Indice dei contenuti per July 2022 in MOJO

THERE IS APPARENTLY A COCKTAIL called Tiger On Vaseline available in a London bar these days: a remodelled Piña Colada that, among other things, involves roasted pineapple juice. Perhaps you don’t have one to hand? No matter – a pint of milk will do just as well, as you’ll hopefully join us in raising a glass to one of our very finest. Auspicious birthdays demand auspicious celebrations, and that’s what we’ve tried to arrange for this special edition of MOJO to mark Ziggy Stardust turning 50. His conception date is a little hazy, as is the way of these things. But Ziggy was delivered in physical form to British record stores on June 16, 1972, precipitating a short life and epic afterlife that has resonated more than those of most…

AS MOJO WENT to press, one of Howard Devoto’s original hand-rendered posters for a 1976 Sex Pistols/Buzzcocks gig sold for a cool £22,000. Further proof that the vintage concert bill demi-monde exerts a strange but undeniable pull, offering portals into legendary moments forever on the brink of explosion. There are many such moments in new 192-page book German Underground Concert Posters 1968-1981 (Popdom), which features scarce playbills for gigs by Can, Faust, Neu!, Amon Düül II and other names familiar to Anglo audiences, plus others for lesser-known rockers including Hoity-Toity, Dog Breath, Missus Beastly and High Crack. Never intended to last, they offer novel perspectives on otherwise known quantities, revealing playful aspects to early Kraftwerk, for example, or illuminating the uncompromising radicalism of the era. A 1969 poster for an…

1 SUGGS & PAUL WELLER OOH DO U FINK U ARE? Two British pop titans soulfully reflect on the English tragedy of knowing one’s place, with a soupçon of Costello’s Accidents Will Happen. Find it: streaming services 2 TY SEGALL HELLO, HI After the arena-sized synth grunge of last year’s Harmonizer, the indomitable Cali rocker relocates to the fuzz garage – once he’s got the spooky a cappella action out of the way. Find it: Bandcamp 3 JAH WOBBLE & THE UKRAINIANS FEAT. JON KLEIN UKRAINIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM IN DUB Wobble and Pete Solowka’s band do a bass-heavy-in-the-echo-chamber version of the national song of Ukraine: proceeds to supporting refugees from the war. Find it: Bandcamp 4 DANGER MOUSE & BLACK THOUGHT NO GOLD TEETH The intrepid super-producer returns to hip-hop after 17 years…

STAR TURNS KEN SCOTT BOWIE LEARNS TO ROCK WOODY WOODMANSEY THE BAND FROM MARS MIKE GARSON AMERICA ZIGGY ANGIE BOWIE THE LIBERACE FACTOR KRIS NEEDS KISS OF THE SPIDER MAN AND MUCH MORE… THE CONCEPTION “TOTALLY INVOLVED, TOTALLY NOT SERIOUS” OVER 1971, SOMETHING WAS BREWING IN DAVID BOWIE’S BRAIN – A HYBRID ROCK’N'ROLL WHERE SEX AND SCI-FI MET. Early august 1971: bowie was feeling “a lot lighter”, he told NME’s James Johnson. Hunky dory, in fact, the title of the album he’d just finished recording. “It’s been gloriously easy to record, ” Bowie added, his best album yet. It needed to be. His first three had all been failures. Hunky Dory was everything Tony Defries, Bowie’s ambitious manager since spring 1970, had been waiting for. At Defries’s prompting, Bowie had…

Wilco ★★★★ Cruel Country DBPM. CD/DL/LP FOR ALL their love of the genre, Wilco were never really a country band – too grungy on their 1995 debut, A.M.; stretching out into ’60s Beach Boys pop and ’70s Stones-y rock on the multi-directional ’96 double Being There. Twenty-six years later arrives their second twin-disc-length album, hot off the press after being recorded, live in the studio and with few overdubs, in the first months of 2022. But while singer Jeff Tweedy declares that with this twelfth record, for once, Wilco are “digging in and calling it country”, this is far from a rootsy, back-to-basics affair. Since the “American Radiohead” tag was affixed to them from 2001’s masterful Yankee Hotel Foxtrot on, as a band they’ve advanced further into and then retreated…

