Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2019 in MOJO

Ian Harrison A willing victim of Sonic Attack, MOJO Associate Editor Ian was thrilled this issue to fall into an intergalactic wormhole and look back on Hawkwind’s 1973 magnum opus Space Ritual (see p50), in the company of esteemed crew members (here he is with the mighty Stacia). Kevin Westenberg Kevin is excited to be back shooting after a five-year hiatus. He's currently working to fund and create a retrospective photography book and, in conjunction with the book, is helping create a movie about a life photographing musicians and other distinct personalities for over 30 years. Corey Brickley Corey is an editorial and publishing illustrator. His work’s appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Playboy and, of course, MOJO (see p85). Lead animator for the documentary…

IN THE SPRING OF 2018, ROGER DALTREY and Pete Townshend spoke to MOJO around the release of Daltrey’s tenth solo album. Inevitably, the future of The Who was also up for discussion. Should a new Who album be forthcoming, Townshend had a radical plan: he and his singer would share the songwriting chores. “If there was tricky karma between us once,” the guitarist concluded, “it feels as though it’s been worked out.” Eighteen months later, the first Who album in 13 years is not quite what Townshend predicted. It is, in fact, a late masterpiece of “tricky karma”, in which the tensions between its two creators have been positively weaponised one more time. This month, we’ve been granted audiences with Townshend and Daltrey to uncover the story of WHO ,…

…the long-awaited JACK WHITE/JACK BLACK team up is underway, with the latter Jack (right) telling Tenacious D’s crowd at the Ascend Amphitheatre in Nashville in August, “Jack White – we went over to his house today and recorded a brand new song”… new music from HAIM is on its way, the first piece being the Walk On The Wild Side-like Summer Girl produced by Rostam atmanglij and Ariel Rechtshaid. “Some of it is raw as fuck, some of it is for the dancefloor, some of it is just us getting weird,” they’ve promised… out now is the debut EP by PLANET ENGLAND, AKA Andy Partridge and Robyn Hitchcock. “Rather than these two big planets and their similar odd gravities repulsing each other,” says Andy, “I can cheerfully tell you that…

IN THE first half of 1995, Tricky was the hottest property in British music, the Bristolian rapper, former Massive Attack associate and explorer of sonic penumbra reeling from the success of his intense and emotional debut album, Maxinquaye. As his vivid new autobiography, Hell Is Round The Corner, makes clear, it was a mad journey from the rough landscapes of Bristol’s Knowle West, where the artist born Adrian Thaws was raised in the company of uncles with violent reputations and jail terms, his first memory the body of his mother – the album’s titular Maxine Quaye – in her coffin. Fame had thrust Tricky into a spotlight he couldn’t be ready for. “I thought I was going to be an underground artist, making my own little weird music,” writes Tricky.…

WHEN I asked D. A. Pennebaker, AKA Penny, in 2013 why he’d omitted the apostrophe in “Dont” of 1967’s Dont Look Back, he said, “I got tired of everything looking like everything else. And I thought, Fuck it.” Those two simple words are the perfect epitaph for the director, a pioneer of the cinéma vérité school of film-making who emphasised naturalism and improvisation, and avoided narration, discarded rules, trusted his instincts and designed tools that accommodated his vision. “You learn the wonder of making stuff up as you go along.”D.A. PENNEBAKER He chronicled Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour in Dont Look Back, and as Dylan revolutionised music, Penny revolutionised cinema. That film, his first feature, used an improved 16mm sync sound system, a technology he helped develop that enabled him…

VOICE NANCY HOLLOWAY (below, b.1932) danced in New York before making her singing debut in Paris in 1954. After several years performing across Europe, she returned to Paris where she appeared on TV, founded her own nightclub and released yé-yé-viablack America 45s, translating songs including Don’t Make Me Over, She Loves You and Hit The Road Jack for the French market. P-FUNK artist PEDRO BELL (b.1950), dubbed a “ghetto Hieronymous Bosch”, would create comic, subversive sleeve art for such essential Funkadelic/ Parliament albums as Cosmic Slop, Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On and One Nation Under A Groove, all rendered using marker pens and acrylic paint. As Sir Lleb Of Funkadelia, he also wrote punning, language-warping sleevenotes to further enhance the music’s psychedelic cosmology. He later designed sleeves…

