Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2020 in MOJO

James McNair James McNair has been a contributor to MOJO since 1994. Born in Glasgow, he moved to London in 1984 in search of the rock’n’roll dream. He didn’t find it. He now lives in Whitley Bay, where he is The Buddha Of Coastal Living. This month he channels The Black Crowes’ Steve Gorman on page 52. Mike Barnes Mike Barnes’s book A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s is published by Omnibus in February, and on page 68 he chronicles the mid-decade difficulties facing some of prog’s big hitters and surveys the outerwear of their fans. He also enjoyed an audience with The Chocolate Watch Band’s Dave Aguilar (see page 130). Kevin McGivern Kevin is a professional illustrator from Glasgow, Scotland. Working primarily in portraiture, he…

ON THE FACE OF IT, THERE CAN BE FEW bands more different than Joy Division and Genesis. The first helped usher in a new era of spare aesthetics and emotional literacy; the second, all rococo complexity, epitomised the decadence that punk and post-punk were programmed to destroy. This month, though, MOJO finds an unlikely congruity between these contrasting musical giants. Forty years on from the completion of Closer , Stephen Morris remembers Joy Division listening back to their album for the first time. “We thought it was a fucking disaster,” admits Morris, with the rueful candour that makes his and his bandmates’ recollections so powerful. He recalls the snap judgment of Annik Honoré, companion of Ian Curtis. “It sounds,” she said, “like Genesis.” In 1980 Genesis were, to many, the…

Various Death & Horror (BBC, 1977) An old chestnut from the BBC Sound Effects series, with nutty titles such as Sawing Leg Off, Three Men Screaming, and The Mad Gorilla – great for giving your mum a fright, at full volume. See others in the series like More Death & Horror and Even More Death & Horror. Michael Siegel Sounds Of The Office (FOLKWAYS, 1963) From the ‘urban field recording’ file: office noises of clocking in, typing, coffee breaks, dictation and so on, from 57 years ago. Try blowing fag smoke over yourself for an added true-to-life smell aspect. Siegel also did The Sounds Of The Junk Yard. Philip Corner Coldwater Basin (ALGA MARGHEN, 2011) One for the real heads – “a home recording of water running from a faucet…

1 SWAMP DOGG SLEEPING WITHOUT YOU IS A DRAGG With Jenny Lewis on BVs, Swamp gets tender on this cut from new country-soul LP Sorry You Couldn’t Make It. “I’m in good shape for a 77-year-old motherfucker,” he assures MOJO. Find it: streaming services 2 SHANNON LAY BLUE LA singer’s languid folk-blues for Sub Pop’s Singles Club. “I will love you ’til my hair turns blue,” she promises. Find it: YouTube 3 NEIL INNES JUST ANOTHER STORY From the late Bonzo/Rutle’s TV show in 1980: Beatlesque voice and strings tell of the unbearable sadness of being. Visuals add Vim-under-the-sink, J. Alfred Prufrock vibes. Find it: YouTube 4 THE STROKES ODE TO THE METS Live in Brooklyn on NYE, Casablancas and co prove…

JOHN PRINE IS DEEP IN THOUGHT, DISCUSSING the craft of songwriting, when suddenly his gaze is diverted to the big bay windows of his dining room. His eyes suddenly widen with excitement. “It’s starting to snow,” he says, his voice rising. “Hey Fi! It’s snowing!” It’s the start of the holiday season, and Christmas-loving Prine is holding court in his Georgian-style manor in this quiet south Nashville neighbourhood. The singer and his manager wife Fiona moved here a couple of years ago, in part because their old house had become a stop on a country music celebrity bus tour. “You’d be carrying out your garbage and there’s people taking pictures with flash bulbs,” chuckles Prine. “Very glamorous.” In a black sweater and slacks, with prodigious cheeks and twinkling eyes, Prine…

