Tabla de contenidos para April 2020 en MOJO

Fred Dellar It's been a long haul for Fred (pictured with his good pal Stan Britt (right)), whose CV includes spraying silver spots on ladies’ handbag mirrors and peeling spuds. Oddly, he says he much prefers writing for MOJO. As he does every issue, he brings his expertise to Time Machine, Ask Fred and the MOJO Crossword. Bob Mehr Bob travelled to the Great White North to untangle the tale of soulful Vancouver singer-songwriter Frazey Ford (page 44). “Her story is a dramatic and labyrinthine family narrative – and so much of that imbues her music,” says the 17-year MOJO man, author of the New York Times bestseller Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements. James Albon James Albon is an award-winning illustrator living in Edinburgh. He studied at…

IT’S NOT SOMETHING WE TYPICALLY make a fuss about, but the Zelig-like ability of MOJO writers to have been in the right place at the right time certainly has its uses. How fortunate, for instance, that this month’s cover story on the last rites of Jimi Hendrix could be written by Michael Simmons. Michael’s research and insights are given a particular edge by the fact that he was a “stoned, long-haired freak, on the cusp of his 15th birthday,” at the Fillmore East on New Year’s Day, 1970; the Hendrix gig captured for posterity on the Band Of Gypsys album. Our man’s persistence has also uncovered some intriguing new details about Hendrix’s final months – not least the contents of a jewellery box brought backstage to the Fillmore by a…

…a mere 12 years after their last album, GUNS N’ROSES guitarman Richard Fortus told Forbes magazine, ”We love bringing new songs in… I hope that we have new music out this coming year” … ex-KRAFTWERK man Wolfgang Flür (right) has confirmed that he will collaborate with Detroit techno pioneer Juan Atkins on the first new Cybotron album in 25 years… JASON ISBELL’s new album is mminent. “Start to finish, I believe we’ve made our best album yet,” he said in a statement… Ronnie Wood told showbiz column Bizarre about how the new ROLLING STONES album is progressing: “[It’s] like a puzzle, we still have to put the missing pieces together. We hope to release it in 2020” … RICK WAKEMAN’s been back in the studio making a new prog album.…

1 On yer bike: fledgling chirpy Cockney Joe with wheels and friend Pete Oakham, East London, early ’50s. 2 A Picture Of You: “Bring your guitar and we’ll have a strum.” Young Joe, ready to take on the crazy world. 3 “You’ll be Elmer Twitch & The Fidgets”: Brown and The Bruvvers having avoided the shakes, May 1964. 4 Rock summit: (from left) Gene Vincent, Brown, Billy Fury, Eddie Cochran in 1960. “I’d sit up and play guitar with Eddie for hours while he looked after Gene.” 5 “We were really into The Band”: Joe on-stage at London’s Roundhouse, 1972 with Brown’s Home Brew. 6 Mine’s a barrel: the full Home Brew with Brown (third from right) next to his then-wife Vicki. 7 I’ll see you in my dreams: Joe…

WHEN SHE WAS 19 YEARS OLD, when it should have felt like everything was in front of her, Frazey Ford believed there were only two options left in life: the sanitarium or suicide. “I had to make a choice whether I was going to live, or die, or just disappear into some fog,” she says. Having suffered an acute nervous breakdown, the teenager found herself convalescing in the mountains of British Columbia. But rather than curl up and die, as she thought she might, she began running in the woods, running every day. “And as I ran, I would sing,” she says. “I would sing loud, mostly to scare off the bears.” Three decades later, Ford has stopped running – from a complicated past and her own fears – but…

A lyric to an unreleased Ian Dury song, hand-written by the singer and owned by artist and former member of Kilburn & The High Roads, Rod Melvin, takes pride of place in an exhibition of works inspired by Dury that opens in Shoreditch, London, on March 24. All Kinds Of Naughty is the title of the lyric (pictured left), and also the name of the free-to-view show, which will proceed to visit locations with connections to Dury’s life story, including Southend, where he contracted polio; Hornchurch/Upminster, where he spent much of his childhood; and Canterbury, where he taught art in the ’60s. The exhibition features works by the Thames Group Of Artists – including paintings, sculpture, photography, ceramics, 3D mixed media, film and performance, all informed by Dury’s songs and…