1 The young Judy Collins, aged five, two years after a memorable public performance, in Butte, Montana. 2 “I was very serious”: Judy at the piano, November 1952. She’d abandon it for folk guitar less than three years later. 3 “You’re ready to make a record”: Judy with Jac Holzman, founder of the Elektra label, 1975. 4 “I was just crazy about her songs”: Judy watched by Joni Mitchell, Big Sur Folk Festival, 1968. 5 Collins with (from left) Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Arlo Guthrie, performing at A Tribute To Woody Guthrie, Carnegie Hall, NYC, January 20, 1968. 6 “Hot and short”: so Collins says of her affair with Stephen Stills, here together in San Francisco, July ’68. 7 “I don’t know if this is a song”: Judy with…

“They come on-stage with nothing,” says Karl Hyde, a gasp of wonder and envy in his voice. “I first met them for these shows I did with Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House. Then I took some friends to see them live at the Village Underground [in Hackney].” He pauses. “Possibly the most astonishing gig of my life. Just piano, bass and drums and they sound like a supertanker. Chris Abrahams is a beast behind a piano, [drummer] Tony Buck was playing three different rhythms at once… the audience just started to punch the air and scream like they were at a Metallica gig. Best thing I’ve ever seen.” Surprisingly, this is not an uncommon response to seeing The Necks live for the first time. Since their formation in…

“WISH ROGER WAS HERE.” In the course of his interview with MOJO, Pete Townshend has said some remarkable things. About the time he met Donald Trump, for instance, on a US TV show where Townshend was discussing his arrest in 2003 for alleged consumption of child pornography. “He was incredibly kind to me, and understanding,” Pete recalls. “Maybe because he saw himself as a warped ally, I don’t know.” Then there’s his admission that he recently locked horns on Instagram with a fan lamenting how all the love and passion he had invested in The Who was squandered in 1983 when Townshend “went up his own arse and killed the band I love.” Townshend’s response was blunt – “We’re not a bank, you don’t invest and then get something back,…

• After Love & Hate’s success, filmmakers sought to include its tracks on their soundtracks, which in turn inspired Kiwanuka. “My songs were being ‘synced’ to things like the James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro,” Kiwanuka says. “I started to learn more about Baldwin’s life and artistry, and also really got into the work of Gordon Parks – his movies, but also his photography around the civil rights movement, his portraits of poor black families in the South. And when I started reading up on Fred Hampton ( above ) of the Black Panthers, it helped unlock the lyrics to Hero, which I’d begun a year earlier but couldn’t get any further than the chorus. But, thinking about Fred and the movement, the lyrics just poured out of…

Bantou Mentale ★★★★ Bantou Mentale GLITTERBEAT. CD/DL/LP Another new noise from Kinshasa’s underground: loud, violent and unsettling – or, as the press release describes it; the soundtrack to an African Blade Runner. Three émigrés from the Democratic Republic of Congo, plus an Irishman, Liam Farrell, whose sonic fingerprints suggest filing this next to Mbongwana Star and Les Amazones d’Afrique. Useful if, like the eponymous hero of Papa Joe, your parties involve crocodiles and dynamite. BaBa ZuLa ★★★★ Derin Derin GLITTERBEAT. CD/DL/LP Our deep dig into mysticism continues with the return, after five years, of the veteran Turkish heads who act as a link between Erkin Koray, Can and Mad Professor. They may not have the perky energy of Gaye Su Akyol, but that all-electric saz and oud frontline (plus percussion…

SCOTLAND Assai Records 33 Union Street Dundee DD1 4 BS 01382 205671 1 Grindlay Street, Edinburgh EH3 9AT 0131 228 3943 Europa Music 10 Friars Street, Stirling FK8 1HA 01786 448623 Mo Fidelity 126 Murray Street Montrose, DD10 9JG 07870 491240 NORTH WEST 81 Renshaw Street Liverpool L1 2SJ 01517071850 Action 47 Church St, Preston PR1 3DH 01772 884 772 / www. action-records.co.uk Five Rise Records 30c Park Road Bingley, West Yorks BD16 4QF 01274 512867 Grind and Groove Records 58 Cavendish Street, Keighley BD21 3RL 07483 156867 Piccadilly Records 53 Oldham St, Manchester M1 1JR 0161 839 8008 Vinyl Cafe 44 Abbey St, Carlisle CA3 8TX 01228 522845 X Records 44 Bridge St, Bolton BL1 2EG 01204 384579 TNT Records Ltd 86 Duke St Barrow in Furness Cumbria LA14…