1. Sex (Spiral Scratch, 1989) Where it all begins, and still their most successful album: imagine the Bill Evans Trio stretched to a radical new place, without losing an iota of their elegance. See also 2003’s Drive By, for similar late-night, cool jazz vibes. 2. Next (Spiral Scratch, 1990) In a deep, varied discography, The Necks’ most eclectic album, as the nascent band experiment with possible futures. Includes the title track’s pedal steel-augmented, Talking Heads- adjacent punk-funk and the Kind Of Blue-tinged The World At War, the only Necks track to feature a horn section. 3. towNSville (Fish Of Milk/ReR Megacorp, 2007) The most recent of The Necks’ four live albums, recorded in Thuringowa City, Northern Queensland. Proof of how their discussion-free, entirely spontaneous methods can result in startlingly coherent…

(Def American, 1990) The Aerosmith influence punches through on this debut, as a big, dry George Drakoulias sound grounds it in turn-of-the-’90s hard rock. Taut where its successor would be more freewheeling, full of party-starting riffs but also the tingling gospel-folk of She Talks To Angels – early proof of their soul and range. DE (Def American, 1992) Enter Marc Ford – the Crowes’ Mick Taylor – on the best batch of songs the Robinsons wrote. Hotel Illness rolls as it rocks. Thorn In My Pride is a skinny dip in the Tennessee river at Muscle Shoals. Chris Robinson sings like a ragged angel. What Primal Scream dream they sound like. DE (American, 1994)  How to transcend Southern Harmony? By doubling down on the jams and the boogie, and spiking…

IN THE ’70s there was a distinct feminisation of men’s fashion and while progressive rock fans were predominantly male teenagers, it was cool to look a bit “fem”. And what better way to achieve that look than a unisex Afghan coat? You could pick these up from the small ads in the NME for £14.95 in 1975 – the equivalent of around £125 in 2019. But while the coats always smelt on the earthy side, cheaper examples made of less well-cured leather could really reek. “I can’t decide what it was that attracted me to my Afghan coat,” says Norwich head Richard Ball. “I’d seen other people wearing them, in photographs or on telly, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d want one. However, one day I popped into…

JULY 20, 1976: Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook attend Sex Pistols gig at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall MAY 29, 1977: Warsaw – featuring Sumner (guitar), Hook (bass), Ian Curtis (vocals), Tony Tabac (drums) – debut at Electric Circus, supporting Buzzcocks. JULY 18, 1977: Warsaw demo tracks at Pennine Sound Studios, Oldham. DECEMBER, 1977: the group, now featuring Stephen Morris on drums, record An Ideal For Living EP. JANUARY 25, 1978: First show as Joy Division at Pips Disco, Manchester. JUNE 3, 1978: An Ideal For Living EP released on Enigma. SEPTEMBER 1978: Joy Division play Shadowplay on Granada TV’s Granada Reports, co-hosted by Tony Wilson. OCTOBER 11,1978: JD record two songs with producer Martin Hannett at Cargo, Rochdale for A Factory Sample. DECEMBER 27, 1978: Curtis suffers his first…

Rich Ruth ★★★★ Calming Signals GENERAL GENERAL/PLANT LIFE. DL/LP Following a gunpoint car-jacking outside his Nashville home, Tennessee ambient composer Rich Ruth channelled his anxieties into this genre-hugging union of Ingram Marshall drones, spiritual noir sax, backwards guitar and small-kit jazz drumming. Named after dogs’ ability to self-pacify, this is deeply nutritious Fourth World soul food. Espen Sommer Eide ★★★ The Waves SOFA MUSIC. CD/DL/LP Recorded by the Rune Grammofon alumnus over 12 months in Maastricht’s famous Marres family villa (before being installed in the house as “an experimental spatial album”), The Waves is a haunting collage of field recordings, electro-acoustic wanderings, kosmische miniatures and near-tactile sonic experiments. House music where the house is the studio, instrument, audience and venue. Zachary Hay ★★★★ Zachary Hay SCISSOR TAIL. DL/LP Recording as…

Paul Weller In Another Room GHOST BOX. 7-INCH A DECADE or so ago, the idea of Paul Weller releasing an EP of eerie musique concrète might have seemed fantastical, yet post-2010 LPs such as Sonik Kicks and Saturns Pattern have acclimatised fans to the Modfather’s increasingly experimental mindset, here reaching an apogee on four instrumentals: In Another Room, Submerge, Embarkation, Rejoice. Pieced together from spectral piano parts, white noise, doomy ‘dongs’, faraway voices and field recordings of birdsong and running water, they fit the Ghost Box label’s rubric of “hauntology” impeccably. Elements of these tracks, described by Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp as “like a late Beatles studio experiment”, can also be heard on Weller’s new, as-yet-untitled album, due in summer 2020, most discernibly in its epic opening track, Mirror Ball.…

