Tabla de contenidos para August 2020 en MOJO

…Manc funk-punks A CERTAIN RATIO release their first LP in 12 years in September. Featuring Factory Floor’s Gabe Gurnsey, it offers “an accumulation of ACR’s DNA from point zero (1977)… an album to dance, cry, fall in love and party to” … WU-TANG  CLAN’s Ghostface Killah will produce the rap legends’ next record, revealed the HipHopDX site, though member Masta Killa argued de facto generalissimo the RZA (left) ust handle their final album. “RZA got about a million beats,” he said. “We could pick 10 that would definitely bring you right back to that essence core of what you would classify as classic Wu-Tang” … TEENAGE FANCLUB release Endless Arcade later this year. They recorded 13 songs at Hamburg’s analogue Clouds Hill Recordings studio last November and spoke of “putting…

“I don’t know much of the background of The Embassy, other than they are from Gothenburg, Sweden, where they were at the vanguard of a movement of evocative, melancholy, vaguely electropop acts there in the early 2000s. This record and others by associated acts like Jens Lekman, Studio and Air France became the soundtrack of a lot of our youthful lives in Melbourne in the early 2010s. Even though these songs are breezy, it feels like sadness is just below the surface. It’s a warm summer evening, but it’s getting darker and you have work tomorrow. That contrast between happiness and sadness in a pop song format was a big inspiration for our band when we were starting out. We also always talked about how the best sunny music seems…

• For fans of: Elliott Smith, Wilco, Cass McCombs. • Mills is spending lockdown watching a family of coyotes outside his Silverlake home, and working on the soundtrack to forthcoming Amazon TV show Daisy Jones And The Six, about a ’70s rock band. • Don’t hire Mills to produce your record if you want him to focus on radio-friendly hits. “I’m not very well versed on what the expectations are,” he says. “I don’t really listen to contemporary music much.” • That hasn’t stopped him, though, being consulted by Jay-Z, and producing and co-writing John Legend’s Darkness And Light album.…

1 BOB MOULD AMERICAN CRISIS Opens on a scream, then gets angrier: Hurricane Bob rains viral vitriol on a “fucked up USA”, equating Reagan’s ’80s with Trump’s present. New LP Blue Hearts in September. Find it: streaming services 2 THE RACONTEURS BLANK GENERATION Jack White and troops tweak the Voidoids classic for “Generation X”. Insouciant and splenetic. Find it: Spotify 3 RADIOHEAD SEPARATOR A limpid highlight of the 2011 From The Basement session for The King Of Limbs, now streaming in full, for free. Visceral, bittersweet – and better than the album? Go, Colin! Find it: YouTube 4 SHARON VAN ETTEN & JOSH HOMME (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING Lazy cover of Nick Lowe’s heartwarmer with video of the…

“WATCH YOUR STEP,” ADVISES Steve Cropper, as he leads MOJO down a steep flight of stairs. It’s a quiet Saturday morning in early 2020, and he’s giving a tour of Nashville’s iconic RCA Studios on Music Row. Moving down the halls of Studio B – lined with framed photos of the country music legends who’ve recorded here, from Johnny Cash to Willie Nelson – we come upon Cropper’s own little hideaway. Somewhat detached from the rest of RCA’s complex is Studio C, where Cropper keeps his production offices. This particular addition was actually built for another Memphis music legend. “They opened this in 1964 for Elvis,” Cropper says. “It was Elvis’s favourite place to hang out because he could get away from everyone.” Cropper admits he’s rarely here. When he’s…

STADIO COMUNALE DELLA Favorita, Palermo, Sicily, July 14, 1982: the last night of an incident-packed two-month tour and Frank Zappa was pleased it was almost over. He’d spent the previous day visiting the nearby town of Partinico, the Zappa family’s ancestral home, the place his father left decades ago on an immigrant boat in search of a better life. Walking its narrow streets, Zappa felt grateful he’d be back in Laurel Canyon soon. “Frank would come to life on tour,” says Steve Vai, Zappa’s ace ‘stunt’ guitarist between 1980 and 1982. “He’d rent the limo, we’d go to discos. He knew how to have a good time.” But the final weeks of this trip were cramping his style. Frank got ill, there were cancellations and too much of what he…