• While J Mascis would self-produce all four albums Dinosaur Jr made under their Warners contract, he’d draft in trusted engineers – initially Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie, and then John Agnello (above), who later produced The Hold Steady, Sonic Youth and Kurt Vile. All were somewhat in awe of Mascis’s high-volume methods. As Slade noted: “J is so talented that he makes it all seem effortless. When he’d do guitar overdubs, literally all the knobs on the Marshall were turned up all the way. When he was playing you literally could not walk into the room. It’s really the key to the sound.”…

Stereolab Green Man Festival, Crickhowell, Powys THERE’S SOMETHING about the natural grandeur of the Green Man site – the way the grassy terraces sweep down to the main stage as Sugar Loaf mountain looms up beyond, like a one-off collaboration between Victorian landscape gardener Capability Brown and prog album sleeve visionary Roger Dean – which encourages an audience to keep a proper sense of perspective. Especially when savouring Saturday night shows by recently re-formed art-rock bands who peaked in the late ’90s. Just as with Super Furry Animals four years ago (and with Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, Air and The Beta Band in an imaginary future, unless the druid I bought that lucky heather off was just telling me what I wanted to hear), the feverish anticipation which precedes the advent…

GRAVE ON 2 A month after an attempt to steal the body of Elvis Presley (above) from a grave in Forest Hill Cemetery, his and his mother Gladys’s are re-interred at Graceland. CAN’T HACKETT 7 Guitarist Steve Hackett quits Genesis for a solo career after seven years. The band’s next album will be titled And Then There Were Three . PITCHER THIS 14 Linda Ronstadt sings the US national anthem at Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium at the request of the Dodgers themselves. They lose to the New York Yankees. BYE, BING 14 World-famous crooner Bing Crosby, who made 58 motion pictures and sold more than 300 million records, collapses and dies while playing golf outside Madrid, aged 73. ROSE & CONS 15 It’s reported that Warner Bros must change the…

MINDWARPING COLLECTION DESIGNED TO BE PLAYED AT maximum volume,” announced MOJO in December 2007, introducing the first volume of our CD series, Heavy Nuggets. The aim was to present a snapshot of British rock at the start of the 1970s, as psychedelia evolved into something gnarlier; where belligerence triumphed over whimsy. “Heavy music for heavy times,” we promised and, over three subsequent editions, we delivered that in spades. Now, finally, we’ve come up with the perfect line-up for a fifth volume. The roots and guiding principles are the same: aural “assault and battery on the human anatomy”, as Hawkwind would have it. But this time, we’ve expanded the frontiers of time and space to include cosmic freakouts, uncanny proto-metal, primo stoner rock and other sonic disturbances from the past five…

MOTOWN’S 60TH anniversary, first celebrated in MOJO 306, passes its halfway stage with an explosion of goodies, the highlight being Hitsville: The Making Of Motown, a documentary by Ben and Gabe Turner, the brothers behind 2016 Usain Bolt movie I Am Bolt. The supporting cast is mighty, too: a 3-CD Motown Greatest Hits , plus Marvin Gaye and Jackson 5 repackages; books – by producer/ writers Brian and Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Supreme Mary Wilson; events during a Motown 60 Weekend in Detroit in September; and, on November 28, label founder Berry Gordy ’s 90th birthday. “The music is timeless,” says Gabe Turner, “embedded in all of our lives. Songs like What’s Going On and I Heard It Through The Grapevine, any Stevie [Wonder] track and Baby Love, those…

“THERE IS A photo of me on my Instagram,” says Orville Peck. “I’m eight years old and wearing a cowboy hat and a handkerchief over my face. I was obsessed with cowboy imagery and spaghetti westerns, especially the outlaws and the bandits. The ones with something to hide.” “Country music is the perfect cross between sincerity, storytelling and camp.” ORVILLE PECK That childhood obsession is one explanation why, on a hot summer’s day, the grown-up Peck is modelling not only a Stetson and cowboy boots but also a black leather mask with long white tassels. He looks like a burlesque take on The Lone Ranger, and Peck’s debut album provides the ideal musical accompaniment to such a striking image. Pony sublimely blends torch and twang, with Peck crooning like a…