Soccer Mommy ★★★★ Sometimes, Forever LOMA VISTA. CD/DL/LP SOPHIE ALLISON’S swift progress from teenage bedroom diarist self-releasing on Bandcamp to public-facing recording artist sharing a label with St. Vincent must have challenged this intrepid auditor of young adult confusion. The final song on her third Soccer Mommy album finds the 24-year-old addressing the downsides of laying it all out there in a world where haters gonna hate across multiple platforms. “I read the things people have to say/They make me feel like I’m not a person, ” Allison notes on Still, voice sorrowfully blank, words and acoustic guitar downstrokes recalling those early DIY days’ unvarnished intimacy. We hear about “white little pills” and an act of self-harm. “I still don’t know what I was thinking/But I did it still.” Evoking…

Matador’s Revisionist History podcast (Spotify) hooks-up Matt Sweeney (Chavez et al) with Pavement’s Scott ‘Spiral Stairs’ Kannberg and Stephen Malkmus for the 30th anniversary of their debut, Slanted And Enchanted. Fingerprint analysis of the songs reveals that Malkmus wrote the chords to In The Mouth A Desert on his teeth while walking home to Hoboken after Cop Shoot Cop’s Jim Coleman had given him mescaline. Memories of their “suburban striver” days include Hoboken’s Pier Platters Records, where $100 could buy a Sonic Youth 7-inch single containing Thurston Moore’s hair. Further ruminations on Vanilla Ice, David Berman, post-modern philosophy, weed and overdubs fill 95 minutes. Stray Cats drummer Slim Jim Phantom is contrastingly brisk in Rockabilly Confidential (Spotify). Under-20-minute episodes of anecdotes interspersed with songs: season two includes Jim’s pal Harry…

ASTOR PIAZZOLLA was a prodigy on the bandoneon, or button accordion. Born in Argentina in 1921 of Italian immigrant parents, he grew up in Greenwich Village and Little Italy, New York, took up the instrument aged eight and composed his first tango aged 11. At 14, he was spotted by tango legend Carlos Gardel, who invited him to tour with his orchestra. Piazzolla was crushed when his father refused permission. Shortly afterwards, the whole Gardel touring party perished in a plane crash. Astor would later joke that, had his father let him go, he’d be playing the harp. At 17, Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires and studied under Argentinian classical composer Alberto Ginastera, who taught him orchestration. His Octeto Buenos Aires, formed in 1955, was effectively a chamber orchestra with…

Captain Sky The Adventures Of Captain Sky AVI, 1978 AT SPIRITED US indie AVI Records, Liberace wasn’t the only cape-wearing artiste promoting a larger-than-life fantasy in 1978. Daryl Cameron, a singer, writer, producer and arranger from southside Chicago, had also joined the LA-based label’s roster. He had, he said, “entered the phone booth of his mind, ” and emerged in comic book costume to become his crime-fighting alter-ego Captain Sky. “There weren’t enough black superheroes back then, ” the 64-year-old tells MOJO today. “So Captain Sky came to the rescue!” Born in 1957, Cameron’s first loves were Batman and James Brown. He first saw the latter perform live at Chicago’s Soldier Field football stadium when he was 13. “I was sat right at the front and I couldn’t believe my…

The Islander: My Life In Music And Beyond ★★★★ Chris Blackwell with Paul Morley NINE EIGHT BOOKS. £20 “MY ACCENT put me on the wrong side of history, ” the old Harrovian behind Island Records confesses early in this thoroughly quotable autobiography, a book it’s hard to put down because you know that in a page or so Blackwell is going to pithily dismiss yet another of the superstars he signed against his better judgment. Few escape: U2 (“a bit rinky-dink”), Cat Stevens (“I couldn’t have been less interested”), Frankie Goes To Hollywood (“all smoke and mirrors”), Roxy Music (“like The Tremeloes” – actually, it was Muff Winwood who thought that) and the author himself (“an Anglo-Irish-Jamaican boarding school flameout”). Yet, thanks to a blend of the self-confidence gained at…