IN THE EARLY hours of Monday, August 31, 1970, Jimi Hendrix was standing in the wings waiting to perform his first British gig in 18 months. The occasion was the third Isle Of Wight Festival, where an estimated 600,000 had made the pilgrimage to East Afton Farm, Freshwater, to see him. “I noticed he had a split in his trousers, in the bottom of his ‘arris’,” says Jeff Dexter, festival DJ and co-MC. “I always have a needle and thread with me so I tucked him up.” Then Hendrix realised he had a problem with his green and red, butterfly-style blouse. “The sleeve was so puffy that it was flopping over the strings and killing them,” Dexter says. “I sorted that out with half-a-dozen safety pins.” The festival, already five…

• The song Oh Canada is a nod to Joni Mitchell, but also Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Meanwhile, the album itself takes its title from an interview with one of Nadia’s favourite New Zealand authors, the late Janet Frame (above), in which the interviewer asks if the author has considered that she is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century – to which Frame uncomfortably replies, “That question doesn’t reach me. It’s out of my province.” Explains Nadia, “I was so moved by her response for some reason. So ever since… ‘out of my province’, that phrase has never left me.”…

Simon & Garfunkel Live At Carnegie Hall 1969 AHEAD OF the gold vinyl 50th anniversary edition of S&G’s January 1970 swansong, Bridge Over Troubled Water , is this streaming four-track EP of songs from the album, captured live at New York’s Carnegie Hall, November 27 and 28, 1969. Four intimate, acoustic versions of the title track, Song For The Asking, The Boxer, and So Long Frank Lloyd Wright showcased the duo’s most adventurous album, their partnership peaking just as it was about to fold. The six-date US tour was recorded for a live album, planned to follow Bridge Over Troubled Water , The material stayed in the can until 2009’s Live 1969 , though none of these performances were included. Confirming their studious credentials, Paul explains that “Art used to…

The Associates ★★★ Perhaps CHERRY RED. CD The intense and loopy luxurysynth-pop of 1985’s multi-producer third Associates LP took two years and a quarter of a million to produce. Flawed it may be, but wildest voice of Billy Mackenzie makes anything worth close listening: do so to Breakfast, and swoon. IH Big Star ★★★ In Space OMNIVORE. CD/DL/LP Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens released this raw new material with Posies Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow in 2005. While the guitars jangle and harmonies soar, there are no classic hooky pop-rockers. Best bonus cut: the a cappella group singing on Turn My Back On The Sun. MS Clancy Eccles & The Dynamites ★★★ Freedom/Fire Corner DOCTOR BIRD. CD The singer/producer/songwriter brings strong and wiry boot-tapping ’69 reggae with calls for romance,…

“WELL DONE Boris, no hard feelings Pete Townshend! – Rod xxx.” So tweeted Sir Rod Stewart the day the UK’s General Election result happened to chime with Stewart’s latest acclamation as the LP chart’s number one alpha male. You’re In My Heart, an orchestral reboot of sundry canonical Modney moments, beat The Who’s comeback album to the top of the charts. perennially indulged, instantly forgiven Jack the Lad…” Saluting the most divisive British premier for many a year, and then getting involved in a brouhaha with security in Florida on New Year’s Eve, are not the only unguarded moments when Rod, now 75, plays fast and loose with a fund of public affection granted few other national and global treasures of the music scene. Rod is the perennially indulged, instantly…

MARCH 10  James Brown was in Nashville recording vocals for his disco’d up 45, It’s Too Funky In Here, when he received a unique proposal. It was country music legend Porter Wagoner, inviting him to appear at the new Grand Ole Opry House, the venerable country music institution’s home since March 1974. Wagoner felt the presence of The Godfather Of Soul could provide a little appeal-widening pizzazz. “It’s nice to have a shot in the arm once in a while to make something exciting happen,” he reasoned. And so it was that on March 10 the Opry got funky, as The Hardest Working Man In Show Business appeared on its hallowed stage. It was not the first time the Opry had featured a black performer. The earliest broadcasts, back in…

