Sommaire pour August 2022 de MOJO

THERE ARE MANY THINGS WE CAN REASONABLY expect from our musical heroes: wild thrills, profound insights. Drama. Epiphanies. Transcendence. Their skills as life coaches, however, can be a bit more hit and miss. As in so many things, Patti Smith is an exception that proves the rule. At 75, she stands apart as a rock’n'roll icon whose ability to connect a devotion to art with a practical existence remains inspirational. “I realised, very early on, that there’s always a million reasons to live, ” she tells MOJO’s Andrew Male, in a series of intimate and significant interviews. “I saw, as Allen Ginsberg would say, some of the best minds of my generation lose their life over accidents, mistakes, carelessness or tragedy. I just decided as a teenager that I wasn’t…

EARLIER THIS summer, Katy J Pearson played the O2 Academy in her adopted hometown of Bristol, at a benefit for Ukraine. “I felt really proud, ” she beams, “of Bristol representing.” The line-up included Idles, Portishead and Billy Nomates, plus guest host, the actor Paul McGann. “Soundcheck was kind of overwhelming, ” Pearson admits, “but backstage there was a real community spirit – being part of it made me feel really happy.” After 2020’s psychedelic Return, Pearson is about to release her second album, Sound Of The Morning – a record overflowing with stylistic playfulness and melody, foregrounding her winsome, Jane Wiedlin-meets-Dolly Parton vocals. But her career began aged 15 when Ardyn, her duo with brother Rob, won a battle of the bands at Gloucester Guildhall. The pair were spotted…

JIM KERR is a morning person. Nonetheless, it’s still impressive to see him in the Hôtel Le Louis Versailles Château’s breakfast room looking quite so fresh, a mere 12 hours after leading Simple Minds on-stage at the Seine Musicale auditorium in Paris. Kerr’s enjoying the reactivated 40 Years Of Hits tour, two years after being halted by the pandemic. Yet he ascribes his energy to anticipation at the imminent release of new LP, Direction Of The Heart. “We did not sit on our thumbs during Covid, ” he smiles, nodding towards Charlie Burchill, Kerr’s creative partner throughout Simple Minds’ lifespan. Until relatively late in the process, a 24-song double album was planned. “But then, ” Burchill says, “we decided no – one LP, and we’re keeping it to nine tracks.…

FORGEMASTERS “The Track With No Name is technically the first bleep techno track, and everything you want from a minimal dance production. You go back to early Warp and see how that progressed from Cabaret Voltaire and The Human League – people listening to the sounds of industry, and trying to turn that into music. An amazing record.” THE HUMAN LEAGUE “Human [Virgin, 1986] is just a brilliant pop song. It’s got that massive chorus, how slow it is, the R&B influence… there’s a lot to take from it, which probably inspired a lot of today’s pop music, I think. The album of theirs I love is Dare, the track is Love Action.” DAVID BOWIE “I listened to the Best Of Bowie [2002] in my dad’s car as a kid,…

AMABUTHO (Motella, 1973) Certified gold (25,000 sales) on release, LBM’s debut shows Joseph Shabalala had the formula in place from the start – the extra bass voices giving them more depth than their peers. Hat tip to producer West Nkosi, a township jive star in his own right who also recorded Mahlathini And The Mahotella Queens. SHAKA ZULU (Warner Bros, 1987) The first of a trio recorded for Warner Bros to capitalise on the success of Graceland and arguably the pick of all their studio albums. Shabalala returned to songs they had already recorded, but Paul Simon’s production takes tracks like Hello My Baby and Rain, Rain, Beautiful Rain up a notch. THE STAR AND THE WISEMAN (Polygram, 1998) Your one-stop-shop best-of. Though it favours their glossier, post-Graceland recordings, the production…

Nina Nastasia ★★★★★ Riderless Horse TEMPORARY RESIDENCE LTD. CD/DL/LP IT’S BEEN 12 years since Nina Nastasia released her last album, Outlaster, its sleeve featuring a pulp-horror style portrait of the Hollywood-born singer-songwriter. Yet nobody – not even her friends, kept at careful arm’s length – recognised the all-too-real everyday darkness running through Nastasia’s life. For 25 years, she was locked into a psychologically abusive relationship with her manager and close collaborator Kennan Gudjonsson: their tiny Brooklyn apartment increasingly became their world; his impossible standards for her music left Nastasia feeling as if she was the “weak link” – “if I didn’t succeed, I was failing somebody else at the same time.” Hoping to extinguish a relationship flashpoint, she made the decision to stop making music. On January 26, 2020, Nastasia…