Born in New York, Larry Taylor gigged with surf rockers The Gamblers and Jerry Lee Lewis before doing sessions for The Monkees (that’s him on Last Train To Clarksville, She, and (Theme From) The Monkees). He then joined boogie rockers Canned Heat from 1967 to 1970, playing Monterey Pop and Woodstock, and scoring hit singles with On The Road Again and Going Up The Country. Spending much of the ’70s with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, in 1980 Taylor began his two-decade association with Tom Waits, playing on albums including Rain Dogs and Mule Variations. “Everything that Larry was,” said Waits in tribute, “knowing, hilarious, obstinate, short fused, direct and unflinching… is there in the dig-into-it rhythms of his playing.” As well as his other sessions for Solomon Burke, John Lee Hooker,…

THE FREEDOM SUITE Judy Collins In My Life ELEKTRA, 1966 Collins breaks the folk shackles with the help of maverick arranger Josh Rifkin (orch-pop heads need his 1965 oddity The Baroque Beatles Book), reimagining Dylan (Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues is a pastoral amble), bravely plunging into the music from the London production of Peter Weiss’s play Marat/Sade, while Brecht, Donovan and Randy Newman get seats at the table. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne is handled like silk; Dress Rehearsal Rag is a mad carousel. THE WRITER’S BLOC Judy Collins Wildflowers ELEKTRA, 1967 Collins unveils Joni Mitchell five months before the Canadian’s own debut album, 17 before Mitchell would issue her own version of Both Sides Now. Collins’ is epic (Rifkin again), revelling in Mitchell’s precocious wisdom, while Leonard Cohen provides Sisters…

HAD BIG THIEF’S SINGER, SONGWRITER and sole female Adrianne Lenker been a more pliable daughter, she could have rivalled Taylor Swift. In 2006, when the 16-year-old Swift released her debut album, AdriAnne (as she was then styled) Lenker, aged only 15, released hers, Stages Of The Sun. And that is where their trajectories diverge. At the age of 16, Adrianne broke with her tiger father John who had invested everything in his talented daughter. She had her own way to go. Twelve years later – with Stages Of The Sun and an even more obscure teenage live album airbrushed from the official record – she has released two adult solo albums, two duo EPs, and formed around her voice and songs one of the hottest outfits in the indie firmament,…

BORN RICHARD Michael Davies, DikMik was a key member of the early Hawkwind line-up – perhaps the key member. “I think he was the sound of Hawkwind,” says Nik Turner. Certainly, the ghostly, atonal whooshes, wails and laser fire he produced with his ‘audio generator’ – primitive signal testing equipment and an oscillator fed through an echo unit and various pedals – were absolutely integral in making Hawkwind the world’s pre-eminent space age rock band, their stun guitar riffs and cosmic sax backed by the alien noise of intergalactic machinery. Whereas other groups used early electronic keyboards such as the Minimoog to add sub-classical trills to their music, DikMik’s frequency wrangling brought an elemental chaos to Hawkwind’s sound, and became notorious for the physical effect it had on audiences. Speaking…

THE ROAD FROM NORTHERN CALIFORNIA’S inland airport hub at Santa Rosa towards Mendocino on the coast is as uneventful as the weather on the day MOJO takes the wheel. But after 17 miles of freeway to Geyserville, Route 128 forks northwest through broad valleys before a dark corridor of redwoods at Navarro and a steady ascent to hit the Pacific on Highway 1, triggers a sensation of euphoria and escape. Eight miles further on is Mendocino, less of a town than a community, tucked away on the headland, all weathered wooden Victoriana and abundant flora. Stringent planning laws have ensured the layout and population – currently 894 – has barely changed since Gene Clark moved here in 1970. Born in Tipton, Missouri and raised in impoverished rural Kansas the eldest…

“WE KIND of grew up in that neighbourhood [Grenfell Tower, a block of flats in west London’s North Kensington area, burned down on June 14, 2017, killing 72 residents; questions about negligence with regard to fire regulations led to the resignation of the local council’s leader and chief executive and further examination of culpability and causes]. I knew people that lived in the building next door to Grenfell, and my housekeeper Susanna knew five families who lived in the building, people I was able to help directly. So I felt very involved. “WHEN WE DID THE CHARITY SINGLE, ROGER SAID, ‘IT’S OUR MANOR, WE SHOULD DO THIS.’” When we did the charity single [Artists For Grenfell, Bridge Over Troubled Water], Roger said, ‘It’s our manor, we should do this.’ Nothing…