GEE WHIZZ  4 The Bee Gees’ (above) Tragedy sits at UK Number 1. Three weeks later it does the same in the US, becoming the Gibbs’ fifth consecutive Stateside chart-topper. FAREWELL PATTO  4 In London, singer Mike Patto, formerly of Timebox and Patto, dies from throat cancer, aged 36. DUDE AWAKENING  9 Jeff Bridges narrates Heroes Of Rock And Roll, an ABC-TV documentary that includes clips of Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, The Beatles, Bob Dylan and others plus the first footage of Bruce Springsteen. BOOM! MACCA PACKET  15 Wings’ Goodnight Tonight/Daytime Nighttime Suffering comes out in the US. Paul McCartney’s deal with Columbia makes him the highest paid recording artist in the world. HYNDE DATE  21 Pretenders sign a contract with Sire Records in the US, and will hit the…

HELLO EARLY 1973 Mobi [AKA Dieter Moebius] and I were in a house in Forst in the midst of Germany, very busy in doing our own situation as Cluster. The house was medieval, old enough – in former times they were brewing beer there, and they made laws for the inhabitants of the region. When we went there, we had to build everything ourselves. We had no toilet at first, we had to shit in a trash bin and bring it outside! But it was very beautiful, the situation, beside the river Weser – which was polluted – but it looked very nice. “There was a very nice bordello nearby.”ROEDELIUS The first day, Michael Rother came, he appeared in our community, to try and find out if Cluster and Neu!…

UNLIKE MY Bloody Valentine, who once admitted their nocturnal working patterns meant weeks could pass without them seeing a glimpse of sun, Aoife Nessa Frances understands the importance of a good night’s sleep. “I do love dreaming,” says the Dublin-based singer-songwriter, an unsurprising admission in the half-light of her debut album, Land Of No Junction. These are songs that often unfold in what she calls “the time of dreams – that time in the middle of the night when everything is so still”. On the title track, it’s “five past three”; elsewhere, it’s “the hours after light” or “the darkest hour” – those fuzzy moments where nothing quite makes sense, but anything could happen. “There’s a real power in vulnerability.”AOIFE NESSA FRANCES Today, she’s very much awake, unfortunately in the…

DRUMMER MARTIN GRIFFIN (below, b.1950) was a member of Devon band Ark before joining Hawklords, the group formed when Hawkwind split after a US tour in 1978. They released their sole album, the new wave-influenced 25 Years On, the same year. He later appeared on three more albums by the re-formed Hawkwind. He also ran Roche Studios in Cornwall, where Elvis Costello, ABC and The Doctors Of Madness recorded. From 2009 he played with other ex-Hawkwind members in a reconstituted Hawklords. SINGER BOB SHANE (b.1934) co-founded folk revival group The Kingston Trio in San Francisco in 1957. They enjoyed almost immediate success in 1958 with their self-titled debut album and the Grammy-winning, Shane-sung single Tom Dooley both reaching Number 1: their run of 16 Top 20 albums ended in 1962,…

THE CHIRPY ONE Joe Brown A Picture Of Joe Brown ★★★ (ACE OF CLUBS, 1962) Brown’s first long-playing collection doubled down on the Cockernee light entertainment fare that manager Larry Parnes saw as his USP (vide Lionel Bart’s dratted Jellied Eels). But the roots of his enduring reputation among the next wave of British rockers – simply put, as Britain’s first singing guitar hero – is encoded in the rambunctious The Darktown Strutters’ Ball, his debut UK hit from March 1960, and the frenzied instro, Savage. THE CHOOGLIN’ ONE Brown’s Home Brew Brown’s Home Brew ★★★★ (BELL, 1972) Brown’s version of early-’70s, jug band-indebted, dungaree-rocking, rusty-fiddle revivalism swings like a bastard. The title track may be the best British country-rock recording of the walrus-moustache era. The Cook-Greenaway-abetted Billy Come Down…