Interpol ★★★★ The Other Side Of Make-Believe MATADOR. CD/DL/LP EN ROUTE to becoming an enormous cult band – with the kind of devoted following who treat their songs as soul-mining poetry and ink their skins with their lyrics and artwork – Interpol, to many casual listeners, have seemed to paint in very similar shades of noir-ish rock. Their colours seem to range from dark to even darker, though years of dogged touring, along with the contrasting emotional uplift of their music, has found them occupying a position similar to the oft-missing-in-action Cure. The last we heard of the New York trio, in 2017, they were celebrating the 15th anniversary of their Turn On The Bright Lights debut and following it up, in 2018, with Marauder, an album recorded with Flaming…

Twink ★★★★ You Reached For The Stars: The Best Of Twink SUNDAZED. CD/DL/LP FOR LONDON counterculture impresario Joe Boyd, the ’60s peaked in the early hours of July 1, 1967. His UFO Club partner, John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, had just been jailed after a dodgy drug bust, with the News Of The World stoking the persecution of the long-haired, free-thinking and free-loving every Sunday, most notoriously Stones Mick and Keith. In protest, that night some 200 UFO regulars marched to the NOTW building; at its head, Twink, the drummer of the evening’s entertainment, Tomorrow. Back at the UFO by 4am, Tomorrow played the show of their lives, Twink leaping into the crowd, hugging, crawling and chanting “Revolution, revolution!” At that moment, Boyd recalls in his memoir White Bicycles, “The tide of…

Mark Murphy Love Is What Stays VERVE, 2007 WHEN ELLA FITZGERALD did an impromptu scat-singing duet of Tea For Two with Mark Murphy at Ronnie Scott’s in 1968, she memorably declared, “he’s as good as I am.” Scott Walker and Dusty Springfield also loved Murphy’s singing, while Liza Minnelli is credited with the words, “There’s a party goin’ on in Mark’s head and I want to go to it.” Yet mainstream acclaim was always denied him. A wildly expressive, tirelessly explorative and technically virtuosic jazz singer born in Syracuse, New York in 1932, his mind opened to the music in the presence of Peggy Lee and Nat ‘King’ Cole, among others. After debuting with Meet Mark Murphy in 1956, his was a long career of imminent but never realised lift-offs.…

EVÁNGELOS ODYSSÉAS Papathanassíou was always captivated by the expressive possibilities of keyboards, and even as a four-year-old would marvel at the sound of his parents’ piano, having appended miscellaneous kitchen utensils to its strings. Innately talented, he rejected music lessons and remained an instinctive, autodidact composer, once opining that formal tuition would only have impaired his intuitive creativity. Born in 1943, in Agria, Thessaly, and raised in Athens, Vangelis’s career took off in 1964, as organist in Greece’s first popular rock band, The Forminx, who would enjoy a string of chart successes. After a right-wing junta overthrew the Greek government in 1967, he, like many of his peers, absconded, initially targeting London but settling instead in Paris. There, he would launch psych-prog-rockers Aphrodite’s Child, alongside fellow émigrés Demis Roussos and…

JULY 18 There had long been nudity in rock. Ray Sawyer from Dr. Hook, for example, or Hawkwind’s Stacia, or the infamous GG Allin, had proudly bared all on-stage. But few instances were as militant or unanimous as when Rage Against The Machine played touring alt-rock festival Lollapalooza this July day at Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium. Appearing on the main stage before acts including Primus, Tool, Alice In Chains and Front 242, their music-free show featured every band member stark naked, with gaffer tape over their mouths and the letters ‘P’, ‘M’, ‘R’ and ‘C’ painted on their chests. It was all a massive two fingers to the PMRC, or the Parents Music Resource Center, a pressure group with the ear of government who sought to defend America’s music-listening youth from…

