiosity about music.

Nurit Wilde (2 ), Getty (7 ), Frank Bez/Courtesy of Rhino

Lowell George [in ZigZag,1975]:Russ Titelman was starting a publishing company and asked me if I wanted to co-publish [Willin’] with him and see what he could do with it. So I recorded it and went on the road the same day with the Mothers, and was gone for about five weeks I guess. Then I came back and nothing had happened. But somehow a demo of the tape got out and it was the rage of the Troubadour.

FT:The story you hear is that Zappa fired Lowell [in May 1969] after he heard Willin’,because it had drug references in it. But I don’t think that’s true. I mean it’s true that Frank didn’t like drugs.

Frank would tell the band on the road,“OK,now they’re gonna search us at the airport,so you guys better not be carrying anything.” And Lowell would say,“Oh don’t worry,we did it all last night.” (Laughs) But I actually think Zappa was really encouraging of Lowell. He heard Willin’ and said,“Lowell,you need your own band,you need to do your own thing.”

Bill Payne:I had been playing piano since I was five,started playing in my first bands at 15. I came down to Los Angeles from central California originally because I wanted to meet Frank Zappa.

Zappa had two labels,one was Bizarre and one

54 MOJO

was Straight. So,naturally,I called up Bizarre.

I didn’t get to meet Frank then,but eventually I sort of got directed to this guy,Lowell George.

RT:I was working on the Performance soundtrack [released September 1970],which Warner Brothers was putting out. I brought Lowell in to work with the rest of the core musicians,which was me and Ry Cooder,Jerry Scheff,Gene Parsons and Randy Newman.

Lowell and I got really tight around that time, which is when he was putting together Little Feat with Billy Payne.

BP:I drove to Lowell’s house. It was summer, and the door was wide open. I walk in and this beautiful blonde is sitting on the floor crosslegged listening to Erik Satie. She says:“Oh you must be Bill. Lowell is expecting you… He’ll be back in four hours.” (Laughs) I said,“What does he do if he’s not expecting you?”

So I walked into Lowell’s home,and on the back wall is a samurai sword;he was a brown belt [in Okinawan martial arts]. And in the corner of the room is a sitar. While I’m waiting I start looking through his book collection and his record collection. There was Smithsonian Blues compilations,records by Muddy Waters,John Coltrane,Lenny Bruce,books by Carl Sandberg, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl,Last Exit To Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. By the time he showed up – which was indeed about four hours later – I already had a sense of who he was. I liken it to when Che Guevara and Fidel Castro first met – they talked about everything under the sun.

Our philosophical discussions became about, what kind of band do we wanna be in? We’re not gonna be a blues band… but we’ll play some blues. We’re not gonna be a country band… but we’ll play some country. The idea was that it was supposed to be eclectic and not any one thing.

LG [in Melody Maker,1974]:Mostly we wanted to play what I would call music with a stream of

consciousness. We wanted to explore all sorts of areas together and we just took it from there.

BP:Eventually,Lowell brought in [drummer] Richie Hayward [who’d played with George in The Factory]. Then we went through 13 or 14 bass players,before Roy Estrada came in from The Mothers Of Invention.After many months,we had the songs and a plan to make a record.We talked to [Byrds producer] Terry Melcher about it,but that was right when the Manson Family was looking for him. We took our music to Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic. He listened and said,“Boys,it’s too diverse.” At the time we had even weirder songs: Ten Thousand Whips,Dance Of The Nubile Virgin Slaves. It was much more Zappa-esque. But if you just look at the titles on the first record – Brides Of Jesus,Hamburger Midnight,Crazy Captain Gunboat Willie – you still wouldn’t know what kind of songs or music this was. It was still outside.

RT:At one point,Lowell wanted the band to sign to Lizard Records,[Steppenwolf producer] Gabriel Mekler’s label. And I said,“No,let’s go see Lenny Waronker at Warner Bros Records. ” We went over to the office in Burbank. Lowell brought his guitar and there was a spinet piano in the office that Billy played,and they did like five songs right there. And Lenny said,“OK,go upstairs and see [Warner president] Mo Ostin and make a deal.” He didn’t even see the band! He heard the songs,he heard Lowell sing,and it was good enough for him.

Lenny Waronker:The typical A&R approach is to suss out the band,see them as much as you can.

But I always believed if the music is great,that was really it for me. In those days it was much more about believing in something and doing it.

RT:There was a home at Warner Bros and since I brought them,I became the producer. I hadn’t produced a record before. Lenny said,“Go in and make some demos” [in late summer 1970].

Some of those ended up on the finished album

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

● Van Dyke Parks: Little Feat friend and collaborator

– like Truckstop Girl and I’ve Been The One,Willin’also,those are all demos.

But then we finished them,did some overdubs,and then cut some other stuff. I wanted this record to feel like The Band in spirit,but they didn’t really sound like The Band. Little Feat had these unusual pieces,lyrically and melodically. And Billy’s chord changes are so different,they were stretching the form. Billy had written Brides Of Jesus. Just wonderful stuff,but the material was rock and country and gospel and some of the Mothers/ Zappa influence was still in there,in things like Hamburger Midnight.

BP:We were listening to Dylan, listening to The Band,but Lowell and I were also watching the Marx Brothers’ movies and listening to the songs in them. All that stuff is in the mix on the first record. That was what I loved about Little Feat and that record in particular. It was this amalgam of throwing things against the wall, looking at it and saying,“Yeah, I like that.”

VDP:And you can’t forget the blues, the pinnacle of which for Lowell and I was Howlin’Wolf. That’s why the Wolf [medley of Forty-Four Blues/How Many More Years] is on that record.

BP:Lowell was into building model airplanes. We’d take them over to Griffith Park and fly them around. He’d let the goddamn thing go until it ran out of gas and he crashed it. Anyway, Lowell was working on a plane and had this [vice] that held the motor in place.

Well the thing snapped,and the engine flew off at Lowell’s face. He put

Fred Tackett: Longtime Lowell George pal, later Little Feat guitarist ●

● Russ Titelman: Producer, Little Feat

● Lowell George: Little Feat cofounder, guitarist, vocalist

● Bill Payne: pianist, Little Feat co-founder

up his hand – he had quick reflexes – thank God,so it didn’t go right into his face,but it ripped up his hand.

RT:He showed up to the session with his hand all bandaged… so Ry Cooder came in and played slide on Forty-Four Blues/How Many More Years. We cut that shit live. Lowell was singing on a mike we put though a guitar amp, that’s how we got that sound. He did that Howlin’Wolf stuff so good.

It was like the real article. Even with Beefheart when he did Wolf-style stuff,you could hear him trying. For Lowell it just flowed out of him. He was a great singer,good as anyone you can think to mention.

FT:Lowell was a natch – a totally natural singer. He took a lot from Indian music,the melismatic singing, and brought that to the blues and had his own thing going.

BP:The thing he had in his voice – his timbre,his phrasing,all the things that drew you in – that’s where I put his genius,truly.

RT:The first Little Feat record was very much cut live with me saying,“Play…

OK,that’s the take… next!” It wasn’t overwrought or overproduced or over-anything. I loved that,but at some point Lowell wanted to make a more involved or sophisticated record.

He was not happy with what we had.

But he made that decision toward the end of session and we’d used up the budget. I felt like what we had was good. So me and Lowell really got into it and… it wasn’t nice.

BP:When we were done with that

Lenny Waronker: Warner Bros A&R

record,I felt like someone had shoved me into a dryer because of the conflict between Russ and Lowell. It didn’t get physical but they had vicious fights. It was like being in Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? It was tough because they had been close. I took Lowell’s side then,but later on I told Russ I might have been wrong.

LW:I don’t think the problem was the quality of the work that Russ wanted to hang onto. But as with most strong artists – who are the best ones, obviously – the first record can be really tough.

Knowing when to let go,knowing when to say it’s OK. It’s a difficult situation. But I tried to say to Lowell,“Look,this is the record you’ve made right now. Just believe in it and don’t worry.”

RT:When it came out [in January 1971] the reviews were really amazing. But… it didn’t sell a lot [only an estimated 11,000 copies,initially].

BP:I was naïve enough to think,Maybe we’ll become The Beatles (laughs). I felt like it would do pretty well. But the reality,once we were out there and were playing these songs… we would get up in front of people in the Midwest,in say, Cleveland,opening for the Vanilla Fudge,and people are yelling “Bring on the Fudge!” the whole time. So it was hard to get those songs across.

LW:That record is a kind of starting point for the band and Lowell,for what they would do and become. He would go on to cover a lot of ground,which was inevitable. He knew a lot about different genres,whether it was country or blues,New Orleans,Allen Toussaint music.

He gobbled up anything that was appealing to him. It’s what made it him special and what made Little Feat special. The notion that anything was possible.

BP:That’s true. It’s what initially captured people’s imagination and continued on… and it continues to this day. Little Feat had a sort of fearlessness, and you can hear that on the album.

M

●

MOJO 55

Michael Putland/Getty

56 MOJO

COTT WALKER REFERRED TO HIS manager Maurice King as ‘Boris’ (as in ‘Karloff ’) or simply ‘The Monster’.

For 17-year-old Steve Marriott, the underworld-connected King, who also managed Van Morrison (his contract would soon end up in the hands of the Mafia), was his meal ticket.

Having emptied his Post Office account of the savings he’d earned from his stint as a child actor, Marriott often performed at King’s West End club, the Starlite, a sordidly glamorous fleapit frequented by celebrities and gangsters such as the Krays. The pocket-sized wannabe soul singer was also familiar with the Krays having used their nightclubcum-gambling den in Knightsbridge, Esmeralda’s Barn, as a rehearsal space. Now, in September 1964, he was rehearsing his new band, the novice Small Faces, at the Starlite with King hoping to sign him to his Capable Management stable.

“With Maurice King…” Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones pauses. “It was just everyone asked favours of the Krays. If you were a bit of a hood yourself, you wanted to know the Krays. The East End was a small community and the music going on there was confined to a small number of people.”

Marriott had a favour to return to either King or the Krays. It was why the Small Faces performed their first gig at the Twisted Wheel club in Man- ➢

“Maybe he was the best Steve Marriott he could possibly have been,and that included the downfall”: Marriott,1973,around the time of Humble Pie’s Eat It.

➣

chester in October. The van they travelled up in from London was used by local villains in a leather shop robbery. Marriott received a free leather coat as his corner.

Success came quickly under Arden. He supplied

TEVE MARRIOTT WAS NOT THE only ’60s star to find the business of rock and pop entangled with gangsters, and though he would come to regret some of those associations, there was also a relish for the rough and tumble of the underworld – indeed, a relish for rough and “There was a relish for tumble generally. the rough and tumble of In 1965 he was already on the rise. In the underworld”:(from less than two years he would be estab- above) the Krays;hood hang-out Esmeralda’s lished as the most explosive singer and Barn;Don Arden. charismatic frontman of the UK beat boom, with songwriting skills and a brilliant band to match, but behind his livewire front lay insecurities that would sit uncomfortably with success and fame, a childlike side to his character

Marriott had been broke, desper“Steve was the realist of the band,”

Getty (2 ), Alamy, Shutterstock, Tracks, Mirrorpix

the Dreamland Centre in Margate.

58 MOJO

All or nothing:(from far left) Marriott at his London home,1966;Small Faces (from left) Marriott,Ian McLagan, Kenney Jones,Ronnie Lane do the alligator walk;on-stage at London’s Roundhouse,November 1968, shortly before quitting Small Faces; (insets below) Small Faces on 45.

Glyn Johns, and protective of the influence he exerted through Ian ‘Sammy’ Samwell, cowriter of the band’s first threatened. Johns recalled being approached at Olympic studios and ushered outside to a car where a “short, stocky man who apparently had been a professional wrestler” levelled a sawn-off shotgun at his legs. Arden later claimed that he had some of his men take Johns to a remote spot, tied to a tree and left there overnight.

In part, it was the tension between Marriott’s creative impulses and Arden’s more prosaic approach to the music business that saw Marriott – shortly after the Top 5 success of Sha-La-La-La-Lee in January 1966 made him a teen-pop pin-up – suffer a breakdown, accompanied by dramatic weight loss and his first deep dive into drugs and alcohol.

Tony Calder, who had managed Marriott for a year in 1963 and would soon, alongside his partner in Immediate Records Andrew Loog Oldham, take over as Small Faces manager (and record label, and publisher), reckoned “When people come out and they want to touch you and get a piece of you and you’re 19, it’s not like acting in the theatre or being in a TV studio,”

Many of Marriott’s problems were deep-root-

tions, Marriott’s urge to spin them tells its own troubled story. Kath Marriott, certainly, was over-bearing and outspoken. She had been horrified when he gave up acting for music, not least because his wages as a child star had doubled the family income. Now she became pro-active in his recording career. “His mum was winding everybody up,” says David Arden. “She wanted to know about what was happening with the money.”

When Kath hired an accountant, with links to the Krays, to investigate the band’s finances, Arden reacted by putting the company through which he channelled Arden negotiated to sell the band to Brian Epstein but The Beatles’ manager died before the contract could be signed. Eventually he struck a deal with Calder and Loog Oldham at Immediate. Oldham recalled handing Arden £25,000 in cash in a brown paper bag to close the deal.

“I sent the contracts girl to the house in Pimlico to sign the contract,” says Tony Calder. “She came back and said, ‘There’s your piece of paper and never ask me to deal with that band again.’ She ➢ MOJO 59

Happy boys happy:Small Faces arrive in Australia with Andrew Loog Oldham,1968; (below) Tony Calder;(right) Humble Pie (from left) Greg Ridley,Peter Frampton, Marriott,Jerry Shirley,1969.

➣

said, ‘I went to the house and there was marijuana smoke everywhere. I go to the upstairs bedroom knock on the door and the first thing that Steve Marriott says to me is, Do you fancy a shag?’”

T IMMEDIATE, MARRIOTT BLOOMED AS A PRODUCER, musician and songwriter. Oldham offered him unlimited studio time at Olympic, the use of the coveted Glyn Johns, the roster at Immediate to play with and his own time and guidance.

The results were astonishing – Here Come The Nice, Itchycoo Park, Tin Soldier and Afterglow merged Mod pop with soul and psych with a uniquely exciting edge – but Marriott’s personal problems and disquiet with fame only seemed to intensify.

“His self-esteem was not high. In normal social situations he couldn’t communicate at all with people,” says Jenny Dearden, Marriott’s first wife. “I got persuaded to go to a party at [antiques dealer and collector] Christopher Gibbs’on Cheyne Walk in Chelsea and Steve sat in the corner and couldn’t cope at all. Any musicians around he would have been able to latch onto them. We didn’t stay.

He got paranoid, he felt undereducated.”

He took out many of his problems on the Small Faces, quitting for the first time in early 1968 while on tour in Australia. “Steve said to me, ‘I’m leaving the band,’” recalled Calder. “He said, ‘I’m not going on with that fucking arsehole Ronnie [Lane] again, I’m not having that cunt nick my money any more.’”

Despite the hit records, Marriott was broke. Immediate agreed to pay an advance on the Small Faces’ publishing. Marriott spent the lion’s share on a thatched cottage in Essex, called Beehive. “The advance went to Steve and Ronnie being principal songwriters,” says Kenney Jones. “Mac and I were incredibly hurt we were left out because it was the Small Faces who got that advance, not Steve and Ronnie. The cash should have been split four ways. We only found out after the deal was signed. Ronnie got the raw end of the deal because on the property there was a garage with a flat above it and Ronnie got that while Steve got the cottage.”

Marriott, 22 now, was glad to see the back of the Small Faces. His new band, Humble Pie, with drummer Jerry Shirley, Herd guitaristsinger Peter Frampton and Spooky Tooth bassist Greg Ridley, abandoned pop, mixing acoustic musings, bluesy rock and country.

Marriott felt vindicated when, without the aid of any Consider yourself one management, he negotiated a vast £400,000 advance of us:Steve (back) from A&M. He splurged his share on a house for his understudies Tony Robinson (front) in parents. “[A&M co-founder] Jerry Moss asked me Oliver!,London,1960.

Courtesy of Omnibus Press, Getty (2 ), Shutterstock (2 )

STEVE WAS 1 3 when I met him.

I knew him as Stephen. I was the understudy to The Artful Dodger [in West End musical Oliver!] and Steve came in as my understudy about two or three months after the show had started [Oliver! opened on June 3 0 , 1 9 6 0 ]. When I went on as The Artful Dodger, Steve played my part in the chorus, the rest of the time he would just be sitting around in the dressing room weeks at a time with the other understudies.

We would spend time together at weekends. Every Sunday I went to [his home in] Manor Park to visit him.

He and his mum were always rowing and they’d say terrible things to each other. We never really used to play in his house, we always went out.

We’d go down to Ilford to Valentines Park [supposedly the inspiration for the Small Faces’ Itchycoo Park] which was run-down and boarded up and one time he’d got some super-strength untipped cigarettes for us to try. He had a magnetic and seductive air.

I really had a love/hate relationship with Steve. One minute he’d be my best buddy ever, the next he’d heap scorn and derision on me. He made me cry more than once but I loved the fact he was frightened of no one. I was rather respectful of my seniors, Steve never was. He modelled himself very much on the 1 9 5 0 s London geezer, even as a 1 3 -year-old… he liked to see himself as quite tough, a wide boy, a chatty boy, very much a Cockney boy.

Even though he was younger than me [by six months] he did intimidate me. He said he would teach me guitar and I said, “I don’t have a guitar.” He said, “Well give me £5 and I’ll go buy you one.” That was a

huge amount of money for the time but we were earning huge amounts.

I was earning £1 0 a week [in Oliver!] and Steve was earning £8 a week. I gave him the £5 on a Monday and on the Friday he brought in this red and yellow, really quite small, musical instrument. I was so intimidated I didn’t complain or anything. I took it home and my dad said they cost £1 in Woolworths and not only that but it’s not even a guitar, it’s a ukulele, and this one wobbles, the neck is loose. When I took it back in to Steve and said I want my money back, he said, “Why?” And then he said, “It’s supposed to wobble like that… it’s a Hawaiian ukulele and it goes ‘Wah! Wah!’ when you move the neck backwards and forwards and that’s why it’s so expensive.” I was so humiliated.

That epitomised my relationship with Steve.

He was very hyperactive.

Certainly if he had been at school today, he wouldn’t necessarily have gone to special school but there would have a been a teacher who would have appreciated he was showing some signs of anti-social behaviour and he would have been helped in a way he wasn’t back then. But maybe that would have inhibited the person he became. Maybe he was the best Steve Marriott he could possibly have been and that included the downfall.

As told to Simon Spence

“He had that physique”: Dee Anthony gets a grip on the impressed Marriott;(below) 1970’s Big Black Dog 45 and the Humble Pie joke that backfired;1971’s live album breakthrough Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmorey.

to talk to them about doing a tour of America to coincide with the album release,” says Larr y Yaskiel, A&M’s European director. “I couldn’t reach Steve on the phone. I sent him a telegram and he answered. I asked, ‘What happened, why didn’t you pick up the phone?’He said, ‘I’ve run out of money, my phone’s been cut off.’”

Marriott seemed unwilling or unable to oil the breakthrough hit for the band, securing them a pre-recorded Top Of The Pops appearance. “They did these live interviews at the same time as the pre-record,” says Jerry Shirley. “It was with Tony Blackburn and Steve came up with this idea of each of us calling him by another famous DJ’s name. [Then], whatever he’d ask us we’d say, ‘Dunno, ask our manager.’ Consequence was they never aired Big Black Dog the following week.”

Marriott needed a manager and chose Dee Anthony, supporting David Arden’s belief that the singer enjoyed dangerous company.

Anthony, an Italian-American from the Bronx, was a former manager to Tony Bennett. “They were all terribly impressed by him, completely overwhelmed,” says Jenny Dearden. “He was this big, hearty, funny guy, charming, and he had that physique that commands instant respect. It was a father figure for Steve… Dee was an American version of Don basically.”

Jerry Shirley met a friend of Anthony’s in New York called Carmine ‘Wassel’De Noia, six-foot-two and over 200lbs. Wassel was an associate of the Genovese crime family and the Pagano crew. “We were introduced in Dee’s apartment,” says Shirley. “He took my arm, his hand was so big it reached from my elbow to my wrist and he squeezed my arm and said, ‘Anybody who is a friend of Mr Anthony is a friend of mine… Anybody who is an enemy of Mr Anthony is an enemy of mine’… all this classic theatre.”

ITH DEE ANTHONY IN PLACE, HUMBLE PIE SHIFTED toward hard rock with Marriott as focal point, the band playing long stretches of dates on the American club and dancehall circuit. They broke big with a live album, Performance: Rockin’ The Fillmore, that spawned the radio hit, I Don’t Need No Doctor.

Soon after the album went gold, Peter Frampton quit. “Peter just

Success, even as a rocker rather than pop

and Olympic for three days.”

For a while, revenues kept pace with consumption. On joining the group, Frampton’s replacement Dave Clempson was paid £26,000 and given a Bentley. They toured in private jets, Marriott bought $6,000 fur coats as gifts, and Anthony arranged for six seafront houses to be bought in the Bahamas. At Beehive, Marriott had two Aston Martins in the garage. But he was not happy – months of headspinning all-out live performances, plus cocaine and alcohol abuse, had turned his thoughts to mush and laid waste to his private life.

“Steve could be very hyper and he could be very low,’ says Dearden. “They used to call it manic depression. It could have been ADHD, could have been bipolar. You didn’t deal with those things… back then it wasn’t discussed. Today, you could see he was manifesting symptoms that meant he could probably have been helped… but he was using substances to self-medicate.”

His marriage to Dearden was in a perpetual state of collapse.

They argued continually. When she hoped to start an antique shop, Marriott gambled away the money set aside for the project and tried to hide the fact. “Steve told me that the money was stolen by somebody in baggage [at the airport] and I believed it,” Dearden says. “I do remember saying, ‘Why on earth did you put it in the suitcase?’”

Marriott had signed over control of his money and music to Anthony and spent hundreds of thousands building a high-end recording studio at Beehive. When Dearden left him, he poured everything he had into Humble Pie’s seventh album, Eat It, a sprawling double recorded at the cottage. When it tanked, he ended up, on Quaaludes, smashing one of the Aston Martins into a bridge and careering into a river. Everything was a mess.

“He let Beehive go wild,” says Shirley. “The back door would be left open and cats, dogs, ducks and chickens would come in and ➢ MOJO 61

NTO MARRIOTT’S LIFE STEPPED A NEW MANAGER, Laurie O’Leary, a childhood friend of the Krays. He had run Esmeralda’s Barn from 1960 to 1963, and gone on to front two famous London nightclubs: Sibylla’s and the Speakeasy. O’Leary soon discovered that, contractually, Anthony had complete control over Marriott for years to come. Via The Krays, O’Leary reached out to the Mafia in an attempt to free Marriott from Anthony, and a meeting was arranged with Joe Pagano at the wedding of Krays associate and former Arden enforcer Wilf Pine at The Motel On The Mountain, Rockland Country, New York.

“So we went and it was nothing but gangsters,” recalls Marriott Land. “Mr Pagano explained to Steve, ‘Too bad, too sad. If you make waves, you’re a dead man because we’re standing by Dee.’” Running out of options, Marriott re-formed the Small Faces. Patrick Meehan’s son Patrick Jr and Wilf Pine had acquired rights to their Immediate recordings from the liquidator and began a spree of re-releases: Itchycoo Park made the UK Top 10 in 1977. Marriott seemed to take the endeavour less than seriously, appearing drunk on-stage and spitting at audiences. He also sabotaged promotion, snubbing, for instance, the offer of a primetime TV duet with David Essex.

After a live show in Edinburgh, he collapsed with heart palpitations.

Attempts at recording new Small Faces material – often with a country tinge – were

was brilliant but they didn’t sustain… and that was the major problem,” says producer Shel Talmy. The project ended in acrimony as the band discovered a substantial part of the large recording advance Atlantic had paid them for the new material had been used to free Marriott from his contract with Dee Anthony, who received an estimated £250,000 while also retaining ownership of all Humble Pie recordings.

Marriott was penniless, again – forced to sell off his studio equipment on the cheap while Beehive was put up for sale. He was also depressed. “Steve was really morose,” says Pam Marriott Land. “The drugs were just for him to cope because he was so bitter – to have worked as hard as he did and to have nothing to show for it slowly drove Steve insane. He just felt people hated him and his music was shit – his [1976] solo album [Marriott] was a flop, the Small Faces reunion was panned – it was so incredibly hard for him.”

The knockout blow was a tax bill for £100,000. Marriott fled the UK, landing with Pam, their two-year-old son Toby, a 62 MOJO

collie dog and a macaw, at a friend’s place in Santa Cruz, California.

It was a destructive period. “Steve’s drinking got out of control,” says Pam. “It was a miserable time, we fought a lot, and he got very violent physically to the point where he cracked my cheekbone. He was so remorseful after it had happened, half the time he wouldn’t even remember what he’d done. He would cry and go, ‘What happened to you?’and I go, ‘Well, you hit me.’”

The last decade of Marriott’s life was a tragi-comedy of opportunities scorned and sabotaged. In late 1979, Jerry Shirley roped him into a re-formed Humble Pie under the tutelage of Aerosmith manager David Krebs, but Marriott did his best to blow it, getting them kicked off AC/DC’s Back In Black tour by insulting the Young brothers. It was another recurrent theme – if an established act professed their admiration for him, Marriott would throw it back in their face, be it AC/DC, Judas Priest or Steven Tyler. The Pie reunion fizzled out. Marriott was a mess, fighting with band members, and ended up in hospital after collapsing with bleeding ulcers.

Broke again, typically he blamed others. “I was told after he left us he was talking about how we had not been fair with his money,” says David Krebs. “I never questioned him about it but I laughed to myself. I think we invested $150,000 or $200,000 in Humble Pie. When I look back on Steve I wish I had been his manager before Dee Anthony. It would have been a different turn-out in my opinion.”

ROM THE SUMMER OF 1981 UNTIL HIS return to the UK in 1984, Marriott continued to disintegrate. He cut a reunion album with Ronnie Lane that went unreleased, Pam left him, and he toured the American backwaters with a young lawyer named Martin Druyan, a novice in

Gifted a few thousand dollars by Keith Richards, he “That was a strange era when he was living in Atlanta, to a ranch house in Pike County, which is about 40 Even at age eight, I remember thinking that she didn’t seem that much older than me. One morn-

sent Steve’s mother a picture of a baby that he had supposedly fathered. Then a few months later wrote to say that the baby had died. Who knows what happened there?”

Marriott left America abruptly claiming his father was ill. In fact he had run up debts he couldn’t pay with local drug dealers. Remarkably, he had convinced Pam to return to the UK with him. On the plane he confessed to her that a girl he’d met in Detroit, Terri Elias, was pregnant with his child (a daughter, Tonya, whom Marriott never got to know). “By the time we got to England I said, ‘This isn’t going to work, I can’t do any more of this,’ and so I flew back home,” Pam says. “And when I got back to our house, it was empty. The cocaine dealer came and just took everything.”

The final years of Marriott’s life ➢

Getty, Mirrorpix

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shit all over the place. It had become a crash pad for every drugaddicted bastard in the business.”

Humble Pie ended badly, after they undertook a ‘farewell’ American tour in early 1975, forced upon them by financial hardship and Anthony’s determination. Marriott returned to Beehive with his soon-to-be second wife, Pamela Stephens (now Pam Marriott Land), having persuaded her to abandon her life (and fiancé) in her native Atlanta. She says she quickly regretted the decision.

Marriott at home was not the charismatic, hilarious star he’d been on tour. He was impractical, often incapable. “Steve was very childlike – he’d been performing his whole life, so all Steve knew was to say, ‘I need money,’ and Dee took care of it,” she says. Anthony, however, had moved on. “He tried to call Dee and couldn’t reach him. The man wouldn’t even take his phone calls. It broke Steve’s heart.”

You’re so good to me:Steve marries second wife Pam Stephens,Kensington,March 23,1977;Pie men Marriott and Greg Ridley soak up the applause,Miami Baseball Stadium,Florida,February 2,1974;(opposite) one of the last slices of Pie,solo album, Small Faces return.

Marriott recording 1972’s Smokin’ album,Olympic studios,Barnes;(right,from top) with Manon Piercey and daughter Mollie at home,1986;with first wife Jenny Rylance,1968; the burnt out Sextons,1991; (below) late work,the instant coffee that brought a lucrative ad and latest biography;(opposite) Steve in November 1989.

think Steve’s got long for this world,’” Parsons would recall. “‘I think he’s done everything he needed to do,’ and that’s why the album’s called 3 0 Seconds To Midnite.”

It was mostly to please Poulton that Marriott, de-

Courtesy of Omnibus Press, Alamy (2 ), Getty, Mirrorpix (2 ), Courtesy the Marriott Family

➣

would be his most excruciating. He hooked up with childhood sweetheart Manon Piercey and she gave birth to his daughter Mollie in 1985, but the domestic harmony was brief. In Canada, abusing crack, he walked out on another Humble Pie tour and told Manon the group had been stealing from him.

“It wasn’t one of Steve’s finer moments,” says Jerry Shirley.

The experience of fame and success, the chances wasted, the damage it had done his body and soul, had hollowed out all hope. “EMI in Germany wanted to sign him [for a reputed £100,000],” says Jim Leverton, who had played bass in Marriott’s Packet Of Three band. “We went out to Heathrow and stayed the night in a hotel for an early flight and when we got up in the morning he just said, ‘I’m not going’… and we didn’t go. He didn’t want to know about the business side of the music business.”

He continued to abuse alcohol and drugs, and left Piercey for Toni Poulton, 14 years his junior and with a troubled past: in 1983 she had been driving, drunk, in an accident that killed her sister Joanna. The pair moved to a

Arkesden in Essex. He was considered to replace Paul Rodgers as vocalist in Bad Company but blew the audition, then scored cash windfalls singing on ads for Puma and Nescafé – also squandered.

There were still shows, in pubs and clubs, sometimes in unlikely spots, which those who witnessed will never forget (see panel).

In 1989, for £10,000 cash, he cut a solo album with producer and film music composer Stephen Parsons.

“I said to my wife after the first time he came round, ‘I don’t

64 MOJO

Frampton had hoped that Marriott would get it all out of his system and complete the recordings. Instead, Marriott fled the country with Poulton after she was arrested for driving under the influence.

ARRIOTT AND POULTON ARRIVED back at Heathrow on April 19, 1991. It was midday. Marriott was 44, hung-over and jet-lagged. It was claimed that while they were away, Sextons had been burgled, the TV and some guitars removed. Marriott’s first stop, however, was at his narrowboat. He’d told friends he

Marriott only had hours left to live and there is much confu-

that evening at the Straw Hat in Sawbridgeworth, after which he drove the couple to the home of concert promoter Brian Shaw, in Kings Ridden, Ongar. Other versions of the story feature a different house as well as persistent claims there was a party going on there.

Nor is there unanimity over why and at what time Marriott returned home to Sextons. It is strongly suggested there was an argument between Marriott and Poulton, potentially about Marriott’s desire to reconcile with Mollie, during which she took off and threw

her wedding ring at him. What seems the most improbable version of events is the story Poulton told The Star newspaper the day after his death:that Marriott had slipped out of their friend’s home so he could tidy up Sextons before she got back.

It was approximately 6.30am when a neighbour of Marriott’s said she had called the fire brigade. “I smelled smoke and looked out to see the roof of next door on fire, just feet away,” she said.

In July 1991, at an inquest into his death, it was recorded that Marriott had enough cocaine, Valium and alcohol in his system to have put him in a coma. He had then breathed in lethal fumes from a fire that was probably started by a cigarette. The recriminations began immediately and continue to this day. “When I heard he was dead, the very next day there was this postcard from LA, from Steve, and all it said was, ‘I want my family back’,” says Pam. “That was odd.”