A TOWN CALLED MALICE/PRECIOUS (Polydor double-A single, 1982) A statement release if ever there was one: …Malice’s atomic Motown drums, Jamerson bass and H-D-H-worthy slice-of-life lyric (“Hanging out their old love letters on the line to dry”), plus heavy-period Tempts funk and Weller’s impassioned growl’n’wail on the flip. The Jam were heading somewhere new, but not for long. YOU’RE THE BEST THING/BIG BOSS GROOVE (Polydor double-A single, 1984) Another AA single flaunting the breadth of Weller’s soul passions, with You’re The Best Thing heralding a bright TSOP softness that would become a Style Council default (and what about that chord change into “Don’t go away”?). On the other side, Thatcher-baiting agit-R&B (with hilariously bad dancing in the video). See also: Money-Go-Round. SHOUT TO THE TOP (Polydor single, 1984) Surely only…

• While Dylan’s new record holds the record (so to speak) for number of famous people and characters namechecked (approximately 50), he’s sung about notables before. Earlier songs included Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot (Desolation Row) and Belle Starr, Jack The Ripper, Galileo and Ma Rainey (Tombstone Blues); later ones referenced Neil Young and Erica Jong (Highlands), Alicia Keys (Thunder On The Mountain) and Leonardo DiCaprio (Tempest). And Murder Most Foul is not the first time he’s referred to President Kennedy (above) – see I Shall Be Free from his second album, 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.…

Syd, Roger, Richard, Nick & David Pink Floyd: An Evolving Playlist Available on Spotify and YouTube, Pink Floyd’s eight-song playlist evolves daily, with lesser-known tracks and rarities added every Friday. The bulk so far has drawn from familiar album cuts and singles; the charming Syd Barrett-era Bike paired up with welcome entries from Floyd’s art-house movie soundtracks, More and Obscured By Clouds. But it’s still enough of a lucky dip to keep listeners returning for more. The motherlode for these rarities are 2011’s Immersion box sets, which accessorised The Dark Side Of The Moon, Wish You Were Here and The Wall with multiple outtakes, live versions and works-in-progress. Here, an early Have A Cigar shows why the band recruited folkie Roy Harper to sing lead vocals on the finished version,…

“Rance Allen used a kind of stripped-back Motown sound.” THE DEVIL may have all the best tunes, but the guy upstairs has inspired a few bangers in his time. You don’t need to be a believer to feel the unalloyed joy in a great gospel recording. In a campaign unspooling until September, Craft Recordings are reaching into the vaults of Stax Records for rarities from its Gospel Truth imprint of the 1970s, making 25 LPs officially available digitally for the first time. Established in 1972 by Stax executive Al Bell, with radio plugger and songwriter Dave Clark and label staffer Mary Peak Patterson, Gospel Truth declared a mission to “carry the message of today’s gospel to the people on the street”. Clark paired down-home, traditional gospel with rock, funk and…

The Yo La discography is full of rare singles, odd EPs, soundtracks and, of course, myriad cover versions. One good place to start might be the valuable compilation, Prisoners Of Love: A Smattering of Scintillating Senescent Songs: 1985–2003, not least for their totemic take on Sun Ra’s Nuclear War. 1996’s rarities set, Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo, is useful, too. All the studio albums are worth a listen: 2009’s Popular Songs and 1992’s May I Sing With Me, the first to feature James McNew on bass, are especially unfortunate to miss out on our Top 10. Further reading: Big Day Coming: Yo La Tengo And The Rise Of Indie Rock, by sometime MOJO contributor Jesse Jarnow, is the obsessive study the band deserve.…

Dennis And Lois ★★★★ Dir: Chris Cassidy iTUNES/AMAZON. EVERY SURFACE in Lois Kahlert and Dennis Anderson’s Long Island home is covered in memorabilia: not just setlists, ticket stubs and laminates, the detritus of roughly 10,000 gigs attended across more than half a century, but also thousands of records and collectible toys and figurines. Beer bottles touched by rock star lips dominate the kitchen; a pair of jeans, more hole than cloth, hang behind a door like a faded denim spider. Once belonging to Joey Ramone, they are a sacred relic of the couple’s time as his band’s T-shirt sellers, a role these down-the-front superfans assumed almost imperceptibly, edging quietly into the Ramones’ inner circle. Since then, they have forged connections with dozens of artists, from Oasis and New Order to…