YOU HEAR THE WHO’S LEAD SINGER BEFORE you see him. Roger Daltrey’s booming voice announces his arrival at London’s Durrants Hotel. It’s like a whirlwind has blown in. Back in his acting days, he’d have made a great Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist (“More! You want more ?”). “Sorry I’m so loud, I’m a bit Mutt and Jeff,” he says later, deploying the Cockney rhyming slang for ‘deaf ’. “I’m probably too noisy for this place.” Ushered into a private room, a waiter brings him a pot of tea and a china cup and saucer. Daltrey pours himself a brew. MOJO had him down as a strong builder’s tea kind of guy, but the resultant beverage is disappointingly milky. With his plume of grey-blond hair, slim-fit T-shirt and rich bloke’s…

Love & Hate sprang from a crisis of confidence. Did Kiwanuka come from a less traumatic place? “I definitely went into this one with more of a confidence in who I am and what my place in music is – I felt more comfortable in myself and what I’m trying to do as an artist. There wasn’t the self-doubt. The response Love & Hate got taught me to trust in myself a little more, to focus on my creativity, to express who I am – that’s the anchor.” The songs are threaded together with interstitial tracks, which include voices from the civil rights movements and the “sit-ins” of the ’60s… “I wanted there to be no gaps between the songs, for it to be filled with music or ideas the…

Jas Shaw ★★★★ Exquisite Cops DELICACIES. CD/DL/LP Following a cancer diagnosis last year, Jas Shaw, one half of indie dance groovers-turnedtechno nihilists Simian Mobile Disco, embarked on some musical housekeeping. Jettisoning or fleshing out unfinished tracks as necessary, this highlights selection barrels from face-melting neo-trance (Popes Of Dischord) to Merely Bathing, an 8-bit/slow acid hybrid that’s always on the cusp of destructive implosion. Special Request ★★★★ Offworld HOUNDSTOOTH. CD/DL/LP As Special Request, Paul Woolford has shown a remorseless work ethic that could creatively liquidate other producers. Offworld, his third album in almost as many months, is a vivid tableau of late-’80s-inspired wistful house and dream-like electro jams. Punchy bass stabs and twinkling pads abound, but Woolford’s deft hand never allows it to boil over into pastiche. Lindstrøm ★★★★ On A…

31 High Street Stroud GL5 1AJ 07984 146359 Sound Records only opened in March 2018 but has already carved out a reputation for securing records beyond the norm. They have a particular interest in Latin, African and Jazz records as well as stocking both new and second hand rock, soul, reggae and indie. Proprietors Sean and Tom spend much of their week securing unusual stock which has already led to a loyal following from those who have visited. They also host events and had the Orb in town to play their first birthday party. Being one of three record shops within a 3 mile radius they are keen to have a unique proposition and so far it seems to be paying off.…

Prefab Sprout Four Albums Remastered SONY LEGACY. PADDY MCALOON loves pop, but on these records didn’t so much embrace it as stalk it. Unable to be mindlessly commercial, he served bewildering bonbons of mustard and butterscotch with high-precision ’80s production values, all glassy bell synths, smacking snares and limpid singing. On Swoon he came on both bold and awkward, like he was chatting you up while wearing a scratchy cardigan. Cursed with a million ideas, he might attempt to cram a few thousand into one song. By From Langley Park To Memphis he’d found his happy place – T.S. Eliot set to the swaggery gloss of Michael Jackson – and had actual hits. By Jordan The Comeback McAloon is ascending to heaven maddened with unrequited something-or-other. His songs can be…

THERE’S A GOOD argument to be had that if itinerant tribesmen in the Sahara had never thought to bend the strings on whatever instrument they played to get them through the long days in the desert, you wouldn’t be reading this magazine. Even in western Africa, the technique was never universal, which (coupled with enforced migration, of course) goes some way to explaining why the early development of the blues is associated with one corner of the Americas… and why so many referenced John Lee Hooker when they first heard Mali’s Ali Farka Touré. Those desert blues, that feeling known as “assouf”, those circular rhythms, that tempo set to a camel’s walk, they had a baby and they named it, well, “the blues”. But it took a good half century…