HELLO SPRING 1978 I was working at Melody Lane, a record shop in a suburban strip mall in St Paul, Minnesota. A couple of months later, I met this guy in the food court who turned out to be Grant [Hart]. He was all upset that I’d taken his job which we’d both applied for. I convinced the assistant manager to hire Grant too, and we became fast friends, sharing a ferocious appetite for anything punk rock. Melody Lane had a sister shop, Cheapo Records, on the campus of Macalester College, where I got some shifts. One Saturday, Grant brought a speaker to Cheapo, set it up on the sidewalk and started playing Ramones songs. Along comes this lanky kid in a leather jacket, All Star sneakers and a Johnny…

★ SPARKS ★ NEW YORK DOLLS ★ MICK RONSON ★ DANA GILLESPIE ★ SUZI QUATRO ★ HOLLYWOOD BRATS ZIGGY PLAYED GUITAARRRR – AND HE WASN’T THE only one. Since Bolan appeared bedecked in glitter in ’71, glam had been out of the bag, percolating and mutating in Britain and America. A big and flashy amalgam encompassing rock’n’roll guitars, decadence, spectacle, flamboyance, bubblegum, glamour, escape and, often, a thumping trucker’s beat, the church was a broad one. As well as such big hitters as Roxy Music, Sparks, Lou Reed, Slade, Sweet and Suzi Quatro, there was an underworld of influential prophets unacknowledged in their lifetime – hello, New York Dolls – and for obscuria-hungry bin-trawlers, the legions of spirited never-weres with goofy names, the hod carriers in lipstick whose output has…

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO IF NEWS of Roxy Music’s first full reunion tour since 2011 came as a surprise to fans and music journalists, they weren’t the only ones. “I’ve been sort of locked down here in West Sussex, quite near to where Bryan [Ferry] is actually, ” relates Roxy guitarist Phil Manzanera. “I’ve been popping over, occasionally playing on some of his solo stuff – bits that he inevitably takes off… And one day, he just said, ‘Fancy doing some gigs?’ Whaaat?!” This was shortly before Christmas 2021, as the 50th anniversary of the band’s eponymous futuristic debut album loomed. “So yes, ” continues Manzanera, “if there’s a year to celebrate, this is it.” Manzanera talks to MOJO between shifts of woodshedding. Not in…

“The music’s going to be healing.”URAL THOMAS “I NEVER CARED about money, girls or fame, ” says R&B veteran Ural Thomas. “Music always seemed so magical to me – it lifted my whole body up, so I felt like I was floating.” Thomas, now 82, initially called time on his professional music career over half a century ago, but you can’t keep a great voice down. Rescued from obscurity by drummer/DJ Scott Magee in 2013, Thomas is currently enjoying an unlikely comeback fronting his new band, The Pain. Thomas’s course was set at an early age. His earliest memories are of listening beneath a pew as his preacher father sang in church, and as a teenager he’d sing doo wop with his schoolfriends in North Portland, Oregon. But while those…

THERE COMES A MOMENT IN EVERY HARD-living, hard-touring band’s career when the bus hits a wall. For Drive-By Truckers’ Mike Cooley, that reckoning came in Germany just before Christmas 2010. “I collapsed on this moving sidewalk up from the airport to a hotel, ” he recalls in a slow Alabama drawl. “I came to while it was still moving, went up to my room with a fuzzy head, thought I’d forgotten my room key and was walking across the lobby when I blacked out again.” In a downtown dive bar in Athens, Georgia on a sunny Sunday afternoon, DBT’s co-singer, writer and guitarist stops and sips his pale ale. “You know, when you hear someone saying, in that accent, ‘Sir, don’t get up, you’re bleeding from your head. Sir, do…