• According to friend Jim Imlach and Solid Air producer John Wood, Martyn “actively hated” the 1973 LP for which he is best known. • Among Martyn’s culinary specialities were monkfish steamed in vine leaves, goat curry and herb dumplings. • Thomson reveals a significant bust-up between Martyn and close friend Nick Drake shortly before the latter’s death, this partly down to Drake’s growing dismay at Martyn’s errant behaviour. • At a prosthetics specialist’s in 2003, after his right leg had been amputated below the knee, Martyn learned false leg technology was “coming on leaps and bounds”.…

In Chuck Berry’s No Particular Place To Go, he parks “way out on the Kokomo”, and Bruce Springsteen, in 4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy), similarly “saw her parked with her lover boy out on the Kokomo.” I know a Beach Boys song of the same name is about an island in the Caribbean, and there’s a town called Kokomo in Indiana, but Bruce and Chuck both seem to be talking about a particular type of road, or maybe a natural feature – some kind of promontory? So exactly what is a Kokomo? Tim Turner, via e-mail Fred Says: The Kokomo, as referred to in the Berry and Springsteen songs, refers to a privacy-assured car or caravan park. A survey of Kokomo, Indiana, once revealed that the local roadhouse parking…

Billy Gibbons ZZ TOP’S ENDLESS BOOGIER What music are you currently grooving to? The best! All the usual suspects starting with, and, most likely ending with, Jimmy Reed. Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmie Vaughan, The Red Devils… gotta love the guitar meanderings from Jimmy Nolan on James Brown’s tracks. Venturing into some unexpected lofty realms with the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Rodney Crowell, Graham Bond, Long John Hunter, The Specials, Madness, Chrissie Hynde, Elvis Costello, even the real ZZ Top Rhythmeen recording from ’96. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Some Girls, Rolling Stones. Released in ’78 after we appeared with ’em in Hawaii in ’72. The mesmerising effect takes hold as soon as the platter takes off. Really good stuff… I’m a fan! Hell, any disc…

1 ROSALYN (Fontana single, 1964) It’s hard to convey the shock, outrage and sheer glee that greeted the band’s punk-attitude R&B, as Rosalyn announced The Pretty Things to the world by mutating Bo Diddley’s hoodoo shimmer via May’s borstal snarl and Taylor’s scything slide guitar. A Number 41 near-hit, its anarchy-presaging impact was cemented by frantic 45s like Honey I Need and Midnight To Six Man. 2 DEFECTING GREY (Columbia single, 1967) Just as they’d taken R&B to primal extremes, the Pretties went feet-first into psychedelia with this Norman Smith-produced, five-minute hallucinogenic Anglo-answer to Good Vibrations, traversing park bench whimsy, reversed guitars, freak-beat frugging, California harmonies, acid-rock squalls and a closing pub knees-up. The mature follow-up, Talkin’ About The Good Times, upped the vocal harmonies and provided an…

WHEN HE WAS a kid in Dayton, Ohio, Robert Pollard would create album covers for the fantasy music in his mind. That music broke through into the physical world in 1986 when he was already 29, but in some ways that imaginative trust in the transcendent mysteries of rock’n’roll has informed everything he’s done. The clock’s still running, but so far there have been 107 albums of wildly creative indie rock by his main outlet, Guided By Voices, plus solo and side projects – “I figured if you record 100 songs there’s gotta be 20 good ones in there,” he once reasoned to MOJO. Keeping up the standard is GBV’s latest, Mirrored Aztec , whose Bunco Men refers to being, “under the bushes… under the stars,” also the title of…

“IDON’T REALLY have a set style,” says Chronixx on a lockdown call from Jamaica, explaining how he’s become the most exciting new roots reggae artist in years. “I started out as a songwriter, so part of my process is coming up with a new character for every song. Even in one song, you’ll have multiple characters. So there’s Chronixx the original, Chronixx the Marvin Gaye wannabe and Chronixx, the fourth member of The Wailers.” “Working on an album is always down to the wire.”CHRONIXX Although grounded in the 1970s roots sounds of Burning Spear, Gregory Isaacs and Bob Marley, Chronixx’s approach is unusually eclectic. His emotive tenor and understated phrasing point to Marley as the most obvious role model, but he’s also drawn on the rougher edges of early dancehall,…