• During a Blue Note session, Miles Davis asked Wayne Shorter, “Do you ever get tired of playing music that sounds like music?” • There was a simple way to tell if a Blue Note session had gone well. “If you played and [Francis Wolff] was dancing,” says Herbie Hancock, “that was the take. If Frank wasn’t dancing, that was not the take.” • Wayne Shorter’s famously eerie Masqualero was inspired by the elaborate masks worn by the southwestern Native American tribe: “When defending their land they seemed to come out of nowhere and then recede into nowhere, so the bass line was written to create some kind of mystery. It’s my way of shining a light on something that really happened in American history.”…

Which rock movie was the first to have a soundtrack long-player released? Ken Cooper, via e-mail Fred Says: The first rock movie to gain a dedicated soundtrack album release was Rock, Rock, Rock! issued on Chess in December 1956, with songs by Chuck Berry, The Moonglows and The Flamingos (all hailed by advertising blurbs as “The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Music, played by Biggest Rock’n’Roll Groups This Side Of Heaven”!). In truth, only four of the album’s 12 tracks actually appeared in the Sam Katzman-directed film, setting a pattern for many soundtracks to follow. The first rock OST to enter the Cashbox Top 20 was the following year’s Rock, Pretty Baby, credited to Jimmy Daley And The Ding-A-Lings. The field was then open for the OSTs of such admirable movies as American…

Amy Taylor AMYL SNIFFIN’ BOOT-GIRL What music are you currently grooving to? I’m gonna promo a bunch of Aussie bands I like, ha ha! Pinch Points, Miniskirt, Nasho, Peter Bibby, Vertigo, Parsnip, C.O.F.F.I.N. Tkay Maidza is so sick too. Out of Aus, I’ve been frothing Skepta, Mr Traumatik and Peckerhead lately. JPEGMafia’s new song is banging too. And X-Ray Spex’s Germfree Adolescents is always a classic. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? It’s hard to pick an all-time favourite because then I’d have to pick a favourite genre and I don’t wanna. Sleaford Mods? I just can’t choose. Invasion Of Privacy by Cardi B? What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? My first one, I think it was…

• Hitsville: The Making Of Motown is in UK and Irish cinemas on Monday, September 30. A soundtrack LP is out on September 27. • Motown Greatest Hits in 3-CD and 2-LP forms is out now. • Supreme Glamour (Thames & Hudson) is also out now. • How Sweet It Is: A Songwriter’s Reflections On Music, Motown And The Mystery Of The Muse By Lamont Dozier With Scott Bomar (BMG) is out on October 22. • Come And Get These Memories: The Genius Of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Motown’s Incomparable Songwriters By Brian And Eddie Holland With Dave Thompson (Omnibus) is out on October 10.…

1 RACHAEL DADD CUT MY ROOTS This Is The Kit-aligned singer-songwriter with a similar gift for vocal melodies and proggy-folk virtuosity brings warm tones and lyrics hinting at turbulence. From her LP Flux. Find it: streaming services 2 WILLIAM DOYLE DESIGN GUIDE Eno joins the former East India Youth for an electric-bucolic examination of English suburbia. From new LP Your Wilderness Revisited. Find it: streaming services 3 WALRUS COOL TO WHO Nova Scotia neo-psych from the home of Besnard Lakes, in the mould of Scottish bands De Rosa or The Delgados. Find it: streaming services 4 SHAKESPEARS SISTER WITH RICHARD HAWLEY WHEN SHE FINDS YOU Transatlantic pop duo recruit Hawley as the third person in their retro-electro nervy psychodrama. From new EP,…

AS JUDY COLLINS THUMBS THE YELLOWED pages of Sing Out! magazine, the blue eyes hymned by Crosby, Stills & Nash light up. It’s an edition from the very end of 1960, with Lightnin’ Hopkins on the cover; MOJO brought it along today in case it brought back memories of what she calls The Great Folk Scare. “I’m sure it was in Sing Out! that I saw the words to Blowin’ In The Wind,” she reflects. “I thought, That guy wrote this ?” A professional folk singer since the late-’50s, having turned her back on classical piano, Collins first met Bob Dylan at the Gilded Garter in Central City, Colorado. She wasn’t impressed: “Badly chosen Woody Guthrie songs, badly sung.” By mid-’62, relocated to New York, she was married with a…