“In a snapshot taken by the mother of another singer, Williams looks barely there, a dandy in white with a cold blank stare. Life’s other side is written all over his face.” Hank Williams ★★★★ Pictures From Life’s Other Side BMG. CD/DL WHEN HANK WILLIAMS quietly expired in the back seat of his 1952 baby-blue Cadillac in the early hours of January 1, 1953 – during a long, frigid drive from his home in Montgomery, Alabama to a New Year’s Day show in Canton, Ohio – the singer was 29 years old and country music’s biggest star. Of Williams’ 37 singles for the MGM label, starting with his saucy hillbilly blues Move It On Over in June 1947, all but six went into the Top 10 of Billboard’s so-called Folk…

Big Star ★★★★ Radio City CRAFT. LP From ’74, the Memphis shouldhave-beens’ second is hailed as holy writ for powerpop, but these super-melodious, jangling-yet-barbed songs of despair and disturbance aren’t that simple. 1972’s Radio City is also out on 180g, analogue-mastered black plastic again. IH El-P ★★★ I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP Company Flow founder’s second solo album from 2007. With sci-fi sound effects, sharp diction and guests of the day including Trent Reznor, Cat Power, The Mars Volta and Matt Sweeney, highlights such as EMG and Habeas Corpses still sound progressive, ambitious. CP Cat Stevens ★★★ Back To Earth BMG. CD/DL Deluxe box of 1978’s farewell to stardom, a still-relevant ecological/humanitarian crisis theme framing Stevens’ plaintive, questioning songwriting. Countless extras: two strong album cast-offs; ’79’s UNICEF…

“Truth is, I enjoyed being a fool.”ETTA JAMES FOR SOME, the cliché of great art being hewn from life’s hard knocks runs very close to hard fact. Thus Etta James, an expressive and truth-telling interpreter of blues, soul, R&B, jazz, rock’n’roll and gospel, her work from the ’50s to the ’90s forming a largely consistent catalogue of a singer using her life experiences to burnish the grooves. Abusive relationships and heroin addiction were a shadow behind her most glowing performances of the ’50s ’60s and ’70s. “Tina [Turner] reminded me of Aretha, we were all going through similar hell with men,” Etta wrote in Rage To Survive, her 1995 memoir with David Ritz. “If there was an understanding, it was silent, hidden in a secret part of ourselves we were…

DOUGH YEAH  7 Barrett Strong (above)’s Money (That’s What I Want) enters the US Hot 100. It becomes a staple of UK Beat bands, with covers by The Beatles, The Searchers and many more. THEY’RE WALKIN’  8 The Hollywood Walk of Fame is dedicated on Hollywood Boulevard. Among the musical talent later honoured are Aretha Franklin, Fats Domino, Hank Williams, James Brown, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Spike Jones, Leiber & Stoller and Johnnie Ray. KING PROMOTED  11 Elvis Presley receives his full sergeant’s stripes and throws a party to celebrate. He’s due to be released from the army on March 5, when he’ll get a cheque for $109.54. 33s BEAT 45s  15 Album LP sales exceed those of singles. In the previous December, LPs sold over six million while singles…

FORTY YEARS ON FROM ATMOSPHERE, LOVE WILL TEAR Us Apart and Closer, it seems as if ominous, ferocious, emotionally brittle music, of a kind inspired by Joy Division, is having a moment again. This month’s meticulously-compiled MOJO CD showcases the post-punk class of 2020, 15 bands who have consciously or unconsciously absorbed the harsh lessons of Ian Curtis, his bandmates and their equally uncompromising contemporaries. A couple of those Joy Division peers turn up on Atmospheres: Factory labelmates A Certain Ratio, still pursuing their bony, abrasive take on funk, four decades down the line; the similarly resilient Wire, whose enduringly radical grasp of punk’s potential also continues to pay dividends. But the bulk of these artists were born a decade or two after Joy Division’s time - inheritors of a…