HIS FORMAL interviews were few and his enigma remained, but Kraftwerk’s co-founder Florian Schneider liked to break cover in mischievous ways. Examples of his dry humour include a recent online clip of him riding a tiny scooter past a traffic cone in a multi-storey car park, and a be-wigged cameo playing in a bar band in 2001 murder mystery Klassentreffen – Mordfall Unter Freunden. In 2008, meanwhile, Schneider dusted off his Vocoder to record a poem about the Doepfer A100 modular synthesizer. “Technisch, logisch, funktionell,” he sang, adding (in translation) “compact and transportable for a musical adventure… A-100 to the future.” “His cold emotion/ warm emotion, I responded to that.”DAVID BOWIE He could have been talking about his life’s work in Kraftwerk. Born Florian Schneider-Esleben on April 7, 1947 and…

1 Ready to make his Mar-Key: Cropper at Messick High School, Memphis, 1959. 2 “Those records capture energy really well”: The M.G.’s (from left) Booker T. Jones, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn, Cropper rehearse with Carla Thomas in London, 1967. 3 “Most of the time I was helping him finish the songs”: on-stage with Otis Redding, Hunter College, New York City January 21, ’67. 4 “Al was the anchor”: classic M.G.’s (from left) Duck, Cropper, Booker and drummer Al Jackson Jr, 1970. 5 “The workload got to be crazy”: Steve after leaving Stax, 1973. 6 “…and we’re wearing sunglasses”: Steve (second left) in The Blues Brothers film, 1980, with Joliet Jake (John Belushi, far right) and Elwood (Dan Aykroyd, second right). 7 “Voted the number one tour of the year”: on-stage with…

THE TITLE OF the new Fontaines D.C. album, A Hero’s Death, comes from Brendan Behan’s (pictured, right) 1958 play The Hostag , a satirical critique of Irish nationalism. Its cover art, meanwhile, depicts The Death Of Cúchulainn, a stat e of the mythic Celtic hero unveiled at the GPO in Dubl n in 1935 as a memorial to the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. As Grian Chatte and Conor Deegan explain, the band’s relationship with Ireland is far from straightfo Deegan: “Ireland is basically the story of our entire lives. There’s a lot of deep-seated issues in Irish society that form the nature of your relationship with your school and your work and your family. The church. Alcoholism. In Ireland, alcoholism isn’t called ‘alcoholism’, it’s called ‘someone who’s fond…

SMALL TWO-STOREY TERRACED HOUSE in Bow, East London. No hot water, outside loo. We lived – mum, dad and me – upstairs; maternal grandparents downstairs. Our ‘tech’ was a hefty radiogram whose dial I’d twirl to find an alternative to the BBC’s Light Programme and Home Service – Luxembourg or AFN (American Forces Network), whatever blipped or skree-iggled into earshot. One early evening, that sound hit. Loud! Shouting, screaming, joyful, rhyming, lapel-grabbing stream-of-unconscious exhortations, an aural colour-burst, with a crazed band pounding behind. Hearing Little Richard explode from that radiogram in the ’50s transfixed me. There had been nothing, nothing, like this before. It was not like an explorer discovering a land that had, in fact, been there for millennia. This was new. As new to the continent on which…

“PAUL’S KNOWN FOR NOT LOOKING BACK. BUT FOR WHATEVER REASON HE’S IN A GOOD PLACE WITH THE STYLE COUNCIL.” LEE COGSWELL IN THE PULPIT of St Mary The Virgin, in Finedon, Northamptonshire, the parish priest is delivering a sermon. But listen closely, for while the words have a deliberately-wrought gravitas there’s not a lot about God, or Jesus, or conventional Christian salvation. “And never forget, children, that beauty is here, not only in the sight of a star-filled sky, the lights of a city, or the sight of a raindrop dripping from a green luxuriant leaf, but also in that magical power termed love…” The voice is familiar, and so is the face. That’s because he’s the Reverend Richard Coles, once the instrumental half of Red Wedge-affiliated pop duo The…