“I’ve always found his death very suspicious,’say Kenney Jones.

“I often think it. Steve was known for upsetting a few people.”

Others felt his death was an accident waiting to happen. “He nearly set fire to my house one time,” says John Skinner, Marriott’s long-time guitar tech, roadie and driver. “He was so drunk I wouldn’t let him drive home so I put him to bed. My wife went up and he was fast asleep with a cig in his mouth – when he breathed in, the end would glow. She took it out and the response was, ‘Oi, you cunt, I’m smoking that.’He was a terrible smoker in bed.”

In 1993, Poulton was involved in a second fatal car accident on the same stretch of road in Epping where her sister was killed. The driver of the other vehicle, 21-year-old Penny Jessop, died instantly.

After pleading guilty to driving without due care and attention when over the alcohol limit, Poulton was jailed for five years.

The Marriott estate she had inherited fell into disrepair with Marriott demo and live tapes circulating freely. In 1998 music executive Chris France took over its running on her behalf. “Toni was a heavy drinker before she went into prison and when she came out the whole estate was in a complete mess,” says France. “He was being bootlegged everywhere, particularly live tapes, and a few studio bits and pieces… nobody was taking care of business.”

France, with Kenney Jones, chased down royalties owing the Small Faces and secured the band a decent future royalty. There was no money from Humble Pie. “It goes to the Dee Anthony estate,” says France. “We still get the publishing money but none of the money from record rights.”

Poulton and the other branches of Marriott’s family remain on poor terms. In 2012, when the Small Faces were inducted (jointly with the Faces) into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kenney Jones made sure Mollie received the award on behalf of her father. “Chris [France] called and demanded we send the award to Toni the next day,” says Toby, who was also at the ceremony. “Me and Mollie decided to give it to Tonya [Marriott’s child with Terri Elias] who hadn’t received anything of Steve’s and was rightfully due to get something.” Complicating matters further, Poulton suffered a serious head injury circa 2014/15 from which she is yet to fully recover.

“I’m not sure what Steve would have thought about this,” says Toby. “He probably would just tell us that it’s just money and to get on with our lives instead of getting involved with the mess he made. But to have these people represent him is very hard for myself and Steve’s other kids to accept.”

ARRIOTT ALWAYS SAID HE’D DIE YOUNG. “I won’t make old bones, mate, I know that,” he’d told John Skinner in the mid-’70s. His career decisions were those of a man who gave no thought to tomorrow, and at its best his music had the same devil-may-care, sometimes desperate, quality.

“It was exhausting being around Steve but what it must have been like to be Steve, God only knows,” reflects Jerry Shirley. “He was often accused of being overwhelming and he’d go, ‘I’m not overwhelming, am I? Am I? I’m not overwhelming… what do they mean?’And in an overwhelming way he’d tell you he wasn’t overwhelming.”

Tony Calder saw Marriott as a man in thrall to his impulses: often creative, sometimes self-gratifying, other

times quite the opposite. “He’d come into the office,” Calder recalled. “‘Tone, I got to get a new guitar.’‘What happened to the last one?’‘I saw some bloke and I gave him my favourite guitar.’‘Why?’ ‘Because he didn’t have one.’”

Pam Marriott Land, with more reason than most to harbour a grudge, prefers to remember the man in full.

“Seems I’ve outlived most of our friends from those years,” she says, “and I guess that made it easier for me to spin my version of our life together to make me a victim and Steve the bad guy. That really wasn’t the case. Truth is, Steve was the best mentor I could have ever hoped for. I’ve had an extraordinary life, and I wouldn’t have done a third of the things I have if it wasn’t for Steve’s influence. I’ve never met anyone who loved life as much as he did. With money, without money, good times and scarier times, he never lost his sense of humour or ability to draw you in with him, even when you hated his guts. He’s a movie. That’s for sure.”

M All Or Nothing: The Authorised Story Of Steve Marriott by Simon Spence is published by Omnibus Press on March 1 8 .

STEVE MARRIOTT? Me and my friend Martin, we did a double-take at the black and white, photocopied poster stuck on a lamp post: Steve Marriott’s Packet Of Three.

It couldn’t be the real Steve Marriott… in a pub in Betws-yCoed, in the mountains of north Wales. But worth a phone call.

The landlord said yes, it’s tonight. The real Steve Marriott.

Saturday, November 24, 1990.

We pulled the old Mini into the carpark of the Swallow Falls Hotel, and reversed into a slope so we could roll down and bump-start later… in time to pay a fiver for the ticket and get a pint before the music started.

Snugly packed, about 50 people in a Victorian country pub. An atmosphere of tingling-tense excitement… then Marriott, plus drummer and bassist emerged

time to introduce them, and no one could balance their pints and muster a round of applause.

Marriott put his mouth to the mike. “Do you want us to tune up?

No, fuck it, this guy’s gonna hit the fuckin’drums and we’ll just start…”

Straight into Memphis Tennessee and a non-stop, rowdy celebration of rock’n’roll classics and Steve Marriott originals.

It was loud, very loud in a little space stuffed full of people. You couldn’t speak or shout but just keep catching the glistening, appreciative eyes of the other lucky humans. Jim Leverton on bass and drummer Alan ‘Sticky’Wicket were tight and true. Marriott himself, irrepressibly cocky, a swaggering presence, loving the music and happy to be there, in a pub in the mountains of Wales.

Whatcha Gonna Do About It… Five Long Years… Some Kind Of Wonderful… a break just long enough to grab a beer… and then he was back again, not bothering with banter except to lace his intros with fuckin’this and fuckin’that and give us all that we wanted: Tin Soldier, Itchycoo Park and Natural Born Bugie… to a climax of All Or Nothing.

Deafened and dazed, we tumbled outside. Me and Martin, we hovered at the door of the pub, hopeful of a rumbustious

The following April – another

Born to dye:lady in black Lana Del Rey,Los Angeles, January 7,2021.

MOJO 67

T’S MIDNIGHT IN MODESTO AND LANA DEL REY HAS swung into the backyard, pulled up in her fast car. “I told my boyfriend I was going to go out and sit in the car because I hate it when people listen to me talk,” she says. “I’m at his parents’farm, so we’re in, like, the guest house. It’s pretty idyllic:Northern California, pretty cold, 40 degrees and a little fireplace. We had a sweet little night singing all the old Disney and holiday songs – not what I expected after a long car ride, but everyone was in a good mood.”

Tomorrow, Del Rey will hit the

The record states that Elizabeth Woolridge Grant was born in New York in 1985;as a baby, she moved with her parents upstate to Lake Placid. Music

she’s wearing a sling in MOJO’s cover photograph.

“People said I came from money,” she recounts.

University in the late 2000s, there’s been a question lurking in Del Rey’s mind:what if something happened to make the world stop? “So when it did,” she says, “I was kind of shocked.” The pandemic has inevitably hampered her movements – festivals cancelled, studio time with producer Jack Antonoff truncated – but it hasn’t slowed down her creative jumps (or her willingness to crash into social media).

September saw the publication of her poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass. In November, she covered Summertime as a fundraiser for the New York and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestras; covering all bases, she also recorded You’ll Never Walk Alone for a documentar y about Liverpool FC. The most significant landmark, however, was the completion of Chemtrails Over The Country Club, the album she has been promising (sometimes as White Hot Forever) since the release of 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! Bruce Springsteen, who knows a bit about the flipside of the American dream, loved that album:“She just creates a world of her own and invites you

me a record deal and us being some rich white family when we fought over money constantly when we were young.” Later, she says “I was not from the right side of the tracks, period.”

Sent to boarding school to address an alcohol problem – a period she captured in This Is What Makes Us Girls from her Born To Die album of 2012 – she “was made fun of mercilessly for being white trash. It was so hard, every minute of it was super-tough, not having come from Greenwich. Being super straight-edge in college was just, like, crazy. It’s been the road less travelled the whole time.” She has no interest, she insists, in properly telling her own story, “beautiful” though she says it is: “I don’t give a fuck about people knowing [mocking little Early detractors, chasing down a narrow idea of “authenticity”,

Sirens under the name May Jailer, Lana Del Ray AKA Lizzy Grant, was removed by her managers from the internet in

Behind her, the Californian coast is on fire.

The Greatest, Norman Fucking Rockwell!

In 2008, Del Rey was living in the Manhattan Mobile Home Park in New Jersey. She would also take the light

the since repudiated Lana Del Ray. She had a deal with David Nichtern’s 5 Points Records; Lady Gaga’s was next?

“No,” says Del Rey lightly. “I felt totally fucked.”

➢ “daughter of a domain-name magnate.”

68 MOJO

Alamy, Charlie Grant (retouching by Kevin Westenberg and Edwin Ingram)

Ultraviolence indicates (“Well my boyfriend’s in a band/

Don’t let me be misunderstood: (clockwise from left) on-stage in Amsterdam,2011;backstage at the LA Roxy,2012;with sister Caroline;on-stage as Lizzy Grant, New York,June 2009.

Getty (3 ), Avalon.red, Koen Van Weel/EPA/Shutterstock, Alpha Press, Digital/Eroteme.co.uk

➣

There was this company that emerged called The Orchard that was taking submissions for, like, toilet paper commercials and I probably did one, like, under a pseudonym. Definitely the happiest I’ve ever been. Stay in the middle, no dog in the race, people would even hire me for background stuff. I tried to act so cool on every sofa I sat at.”

It was only in 2010, when she met her current manager Ben Mawson at the CMJ Festival in New York’s Chinatown, that gears shifted and she glimpsed a significant future for herself: “Then I moved to London with him that week and he got me out of my deal that day.”

Success was not immediate. “I lived in a shitty flat with no heat, it was so awful – but they told me it was on Camden Road near where Amy Winehouse used to play at the Roundhouse, and I loved Amy.” Her voice softens dreamily. “I loved Amy.” Fed up with trying to write songs for other people, one day she “just said ‘fuck it’” to her collaborator Justin Parker:“‘I’m going to write what I want to write now.’”

In a Dolly Parton-style fit of productivity, within 72 hours she had Video Games, Born To Die, Blue Jeans and Ride.

On July 23, 2011, just under a month after Video Games appeared on the internet, Del Rey was on a train to Glasgow when Mawson told her she had Once upon a dream:(right) the many faces of Lana Del Rey, from demos LP Sirens as May Jailer to Lizzy Grant’s digital EP Kill Kill and breakthrough single Video Games.

70 MOJO

received her first review. “I had 10 seconds of the most elated feeling,” she remembers, “and then the news everywhere, on all of the televisions, was that Amy had died on her front steps and I was like no. NO.” She breathes in sharply. “Everyone was watching, like, mesmerised, but I personally felt like I didn’t even want to sing any more.”

EN SECONDS OF ELATION seems to be as much pleasure as Del Rey has ever taken from her press.

When she covered Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood on 2015’s Honeymoon album, it was not casually chosen:anger at the way she feels she has been misrepresented surges through her conversation, despite the four billion streams, the four UK Number 1 albums, and the validation of famous fans from Stevie Nicks to Courtney Love.

Even Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s ecstatic reception was no antidote. “I knew they were going to like Norman… because there’s kind of nothing not to like about it,” she shrugs. “Norman…’s just cool, it’s easy to cheer for that.” She doesn’t, however, believe people are cheering for her:in September, she declared she still felt like an “underdog”.

“When I’m in London I’m reminded of what other people think of me in a great way. Being on

the cover of MOJO – I fucking love MOJO. It’s crazy to me, crazy to me, crazy to me that I could be on the cover of MOJO but it’s a little different – ha! – over here,” she says, ie, in America. “I mean, I guess I’ll never forget my first four years of interviews. They just fucking burned me.”

There was the one where the journalist “made fun of me mercilessly, for like, five hours about how I adopted a New York City accent and that everyone knew it was fake, so just give it up. It was embarrassing – he humiliated me. So by the time he asked me about feminism, I said I just wanted to talk about aerospace travel.”

A 2014 Guardian interview headlined “I Wish I Was Dead Already” is another thorn in her psyche. “I didn’t say I wanted to die because of the 27 Club – I said I was having, like, a fucking hard time. The way people talk about mental health in 2020” – she makes the noise of an explosion – “mind blown. Talk about a different world compared with five years ago. You said anything remotely like you’re not feeling so good that day and it’s like, ‘Woah, you’ve set women back like 200 years.’ Or ‘Witch!’ It was superhard to be a real person.”

Instead, Del Rey continued to build her musical world, creating a reality nobody could dismiss. ‘Evolution’suggests dramatic Bowielike shape-shifts; instead, her six albums have been a process of refining her core material – the palette of upcycled hip-hop, vintage Hollywood glamour and Laurel Canyon classicism. But Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s widescreen dazzle was a dead end of sorts – “I had to turn back inward,” she says – and Chemtrails Over The Country Club appears to reveal a more vulnerable Del Rey:lighter on the LA menace, more innocently emotional:“We did it for fun/We did it for free,” she sings sweetly on the song Yosemite, “we did it for the right reasons.” It’s an album that looks at the road ahead, but also, back to where she’s come from, making her strongest connection yet with her antecedents.

“I’ve been covering Joni and dancing with Joan,” she sings on Continues on page 7 4

In October 2019, Joan Baez received a surprising phone call. It was Lana Del Rey, asking if the folk legend would join her at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre to sing her 1975 track Diamonds And Rust. “I was sort of amazed because I didn’t know she would know so much about me,” Baez tells MOJO today.

In the run-up to the show, Del Rey visited Baez at home in Woodside, California, and reverentially refers to Baez “evaluating” her harmonies.

Baez laughs. “It was mostly a hang-out; we just walked and we saw the property and fed the chickens, so we got close that way. And it was a riot from then on.”

Baez was surprised when Del Rey (“absolutely lovely”) asked her to sing another song at the show.

“I said, ‘Without you, Lana? Those kids are all 16 years old;they’re hardly going to relate to me.’And she said:‘Well, they should! They should know you.

And anyway, their parents come!’”

Baez added Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.

Subsequently, Baez and her son Gabriel took Del Rey and pals dancing at Little Baobab – Baez’s preferred spot for African and Latin music (“and some rap and reggae”) in San Francisco’s Mission district.

“She showed me and my sister

Courtesy of Joan Baez and The Seager Gray Gallery

God knows I tried: (above) Del Rey satisfies her fans,2013;(below) in LA with Jack Antonoff (left) and Ben Mawson for the Grammys,Beverly Hills Hilton,February 2019;(panel right) with Joan Baez,2016 and (inset) painted by Baez, without makeup.

up until 2am,” recalls Del Rey. “I said to her guitar player Dirk [Powell], who’s been with her 30 years, ‘She just doesn’t stop dancing!’And she hadn’t stopped shimmying at all. And he said, ‘She’s not going to stop dancing until she dies.’

And I said, ‘Ooh, Dirk, we have to write that one.’”

Baez has been concentrating on her art since her 2018’s Fare Thee Well tour, and recently painted Del Rey from a photo of the singer with no makeup, inspired by a similar portrait of Marilyn Monroe.

“I went through, like, a gazillion photos on the internet – she’s a gorgeous narcissist and she knows it,” says Baez. “They were all made-up with roses and those eyelashes she never takes off. And then there was just one picture of her with no makeup on and that’s the one I painted and she loves it.”

Meanwhile, Del Rey has been helping Baez’s 16-year-old granddaughter Jasmine with her songwriting via text. Baez laughs at the suggestion she would offer Del Rey any advice – “Good Lord!

She runs things!” – describing her as “an extraordinary woman who has taken her career into her own hands. Because that’s what you have to do these days.”

On November 7, 2020, Lana Del Rey posted an Instagram video of Baez, shimmying in the aisles of a grocery store in celebration of Joe Biden’s victory.

“Man, that’s my girl,” Del Rey wrote underneath. “She never stops dancing!”

about gaslighting,infidelity and domestic violence,songs about women written by women,most notably Ellie Greenwich,Carole King and Cynthia Weil.

CONVERSATION WITH LANA DEL REY IS RICH WITH HER influences and inspirations: those singers and musicians who have touched her life in some way and fed into her work. But the dreamworld of her songs – eerie, hallucinatory – would be familiar to an even richer array of artists. There are names here that Del Rey has referenced and collaborated with (Stevie Nicks, Tammy Wynette), others who came before and travelled along similar paths (Dory Previn, Sibylle Baier), and those who work in different mediums, but plot out similar routes (David Lynch, Ed Ruscha, Catherine Opie). Cartographers all of that vivid, haunted West Coast highway of hope and ruin, the one just beyond the H of the Hollywood sign…

In 2013’s Tropico,a short film written by LDR to showcase her 2012 Paradise EP and directed by Anthony Mandler,the singer’s performance of Gods & Monsters includes a recital from Allen Ginsberg’s visionary beat poem Howl. Although the 1955 peyote-inspired cry of wild freedom was set in Ginsberg’s New York,Del Rey relocates it to modern-day Los Angeles,“Eden transformed into the Garden of Evil”.

Neil Krug, Image Courtesy of The Advertising Archives, Getty (6 ), Alamy (7 ), Shutterstock, Courtesy of Light In The Attic, Emma Tillman

Born and raised in ’50s Hollywood, Babitz spent her teenage years hanging out with the LA art and rock scene before writing it all down in aphoristic Fitzgeraldean soliloquies of vivid euphoric bliss.

Her books,much like LDR’s music, are half memoir,half seduction, sardonic female perspectives on that dangerous yet alluring world of sex,drugs and rock’n’roll.

raise a family,Baier left behind one haunting

songs possess a similar tension between profound human drama and complete self-absorption.

Best known for her 1967 Southern gothic chart-topper,Ode To Billie Joe,this Mississippi-born singersongwriter also specialised in a particular kind of seductive yet poignant narrative balladry, poetically dark songs of romantic metaphor delivered in a her alluringly sad Southern tones and rich in the rococo imagery of caged birds.

When LDR controversially quoted The Crystals’ 1962 song He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) in the title track to 2014’s Ultraviolence,she was underlining a dark thread of girl-group tragedy that runs through all her work:’60s pop songs

There is a duality to Del Rey’s finest songs,a romantic drama that is both tough and vulnerable,sweet and sinister. It’s similar to the erotic tension that dwells in the finest works of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra,songs like Some Velvet Morning and Summer Wine where every line feels like a coded invitation to something dark,sensuous and forbidden.

Del Rey has talked of her desire to work with the 74-year-old director,while Lynch has favourably described LDR as “a character born of another time”,and LDR wears her Lynch influences boldly,from dream-pop arrangements that echo Lynch soundtracker Angelo Badalamenti to an interest in the horror that lies behind quaint images of suburban America.

The 77-year-old Illinois-born director began his career with female-narrated tales of doomed love – Badlands (left),Days Of Heaven – shot through with a dusk-fire light. Now,he makes sensual, hallucinatory epics,stream-of-consciousness juxtapositions of beauty and despair,forever on the edge of euphonic disintegration.

Del Rey duetted with the Fleetwood Mac singer on the soaring Beautiful People,Beautiful Problems from 2017’s Lust For Life and the pair interviewed each other that year,with Nicks describing LDR as “[my] witchy sister”. Certainly the two share a magic touch when it comes to transforming songs of romantic despair into eerie anthems of defiance.

hope and heartbreak at their core.

The California writer’s late ’60s and ’70s essays on LA are

paranoia fulfilled.

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He appeared in Del Rey’s 2016 Freak video and Fucking Rockwell! about him. The hirsute self-

Over the past 30 years,this California photographer has catalogued the dreamlike dead spaces of Los Angeles – freeways,mini-malls, Beverly Hills gated communities – alongside Old Master-style portraits of surfers,footballers, and queer subculture. In all her works there is a stunning juxtaposition of the banal and the beautiful.

Forty-five years before LDR’s Lust For Life,this New-Jersey born Hollywood lyricist fashioned a whole concept LP around actress Peg Entwistle’s 1932 suicide from atop the Hollywood sign.

Inspired by her broken marriage to composer André Previn,Dory’s songs are proto-Del Rey baroque LA confessionals of madness,longing and recrimination.

Alongside the hazy dreamlike death-trap of Sofia Coppola’s 1999 film The Virgin Suicides, LDR’s visual aesthetic most closely resembles Peter Weir’s hallucinatory 1975 film about the disappearance of four Australian schoolgirls. It’s murder mystery played out as conspiracy or chimera,heavy with an inexplicable erotic weight.

The confessional American poet, who took her own life in 1963,is arguably the most visible and consistent literary reference in LDR’s work:her themes of alienation and psychological trauma brought vividly up to date in numerous LDR songs,videos,and, most overtly,last year’s book of poetry, Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass.

This Nebraska-born photographer and painter is an artist influenced by the landscape, culture and architecture of southern California. Like LDR’s, his works possess what might be best described as a cool gaze or a blank authority,huge disquieting images of corporate America devoid of people,wealth and prosperity as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

“Who d’you think you are? Norman fucking Rockwell?” That’s the gag in LDR’s 2019 title-track – a scathing put-down of an artistically-affected ex-lover. The New York painter’s 20th century commercial style is both masculine and idealistic, but it’s also eerily Lynchian [see L],suggesting a sinister grotesquerie at the heart of the American dream.

Bare feet on ivories: Del Rey gets comfortable with her muses:(above, from left) Stevie Nicks; David Lynch’s Blue Velvet; Norman Rockwell art; (below,from left) Allen Ginsberg;The Crystals; (opposite) Dory Previn.

A teenage rebel,one-time armed-robber,jazz-bar pianist and heroin addict,the life of this California-born ’70s songwriter sounds like the stuff of LDR make-believe,but there are clear parallels in their music – multi-tracked,introspective,devotional vocals over rolling piano melodies and that eternally deferred tonic note.

“I don’t want to end up like Tammy Wynette,” sings LDR on Chemtrails’track Breaking Up Slowly,but the First Lady of Country Music’s tragic career has been a huge influence on Del Rey,witnessed in her tough trailer-park glamour and that tear-in-every-word delivery of sad,strings-rich ballads.

The artist formerly known as Natalie Laura Mering has supported LDR on her Norman Fucking Rockwell! tour,duetted on a cover of Joni Mitchell’s For Free and describes her friend as “a total chaos artist”.They are also kindred spirits,dealing in forlorn pop anthems that draw on a nostalgic love for ’70s AOR balladry.

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Getty, Charlie Grant (retouching by Kevin Westenberg and Edwin Ingram)

Continued from page 7 1 Chemtrails…’ Dance Till We Die – and it’s all true. In October 2019, Del Rey duetted with Joan Baez on her 1975 song Diamonds And Rust at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre;a night of non-stop dancing with the 80-year-old folk hero followed. And as promised, Chemtrails… includes a Joni Mitchell cover:For Free, from Mitchell’s 1970 album Ladies Of The Canyon. Reprising their October 2019 performance at the Hollywood Bowl, Del Rey shares the verses out with Arizonan singer-songwriter Zella Day and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering. A bittersweet commentary on the value of art, Mitchell contrasts

doubt Del Rey’s investment in For Free. “I think the verse that Lana sings – “Me, I play for fortunes” – it’s her story too,” she says. “She understands the ephemeral quality of music and that it can’t be completely commodified, even though she’s done such a great job of doing that. I think Joni is very similar.”

AEZ AND MITCHELL, DEL REY says, are “like unicorns”. “Joan, Bob, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, it’s less the albums and more the songs – the single perfect songs. Like Diamonds And Rust or Woodstock.” She rummages on You Tube to find a “staggering” 1962 coffeehouse performance from Baez. “I see a lot of people now wanting to

thing” to her.

until then, I sang for less pure of soul. I didn’t give a fuck.”

Mering, comparing Del Rey to For free:(from left) Weyes Blood,Del Rey, Zella Day and Joni Mitchell’s Ladies Of The Canyon;(above) “I had a lot of fun dreaming about what was going to come next”.

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loose. What she goes for in terms of when she’s writing and working, it’s very magical and intuitive and it’s not very calculated – even though I think maybe she’s been accused of that in the past.”

That looseness – a willingness to wander – feels more present on Chemtrails… than previous albums, yet she insists it has been “so much harder than any other record I’ve made.” Covid separated her from Antonoff – also a collaborator with St. Vincent and Taylor Swift – in the final stages of recording and she missed him. “Everything that could be terrible is hilarious in Jack’s world. I think that’s why he does so well. It’s a rare quality for a man to have that softer kind of side – all hilarity and no inappropriateness.”

She says she finds listening to the new album “a fight”, conceding that she’s offering a pre-emptive critique. “It wasn’t so much that I thought the songs fantastically fit together with like seamless, sunkissed production – but you know, there’s a life lived in there.”

Del Rey has long used Los Angeles to colour and contour her songs. But Chemtrails roves further – Tulsa, Nebraska, Florida – a fitting backcloth for a record about freedom in a world where everything has a price. Not All Who Wander Are Lost – a song whose sky-high trill reminds Del Rey of “Cinderella in the movie where she’s holding the bluebird” – romanticises wanderlust. Wild At Heart and the title track (“I’m not unhinged or unhappy/I’m just wild”) hint at something untameable. If For Free is the record’s presiding spirit, you can also feel the vibrations of Mitchell’s Cactus Tree, a song that acknowledges the hard work of “being free” – shedding compromise, swerving control.

It’s a struggle Del Rey maps onto her folk and country influences, most explicitly on Breaking Up Slowly. A mournful lament riffing on Tammy Wynette and George Jones’s notoriously turbulent relationship, it was written with Tennessean singer-songwriter Nikki Lane, who supported Del Rey in 2019. In a hotel room, Lane mentioned that somebody told her she was “breaking up slowly”. Del Rey immediately sang “…is a hard thing to do”.

“One of the most incredible things about being around her is like, she is a song,” says Lane of Del Rey. “It’s just coming out of her at all hours of the day.”

They have written four more originals; there is also, says Del Rey, “a cover album of country songs” and one of “other folk songs”. Del Rey expects “scepticism,” but explains her father and uncle Phil Madeira (one of Emmylou Harris’s Red Dirt Boys) exposed her to country music in her youth. Her

★★★ (5 Points, 2 0 1 0 ) Still uncertain about her name (and its spelling), Lizzy Grant sheds a final skin with this torch-song trip-hop and motel-room pop.

Very “proto”, although Yayo made it onto the expanded Born To Die. Famously “scrubbed” from the internet after release as Del Rey remapped her past and future.

★★★ (Polydor, 2 0 1 2 ) The outrageous success of Video Games guaranteed that this “proper” debut would struggle to match expectations. With hindsight, its deathly romance (Blue Jeans), dangerous men (Off To The Races), corrupted privilege (National Anthem) and lost causes (everything, always)

★★★★ (Polydor, 2 0 1 4 ) The Black Keys’Dan Auerbach produced this record, calling Del Rey “a true eccentric”.

She doubled down on her distinctive vision:the market for David Lynch comparisons rocketed ten-fold, while the doomed, swooning, Crystalsquoting title track became the

★★★★ (Polydor, 2 0 1 5 ) Smoke-wreathed and sun-blinded, Del Rey’s fourth album almost sinks from languor into stupor, a hip-hop beat or jazz flourish occasionally shaking it by the shoulders. It’s a beautifully seductive half-light/ half-life spell, unbroken by the TS Eliot recitation or the Don’t

★★★ (Polydor, 2 0 1 7 ) The smile on the cover, the cast of collaborators (including The Weeknd and “witchy sister” Stevie Nicks):it seemed Del Rey’s tightly sealed world was opening up, even stirring into political consciousness. Still plenty of dark-blue atmosphere on Topanga Canyon swelterer Heroin, though.

★★★★★ (Polydor, 2 0 1 9 ) “Goddamn manchild/You fucked me so good that I almost said ‘I love you’”… From those defiant opening seconds, it was clear Del Rey’s sixth album was about to change her game, elevating “gangster Nancy Sinatra” to the next best American songwriter. Pop. Art.

tastes are “stark and blue, somewhat outlaw”: Hank Williams, Bobbie Gentry, Patsy Cline, Wynette. “With a little Marty Robbins and Johnny Paycheck. I went back and listened to Ride [from 2012 EP Paradise] and Video Games and thought, you know, they’re kind of country. I mean, they’re definitely not pop. Maybe the way Video Games got remastered, they’re pop – but there’s something Americana about it for sure. So let’s see how these things come out – I’m not going to have pedal steel guitar on every single thing, but it is easy for me to write.”

YEAR OR SO AGO, DEL REY attended a party with Jack Antonoff and St. Vincent at the house of Guy Oseary, manager of Madonna and U2. “Something happened,” she says, “kind of a situation like – never meet your idols. And I just thought, ‘I think it’s interesting that the best musicians end up in such terrible places.’ I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to try my best not to change because I love who I am.’ I said, ‘Jack, it’s dark.’ And he said, ‘Well, it’s dark – but I mean, it’s just a game.’”

The incident inspires a song on Chemtrails… Dark But Just A Game mixes Portishead, Ricky Nelson’s song Garden Party and Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl (“The best ones lost their minds”) into a potent statement of defiance.

“Dark But Just A Game is so her to me,” Antonoff will tell MOJO: “fly down the rabbit hole and smile in the same breath.”

The game, however, takes its toll. As Del Rey talks, it frequently feels as if she’s dusting herself down from past humiliations, brushing off old slights.

“People are constantly inferring that I’ve done so much to myself, when I’ve never even been under anaesthesia or whatever,” she says unprompted, apparently still stung by 2012 speculations over the size of her lips. Occasionally, she makes grand statements: “I wanted music to change in the early 2000s and I wanted it to be better than it was. I think it is and I genuinely think I had a hand in it for female singer-songwriters.” They don’t land like shots from a weaponised ego – more the affirmations of someone who still feels as if she doesn’t say it, nobody will.

On a Chemtrails… song called White Dress she sings in a breathlessly rapt whisper of being “only 19”, working as a waitress, listening to The White Stripes and Kings Of Leon. “Look how I do this,” she sings with trembling innocence, “look how I’ve got this.” Then comes the fall:“It kind of makes me feel that I was better off.”

“I’m sure the grass is always greener,” Del Rey says, looking back on her waitressing days, “but I had a lot of fun dreaming about what was going to come next. Also, I really liked being of service and I still do – I do lots of little things in my spare time that put me back sort of in that service ➢ MOJO 75

are slated for being their authentic, delicate selves.”

“I wasn’t saying white like me,” she insists, emphasising that the women she mentioned are artists she loves. “I was saying people who are made a joke of like me.”

Charlie Grant (retouching by Kevin Westenberg and Edwin Ingram)

➣

space. How I kind of grew up was to be a man amongst men and a grain of sand on the beach and I preferred to stay in the middle of the boat in that way. Sometimes I feel, with fame, it can put you on the peripheries, where the vultures can pick at you. It’s dangerous on the edges.”

“It’s not that I aspire to be the girl next door,” she says later, “but it’s just that I actually was and I think what some people don’t understand is that the girl next door has things going on, too. A lot of these other people who I see portraying that image are not that way at all – they’re like the biggest bitches who live in, like, insane mansions and who rip people off. This is not bitterness speaking at all. It’s literally just kind of just the facts, ma’am.”

In May 2020, Del Rey posted a “question for the culture” on Instagram. In it, she expressed her belief that artists including Beyoncé, Cardi B and Kehlani were applauded for portraying their sexuality in all its messy complexity, while she was accused of “glamorising abuse” in songs like Ultraviolence, where she quoted the title of The Crystals’ Goffin & King classic He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss). The culture’s answer was not sympathetic: Del Rey was held to account for appearing to single out artists of colour, and criticised for asking feminism to save a place for “women who look and act like me… the kind of women who

76 MOJO

HORTLY AFTER SPEAKING TO MOJO, Del Rey issues another pre-emptive social media strike, pointing out the new album’s artwork – a photograph of the singer surrounded by her friends – does feature women of colour. Three days after that, she posts a video railing against magazines suggesting she told Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac that she didn’t believe Donald Trump meant to incite the Capitol riot. In fact, she says, she was accusing him of sociopathy – a subject, she tells MOJO, she studied for six years, along with “psychopathy and narcissism and delusions of grandeur”.