“I’d throw some paint on the wall, try a few different colours…”GREGORY PORTER “NAT KING Cole was an important part of my story which I had to tell,” Gregory Porter explains of 2017’s covers set Nat ‘King’ Cole And Me. “But this album is me coming back home to the energy and vibe of [2013’s Grammy winning] Liquid Spirit and even records before that, like [2012’s] Be Good. It’s a total expression of me, of who I am.” The songs MOJO heard from his sixth album bear witness: the intimate ballads If Love Is Overrated and Concorde, the rousing unity call of You Can Join My Band, and the redemptive high-on-hope Revival are model Porter, carrying messages of subtle protest and love over melodious grooves that bridge gospel, jazz and…

“The country-punk thing… turned into my least favourite kind of music.”MARIA McKEE TEEN FRONTPERSON with Lone Justice-turned-genre-fluid solo artist, the “passionate, quixotic, emotionally driven” Maria McKee, who divides her life equally between homes in London and Los Angeles, has been many things, through many stages and remains unashamedly freewheeling and spontaneous. Just before marrying in 1996, she released the bruising, brilliant but misunderstood Life Is Sweet , an album that “smashed up my Americana brand” and ended her career as a major label artist. Subsequent releases, though decent, she considers “somewhat phoned-in” and her last solo album was 13 years ago. However, the recent realisation that she would never have a child of her own, sparked a creative explosion – “I opened Pandora’s Box” – and a wholesale re-evaluation of…

1 “Whe I got the orders [to go to] Germany I was really happy”: Prine in uniform in 1967 reflects on escaping a tour of duty in Vietnam. 2 Play me those backyard blues: John in 1968 with his father William Prine and his brother Dave. 3 How lucky can one man get: Prine (right) with seated Sam Phillips. “My voice sounded so awful he thought he’d stick around and see if he could fix it.” 4 Jukebox jokers: Prine (right) with Steve Goodman. Kris Kristofferson said, “I’m gonna put you guys up on stage.” 5 On-stage with Kristofferson, Bonnaroo Festival, Nashville, June 2010. 6 Winner’s enclosure: Prine with his Best Contemporary Folk Album Grammy in 1992 for The Missing Years. 7 A way with words: Prine receives the PEN…

The Young Mod’s Forgotten Story (Curtom, 1969) After the excellent This Is My Country, Mayfield maintained the standard on an album featuring arrangements by new protege Donny Hathaway, enduring ‘message’ songs (Choice Of Colors, Mighty Mighty (Spade & Whitey)) and typically deft ballads (My Deceiving Heart, Seven Years). The Baby Huey Story: The Living Legend (Curtom, 1971) Posthumously released debut LP, The Living Legend memorialises James Thomas Ramey AKA Baby Huey via seven tracks, notably a much- sampled version of Mayfield’s Hard Times, an expansive cover of California Dreamin’ and a dramatic take on Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come. He died at just 26 after a heart attack. The Man! (Curtom, 1974) After almost three years as Curtis’s replacement in The Impressions, Hutson, who co-wrote The Ghetto with…

Mike D: We had probably some of our best times making our first album – going to clubs and then back into the studio at 2am, hanging out with Rick Rubin. There is no great, grand plan in hip-hop – it’s about just making the statement of the moment. Bill Adler: It’s not like that attention they received for the first album hurt them. I think Russell [Simmons, Def Jam co-founder] saw it as exactly the sort of ruckus you want to raise – to be attacked by the Fleet Street newspapers was perfect. You want them to hate you because they’re so hateful themselves. [But it] wasn’t much fun for Ad-Rock to be put in jail and have punk rockers throwing beer bottles at him [on May 30 1987,…

“YOU HAD THE looming Thatcher thing creating this consumerist-stroke-fascist society,” said director Malcolm Whitehead in Grant Gee and Jon Savage’s 2007 documentary Joy Division. “Then we cut to, if you like, the underground feel of the rehearsal rooms… That was the idea to get across: that this was a resistance, through art and culture.” He was discussing his 17-minute document from 1979, The Joy Division Film. Celebrated for its Super 8 footage of She’s Lost Control, Shadowplay and Leaders Of Men live at the Bowdon Vale Club in south Manchester on March 14, 1979, it also collaged interview material with authoritarian Manchester Chief Constable James Anderton, an audio sample from Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies and scenes of Manchester’s urban decay. After showings in London and Berlin, the film quickly disappeared from…