“A cast of gamblers, train drivers and everyday ‘workingmen’ were imbued with magical realist qualities.” Grateful Dead ★★★★★ Workingman’s Dead: 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition RHINO. CD/LP BY THE end of the 1960s, drug busts, tourists and tear gas bombs on Haight Street had driven the Grateful Dead from San Francisco. Like many countercultural pioneers, they headed out of the city in search of a theoretically freer, simpler life adjacent to nature. Their destination was Marin County, an hour to the north, where they could relax and indulge in sepia-tinged fantasies of what drummer Bill Kreutzmann called the “cowboy lifestyle”. Congregating on the Novato ranch rented by the band’s other drummer, Mickey Hart, they rode horses, ate barbecue sauce dosed with acid, and played with guns. They shot at old television…

What gave you the idea to create this ode to California? “It was the art that drew me to California, promising rain and a Garden of Eden. I got the verse of the title song in my hands like a piano study and I’d play it for my children. This piece hounded me. Finally it occurred to me: write what you know. I knew about orange crate art.” How did Brian get involved? “When I went to his home in Latigo Canyon and saw him looking at a television that wasn’t on, my response was to insist that I needed him to go down this rabbit hole with me.” What was the process of working with Brian on this? “We worked without a net. There were no rehearsals and no…

• The couple have “Mekons” number plates in tribute to their beloved Leeds band. • Anderson was born in the same Hoboken hospital as Frank Sinatra. As a teenager he helped TV host Clay Cole choose the best bands for his rock’n’roll show. • When Jimi Goodwin of Doves was a child, his father took him to see the Ramones in Manchester. Lois, feeling bad she didn’t have a kid-sized T-shirt for him, offered to take him backstage to meet the band: “My formation as a musician, they facilitated that,” says Goodwin.…

WHEN WE BEGAN PUTTING TOGETHER this issue of MOJO, lockdown was still, fatefully, over a fortnight away. On Thursday, March 5, Paul Weller turned up at a West London photo studio full of energy, moves and ideas. “Music is something you’ve always got to be thinking about,” he told Danny Eccleston that afternoon. “Like an athlete or a boxer, you have to keep training.” In the long intervening months, I’m sure we’ve all stayed in the game, one way or another, by tending to our musical obsessions. Playing records and editing MOJOs have been as much of a pleasure as ever, regardless of the challenges of our new working environment; thank you, once again, for all your support. A gig or festival would be nice, though, and so this month’s…

I’m a bit of a fan of Tom Waits.”YUSUF/CAT STEVENS AS THE 50th anniversary of Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman looms this November, the 71-year-old singer has chosen to mark it not with the typically lavish remaster/outtakes/demos box set. Instead, at the suggestion of his son and manager Yoriyos, he has re-recorded the multi-platinum 1970 album in its entirety. “It made sense to me to update and reimagine the album, according to the way I feel today,” the singer tells MOJO from his home in Dubai. “I’ve just had such fun and such joy revisiting these songs. They’re incredibly relevant to me now, and to the world, I would say.” Reassembling key members of the original team for the making of Tea for the Tillerman² – namely producer Paul…

IT’S AN arresting image by any measure: a handsome young black man, with an easy grin and smiling eyes, crammed into a photobooth with a Kalamazoo acoustic guitar, held close to his body as if he and it are one. The photograph is a newly discovered portrait of Robert Johnson, according to many the greatest bluesman that ever lived, and whose legend as the 1930s Delta guitarist who sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads, in exchange for preternatural gifts, is one of rock’s foundational myths. The image, unearthed during research for a new book, Brother Robert, written by Johnson’s now 94-year-old stepsister, Annye C. Anderson, is as extraordinary as the memoir itself. It is, incredibly, only the third verified photograph of the bluesman, adding to the rather…

• For fans of: Bob Marley, Gregory Isaacs, Luciano. • Chronixx made his first recordings, aged 11, in family gospel group Hearts Of Worship. • Chris Blackwell told The New York Times that Chronixx’s phrasing and timing are as distinctive as Bob Marley’s, suggesting that his clear enunciation is on par with Frank Sinatra’s. • The new album features a number of guest collaborators, including blues guitarist Gary Clark Jr, Free Nationals’ bassist Kelsey Gonzalez, and Damian ‘Junior Gong’ Marley.…