David Gedge: In our minds, it was the culmination of a scene that had been bubbling for a year or two. We were lucky. We seemed to burst onto this scene where there were a lot of small, independent promoters, fanzine writers and like-minded bands. We’d find ourselves on bills with the likes of The Wolfhounds, The June Brides and Big Flame. I guess C86 was an attempt to document that, to bring them all together on a compilation LP. Adrian Thrills: There was a groundswell of vaguely like-minded, underground bands who were putting out great 7-inch singles on independent labels like Creation, Subway, Dreamworld, Probe Plus and Ron Johnson. The Smiths had cast a long shadow over independent music for the previous two years, so it felt good to…

Angel Olsen ★★★★ Big Time JAGJAGUWAR. CD/DL/LP UNCERTAINTY AND turmoil can trigger two standard creative responses: an attempt to replicate those emotional shatter patterns and seismic shocks, turning all the disturbance and disorientation into brutal art, or else a move towards the familiar and comforting, something with deep roots, stable sides, solid foundations. Big Time, Angel Olsen’s sixth album, emerges from a period of axis-shifting change. Last April, she came out to the world via Instagram, captioning a picture of her partner, Beau Thibodeaux, with “My beau, I’m gay”. While she was ready to celebrate her identity, however, she lost both her parents in cruelly quick succession. Three weeks after her mother’s death, the North Carolina-based Olsen was in her co-producer Jonathan Wilson’s Los Angeles studio recording Big Time. “I…

Sun’s Signature ★★★★ Sun’s Signature PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP IN 2012, during a vanishingly rare interview, Elizabeth Fraser was asked whether she ever had any teenage dreams of leaving her hometown, Grangemouth. “No, I never thought of the next day, ” she said. “I just had a lot of something – what was it? So much sun, I suppose, running through me. All this wonderful sun! An Apollonian spirit, if that is a word.” If that was the light that guided her towards her time in Cocteau Twins, it has often been hidden in the 25 years since the band fell apart. There have only been intermittent flickers since, through guest appearances (Massive Attack, Jónsi, Oneohtrix Point Never among them), occasional music for museum installations and soundtracks, and 2009 single Moses. Sun’s…

The Clash ★★★★★ Combat Rock/The People’s Hall SONY. CD/DL/LP THEY SAY A week is a long time in politics, but in the world of The Clash it could be an eternity. Take the seven days commencing May 14, 1982, the date Combat Rock, the group’s fifth album, was released. At the time, singer Joe Strummer was AWOL, having dramatically vanished three weeks previously on the eve of a UK tour. His disappearance generated grave concern – and chaos – but on May 17, thanks to the efforts of band aide Kosmo Vinyl and a private detective, he was finally discovered hiding out in Paris. The following day he was back in London and just 48 hours after that, on May 20, The Clash headlined a festival in Holland. Yet that…

★★★★ Exposures 1977-1983 DGM/PANEGYRIC. CD+BR+DVD WHILE SOME artists are known as masters of the three-minute single, Robert Fripp has become the doyen of the deepdive multi-disc box set. Sets such as Thrak Box, The Road To Red and 1969 have documented in exhaustive, occasionally exhausting, detail the long-ago doings of the adventurous, virtuosic and slightly uptight musicians who have laboured under the banner of his band, King Crimson. Now Fripp’s archaeology unit turn their attention to the guitarist’s solo work created in and around one of Crimson’s regular interregnums. Three DVDs, four Blu-Ray audio discs and 25 CDs document the angelic shimmerings of his patented Frippertronics, three solo LPs and the self-described “second-division new wave dance band” The League Of Gentlemen. Outtakes, remixes, rarities and the occasional unreleased track will…