“When Trump became President, I was not surprised,” she says, “because the macrocosm is the mirror of what goes on in our bedrooms. In our inner lives.

“A lot of the things I was writing [songs] about, people shamed me for,” she continues, “but I like to think now I was actually writing about what thousands of housewives were experiencing and no one ever said a thing from Brentwood to Boca Raton. I just dyed my hair black and talked about it and I got a lot of shit for it.”

She declares that “It takes a more dignifiedlooking person with a better reputation to call out the world, or the President or some guy who runs a restaurant. I’m going to be the person who corroborates that story, the blonde at the end of the bar… The reason why I can’t be a person who starts certain movements is because of what people have written that isn’t true. And that’s too bad – because I know a lot.”

Does she feel she’s been discredited?

“I was discredited for seven years,” she says, her voice rising so fiercely it’s briefly unclear whether she’s laughing or crying.

“There’s no other way of looking it.”

In the poem SportCruiser from Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass, Del Rey wonders if learning to fly could help her navigate life, if learning to sail would show her which way the wind was blowing. Then she realises writing is all the adventure she needs.

“I certainly have to circumnavigate the globe quite a few times to come back to the fact that what I do is that I write, that I live here in LA, that I know who I am,” she says. “I think I’m very hopeful that I’ll feel more and more serene, because that is an objective for me. I just like the idea of waking up peacefully, rather than waking up in a sweat, throwing my feet down on the ground and being like, ‘Oh, what’s going wrong today!’”

Talking earlier about her whispery vocal on White Dress, Del Rey said it was not only close to unedited “journaling” but “also, not too afraid about being kind of stupid. The way I sound in the chorus – because I know it’s… not great, you know,” she laughs.

It sounds perfect for the song, though – trembling, awestruck.

The voice of somebody on the brink of something. She agrees – not because it catches her teenage perspective, but because it speaks to her now.

“I actually said to a friend the other day I feel something brewing,” she says. “And that’s the first time in a long time. I have M no idea what it is. But I know that it’s good.”

MOJO FILTE R YOUR GUIDE TO THE MONTH'S BEST MUSIC EDITED BY JENNY BULLEY jenny.bulley@bauermedia.co.uk

CONTENTS

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ALBUMS • Arab Strap:enough to make a grown man cry • Country rocks:Topaz by Israel Nash • Good murmurations:Jane Weaver’s Flock • Loretta Lynn invites the girls round • A posthumous album by Chris Cornell • Plus, Cathal Coughlan, Alice Cooper, Kings Of Leon, Valerie June, The Anchoress, Sunburned Hand Of The Man, Weezer and more.

90

REISSUES • Just the tracks, man:Bob Dylan, 1970 • First Nation under a groove:Willie Dunn • How Dusty Springfield fared at Atlantic • John Coltrane on vinyl • Plus, New Age Steppers, The Fall, P.J. Harvey, Birth Of Soul in LA, Stereolab, Carla Thomas, Sam Cooke, and more.

1 0 0 HOW TO BUY… • Take the romantic lead with our list of Lovers Rock reggae albums

1 0 2 BOOKS • Don Letts it all hang out in his new autobiography • Plus, Serge Gainsbourg, psychobilly, Bessie Smith, Andrew Weatherall and more.

1 0 4 SCREEN • Thank you for your feedback:Neil Young And Crazy Horse live in 1990.

“Superior pop singer with excellent taste, who sometimes sang soul songs.”

JIM IRVIN RIGHTS POP WRONGS. FILE UNDER PAGE 9 4

INDEX Alabama Slim Anchoress, The Arab Strap Baker, Julien Bird, Andrew & Mathus, Jimbo Black Crowes, The Black Sabbath Celeste Coltrane, John Cooke, Sam Cooper, Alice Cornell, Chris Coughlan, Cathal Del Rey, Lana Design Dialect Doyle, William Drive, The Dunn, Willie Dylan, Bob Fall, The Feldman, Mark Frank, Bob Fruit Bats Goldfrapp Gordons, The Haines, Luke Harvey, P.J. Hearty Har

87 83 78 86 82 96 92 83 96 96 84 80 80 80 93 85 84 97 93 90 93 87 95 84 95 92 86 93 81

Howard, Ben Ibn Ali, Hasaan Jenkins, Cassandra Joan As Police Woman Johnston, James & Gullick, Steve June, Valerie Khorshid, Omar Kings Of Leon L’Orchestre OK Jazz Lady Blackbird Lynn, Loretta Martha’s Vineyard Ferries, The Metheny, Pat Montgomery, Wes Mouse On Mars Nash, Israel New Age Steppers Owusu, Genesis Pallett, Owen Postdata Salsburg, Nathan Saxl, Elori Sinatra, Frank Smith, John Sombre, Cheval Songs Of Green Pheasant

81 97 84 83 85 80 95 80 92 87 81 85 87 92 83 82 95 85 83 83 82 87 88 84 84 85

Spare Snare 93 Sparke, Indigo 81 Springfield, Dusty 9 4 Stanton, Harry Dean 9 6 Stereolab 96 Sting 92 Stone, Martin 92 Stooges, The 96 81 Strawbs Sunburned Hand Of The Man 85 Tanega, Norma 94 Tasjan, Aaron Lee 8 2 Thomas, Carla 95 VA: Coxsone’s Dramatic And Music Centre 92 VA: Different Fashion 9 6 VA: LA Special Soul 9 5 VA: Do You Have The Force?

95 VA: Keith Emerson Tribute Concert 87 Vega, Alan 97 Walker, Karima 82 Wau Wau Collectif 8 4 Weaver, Jane 86 Weezer 86 White, Matthew E & Holley, Lonnie 86 Younge, Adrian 83

MOJO 77

F I LT E R A L B UM S

Roaming in the gloaming Their first new album in over 15 years sees the reactivated Falkirk duo older and wiser, raving against the dying of the light. By Victoria Segal. Illustration by Borja.

Arab Strap

Cave’s nightmare dreamscapes on hellishly symbolic train journey Sleeper. The music, too, no longer feels at risk of bruising its shins as it stumbles next to the singer, beats steady, electronic underpinning crisp. There’s been no lightening up – all the songs As Days Get Dark are set at night, for a start – yet there’s a sense of ROCK ACTION. CD/DL/LP a slight remove, a safer distance, the lyrics feeling T THE peak of the late-1980s’ alternative less like they have been scrawled in wet cement or comedy boom, Arab Strap’s singer Aidan scribbled on a bus ticket on the way home from Moffat had a different idea about how the somewhere faintly shameful. new rock’n’roll might look. He would become a Here Comes Comus! is still full of drink, drugs stand-up tragedian, “sitting on stage in a leather and regrettable sexual acts by the bins, yet its star is, wingback armchair and telling tales of woe”. The “An album by fantastically, the Greek god of nocturnal festivities audience would dissolve into tears, sharing a grand (“He’s maybe wearing makeup or his tears are a band able cathartic splurge;after the sobbing stopped, there black”). Kebabylon casts a street sweeper as another would be “100 per cent cotton souvenir to grow and god-like figure, sweeping up condoms and syringes handkerchiefs” for sale in the foyer. the day can continue;the atypical Fable Of The change without so His vision, outlined on uncomfortably numb new Urban Fox, a sad (if slightly blunt) metaphor for compromising bigotry against migrants, is delivered as a song Tears On Tour, was almost made flesh in Arab Strap. Founded in 1995 by Moffat and Malcolm straightforward folk tale. their spirit.”

Middleton, Falkirk allies who were drawn together Yet even at a remove, these are intimate, close-up musically by a love of Palace Brothers, Smog and the songs – sometimes, as the horrid saxophone on Kebabylon sidles near, too close. Ageing, “settling down”, passing flintier, Slintier end of post-rock, they often seemed to flirt as time, death:these have long haunted Arab Strap, but here, the tick drunkenly and promiscuously with tragedy as they did with the of the clock sounds like a pneumatic drill. The Turning Of Our darkest comedy. Their 5am confessionals, often spoken-word vignettes of sex and self-loathing, frequently felt like accidents Bones, inspired by a Madagascan ritual death-dance (and The waiting to happen (the unsafe Packs Of Three from 1998’s Cure), unfolds like a Hammer Horror version of Enjoy Yourself, Philophobia, or The First Big Weekend, slipping about on a slick invoking a zombie band back for one final caper, or lovers locked in a maggot-covered last embrace. It’s Moffat’s take on the of strawberry tonic wine and Merrydown metaphysical poet trying to lure somebody into bed by reminding cider) or accidents that had. These were them it’s later than they think, skull in one hand, zip in the other. songs ripped from their own emotional “Abandon all decorum, boil us down to our essentials/We’re all headlines, date-stamped snapshots of empty just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams,” he sings, before sex, empty bottles and unwashed sheets, a mention of Tesco and the school run breaks the spell. long before social media facilitated 24/7 A small skull adorned the cover of The Last Romance, but there’s livestreams of dirty laundry. a memento mori lurking in every corner of As Days Get Dark. The Yet Arab Strap never quite fostered the baroque I Was Once A Weak Man is a horrible depiction of “collective cry” that Moffat’s theoretical someone furtively returning home at dawn, justifying his nightstage-show demanded, their songs too time activities with, “Well, Mick Jagger does it and he’s older than sourly specific, too gloweringly defensive. me”. Tears On Tour catches the peculiar sentimentality of middle They called it a day in 2006 after the BACK STORY: age, undone by the poignancy of both the young and the old, sharpened-up The Last Romance, the core VULPINE Moffat crying at “The Muppet Movie/Frozen/Frozen II”. Another VERSES duo holing up with their prolific side ● As Days Get Dark’s Clockwork Day, meanwhile, is about a man so bewildered by projects – Moffat’s L Pierre and Fable Of The Urban Fox modern pornography (“It’s all stepmums and stepsisters now – describes two country collaborations with Bill Wells, Middleton’s foxes facing hostility in what the fuck’s all that about?”) that he has to fire up his own work under his own name and as Human the city. It was inspired personal collection in search of “something real”:files of old Don’t Be Angry. “We could only write

by Moffat reading photographs of his partner. “IMG4564,” for example, “The about newspapers’ songs of that ilk at a certain age,” said demonisation of these Sleeping Venus in a half-painted kitchen, as hopeful spermatozoa Middleton in 2013, then dismissing the incomers – “the same race to an ovum’s open arms.” The guitars are sleepily papers that are possibility of a new record. conspiratorial, a surprisingly sweet testament to the triumph demonising migrants, Almost five years after their 20th so it was a very clear of real people, real life. anniversary reunion shows, however, comes metaphor. I don’t even It’s easy to understand why Middleton might once have been see it as a political song As Days Get Dark, a record that has kept the – it’s a human decency sceptical about making another Arab Strap record, but As Days Get contact details for “songs of that ilk” while song.” Moffat partly Dark feels like an album made by a band who have been able to credits his exploration clearly having moved on. It’s informed by grow and change without compromising their bleak spirit. The of Scottish folk music – mid-life, but creatively at least, it’s not in caught in Paul Fegan’s hair-raising honesty of their younger incarnation might have crisis. Moffat’s vocals are alert and precise, 2 0 1 6 documentary softened, but their new confidence and control ensure these songs Where You’re Meant To whether playing the Leonard Cohen on let a lot of life in. Stand-up tragedy might not have caught on, but Be – as priming him for Compersion Pt I (“I come on strong with this atypical direction. as Arab Strap have always known, it’s more complicated than that.

“I like telling stories as a limerick/She knocks me back with a much now as I do talking villanelle”), relishing the words “lachrymal THE STRAP VOICE ON WEEPY FILMS, about myself.”

THE GOD OF EXCESS AND FICTIONAL FUN. Niagara” on Tears On Tour, or echoing Nick

★★★★

Alamy

A

78 MOJO

AIDAN TALKS!

F I LT E R A L B UM S

★★★★

Chemtrails Over The Country Club

Erudite and tender, Song Of Co-Aklan definitively affirms Coughlan’s place amid Ireland’s poetic pantheon.

Keith Cameron

POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP

Beat down Kebabylon:Aidan Moffat summons his guardian angel.

“In the ’8 0 s, men didn’t talk about crying.”

Aidan Moffat talks to Victoria Segal.

Was there a moment that made it clear there would definitely be another Arab Strap record?

“We did some anniversary shows in 2016, and because it was a 20th anniversary there was a compilation as well. You don’t really appreciate what you do while you’re doing it, I think. Looking back on it, we found the things we enjoyed most. We didn’t really talk about doing a record until we’d done those gigs – I suppose it was a way of making sure we could still get on in a tour bus.”

Superb,Joni-tinged followup to Norman Fucking Rockwell.

Chris Cornell

The intoxicating strain of California anomie that pervaded 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell is still, thankfully, strong on Del Rey’s excellent seventh album. Indeed, Chemtrails Over The Country Club initially sounds much like a straightforward sequel to that album and its hazy subversions of old Hollywood chic. There is, though, a more explicit autobiographical edge, a preoccupation with notions of authenticity and, as the album progresses, a powerful expansion of Del Rey’s folkier inclinations. Hence country twangs (on Wild At Heart and Nikki Lane duet Breaking Up Slowly), and a tentative reorientation away from manicured lawns and towards wilder terrain:Yosemite, and the storied canyons of LA. Neat, too, how she references covering Joni Mitchell (and Joan Baez, Stevie Nicks and Courtney Love) on the outstanding Dance Till We Die, and then does just that, with a gorgeous version of For Free.

The last voice on the track is Weyes Blood, though you’d be forgiven for thinking it was Joni herself.

John Mulvey

No One Sings Like You Anymore,Vol.1

What were those things you enjoyed most about Arab Strap?

“What you don’t really think about at the time is why other people like you. Listening back on it, I was quite surprised to find how kind of unique it sounded. People don’t really do cover versions of our songs because I don’t think they can.”

CathalCoughlan

How has the way you write changed?

“When we started – and maybe even up until 10 years ago – I was always focusing on truth and everything had to be autobiographical. I was absolutely determined to make sure everything was honest and true, and that was fine – it worked the first time round – but as I’ve got older I find I really enjoy writing words a lot more without the restriction. It’s a much more fun process. Inspiration comes from everything. Kebabylon was based on a chapter I read in a book about a road sweeper and it seemed to me that he was like a guardian angel, looking after us and hiding all our secrets for us before the sun comes up. Here Comes Comus – he’s the god of nocturnal excess. He’s basically just a way to excuse bad behaviour, an elaborate way to say:‘He made me do it!’”

Microdisney and Fatima Mansions singer’s first new album since 2010.

On Tears On Tour,you sing about leading the audience in a “collective cry” – would that be your ideal show?

“I’m suddenly more emotional than I was and I don’t know if that’s age or being a dad but I tend to cry a lot at films now. But you know, when I was a teenager, even in the ’80s, men didn’t really talk about crying. It’s only in the last 15 years or so, people have started talking about emotions and ideas of masculinity are so much different from when I was growing up. That was part of what I was thinking – to write something honestly and to admit your failings and your mistakes, and there wasn’t a lot of that about when I was writing that. Certainly not in the way I wanted to hear it. I think when we started I was just very much focused on talking as I would to a friend – and that was all we expected. When we started out I had no idea we’d end up making a career out of it.

Nobody sang in a Scottish accent back then except for The Proclaimers – the first two Proclaimers albums are great – but it was very rare to hear a Scottish accent singing. Being from Falkirk, it wasn’t an accent Scottish people had heard much of either.”

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★★★

INTERSCOPE. CD/DL/LP

Soundgarden/Audioslave singer’s posthumous coverversions album gets belated physical release.

Though his contemporary Axl Rose thought him the finest rock singer of his generation, grunge/alt-rock icon Chris Cornell liked to tap other genres. Scream, his 2009, Timbaland-produced solo album said as much, and so does this eclectic covers set, recorded in 2016. If John Lennon’s Watching The Wheels, here recast as a buoyant acoustic strummer, follows the golden-rule of reinvention, not replication, the standout is a take on Nothing Compares 2 U, Prince’s adroit vocal melody a showcase for Cornell’s affectionate, bluesier reading. Elsewhere, Harry Nilsson’s Jump Into The Fire is toughened-up and much abridged, ELO’s Showdown gets thumping drums and sweet falsetto notes, and Stay With Me Baby, an impassioned 1966 single for Philadelphia-born soul-singer Lorraine Ellison, provides Cornell with a closer of thrilling, Joe Cocker-like oomph.

James McNair

★★★★

Kings Of Leon

DIMPLE DISCS. CD/DL/LP/MC

★★★★

Song Of Co-Aklan

Cometh the apocalypse, cometh the man. Cathal Coughlan has been lamenting personal and societal folly with golden-voiced brio since 1980, but his low profile these past 10 rupturous years was evidently an epic exercise in loin girding. This sixth solo album’s opening title track represents the apex of Coughlan’s craft:an aural Bayeux tapestry for our bitter and twisted age (“Feeling affronted? Blame the unwanted!”), its prismatic lyric weaving an allusive litany of bêtes noires – India’s PM Narendra Modi;Robert Nairac, the British solider/spy killed by the IRA in 1977 – around synthetic Northern soul euphoria. Its daunting standard is maintained, via theatrical grotesques Passed Out Dog and My Child Is Alive, while Owl In The Parlour and Let’s Flood The Fairground refine the younger man’s intemperate instincts with heightened perspective.

When You See Yourself RCA. CD/DL/LP

The Followill family’s epic eighth;their best in years.

The last decade began ominously for Kings Of Leon.

First, they had to abandon a show in St Louis in 2010 because pigeons were defecating on them. A year later, a tour was nixed in

the wake of frontman Caleb Followill drunkenly departing the stage mid-gig. This period of adversity seemed to give the quartet pause for thought, and in the intervening years, the Southern rock buccaneers have become a more considered and reflective version of themselves. This eighth album continues in that vein, exhibiting an expansive sound that aligns them with the grown-up sound of American rock classicism. There are echoes of Springsteen on gloriously unhurried opener When You See Yourself, Are You Far Away and Pearl Jam on the chugging, melodic Time In Disguise. It seems that selfexamination has taken them to bold, new places.

Niall Doherty

Valerie June

★★★★

The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers FANTASY. CD/DL/LP

Dylan-touted Tennessean conjures up country soul fantasia.

While Valerie June is rooted in the familiar territories of folk, R&B and gospel, the striving for spacier vibes hinted at on Astral Plane, from 2017 predecessor The Order Of Time, is fully realised here on her third album, thanks in part to Kendrick Lamar/Solange producer Jack Splash. Trad instrumentation is often treated with clouds of reverb – Stardust Scattering sounds like the Stax house band floating through space. Acoustic guitar/chamber pop ballad Colors, meanwhile, spotlights June’s Joanna Newsom-like chewy Appalachian vowels and tart higher register. The idiosyncrasies of her voice are showcased to full effect in soul showstopper Call Me A Fool, with dramatic rasping and swooping that some might find off-putting, but which undeniably underlines her distinctive character. There’s delicacy too:in the stark campfire hippy gospel of Fallin’, even when stripped of the sonic layers, June burns.

Tom Doyle

Valerie June: with stars in her eyes.

Renata Raksha

Lana DelRey

“We girl singers gotta stick together”:Loretta Lynn,from a honky tonk girl comes home.

Crown & country On her follow-up to 2018’s Wouldn’t It Be Great,the C&W queen celebrates the gals.

By Sylvie Simmons.

Loretta Lynn

★★★★

Still Woman Enough LEGACY. CD/DL/LP

THE PHOTO on the front sleeve has her sitting on a velvet throne: the queen of country, all spangles and brocade. There’s a tiara hooped over one ornate arm of the chair, her guitar leans against the other, and the look on her face is of someone who has business to do. And knows how to do it:this is Loretta Lynn’s 50th studio album. Within days of its release, she’ll be 89 years old. But age – judging by the clear, strong voice and spot-on band on these 13 songs – has not withered her. A coal miner’s daughter, married at 15, six kids, a grandmother at 34, she’s made of steely stuff.

Loretta is – like Willie Nelson, one year her junior – equal parts accomplishment and endurance;a flagship of classic country music, a link to its rural, working-class roots, the writer of countless songs that have become part of country’s lexicon, and a star who’s taken her own path while operating within the system, never backing down.

What Loretta Lynn did was write frank and honest songs about being a woman.

Sometimes so frank and honest (like Rated X

or The Pill) they were banned by country radio.

She sang what women were thinking and she was the first, she said, “to ever go into Nashville, singing like the women lived it.”

The idea behind this new album – recorded once again at Johnny Cash’s old studio, Cash Cabin, with Cash’s son John Carter Cash and Loretta’s daughter Patsy Lynn Russell co-producing – was, she explains, to celebrate country music made by women, with women. “I am just so thankful to have some of my friends join me on my new album. We girl singers gotta stick together.”

The “girl singers” include Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, Suzi Ragsdale, Margo Price and Tanya Tucker. They do a fine job (extra applause to Price in One’s On The Way

in a satisfyingly subtle manner.

The Strange Last Flight Of Richard Russell blends Enostyle atmospherics with delicate hooks, and the airy electronica of Finders Keepers buries its melody under waves of washed-out keyboards.

The whole thing is played out with the hush of someone trying not to wake the person next door.

Niall Doherty

Ben Howard

★★★★

Collections From The Whiteout

Hearty Har

ISLAND. CD/DL/LP

Radio Astro

David McClister

Devon singer-songwriter mesmerises with quiet complexity.

One of the more interesting artists to emerge from the Mumfordisation of British indie-folk, Ben Howard won a Brit Award on the back of his million-selling 2011 debut but has been off-roading into rougher terrain ever since.

Here, he delivers another strange and beautiful record, retooling his soporific folk sound with synths and experimental soundscapes.

At times, Howard resembles a British Bon Iver in the way these songs avoid any sort of crescendo, building the drama

★★★

imitation. Instead, it’s a saucereyed journey through the musical version of Alice’s Wonderland, with far-ranging influences. Scream And Shout! stirs some Stax-style soul into the mix;One For The Other offers fuzzy, Nuggets-esque powerpop, while instrumental Canyon Of The Banshee suggests a mariachi band stumbling out of the desert after a peyote trip. There are times when the self-consciously wacky psychedelic tropes grate, but on most of these 10 tracks the Fogerty boys’songwriting gifts shine through.

Mark Blake

BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT. CD/DL

John Fogerty’s offspring deliver psychedelically inclined debut.

Indigo Sparke

Hearty Har’s linchpins, Shane and Tyler Fogerty, are the sons of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s mainman John. Their first album’s lead-off track, Radio Man ’56, celebrates a creature with “green eyes and yellow hands”, fusing B-movie horror imagery with a hint of CCR in their scuzzy Cosmo’s Factory pomp.

However, the rest of Radio Astro mostly shuns slavish

Echo

★★★ FORMATS. CD/DL/LP

From Sydney but sounding more like the American prairie.

Indigo Sparke’s actor/model background fool shouldn’t anyone into believing ‘singer-songwriter’ is another career move. Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, who coproduced Echo, is a believer,

and Tucker on the title track) – but this is not another tribute-to-Loretta album, it’s Lynn’s show, and she and the band are on fine form.

They’re Lynn’s songs, too, for more than half the tracks. The selections date right back to her debut single Honky Tonk Girl – a rendition so good you can smell the beer – and Coal Miner’s Daughter, her signature song, whose words she recites, like an autobiographical poem, over a slow, sparse, moody banjo.

She doesn’t revisit the banned songs. The rest of the album is made up of traditional and old country songs that men wrote, and she covered. Among the best:a lovely take on Stephen Foster’s Old Kentucky Home;a warm, churchy sing-along of Hank Williams’ I Saw The Light;and Keep On The Sunny Side, an upbeat homage to the first lady of country music, Mother Maybelle Carter.

and with a jazz singer and a musician for parents, music is in her blood. She joins with Lenker, Angel Olsen and Lana Del Rey in the Appalachian canyon canon, but Sparke’s heart-achy melodies and vocals hold their own, with skeletal instrumentation (sometimes just strummed guitars) enhancing rather than competing. Compared to Lenker and Olsen’s complexity and range, Echo mostly plays safe, but signs of where Sparke can stand alone include Dog Bark Echo’s red-desert heat, Everything Everything’s jabbered vocal and dissonant piano, and a particularly devastated Bad Dreams, where “there’s blood on my horizon and I’m rotting in the smell.”

Martin Aston

Strawbs

reined-in anger he displayed on songs like 1972’s New World. The reflective Strange Times, with its acoustic guitars and piano, lowers the heat, but although they’ve already celebrated their 50th birthday, Strawbs are clearly not intent on coasting. The album was produced by keyboard player Blue Weaver, who left the band in 1973, while John Ford, who quit shortly after but has guested with the group live, co-wrote Each Manner Of Man with Cousins and sings lead over Dave Bainbridge’s baroque harpsichord. It’s a group effort and guitarist Dave Lambert and bass player Chas Cronk also contribute, the latter’s Liberty another of the album’s highlights with its haunting, descending chord sequence, and organ and guitar flourishes adding splashes of colour.

Mike Barnes

★★★

Settlement CHERRY RED. CD/DL/LP

The folk-prog stalwarts welcome back old friends from their ’70s heyday.

On the title track, backed by ominous mellotron, Dave Cousins sings of the fracturing of democracy (“the chaos in the system”) with the barely

MOJO 81

Out of the blue Texas-based songwriter and seer detours off the Southern highway.

By Andy Fyfe.

IsraelNash

★★★★ Topaz

LOOSE. CD/DL/LP

ALMOST A decade ago, in the 100-capacity back room of Cleeres pub in Kilkenny, Israel Nash made his live European debut with a hurricane blast of country rock so intensely loud that the nails in the corrugated

Aaron Lee Tasjan

★★★

Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan!

NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP

This Nashville Songwriter!

Can Do! Anything! But should he?

Life as a polyglot can become a slog of diminishing returns.

During the last decade, Aaron Lee Tasjan has played an expert game of musical hopscotch, bounding between straight-ahead rock and warped alt-country, brooding folk confessionals and slanted pop wonders. He’s at his best when his feet are in several squares at once. His self-exclaiming fourth album digs into the varied strata of powerpop, alternately overlaid in paisley or decorated with drapery borrowed from Big Pink. Tasjan is a cunning chameleon, convincingly

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metal roof are still rattling.

Nash is one of those musicians for whom music is a spiritual quest. The son of a Missouri minister, he grew up in the church without entirely embracing his father’s faith and replaced religion’s sense of community with the camaraderie of musicians. As he sings on one of Topaz’s central tracks, the joyous Closer, “Strumming chords and making friends and rolling Js and losing money/Running in and out of luck” is very much his wheelhouse, one he’s well able to indulge on his Texan hill ranch outside Austin.

In the splendid isolation of his Quonset hut studio next to the ranch house, Nash

trying on Big Star, Wilco, Fountains Of Wayne, and latecareer Elliott Smith in the first four of these dozen tracks.

There are wonderfully built earworms here, but callow writing sometimes morphs them into mere infections.

Tasjan has an incredible tale to tell, full of surreal brushes with fame. He still seems unsure of how to share it.

Grayson Haver Currin

Jimbo Mathus And Andrew Bird

★★★★

release a solo album, then finished up in early 2020, just before the world shut down.

It’s worth the wait. Some songs here sound like old-style country classics (Poor Lost Souls;weepy Encircle My Love; Burn The Honky Tonk), while others are clapboard-church gospel and blues (Stonewall (1863);High John;Bright Sunny South). The vocals are spot-on and so is the musicianship – lots of virtuoso violin;you’ll have to wait until the end for the whistle – but it also has the warm, first-take feel of two old friends having a fine old time.

Sylvie Simmons

These 13

THIRTY TIGERS. CD/DL/LP

Two mainstays of Americana reconnect on 13 new songs.

It’s been 27 years since they first met at a folk festival, back when Andrew Bird played medieval fiddle and Jimbo Mathus’s band the Squirrel Nut Zippers played swing and juke joint blues.

Bird joined the Squirrels for a spell, but this is their first true collaboration in 20 years.

They started swapping ideas in 2018, recorded some in 2019, took a break to each

Nathan Salsburg

★★★★

Landwerk No.2

slowly put together Topaz on his own over the past 18 months, rather than his usual method of inviting friends over to smoke, drink and rip through an album in a couple of weeks. Taking time to think deeply about what was most important to him, all that reflection didn’t exactly change him or his path so much as open up different avenues.

In the past, Nash’s reedy voice, live-and-letlive politics and peeling guitar have most often been compared to Neil Young, but Topaz brings new dimensions and subtleties to his music.

Opening track Dividing Lines is the most radical departure from Nash’s six previous albums, a slice of country prog that wouldn’t be out of place on Pink Floyd’s Meddle. But it’s slinky, snake-hipped Southern soul that dominates the album, from the chicken grease grooves sliding beneath punching horns on Down In The Country, like a Memphis Baby Huey, or the regretfully tender, blue-eyed Stay, rueing the prospect of leaving home and his wife for his other life on the road.

In another decade, Nash could’ve sold Stay to Hall & Oates and trousered the royalties from a worldwide smash.

Nash is also a political science major and, start to finish, Topaz conveys a strong undercurrent of social commentary, from the all-too topical and self-explanatory Dividing Lines to the final track, Pressure, which pops with a growling futility and injustice similar to Young’s Powderfinger, with added Tex-Mex swagger.

As a man on a quest, Nash needs to constantly move forward, re-evaluating and reinventing his limits. He may not be leading his flock to entirely new pastures with Topaz, but he’s showing them a bright and clear map of how he’s getting there.

solo albums (when he’s not busy as Joan Shelley’s key accompanist). His Landwerk recordings, though, are an uncanny extrapolation of his knowledge and craft, where Salsburg calmly improvises over crackly loops sampled from old 78s. Source material for this bewitching second batch come from four 1920s sides:two klezmer;one Yiddish folk;and one by a Slovak miners’ orkestra from northeastern Pennsylvania – “home,” he notes, “of six generations of Salsburgs”. The results are eerie and hypnotic, but meditative rather than unnerving;a hermetic practice in which Salsburg makes profound musical and emotional connections with history in a way conventional revivalism could never do.

John Mulvey

NO QUARTER. DL/LP

Louisville guitarist experiments with hauntological folk Mostly, Nathan Salsburg engages with the past in relatively straightforward fashion, as an archivist for the Alan Lomax Archives, and as a skilled explorer of folk traditions on a series of

Karima Walker

★★★★

Waking The Dreaming Body ORINDAL/KEELED SCALES. DL/LP

Second album proper from the Tucson,Arizona singersongwriter.

When MOJO spoke to Karima Walker, back in 2017, she was

pondering the space between singer-songwriter and sound artist. “Lyrics don’t have to carry an entire record any more,” she said. If the danger was that Walker’s delicate interior songs might vanish altogether, Waking The Dreaming Body is both welcome comfort and a surprising joy.

Created almost entirely as a Covid-enforced solo project, while a nearby mountain burned for weeks, this is, as its title suggests, an album that inhabits a warped untethered post-sleep space. Here are intricate songs born in the actuality of debt, depression and climate change, that then take off into vast immersive drone-spaces of comfort and release, like couch-bound afternoon daydreams captured in song, or messages written in window-frost, evaporating in the bright winter sun.

Andrew Male

F I LT E R A L B UM S string section (A Kiss), birdsong (The Promise) and a holding pattern of vibes (Beloved). Tell Me Something I Don’t Know summons blue skies out of Phil Collins-grade old-soul. She’s in a league of her own.