“He holds the parting note of Colouour for a showstopping 11 bars, and finishes with a sigh, marvelling at his own lung capacity.” Moses Sumney ★★★★ græ (Part One) JAGJAGUWAR. CD/DL/LP OFTEN, THE best albums invite the listener into the fully-realised dreamworlds of their creators. For California-born Moses Sumney, this process of imaginative block-building began between the ages of 10 and 16, as he doodled songs during reveries on a school bus in Ghana as an alienated, culturally-disconnected soul temporarily transplanted to his parents’ native land. By 20, he was in Los Angeles, haunting the coffee bar gig scene with his elastic, octave-vaulting voice, and capturing the spooked, gauzy sounds of his debut, 2014 EP Mid-City Island, using a 4-track borrowed from TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek. On that…

Robert Glasper ★★★ Fuck Yo Feelings LOMA VISTA. CD/LP In stark contrast to the careful calibrations of 2016’s ArtScience, Robert Glasper’s latest is a deliberately free-form two-day studio session with a clutch of starry guests, including Yasiin Bey. While his spacey keyboard constructs connect with backing neo-soul singers Yebba, Audra Day and Baby Rose, the otherwise sprawling results of this agreeably mellow mess cry out for a more ruthless editor. CP Unit ★★★★ One Foot On The Ground Smoking Mirror Shakedown RAMP LOCAL. CD/DL The sounds summoned from the depths by saxophonist/ composer Chris Pitsiokos’s uncompromising quartet are not for the fainthearted – a mind-frying amalgam of musique concrète, Captain Beefheart and Ornette Coleman’s harmolodic funk. While Pitsiokos gives his guitar-bass-drums accomplices plenty of free rein, it’s his fevered bipolar…

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 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 1RD 07428171256 Wax at Moorgate 643, Chesterfield Road,Sheffield S8 0RY 01142 275 6048…

Shina Williams & His Africa Percussions ★★★★ Shina Williams MR BONGO. LP  The reissue of Emmanuel Adeshina Williams’s dynamic African Dances was one of 2018’s highlights. Now here comes its 1980 follow-up. It’s built around a pair of grooves – there are six named tracks but separated by solos, and seguing reduces them to two, each weighing in around 16 minutes. What it lacks in fire, it makes up for in deep trance. Marcos Valle ★★★★ Braziliance! MR BONGO. CD/LP With the 23-year-old composer looking like a cherubic Beach Boy, Marcos Valle’s US debut must have seemed like manna from heaven for American sophisticats in 1966. Credit Eumir Deodato (or ‘Deodata’ on earlier pressings) for arrangements that surely influenced every big-band leader with an eye on Saturday-night light entertainment extravaganzas…

10 Etta James The Dreamer VERVE FORECAST 2011, £6.00 You say: “A remarkable farewell in incredible voice…” Jason Schmidt, via e-mail Her final studio album, self-produced with her sons Donto and Sametto and MD Josh Sklair. The 11 songs catch Etta’s extraordinary voice at 73 years old, still expressing emotional truth with strength and control. Having made solid LPs for Private Music and RCA Victor, The Dreamer set her alongside the late-period excellence of Mavis Staples. There’s an all-encompassing atmosphere of reflection, some regret, but of acceptance too. Her version of the Dorothy Moore hit Misty Blue hits the country-soul spot and she does justice to Otis Redding’s Cigarettes & Coffee. The jury’s still out on her cover of Guns N’Roses’ Welcome To The Jungle – even though her…

• By the mid-’50s, Brubeck-bashing was rife. In 1956 tenor sax man Billy Root called Brubeck “pseudo-hip scuffling for hippies who think they have to ‘study’ jazz.” • Brubeck wasn’t as comfortable in the studio as on stage. Studios made him nervous. Says his son Dan, “My dad assumes that if you’re in a studio everything is being recorded – like Watergate.” • Live dates were regularly disrupted by Paul Desmond’s drinking and carousing. In Hamburg in 1967, the saxman went missing and it was thought he’d been murdered. Found in a Reeperbahn bar, he claimed he was researching a book called Sin Cities Of The World.…