THE BE GOOD TANYAS CHINATOWN (Nettwerk, 2003) The second and best album by Ford’s folk harmony group. A crisp, wise take on bluegrass and tradition betrays strong affinities with Gillian Welch. But amid some fine covers (Townes Van Zandt, House Of The Rising Sun), Ford’s own songwriting begins to flourish: beneath the banjo, Ship Out On The Sea is a covert intimation of funk. FRAZEY FORD OBADIAH (Nettwerk, 2010) With the aid of Be Good Tanyas bandmate Trish Klein on guitar, Ford negotiates a graceful entente between country and soul on her solo debut. Bird Of Paradise is a high-stepping highlight, like Dolly Parton riding a jazzy breakbeat; Dylan’s One More Cup Of Coffee, reconstituted as slow-burning blues, showcases Ford’s knack of deploying emotional heft with uncanny lightness of touch.…

It’S DECEMBER 23, 1978, and Ian Dury And The Blockheads are playing Gants Hill on the East London/Essex border. It’s very much the singer’s manor. But the Odeon cinema has not been designed for rock’n’roll and the organ pit in front of the stage is boarded over and carpeted. As Dury performs Billericay Dickie from his defining 1977 album, New Boots And Panties!! – a local favourite – the audience starts to pogo and the floor gives way. “Suddenly [the band] were all two-foot shorter,” recalls Dury’s Stiff Records press officer Kosmo Vinyl. “The only thing that stopped them from falling into the basement was that carpet. It was holding them all up!” Durymania? Something like it had been stirring since the April release of his third Stiff single, What…

IT WAS THE NIGHT OF THE FIRST DAY OF A NEW DECADE – JANUARY 1, 1970. The atmosphere inside the Fillmore East concert hall in New York City’s East Village was thick with marijuana smoke and possibility, not only for the infinite promise of the ’70s, but for the more immediate unveiling of Jimi Hendrix’s new band. The Band Of Gypsys had performed two shows the night before, New Year’s Eve, and would perform two more tonight. Rolling Stone, the underground press and the hippy jungle drums that passed around pre-internet information like a joint had hipped the assembled young people, yours truly among them: The Jimi Hendrix Experience were now fully disbanded. Hendrix’s current collaborators were bassist Billy Cox – a presence since the Woodstock festival of the previous…

SEMINAL ’60s bluesman John Hammond Jr witnessed the start of Jimi Hendrix’s career as well its tragic end. He first met Hendrix in 1966 when the latter was jamming at the Café Wha in Greenwich Village. “Man, I’m stranded here in New York,” the future icon pleaded. “Can you get me a gig?” Hammond promptly booked himself with Hendrix and a band at nearby Café Au Go Go. In a New York minute, Hendrix left for England and became a superstar. Hammond: “And then he was gone.” Journalist Al Aronowitz organised a contingent to attend Hendrix’s hometown funeral on October 1, 1970 and invited Hammond. There was a taxi strike in Seattle, so he and fellow bluesman Johnny Winter hoofed a hard mile between motel and church. The funeral was…

Ewan McLennan ★★★★ Borrowed Songs EML. CD/DL McLennan’s 2016 album Breaking The Spell Of Loneliness with George Monbiot explored the impact of alienation, and here he reaffirms the power of simplicity and understatement. Two new songs – Windrush and Blacking The Engines – address the politics of immigration and arms sales respectively through compelling human stories, and the warm informality of his telling is equally effective on well-trodden trad territory like Our Captain Calls All Hands and Wild Mountain Thyme. Salt House ★★★ Huam HUDSON. CD/DL Jenny Sturgeon, Ewan MacPherson and Lauren MacColl collaborate on an elegant collection conceived and delivered from the Scottish Highlands and islands; an album they describe as an expression of “hope, wonder and a desire for calm and equality in a disparate world.” Lofty ideals,…