Michael hurley & Pals armchair Boogie Warner Bros, 1971  By one of the Greenwich Village folk scene’s great eccentrics. Big Thief especially dig the song Open Up. “It’s both a perfect country song yet at the same time so psychedelic,” says Meek. “It’s essentially American, rooted in the freewheeling yet so far out. It’s essentially about making love in space.” siBylle Baier colour Green Orange Twin, 2006  Meek: “She was a German housewife who sang these incredible songs into a tape machine in the early ’70s when her husband was at work, like her therapy, processing her life and sexuality in a private way with no pretence.” Her music – used in Jochen Richter’s 1975 movie, Umarmungen Und Andere Sachen – was not released until 2006. Fleetwood Mac tusk Warner…

(Liberty, 1970) The pre-eminent jam band of the Portobello Road freak scene, Hawkwind debuted live in the studio with The Pretty Things’ Dick Taylor at the controls. The acoustic strum of Hurry On Sundown is the pop end of an experimental set, the claustrophobic wig-out of Seeing It As You Really Are pointing the way to the band’s future sound. (United Artists, 1971) Housed in an interlocking fold-out sleeve designed by Barney Bubbles, Hawk-wind’s second album solidified their sonic and visual aesthetics. Heavy repetitions throbbed through monolithic opener You Shouldn’t Do That, while Master Of The Universe provided Dave Brock’s men with a timeless crowd-pleaser. (United Artists, 1972) The sleevenote to Hawkwind’s third album promised a collection of “ritualistic space chants, battle hymns and stellar songs of praise”, and the…

ONE OF THE most flummoxing aspects of No Other was its somewhat camp sleeve art. Clark asked Philip O’Leno’s wife Ea, a hairdresser whose clients had included Jimi Hendrix and a dab hand at artful collages, to design it. “Gene didn’t give Ea any brief,” says O’Leno. “She just gathered whatever was at hand, and started cutting and arranging.” The result resembled a tribute to Art Nouveau and flapper-era jazz more than Cosmic Americana. More surprising still was Clark’s image on the back cover and inner gatefold, wearing make-up, billowing pantaloons and blouse. “His ‘David Bowie face’, Gene called it,” O’Leno says. “Our friend owned a boutique, the Pleasuredome, and Ea and Carlie got the idea of dressing Gene up. He didn’t take much persuasion. I think it was partially…

IN NOVEMBER 1979, Phil Daniels’s Jimmy Cooper rode the Ace Face’s Vespa off the cliff-top at Beachy Head and into film history. Forty years later, Quadrophenia – with its iconic scenes of Mods running riot in Brighton, Jimmy and Steph’s knee-trembler in a back alleyway and, ultimately, our teenage anti-hero’s mental disintegration – is rightly toasting its reputation as a Brit movie classic and street-fashion touchstone. But -its loose translation of the story behind The Who’s 1973 concept album was by no means assured of success on its release. “It shouldn’t have worked, really,” muses actor Mark Wingett, one of many Quadrophenia cast and crew members participating in the anniversary celebrations, including a filmed on-stage read-through of the original script (Reunited 40 Years On) and a ‘making of’ Sky Arts…

“It’s heavy stuff but Kiwanuka’s inspired touch transcends the gloom.” Michael Kiwanuka ★★★★ Kiwanuka POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP ICHAEL KIWANUKA’s last release, 2016’s M Love & Hate , was a textbook ‘difficult’ second album, recorded while the north London singer-songwriter weathered a perilous crisis of confidence. This dark night of the soul marked the first speed-bump in a career that had only gathered velocity as Kiwanuka graduated from releasing demos on MySpace, to cutting low-key EPs on Ben ‘Mumford & Sons’ Lovett’s Communion record label, to accruing Mercury and BRIT nominations with his debut full-length, 2012’s Home Again . But as his first album mopped up the plaudits, Kiwanuka contracted a debilitating dose of Imposter’s Syndrome, provoked in part by a disorientating, unsatisfying collaboration with Kanye West that left him feeling “out…