1 RICHARD HELL AND THE VOIDOIDS BLANK GENERATION Where better to begin than a crucial document of NYC punk at its most louche and literate? When Richard Hell retooled Rod McKuen’s Beat Generation in 1976, he’d already formed and quit The Heartbreakers and Television – whose first review was written by Patti Smith. Written by Richard Hell Published by Automatic Music Inc. adm by Warner-Tamerlane Pub. (BMI) / Doraflo Music, Inc., BMI / Quickmix Music, BMI / Warner-Chappell Music., Inc. 1977 WEA International Inc. USWB19904285 Licensed courtesy of Warner Music UK Ltd. 2 GLENN BRANCA LESSON NO. 1 The anthemic, pulverising solo debut of Downtown eminence grise Glenn Branca, 1980’s Lesson No. 1 makes systems symphonics out of the raw punk frequencies of electric guitar. Not just a vital precursor…

Back On Main St. Unearthed! Norman Seeff’s unseen Exile… images. Plus, the Stones’ Sixty Tour comes home. THE ROLLING STONES’ Exile On Main St.: 50 years old yet strangely timeless, rough and ready yet miraculously integrated. So too the packaging. Recruited at the suggestion of Stones assistant Chris O’Dell, art director John Van Hamersveld has spoken about the sleeve art of Exile… in detail. Having his say today is Van Hamersveld’s then-design partner – and the only visual creative actually pictured on that hallowed sleeve – the legendary photographer Norman Seeff. What’s more, for his ongoing exhibition in Los Angeles, the pin-sharp 83-year-old has unearthed not only a Stones shoot in their Bel Air mansion, but the elaborately staged session Mick Jagger originally commissioned for the sleeve. “Mick had seen…

1 CASS McCOMBS UNPROUD WARRIOR A pensive, poignant, rather unsteady jazz-folk shuffle about a military veteran heralds the Californian troubadour’s tenth album, due in August. Find it: streaming services 2 KIWI JR. UNSPEAKABLE THINGS Tough-pop Canadians blend Morrisseyish syntax (things “gather unsold at auction”) with bittersweet, Go-Betweens swoon and circling organ. Find it: streaming services 3 RICH RUTH TAKEN BACK Ambient jazz meets guitar freakout on this chakra-realigning jam out of Nashville. Where Jon Hassell, Alice Coltrane and John McLaughlin meet. Find it: YouTube 4 GAZ COOMBES SONNY THE STRONG Based on the sorry tale of Randolph Turpin, the British boxer who beat Sugar Ray Robinson, the ‘Grass man brings a shivery transmission of rain-drenched ghost-rock. Find it: streaming services 5 THE DREAM MACHINE TOO STONED TO DIE Merseydelic Coral-affiliated…

Paul Jones: I was studying English at Oxford and I heard T-Bone Walker’s T-Bone Blues. Everything changed! I dropped out – my dad wasn’t at all pleased – and I started going to Ealing Jazz Club to see Alexis Korner. This was early ‘62, incredibly exciting. Alexis was a serial encourager of young musicians, and we would cluster at the front. There was me, Mick Jagger… he’d point at one of us and we’d jump up and sing. I was going under the name ‘PP Jones’, after BB King and with ‘PP’ standing for my real name, Paul Pond. Manfred Mann: I moved to London from Johannesburg in 1961. I’d been playing in a jazz trio and my father made the joke: “Manfred is going to London. Apparently they are…

1 Looking for a kiss (7-inch, Mercury, 1973) The sound of the disreputable backstreets as Shangri-Las suss – that pouty, attitudinal intro – collides with the Bo Diddley beat. But for all the messy playing, it’s still delivered with a sexy, ‘fuck you’ economy. 2 Pills (on New York Dolls, Mercury, 1973) Bo Diddley’s 1961 Chess single given the Dolls treatment: sped up and saturated in Lower East Side sleaze with Johansen salivating over lyrics about a rock’n'roll nurse giving pills and shots. A genius coupling. 3 Personality crisis (7-inch, Mercury, 1973) A licentious coming together of past and future where, over golden-age rock’n'roll – all primitive guitar riffing, piano pumping and forceful drums – Johansen bays about changing into “the wolf man howling at the moon”. 4 jet boy…