AS A MOJO reader, you probably see yourself as a bit of a cratedigger. You know your stuff, the canonical classics and the hidden gems, but you’re also aware there’s more to discover. Your tastes are wide, but they could always be wider, and you know when a little help is required: a super-informed record store clerk, perhaps, to guide you to hitherto unexplored corners of their shop. Or a record label, born out of the culture of those eclectic, open-minded record shops, that can dedicate 30 years to putting out precisely the kind of compilations – at once scholarly and exciting, specialised and anti-elitist – that you’ve needed all along. This, in essence, is the MO of Soul Jazz Records, a label that’s established themselves as masters of the…

Stranded Man Chris Bailey, frontman of Brisbane anti-heroes The Saints, left us on April 9. SHORTLY AFTER Chris Bailey’s death, Nick Cave posted a tribute in his Red Hand Files, with a photograph of The Saints’ singer sat crumpled on the edge of the low stage of a small Melbourne club in early 1977. At the front of the crowd stood an awestruck 19-year-old stonewash denim-clad Nick Cave. “You can almost see the thought bubble forming above my head: ‘This is what I want to do and this is who I want to be, ’” Cave wrote. “In my opinion, The Saints were Australia’s greatest band and Chris Bailey was my favourite singer.” As well as capturing the beginning of the rest of Cave’s life, no less instructive was the…

CELEBRATING 30 years of psychedelic, progressive indie rock, Idaho institution Built To Spill has been in a state of flux since long-serving sidemen Bret Netson and Jim Roth exited in 2015. And that’s the way singer/guitarist Doug Martsch likes it. “Playing with different people and making different kinds of records is what I want to do, ” he explains. “David Bowie was a hero of mine – every record of his was a completely different thing, with different collaborators. I want to follow in his footsteps.” Built To Spill’s forthcoming tenth album, When The Wind Forgets Your Name, is rooted in one of these periodic reshuffles. In autumn 2018, with the group’s first Brazilian tour on the horizon, Martsch swapped out his existing rhythm section to work with drummer Lê…

IT’S ONE AM in Los Angeles and Alex Izenberg is not quite here. “To be honest, it’s a little bit past my bedtime, so I’m not 100 per cent present right now, ” he says over a ghostly ripple of wind chimes. “Maybe that’s a good thing.” To be fair, the 31-year-old singer-songwriter’s new album promises nothing else. It is called I’m Not Here, features an empty white mask on the sleeve, and the songs are often about things that are missing, elusive, hard to keep together, all rendered in out-of-time classic rock colours. “It has to do with not feeling like I have free will and not really getting why I’m alive, ” Izenberg explains. “That’s what the mask is supposed to represent – not really knowing where my…

SOUTHERN ROCKOPERA ★★★★ (Soul Dump/New West, 2001) Epic double album, and a concept within a concept. Partly the story of a fictional ’70s rock band à la Lynyrd Skynyrd, it also explores the relationship the South has with itself, how it both embraces and rejects its political and racial stereotypes. THE DIRTY SOUTH ★★★★★ (New West, 2004) Jason ‘Isbell’s second DBT album, and a companion piece to the previous year’s Decoration Day. Dark stories from the margins of Southern life, where respectable people can find themselves trapped in desperate criminality – or worse – within a heartbeat. ENGLISH OCEANS ★★★★ (ATO, 2014) The current line-up’s debut and first to split songs almost 50/50 between Hood and Cooley. Far more upbeat than previous albums, Hood calls it his partner’s “songwriting coming…

Flock ★★★★ Flock STRUT. CD/DL/LP Five heavyweights of the new British jazz scene step into the unknown. First brought together remotely last year, Flock boast a singular group chemistry at odds with its members’ other endeavours. Their slow-release debut rests on the hypnotic percussive bedrock of drum/tabla meister Sarathy Korwar and gyil titan Bex Burch (Vula Viel), allowing the keyboard atmospherics of Danalogue (The Comet Is Coming) and Al MacSween (Maisha) free rein as baritone saxophonist Tamar Osborn (Collocutor) bears the melodic weight. Her haunted horns tangle in the ethereal synth mists of Prepare To Let Go and the disquieting shape-shifting of Bold Dream, before developing distinct heads of steam, but are eclipsed by the ebbing sonorities of How Many Are One and quirky meditations of It’s Complicated – searching…