Mudhoney Morning In America SUB-POP. DL/EP The title of Mudhoney’s new 7-track EP references the 1984 television commercial that spearheaded President Reagan’s re-election campaign, the gist of which was that no one in their right mind would seek a return to the pre-Ron dark ages. As the US gears up for Trump pulling a similar stunt in 2020, Seattle’s original grungesters’ state of the nation address is full of pith and vitriol. “Fight back, stand up tall/Kick ’em square in their tubular balls,” urges Mark Arm, at his caustic best on opener Vortex Of Lies. These songs date from 2018’s Digital Garbage sessions, and give or take a few blunt-instrument lyrics, that record’s enraged posture is staunchly upheld. The title track’s queasy grind boasts a fine sustain solo from Steve…

Dinosaur Jr Warner Bros albums 1991-1997 CHERRY RED. CD/DL/LP “The slacker king may have actually been a control freak, à la Prince.” AS THE key bridging act between late-’80s post-hardcore and early-’90s grunge, Dinosaur Jr were rightly fêted in their day, if never commercially garlanded, nor aptly appreciated in the long run. In June 1993, four months after the release of Where You Been ★★★★★ – the pick of this quartet of reissues from the band’s 1991-97 tenure at Warner Bros – their ever-withdrawn leader graced the front of US alternative rock mag Spin with the cover-line: “J Mascis Is God”. Son of a dentist from affluent Massachusetts, Joseph Donald Mascis was Douglas Coupland’s Generation X incarnate: with his drawling air of stoner detachment, he was often cast as the…

Ambolley ★★★ Ambolley MR BONGO. CD/DL/LP Crazily rare ’82 highlife-disco sounds from the veteran Ghanaian bandleader: in parts the mood is blue and brooding, elsewhere the band operates as a living entity of the groove, like the Blockheads cutting lose on the back streets of Accra. IH The Lightning Seeds ★★★ Jollification SONY MUSIC. DL/LP This 25th birthday vinyl remaster of Ian Broudie’s once-inescapable 1994 opus adds bonus 7-inch with a swirling cover of Pink Floyd’s Lucifer Sam. Superbright ’60s hooks and of-its-time eagerness belie a m lancholy, epitomised by Terry Hall-assisted Lucky You. DE Various ★★★★ 2-Tone 7” Treasures 2-TONE/CHRYSALIS. 7-INCH Celebrating 40 years of 2-Tone, a dozen facsimile 45s from the glorious punk-reggae ska revival. Mainly, it’s The Specials’ show (Gangsters, Stereotype and Ghost Town – mindblowing!), but…

The music is base camp, for real understanding you need to head into the desert. Failing that, opt for the cinematic experience: begin with Johanna Schwartz’s 2015 documentary They Will Have To Kill Us First, featuring Songhoy Blues, Tartit and – how could she not make the Top 10? – Khaira Arby. The struggle against Islamists is elegantly set out in Abderrahmane Sissako’s acclaimed 2014 feature Timbuktu; Lionel Brouet’s Festival In The Desert, meanwhile, captures Ali Farka Touré, Oumou Sangare, Robert Plant et al at the famous 2003 gathering in Essakane. From 2001, Jacques Sarasin’s Boubacar Traoré biopic-cum-weepie I’ll Sing For You is an astonishing treat for the eyes.…

Year Of The Monkey  ★★★★ Patti Smith BLOOMSBURY. £12.99 DECEMBER 29, 2015: Patti Smith is back at the Fillmore in San Francisco and ready to hit the stage. Whenever she’s in town, old friend Sandy Pearlman always turns up, watching from behind a curtain clutching a glass of ginger ale. But this particular year, Patti was obliged to do the visiting. Sandy had suffered a brain haemorrhage the day before the show and lay in a coma in a Marin County hospital bed. Smith knew the only course of action. “We plunged into the first of three nights of feedback, poetry, improvisational rants, politics, and rock’n’roll, with a relentlessness that left me breathless,” she writes, “as if we could sonically wake him up.” A firm believer in the power of…

HELLO DECEMBER 31, 1979 We were at a party in Cork. I’d been transplanted from Luton, I was working at this food factory, Swissco, where we made ravioli and lasagne in tins, and airline food. Cathal [Coughlan, singer] was at college. Back then, in the provinces, or in Ireland, the hippy thing hadn’t ended and you got a lot of heads. We were the only two people there who were vaguely not hippyish, and we fell into conversation and started to talk about music, The Pop Group, Scritti Politti, The Residents, things like that. We quickly decided to meet with words and very, very rash, rudimentary guitar ideas. I could play in those days but I didn’t really have any formed ideas, and Cathal, who was a very literary man,…