AS 1962 BEGAN, THE BEACH BOYS HAD A NAME AND A HIT. But they were soon to be without a record label. The industry attitude was that surfing was just a fad, and one wonders if the group would ever have gotten a recording contract without the persistence of Murry Wilson. Years later, Brian Wilson would take note of his dad’s push and recognise its importance. As a father, Murry may not have been ideal, but as a manager of a rock group, he had unrelenting drive and ambition. He hadn’t made it as a songwriter; no matter, his boys would make up for his failure. He’d see to that – and he did. Surfin’, released on Candix (a small, local label) the previous November, had made it into the…

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL SPRING MORNING IN ROCKAWAY BEACH, NEW YORK, AND Patti Smith is drinking black coffee in her small workers’ bungalow, a bolthole and retreat for the 75-year-old singer and poet since 2012. She’s part way through her extensive 2022 world tour and just back from Austin, Texas, where she entertained an audience of 3,000 with a transportive evening of songs and stories that encompassed her entire life. Significantly, she has no album to promote, and hasn’t since 2012’s Banga, and the merchandise table is solely given over to copies of her 2019 book, Year Of The Monkey. Because Patti Smith is also a writer, has been from the age of 12. Since the 2010 publication of Just Kids, her award-winning memoir documenting her friendship with the late artist…

Jack White ★★★★ Entering Heaven Alive THIRD MAN. CD/DL/LP JACK WHITE pivoted like a pro when it came to the question of a third marriage. “I’d love to have more kids before I’m instantly a grandpa while they’re growing up, ” he told MOJO in early January after the idea of nuptials arose, grinning beneath his sweep of electric blue hair in his gilded Nashville office. “So many things have taken me away from that. It might already be too late.” Though he had been the first to mention Olivia Jean Markel, his longtime girlfriend and collaborator, he took care not to overcommit. But less than three months later, in April, White took the plunge in Detroit’s massive Masonic Temple, not far from his childhood home. After inviting Olivia Jean…

Black Midi ★★★★ Hellfire ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP IF EVER A band had “Not For Everyone” tattooed across their foreheads – or possibly used as the title for a song-suite with sections in 11/8 time – it would be Black Midi. Many listeners of a certain age will take at least two of their alleged antecedents – Primus and The Cardiacs – as signals to run for the hills. Yet the band’s audience continues to grow among younger and older alike, and what is difficult or abstruse or in-jokey about their music and how they present it is worn as a badge of honour in the same way it’s worn by Zappa fans. Meanwhile, the peculiar alterna-universe that singer-guitarist Geordie Greep appears to inhabit – the Instagram videos where he would…

IN 1965, after winning a high-school talent contest, 14-year-old Linda Hoover was invited to meet with American singing star Bobby Darin’s manager, Ed Burton, and his young staff-producer Gary Kannon at Darin’s TM Music label. Hoover’s father trusted Burton but wasn’t sure about the young hipster. But she recalls, “I liked Gary immediately, thought he was funny and cool and spoke my language.” Kannon kept in touch, and several years later invited her to the Brill Building offices of JATA, the publishing company of dwindling hitmakers Jay & The Americans. There she met one of the band, Kenny Vance, who took her to a tiny room just big enough for a piano, a desk and two young songwriters, whose quirky songs Vance thought might suit Linda, now 19, and possessed…

WE’VE ALL got a song in us. And with the Joué Play, even the musically untrained can get it out. Consisting of up to four silicone pads representing guitar, piano, keyboards and drums, and an intuitive app that contains a bank of over 40 professional-quality sounds, it’s an easy-to-use, visually informative interface that makes mixing and creating songs easy. And when you paint your masterpiece, why not listen to it on some noise-cancelling Lypertek PurePlay Z5 earphones? Their 10mm dynamic drivers deliver detailed, natural sound, while the PureControl ANC app allows you to personalise EQ, controls and ambient modes for a complete wireless listening experience. We have both of the above prizes for this month’s crossword giveaway! Be in for a shot at the gold by completing this month’s rocking…