“It’s undeniably moving to see O’Connor operating at her fiercest.” Sinéad O’Connor Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London AS SINÉAD O’CONNOR begins her final song, an airy new track called Milestones, she leaves her voice unamplified, forcing the audience to quieten down and lean in. “This is where I get to be me,” she sings, articulating the dream that has so often seemed to drive her through her turbulent career. That’s not been an easy process, especially in recent years. Over the distracting static of online spats with Miley Cyrus or Amanda Palmer, she has spoken out – sometimes in harrowing social media real-time – about her issues with her mental health. She has also shared all the details of her enduring spiritual quest, including her decision to convert – she prefers…

1 THE OF MUSIC SOUND ORIGINAL CAST COLUMBIA 2 AGAIN HERE WE THE GO KINGSTON TRIO CAPITOL 3 PERCUSSION PERSUASIVE VARIOUS COMMAND 4 PROVOCATIVE PERCUSSION VARIOUS COMMAND 5 PRAYER THE LORD THE ’S MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR COMMAND 6 AT BELAFONTE CARNEGIE HALL HARRY BELAFONTE RCA VICTOR 7 AGAIN LET’S DANCE DAVID CARROLL AND HIS ORCHESTRA MERCURY 8 ORIGINAL FIORELLO CAST ! CAPITOL 9 JOHNNY FAITHFULLY MATHIS COLUMBIA 10 VILLAGE QUIET THE EXOTIC SOUNDS OF MARTIN DENNY LIBERTY…

Jenny Lewis NICE AS FUCK What music are you currently grooving to? Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. What a great album. And Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters, Jim Sullivan’s U.F.O. and Frankie Reyes’ Boleros Valves Y Más, which also has a Guaraldi-esque feel to it. And Bob Dylan, who I listen to most – every year I find myself enjoying the music he created at the age I’m closest to, which is the Christian era, currently. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? The Cure’s Standing On A Beach? Revolver? 3 Feet High & Rising? Don’t make me choose, it could change. This year, Tyler, The Creator’s Igor. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Pass The Dutchie…

…Lou Barlow has said that DINOSAUR JR are in the studio making a new LP … JOE BONAMASSA has been in Abbey Road recording a Brit-blues influenced new record, writing with Cream lyricist Pete Brown for the as-yet untitled set… John Frusciante has returned to the RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS. It’s been four years since their last album… ELTON JOHN (left) told Classic FM’s Tim Lihoreau that he’s writing a new record in ustralia, where he’s currently touring. “I’m looking forward to writing,” said Elt. “The great thing about writing with this style, I never know what I’m going to get. So the process has never gotten dull” … in December Ian Gillan said that DEEP PURPLE have a new LP, produced by Bob Ezrin in Nashville, ready to go…

“Dr. John went on to make more albums and play to large audiences around the world.”JERRY DAMMERS A COUPLE OF years ago I was asked to do a painting to be auctioned for charity on the subject of the anniversary of a painting which the four Beatles did together whilst holed up in a hotel room in Japan in 1967. The organisers (Eazl CIC) recently asked me to do another illustration of any song which I found “inspirational” and which I thought could hopefully be helpful to people with mental health issues. One of the charities which the proceeds of the auction will go to is called CALM, set up specifically to help people who are considering suicide, especially young men under 45, for whom suicide is the biggest cause…

SOPHIE ALLISON loves horror movies, especially the jump-scare. The 22-year-old singer-songwriter, who operates under the slyly normcore name of Soccer Mommy, relishes waiting for somebody – or something – to leap out, the tense build-up, the moment of release. She is pleased, then, to have a song on the soundtrack of The Turning, director Floria Sigismondi’s update of Henry James’s terrifying novella The Turn Of The Screw. It’s called Feed, a song about being devoured by dark forces. “It’s boiling down to good versus evil.”SOPHIE ALLISON AKA SOCCER MOMMY Inappropriately, it’s a match made in heaven. “I talk about demons a lot in my day-to-day life,” admits the Nashville-raised Allison, a slight laugh cracking through her cold-muffled voice. “I feel I have a lot of paranoia and it always comes…