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…

IN HIS EXCELLENT book on reggae history, Bass Culture, Lloyd Bradley notes that dub could well have roots in obeah, the Jamaican equivalent of voodoo, where the body is considered to have seven selves – sexual, digestive, heart, brain, etc – and practitioners attempt to ‘bring forward or push back’ the different selves, just like the channels on a mixing desk, to provide a new balance. On the other hand, he adds, it may simply be that Jamaicans who couldn’t afford to throw anything away became brilliant at recycling. The fast-moving Jamaican music scene of the late 1960s, where new fads popped up every few months, necessitated squeezing new music from old tapes. Dub grew from the soundsystems’ discovery that crowds also loved instrumental versions of vocal hits because they…

Bravado, banter and babes in tartan miniskirts barely conceal a shyness that had the young Rod Stewart cowering behind the speakers when touring with The Jeff Beck Group. Though YouTube offers copious recent TV footage, he has sanctioned few DVDs, perhaps reluctant to reveal to cameras the stiffness behind the showmanship. One Night Only! Live At Royal Albert Hall (BMG, 2005) is hammy, fun, slick, stirring in parts, and warms up as it proceeds. As for the printed word, Rod: The Autobiography (Century, 2012) is long on laughs, while Andy Neill’s Had Me A Real Good Time: Faces Before, During And After (Omnibus, 2016) is detailed and insightful.…

MARCH 2  At Havana’s 4,000-seater Karl Marx Theatre, Havana Jam – the first jointly sponsored US-Cuban music event since the island went communist in 1959 – begins three days of performances. America dispatches Billy Joel, Stephen Stills, Kris Kristofferson, Weather Report, The Fania All-Stars and the short-lived fusion superband Trio Of Doom. Meanwhile, the homegrown talent includes Irakere, Orquesta Aragón, Pacho Alonso, Elena Burke and Tata Güines. CBS records much of the event for two double live albums, but, due to the political situation, the invitation-only event is doomed to receive very little coverage in the Cuban press, and President Fidel Castro fails to show.…

I recently picked up the CBS 1970 sampler Rock Buster. The music is great – Miles, Softs, Byrds, Dylan, plus lesser-known nuggets – but I was surprised at the gatefold sleeve featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, as this was years before his movie roles made him famous. Are there any other good examples of luminaries gracing record covers before they made it? William Murray, via e-mail Fred Says: Star quality – you can never hide it! The stories of those who found LP cover fame before they became recognised in their own right makes for some curious reading. For example, Brad Garrett, a star of long-running TV comedy Everybody Loves Raymond, can be seen in Arabian garb unsheathing his scimitar on the inner sleeve of ELO’s 1979 LP Discovery. Then in 1983,…

Anaïs Mitchell BONNY LIGHT HORSEWOMAN, PLAYWRIGHT What music are you currently grooving to? My bandmate Eric [D Johnson] from Bonny Light Horseman just turned me onto Folk Roots, New Routes by Shirley Collins And Davy Graham. I’m also obsessed with Christian Lee Hutson’s song Northsiders. I just came from the Grammys and was so impressed by Lizzo and Tyler, The Creator. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Joni Mitchell’s Hejira! A sweeping, majestic aerial view, but also intimate and forthright in the lyrics, the musical quality of never quite ‘landing’, and her voice at its most expressive. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? A C+C Music Factory album, Pearl Jam’s Ten, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and the OST to…

IN BURTON, southeast Texas (population 473) there’s a historic 19th-century barn, out of which strange and intoxicating sounds emanate. This is the WiFi-free, non-sterile recording space of choice for dub-exotica beat mysterios Khruangbin: following the acclaim for 2018’s gauzy delight Con Todo El Mundo , they returned there in May 2019 to start on its follow-up proper with regular producer Steve Christensen. “Steve brought more equipment from his end than he did last time,” says bassist Laura Lee. “But it’s the same situation – you’re in the natural elements, we went without very much written, and it was a fun and painful process! I mean, I cried a lot. You really, like, go in deep, you know?” Lee says, contrary to some reports, the group don’t jam songs into creation:…