FILMMAKER BRETT Morgen doesn’t mind admitting he’d “checked out” from David Bowie’s career after 1983’s Let’s Dance made Bowie a mega-selling MTV favourite. What that provided some 40 years later, during a torturous lockdown edit of Morgen’s genre-busting Bowie film Moonage Daydream, was the element of surprise: at pretty much every turn, nuggets kept appearing. “My favourite discovery, ” he tells MOJO at Cannes, where the film had its world premiere in May, “were the outtakes for [‘95 single video] The Hearts Filthy Lesson. I used the shots during what I call the ‘Philip Glass sequences’ of the film, that have the orchestral music, and David starts in a crouch and then comes up. If you watch the [original] video, that doesn’t exist. Getting these music video dailies from like,…

WHEN JAZZ organ freak Scott Hawthorn watched Hammond B3 great ‘Brother’ Jack McDuff at Parnell’s club in Seattle in June 1982, he was aware that the keyboardist’s Leslie cabinet had a rip in its bass woofer. “Because of the particular notes that ‘farted’, ” Hawthorn says today of the damaged speaker’s distorted sound, “it really did seem to add to the funk.” Hawthorn taped the four nights and shared them – audio murk, hiss, ‘farts’ and all – with other McDuff aficionados. But 40 years on, via advances in A.I. sound restoration technology, the recordings are to be made available in uncannily listenable, scrubbed-up form as Live At Parnell’s. How did this happen? Thank Greg Boraman of the Soul Bank reissue label, who sent the recordings to Claudio Passavanti of…

“I’m interested in the freedom to not give a fuck.”FANTASTIC NEGRITO FACT SHEET • For fans of Prince, World Party, Sly & The Family Stone • Dphrepaulezz’s monthly underground club in South Central Los Angeles included a film theatre and a jacuzzi. Police, Bloods and Crips were keen patrons. “It looked like the bridge on Star Trek. The police came in after their shifts and hung out. The gangbangers gave me a pass because I drove a 1967 stickshift Volvo, had all these pretty girls and wasn’t from LA. We’d put everyone’s guns in a cabinet so it was a safe space.” • He’s discovered family roots in Surrey as well as Scotland. “They were Quakers rather than slave owners.” KEY TRACKS • Venomous Dogma • They Go Low •…

ON SEPTEMBER 25, 1982, Simple Minds’ fifth album entered the UK chart at Number 6 – the band’s first Top 10 record. It was titled New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84), an auspicious, slightly pretentious declaration of context, momentum, and intent: there’s where we’ve been, here’s where we’re going. “On previous albums I still felt we were a student band, ” says Jim Kerr. “In the sense we’re still learning from those who inspired us – Magazine, Bowie, Roxy and so on, using base metals to get to our own thing. With New Gold Dream, it was like: this is us now. These are our times.” One week later, Glittering Prize, a celestial union of iridescent melody, assertive rhythm and Kerr singing about “the price of lost love” and “the attraction of…

AMONG THE aspects of Omnibus’s upcoming update of David Leaf’s vintage Brian Wilson/Beach Boys biog likely to be embraced by readers, there’s this: unlike previous out-of-print editions, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg on Ebay. “I was at a concert in New York, ” recalls Leaf. “And this guy came up to me and said, ‘Mr Leaf, I just bought a copy of your book for $500.’ I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry.’” In 1978, when the first edition of Leaf’s book emerged (as The Beach Boys And The California Myth) it was one of the first exposés of the true complexity of the group’s story: the abusiveness of the Wilson brothers’ father Murry; the mental struggles that prompted Brian’s retirement from touring at the…

IT’S MAY 1986, AND NBC’S SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE IS about to showcase a joyous musical sound founded in racial oppression 8,000 miles from New York but now steered into the mainstream by Paul Simon. “For me, it was always, ‘Oh, now this is happening to us… oh, now this is happening to us, ’ yet I still travelled everywhere by bus, ” recalls Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Albert Mazibuko. “But now something was really happening.” The SNL cameras turn to 10 South African Zulus wearing headbands and animal skins. By the time they stop singing, Simon knows his still-unfinished album Graceland will be a hit, and his collaborators have arrived, overnight sensations more than 25 years after they were formed. MOJO meets LBM at the home built by group founder Joseph…