BLACKPOOL dissident SIMON MORRIS (below, b.1968) led deep-underground experimental-DIY opinion dividers Ceramic Hobs from 1985, purveying a unique brand of therapeutic strong meat via albums including Psychiatric Underground, Straight Outta Rampton and Al Al Who, and shambolic live shows. Part of the Mad Pride movement which sought liberation for mental health system survivors, their 2017 best-of Black Pool Legacy was released on former Sleaford Mods label Harbinger Sound. Despite deciding to disband in 2015, they continued to play “farewell” gigs. Morris was also a published author. SINGER, lyricist and composer IRVING BURGIE (b.1924) fuelled the 1950s’ calypso craze when he wrote Harry Belafonte’s signature tune, Day-O (AKA The Banana Boat Song). Born in Brooklyn to West Indian-American parents, he learned saxophone while serving with the US army in Burma. His…

THE ME-DECADE MASTERPIECE John Prine Bruised Orange (Asylum, 1978) While the startling material on Prine’s self-titled debut built his reputation, it was his fifth ’70s LP that found him refining his songs and sound and reaching a creative apotheosis. A perfectly realised blend of tragicomic poetry and narrative, Prine offers up cockeyed takes on show business (Sabu Visits The Twin Cities Alone) and soured romance (If You Don’t Want My Love, co-written with Phil Spector), while pondering the cosmic absurdity of life (That’s The Way That The World Goes ’Round). THE ENTERTAINER John Prine Live (Oh BOy, 1988) A double LP capturing Prine in his natural environment: spinning yarns, telling jokes, and playing songs from across his catalogue on the club stage. Mostly recorded during a multi-night solo stand in…

TECHNICALLY, THE SHOW STARTED a couple of minutes ago, but the band on-stage are still as silent as the audience. In this East London church, no one has any idea what will happen next – not least the musicians. The pianist rubs his eyes. The bassist closes his. The drummer appears to be waiting for one of the others to blink. “If you ask me, ‘Where do you think a piece is going to go?’, I won’t have any idea,” says the bassist, Lloyd Swanton, some time afterwards. “An hour later, I’m as flabbergasted as the audience.” Finally, though, the pianist cracks, and tries out a phrase on the keys of an old grand piano he will later describe as “psychedelic” in tone. After a while, his bandmates join in,…

BORN IN MARIETTA, eorgia in 1984 and ised in Atlanta, the nd that became The Black Crowes grew up in the shadow of R.E.M., even down o the waistcoats. At eir core were the inson brothers – dour, OCD guitarist Rich and manic, voluble Chris – a pair who fought like fury and found themselves increasingly drawn to the music of the late ’60s and early ’70s: the Stones and Faces, Zeppelin and Free. By the time they’d found a drummer in Steve Gorman, a producer-cheerleader in Rick Rubin associate George Drakoulias and the final version of their bandname (it beat out Rubin’s improbable suggestion: Kobb Kounty Krows, or KKK for short), they’d forged a reputation as diehard outsiders, fighting a corner for soulful rock’n’roll in the long twilight of…

LOVE WILL TEAR Us Apart came out on June 20, 1980, one month after Ian Curtis’s death. On July 26, it reached Number 13 in the UK singles chart. That same week, propelled by the momentum of Joy Division’s only hit, Closer entered the albums chart at Number 11. When a song instantly becomes an epitaph for the person who wrote it, the more mundane details inevitably get overlooked. But in the case of Love Will Tear Us Apart, even these seem loaded with significance. Its public debut took place on October 16, 1979, at Plan K in Brussels. Joy Division’s first gig outside the UK was a launch for a new arts venue in a converted sugar refinery, also featuring Sheffield avant-electro duo Cabaret Voltaire plus Beat icons William…

Making your second album a double is a bold move. Did you have an abundance of material? “Yeah, that was the main thing. I desperately wanted to have a very short album, but I could not get rid of at least eight or nine songs. After chopping it down from between 30 and 50 songs, I figured, Let’s just put it all out. I wanted it to be a double album to kind of emphasise its depth.” Why release it in two instalments? Do you think that works better with people’s lower attention spans these days? “I do. Y’know, I’m experimenting in music and I think it’s interesting when the release model is also a little bit experimental. I don’t think the modern listener really gives music that much time.…