Mavis Staples & Levon Helm ★★★★ Carry Me Home ANTI-. CD/DL/LP THE FIRST time Mavis and Levon sang together was in 1976 in San Francisco – Mavis was with The Staple Singers, Leon was in The Band and the concert was The Last Waltz. The last time they sang together was in 2011 at a low-key show in a barn in Woodstock. On both occasions they sang The Weight – a song Mavis knew well, having covered it with The Staple Singers in ’68 and in her solo shows. It’s interesting to play those two performances side by side. The big, powerful Last Waltz version still has that communal singalong quality, in spite of the show being based around the break-up of the band. The main difference on this version…

The Rolling Stones ★★★★ Live At The El Mocambo ROLLING STONES/UME. CD/DL/LP “IT’S LIKE the movies, ” guitarist Keith Richards said in 2002, summing up The Rolling Stones’ history in live albums to that point: mostly routine souvenirs doctored with overdubs and crowd noise, even on the 1969-tour landmark, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out. “Everybody’s getting splattered, blood and bones flying about. But it all just sits there on the screen. You can’t smell it or taste it.” A notable exception: the four blues and early rock’n’roll covers on side three of 1977’s Love You Live, pulled from two club shows on March 4 and 5 of that year at Toronto’s El Mocambo Tavern. In that short window, the Stones jammed their hockey-rink might into the exuberant crush of a 1963…

Elton John ★★★★★ Madman Across The Water UMC/EMI.CD/LP Multi-format anniversary for Elton and Bernie’s second intricate 1971 pop travelogue around mythic America. Extras on the 4-LP and CD box sets include piano demos, BBC Sounds For Saturday concert, the Mick Ronson-featuring original of the title track and more. Sex Pistols ★★★★★ The Original Recordings UMC. CD/LP/MC Released to coincide with Steve Jones’s mini-series Pistol, this 20-track comp has the unenviable job of choosing what not to include: all key stonkers are present, while democracy reigns with Swindle vocal cuts by Jones, Vicious and, cripes, Cook (his Silly Thing). Various ★★★★ Lovers Rock TROJAN. CD/DL/LP Subtitled: The Soulful Sound Of Romantic Reggae, a 2-LP or 3-CD set of golden age lovers in ’70s/ ’80s Britain and JA, where soul met roots…

CONVOY KING C.W. McCALL (below, b.Billie Dale Fries, 1928) was working at an Omaha advertising agency when, in 1973, he devised his truck-driving alter-ego for a series of award-winning bread adverts. As a recording artist, in 1976 he scored US Number 1 and global hit Convoy, a speed limit protest novelty which cashed in on the CB radio craze and inspired Sam Peckinpah’s 1978 movie of the same name. He was later elected mayor of Ouray, Colorado. ACCRINGTON-BORN SIR HARRISON BIRTWISTLE (b.1934) was a modernist composer who abjured indulgences like melodic accessibility, but his capacious oeuvre, embracing chamber, orchestral and choral works, was widely revered. He gained an international reputation with works like dense, electronically-punctuated 1986 opera The Mask Of Orpheus, which the rarely reticent composer himself described as ‘perhaps…

Win! A pair of Q Acoustics M20 HD wireless speakers. BRITISH AUDIO specialists, Q Acoustics, is offering one lucky MOJO reader a chance to win a pair of M20 HD wireless powered speakers worth £399. A powerful, immersive and convenient way to enjoy music and movie sound anywhere in the home, this stereo music system features aptX™ HD Bluetooth® connectivity for wireless streaming of high resolution-quality audio from devices such as a smartphone, tablet, laptop and network streamer. The versatile M20 can also deliver superb sonics from a games console, TV, turntable, set-top box, CD player and portable music players alike. And, with an amplifier built into one speaker, there’s no extra amplifier box cluttering up your living space. The M20 HD arrives in elegant matte white, vintage walnut veneer…