“THE PANDEMIC took us off the road for almost 18 months, and I realised how much we need to play music, not for the adulation but the physical and spiritual release, like outer meditation, it takes you to another place. What’s changed since the group started is our understanding of the material and how deep it runs, parallel to our growth as artists and humans. It’s not like sports where the body starts letting you down. I think, with musicians, there is a grace in growing older, and I understand better how to get to where I need to, and make each song new. What’s stayed the same is our commitment to our art and idealism, to bring a positive energy and inspire the audience to swim in their own…

Kendrick Lamar ★★★★ Mr Morale & The Big Steppers AFTERMATH. CD/DL HALF-A-DECADE on from his last album, Kendrick Lamar offers a simple explanation for his lengthy silence in the first lines of this, his fifth long-player: thing.” Many things, in fact. Themes surfacing “I’ve been going through some across Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers include the challenges of monogamy and parenthood, Covid, institutional racism and the weight of black celebrity, and his struggles to heal generational trauma within his family and halt long-established patterns of selfdestructive behaviour. Heavy stuff. But then, Lamar is the first rapper to win a Pulitzer. He doesn’t deal in escapist fantasies or lurid entertainment, nor does he have a clothing brand or signature champagne to hawk. “I’m not in the music business/I’m in the…

Neil Young with Crazy Horse ★★★★ Toast REPRISE. CD/DL/LP BARELY HALF a year after Barn, Neil’s second album in a row with the Horse, we have a third. Named for the San Francisco studio where it was recorded in 2001, Toast’s legendary status among Neil’s abandoned albums was up there with Homegrown (1975) until he finally released that record in 2020. It’s interesting the reason Neil gave for shelving Homegrown was the same he gave for Toast: that it was “too sad”. Both concerned love gone wrong, first Carrie Snodgress, then Pegi Young. “I couldn’t handle it at that time, ” Neil said. “I just skipped it and went on to do another album in its place.” That album was Are You Passionate? (2002), made with Booker T And The…

Chuck Armstrong ★★★ Shackin’ Up REAL GONE. LP George Kerr-produced Southern soul collectable from ’76, when Al Green was at his peak. Armstrong’s tone and phrasing are very like Green’s, but who’s quibbling with tracks as strong as Goodness Gracious or You’ve Got To Deal With It (This Superworld). The House Of Love ★★★ Burn Down The World CHERRY RED. CD Rock hugeness was the plan, but when guitarist Terry Bickers left in ’88, Guy Chadwick’s band didn’t recover. Over eight discs and 139 studio, demo and live tracks, their 3-LP major-label period is fitfully wonderful, but elsewhere stricken with entropy. Various ★★★★ United Dreadlocks Volumes I & 2 DOCTOR BIRD. CD Top ranking, 44-track selection of late-’70s reggae productions by Jamaica’s ‘Mighty Two’ – Joe Gibbs and genius engineer…

A Likely Lad ★★★★★ Peter Doherty with Simon Spence CONSTABLE. £20 IN A MEMOIR where drugs, violence, death and HMP loom large, there’s one passage more deeply disturbing than most. During a holiday in Wales to write material for a second Libertines album, Peter Doherty tells how he and his bandmate Carl Barât argue over a girl, after which Barât attempts suicide by stabbing broken glass into his face. The next day, Doherty is blamed by management for his horrific injuries; Barât says nothing. Was Doherty responsible? This is the reader’s dilemma, and part of A Likely Lad’s irresistible allure – to peer into the fog of blurred remembrance and sift fact from fiction, reality from drug hallucination. Did Kate Moss really burn Doherty’s beloved teddy bear Pandy when they…

HELLO JANUARY 1970 I’d just done an amazing tour with P.P. Arnold and those lovely guys Ashton, Gardner And Dyke. We played with Eric Clapton and Delaney & Bonnie. That knocked us sideways, hearing a big stomping Southern rock band rehearsing in the Lyceum. So I was – I could use the word ‘desperate’ to find a good gig. I mean, I was hungry. Then I got a phone call. Chris [Squire, Yes bassist] said, “We’ve seen you play, do you want to come down and play with us?” I said, “Well, I’ve heard of you but I haven’t heard the band.” So I went to Barnes a few days later with my [Gibson ES-]175. It’s a bit hazy. We were either in a small barn, or it could have…