“I first heard it when I was 13 in a record store in Glendale, California, that had guitars. They’d play the usual stuff – Beatles, Stones – and one day they played this. I think it was the first thing I’d heard outside of, like, AM radio, and I didn’t understand it all, I didn’t even know if it was music. It turned me onto the fact that there’s a world out there outside of four guys with guitars. I finally bought it when I was 16, 17, and I’ve played it probably once a week my whole life. I love the non-linearity of it. These guys are pretty clearly making it up as they go, and the musicianship and inspiration is at such a high level that it makes…

1 ANNA CALVI DON’T BEAT THE GIRL OUT OF MY BOY (FEAT. COURTNEY BARNETT) Calvi reworks tracks from 2018’s Hunter with guests: here Courtney B’s vocal and resonant guitar atomise the original to a menacing, doom-twang, even the “doo-da-doo”s. Find it: Hunter (DOMINO)/YouTube 2 ARBOURETUM A PRISM IN REVERSE New incantations from Dave Heumann and magi, invoking a heady take on the Fairports. Find it: streaming services 3 GHOSTPOET CONCRETE PONY Where Ghostpoet grumbles, re: modernity over brooding chamber pop. Album I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep is out on May 1. Find it: YouTube 4 MARGO PRICE STONE ME A deceptively tender kiss-off to music biz bull, Nashville’s rebel queen gets a touch of the Stevie Nicks on this…

‘‘TOOT TOOT!” THE BELL-PULL ON Joe Brown’s front door makes the sound of an American locomotive whistle, the perfect summons for a former employee of the British steam railways who’s steeped in Americana. In fact, Brown was technically still a trainee fireman when, aged 18, he was thrust onto the 1959 TV rock show, Boy Meets Girls. In turn, that led to his first solo single, Comes The Day/People Gotta Talk, and a career as a reliable Cockney funmonger throughout the ’60s. To commemorate 60 years on record, he’s just released a multidisc box of highlights, from 1962’s Number 2 hit A Picture Of You, through songs by a varied cast of composers – Jeff Lynne, Hoagy Carmichael, Motörhead among them – to his own compositions with Nashville-based buddy Roger…

“OH! WE LOVE YOUR MUSIC!” Two ladies in middle-middle age have spotted Rufus Wainwright in a west London restaurant, and are introducing themselves. They’re a spot wobbly – they smashed a wine glass earlier – and envelop him in hugs. Wainwright, returning to his falafel, rolls his eyes – but not unkindly. Today’s Rufus enthusiasts are a little like characters in This One’s For The Ladies (That Lunge), one of 12 new songs on Unfollow The Rules, his imminent homecoming to the discipline of songwriting after time out on his second opera, 2018’s Hadrian, and what might be termed a classical-fusion project, 2016’s Take All My Loves, which featured his arrangements of nine Shakespeare sonnets. “My love and passion for opera has officially been appeased,” he declares, throwing up his…

“THE PARADISE Of Bachelors label is half-based in Philly and I have a buddy who works for them. When POB reissued Lubbock (On Everything) he sent me one. I listened to it shovelling snow, and the songs really cracked me up – like The Beautiful Waitress, where the waitress is drawing pictures of horses, and the narrator says they look like sausages and she goes, ‘No, they’re horses’. A couple years later I was driving with my family from Marfa, Texas to Luck, just outside of Austin, to play Willie Nelson’s ranch. And I played Juarez as we drove through Texas and it really hit me hard. Now I find it hard to think of a greater masterpiece by any artist. Through the label I got to meet Terry and…

When did you stop being merely aware of career when I may have been less what your dad did, and start appreciating certain about who I was, but I’m what he did? certain about who I am now, and it’s Well, I always liked the music. We were reared definitely to do with a family way of on it and invited into it, in a kind of Bohemian thinking. We grew up shaking way, and from a young age we were at the gigs. cornflakes packets and everyone There’s also a kind of child-like intuition about jamming, and there’d be a bloke in the music – which comes from some of dad’s a dress, and someone doing an musical limitations. And it was anthemic in a etching of you. Dad…