Ed Dupas ★★★ The Lonesome Side Of Town ROAD TRIP SONGS. CD/DL Ten of the 11 songs on Ed Dupas’s third long-player are about love and, mostly, loss. “I live right here where you don’t live any more,” he sings in On My Way – one of several really fine songs that bring Steve Earle to mind (Hypnotized; Love Me Right). Only State Of The Nation, bang in the middle of the album, means well, but sticks out like a sore thumb. Philip B. Price ★★★★ Bone Almanac SIGNATURE SOUNDS. CD/DL/LP It’s been 15 years since Winterpills’ founder/front man Philip Price released a solo album – and Bone Almanac is very much solo, with everything written and performed by Price. The sleeve art – wintry, webby and monochrome – gives…

Robert Plant Digging Deep ESPARANZA LIKE HIS solo albums, no two Robert Plant singles sound alike. Digging Deep collates eight 45s and B-sides, spanning 1982 to 2006 and their original artwork in a handsome hardback book. It’s a variable journey with numerous tangents and blind alleys. The early 45s, including ’82’s Burning Down One Side and the following year’s hit, Big Log, suggest Plant constantly checking himself not to let rip with a lemon-squeezing roar. Later, in the ’80s and early ’90s, he is more at ease with the past, w Cool One’s toug rockabilly swagger and sampled Led Zeppelin riffs, and the stately mid-paced ballad 29 Psalms. This century’s singles see Plant zigzagging between covers of Tim Buckley’s Song To The Siren and the metal-meets-trip-hop of Tin Pan Valley;…

Tracks: Dead Radio / Breakdown (And Then…) / She Cried / I Burnt Your Clothes / Exit Everything / Silver Chair / White Wedding / Undone / Autoluminescent / Sleep Alone Personnel: Rowland S. Howard (vcls, gtr), Mick Harvey (dr, keys, gtr), Brian Hooper (bs), Genevieve McGuckin (keys), Steve Boyle (dr), Andrew Entsch, Jen Anderson, Robin Cassanada (strings) Producer: Lindsey Gravina Released: 1999 Recorded: Birdland Studios, Prahran, Melbourne Chart peak: n/a Current availability: to be reissued on Mute in 2020.…

On record, a cheap-as-chips The Best Of… (Spectrum, 2000) is a concise 18-song run through the best of the Chess years and includes In The Basement, her duet with Sugar Pie DeSanto, Stop The Wedding, Pushover and all the hits. To splash out go to The Chess Box (MCA/ Universal, 2000), three CDs of uplift and pain. Those emotions are at the heart of Rage To Survive, her story co-written with David Ritz, as honest and revealing a memoir as you’ll find, with heroin addiction, abusive men, some self-analysis, and a lot of defiance. There’ve been live gig visuals from Montreux, 1989 and ’93, and Burnin’ Down The House, a 2001 show with The Roots Band. Finally, 2008 movie Cadillac Records re-tells the Chess story, with Beyoncé (above) starring as…

A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970 s ★★★★ Mike Barnes OMNIBUS. £20 Mighty volume celebrates the era when prog was the coolest sound on the planet. This 600-page blockbuster has all the heft of an Emerson, Lake & Palmer three-record set but with more focus – and no drum solo. MOJO contributor Mike Barnes opens with an essay defining the origins of prog (as it was never known) among English groups bored with the 4/4 shuffle of R&B – The Nice, Procol Harum, The Moody Blues. In individual chapters, he then tells the stories of progressive musicians famous – Yes, Genesis, King Crimson – and bracingly obscure – Egg, Gracious. There are brief diversions into prog fashion, drugs and the 1970s rock press (long before the…

I read recently in Elton John’s book that he played piano on the Stiff Records ‘package’ tour. Did he tour with the Blockheads, Elvis Costello et al, or is it a case of too much Elderberry Wine talking? Graham Elliott, Ramsgate, Kent Fred Says: According to Wreckless Eric, Elton played with Eric’s band at a Hemel Hempstead Pavilion gig during the Live Stiffs tour. Initially he was just going to jam on Whole Wide World and had even practised for the occasion. Eric introduced him by announcing: “Now we’ve got a special guest – nothing to get too excited about, it’s just some bloke called Reg from the football club that asked if he could get up and play the piano.” Reaction was such that Elton proceeded to jam on…