Andrew Collins

there’s a lengthy, menacing cover of Prince’s Kiss, while I Defy, her 2006 collaboration with Antony Hegarty, rumbles with renewed intent. A peculiar, but far from meritless affair.

John Aizlewood

Mouse On Mars

★★★★ AAI

THRILL JOCKEY. DL/LP

★★★

Electronic experimentalists promote an artificial intelligence-driven future.

The American Negro JAZZ IS DEAD. CD/DL/LP

No punches pulled on LA musician/producer’s tract on racism through the ages.

Issued in tandem with a podcast (Invisible Blackness) and short film (TAN), Adrian Younge’s ambitious album splices all-analogue blaxploitation sounds with psychedelia.

It’s a volatile mix for songs that pay tribute to Margaret Garner and George Stinney, gravely wronged by the white establishment, the sometime Jay-Z and Ghostface Killah producer meshing Linear Labs Orchestra’s strings with his own wah wah guitars, Fender Rhodes and busily tiptoeing bass lines. Loren Oden’s falsetto hymning of his uncle James Mincey Jr and Sam Dew’s impassioned turn on Light On The Horizon are broken up by intense between-song soliloquies (Paradox Of The Positive simply states:“We’ve been marching for years but haven’t moved an inch”) that pall over repeated listens, making for both a chastening and frustrating listen.

Andy Cowan

★★★ Live

SWEET POLICE/PIAS. CD/DL/LP

Fresh from the Gorillaz LP, Joan Wasser goes live. Sort of.

On November 16, 2018, Joan Wasser and her three-man Joan As Police Woman band concluded their Damned Devotion tour in New York.

Eleven days later, for reasons still not wholly clear, they went into a Brooklyn studio to record their live set in one, chat-free take. Fast-forward to March last year and Wasser mixed the tapes for this year’s release. Not a career-spanner – 11 of the 17 tracks are taken from Damned Devotion – but as follies go, it’s a treat. Damned Devotion remains the career highlight it seemed at the time and honed on the road, Tell Me, Valid Jagger and the title track take new flight. Elsewhere,

Celeste

The Anchoress

★★★★

★★★★

Not Your Muse BOTH SIDES/POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP

Accolade-magnet from Culver City via Brighton’s debut album.

Jodie Cartman

Joan As Police Woman

That Mouse On Mars retain their relevance after 25 years is testimony to the Berlin duo’s singular boldness and creativity. Musically, AAI – or Anarchic Artificial Intelligence – is a magical, freewheeling trip through a forest of dense sub-bass, skittish rhythms and off-kilter melodies. But it aims higher than that. Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma worked with an AI tech collective and a pair of ex-Soundcloud programmers to create bespoke speech modelling software. Putting this into action with the help of writer and academic Louis Chude-Sokei, they created an artificial version of his voice used to sew a narrative throughout AAI. Their goal, they say, is to encourage us not to fear AI but embrace it as an antidote to moral and cultural stagnation. A lofty ambition, but one supported by a collection of tunes with groove at its synthetic heart.

Stephen Worthy

The stentorian Sky Sports voiceover urges:Take Your Seat.

While montaged galácticos like Jamie Vardy and Virgil Van Dijk do their day job, cucumber-cool 26-year-old, LA-born, Brightonraised chanteuse Celeste Epiphany Waite does hers – belting out stadium jazz-funk anthem Stop This Flame (“You’ll never stop this flame!”). Her debut, co-written with Rag’n’Bone Man producer Jamie Hartman, confirms her 2019 Rising Star Brit and BBC’s Sound Of 2020 awards were no fluke. The gossamer Strange finds Celeste’s smoky vocal sweet spot, where Adele and Corinne Bailey Rae connect to Nina Simone (whose Sinnerman is heavily sampled on pop monster …Flame), filling her immaculately strained, ethereal range. Skip the gooey self-penned A Little Love (John Lewis’ Christmas ad) to find a

The Art Of Losing

Owen Pallett

★★★★ Island

DOMINO. CD/DL/LP

Well-connected Canadian’s third long-player under his own name.

With a CV that features Arcade Fire (for whom he plays violins and arranges strings), R.E.M., Taylor Swift, Pet Shop Boys, Linkin Park and Robbie Williams, Owen Pallett also enjoys a lauded solo career, initially as Final Fantasy and, more recently, under his own name. Overflowing with ideas, Island is a near-concept album, which resurrects his characters Lewis (a selfdestructive farmer) and Owen (a god). Sometimes downbeat, sometimes expansive, but always acoustic, Island veers between the lush, string-enhanced melancholia of pieces such as Perseverance Of The Saints and the more edgy, Scott Walker-esque fare in the vein of Lewis Gets Fucked Into Space. Everything comes together on the atypically frantic A Bloody Morning, which begins, “I started drinking on the job and the job became easy,” and,

underpinned by typewriter percussion, dreamy choral vocals and the London Contemporary Orchestra, escalates into a sublime, noholds-barred stew.

John Aizlewood

Postdata

★★★★

Twin Flames PAPER BAG. CD/DL/LP

Third album from Wintersleep singer’s darker side project.

If you want to signal an album’s foreboding tone, “Don’t go tripping through the wild woods when there is a wolf right at your door”, is a hard opening line to beat. As leader of Canadian indie rock stalwarts Wintersleep, Paul Murphy does a neat line in soft-focus dread, but his Postdata side project takes that even further, particularly on that opening song, Haunts.

It’s a clever track, too, turning traditional arrangement on its head as Murphy’s martial vocals hold the beat while the pots-pans-bottles-whatever percussion delivers the melody.

Followed by the gigantic indie pop of Inside Out, sounding like Arcade Fire on galloping uppers, it’s an extreme stylistic palette that Murphy ably deploys over seven more songs. Proof that inventive, envelope-pushing indie rock hasn’t disappeared off the map just yet.

Andy Fyfe

All sudden farewells:The Anchoress,now in full bloom.

KSCOPE. CD/DL/LP

Art rock and neo-classical exploration of loss and grief.

CATHERINE ANNE DAVIES admits she suffered through an “abysmal time” while making her second solo album:her father died, she lost a baby and she was worn out by touring as the keyboard-player in Simple Minds. Having given up that gig in 2019, she refocused on her own career as The Anchoress and The Art Of Losing quickly follows last year’s In Memory Of My Feelings, a collaborative album with Bernard Butler.

Amid the mid-paced balladry of All Farewells Should Be Sudden, there’s more than a trace of Chrissie Hynde in her fittingly tremulous voice, while in sharp contrast both Show Your Face and The Exchange (which finds her trading lines, about an internecine relationship, with James Dean Bradfield) cut latterday Bowie art rock shapes.

Throughout, a recurring Satielike piano motif floats in and out, soothing the raw emotions.

Tom Doyle

MOJO 83

F I LT E R A L B UM S

William Doyle

★★★★

Great Spans Of Muddy Time

Cassandra Jenkins

ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP

Former East India Youth learns to love his imperfections.

HAVING sharpened his synth-pop visions for a first album under his own name, 2019’s Your Wilderness Revisited, William Doyle takes a more relaxed approach on Great Spans Of Muddy Time. Gone is the exacting perfectionism, in its place a roughshod, playful approach more akin to his East India Youth work, ricocheting between aching and windswept balladry, ambient vignettes and tracks melding those disciplines, such as Who Cares, where Doyle’s keening vocal rides low electric hums and high-speed organ loops. Nestled among

possessing a drama and romance worthy of Marc Almond. Seesawing between pristine songcraft and experimentalism makes for a diverse, satisfying whole.

Ryan McPhail

Glorious mud: William Doyle, roughshod and playful.

An Overview On Phenomenal Nature BA DA BING. CD/DL/LP

Perennial New York sidekick fronts a jazz-soulful beauty.

Jenkins is best known as a guitarist in Eleanor Friedberger and Craig Finn’s bands, despite her own 2017 debut Play Till You Win, which subtly melted pop into country soul, reminiscent of Jenny Lewis. That album, however, is a sketch compared to the fleshed-out contours of An Overview…, overseen by Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman. Jenkins’ understated croon, like a downbeat Blossom Dearie, is closer-miked than before, and there’s a new injection of jazz – the smooth, Steely Dan variety. New Bikini spirals into piano-bar ambience;the title track’s spoken word/sax brew sounds like rain in city streets;seven-minute finale Rambling is even more impressionistic – children’s voices, birdsong, woodwind drift. Lasting only an economic 33 minutes;on this form, she could pull off a double album.

Martin Aston

Stevie Chick

Wau Wau Collectif

John Smith

Fruit Bats

ChevalSombre

★★★★

★★★

The Fray

★★★

★★★★

Yaral Sa Doom

THIRTY TIGERS. CD/DL/LP

MERGE. CD/DL/LP

SAHEL SOUNDS. CD/DL/LP

Dreamy West Coast psychedelia from Senegal.

Respected folkie blends true grit and honey on his “most honest” work yet.

Subtle career high for LA-based indie-folk lifer.

Based in Toubab Dialao, a fishing village an hour south of central Dakar that has become home to many of Senegal’s bohemia, the Wau Wau Collectif only got together when Swedish musician Karl Jonas Winqvist organised genre-spanning sessions that produced the sort of drowsy psychedelia you would expect when the players had to drag themselves off an idyllic beach to contribute. Percussionists, beat poets, guitarists and singers float on grooves borrowed from tradition and dub, with standout track Salamaleikoum seemingly based on a music box, yet with its choir of angelic backing voices it’s undeniably moving. Mouhamodou Lo And His Children uncovers a Leon Redbone-like blues somnambulist;elsewhere Sufi soul singers (Gouné Yi) and spiritual jazz (Legui Legui) are the dominant takeaways. So, something for everyone on an album that should be a huge crossover hit.

David Hutcheon

2020 dealt sharply with this Devonraised guitar troubadour;by spring, his mother had been diagnosed with cancer and his wife had miscarried. Tour dates cancelled, he sat and turned out something aching, doggedly optimistic and gently spangled with hooks.

Friends is a gruff gem, acoustic with fingerclicks, while the vocal – John Martyn via Joe Cocker – assures those he misses that “we’ll find each other down the line”. Hold On approaches incandescence, Smith’s echoing open tunings flanked by Jessica StavelyTaylor’s guardian angel chorus as he struggles with isolation (“Who did I want to be? I forgot, myself…”). Smith is occasionally stodgy, but when he’s good, he cuts to the heart:selfhatred, on the rocky pedal steel of Deserving;potential break-up in the bitter Americana of Eye To Eye;and love triumphant on sweet, earthy Just As You Are. Glyn Brown

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★★★★

The Pet Parade

In 2020, Eric D Johnson garnered a couple of Grammy nominations and the MOJO folk album of the year title as one-third of Bonny Light Horseman. For the past two decades, however, apart from a stint in The Shins, his energies have mostly been concentrated on Fruit Bats. Fellow Bonny alum Josh Kaufman produces this ninth Fruit Bats album, and their ethereal simplicity has clearly inspired a relative streamlining of Johnson’s shtick. So while 2019’s Gold Past Life piled on ’70s soft-rock trappings – a bit too much Supertramp, perhaps – The Pet Parade is calmer, folkier, and more accommodating to Johnson’s pinched nasal tones. There are lovely things here, not least Discovering, blessed with the easy lope and psalmist wisdom of ’70s Dylan. And if you’re looking for songs that share the consolatory warmth of Fleet Foxes’ Shore, try All In One Go and Gullwing Doors; definitely fit for purpose.

John Mulvey

Time Waits For No One SONIC CATHEDRAL. CD/DL/LP

Alice Cooper

New Yorker’s third instalment of languid California-dreaming.

★★★★

With no solo album since 2012, Chris Porpora could be reproached for letting time get the better of him. In his defence:2018’s ‘cowboy’ covers album Cheval Sombre Vs Dean Wareham with the exGalaxie 500/Luna frontman, and another solo album due in May, also produced by Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3, Spectrum), who shares electric guitar duties here with Wareham.

Sombre’s unhurried attitude extends to his sound, adjacent to Spacemen 3’s narcoleptic blues, though Sombre’s parched voice and Wild West vibe carves its own niche. The sampled newscasts of terrorist incidents in Had Enough Blues highlights the album’s theme – about slowing down, to resist modern life’s relentless march and mayhem. As Sombre notes in a heat haze cover of Townes Van Zandt’s No Place To Fall, “Time, she’s a fast old train/She’s here, and then she’s gone.”

Martin Aston

Detroit Stories EARMUSIC. CD/DL/LP

Alice,Bob Ezrin and heavy friends pen raucous love letter to the Motor City.

As typified by stirring tribal riffer Detroit City 2021, this inspired happening pays gutsy tribute to the ’60s Michigan scene that spawned MC5, The Stooges, Alice, Suzi Quatro et al, Cooper conjuring an era when “[Slim] Shady wore a bib and the [Insane Clown] Posse wasn’t even alive.” With Wayne Kramer co-piloting an electrifying cover of Sister Anne, Sister Sledge/The Motor City Horns attendant on $1,000 High Heel Shoes, and Cooper sketching a gaggle of vivid deviants on Social Debris, Hail Mary and Drunk And In Love (“I saw you baby and I pissed my pants”, begins the latter), the energy never flags. With Cooper in sterling voice throughout, perhaps the most exhilarating is Go Man Go, a deliciously dumb, Eddie Cochran-style riffer wherein an ex-con’s beau/partner in crime Crazy Jane, “Knows that I’m a moron.”

James McNair

UNDERGROUND

BY ANDREW MALE

Sunburned Hand Of The Man

★★★★ Pick A Day To Die THREE-LOBED. CD/DL/LP

New Weird America standard-bearers freak out, in perpetuity.

Nearly 20 years ago, as acid folk became briefly fashionable, a wilder and less assimilable music followed it out of the US underground. Hairy commune jams proliferated, along with an untethered sense of psychedelic possibility that meant these artists would never enjoy – or want – the relative success of, say, Devendra Banhart. Nevertheless, a few hardier free spirits have endured, none better than fearsome Massachusetts collective Sunburned Hand Of The Man. Their catalogue can be thrilling but forbidding; almost 150 albums are currently available on Bandcamp.

Pick A Day To Die, however, might be one of the very best, and a neat entry point for new explorers. Many of the evershifting band’s modes are here – motorik ritual;weirdo backwoods funk;eldritch fingerpicking;Beefheartian gibber; noise-jam exorcism – stitched together in uncharacteristically cohesive fashion. Hold tight, too, for the last-minute arrival of J Mascis, channelling Eddie Hazel, on closer Prix Fixe.

John Mulvey

James Johnston/ Steve Gullick

★★★ We Travel Time GOD UNKNOWN. DL/LP

Evocative series of vignettes by the two musicians and visual artists.

Heather Corcoran

This duo first collaborated in …Bender in 2004 and resumed activities after working on an art show in 2019.

Johnson is best known for playing with Gallon Drunk and Nick Cave, and Gullick as a photographer, but We Travel Time combines the more impressionistic aspects of their solo albums. When I’m Down is

Genesis Owusu has something to get his teeth into.

a plea for comfort set to dolorous violin, and Stormy Sea, based on skeletal piano and guitar figures, feels like peering out at waves and harbour lights. The vocals are set back in reverby space, making these short songs deliberately sketchy and understated:We Sail is basically the repeated refrain “We sail to the edge of the world…”. The lengthy title track is similarly inscrutable, with violin and guitars petering out into the sound of rain, before some of the vocals return running backwards, leaving it all feeling oddly unresolved.

Mike Barnes

Songs Of Green Pheasant

★★★★★ When The Weather Clears RUSTED RAIL. CD/DL

The North’s one-man dreampop thaumaturge creates defining album of his career.

Stockport-based teacher Duncan Sumpner has been releasing records as Songs Of Green Pheasant for nearly 20 years now, almost two decades spent crafting intricate, hypnotic spare-time songs of pastoral slowcore dream-pop for a small if dedicated audience. Early albums possessed a romantic naïveté in both voice and outlook that lent his frail, impressionistic folk a necessary bucolic innocence. By comparison, this is Sumpner’s Songs Of Experience, the older artist devising “Heaven in Hell’s despair”. Opening track Garden Hook suggests a pagan processional ushering us into the hazy comforts of Sumpner’s visionary northern landscapes. This album was my morning alarm for the whole of last December, its benign psychedelic melancholy gently escorting me out of an awful year. It possesses a bizarre, intimate beauty, a spectral magic that comforts and

beguiles. You’ll hear few records like it this year.

Andrew Male

The Martha’s Vineyard Ferries

★★★★ Suns Out Guns Out ERNEST JENNING RECORD.CO. CD/DL/LP

Underground supergroup’s third delivers crunchy, sardonic post-punk.

Though their previous albums passed somewhat beneath the radar, The Martha’s Vineyard Ferries have impressive pedigree – bassist Bob Weston has anchored Shellac for decades, drummer Chris Brokaw is an alumnus of Come and Codeine and occasional Thurston Moore sideman, and guitarist/singer Elisha Wiesner fronted obscure Massachusetts marvels Kahoots.

Seven years in the making, this third full-lengther is a punchy half-hour or so of feedbackgarlanded post-punk, where bruised early-R.E.M. tunefulness is swallowed by no-nonsense Mission Of Burma-style dynamics (Not Jail Material).

But beneath the gnarly mêlée charming pop lurks, like the haunted YLT-meets-GBV glide of The Daily Biscuit, or the charming middle-aged melodic hardcore of Chalk It Up To Island Time. The brooding post-rock of Laos, meanwhile, speaks to the economy and depth of these veteran noisers, packing a high standard of din into so slender a package.

Stevie Chick

Genesis Owusu

★★★★ Smiling With No Teeth HOUSE ANXIETY/OURNESS. CD/DL/LP

Aussie star-in-waiting announces himself in style.

Images of black dogs and depression are recurring themes on this excellent debut LP by Ghanaian-born, Canberraraised Genesis Owusu. Rather than let serious subject matter lead to too much earnest reflection, Owusu embarks on a radiant journey through self-examination. The songs morph from P-funk grooves to punk riffs to euphoric synthpop and more, as Owusu’s honeyed croon shapeshifts into crazed barks and urgent rapping. The Other Black Dog sounds like Outkast turning TV On The Radio’s frown upside down, Waitin’ On Ya is an existential crisis neo-soul anthem worthy of Frank Ocean’s debut, and the sweet sway of A Song About Fishing sounds like a cosmic-pop update of I Got You Babe. Owusu is a charismatic anchor throughout this boundary-pushing debut.

Niall Doherty

Dialect

★★★★ Under~Between RVNG. CD/DL/LP

Fourth solo outing from Liverpool art-scene polymath. a decade, Andrew PM Hunt remains undefinable, fronting art-pop group Outfit, guesting in numerous experimental combos and devising solo projects. Following last year’s superb Land Trance collaboration with Ex-Easter Island Head’s Benjamin D Duvall, comes his fourth solo release as Dialect. If there is no uniform sound across Dialect’s quartet of albums, there does appear to be a defining aesthetic. These are records that might have issued from New York’s Kitchen Arts Centre in the mid-’70s, informed by the experimental sonic landscapes of Rhys Chatham, Arthur Russell and Laurie Anderson. They’re also recordings concerned with landscape, and Under~Between moves with a whisper from avant-grade chamber works to beguiling voice exercises and delicate percussion pieces, as if Hunt were creating ambient chamber scores for utopian landscapes, where birds chatter like computers, and passing cars sound like small sad jazz trios.

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Senyawa

Fujiiiita

★★★

★★★★

Alkisah

Komori

PHANTOM LIMB. CD/DL/LP

DOCUMENTING SOUND. DL/MC

For their seventh album, the Indonesian ambient metal duo of Wukir Suryadi and Rully Shabara summon up folkloric demons and ancient musics with a barrage of homemade instruments and interlocking vocal growls (a mix of Javanese, Bahasa, and other Indonesian languages, apparently) in a manner that suggests a dissolute gamelan orchestra repurposed as a siege weapon.

2020’s iki was one of MOJO’s Underground albums of the year, a deep, resonant space of modulated organ drones. For his small-scale follow-up, Yosuke Fujita took his custom-made pipe organ to a cave at the base of Mt Fuji where he duetted with the resident bat colony, playing a form of classical court music including one piece constructed from solely from ultrasonic bat calls.

Geneva Skeen

Vitor Joaquim

★★★

★★★★

Double Bind

The Construction Of Time

ROOM40. CD/DL

With her second full-length LP for Lawrence English’s Room40 label, LA-based Geneva Skeen captures the sonic chaos of life on the West Coast in 2020.

A muted buzz of panicked voices, helicopter drone and bushfire crackle and female choirs that sound like ghosts of the apocalypse. Ambient music as Earth chaos, this is the soundtrack to the one nature documentary you hope will never be made.

VITORJOAQUIM.PT. CD/DL

A Portuguese arts scene fixture since the mid-’80s, Joaquim is an electronic composer who, like film director Werner Herzog, is searching for some kind of “ecstatic truth” in music.

He manipulates, piano and electronics alongside Gulf War radio broadcasts and João Silva’s trumpet to create a sonic world, caught between past and present, that makes you reevaluate your listening space. AM

MOJO 85

F I LT E R A L B UM S

Jane Weaver: reprogrammed for the ‘new normal’.

Winged messenger Songwriter and ‘sound carrier’ hits stride with psych space-pop and a new direction. By Lu cy O’Brien.

Jane Weaver

★★★★ Flock

FIRE. CD/DL/LP

WITH ITS SPARE Prince-style guitar riffs and loping bass funk The Revolution Of Super Visions, lead track from Jane Weaver’s eighth solo album, comes across like a

★★★★

Setting The Dogs On The Post Punk Postman CHERRY RED. CD/DL/LP

Suburban Britpop-denier hymns Cutler,late-’80s Scallydelia and more.

Fiftysomething Elmbridge curmudgeon-general of The Auteurs, Baader Meinhof et al, many of Luke Haines’ 14-ish solo works have been noteworthy. With cameos by Julian Barrett and Peter Buck, Setting The Dogs On The Post Punk Postman delivers. Tremulously crooned over dirty guitar and thumped drums, Haines observes with a novelist’s rheumy eye. Never Going Back To Liverpool seeks “Psychedelic Derek” for “a quid of blow”, noting that “everybody sounds like [late-’80s scally band] Rain.” Recorder-tootled folk ditties When I Owned The

86 MOJO

broadcast from the Mothership. “Do you look at yourself and find nothing?” Weaver sings, cool, keening and gently sardonic. Basting her targets (inequality, addictive social media, and “the toxic masculinity of world leaders”) in a mix of oscillating grooves, new wave synths and a subatomic pulse, Weaver has created her finest set to date.

Recorded in Stockport with co-producer and long-term collaborator Andy Votel, Weaver incorporates the fat, fuzzy sounds of vintage instruments like the mellotron and marxophone, or the warm woodwind of the bombarde, with shimmering pop. Weaver’s

Scarecrow and Ivor On The Bus prefigure a surprise hot flush in Hoople-esque I Just Want To Be Buried “between your breasts and between your legs.” Andrea Dworkin’s Knees lullabies the late feminist’s demise:“If you’re carrying all the love in the world there’s a price to pay.” Seemingly re-wilding for birdlife in Landscape Gardening, Haines might just be going soft on us.

Andrew Collins

Matthew E White & Lonnie Holley

★★★★

Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection

was recruited to improvise first-take vocals across the lengthy, free-form pieces. His freewheeling social critiques and invocations of transcendence, equal parts Solomon-like sagacity and nutty, cosmic fancy – Gil Scott-Heron by way of Sun Ra – prove a perfect complement to White and band’s slithering, seething, On The Corner-meets-early Can interplay. These reach a far-out apotheosis on I Cried Space Dust, with its belching synths and frenetic percussion framing Holley’s Funkadelic-like top-line (“keep on building on our reality”), as they do an excellent if eccentric job of evoking the pixelated ineffability of, well, existence itself.

David Sheppard

SPACEBOMB. CD/DL/LP

Virginian singer-songwriter and sculptor-cum-blues visionary take cosmic flight.

Julien Baker

Based on semiinchoate jams with a sprawling cast of musicians, including a four-piece rhythm section, Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection began life as a prospective White solo LP. With the music proving too abstract to parlay into orthodox songs, it was shelved until Lonnie Holley

Little Oblivions

work has always been driven by her curiosity and is non-aligned to genre, going where the music leads her. As a result, her success has been a slowburn, from the lo-fi indie of her solo debut in 2002, to the spectral folktronica of The Fallen By Watchbird (2010), to the acclaimed kosmische sound of The Silver Globe (2014) and her last offering, 2017’s Modern Kosmology. That curiosity led to her setting up the Bird label (an offshoot of Twisted Nerve) and releasing more obscure records by female artists, like folk compilation Bearded Ladies, or 1 6 1 2 Underture, featuring Maxine Peake delivering a spoken word poem about the Pendle witches. It has fuelled assiduous cratedigging for Votel’s Finders Keepers label and given Weaver a bank of samples, such as the whirring electronics of an ’80s French new wave band on Flock’s standout Sunset Dreams.

Despite her experimental edge, Weaver says, “I always have to try and get a song in there.” Flock bears this out. Each track is a combination of the cosmic and the deliberate – like the hypnotic Modern Reputation, propelled by free jazz and Broadcast-style ambient pop, or Pyramid Schemes, with flute and electronic drone entwined in a humorous dancefloor bump’n’grind chug. What connects these songs is Weaver’s unearthly voice. Some lines are delivered in deadpan low tones (“You cannot see I won’t be bought off/Quit bothering me”), but when she hits the high notes her voice has an airy sublimity, as if floating on currents of altered consciousness.

Shifting from future funk stomp to sonorous, drifting cosmic keyboards, this album is about opening up the third eye, a subtle reprogramming for the ‘new normal’ age.

Weaver’s early influences – Pink Floyd, ELO, disco, Kate Bush and Hawkwind – are all here, like ghostly traces at a space rock party.

One to which I’m sure we are all invited.

Little Oblivions is the sound of somebody who has been on high emotional alert for so long their batteries are starting to run down:agitated but exhausted, a little fuzzy at the edges. The Memphis singer and guitarist shares a nervous energy with Boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers, but on her newly expansive third album she often keeps it under a weighted blanket of guitar and synthesizer. Ziptie holds its head up with the same battered dignity as The National’s Pink Rabbits;Hardline and Highlight Reel let the adrenalin flood in, fight-orflight style. It can be vague on the details, but Baker’s songwriting is smart and serious enough to keep Little Oblivions from burning out entirely.

Victoria Segal

★★★

Weezer

MATADOR. CD/DL/LP

★★★★

A third of Boygenius returns with first solo album since 2017’s Turn Out The Lights.

“The smoke alarm’s been going off for weeks,” sings Julien Baker on Faith Healer, “no one showed up.” Similarly,

OK Human CRUSH MUSIC/ATLANTIC. CD/DL/LP

An orchestral pop album part influenced by Pet Sounds.

When lockdown paused pending metal greats-inspired album Van Weezer, the band’s linchpin Rivers Cuomo took to the piano to pen these eloquent songs about the

pandemic rendering us both “over and under-connected.”

Face-masked, Abbey Roadrecorded orchestral sessions embroider some wonderfully imaginative conceits, Cuomo’s trademark wryness dialleddown a tad as he focuses on tuning-out doom (“Kim Jongun could blow up my city/I’d never know,” he reports on Playing My Piano), isolation with his family (Screens), and his concerns about using literature to escape/selfmedicate (Grapes Of Wrath).

But it’s Numbers (“are out to get you”) that punches hardest, its compassionate message about the futility of measuring ourselves against others deftly handled. The album’s title, if you’re wondering, is billed as “a cheeky nod to Radiohead’s technophobic future trip OK Computer.”

James McNair

JAZZ B Y A N DY C O WA N

★★★★

The Blue Of Distance WESTERN VINYL. CD/DL/LP

Gorgeous new age/classical response to the American wilderness.

Elori Saxl, a Minnesotan now living in New York, is hardly the first electronic composer to use technology to invoke the wonders of the American landscape. She is, though, an unusually gifted one, hyperaware of the ironies and poignancies of summoning natural visions with digital tools. The Blue Of Distance, composed during a summer spent in the Adirondacks and a winter retreat on a frozen Lake Superior island, artfully mixes new age synth effects with live strings and woodwind, plus field recordings of water and the elements. The resulting six tracks sit in some exalted space halfway between psych-synth practitioners like Bitchin Bajas and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith on one bank, and a sort of chamber minimalism – Rachel’s and Arthur Russell, as well as Steve Reich and Julius Eastman – on the other. A little too melodic to be ambient, a little too subtle to be majestic;but in all, rapturous compromise.

John Mulvey

Lady Blackbird

★★★★

Black Acid Soul FOUNDATION MUSIC. CD/DL/LP

Impressive maiden flight

by American jazz vocalist.

Under her birth name of Marley Munroe, this Los Angelesbased singer has written songs for Anastacia, recorded

with the Italian house duo, Supernova, and back in 2013 was briefly signed to Epic, recording a couple of poporiented singles. Now, Munroe has reinvented herself as jazz singer Lady Blackbird, and it’s a transformation that suits her rich contralto voice, which is a stop-you-in-your-tracks cross between Roberta Flack’s sanctified fervour and Cassandra Wilson’s smoky sensuality.

Together with her producer Chris Seefried, (Larkin Poe, Trombone Shorty), Blackbird has crafted a tremendous debut album that contrasts her hauntingly dramatic vocals with starkly atmospheric backdrops.

There are strikingly soulful versions of tunes by Nina Simone, Tony Joe White, Irma Thomas and Sam Cooke, but most memorable of all is the singer’s outstanding jazz repurposing of the James Gang’s rock ballad Collage.

Charles Waring

Various

★★★

The Official Keith Emerson Tribute Concert CHERRY RED. CD+DVD

Soundtrack and film of an LA concert celebrating the late prog keyboardist’s music.

For an outfit who were all-conquering in the 1970s, Emerson, Lake & Palmer have oddly faded from popular memory. Here, though, are Keith Emerson’s peers – Eddie Jobson, Brian Auger, Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter, Vinnie Colaiuta and plenty more – reviving the keyboardist’s red-blooded fusion of classical and rock music (occasionally more of a collision). After a gentle start – Emerson’s lovely piano piece Prelude To Hope – the stage is swiftly packed with keyboardists and guitarists battling through Tarkus, Tank and The Endless Enigma. Most are faithfully reprised, though Lucky Man, for instance, gets a silvery pedal steel solo as well as the wibbly Moog outro. Odd, perhaps, to see so many gurning axemen celebrating

David Laskowki

Alabama Slim: hypnotic boogie.

a keyboardist;still, Emerson, who died in 2016, was a rare showman amid the earnest ranks of prog and would surely have applauded this display of thunderous reverence.

John Bungey

Pat Metheny

★★★★

Road To The Sun MODERN/BMG. CD/DL/LP

Pre-eminent fusion guitarist drops the drums to compose for classical guitars.

This is Pat Metheny unplugged – in fact, so unplugged that on an album of flying-fingered guitar music he performs only on one ‘’bonus’’ track. His 42-string Pikasso guitar manages to sound like a harp, a Japanese koto and guitar all at once on Arvo Pärt’s glacially beautiful Für Alina. Elsewhere, Metheny is the composer, with the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet playing the album’s six-part centrepiece Road To The Sun. Despite the classical milieu, this is very much Metheny music – alternately wistful and pretty and with a recurring theme that will instantly chime with fans of Bright Size Life or Are You Going With Me? Incorporating flamenco flourishes and jazzstyle trading of licks, the suite ranks among his most satisfying work. Before that comes a four-part piece played by classical guitarist Jason Vieaux, the delicate, intense and Spanish-tinged Four Paths Of Light.