TRAX records co-founder LARRY SHERMAN (right, b.c.1950) was pressing vinyl for jukeboxes in Chicago when he was contacted by DJ/producers Jesse Saunders and Vince Lawrence. From 1985, their TRAX label played a huge part in popularising the city’s nascent house sound, with 12-inch singles by Adonis, Jamie Principle, Frankie Knuckles, Marshall Jefferson and Larry Heard – as well as Phuture’s 1987 Acid Trax, a catalyst for the UK rave scene. GEORGIA R&B SINGER EDDIE COOLEY (b.1933) moved to New York and co-wrote Fever with Otis Blackwell in 1955. Made into an R&B hit by Little Willie John in 1956, it would be widely covered, most famously by Peggy Lee in 1958, but also by Elvis Presley, James Brown, Madonna and others. In 1956 Cooley, with vocal group The Dimples, would…

THE CATALYST Various The Complete Stax/Volt Singles 1959-1968 (ATLANTIC, 1991) Covering Stax’s first decade, this box set doubles as a testimonial to Cropper’s many virtues as a guitarist, songwriter, and producer. From his one-finger organ drone on The Mar-Keys’ Last Night, to his signature licks on Sam & Dave’s many hits, to his part in helping shape Otis Redding’s epochal sides, Cropper proves himself arguably the pivotal force in Southern soul’s greatest institution. THE TELECASTER MASTER Steve Cropper With A Little Help From My Friends (STAX, 1969) As part of Stax’s multi-album post-Atlantic relaunch, Cropper ventured out for his first solo outing, a killer instrumental platter, on which he revisits some of his notable R&B co-writes (In The Midnight Hour; 99-½), delivers sharp readings of contemporary pop hits (including the…

FRANK ZAPPA The Mothers 1970: 50th Anniversary (UMC) “I DON’T SEE why I shouldn’t put these things out myself, because I created them in the first place,” Frank Zappa told me in 1991, explaining his decision to confront bootleggers head-on with his own Beat The Boots! releases – basically, a series of existing bootlegs rebranded with the proprietorial musician’s own imprimatur. “AIMED SQUARELY AT PEOPLE WHO’LL THRILL AT OWNING MORE VERSIONS OF WONDERFUL WINO.” Five of the 15 original Beat The Boots! were culled from 1970-71 – suggesting Zappa’s fondness for that fecund period – and The Mothers 1970 offers more evidence, finding the line-up of Ian Underwood (keyboards/guitar/sax), Liverpool-born drummer Aynsley Dunbar, fusion keyboard wiz George Duke, Jeff Simmons (bass) and vocal duo Flo & Eddie (AKA The Turtles’…

“A cuckolded narrator addresses the knave, ‘The size of your cock will get you nowhere’ – not your everyday admonishment.” Bob Dylan ★★★★★ Rough And Rowdy Ways COLUMBIA. CD/DL/LP DOES BOB DYLAN have a wizened Romani palm reader on call? His timing is uncanny. In the midst of a global pandemic, he’s released a new album – his first collection of new compositions in eight years. It’s not merely the novelty of new Bob songs that offers comfort, it’s a set of songs that provides inspiration at a juncture in which it’s in short supply. Call it a vaccine against culture’s shrinking expectations and the subsequent sapping of spirit. Or just call it great music. Of course, an earlier Dylan album, Love And Theft landed on September 11, 2001. His…

Ben Salisbury, The Insects And Geoff Barrow ★★★ Devs INVADA. DL Alex Garland’s recent eight-part TV drama took the tropes of the evil genius sci-fi thriller and dragged them out to an unsettling length. For the score, Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow go deep on the slow nightmare vibe, drawing on themes from early choral music and classic Hollywood melodramas by Bernard Herrmann, to create a mood somewhere between love, devotion and terror. Blanck Mass ★★★ Calm With Horses INVADA. CD/DL/LP A brutal tale of loyalty and redemption set in rural Ireland, Nick Rowland’s debut film is a deceptively emotional gangland tale – tough on the outside, broken inside. Benjamin Power’s score is fittingly caught between the melancholy and the euphoric, peeling layers of harsh electronics, revealing a deeper emotional…