What was the genesis of your involvement with Electric Lady Studios? “JIMI WOULD GO TOUR, COME BACK WITH $25,000 IN CASH AND WE’D GO BACK TO WORK.” I was 22 in the summer of 1968, having graduated from architecture school. I used to go to The Generation club at 52 West 8th Street. Little did I know that I’d be spending a year and a half of my life there ’cos that was the space that Jimi took over. One evening I grabbed [underground newspaper] the East Village Other and looked at the want ads. One of them said, “Wanted – carpenters to work on experimental nightclub.” The idea was that lights and scenes would change – it was a kind of sensorium. I said, “I’ll help you build this…

“These are riddles… songs to keep returning to with no hope of ever exhausting their meaning.” Nadia Reid ★★★★ Out Of My Province SPACEBOMB. CD/DL/LP WHEN NADIA REID last spoke to MOJO, in 2017, promoting her second album, Preservation , she was very clear on plans for a follow-up. “I hope to bring it all back to just guitars and voices,” she said, “the emotions of the song stripped of their production.” The Nadia Reid of three years ago was an artist moving into the second stage of her career, but desperate to shake off the dust of her past. Raised in Dunedin by her actress mother, Reid had received a Steiner school education that focused on singing and painting but left her struggling with the more ordered world of…

Cubicolor ★★★ Hardly A Day, Hardly A Night ANJUNA DEEP. CD/DL/LP There’s an endearing fragility to the doleful electronic pop of Anglo-Dutch trio, Cubicolor. Tim Digby-Bell’s folksy vocals spiral like wisps of smoke from a bonfire, buttressing gossamer-light beats and slivers of woozy piano. At times it sails close to the cloying, but glitchy instrumentals – like Melodies – act as aural plate shifts. Nazar ★★★★ Guerrilla HYPERDUB. CD/DL/LP This album of scabrous, denture-rattling bass music has poignant provenance. Manchester-based Nazar’s father was a rebel general during Angola’s civil war and he draws on his parent’s journals and family memories, combining it with a frantic, experimental variant on kuduro – the southwest central African country’s energetic, homegrown dance music. Unique and hugely addictive. Wajatta ★★★★ Don’t Let Get You Down…

“It’s genuinely wild around the edges – Nick Cave’s admiration for her work comes as no surprise.” Karen Dalton ★★★★ The Karen Dalton Archives Box Set MEGAPHONE. CD/DL/LP “FOR TEN YEARS, Karen Dalton has been trying hard not to be famous,” reads the headline on a press advertisement for the folk singer’s 1971 album, In My Own Time, a clipping reproduced in the extensive booklet that accompanies this compilation. Released on Woodstock promoter Michael Lang’s Just Sunshine label and recorded at Bearsville Studio, owned by Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, In My Own Time indicates how close Dalton came to the big machinery of folk music’s industrial complex. Yet the advertisement’s pitch is disingenuous: despite her stellar reputation among peers – she commanded Greenwich Village’s “basket houses” with Fred Neil,…

Tracks: Journey (Destruction/ Rebirth – Patterns Of Life) / Questions (Did You Know? – Will We Be Alive?) / Times (Seven Seasons – The Path – Given Time) / Feelings (Look Around You – I Want To Feel You) / Dreams (Story Of Our Time – Beneath This Sky) / Journey (ii) (A Game For All Who Know) Personnel: John Ferdinando (gtr, vcls, bs, org, autohrp), Peter Howell (gtrs, pno, org, mando, perc, recorder, tape effects), Lee Menelaus (vcls), Brian Hussey (drms), Robert Ferdinando, (classical gtr), Andrew Lowcock (flute), Martin Garrett (12-string gtr), Cement (bckng vcls) Producer: H&F Recordings, Brian Croney (engineer) Released: 1973 Recorded: H&F Recordings, Hove Chart peak: n/a Current availability: A Game For All Who Know – The H&F Recordings Box (Grapefruit, 2017)…