John Bungey

Alabama Slim

★★★★

The Parlor CORNELIUS CHAPEL. CD/DL/LP

Superb third outing from the 72-year-old bluesman.

From Vance, Alabama but a New Orleans resident since 1965, Slim grew up on Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bill Broonzy 78s, and made his name playing local juke joints in the late 1950s and early ‘60s.

He didn’t record his first album, The Mighty Flood, a collaboration with his cousin Little Freddie King, until 2007.

King is his main partner once again on this album, recorded in one four-hour session with drummer Ardie Dean – Jimbo Mathus added piano and organ and Matt Patton bass at a later date. Slim plays hypnotic boogie like John Lee Hooker, his style raw and steady while his singing is a soul drenched moan. Both are encapsulated perfectly on possibly the most laid-back cover of Rock Me Baby ever and originals including Forty Jive, a smarting state-of-thenation affair.

Lois Wilson

Mark Feldman

★★★★

Sounding Point INTAKT. CD/DL

Chicago string stylist digs deep on belated sequel to 1994’s Music for Violin Alone.

Mark Feldman’s first entirely solo outing in 26 wide-roaming years (taking in work with John Abercrombie, Loretta Lynn and Sly & Robbie) fizzes with invention. A musician whose improvisations feel like compositions, his unbound approach grips from the off, in the restless jigging and pokery of As We Are and the spectral title track’s weeping phraseology. Feldman deploys all his instrument can offer – string-picking, pizzicato, batting – across these mostly single-take affairs, using sparing overdubs on a rapid replay of Ornette Coleman’s Peace Warriors and to ramp up the Hitchcockian suspense amid the tense screaming trills of Viciously. If 44 minutes with a virtuoso sounds daunting, his persistent gifting of harmonic surprises ensures you never feel schooled.

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ShaiMaestro

★★★★ Human

SachalVasandani & Romain Collin

★★★★

ECM. CD/DL

Midnight Shelter

Originals abound on the Israeli pianist’s tender and literate third suite with Manfred Eicher at the controls. There’s real finesse to the minimalist storytelling of Hank And Charlie or Mystery And Illusions, Maestro’s organically entwined band matching melodic clarity with rhythmic nuance, new trumpet recruit Philip Dizack evolving seemingly simple phrases into something greater.

An upbeat take on Ellington/ Coltrane’s In A Sentimental Mood provides a lap of honour.

EDITION. CD/DL/LP

A covers set assembled while these New York neighbours were under lockdown, Midnight Shelter swerves clichés at every turn. Whether reshaping Dylan, The Beatles, Nick Drake or paring back Lewis Capaldi’s and Harry Styles’ pop smarts, Collin’s downbeat, ruminative piano arrangements and Vasandani’s soulful baritone and heavylidded come-hither croon render the originals unrecognisable.

Listen with the lights off.

Misc

Johnny Butler

★★★★ Partager L’ambulance

★★★★

BONSOUND. CD/DL/LP

HI 4 HEAD. CD/DL

Misc sprout wings on their second outing. Forged from early-hours studio jams, the young Montreal trio display a mastery of push and pull, tension and release throughout, be it via the surging crescendos of Petite Apathie, Jérôme Beaulieu’s delicate piano patterning on Superman Se Pointera Pas or a cinematic cover of Suuns’ X-Alt that peers hard into the abyss before pulling back.

Butler has turned playing by himself into high art.

Recorded in realtime with a handful of electronic devices, you would swear the New York saxophonist (of jazz-proggers Scurvy) was using synths and guitars to summon Little Creek’s woozy reverse procession or Noodle Face’s distorted elegance. The purer textures of Baroque and Glinka combine deep emotional resonance with high technique. AC

Thirteen Dances

MOJO 87

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

★★★

★★★

★★★★

Atlas Mountains

ERASED TAPES. CD/DL/LP

FOUNDATION II. CD/ DL/ LP

MOTE. CD/DL/LP

Banane Bleue

GOOD QUESTION. DL

Fluid, largely instrumental improv by the reconvened Montreal collective that includes Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry and Sarah Neufeld.

Recorded in the latter’s Vermont home, the 10 tracks rise and fall through burbling electronics and explorative jazz. JB

Blackburn’s Bradford, contenders in the late-’80s ‘new Smiths’ rush, recruit Stephen Street for long-delayed second. Jangling indie verities gain polish and folk twang for age-appropriate kitchen sink ruminations on sorrows, joy and, on Down Faced Doll, deep despair. IH

Having all but turned his back on the piano, jazzer and Adele collaborator Cowley rediscovers his calling. While each unflashy piece slightly distorts or warps the instrument, his gift for plucking melodies from thin air is undimmed. A delicate show of restraint. AC

DOMINO. CD/DL/LP

François Marry follows the titular European industrial backbone with indie-pop sung in French and English (Julie, a Smiths-ish domestic portrait is a highlight);Interrailinginspired The Foreigner is full of Greek, Finnish and Italian. JB

Saxophonist on King Krule’s Man Alive!, Ignacio Salvadores heads into the hazy early hours avant-garde with producer Tom Grey. Short and sweet at 22 minutes, its cinematic rushes and warped dance moves lie to the left of KK’s elegantly stylised murk. AC

★★★★

★★★★

★★★

★★★★

DRAG CITY. CD/LP/MC

CORRUPT. DL/LP

RANSOM NOTE. DL/LP

In search of a “low stress environment”, Hanson recorded in the desert;all the better to channel the darkside introspection of ’70s country rock. Vibes, instrumental and psychic, are crucial:to Angeles’ reverberant keys or redemptive LP coda, Pigs. JB

Kane and his band The Expendables have flourished in the shadows. Work, politics, death and addiction are tackled with biting incision on a resplendent fourth album that sits somewhere between Cohen, Cousteau and early solo Scott Walker. AC

Bookended by two tense epics of ’70s-flavoured electronics, with the kosmische whoosh button taped down at ‘on’, is this debut by Vito Roccoforte and Gabriel Andruzzi from The Rapture, plus vocalist Jaiko Suzuki. In between, the latter’s deadpan vocals dominate. JB

House Music

Pale Horse Rider

Bright Hours

Book Of Broken Things

Hall Of Mirrors

I Hear

★★★

★★★

Gal Go Grey

& Youth

a lo pesau,a lo bajo y a lo llano

★★★

SLOVENLY. CD/DL/LP

YOUTH SOUNDS/CADIZ ENTERTAINMENT. CD/DL

Isidro Rubio de Valencia threads traditional Spanish folk, psych rock and soundtrack moods into something wild and occasionally unsettling (sad, slow Unicorn Embolat raises the worrying prospect of setting a unicorn’s horn on fire). JB

Interstellar Energy Worked up during an all-star live jam at Glastonbury in 2017 and ’19, then recorded at Konk studios last year, the prog psych titans create pulsing, throbbing, healing cosmic pop with sax, violin and synths. CP

EXTENDED PLAY

Frank Sinatra Rarities Volume 2

88 MOJO

★★★★

Three Minute Heroes Vol. 2 WARREN. CD/DL

Local kids express their fears; Yorkshire’s indie community set them to music, to raise awareness of adolescent mental health issues. Vol. 2 spans Tom Skelly’s forlorn folk to the lo-fi slackerdom of Joe Russell-Brown and Spilt Milk’s post-punk. LW

★★★

Thumbing Thru Foliage BAD TASTE. DL/LP/MC

Frank with the laughing face: Sinatra breaks free.

Miami rapper follows 2019’s debut Mazal with more forceful and candid reflections – as much about his cool delivery as the content. NYC producer ewonee matches every drama, hot stepping between stringy R&B, jumpy ’70s funk and baroque orchestral loops. AC

Frank Sinatra Enterprises

TIRED OF arguing with the “suits” of the music biz, Frank Sinatra founded Reprise Records in 1961, his own label that allowed him (and anyone else he chose) complete artistic freedom. This is the second entry in UMe’s series of digital releases high-lighting the best of the Reprise years, some classics plus lesserknown deep album cuts. He focuses here not only on romance, but also on close relationships with women:two songs – Nancy (With The Laughing Face) and Tina – are by-name tributes to his two daughters. I Love My Wife and Barbara are for his fourth bride. (Frank loved women so much, he kept on marrying.)

Lady Day is an empathetic, bittersweet ode to Billie Holiday. Throughout is that voice in the September of its years:slightly weary, a little wiser, still utterly singular.

Michael Simmons

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

Morning becomes eclectic How did a limited-edition,copyright-confounding,Europe-only reissue series become the must-have item in the Bob Dylan back catalogue? Andrew Male has the answers.

After all, the best had already been chosen for us.

Right? However, the positive reception Another Self Portrait received, plus the promise of the complete May 1, 1970 studio recordings with George Harrison, has led us here.

1970:The 50th The look is still bare bones, the CD digipack still (relatively) limited release and it won’t be available Anniversary Collection for streaming, but what do we have? As MOJO’s COLUMBIA/LEGACY. CD/DL Michael Simmons outlines in his linernotes, the AY BACK in March of 1991, Columbia first songs Dylan recorded were Tom Paxton’s I Records released The Bootleg Series Volumes Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound, Buffy 1 -3 box set. Thirty years into his career, Sainte-Marie’s Universal Soldier and Eric Andersen’s and buoyed by the critical and commercial success Thirsty Boots. Familiar, comfortable stuff.

“These of 1989’s Oh Mercy, Bob Dylan finally allowed fans to What’s interesting is that you get to hear Bob in glimpse behind the curtain, and gave them outtakes have a transition, a Doctor Who-style regeneration. Initially “Official” access to demos, offcuts, and live reliant on his “old fashioned” folk voice, he also charm – Dylan still recordings that had previously only been available, if revisits the Webb Pierce-with-a-head-cold tones of at all, as unofficial, under-the-counter product. sounds content, Nashville Skyline before trying out variants of the nasal From 1969’s Great White Wonder on, the trade in New Morning style across his own songwriting past. playful, happy.” These bootlegs became an accepted aspect of Bobology, delight, especially the versions with Harrison. and both Dylan and his record label undeniably Recorded at New York’s Columbia Studios B on benefited from their outlaw cultural cachet. Plus, it May 1, 1970, and starting with a murmured ripple cemented a belief in the heart of true Dylan fans that, whatever through Ghost Riders In The Sky, the Harrison session moves from lazy sub-par material he might release, from Saved to Down In The Groove, jams (One Too Many Mornings;Gates Of Eden;Mama, You Been On there was a parallel world where the good shit was getting shelved.

My Mind) to playful covers (All I Have To Do Is Dream;Matchbox).

And the Bootleg Series seemed to confirm that. Of course, there was Their take on The Beatles’ Yesterday, unfortunately, is closer to a seven-year gap between those first three volumes and Bob Dylan Self Portrait’s rendition of Paul Simon’s The Boxer, Dylan vocalising Live 1 9 6 6 , The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert, but here was that hidden somewhere between politeness and parody, and Harrison feeling path in clear view, adding historical depth to Dylan’s career, and he should play along. Such strangeness is forgotten on a country allowing his fans to feel like archivists poring over lost manuscripts. ramble through Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, a lazily laid-back However, a number of things have shifted in the 22 years since retread of 1962’s Song To Woody, a joyful One Too Many Mornings Live 1 9 6 6 . The audience still buying beautifully packaged and and an It Ain’t Me Babe that turns the original’s snide plead into a curated CD box sets has diminished and grown older. They also free-and-easy clarification, like some older Dylan, in Woodstock and backed by a Beatle, turning away fans looking for answers. know their stuff, and view releases such as 2010’s Whitmark Demos That’s something else time and context have changed. These and 2019’s Travelin’ Thru, 1 9 6 7 -1 9 6 9 as recordings long in bootleg outtakes now have a charm that would have been harder to read in circulation and, as with the Johnny Cash duets, fun but inessential.

1970 because Dylan sounds content, playful, happy. That wasn’t Simultaneously, something with fewer frills was unfolding. wanted as the ’60s dream collapsed:Give us some answers, Bob! Since 2012, Sony Europe had been quietly releasing copyright OK, here’re three different versions of Jimmy Newman’s Alligator extension collections of previously Man! You’d better dance! The mood is light but tight, with Dylan unreleased Dylan recordings, to keep the playing at his absolute best alongside Harrison, Al Kooper, fiddle recordings out of public domain for a player Dave Bromberg, guitarist Ron Cornelius, drummer Russ further 20 years. The print run of the first Kunkel, Charlie Daniels on bass. As Kooper tells Simmons, “Bob’s – unheard recordings from 1962 – was piano playing was exquisite. It was four-fingered, he didn’t use his limited to 100 copies, pressed on CD-R. pinky. Great dexterity for an eight-fingered pianist.”

Demand among collectors grew. Sony began Listen to his soft-padded playing on take one of New Morning’s pressing on vinyl, print runs increased to BACK STORY: Sign On The Window. One of this collection’s absolute highlights, 1,000. Then, in 2016, Columbia released THE KING ’S it’s both heavenly and strange, sure-footed and mysterious, a Zen the 1 9 6 6 Live Recordings , a 36-CD box set G AMBIT ● Rumour has it that at koan buried inside a peaceable country dream of future featuring every known recording from that the May 1 , 1 9 7 0 session contentment. The test of the true fan is whether you’ll then want world tour, plus audience tapes. This was no at Columbia Studios B, to listen to seven further takes of the same exquisite song. If your carefully curated addition to the series, but New York, both Bob answer is a loud ‘YES!’, you have come to the right place. the equivalent of a massive data-dump. You Dylan and George Harrison were waiting There is a strong argument for the fact that New Morning was became the curator. This, evidently, was for Elvis Presley to Dylan’s first religious LP, the singer embracing a kind of Buddhist something fans wanted, total Dylan access arrive. That certainly simplicity on tracks like Three Angels and Sign On The Window. with no worry that a lost masterpiece, perfect gives an extra reason for their playing Carl Listen to the alternate version of Three Angels here with Kooper’s fragment or minor sketch had been missed.

Perkins’ Matchbox and organ playing in a mellower key, and Dylan just listing things he On December 4, 2020, Sony released the Everlys’ All I Have To sees in front of him:“One U-Haul trailer/A truck with no wheels/ their first version of this collection, again in Do Is Dream. Yet, while Presley was certainly in A man with a badge”, and the world feels like a better place. limited quantities. Maybe there would have the city, having landed In their own separate ways, Self Portrait and New Morning seemed been a time when three-and-a-half hours of that day at JFK in his inexplicable 50 years ago, an artist associated with ideas of youth unreleased music from the New Morning and $ 6 0 0 ,0 0 0 Convair 8 8 0 private jet the Lisa and protest settling into a cosy early middle-age, content to watch Self Portrait sessions, tracks not already on Marie, the singer never the world drift by, and pass out good vibes. It wasn’t what was wanted Bootleg Series Vol 1 0 : Another Self Portrait , showed up. of Dylan then. Thankfully, it’s what we can get from Dylan now. wouldn’t have caused such a fan furore.

Bob Dylan

★★★★

Al Clayton, Alamy

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Light but tight: Bob Dylan, playing at his absolute best.

F I LT E R R E I S SU E S The Gordons

★★★★

The Gordons + Future Shock 19 7 2 . DL/LP

1981 debut from “sonically challenging” NZ trio who became Bailter Space.

“It all sounds immense”:Black Sabbath’s Vol4.

titled) and pranks gone wrong (sleeping drummer Bill Ward’s

Black Sabbath

★★★★

Vol 4:Super-Deluxe BMG. CD/DL/LP.

Four discs and 10 vinyl sides’worth of doom and gloom from 1973.

IN MAY 1972, Black Sabbath holed up at the Record Plant in Los Angeles to make their fourth album.

Created amid a blizzard of cocaine (the song Snowblind was aptly

Various

★★★★

Coxsone’s Dramatic And Music Centre STUDIO ONE/YEP ROC. CD/DL/LP

Avalon

Clement Dodd’s first LP,here using original master tapes.

The 45rpm single has always been king in Jamaica, especially among the sound system proprietors who moved into record production from the late 1950s. Clement ‘Sir Coxsone’ Dodd’s Studio One gave rise to the island’s most important performers, yet this debut compilation LP broke the mould in 1961, two years before Dodd’s studio opened. Songs like Clue J & His Blue Blasters’ Beeston Street Riff and Aubrey Adams’ Little Willie show how rhythm and blues was mutating in Kingston, and tracks like Rub Up, with Australian guitarist Dennis Sindrey, incorporate rhythms and melodies from elsewhere. Ballads like Simms & Robinson’s I Love You and The Blues Busters’ Donna have a delightful innocence, contrasted by the repatriation message of Clancy Eccles’ Freedom. The tape transfers by Dodd, shortly before his death, ensure good sonic standards.

David Katz

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Goldfinger-style, resulting in a violent seizure), it remains a high watermark, despite the surrounding bedlam. Remixed by studio guru Steven Wilson, every bowelchurning riff and bass lick on Wheels Of Confusion, St Vitus Dance and Tomorrow’s Dream has

outtakes – including a fluffed stab at Supernaut and a guide-vocal version of Under The Sun – plus a live set assembled from Sabbath’s 1973 UK tour, which is really 1980’s unloved and unlovely Live At Last, fleshed out and given a new studio paintjob.

Mark Blake

Christchurch trio Gordons were NZ’s most influential noisemakers of their era, cited

by Sonic Youth and numerous Flying Nun label scene-makers.

Their debut EP Future Shock bypassed post-punk for minimalist, pummelling protopost-hardcore. But it is a mere sketch compared to the following album. The sound is so dynamic you’d swear Steve Albini engineered rather than a cash-strapped local. John Halvorsen’s galvanising bass sat alongside Alister Parker’s guitar squalls (he’s also an alternately sinister and nervy presence on vocals), while Brent McLachlan’s concretesteady drums held more than a supporting role. With both Right On Time and Growing Up stretched to nine minutes, The Gordons resembled a juggernaut, and even the shorter Laughing Now felt unstoppable. Parker’s conversion to Christianity fatally intervened, but nothing can diminish their brutal beauty or legacy.

Martin Aston

Wes Montgomery

L’Orchestre OK Jazz

Martin Stone

Sting

★★★★

★★★★

Down But Not Out In Paris And London:The Mad Dog Chronicle

★★★ INTERSCOPE. CD/DL/LP

JAZZLINE. CD/DL/DVD/LP

MAD DOG. CD

Sixteen made earlier,plus a new duet with Italy’s Zucchero Fornaciari.

Jazz guitar magus captured live in 1965.

Pas Un Pas Sans – The Boleros Of OK Jazz 1957-77 PLANET ILUNGA. LP

Soulful slow dances from the kings of Kinshasa Planet Ilunga’s third collection of OK Jazz tracks comes with the label’s admirable attention to detail and fabulous sound but focuses on boleros, those Cuba-influenced ballads that allowed dancers to get close in Kinshasa clubs yet don’t always get the kudos of the band’s rhumbas. Remastered from the original 45s and 78s – OK Jazz issued almost 500 singles, so it saves time and money letting somebody else make the selection – these 24 tracks are the sound of bandleader Franco (composer of all but nine) exploring love and pain primarily, but with a bit of social comment thrown in (Organise The Congo, One Of These Days) and a jingle for shoes (Not A Step Without Bata). Hearing OK Jazz develop from 1957 B-side Kenge Okeyi Elaka Te to 1977’s epic lament Tolinganaki Toboyanaki is quite the experience.

David Hutcheon

Warm celebration of British bohemia’s ultimate guitarist.

“Martin Stone was a dandy.

Everything about him was shot through with a thread of apparently effortless élan.

The world is poorer for him no longer being in it.” Nick Lowe’s tribute is paid in the book that comes with this glorious 4-CD set dedicated to the everquesting, mercurial guitarist who died in December 2016.

Stone was integral to the heady Mighty Baby and rootsy oddballs Chilli Willi And The Red Hot Peppers. Later, he was briefly in The 101’ers with Joe Strummer and then Pink Fairies.

Here, though, is Stone’s 1992 to 2013:an aromatic workout with Wolf People, a groovy collaboration with Mother Earth’s Matt Deighton, sessions with (Wreckless) Eric Goulden, a previously cassette-only LP from ’92. Throughout, Stone’s liquid yet forceful playing dominates. Inside the slipcase, a hardback book, a folder with the CDs – and true affection.

Kieron Tyler

Duets

Seventy this year and booked for a Las Vegas residency, Sting is facing his twilight years with predictable vigour. Teaming up with duettists vocal and instrumental, this internationalist set sees such disparate talents as Julio Iglesias, Eric Clapton, trumpeter Chris Botti and Congolese rapper GIMS lock antlers with him. Sting usually leads off, but makes an exception for the late Charles Aznavour on 2011’s stately L’amour C’est Comme Un Jour. If there’s a stylistic thread that binds it’s nylon guitar-led Latin/MiddleEastern pop, as defined by Little Something (with Melody Gardot), Rise And Fall (with Craig David), and Mylène Farmer’s seductive steal of Stolen Car. Despite competition from standards such as My Funny Valentine, Sting’s own Practical Arrangement – penned with Rob Mathes for 2014 musical The Last Ship and brilliantly co-piloted by Australia’s Jo Lawry – stands out.

James McNair

★★★★

The NDR Hamburg Studio Recordings

With his ability to create liquid solos like a horn player, Montgomery’s fretboard virtuosity blew minds when his debut album landed in 1959. Sadly, his time at the top was spectacularly brief, and by 1968 he was dead from a heart attack. Three years before his demise, he toured Europe, which included a visit to Germany where the tracks for this archival release were recorded in front of a studio audience. Montgomery’s associates include fellow American, saxophonist Johnny Griffin, and the UK’s three Ronnies:Messrs Scott and Ross, on saxophones, and drummer Stephenson. They all contribute simpatico accompaniments on 11 hardswinging tracks whose standouts are sizzling versions of West Coast Blues and Four On Six, two of Montgomery’s signature tunes. Both the CD and vinyl packages include a 30-minute DVD featuring footage of the guitarist and the band rehearsing.

Charles Waring

Willie Dunn (with guitar):reading history in the landscape.

Design

Spare Snare

★★★★

★★★★

Design

VACANCY. CD

Another day in the sun for the heavenly British harmony poppers.

The liner notes of this 50thanniverary reissue of Design’s first album say they became “the most televised group in the UK, appearing with major stars such as Morecambe & Wise, Benny Hill, Tommy Cooper and The Two Ronnies.” The variety audience courted by the avowedly square Design was won over by their creamy harmonies, soaring melodies and often jazzy approach to songwriting. Effectively – the name is coincidental – they were the UK’s equivalent to America’s similarly feathery Free Design. 1971’s Design is their highpoint:a lovely shower of sumptuousness. Here, it’s bolstered by alternate versions and demos, including a preDesign track recorded for Apple publishing by band member Barry Alexander.

Inessential post-Design tracks fill out the picture. One cut, from 2003, is produced by Sex Pistols soundman/producer Dave Goodman. Plus ça change.

Kieron Tyler

The Complete BBC Radio Sessions 1995-2018 CHUTE. CD/DL

Collected radio output from three decades of Dundee indie.

Tenacious purveyors of handmade, often homemade guitar pop since 1991, Spare Snare’s profile was raised in 2018 when Steve Albini travelled to Scotland to record their Sounds album, which revisited 10 songs from their back catalogue. The Complete BBC Radio Sessions re-examines it in another way, compiling their recordings down the years for John Peel, Marc Riley and even Aled Jones to chart their progress from ramshackle ’90s upstarts to their more strapping and assured current form. Along the way there’s an echo of early R.E.M. in the lovely Holding On To The Shore, brilliantly daft song titles (see:D’ye Ken That Bruce Hornsby And The Range Are On The Mogadons, Ken?) and a flip manifesto in the lyrics of We Are The Snare (“We can’t do drum’n’bass/We don’t do middle eights”). This threedisc box set is impressive.

Tom Doyle

P.J. Harvey

★★★★★

The Fall

Stories From The City, ★★★★ Stories From The Sea Live At St Helens ISLAND. DL/LP Technical College ’81 Sixth instalment of monthly P.J.-on-vinyl battery.

Following a stormy tryst with Nick Cave and a breakdown during 1998’s tortuous Is This Desire?, Polly Harvey cut this free-spirited, occasionally raunchy follow-up with ‘new positivity’, offering artfully indistinct yet palpably truthful snapshots of a young woman’s transformative experiences at a transitional time of life. Most were written during a year living in New York – a Somerset girl stoked on Big Apple electricity. Sessions in rural Blighty, backed by trusty sticksman Rob Ellis and Bad Seeds multi-instrumentalist Mick Harvey, presented P.J.’s bare-wire songcraft with newfound approachability. With its NYC psychogeography (You Said Something’s Manhattan panorama) and Patti Smith homage (Good Fortune, à la Dancing Barefoot), the album’s East Coast relevance only multiplied when it won the Mercury on 9/11, Harvey accepting from a Washington DC hotel room overlooking the smouldering Pentagon. A parallel Demos LP corrects its one flaw:the bloodless Thom Yorke on This Mess We’re In is substituted by Polly herself.

Andrew Perry

CASTLE FACE. LP

Forty years on,the Gruppe blaze away on-stage.

Just as Trump putschists were vandalising the US Capitol in January, this Feb ’81 live set – released on Oh Sees chief John Dwyer’s label – was announced on outlets including Rolling Stone with topical taster track Leave The Capitol (actually, said Mark E Smith, about time warps in “Victorian Vampiric London,” but who’s griping). Should any bison horn-wearing QAnon chump be moved to investigate it, their conspiracy-addled minds may implode. In high, smellthe-nylon-shirts-and-bittermarinated-carpets audio quality, and backed by one of the all-time crack Fall platoons, MES is at an early peak of analeptic creativity, spitting out such oracular twisters as the comic/Oedipal An Older Lover, anti-knacker’s yard talisman Fit And Working Again and indomitable multi-lambaster Slags, Slates Etc., with an askew verve often absent from their studio versions. Comes with lyrical distortions, clarinet and backing vocals from thenmanager Kay Carroll. For hardened users and trainees alike.

Ian Harrison

Creation rebel Rediscovered:the Native American Leonard Cohen.

By JohnMu lvey.

Willie Dunn

★★★★

Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies:The Willie Dunn Anthology LIGHT IN THE ATTIC. CD/LP

IN 1968, around the same time Neil Young bestowed the name Crazy Horse on his new backing band, another Canadian musician was embarking on a much deeper study of Native American history. Willie Dunn, Mi’gmaq on his mother’s side, had lived for a while on the Listuguj reserve in Quebec as a child before joining up with the Canadian Armed Forces. By the late ’60s, however, he had also spent time on the Greenwich Village folk scene and had supplemented his music-making with a tentative career in film.

Dunn’s first movie, an award-winning 10-minute short, combined a weight of historic photographs with an instantly memorable song. The Ballad Of Crowfoot was a solemn and unstinting narrative that connected colonial injustices of the 19th century with their enduring legacy in the 1960s:“It’s always the Indian,” he noted, “who gets the blame.” The message was powerful, but so was the performance.

Dunn, it transpired, was a baritone craftsman akin to Fred Neil, a troubadour capable of evoking the majesty of the North American wilderness without ignoring the political realities that also existed there.

The Ballad Of Crowfoot appeared on Dunn’s selftitled debut in 1971, and again on a re-recorded version of the album in 1972. Neither record was much of a success, and

Dunn’s subsequent musical career, until his death in 2013, quietly co-existed with filmmaking, writing and, most prominently, political activism. Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies, though, makes a persuasive case for Dunn as a significant songwriter;one whose serious engagement with his First Nations identity was sadly not as lucrative as appropriating Native American imagery proved to be for some of his contemporaries.

Initially, Leonard Cohen seems to be Dunn’s key role model. A clutch of lovely tracks from his debut are heavy on the poetic gravitas and flamenco-tinged guitar:Peruvian Dream (Part 1) feels like a mildly psychedelic first cousin of Suzanne and is no worse for that. The superb I Pity The Country, meanwhile, is a prescient survey of a country choked by pollution, exploited by big business and undermined by incompetent governance, at the mercy of “bigoted newspress, fascist town criers”. As the years go on, Dunn artfully expands his remit to include a kind of baroque folk in the vein of David Ackles (The Carver), recitations of Shakespeare set to chants by the Akwesasne Singers of Mohawk heritage, and his own invocation of Crazy Horse, that in part recalls a Celtic hoedown convened by Johnny Cash.

Odd, but effective.

What provides a constant is his love, respect and ability to read the history in the contours of the landscape. Songs from a pair of rare 1980s long-players find Dunn contemplating the ocean as well as the inland expanses of Canada. Nova Scotia, in particular, is a rugged and gorgeous song of longing for both the sea and the valleys;a sense of total connection with the whole spectrum of unforgiving environments.

This land was Willie Dunn’s land, and his ways of honouring it remain just as poignant now as ever.

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Just a little loving: Dusty Springfield and Jerry Wexler discuss song choices.

F I L E U N D E R ...

Atlantic crossing Going to America to find her soul didn’t quite work out.

By Jim Irvin.

OES ADMIRING soul singers and covering their work automatically make you one yourself? Discuss.

Ms Springfield, Dusty by name, smokey by timbre, was born Mary O’Brien into an Irish family in middle-class West Hampstead, London. After making her name as part of folksy trio The Springfields, somebody decided to market her as “the great British blue-eyed soul singer”, a chancy bit of ’60s PR that somehow took root. The description is routinely trotted out to this day, without much aural evidence to back it up.

Dusty was a vocal chameleon, adapting her delivery to suit the material. Covering Tony Joe White’s Willie & Laura Mae she affected a greasy delivery behind the beat, singing Michel Legrand’s Windmills Of Your Mind she sounded cool, precise, and French.

So, “superior pop singer with excellent taste, who sometimes sang soul songs” would be a more accurate, if less sexy description of her gifts. Whatever, Atlantic Records, noting her enthusiasm for their output, thought she might at least help them find a white audience they weren’t reaching, so snapped up her US rights in 1968 and sent her to Memphis. Label boss and producer Jerry Wexler offered her a slew of songs to record, which she turned down, bar Son Of A Preacher Man and Just A Little Lovin’, both sides of her first single, which

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You, Haunted, Nothing Is Forever – taken from sessions for a shelved third Atlantic album produced in 1971 by writer Jeff Barry (eventually released in 2015 as Faithful).

Perhaps Atlantic missed the point of her talents. Perhaps that inferiority complex became too crippling, manifesting as intense, costly, time-consuming perfectionism. (Later producers would have to record Springfield one word at a time.)

Her Atlantic singles output adds up to an enjoyable, skilfully rendered, soul-flavoured, pop collection, but you get why they weren’t bigger hits:some kind of conviction has gone missing at some point in the process.

annoyed him a little, because he had to find a load more material. Then Dusty choked in front of American Sound’s celebrated studio band. Most of Dusty In Memphis’s vocals were eventually cut in New York. Wexler decided she had a “gigantic inferiority complex.”

However, it is said that it was Springfield who tipped off Atlantic about a new band featuring her talented mate John Paul Jones, called Led Zeppelin. In that way, she did find Atlantic the huge white audience they craved.

But, aside from Son Of A Preacher Man – a Top 10 hit everywhere, Grammy nominated – her own gig with the label didn’t really work out. Dusty In Memphis was a modest seller, peaking at Number 99 in the US. She released 12 singles with Atlantic and all 24 of the A- and B-sides are collected on The Complete Atlantic Singles 1 9 6 8 -1 9 7 1 +++ (Real Gone). Eight of these tracks appear on Dusty In Memphis, six are from her second album for the label, recorded with Philly team Gamble & Huff, the underwhelming A Brand New Me. The rest were stand“Perhaps alone sides on flop singles, a Atlantic few of them – I Believe In

missed the point.”

Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog ++++ (Real Gone) was the first album by Panamanian/Filipino singer Norma Tanega, who hit internationally with the title track in 1966 but paused her career to live with Springfield in London for five years. On the surface it’s pleasing summer-camp folk, but Tanega’s songs are a cut above that, possessing a dry Randy Newman-ish quality and unusual, sophisticated themes. Case in point is opening track You’re Dead, which has just shown up in the hit TV series What We Do In the Shadows. The CD comes with bonus single tracks Bread and Run.

F I LT E R R E I S SU E S country, Thomas’s soulfulness radiates warmth, bringing comfort in sweet melodies.

Lois Wilson

Goldfrapp

★★★★ MUTE/BMG. LP

Within A Few Degrees LAGOONSIDE/LIGHT IN THE ATTIC. CD

A quietly gripping 2-CD and DVD account of the John Prine who never happened.

“I didn’t have a whole lot of ambition,” Bob Frank admits in the title documentary of this audio-visual set, summing up the mythic aura wrapped around his only major-label album, a stark self-titled 1972 masterpiece on Vanguard.

A disastrous album-release gig in New York doomed the Memphis-born Vietnam vet’s shot at the new-Dylan crown.

But Frank, who died in 2019, was writing before and long past that crossroads. On a disc of 1965-71 demos, he is back from the service and a jobbing Nashville tunesmith already on his own highway, rendering tautly performed blue-collar trials in country-blues grit and a rugged voice suggesting the Skip Spence of Oar singing John Wesley Harding. A postVanguard stash of homerecorded tapes stretching into the ’90s includes the shattering rage and suicidal despair of Johnson. As Frank says in the film after performing another long-hidden rough diamond, “There’s an authentic song right there.”

David Fricke

★★★★★ Do You Have The Force? Jon Savage’s Alternate History Of Electronica 1978-1982 CAROLINE TRUE. CD/DL/LP

Seventh Tree

★★★★

Various

Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory’s classy fourth returns to vinyl.

Many reviewers of Seventh Tree in 2008 sans lyric sheet were surprised to learn that Alison Goldfrapp’s exquisite, if somewhat unintelligible, vocal on delicate opener Clowns was “about fake tits, basically”, as she told Blender. Yet Goldfrapp’s fourth all but jettisoned the dancier, exhibitionist content of 2003’s Black Cherry and 2005’s Supernature, the LP’s pastoral folk, psychedelia, paganism and surrealist influences marking the duo as true masters of reinvention. Thematically, it was an opaque kind of lovelorn, while musically, an overt sensuality ruled – the soft-raining needle-static of sepia ballad Eat Yourself, or the seductive and cinematic Gainsbourg-meets-John-Barry trappings of Cologne Carrone Houdini. Next time out, Alison Goldfrapp would don legwarmers for 2010’s ecstatic pop work-out Head First.

Seventh Tree feels more deeply rooted.

James McNair

from 1981). Add Suicide and Cabaret Voltaire and the seduction’s complete.

Jude Rogers

Omar Khorshid

★★★★ With Love WEWANTSOUNDS. LP

Various

★★★★

Adventures in rare,vital electronica from one of pop culture’s finest custodians

Birth Of Soul:Los Angeles Special

Electronica was more punk than punk, buzzes Jon Savage, in the linernotes to this thrilling, imaginative jitter through the genre’s early years. The difference between punk and electronic music, he explains, was “between 1984 and Brave New World, between a totalitarian nightmare, or a dystopia accomplished through seduction.” Savage launches his anthology, fittingly, with two frisky novelties:The Droids’ proto-Daft Punk Star Wars homage, glistening with minor-key magnificence, and a lusty lost Eurodisco banger, Sylvie Love’s Extraterrestrial Lover. Other 12-inch epics explode like shots of silver throughout (Harry Thurmann’s propulsive Underwater, a 10-minute Mexican mix of Patrick Cowley’s finest moments), but there’s also mesmerising rare ambient from Coventry (The Sea Of Wires), shuddering dark drones (Monoton) and arguably the first ever techno record (A Number Of Names’ Sharevari

Placing LA at the centre of the soul universe.

KENT. CD/DL

Ray Charles moved to Los Angeles in 1950, Sam Cooke began his secular career there in 1957, and by the 1960s the city was a hotbed for what was then this new genre called soul. This latest in Ace’s series mapping the music’s genesis brings together 24 tracks spanning 1960 to ’64 from LA labels including Dore, Bamboo, Era and Swingin’. Of those, six are previously unissued:the best are Don Wyatt’s countryish But What About My Broken Heart and The Rev-Lons’ Whirlwind, a frenzied girl group dancer, both Gary Paxton productions.

Of those singles released at the time, the belting I Want A Boyfriend (Girlfriend) by The Soul-Mates, AKA future Motown star Brenda Holloway and songwriter Robert Jackson, and the tough R&B of Let Me Be Your Little Dog by The Phillips Sisters (Lola and Pauline) are the choicest cuts.

Lois Wilson

Highly collectible twangy Arabic exotica from the ill-fated Egyptian guitar maverick.

Omar Khorshid’s work with beat group Les Petits Chats and superstar divas Oum Kalthoum and Farid El Atrache made him a legendary figure in Arabic pop. The sometime silver screen star’s pioneering east/ west fusions and innovative fuzzed-up arrangements on 1978’s With Love witness his superfast fingers wreaking trebly magic on echo-deep, acid-fried cover versions of Mohamed Abdel Wahab’s Ahwak, El-Atrache’s Hebbina Hebbina (an Eno fave) and Rahbani Brothers’ Rahbaniyat.

Elsewhere, the bent and twisted melodies and twitching traditional rhythms of Habibati and Zorba are pierced with pitch-bending, outer-space synth gurgles as they lurch from slow waltz to joyous jig. It’s arresting proof that Khorshid’s romantic mix of Link Wray, Dick Dale and Ennio Morricone’s six-stringer Bruno Battisti D’Amario could have taken him anywhere, had he not become fatally embroiled in Egypt’s turbulent politics.

Andy Cowan

New Age Steppers

★★★★ Stepping Into A New Age ON-U SOUND. CD/DL

Carla Thomas

★★★★ Let Me Be Good To You SOULMUSIC. CD

Kishi Yamamoto

1960 to ’68’s solo albums, 45s,live performance and duets with Rufus and Otis.

Carla Thomas was the first lady of Stax and her impeccable outlay for the label tracks both her artistic maturity and the label’s rise and decline. This 4-CD box, subtitled The Atlantic And Stax Recordings, spans 1960 to ’68 when the two labels parted company, from the giddy self-penned teen ballad Gee Whiz (Look At His Eyes), a Chips Moman production, to the tougher stomp of A Dime A Dozen, produced by Hayes & Porter. They also provided her signatures, the sensuous B-A-B-Y and the seductive title track, and there is further chemistry on display in covers of Tramp and Knock On Wood with Otis Redding.

Throughout, though, whether leaning towards the blues or

First three studio LPs and more in boxed anthology of the loose-knit collective.

BEYOND A few reverential covers (and a certain Bob Marley song), punk’s natural affinity for reggae yielded only occasional audio treasure until revolving-door dub innovators New Age Steppers gate-crashed the party. Held down by the rhythmic interplay of Style Scott (Roots Radics) and George Oban (Aswad), 1980’s unabashed self-titled debut saw Ari Up stretch out her range on messed-up lovers rockers laced with Adrian Sherwood’s inspired cut-ups, collages and dub manipulations. If coverheavy sequel Action Battlefield was less inspired, the magnificently sweet-voiced Bim Sherman’s path-find through Foundation Steppers made full reparations.

Completed by a typically warped re-fashioning of rarities (Avant Gardening) and 2012’s vivid, valedictory Love Forever, sprint-finished after Up’s cancer diagnosis, file this crossbred treat alongside Creation Rebel’s wonderfully window-rattling dubs.

Andy Cowan

Ari Up:stepping into the new age.

MOJO 95

F I LT E R R E I S SU E S One Night Stand! Live At The Harlem Square Club, indeed recorded one night in Miami, in January 1963, is the best example of Cooke on-stage.

Geoff Brown

The Black Crowes:when they weren’t so hard to handle.

The Black Crowes

★★★★

Shake Your Money Maker

★★★★

Harry Dean Stanton With The Cheap Dates

UME/AMERICAN. CD/DL/LP

Ain’t That Good News/At The Copa/ Keep Movin’ On

Expanded 30th anniversary edition with rarities,demos and live tracks from 1990.

ABKCO. LP

Three beautiful Cooke vinyl packages coincide with One Night In Miami movie.

Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Malcolm X might have fancied themselves as singers, but there is only one master vocalist in the Florida tale, as these well-remastered vinyl treasures assert. Produced by arch sweeteners Hugo & Luigi, Ain’t That Good News, from 1964, the year he was murdered, has six terrific uptempo performances on side one (title track, Another Saturday Night, Meet Me At Mary’s Place etc) and more reflective songs on side two, starting with imperishable classic A Change Is Gonna Come. Keep Movin’ On, a double, first appeared in 2001 on CD, and 10 of its 23 tracks feature on …Good News.

Shake, Yeah Man and That‘s Where It’s At are among added essentials. Wear a tux to listen to At The Copa, also ’64. He’d stiffed there in 1958, and while Bill Bailey still isn’t a song you’d readily request of Cooke, he wins the white supper-club audience this time. Mind you,

★★★

October 1993

Thirty years ago, nobody knew that The Black Crowes would quickly become a crucible of toxic in-fighting.

Instead, the stellar gifts of warring brothers Chris and Rich Robinson were the rightful headline news, their seismic, five million-selling debut, masterfully produced by George Drakoulias, a gutsy stramash of good (and bad) time rock’n’roll and packing a taut take on Otis Redding’s Hard To Handle that hinted at later diversity. Enabled by the Robinsons’ current détente and flagging a planned Shake Your Money Maker revisited tour this summer, this edition’s bangs-and-whistles bonus highlights include a previously unreleased cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy whose arrangement plainly owes something to Donny Hathaway’s celebrated version. It’s further proof that the Crowes were never birds of a feather with the hair-metal peacocks they grew up alongside.

James McNair

OMNIVORE. CD/DL/LP

Good singin’from a great actor.

Harry Dean Stanton was the forlorn, soulful thin man many consider the perfect Hollywood character actor.

(His films ranged from Cool Hand Luke to Paris, Texas.) For years there was a chance that if you walked into a party in New York or Los Angeles, there’d be Harry Dean on his eleventeenth tequila, strumming a guitar and mournfully moaning a Mexican folk song in Spanish.

This collection’s first half comprises studio recordings of Chuck Berry, William Bell and Dylan classics and Ry Cooder, Jim Dickinson and John Hiatt’s gorgeous Across The Borderline. The second half are live cuts of yet more rootsy covers recorded at LA’s Troubadour with hotshot pickers including Doobie Brother Skunk Baxter.

It’s fun bar-band music and HD had a tremulous voice that could effectively slip into anything, much like any great character actor.

Michael Simmons

VINYL PACKAGE OF THE MONTH

John Coltrane Lush Life CRAFT. LP

WE ARE now, it seems, close to the point where records will be issued with certificates validating their provenance and terroir.

Craft Recordings’ new Small Batch series doubles down hard on the luxury food and drink analogies: a limited-edition “audiophile” series, on heavyduty vinyl, where mastering engineer Bernie Grundman is invested with the mystique of an artisanal cheesemaker,

96 MOJO

or maverick brewer. It’s a bit daft, but it’s also an appetising proposition for collectors – and this press of Lush Life certainly sounds fantastic. A good move, too, to choose an album originally recorded by the great jazz engineer Rudy Van Gelder for the first release, where his sense of space and depth, and the clarity and

precision with which he picks out each instrument, lend themselves so well to the process. Coltrane, of course, is a marvel, at his most delicate, and it remains mind-boggling that these 1957 and ’58 sessions were left on the shelf until 1961; cave-aged, perhaps?

John Mulvey

Various

★★★

Different Fashion:The High Note Dancehall Collection 1979-81 DOCTOR BIRD. CD

Two-CD foundation dancehall compilation produced

by Sonia Pottinger.

During the late ‘70s, Jamaican music reinvented itself by revitalising Studio One and Treasure Isle classics for younger performers commenting on everyday life; Sonia Pottinger got involved by building new cuts of old rhythms with the Revolutionaries at Treasure Isle, Shank I Sheck becoming the platform for Ranking Joe’s Shine Eye Gal, and The Heptones’ Get In The Groove adapted for Michael Palmer’s Mr Landlord.

Pottinger also re-used original Treasure Isle master tapes for contemporary augmentations: turning Alton Ellis’s Breaking Up into Papa Ritchie’s surreal Phantom, The Sensations’ Baby Love used in Jah Stone’s topical Westmoreland Flood. Errol Scorcher’s Roach In De Corner, Tony Tuff’s Round The World and Ranking Joe’s General are the best of the young guard; Delroy Wilson’s Let’s Unite and Marcia Griffiths’ Don’t Ever Leave find forward-thinking vets rolling with the new style.

David Katz

Stereolab

★★★★

Electrically Possessed (Switched On Volume 4) WARP/DUOPHONIC. CD/DL/LP

Long-awaited fourth set of avant-pop retro futurists’ Switched On rarities.

The belated follow-up to 1998’s Aluminum Tunes off-cuts set, Electrically Possessed combines tracks from Stereolab’s long-out-ofprint 2000 mini-album, The First Of The Microbe Hunters, alongside miscellaneous tour singles, compilation tracks and outtakes from the Mars Audiac Quintet and Dots And Loops

LPs. Much here documents the band’s first brush with home recording, with songs built using samples and computers, although in the motorik, marimba-propelled exotica of Outer Bongolia, or BarokPlastic’s early ’70s librarymusic-meets-Krautrock, their richly layered, sophisticated postmodern-pop bricolage hallmark is present and correct.

The highlight is Dimension M2, its initial tremolo keyboard shimmers and pulsing synths, topped off by Laetitia Sadier’s soothing Française, suddenly veering off into a series of arhythmic abstractions before stealthily returning to a familiar, coolly detached throb.

Chic, witty, yet emphatically utilitarian, if mid-20th century modernist furniture was music, this would be it.

David Sheppard

Iggy And The Stooges

★★★★

From KO To Chaos SKYDOG/JUNGLE. CD+DVD

A Stoogean deluge from across the ages.

Those pining for live music’s electro-kinetic jolt should self-medicate with the recent inundation of vintage performances from stage detonator nonpareil Osterberg, J. Following Third Man’s excavation of The Stooges’ Mk 1’s terminal Fun House-in-full at Goose Lake in 1970, and Cherry Red’s 5-CD Road Tapes 1 9 7 3 -7 4 , Jungle here assemble a limitlessly entertaining eight-disc boxful of Stooges and solo Iggy reissues. Three discs present the complete Metallic KO:this iconic punk-era live LP caught The Stooges Mk 2’s autodestruction amid biker aggro at Detroit’s Michigan Palace in February 1974. As former MOJO editor Paul Trynka’s linernotes explain, the original KO derived from two Palace shows (a disc each, with extra-punchy audio after a tape-speed correction in 2007). Also essential:Telluric Chaos’s combustible Stooges Mk 1 reunion show from Tokyo in 2004. And on two discs (AKA Nuggets) of covers-heavy oddities, Ig crooning Fred Astaire’s One For My Baby to inattentive punkers is a hoot.

Andrew Perry

Getty

Sam Cooke

REISSUES EXTRA

Hasaan Ibn Ali

Way Back Fifties becoming a South African radio hit. Over 13 minutes in its original form, it takes SA jazz to new levels of rhythmic sophistication, with keyboardist Bheki Mseleku’s marrying of marabi tradition to a bebop sensibility. With the remaining two tracks summoning a similar soulful mood, Can You Feel It is a joyful expression of possibility amid apartheid and oppression.

Lois Wilson

★★★★

Metaphysics:The Lost Atlantic Album OMNIVORE. CD/DL/LP

Vanished mythical jazz album miraculously reappears.

In the late summer of 1965, 34-year-old Hasaan Ibn Ali, a largely unrecorded avantgarde pianist from Philadelphia, cut a quartet album for Atlantic Records which was shelved and then in 1978 was deemed destroyed along with hundreds of other recordings when the label’s tape vault burnt down. A couple of years ago, however, a back-up copy was discovered hiding in a Warner tape library and now receives its first unveiling. Hasaan had a unique style – defined by quirky angular melodies and surprising harmonies sprinkled with piquant dissonances – yet the seven-track album, bolstered with three alternate takes, reveals much in common with fellow jazz piano iconoclasts Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, and Andrew Hill.

Though Hasaan’s intriguingly knotty compositions and mercurial piano playing are the main attraction, Odean Pope’s wailing tenor sax playing is also a revelation.

Charles Waring

The Drive

★★★★

Can You Feel It WE ARE BUSY BODIES. LP

1975 South African soul-jazz benchmark.

Horn-playing brothers Henry and Stanley Sithole and drummer Nelson Magwaza had previously played in the politically charged jazz combo The Heshoo Beshoo Group before teaming with guitarist Adolphus ‘Bunny’ Luthuli as The Drive. Between 1971 and ’77, when Henry and Luthuli were tragically killed in a car crash, the group recorded eight albums, with their 1975 David Thekwane-produced second outing capturing them at their commercial peak with an edit of the opening track

Revolutionary Corps Of Teenage Jesus

★★★★

Righteous Lite

Bailter Space

Frank Black

Aretha Franklin

★★★★

★★★★

★★★★

MATADOR. LP

DEMON. LP

RHINO. LP

New Zealand trio’s long out-ofprint 1995 fifth saw their epicminimal drone rock hit peak dystopia. Either gliding through metronomic two-chord sheet metal road mantras (Untied; Colours;Retro) or grinding into manic oblivion (At Five We Drive), it’s blissfully uneasy listening. KC

From 1996, now in blue vinyl, the third Black album is a rougheredged take on Teenager Of The Year’s schizoid jukebox template, and sorely underrated. I Don’t Want To Hurt You and Men In Black are A-grade Frankophile pop, while You Ain’t Me shakes serious flamin’ groove action. KC

From 1972, recorded in Miami and New York and now on burnt orange vinyl, this is one of Aretha’s finest albums from her second flowering at Atlantic, and it gave her the confidence to record her classic Amazing Grace.

Impeccable songs, magical bands, profound soul singing. GB

Japan

Edgar Jones

Level42

★★★★

★★★★

★★★

Wammo

Young,Gifted And Black

The Cult Of Ray

CREEPING BENT. DL/LP

First vinyl release for late’90s interface of Suicide and late-period Altered Images!

In 1998, the NYC punk/ electronicists Suicide had been on ice for six years during a period of acute under-appreciation, when an entirely unsolicited techno rehash of their 1977 debut’s harrowing centrepiece Frankie Teardrop reawakened interest transatlantically. Its unlikely creator was Stephen Lironi, a Glaswegian who first registered circa 1983 alongside Clare Grogan on Altered Images’ Bite, and by the mid’90s was producing Space and Black Grape. Vega duly presented himself for proper collaboration, and the odd couple concocted Righteous Lite in Brooklyn the following year. Who Cares Who Dies stirringly pits a Dream Baby Dream-style twinkling keyboard figure against a robust trip-hop beat, while Motor Cross recasts a T.Rexriffed Ghost Rider close-cousin as skittering drum’n’bass.

A highly plausible update on Martin Rev’s early-doors synthscaping amid unsettling FX, sirens and sampled rants, RCOTJ’s LP jarred horribly with concurrent dance music’s turbo-charged euphoria, but properly resonates in 2021.

Andrew Perry

COMING NEXT MONTH...

Floating Points, Richard Thompson, Teenage Fanclub, Tracey Thorn, Dinosaur Jr, Ballaké Sissoko, Field Music, Binker Gold ing, Ruts DC, Rhiannon Gid d ens (below) and more…

The Way It Is

Quiet Life (Deluxe Edition)

CHERRY RED. CD

The Complete Polydor Years:Volume 1 (1980-1984)

The livery was new romantic, but Sylvian’s post-glam crew alighted on quality Roxy/Low-esque synth/art rock with their 1979 third LP. Now remastered with a disc of rarities and, curiously, a screamtastic bootleg-quality 1980 show at Tokyo’s Budokan. IH

After garage cults The Stairs, Merseyside music apostle Edgar Jones played with The La’s, Paul Weller and Johnny Marr. Over three discs and 70 1995-2020 tracks of retroauthentic R&B, soul, doo-wop, jazz, Fabs-esque rock and more, the joie de vivre spills over. Sound! IH

Makin’Time

Curtis Mayfield

Various

★★★★

★★★★★

★★★★

ACID JAZZ. LP

RHINO. LP

SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP

West Midlands Mods’ 1985 debut captured their live set in the studio:invigorated bursts of smart soulful pop defined by striking singer and organist Fay Hallam. After they split, bassist Martin Blunt co-founded The Charlatans, assuring Makin’ Time a footnote in baggy history but they deserve more. LW

Mayfield’s second solo LP gets overlooked, coming between 1970’s extraordinary Curtis and 1972’s blockbusting Superfly.

Truth is, though, it’s pretty much their equal, a 1971 masterpiece of grace and urgency, compassion and revolutionary ardour, from Get Down on. Now, you’ll note, on orange vinyl! JM

King of rocksteady Alton Ellis opens this faultless set of soulful, late-’60s/early-’70s Clement Dodd productions. Amid stars like Ellis and The Heptones, note Larry Marshall’s warm baritone on Studio One scratch group Freedom Singers’ take on Monkey Man;Ken Parker’s lovely falsetto When You’re Gone. JB

BMG. CD/LP

Rhythm And Soul

Roots

CHERRY RED. CD

Before chart success in the later ’80s, Isle of Wight jazz-funkers’ first five albums, plus five discs of remixes, rarities and live tracks.

No lack of tunes, grooves and great synth sounds:bow down to the slap bass thumb-spankery. IH

Rocksteady Got Soul

RATING S & FORMATS Your guide to the month’s best music is now even more definitive with our handy format guide.

CD COMPACT DISC DL DOWNLOAD ST STREAMING LP VINYL MC CASSETTE DVD DIGITAL VIDEO DISC C IN CINEMAS BR BLU-RAY

★★★★★ MOJO CLASSIC

★★★★ EXCELLENT

★★★ GOOD

★★

DISAPPOINTING

★

BEST AVOIDED

✩

DEPLORABLE

MOJO 97

The Cleveland Show: Tennessee exile Rodger Wilhoit waits for his efforts to bear the fruit.

CREDITS Tracks: When I Climb Back Up To Living / My Shoes Are Not That Hard To Fill / Social World / Since 19 5 9 / The Smell Of Strange Perfume / The Fire Burns Again / Eyes With That Hungry Look / The Touch Of Gold / I’ve Spent My Time In Hell Loving You / My Effort Will Bear The Fruit / God Is Not Dead (I Spoke To Him Today) Personnel: Rodger Wilhoit (vocals guitar), unspecified studio musicians.

Producer: Carl French and Rodger Wilhoit Released: 19 74 Recorded: various studios in Nashville and Cleveland Chart peak: n/a Current availability: Sweet Mental Revenge reissue.

to Texas. Covered quite a bit of ground.”

French’s belief in Wilhoit extended to recording an album, and co-writing all but one song on it.

Wilhoit remembered recording in Nashville, at RCA, Mercury, or Bradley’s Barn, with session musicians including harmonica ace and multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy, fiddler Johnny Gimble and vocalists The Nashville Edition.

Further recordings were made in Cleveland, he added, in an underground facility at the airport.

A strangely reconciled audit of human frailties was the result. The concise arrangements, with their crying steel guitars and strings, display not a hair out of place: contained and intent, Wilhoit is a singer who means business, and comparisons to such heavyweights as George Jones and Merle Haggard are unavoidable. Yet in his reflections on those essential country predicaments – the urge to drink, the yearning for lost love, of lust and despair – he mines rare ore.

A spry setting for the hardest truths, My Shoes Are Not That Hard To Fill is the testament of a gutter-bound man annihilated by booze who knows the futility of trying to keep his woman:at times of acute emotional pain, a piano or a guitar meander playfully, as if asking, what else did you expect? The Smell the farm was connected to the grid in the early Of Strange Perfume and Eyes With That ’50s. Thereafter, radio broadcasts from Grand Hungry Look mull over compulsive promiscuity, the latter song justified by his rival’s Ole Opry and nearby Knoxville exposed him drunken impotence. The acceptance of to The Stanley Brothers, Bill and Charlie Monroe and mandolin great Red Rector. After unhappy matrimony, as in the acrid I’ve Spent playing mandolin, Wilhoit moved on to guitar My Time In Hell Loving You, is a recurring theme, though My Effort Will Bear The Fruit and was playing with local groups by the age evinces the kind of blind hope needed by those of 16. Aged 20, he followed his brother Bill at rock bottom:“I know I can’t have your love to work as a driver and mechanic in the but, strange, I feel I’ve won…”

Cleveland motor industry and entertaining The gospel reset of closer God Is Not Dead customers in the clubs and dancehalls.

(I Spoke To Him Today) suggests the circle of “It was pretty standard honky tonk and sin will not be broken, but in giving voice to country music,” Wilhoit told country sage his pathologies, a pained catharsis is achieved.

Colin Escott of his output, which grew to Yet the big break was not to be. In 1995 he take in rock’n’roll:“If it was good music, returned to Crossville, Tennessee, where he I liked it.” worked as a mechanic and played bluegrass.

In Cleveland, Wilhoit met songwriter, Colin Escott reports that producer and talent scout Carl Wilhoit, a reformed alcoholic, French, another Tennessean, wouldn’t take cough mixture, who later co-founded the or any other medicines, lest Parklane label and released they cause him to return Wilhoit’s first single in 1972. to drinking.

“I wanted to make it in As The “Social World” Of… country music,” Wilhoit was being prepared for its explained, “but I kept my day expanded reissue, on July 1, job going just in case. I worked 2020, he died. “We just didn’t for a fella in an auto body shop. have a whole lot of luck,” I could leave when I wanted.

Wilhoit reflected, as Covid Come back when I wanted.

“I wanted raged outside. “But we For some time, I was playing worked hard at it.” someplace every night of the to make it Ian Harrison week. I’ll say this for Carl, he in country did the best he could… he The album is released in expanded, found me a booker out of remastered form on Sweet Mental music, but Nashville, and I worked some Revenge Records this month.

I kept my shows with George Jones.

Acknowledgements to Colin Escott’s excellent sleevenotes.

I went up into Canada, down day job just

Misery loves company This month on music’s countdown of obscurity:hardcore country for alcoholics and adulterers.

Rodger Wilhoit The “Social World” Of Rodger Wilhoit PARKLANE, 19 74

AM CONFIDENT this album will make Rodger a top name in country music,” wrote producer and songwriter Carl French in the sleevenotes for The “Social World” of Rodger Wilhoit.

“Listen for yourself, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Like a thousand other contenders, Wilhoit was never to reach such top name status.

Instead, his sole solo album was mainly sold from the bandstand as he played one-nighters at the bars and honky tonks of North America.

The record’s illustrated black and white cover gives clues to his provenance and fate.

In 1974, when Willie Nelson was hirsute, bearded and posing for a pot bust mugshot, here was a man with sideburns and hair fully oiled, clad in a tuxedo from the previous decade and manfully avoiding the viewer’s gaze, as if fearing exposure. He is superimposed on Nashville’s nightlife thoroughfare Printers’Alley, where stars came to relax after a day’s hitmaking, though the image is more crime noir than carefree abandon.

Wilhoit began his long pilgrimage to that place he’d never reach in Greeneville, Tennessee. Born on July 17, 1937 to a farming family, he grew up on “mountain music” until

“I

in case.”

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RODGER WILHOIT

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View from a woman’s perspective:Carroll Thompson,undisputed “queen of lovers rock”.

10

Sylvia Tella Spell

SARGE 19 8 1, £4 0

“Ignore the fact she was in Boney M. Sylvia can really sing. She’s got a voice up there with Aretha Franklin’s.” Barbara Simpson,via e-mail From Hulme, Sylvia Tella started singing at the age of seven;at 13 she won her first talent contest at Manchester’s Russell Club;and at 15 she was performing with The Romantics when producer Frank Farian recruited her to join Boney M. However, it was with producer Lloyd Charmers and John Kpiaye that, as a 19-year-old, she hit her stride, recording 1981’s Spell for Charmers’ Sarge label. It’s one of lovers rock’s biggest sellers, largely down to Sylvia’s deliciously rougher-than-herpeers’ sandpaper vocal, although the band are top notch too. Tella continues to record, 2020’s An Audience With… keeping the lovers rock flame alight.

CAST YOUR VOTES…

which, utilising the core house band of Bovell and guitarist John Kpiaye, was home to a series of NITIALLY CENTRED around sentimental ballads genre-defining singles by Brown voiced by young black British women, lovers rock Sugar, Vivian Clark, Cassandra provided the thrilling soundtrack to the late ’70s and TT Ross. and early ’80s blues parties immortalised in Steve Vital in bringing a female McQueen’s excellent BBC film, Lovers Rock. One perspective to the male-dominated standout scene featured a crowded dancefloor united militancy of roots reggae, lovers rock took musical in singing Janet Kay’s Silly Games, the reggae pointers from the rocksteady of Alton Ellis and Phyllis subgenre’s breakthrough tune. Written and produced Dillon and the smooth soul of Philadelphia and

by Dennis Bovell, Silly Games took lovers rock into Chicago, while aligning itself with the politics of disco the mainstream in 1979 when it reached Number 2 – the dancefloor as safe space and pressure valve in the UK singles chart;it also made Kay the highest during a time of huge social upheaval. Although charting black British female of that time. illustrating the black British experience, such was its Based in south London, Bovell had witnessed the wider popularity that by the ’80s, Jamaican singers birth of the genre four years earlier, playing with his such as Sugar Minott, Johnny Clarke and Gregory band Matumbi on what is widely Isaacs were adopting the style. acknowledged as the first lovers rock Britain in the late ’70s/early ’80s record, Louisa Mark’s Caught You In “The danceundoubtedly saw lovers rock’s golden A Lie, the then 14 year-old’s cover of age and forms the timeframe for our floor was a the Robert Parker soul song, which chosen albums here, but the music safe space in a placed her sweet vocals over easynever lost its momentum, with acts going rhythms. It had been Bovell’s like Sandra Cross taking it to new time of social erstwhile collaborator, the producer levels of sophistication into the ’90s, uhheaval.”

Dennis Harris, who originally coined and Hollie Cook and Schniece the term with his Lovers Rock label bringing it to a fresh audience today.

Lois Wilsonswoons to the reggae soundtrack to young love.

I

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4

Vivian Weathers Bad Weathers FRONT LINE 19 7 8 , £4 0

“A recent discovery for me, but a really great record, stunning vocalist.”

Pete Paphides,via Twitter Little is known about Vivian Weathers but his ability was/is immense. As a producer and singer, he worked with Linton Kwesi Johnson on Poet And The Roots’ Dread Beat An’ Blood from 1978, and during that same year he recorded his only solo long-player, the self-produced Bad Weathers for Front Line. The 10 songs, including nine originals, delivered a convincing blend of claustrophobic production, choppy guitar, heavy bass and intense, unnerving falsetto, captured best on the uneasysounding Gypsy Love and the single Hip Hug, an eerie cover of the Slim Smith song.

As an aside, it’s rumoured that Weathers briefly played drums with PiL live in early 1979.

Getty (2 )

Lovers rock

This month you chose your Top 1 0 lovers rock LPs. Next month we want your John Prine Top 1 0 . Send selections via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or e-mail to mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy John Prine’ and we’ll print the best comments.

H OW T O B U Y

Jean Adebambo Feelings

9

8

7

WACKIE’S 19 8 3 , £ 2 5

ADE J 19 8 3 , £4 0

“This wonderful LP is a deeper and more rootsy take on the dreamy lovers sound, accentuated by Bullwackie’s extended dubwise mixes.”

Birmingham81,via Twitter

“Saw her singing back in the day and there was just no one to match her.”

Sophie Perkins,via e-mail

“Quintessential lovers,and the Motown covers are to die for.” Sheila Davenport,via Facebook

“The ultimate in lovers,Ain’t No Sunshine is the bomb.”

Johnny Soul,via e-mail

Put together by Dennis Brown and Castro Brown (no relation), this London trio of Sonia Williams, Christine McNabb and Wraydene McNabb were named 15, 16, 17 after their respective ages when they issued their 1976 debut single, If You Love Me Smile. It’s not on this shelved 1978 album but never mind, you can still hear it online, and Magic Touch is vivifying nonetheless, with the three teens’ irrepressible spirit carried by reggae rhythms from the cream of Jamaica (Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Cedric Brooks, Ansel Collins). The terrific Black Skin Boys, plus sublime covers of The Temptations’ Just My Imagination, re-titled Girls Imagination, and The Supremes’ Baby Love are highlights of the genre.

From Kingston, Jamaica, but raised in London, musical allrounder Jimmy Lindsay cut his teeth in UK funk band Cymande, before going solo and investing heart and soul in two albums for Gem. 1979’s Where Is Your Love was the first and contains some of the most carefree rhythms imaginable, the perfect fit for Lindsay’s expressive vocals:plaintive and imploring on a title track that introduces lovers rock to the violin, or impossibly insouciant on The Commodores’ Easy, but troubled on Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine. With Janet Kay and Candy McKenzie (whose Lee Perry Presents Candy McKenzie almost made the list), providing melodious backing vocals, the album is immaculate throughout.

Love Joys Lovers Rock Reggae Style

Follow-up to 1981’s Reggae Vibes, this second and final album from the Brixton cousins Claudette Brown and Sonia Abel detours slightly from the classic lovers sound. Recorded in 1982 at Wackie’s in New York with Lloyd Barnes, AKA Bullwackie, and the distinctive Wackie’s Rhythm Force including Jah T, it’s delivered with a dread sensibility. One Draw is a scorcher, tougher than Rita Marley’s take, while the self-authored Stranger is a powerful emancipation anthem and the sublime Chances Are gives praise to Jah. Since 1998, Abel, now Marla Allen, has performed as the Natti Love Joys with her husband, the aforesaid Jah T.

Jean Adebambo was a nurse who came to prominence thanks to the Leonard Chin production Paradise. Released

by Santic in 1981, it was an ebullient paean and an ideal vehicle for her diaphanous vocal. The track was included on this debut album, which also acts as a showcase for Adebambo’s deft keyboard and guitar-playing skills, although it’s that voice – sensual, always full of feeling – that bewitches time and again.

Off Key Loving, another classic long-player, arrived in 1985, but she left music to work as a health visitor in south London soon after, only to return for a 2008 show at Brixton Academy before sadly taking her own life in 2009, aged just 46.

15,16,17 Magic Touch

DEB MUSIC/BADDA MUSIC 2 0 0 5 , £ 2 0

6

Jimmy Lindsay Where Is Your Love GEM 19 7 9 , £1 0

5

Janet Kay The Definitive Hits Collection 1977-1985 JANET KAY 2 0 11, £7 .9 9

“The popular choice,but there’s a reason for that,she puts the soul in reggae.”

Jenny Bradford,via e-mail An ambassador for lovers rock who is still performing (Covid permitting), her nourishing falsetto wonderfully intact, the Willesden-born Kay is unforgivably ill-served on physical format. This best-of, however, is available digitally and provides a great cherrypick of her early work on Arawak, D-Roy, Bushays et al.

It’s bookended by Lovin’ You, her heavenly 1977 cover of the Minnie Riperton song, produced by rocksteady singer Alton Ellis, who had by then relocated to London, and 1979’s crossover Silly Games.

In-between are delicious reimaginings of I Do Love You, I’m Still In Love, That’s What Friends Are For and more.

NOW DIG THIS

3

Brown Sugar I’m In Love With A Dreadlocks

2

Louisa ‘Markswoman’ Mark Breakout

SOUL JAZZ 2 0 18 , £2 2 .3 0

BUSHAYS 19 8 1, £ 2 5

“Sweet and sassy vocal trio, producer Bovell at his best, glistening guitar hooks, burbling keyboards.” @AnEarful,via Twitter

“By which all others are judged. Tremendous coming together of soul,reggae and romance.”

Betty King,via Twitter

South London teenagers Pauline Catlin, Caron Wheeler and Carol Simms formed Brown Sugar in 1976 and, like their girl group heroes, they sang of the teen condition but also expressed a black consciousness and pride, not just through the soundsystem rhythms provided by Dennis Bovell and John Kpiaye, but lyrically too. They never made an album but this selection of singles, dubs and mixes from 1977-80 is a requisite, with I’m In Love With A Dreadlocks, Our Reggae Music, Dreaming Of Zion et al a wonderfully transportive experience. Wheeler later found fame with Soul II Soul. Catlin and Simms, meanwhile, enjoyed solo success as Shezzie and Kofi respectively.

From Kensal Rise in north London, Louise Mark’s output was sparse but impactful, her early singles such as Caught You In A Lie and her cover of The Beatles’ All My Loving paving the way for Carroll Thompson, Janet Kay et al. Her sole album, 1981’s Breakout, was a game changer, capturing the just-20-year-old’s tender, sweet and sensual vocals on an intoxicating set honed with producer Clem Bushay, songwriter/arranger Joseph ‘Tunga’ Charles and an intuitive band led by Dennis Bovell. Every track here is perfection:from the selfpenned and deeply soulful People In Love to Even Though You’re Gone, her satisfying rendition of The Jacksons’ hit.

THE STORY OF LOVER’S ROCK

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CarrollThompson Hopelessly In Love

CARIB GEMS 19 8 1, £ 2 5

“The album that defined lovers rock,no question about it.

Fabulous.” Simone Francis,via e-mail The undisputed “queen of lovers rock”, Carroll Thompson was one of the first female British reggae singers to write and produce her own material. From Letchworth in Hertfordshire, she grew up on her grandma’s ska, vocal jazz and rocksteady albums and sang back up with groups, including Imagination, before going solo and hitting the UK Reggae Number 1 spot with I’m So Sorry in 1980 and Simply In Love the following year. Both self-penned and sumptuous, they are included on this debut album, which was co-produced with Anthony ‘Chips’ Richards and is everything you might possibly want from a lovers rock album, conjuring pleasurable moods as Thompson’s deliciously soulful vocal brings instant uplift. High points, along with the aforementioned singles, include When We Are As One and No You Don’t Know, but it’s all crucial stuff.

From 2 0 12 , director/producer Menelik Shabazz’s The Story Of Lover’s Rock (Verve Pictures) is a must-watch, tracing the scene from south London’s sound systems to sell out shows with Peter Hunningale today, via illuminating interviews with Sylvia Tella, author Neferatiti Ife, Steel Pulse’s Mykaell Riley, Kofi and more. The Lovers Rock Story Volumes 1 & 2 (Rads Records) is a great double disc cherry-pick from Dennis Harris’s label which named the genre; across-label various artists compilations are in short supply, but it’s worth tracking down the sadly out of print Harmony, Melody & Style: Lovers Rock In The UK 1 9 7 5 -1 9 9 2 (Soul Jazz) and the two volumes of The Best Of Original British Lovers Rock (Jet Star).

MOJO 101

Don Letts in London with “my punk instrument”.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNT In 1 9 7 9 , Letts scripted “a modern reggae Western set in Brixton” as a UK answer to The Harder They Come, but was beaten to the punch by Franco Rosso’s Babylon. Over 1 0 0 hours of interview footage with every major Jamaican reggae star also remain unseen, in Island Records’ vaults. ● Meeting Federico Fellini at Milan Film Festival, the great post-war film director told Letts (in Italian), “You have the vision of a terrorist!” ● Mick Jones’s post-Clash ensemble initially traded as Top Risk Action Company, then Real Westway, before settling on the punchier handle, Big Audio Dynamite. ●

Punk rocker uptown instance, provides “an antidote to the racist poison we were constantly fed”. Letts, though, also amasses “the second largest collection of Beatles memorabilia in the country” and has a life-changing experience watching The Who perform live and ultra-loud, for free, at the There And Black Again Young Vic theatre in 1971.

“I didn’t understand the attitude,” he ★★★★ summarises, “that dictated, If you’re Black then you only listen to Black music and live Don Letts Black culture.”

OMNIBUS PRESS. £ 2 0 So, while blagging into Bob Marley’s hotel OCIETY MADE me the way I am,” for wee hours spliffs with reggae’s emerging reflects Letts in an opening movie superstar after an historic Wailers show at the script-style dialogue with his Lyceum, he simultaneously falls in with the ghost-writer Mal Peachey, “because it was punk crowd via managing Acme Attractions, always telling me I couldn’t do something, just up the street from Malcolm McLaren’s and I took that as a challenge – I had to prove Sex. He and lively co-worker Jeannette Lee, them wrong.” later Public Image Ltd’s manager, become the Raised in 1960s Brixton amid endemic “golden couple of King’s Road”, first catching racism and nascent immigrant culture, the the Sex Pistols at the Nashville, where he was, young Donovan Letts was in the eye of the as ever, “the only brother in the room”. storm, and to those who’ve not heard his story Letts is none-more-authoritative in before (via his many media appearances contextualising punk during 1976-77, but propagating it), it’ll read like the crowning that’s a tale that’s been well told, not least his unmade episode of Steve McQueen’s Small part in it – DJ-ing reggae at the Roxy, shooting Axe – lavished with the The Punk Rock Movie on author’s cinematographic Super-8 (“my punk instrueye for detail. ment”), and taking John “The Lydon, Joe Strummer and The The opening chapters weather Slits’Ari Up to Dalston’s vividly spirit up the sights, reggae mecca, the Four Aces. sounds and smells of south turned into Habitually, doubtless, one too London’s Jamaican community, a special many joints was rolled on amid a characteristic barrage effect.” of cultural signifiers. British such occasions, but punk reggae imprint Trojan, for aficionados might’ve hoped DON LETTS FILMS

Roxy DJ, Beatles collector, filmmaker, punk mover and shaker, social commentator and intuitive documentarian. By Andrew Perry.

Adrian Boot

“S

THE LONDON CALLING VIDEO 102 MOJO

for fresh testimony here.

Letts and Lydon’s jaunt to Jamaica in the immediate aftermath of the Pistols’implosion in early ’78, however, is thick with such trivia. While Peter Tosh refuses to see them, branding them “heathens”, and ital toaster Prince Far-I looks on aghast as they tuck into hot-buttered lobster, generally the Rastas embrace ‘Johnny Cool’, as “the Jamaicans love a bad man”.

Letts’s relationship with The Clash falters, meanwhile, after Strummer has a fling with Lee in November ’77, ending their coupledom, but he’s back on the team by late ’79 to direct the rain-lashed London Calling video (“The weather turned into a special effect!”) and all subsequent promos.

As samples maestro/lyricist in Mick Jones’s subsequent Big Audio Dynamite, Letts “always felt in Joe’s shadow,” revealing that Strummer even stalked Jonesy on his family holiday in Nassau to try and re-enlist him.

Instead, the hatchet’s buried for BAD’s No. 1 0 Upping Street, and further A-list hijinks ensue with Keith Richards, David Bowie, Ray Davies (but not Bob Dylan).

Latter-day film and video yarns, many Clash-related, complete a mighty colourful autobiography.

F I LT E R B O O K S 1984:British Pop’s Dividing Year

★★★

David Elliott YORK HOUSE. £ 2 0

One year in UK pop told with obsessional verve.

1984 might not have been the best year in pop in quality terms but it did mark the moment of its highest saturation;popular music meant everything and was everywhere, sticking its neb into politics, fashion, journalism, TV and film, and finding ever new ways to sell itself. This was the year of ZTT, Frankie, Wham! MTV, millionselling singles, Band Aid and very big sounds. In this detailed, fan-driven account, the vast array of musical genres which seemed to happily coexist (from Yorkshire’s goth scene to Billy Bragg’s politicking) are discussed in a roll out of individual chapters with a fan’s detail for lists, rather than the sort of theoretical overview found in more academic studies of the period. Elliott argues this was the year a lot ended and something else was taking over:authenticity, stadium rock and selfconscious white liberal corporate caring struck the final blow to early-’80s wan electroid artifice.

David Buckley

A Little Devil In America: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance

Beyoncé Performs At The Super Bowl And I Think About All Of The Jobs I’ve Hated, you’re in the right lane for the treatise about Lando Calrissian in Star Wars having “great hair”.

Andrew Collins

Keith Jarrett: A Biography

★★★★

Wolfgang Sandner EQUINOX. £ 2 5

A sadly timely biography of the great jazz pianist.

Last October, Keith Jarrett announced that two strokes had limited the use of his left hand. The damage almost certainly ends the performing career of the 75-year-old jazz star whose musical vision has incorporated classical, blues and, early on, rock (in 1970 he talked with both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix about recording together). As Jarrett’s career took off, by 1978 his improvised solo shows could command $20,000 a gig. The concert world had never seen anything quite like him. Wolfgang Sandner is an incisive, knowledgeable writer who is in no doubt of Jarrett’s genius.

The pianist, however, was not interviewed by Sandner, who says they fell out when he suggested to Jarrett that The Köln Concert album was one of his greatest successes. Jarrett takes a sceptical view of the LP that sold almost four million copies (too many notes). Just one example of the pricklier side of a fascinating and complex character.

John Bungey

★★★

Hanif Abdurraqib

Shutterstock

RANDOM HOUSE. £ 2 0

Ohio street poet and cultural critic dances a biographical mile in ill-fitting shoes.

When news of Michael Jackson’s death pings around the Nokia telegraph, cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib – selfeffacingly readable student of the black experience – informs us that he was in Columbus, Ohio, and the day’s heat was “unforgiving… I’m saying everything in the air had bad intentions.” This personal footnote adds beat poetry to A Little Devil In America, Abdurraqib’s fourth collection, nominally a history of rugcutting via dance marathons, funerals, blackface, Afrofuturism and “the shadow of Cicely Tyson’s hat at Aretha’s wake”. From hymning Soul Train producer Don Cornelius for offering black people “a promise beyond their pain”, to internecine conflict within the Wu-Tang Clan, he memorialises doomed black astronaut Michael P Anderson. If you can get past a chapter titled

Of Destiny and The Clash, and helping establish psychobilly as an inflammable collision of rockabilly sounds and punk attitude. He is commendably non-judgemental about any differences they had back then, and it is also good to see him give credit to the part played by original manager Nick Garrard. An engaging front line report from the rock’n’roll trenches.

Max Décharné

The Devil’s Rhythm:Birth Of British Psychobilly

★★★

Mark Robertson LOST SOUL. £1 2

Nicely balanced and evocative memoir from the original Meteors drummer.

When The Cramps were asked in 1978 how to describe their own particular brand of music, they answered, “Psychobilly Voodoo”. A teenage punk fan of theirs in England called Mark Robertson joined a British band called The Meteors in 1980 fronted by two musicians from the rocking scene – guitarist P Paul Fenech and bass player Nigel Lewis – and soon they were the support act on The Cramps’ UK tour.

Robertson’s book charts the two hectic years the original trio stayed together: recording, gigging with bands as diverse as Killing Joke, Spear

Relax Baby Be Cool:The Artistry And Audacity Of Serge Gainsbourg

★★★★

Jeremy Allen JAWBONE. £1 4 .9 5

Music-first biog of a French provocateur who may have been a bit of a shit,really.

Eschewing template clichés – struggle, success, drugs, redemption – Allen cleverly puts Gainsbourg’s albums front and centre in this exemplary portrait. Hence, for example, a childhood under Nazi occupation isn’t fully explored until Serge releases Rock Around The Bunker in 1975. If it’s thus a little lighter on his successful work as a pop songwriter for hire in the mid ’60s, there are epic chapters on the Je T’Aime and Melody Nelson eras and damning takedowns of the half-arsed and infantile (but really quite lovely) Vu De L’Extérieur and the shocking (in several senses) decline that preceded Gainsbourg’s death in March

Je ne sais quoi: Serge Gainsbourg with Jane Birkin, circa 1969.

1991. Almost everyone interviewed – British session musicians, family, lovers, fans – appears heroic (and remarkably loyal) in the face of an unfocused and destructive gift that only seems to have made Gainsbourg ask:“What can I do now to make you dislike me more?”

David Hutcheon

Andrew Weatherall: A Jockey Slut Tribute

★★★★

Ed. John Burgess DISCO POGO PUBLISHING. £1 5

Homage to the late Lord Sabre,from ’90s housetechno zine.

The outpourings of grief and love prompted by Weatherall’s passing in February 2020 proved what an inspirational impact he’d had, far beyond the parameters of a mere DJ/producer. His warmth, wit and moral/musical correctness radiate from every page of this anthology, mostly from the none-moreauthoritative zine. Erstwhile co-editor Burgess’s brilliant early-career oral history paints AW as an outsider from the off, playing Echo & The Bunnymen to the soul-oriented crowd at legendary ‘acieeed’ night Shoom. The man himself repeatedly shifts the credit for his visionary production on Primal Scream’s Screamadelica – his big moment – onto chance, or else engineer Hugo Nicholson, and admits, “I decided to jump off the ladder halfway up, because it wasn’t enjoyable.” At the margins,

he rails against “electro Showaddywaddys”, makes wilfully obscure techno, but blossoms into a renaissance man:painter, writer, curator, unstoppable enthusiast, who cherishes where the limelight isn’t. Burgess’s forewordconcluding motto will surely resonate with every reader:be more Weatherall.

Andrew Perry

Bessie Smith

★★★★

Jackie Kay FABER & FABER. £9 .9 9

The Empress Of The Blues, recrowned in the era of BLM. This is a timely reboot (it was first published in 1997) for Glasgow poet Kay’s immersion in the life and work of the ’20s blues star, full of fierce identification with the singer’s race and gender trials. In fact, the narrative of Kay’s bewitchment

by Bessie Smith as a 12-yearold in ’70s Bishopbriggs is almost half the story – and enlivened by factional interludes that are colourful, not fanciful, and clearly demarcated. Battered by the villain of the piece – her husband-manager Jack Gee – exploited by record labels, the precariousness of Smith’s existence is starkly contrasted with the stoic character of her voice and the vital, often racy content of her lyrics, while Kay shines light on the wider cohort of characterful American blueswomen, whose heyday this was, and their socio-economic context.

An ideal companion-piece to Netflix’s current film drama about Smith’s early mentor, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.

Danny Eccleston

F I LT E R SC R E E N

Santa Cruz control: Neil Young in his ragged glory days; (insets) with Crazy Horse at the Catalyst, November 13,1990.

WHAT WE’VE LEARNT

Burn it clean Three uninterrupted hours of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in full flame in 1990. By David Fricke.

unleashes another paroxysm of molten distortion and shrieking harmonics. In this long night of blues march and howling guitar, lockdown feels like breakout.

At the Catalyst, near Young’s ranch in the NeilYoung And Santa Cruz Mountains, he and the long-serving Horse – bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Crazy Horse Molina, second-era guitarist Frank ‘Poncho’ ★★★★ Sampedro – were in public rehearsal, warming up the noise from their latest LP, Ragged Glory, Way Down In The before a 1991 arena tour with avant-garage Rust Bucket juniors Sonic Youth. Most of the 19 songs in SHAKEY PICTURES/REPRISE. CD+DVD/DL/LP this film – directed by Young (as Bernard Shakey) with L.A. Johnson, his late compadre T IS a stinging moment – an accident of in Shakey Pictures (the latter died in 2010) context – in this otherwise gloriously raw, – did not make it to those famously feedbackcontagiously exuberant minimalism:three hours of Neil Young and Crazy Horse up close saturated concerts, including the Zuma gold and in full flame at the Catalyst, a club in Santa of Danger Bird and Don’t Cry No Tears;the crunchy lust of Bite The Bullet from American Cruz, California, on November 13, 1990.

Stars ’N Bars;and an ornery heap of Re-ac-tor’s “We’ll be back in a few minutes, don’t go proto-grunge. But Young, who looks like he away,” Young assures the crowd at the end of the first set – there are two more to go plus a just stumbled in from Tonight’s The Night with torrid encore – while reminding the rest of us, wild bed-head hair and sorely patched and under pandemic siege 30 shredded jeans, comes out years later, that we have blazing, extending Ragged nowhere to go anyway. But Glory’s Country Home and “A primal this long-promised artefact Love To Burn with long vigour that from Young’s archive (with the mission-statement solos audio available on CD and on Old Black, his trusty Les looks and vinyl) is powerful haven: Paul guitar – low, snarling sounds so nothing but incandescent notes wrenched into rippled performance, shot and edited spears of soprano sustain; near and to put you at the foot of the jubilant slaloms coated in real.” squall, at times eye to eye with fuzz-box ash – tied to the the leader as he stomps on his groove by Crazy Horse’s firm, Octave Divider pedal and human clockwork.

I

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The Catalyst

Getty

●

opened in 1 9 6 6 ,

By Young’s eccentric serving coffee and standards as a rock’n’roll hosting poetry cineaste (1973’s wilfully readings until 1 9 6 9 when it became a surrealist Journey Through nightclub. Young The Past;the field-report has played the club quality of 2015’s Muddy 2 2 times, mostly with Crazy Horse, Track, a Crazy Horse-tour since 1 9 7 5 . documentary filmed with a ● Way Down In single hand-held camera), The Rust Bucket includes live Way Down In The Rust premieres of six Bucket is striking purism. songs from Ragged There are no talking heads Glory. Also played on-stage that night or historical-framing frills for the first time to break the music’s surge ever: Zuma’s and climb. The audience Danger Bird and Re-ac-tor’s Surfer is barely there, and the Joe And Moe straightforward cineThe Sleaze. matography often looks its ● The night before age. In long-distance views the Rust Bucket show, Young played of the band, as if from the with Crazy Horse bar at the back of the for his own 4 5 th room, the stage lights turn birthday party at a restaurant in the musicians into the Woodside, burnt-orange blur of California, closing a disintegrating ’80s the 2 0 -song marathon with The home video.

Losing End (When The effect may be You’re On) from distressing at first, a 1 9 6 9 ’s Everybody Knows This Is wayback ride to an Nowhere. excitement and social experience that, for now, feels out of reach. But for that very reason, Way Down In The Rust Bucket is perfectly timed treasure, a primal, thrilling vigour that looks and sounds so near and real that you believe you can walk right in. “Here’s looking up the old address,” Young cracks in the third set, raising his bottle of water in a toast to the crowd before charging into Mansion On The Hill. An eternity later, in the current fear and stasis, looking back never felt so good.

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RE AL GONE Over the Wall:Phil Spector in Gold Star studios,Hollywood, with drummer Earl Palmer seated in the background, circa 1967;(opposite) flying high with John and Cynthia Lennon,February 1964.

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Ruin Of Sound Producer-turned-killer Phil Spector died on January 16.

I

N THE booklet for 1991’s Back To Mono,a five-LP collection mapping the history of Phil Spector’s trademark ‘Wall of Sound’ production technique,there were two essays.

The first was a reprint of Tom Wolfe’s 1965 profile of Spector,‘The First Tycoon Of Teen’, the other a contemporary portrait by New York Daily News columnist David Hinckley.

The Hinckley sketch now makes for uncomfortable reading. In jocular tones,it paints Spector as a dangerous ‘lock-up-your-daughters’ladies’man,before asking us to overlook the “dark corners” of his life and focus on the music:“It’s why we care about him.”

The Wolfe essay is something else entirely.

It describes the then 23-year-old millionaire record producer as a “bearded creep” and an entitled asshole living in “a doldrum fury”,forever “tamping his frontal lobes in the gloom”.

Both these narratives have always been in play. There were always those who looked to the “human hit machine” first. But many others were scared of him from the start.

Music publisher Don Kirshner,who first met Spector in 1961,told biographer Mick Brown “[I knew here] was a candidate for doing himself or other people harm… someone who’d go down in flames to be known.”

Harvey Philip Spector was born in the Bronx on December 26,1940. The son of Ben and Bertha,descendants of Russian Jews, Harv was short,pale,and asthmatic. But he had an ear for music,and following his father’s suicide in April 1949,turned that skill into a kind of weapon,by which he would exact revenge on life.

When Bertha moved Harvey and his sister Shirley to Fairfax,Los Angeles four years later,

worked them through repeated rehearsals until they lost their individualism. Throw in Gold Star’s unique ceramic echo chambers and you get that booming,reverberating roar,simultaneously upfront and remote, euphoric yet utterly forlorn.

Secondly were the husband-and-wife songwriting teams Spector worked with.

Through Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich,Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil,and Gerry Goffin and Carole King,Spector had hit songs that contained a vital female perspective,songs forever caught between romance and heartbreak,love and obsession,devotion and danger – the real and vivid life of the teenage mind.

Thirdly were the voices – Darlene Love, The Crystals’‘LaLa’Brooks,The Ronettes’ Ronnie Bennett – voices rich in innocence and experience,comfort and pain,that have accrued a certain eerie majesty down the years,Spector’s ‘Wall of Sound’making them sound simultaneously more confined and more defiant than ever.

It couldn’t last. Ike & Tina Turner’s 1966 Philles release,River Deep – Mountain High, flopped in the US. Maybe its sound was too overwhelming,or maybe an increasingly arrogant Spector had finally been blacklisted by the DJs and journalists he treated with contempt. Speaking to writer Richard Williams,Jeff Barry has a simpler explanation: “The mix on River Deep is terrible. He buried the lead. Listen to his records in sequence,the lead goes further and further in. He is saying: ‘It is not the song… listen to those strings… listen to that bass sound.’” Listen to me.

River Deep’s failure sent Spector into a tailspin. Retreating to his mansion,deep in depression,obsessively rewatching Citizen Kane,he began to emotionally punish his new bride Ronnie,surrounding their house

with two classmates. Local radio play for title adapted from the inscription on a slot on American Bandstand and a After that,things moved fast. Spector played the guitar solo on The Drifters’On

Alamy, Mirrorpix

at Atlantic Records and started producing and Gene Pitney’s Every Breath I Take.

In 1961 he co-founded his Philles Records label.

How to write about that sound Spector created at Hollywood’s Gold Star studios?

Firstly,like so many great American cultural products of the 20th century,it was art born of the factory system. For each track,Spector employed crack LA session players the Wrecking Crew,who he crammed into DON KIRSHNER Gold Star’s tiny Studio A and

“[He was] someone who’d go down in flames to be known.”

Madness and paranoia,what Spector called “[the] devils inside that fight me”,began to gain dominion. A seeming way out came in 1970 with the invite to remix The Beatles’ stalled Get Back LP. The string-soaked result, retitled Let It Be,is now regarded as an anomaly, its place in the canon effectively erased after 2003’s de-Spectored release Let it Be Naked.

Spector continued to work with high profile artists in the ’70s,most notably John Lennon and George Harrison on Plastic Ono Band and All Things Must Pass,but the productions became murkier,more leaden and cloistered and,as with Leonard Cohen’s Death Of A Ladies’ Man and the Ramones’End Of The Century,came with long nights of psychological torture in which the producer would hold his exhausted musicians at gunpoint to exact one final run-through.

Some turned their back on him,some fled,some weren’t so lucky. Ronnie Spector escaped in 1972,and in 1998 testified that he had frequently threatened to kill her. The same fate befell female guests who visited him throughout the ’80s and ’90s,the majority too afraid to bring legal proceedings.

In 1998 Spector retreated to a mock chateau,Pyrenees Castle,in the run-down Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra,where he continued to live out his paranoid lifestyle.

That’s where actress and fashion model Lana Clarkson was found murdered on February 8, 2003. Imprisoned in 2009 for her killing, Spector died at the California Health Care prison hospital from complications of Covid-19.

This year,a 50th Anniversary edition of All Things Must Pass will be released stripped of Spector’s production. In March,the Ramones’ End Of The Century will be similarly exised, with Rick Rubin and Ed Stasium at the controls. Maybe there will be those who’ll seek to erase those Crystals,Ronettes and Darlene Love 7-inchers,unaware that because of those female voices,the massed ranks of the Wrecking Crew and those vivid lyrics of lived teenage experience,those

Someone to miss:Mark Keds.

Tim Bogert Vanilla Fudge bass/voice BORN 1 9 4 4 Surf rock fan Tim Bogert was a founder member of The Pigeons, who evolved into Long Island hard psych rockers Vanilla Fudge in 1967. They hit US Number 6 the following year with their slow, baroque, Shadow Mortonproduced cover of The Supremes’ You Keep Me Hangin’On. After cutting five albums in three years, where they gave the organ-heavy barbiturate treatment to songs including Some Velvet Morning, Ticket To Ride and The Look Of Love, they disbanded in 1970.

Thereafter, Bogert joined Fudge drummer Carmine Appice in Cactus and, with Jeff Beck, Beck, Bogert & Appice. As well as taking part in Vanilla Fudge reunions, Bogert recorded the solo albums Progressions (1981) and Master’s Brew (1983), and played with Bo Diddley, Bob Weir’s side project Bobby And The Midnites, Rick Derringer and hard rock supergroup The Hollywood Monsters.

He retired from the road in 2010.

Hailing him as “the last of the legendary ’60s bass players,” Appice said he was “as masterful at shredding as he was holding down a groove… no one played like Tim.” Clive Prior

Tom Stevens Fallen Ryder BORN 1 9 5 6

Mark Keds Senseless Thing BORN 1 9 7 1 A prolific songwriter from a young age, Mark Keds – who was born Mark Myers – recalled seeing Siouxsie & The Banshees at the Hammersmith Odeon with his godmother when he was just 10.

A year later he formed his first band with bassist and songwriting partner Morgan Nicholls while the pair were at school in west London.

Following two fanzine singles and 1989 album Postcard CV, Senseless Things signed to Epic in 1991. Their exuberant pop-punk attracted a devoted following on the pre-grunge ‘90s club scene, and they had two Top 20 singles in 1992. After three more albums, the group split in 1995, though Keds had already begun writing for a new band, Jolt. He played a brief

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stint with The Wildhearts and later formed Deadcuts, received a songwriting credit on The Libertines’2004 hit Can’t Stand Me Now and reunited with Senseless Things for a show at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 2017. Upon news of Keds’death, Senseless Things guitarist Ben Harding wrote:“It’s no secret that he had struggled on and off with drug abuse… it’s his passion and lust for life that will stick with us.”

Jenny Bulley

“His passion and lust for life will stick with us.”

SENSELESS THINGS’ BEN HARDING ON MARK KEDS

Indiana-born Tom Stevens’first group was Michigan rockers Magi, Midwest contenders circa 1975-77.

But, introduced to The Long Ryders in 1983 after original bassist Des Brewer left, he became the pioneering Americana band’s secret weapon. He wrote only one or two songs on each album, but they were often among the stand outs.

Stevens and guitarist Stephen McCarthy were also part of the infamous, beer-fuelled Danny & Dusty session – alongside Green

On Red’s Dan Stuart and Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn – that resulted in 1985’s Lost Weekend album, but both left the Ryders in 1987, tired by constant touring.

Stevens continued to play with former Byrd Gene Clark’s live band, but he focused on finishing a computer science degree. He released three solo LPs between 1991 and 2007, most notably ’95’s Another Room, but Stevens largely dropped out of musical sight until the Ryders’noughties reunion, their 2019 album, Psychedelic Country Soul, featuring his songwriting highlight Let It Fly. Andy Fyfe

John Pilgrim Skiffler, washboard don BORN 1 9 3 3 London-born John Pilgrim was an early convert to jazz, learning clarinet during National Service.

He also played washboard with The City Ramblers before joining The Vipers Skiffle Group, alongside future TV and radio presenter Wally Whyton, in 1956. Residents at Soho’s 2i’s, in 1957 the group had Top 10 hits – as did Lonnie Donegan – with the George Martin-produced Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O and Cumberland Gap. Streamline Train reached Number 23 the same year and, the skiffle boom over, the band split in 1960, but not before Hank Marvin, Jet Harris and Tony Meehan of The Shadows had passed through the ranks. Pilgrim later taught sociology, but his love of music found outlets in journalism, working in jazz vinyl distribution and playing washboard with the likes of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Hull student band Humberjug and, with Folk Roots editor Ian A Anderson, in Hot Vultures. It was while studying at Hull that Pilgrim recorded his friend Davy Graham giving an impromptu domestic performance in February 1967, released to great interest in 1997 as After Hours.

Clive Prior

Let it fly:Long Ryder Tom Stevens,2014.

Henry Diltz, Getty (2 ), Alamy

RE AL GONE

Michael Fonfara Jou rneymankeyboardist BORN 1 9 4 6 Born in Stevensville,Ontario, keyboard player, arranger and producer Michael Fonfara studied piano at the Toronto Conservatory of Music before joining local R&B act Jon & Lee And The Checkmates. After working with Blood,Sweat & Tears’David Clayton-Thomas,in 1967 he briefly joined Mike Bloomfield’s soul and blues band The Electric Flag.

Thereafter,he joined Elektraassembled rockers Rhinoceros on organ,scoring a minor US hit with his 1968 co-write Apricot Brandy.

Producer Paul Rothchild recruited him to join Blackstone in 1972, which lead to sessions with The Everly Brothers,Lovin’Spoonful and Ry Cooder. Fonfara worked with Lou Reed on five studio albums,beginning with 1974’s Sally Can’t Dance,and earning co-writer and production credits on Growing Up In Public (1980). In the ’70s he

was also a member of Toronto provocateurs Rough Trade,while his other notable session dates included the mega-selling Foreigner 4 . In later life he played R&B with The Lincolns and in the Downchild Blues Band.

Jenny Bulley

‘Jesus’Jellett Freaky dancer, vibesman BORN 1 9 4 8 Born in Dorset,William Jellett spent time in care homes before moving to London in the late ’60s.

Upon arrival,he made for Covent Garden’s freak-nexus Middle Earth and,in certain important ways, never left,taking the party with him as he relentlessly attended gigs in the capital throughout the ’70s,’80s and beyond. Tall and thin with a distinctive blond mullet/ pudding bowl hairstyle,his calling card was wholly free bodily movement,termed “idiot dancing” by the press,which often involved maracas playing and nudity. He can be seen expressing himself in footage of Cream,the Stones, Glastonbury Fayre and more,and in images of gigs by the Sex Pistols, Hawkwind,Queen,the MC5 and

Spreading the love: ‘Jesus’Jellett saves another soul.

many others:John Lydon wrote, “he didn’t give a toss… I loved him for that.” Profiled by the NME in 1974,he possibly took the nickname ‘Jesus’too literally,and was also to be seen at Speakers Corner espousing his views on spirituality and healthy eating, using nuts and raisins as currency

and means of benediction. Still occasionally glimpsed into the noughties,he later retired to sheltered accommodation outside London. Jesus also appeared on the cover of the Chemical Brothers’ 1999 LP Surrender,lost in music at the Kensington Olympia in 1976.

Ian Harrison

Media Wales, Getty (3 ), Mirrorpix

THEY ALSO SERVED FLORIDA-BORN voice JAMES PURIFY (b.1 9 4 4 ) sang with his cousin Robert Dickey as James & Bobby Purify and enjoyed a string of mid-’6 0 s R&B hits from crossover peak I’m Your Puppet – a US Number 6 pop hit – to Shake A Tail Feather, Wish You Didn’t Have To Go and Let Love Come Between Us. Puppet didn’t peak in the UK until 1 9 7 6 , by which time James had a new Bobby – Ben Moore – and their re-recording went to Number 1 2 .

COUNTRY SINGER-SONGWRITER KT OSLIN (above, b.1 9 4 2 ) spent her teenage years in Houston TX, where she sang in a folk trio with Guy Clark. Moving to New York, she was briefly signed to Elektra, for whom she released two singles. Her breakthrough came in 1 9 8 7 with the single ’8 0 s Ladies, a female anthem for the times, igniting a late-blooming career. Aged 4 5 , she signed with RCA and recorded three albums, two of which went platinum. She won three Grammys and was CMA’s Female Vocalist of 1 9 8 8 .

HIP-HOPPER DUKE BOOTEE (b.Edward

with the David Grisman Quintet, and in 1 9 8 0 co-founded The Bluegrass Album Band, with Crowe and Doyle Lawson among the players, whose debut Rice also produced.

Fletcher, 1 9 5 1 ) can be heard on 1 9 8 2 ’s rap cornerstone The Message by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five (that’s him intoning “it’s like a jungle, sometimes it makes me wonder…”) a track he instigated and co-wrote. In 1 9 8 2 he also collaborated with Melle Mel on the similarly hard-hitting Message II (Survival).

Releasing his electro-charged solo album Bust Me Out in 1 9 8 4 , he appeared on the 1 9 8 5 Artists United Against Apartheid single and album Sun City, and later worked in education. In 1 9 9 2 , Miles Davis paid tribute with the song Duke Booty on his posthumousl LP Doo-Bop.

JAZZ BASSIST EUGENE WRIGHT (b.1 9 2 3 ) began his career in the swing era, playing with Count Basie, Errol Garner and others. In 1 9 5 8 he joined the “classic” line-up of The Dave Brubeck Quartet, remaining for a decade and appearing on albums including 1 9 5 9 ’s breakthrough Time Out. He also worked with Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Red Norvo, Vince Guaraldi and many more, and led his own band.

Later in life he headed the University of Cincinnati’s jazz department, having earned the nickname ‘the Senator’.

VIRGINIA bluegrass innovator, guitarist and singer TONY RICE (b.1 9 5 1 ) was a pioneer of the “new acoustic music” of the 1 9 7 0 s, expanding the bluegrass repertoire to embrace contemporary artists. Rice first found success with Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas in JD Crowe’s New South. He broadened his style to embrace jazz and classical

MC JOHN ‘ECSTASY’ FLETCHER (below, b.1 9 6 4 ) co-founded Brooklyn rappers Whodini in 1 9 8 2 .

Known for his rakishly-worn ‘Zorro’ hat and sex appeal, he appeared on upbeat early hip-hop favourites such as the Thomas Dolby-produced Magic’s Wand (Conny Plank also worked on 1 9 8 3 ’s self-titled debut) and Friends. The group released

their last LP in 1 9 9 6 . Chuck D, LL Cool J and Questlove were among those to pay tribute.

SONGWRITER, producer and manager GEOFF STEPHENS (b.1 9 3 4 ) co-wrote his first hit in 1 9 6 4 with Tell Me When by The Applejacks. The same year he would pen Dave Berry’s hit The Crying Game, and successful co-writes for Donovan, Scott Walker, The Hollies, Cliff Richard, Manfred Mann, Herman’s Hermits, Mary Hopkin, Crystal Gayle, David Soul, Hot Chocolate, The New Seekers and Elvis would follow. In 1 9 6 6 he also formed The New Vaudeville Band, whose novelty Winchester Cathedral was a Grammy- winning US chart-topper.

Stephens also wrote for the West End stage.

PETER SINGH from Swansea, ‘The Rockin’Sikh’ (right, b.1 9 4 6 ) impersonated Elvis Presley, resplendent in a white jumpsuit and turban, playing covers and originals. In August 1 9 8 2 he supported The Clash at the Bristol Locarno and other admirers included The Mekons’ Jon Langford, Bob Geldof and

members of Man, who backed Singh live and on his cassette East Meets West.

POP SINGER JIMMIE F RODGERS (b.1 9 3 3 ) hit US Number 1 with his 1 9 5 7 recording of Honeycomb.

His biggest UK successes were Number 7 Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, also in 1 9 5 7 , and English Country Garden, a Number 5 in 1 9 6 2 . Rodgers sustained serious head injuries in 1 9 6 7 in Los Angeles, but continued to perform into his eighties.

GUITARIST AND FRONTMAN ALEXI ‘WILD CHILD’ LAIHO (b.1 9 7 9 ) led Espoo, Finland’s death metallers Children Of Bodom.

Bringing a neoclassical virtuosity to the genre, the group released 1 0 studio long-players between 1 9 9 7 debut Something Wild and 2 0 1 9 ’s Hexed.

Prolific despite ongoing health problems, Laiho formed Bodom After Midnight – named after one of the original group’s best-known songs – whose recordings will be released posthumously.

Jenny Bulley, Geoff Brown and Ian Harrison

MOJO 109

T I M E M AC HIN E

Atlantic crossing (clockwise from main):Ozzy dry-runs the sleeve for US breakthrough Blizzard Of Ozz;his first two LPs; the band in ’81 (from left) Randy Rhoads,Lee Kerslake,Osbourne and Bob Daisley.

MARCH 1 9 8 1 …Ozzy bites the heads off… doves?

On April 17,1979,Ozzy Osbourne had been fired from Black Sabbath for,in his own words, “being loaded all the time.” “I definitely don’t want to work with them again. They really have been arseholes,” he told Sounds’Sylvie Simmons later,adding that his old bandmates wanted to sound like Foreigner and that their new material was impossible to play live.

“I wanted to get back to good basic hard rock, like we were known for.”

This he had done with his solo debut,and metal landmark,Blizzard Of Ozz. A Top 10 hit in Britain in September 1980,this March it was to get its belated US release. With Sabbath set to release their album Heaven And Hell with new frontman Ronnie James Dio next month, the pressure was on. Rising to the occasion, Ozzy ensured no one at his US label CBS would fail to notice that Blizzard Of Ozz was finally coming out in the States.

On March 27 – coincidentally,the album’s American release date – words and photos emerged saying that he’d bitten the heads off

MARCH 2 7

110 MOJO

two white doves at the CBS sales convention in Los Angeles. The plan had been for Ozzy to give a speech of thanks to his audience and then release three symbolic doves of peace.

However,according to biographer Mick Wall, Ozzy had been hitting the brandy hard. “I just remember this PR woman going on and on at me,” he recalled to Wall. “I pulled out one of these doves and bit its fucking head off. Just to shut her up. Then I did it again… that’s when they threw me out. They said I’d never work for CBS again.”

“The bird was dead… rather than waste it I bit its head off.

You should have seen their faces.”

OZZY OSBOURNE

Speaking to Sounds’Garry Bushell three months after the dastardly deed,Ozzy gave a different perspective. “I wanted to make a real impression. The scam is the bird was dead. We were planning to release it there,but it died beforehand. So rather than waste it I bit its head off. You should have seen their faces.

They all went white. They were speechless.

That girl in the pictures was screaming.

Eventually a bloke came up and said,‘You’d better go.’” The dead bird,he added,tasted like “tomato sauce”.

On April 18 Blizzard Of Ozz had charted.

Four days later,Ozzy’s first solo North American tour began,with a gothic castle stage-set,the singer waving a large cross and performing a fistful of Sabbath crowd-pleasers.

The tour would stretch into September.

Alongside freaking out the CBS retail staff, Ozzy’s second solo disc,Diary Of A Madman, had been in production from February 9 to March 24 at Ridge Farm Studios,West Sussex, with Max Norman,Ozzy and guitarist Randy Rhoads producing. “The band would rehearse while Ozzy would bob up and down and listen to music,” Norman told Los Angeles rock station KNAC. “Ozzy would eventually come up with a melody line.” Norman also recalled recording strings at Abbey Road’s studio C with ELO/Hooked On Classics arranger Louis Clark. “Louis finally shows up one hour late all

ALSO ON! hungover, fucking hair flying in the wind… fuck, he got everything right the first go.

It was unbelievable!”

Yet already trouble was brewing. Bassist and co-writer Bob Daisley, who noted dryly that he, Rhoads and drummer Lee Kerslake initially believed that they were in a band called Blizzard Of Ozz rather than an Ozzy solo project, recalled having to back the singer up when he refused to commit to playing two shows a day. He noted that Sharon Arden, Ozzy’s soon-to-be wife who had taken over day-to-day management of the outfit, was not impressed by this dissent in the ranks. That summer Kerslake and Daisley were out, their contributions to the November-released Diary of A Madman uncredited, with new boys Rudy Sarzo (bass) and Tommy Aldridge (drums) on the sleeve.

Both Daisley and Kerslake would be involved in legal actions regarding their contributions to the album. But the outside world looked the other way and rocked on, with Blizzard Of Ozz peaking at US Number 21 in August; to date, it has sold quintuple platinum.

Ozzy’s solo career was up and running, and as the years rolled by, he would enjoy further platinum LPs, Black Sabbath reunions, and a place among hard rock’s immortals.

And, inevitably, drunken chaos, as when he famously bit the head off a bat someone had thrown at him, mid-gig, on January 20, 1982, in Des Moines (he thought it was a toy, and had to get rabies shots). “In this world, for some reason,” as Ozzy sagely observed to the NME that year, “you have to do some pretty bizarre things before people begin to know what you’re about.”

Ian Harrison

TOP TEN UK ALBUMS MARCH 7 VALUE 1 FACE PHIL COLLINS KINGS OF 2FRONTIER THE WILD ADAM (VIRGIN)

& THEANTS (CBS)

WHERE’S ERIC? Eric Clapton (above) starts a four-month US tour at the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon. On March 14 , he’s admitted to hospital in Minnesota, suffering from bleeding ulcers. Remaining dates are cancelled.

2 Ostend City Limits:Gaye retires to Belgium.

Marvin’s life after Motown Marvin Gaye releases his first single since December 1 9 7 9 ’s Ego Tripping Out. Praise is backed with Funk Me, which, the PR blurb says, “has been toned down for release as Marvin did not wish to offend anybody!”

Both songs are lifted from his recent In Our Lifetime LP. Sales for both are disappointing, and, having moved from London to Ostend in Belgium, Gaye will soon leave Motown and sign to Columbia/CBS. “I’ve been my own worst enemy over the last 2 5 years,” he tells Ebony magazine, adding that he plans to retire at 5 0 . “But as much as I’ve tried to fuck up my career, through my attitudes and personality, it doesn’t seem that I’ve lost a lot.”

MARCH 2

I want a new mug: Daltrey (left) and Townshend with (inset) new album.

NUTTY ACTION begins on Madness’s early years 9biopicFilming Take It Or Leave It. Featuring original locations and ex-band members, it’s directed by Stiff Records honcho Dave Robinson.

DOWN WITH TOTP On BBC1 at 7.2 0 pm, Top Of The Pops features The 12Teardrop Explodes’ Reward, Landscape’s Einstein A Go-Go, dance troupe Legs And Co. interpreting Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime, and Roxy Music’s Jealous Guy. Industrial action means only two performances are new.

3 VIENNA ULTRAVOX THE JAZZ 4DIAMOND SINGER NEIL DANCE 5VARIOUS CRAZE DOUBLE 6JOHN FANTASY LENNON & (CHRYSALIS)

(CAPITOL)

(2 -TONE)

YOKO ONO (GEFFEN) DIFFICULT 7RAINBOW TO CURE CATS 8 STRAY STRAY CATS MOVING 9RUSH PICTURES 1STRAITS 0 MAKING MOVIES DIRE (POLYDOR)

(ARISTA)

(MERCURY)

(VERTIGO)

SLADE RAID release We’llBring The House Down, their 13firstSlade album since their triumphant comeback headlining the 19 8 0 Reading festival. A rush job, it recycles songs from 19 7 9 ’s noncharting long-player Return To Base and will peak at Number 2 5 .

BOSS BREAKS UK leg of Bruce The River 17TourTheSpringsteen’s is due to start at the Brighton Centre. But owing to exhaustion, the 12 dates will now begin on May 2 6 .

Bodysnatchers’ Rhoda Dakar rocks the 2-Tone live album at 5.

AD ARCHIVE 1 9 8 1

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THE WHO FACE DANCE With single You Better You Bet at Number 9, The Who’s ninth LP, Face Dances, enters the UK LP charts at Number 3. With ex-Small Face Kenney Jones replacing the late Keith Moon on drums, the sleeve features portraits of the group by artists including David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake, though Francis

MARCH 2 8

Bacon declines to take part. Pete Townshend later declares the songs – such as Cache Cache, which recalls his lost weekend as a vagrant in Berne sleeping in a bear pit, and How Can You Do It Alone’s encounter with a raincoated flasher – “weren’t right for the band.” They manage one more LP, 1982’s It’s Hard, before Townshend places The Who on hiatus.

Every footballing great needs his own range of slippers – in ‘Stadium’‘Wembley’or ‘Kop’ styles,perfect soles for writing on in biro.

MOJO 111

A S K MOJO

Which big names joined existing bands?

After the death of Chad Stewart of Chad & Jeremy, I read that Jeremy Clyde has also played with Peter Asher from Peter & Gordon. This made me think of other known singers joining forces with other established acts – what are the best examples, and who did it most?

Mike Franz, via e-mail MOJO says:If we’re talking becoming an actual member of another successful group,rather than being a guest or a sideman,an early example is Eric Clapton,who’d been in The Yardbirds before he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1965. Other celebrated ship-jumpers include:Wilko Johnson to Ian Dury’s Blockheads;Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley leaving James Brown for ParliamentFunkadelic;Sammy Hagar succeeding Dave Lee Roth in Van Halen; Dave Mason’s recruitment to Fleetwood Mac;The Move’s Carl Wayne fronting The Hollies; and Ian Gillan,who admitted to having been drinking when he agreed to replace Ronnie James Dio in Black Sabbath in 1983. Some groups have more than one suspect: The Spiders From Mars’Trevor Bolder played with Uriah Heep from 1976 until 2013,give or take a year,while bandmate Mick Ronson was in Mott The Hoople for 1975’s All The Young Dudes. Arguably the most notable repeat offender is Johnny Marr,who after leaving The Smiths served in The Pretenders,The The, Electronic,Modest Mouse and The Cribs,though we should also mention bassist Dave Anderson, whose bands include Amon Düül II,Hawkwind and the Groundhogs (he also rehearsed with Van der Graaf Generator). Any more candidates out there?

112 MOJO

WHO FOLLOWED THE ’NEFF? Re:Roy Sparks’enquiry about the ‘Eskimos’, MOJO 326.

The Mission’s followers were the Eskimos, with other bands of that era having similar groups of followers:Fields Of The Nephilim had the Bonanzas and the Dinosaurs, New Model Army had a fearsome bunch called the Militia, even Gaye Bykers On Acid had the Daye Trippers. To become part of a group took dedication as you had to appear at many, many gigs so that you became recognised and then be accepted as part of the Following. They would tend to dominate the moshpit, creating large circles that only the bravest of other fans would try and enter. People could be part of multiple Followings, but it was rare. I spent many months following the Fields Of The Nephilim and had many happy times as a Dinosaur.

Paul Coyne, via e-mail

SELL! SELL! SELL! I was perplexed when I saw Neil Young had sold song rights to Hipgnosis – I thought they were Pink Floyd’s sleeve designers.

What’s going on?

William Rice, via e-mail MOJO says:Hipgnosis Songs Fund chief Merck Mercuriadis told “digital eco-system blogger” Emmanuel Legrand that his late friend Storm Thorgerson,who ran the Hipgnosis design studio with Aubrey Powell,asked him what he intended to call his new company. “He caught me off guard,” says Mercuriadis,“so,facetiously,but somewhere deep inside,I said,‘I want to call it Hipgnosis but that name is already taken’. And a few days later he wrote me a letter stating:‘I want you to have the name.’”

Mercuriadis added he “ended up paying for the name” by choosing a logo designed by Thorgerson, but that “even then,I didn’t get a chance to choose

elephant’emblem,it seems,represents a pachyderm “blown away” by great music.

WHO FADED AWAY BEFORE BUDDY? I’ve always thought that the fade was a device used when the artist or producer couldn’t come up with a proper finale. But who employed it first?

“Interested Swedish youngster” Max Lorentz, via e-mail.

Fred Dellar writes:It’s a question that has been at the centre of controversy since the era of Thomas Edison. Certainly,some of the acoustic 78s of the early 1900s were faded,mainly for effect. Later, records tended to be abbreviated so that they wouldn’t take up too much playing time on jukeboxes. Operators liked their jukebox plays to be short,neat and profitable. One of the first hits to feature the fade was Cherokee,a 1939 RCA release

by Charlie Barnet,a sax-playing bandleader who filled in the time between gigs by acquiring 11 wives.

HELP MOJO I was listening to some Venom records from the ’80s, and the production is not at all fantastic.

What’s the worst-sounding commercially released album ever?

Anthony Mitchell, via e-mail MOJO says:Shall we start the ball rolling with the mythic official Magma bootleg where an audience member can be heard sneezing? Over to you!

CONTACT MOJO Have you got a challenging musical question for the MOJO Brains Trust? E-mail askmojo@bauermedia.co.uk and we’ll help untangle your trickiest puzzles.

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Pick our brains and let us answer your music qu estions,investigate your inquiries and u ntangle those teasers!

MOJO C OM PE T I T I O N ANSWERS

MOJO 3 2 7 Across: 1 Diana Ross, 6 Push It,9 Various Positions,10 Raydio, 12 Angel Of Harlem, 14 Down,16 Calypso, 17 Ununiform,20 Geno,21 Amyl,22 Madness,25 Little Man,26 Ego,27 Cab, 29 Anji,30 Arlo,31 Magic Bus,33 Stain,36 Colosseum,38 Baxters,39 De Capo, 40 Oli,41 Bobby Keys, 43 Eple,44 Anger,45 Alice,47 Starry-Eyed, 48 Atlas,50 Eskimo,51 Alan,53 Kirk,55 Sam, 56 Vega,58 Air,60 Songbird,61 Moog,62 Cook,63 Rura,64 Eva, 65 Ides,66 Tee.

Let’s get digital Win! An Astell&Kern SR25 portable digital audio player.

EADER IN high-resolution products, Astell&Kern,is offering one lucky MOJO reader a chance to win a A&norma SR25 portable digital audio player worth £649.

Sporting a stunning premium design, the award-winning SR25 lets music fans listen to their favourite tunes on-the-move in studio-quality,high resolution audio (up to DSD256 and 32-bit/384KHz PCM),hearing songs as the artist intended. A first for Astell&Kern players,the SR25 adds LDAC Bluetooth support,allowing users to wirelessly stream 24-bit hi-res audio to compatible speakers and headphones.

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Down: 1 David Byrne, 2 Airto,3 Apollo,4 Ossian,5 Shotgun Willie,6 Phil Lynott,7 Stiff,8 Ian Carr,11 Adam And The Ants, 13 Emmylou,14 Dogs, 15 Wanda,18 Fee Waybill,19 Manic Street,23 Egan,24 Son,27 Cilla Black,28 Bass,32 Sister Sledge, 34 I’m A Believer,35 Amos,36 C.O.B.,37 Sukiyaki,42 Ya-Yas,45 Adamski,46 Can,47 Song,49 Lariat,52 Annie,54 Rage,57 Ama,59 RCA.

It also provides 20+ hours of continuous music playback and a 3.6-inch touchscreen for easy navigation. Elsewhere,this high-performance player boasts an aluminium body with an ultra-precision volume wheel machined with a vibrationfree process used for luxury watches.

Feel the quality! And get in the race by filling in the crossword of His Imperial Dudeness Fred Dellar,and sending a scan of it to mojo@bauermedia.co.uk,making sure to type CROSSWORD 329 in the subject line.

Entries without that subject line will not be considered. Please include your home address,email and phone number. The closing date for entries is April 2. For the rules of the quiz,see www.mojo4music.com.

For more information on Astell&Kern products please visit www.astellkern.co.uk 4

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Winner: Sharon Thompson of Winscombe wins a Cambridge Audio CXN streamer and a year’s subscription to Qobuz and Roon.

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1 His last album was The Crock Of Gold (5,8) 9 The Silly Sisters’ no-show at the disco (2,4,2,3,5) 1 0 Justin Vernon’s band (3,4) 1 2 A late album was Trolling For Owls (3,4) 1 3 Aphex Twin surfed these waves as Polygon Window (4) 1 6 Aztec Camera,Cult,Foetus LP title (4) 1 8 Bowie album,co-produced by Nile Rodgers (4,5) 1 9 This Soundwave was mutinous (8) 2 1 Les Gray’s glam-rockers (3) 2 4 The White Stripes’ drummer (3) 2 5 ---- Code 615 (4) 2 6 Nat ‘King’ Cole’s hippy hit (6,3) 2 9 Bomb The Bass’s number one challenge (4,3) 3 0 Janis Eddy Fink’s adopted surname (3) 3 1 /3 2 See photoclue A (3,8) 3 6 Lord Of The ----- River (Donovan) (5) 3 8 That rockin’ Mr Cochran (5) 3 9 They were Looking After Number One in 1977 (8,4) 4 1 Beach Boys album that contained Disney Girls (5,2) 4 2 Damp sounding Canadian rockers (5) 4 3 The Sex Pistols wanted to know who killed him (5) 4 4 Oh ---- (Alessi Brothers} (4) 4 5 See 6 Down 4 6 Indian musical form (4) 4 7 This General was frontman for Chairmen Of The Board (7) 4 9 Dillard,brother of Rodney (4) 5 0 Black-Eyed Peas demand the truth (4,3) 5 1 Remain to hear a hit by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs (4) 5 2 A much covered song from Mother Earth (4,2,3) 5 5 New York Dolls bassist Mr Yaffa (4) 5 6 Record company located amid Frankie Miller (1.1.1) 5 7 ---- The Blue (The Mission) (4) 5 8 See photoclue B (5) 5 9 Elvis Costello’s was true (3) 6 0 Sky,frontman for The Seeds (5) 6 1 Judy who introduced Over The Rainbow (7)

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1 See photoclue C (6,4) 2 She was once bassist/vocalist with ‘Til Tuesday (5,4) 3 ---- Apparent,band produced by Jimi Hendrix (4) 4 Let’s See ------ (The Who) (6) 5 Could be Woody or Arlo (7) 6 /4 5 A Four Tops hit from 1981 (4,3,3,2,4) 7 Ween enjoyed it with chocolate (6) 8 “All that time I was searching” (Genesis) (2,3,4) 1 1 1963 Odetta album (3,5,2,4) 1 4 Band formed by Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger (3) 1 5 Wordless jazz vocalism (4) 1 6 Manchester electronic duo – a bit sheepish (4) 1 7 Suicide’s Alan (4) 2 0 They provided the charts with an Anthem (1-3) 2 1 SF rockers Toiling ------- (7) 2 2 Her first solo single was I Only Want To Be With You (5,11) 2 3 The surname is Dement (4) 2 7 Broken ----- (Buffalo Springfield) (5) 2 8 They went Over,Under,Sideways, Down (9) 3 3 A sentiment shared by James Brown, Kriss Kross and J.Lo (2,4) 3 4 Monkee Mike (7) 3 5 As performed by Bob Wills (7,5) 3 6 Bird,Earth or Silk? (4) 3 7 Chic-penned LGBT anthem (2,6,3) 4 0 Glittering reissue label? (3,4) 4 3 Band that included the Deal sisters and Tanya Donelly (8) 4 4 Aretha album that first contained Chain Of Fools (4,4) 4 7 Washington DC band whose albums included For Your Own Special Sweetheart (6) 4 8 Wynonna Judd’s mum (5) 5 3 The Soup Dragons’ Mr Dixon (4) 5 4 Foo Fighters’ white vehicle (4)

MOJO 113

HELLO The Pop Group with (from left) Bruce Smith (drums,almost obscured),Gareth Sager,Mark Stewart and John Waddington, Alexandra Palace,London, June 15,1980.

Gareth Sager and The Pop Group It began in the car on the way to the Roxy. And ended under Nelson’s Column.

Getty, John Spink courtesy Bristolarchiverecords.com, Chiara Meattelli

HELLO APRIL 1 9 7 7 Me and Mark Stewart [vocalist] used to see each other at the same gigs and record shops.

We had friends in The Cortinas,the first punk band in Bristol. He was desperate to borrow my David Bowie bootleg whenever he could!

Bruce [Smith,drums] went to the same school as me,and he started to hang out in our gang.

We decided we should make a band in the car on the way up to see The Cortinas at the Roxy club in Covent Garden. We were all 16, in fact Bruce might’ve been 15. Bruce’s mum was driving,she was going to see Bruce’s elder brother in London. ‘Punk’is such a crap name for what was going on – it was an explosion of ideas available to all these oiks, and it felt like you could be part of it. Like,I’ve got the right clothes,that’s all that matters! Mark’s mum came up with the name of the band,I remember us laughing about it,so it obviously worked.

I’d been taught piano and I took music at school, so I knew about John Cage and aleatoric music. I borrowed some money to buy a guitar – I could play two chords,really badly.

Bruce got some drums from somewhere and me,him and Mark played My Generation for about three and a half hours,in this vile, run-down rehearsal room

on the edge of St Pauls that The Cortinas used to use. We thought we sounded great!

The bass player [Simon Underwood] and the other guitarist [John Waddington] joined later,and I reckon it was probably about two months later that we played live. We played an under-12s youth club – I don’t think they enjoyed it,and I don’t blame ’em! We did Solid Gold Easy Action by T.Rex and Jonathan Richman’s Pablo Picasso,and a few of our own songs. We put on our gig at Tiffanys in Bristol,about four weeks later. We played the music we liked,funk and stuff,and made a whole different atmosphere. I know we didn’t want to sound like any other band.

That was our launch point.

G OODBYE OCT 2 6 , 1 9 8 0 We just used to be laughing all the time,and put on the intense,serious young man for that hour on stage. We did [1979 debut] Y, which we were tremendously pleased with,but it’s a fucking difficult album and it didn’t get anywhere near the reaction we were expecting.

So I think the glue that sticks you all together maybe started unsticking a little bit after that. By 1980 we’d gone through about four massive, extreme changes. I’d say,me, Bruce and Simon really loved the concept of improvising, and in Mark’s defence,it’s bloody hard to improvise lyrics. Plus,I’d moved to London so there was the whole thing of not hanging out together… when you all start so young,you just learn all together,and you have

“We played an under-1 2 s youth club – I don’t think they enjoyed it.”

GARETH SAGER

114 MOJO

that little peak period when everybody’s interested in the same things. That can only last for a year and a half,at the most.

The end was classic disintegrating band.

We had a tour of Finland,and one date in Helsinki was a massive anti-apartheid gig in an ice-skating rink with about 8,000 people.

About eight of them knew who the hell we were. You could just tell it was a rudderless ship and it was time to get off. We were meant to do a few more and we just cancelled them.

When I came back,I phoned the manager [Dick O’Dell] and said me and Bruce wanted to move on. I think Mark had already met Adrian Sherwood by then,so he was completely ready to do something different.

There was no animosity. There was absolutely zero money – I think we’d gone bankrupt – and the last year we existed on the dole.

We decided to do this last gig,a massive rally for CND,at Trafalgar Square. It was fucking cold,and dramatic – playing at the foot of Nelson’s Column! Mark did [a version of Blake’s] Jerusalem,which was really good.

I went off long before [co-headliners] Killing Joke played. Within four weeks,I think Bruce and I had done our first Rip,Rig + Panic gig. It was completely positive,moving on. There was no falling out,none of that shit. And [since re-forming in 2010],it’s an ongoing affair,again.

As told to Ian Harrison Gareth Sager’s How Can I Help You When You Don’t Want To Help Yourself is out now on Creeping Bent.

Don’t sell your dreams: the band congregate, 1977;(left) Sager today.

Oasis. MOJ O’s finest writers.

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