Andrew McCormack ★★★★ Solo UBUNTU MUSIC. CD/DL Last seen fusing jazz with prog and math rock via his quintet Graviton, Solo finds the one-time Tomorrow’s Warriors pianist returning to his roots. While Monk’s influence is alluded to in an inventive retake on Wee See, it’s without slavishness. Fluid, enchanting originals like the animated Prospect Park and desolate Adagio weave discreet narrative spells that dovetail with McCormack’s heightened improvisational powers. Oscar Jerome ★★★★ Breathe Deep CAROLINE INTERNATIONAL. CD/DL/LP Positivity flows through this outing from Kokoroko’s guitarist. More song-based than his Afrobeat collective work, there are hints of Grant Green, Wes Montgomery and Kenny Burrell as his summery pluck-and-strum combine with his expressive voice (almost scatting on Give Back What U Stole From Me). When it peaks on the less linear, brass-detailed…

• The Grateful Dead began their six-night run at the Capitol Theatre, Port Chester on February 18, 1971, as a six-piece, but by the February 21 show captured on this set, they had lost a member. On February 18, one of Mickey Hart’s friends, Dr Stanley Krippner, was present to conduct an ESP experiment on the entire audience. He was also required, though, to hypnotise Hart, addicted to heroin and in the middle of a breakdown, so that he could get through the show. Afterwards, Krippner took Hart to his mother’s house in Long Island. Hart slept for three days, then retreated to his ranch. He would not rejoin the Dead until 1974.…

Oneness Of Juju ★★★★★ African Rhythms 1970-1982 STRUT. CD/DL/LP TO THOSE coming to this amazing music wholly or even partly fresh (as all must, given the five unreleased tracks), it’s like acquiring membership of a library where the books are written in a new language which somehow bears all the hallmarks of several familiar tongues. The best comparison for an ensemble whose oeuvre opens out into such a panoramic yet individual take on different black music traditions would be London spiritual Afro-funkers Cymande, but even they would struggle to match the twists and turns of Oneness Of Juju’s creative flight. The short spell of imprisonment Plunky Branch incurred for succumbing to the Vietnam war draft just long enough to learn how to handle a gun before hightailing it to a…

IT IS the weird curse of Yo La Tengo that a joke news story about them might be better known than their actual music. In 2003, The Onion ran a piece headlined “37 Record-Store Clerks Feared Dead In Yo La Tengo Concert Disaster”, which pinpointed their core appeal – as the music snobs’ music snobs. Indie-rockers with an eclectic musical brief, a voracious and encyclopaedic knowledge of rock history, a clear affinity with The Velvet Underground, and some very long album titles, Yo La Tengo could have been purpose-built for cultdom. “They could have been purpose-built for cultdom.” Over the past 36 years, though, the New Jersey trio have transcended those clichés, without compromising on the radical, sneaky nature of their art. “I think many of the decisions we make…

Tracks: And After / If Not This Time / Opus 777 / The Things That Concern You / Opus 11 / Red The Sign Post / For Paula / Rose / Fantasy / God Bless The Child / Cauldron Personnel: Cork Marcheschi (electronics, Theremin, audio generator, siren), David Blossom (gtr, piano, kalimba), Nancy Blossom (vcls), Larry Evans (vcls, gtr), Terry Hansley (bs), Kim Kimsey (drms, perc) Producer, engineer: Dan Healy Released: December 1967 Recorded: Sierra Sound, Berkeley; Columbus Recorders, San Francisco Chart peak: n/a Current availability: Modern Harmonic LP…

TOTP STRIKE!  3 Due to a Musicians’ Union strike over cutbacks to orchestras, for the fifth week there is no Top Of The Pops: re-runs of sitcom Are You Being Served? are broadcast instead, surprising star John Inman (above), who’s in summer season at Blackpool. ZEP GO OUT  7 Led Zeppelin play their final gig with John Bonham in Berlin. It’s a month for farewell shows: on July 13 Bob Marley plays the Bingley Hall, Stafford, his last UK date, while July 31 sees the last Eagles concert until 1994’s Hell Freezes Over tour. HIP HOP HERE  12 Grandmaster Flash And The Furious Five, with Grand Wizard Theodore, Kool Kyle The Starchild and others, play Rochdale Village Community Center in Queens. MALCOLM OWEN RIP  14 Malcolm Owen of The Ruts…

HELLO SPRING 1964 We were living in The Keep, a Span Estate in Blackheath. I was singing mostly on my own then, to my own banjo accompaniment. My husband, Austin J ohn Marshall, was a designer working for The Observer, and he loved jazz. He came home one night saying he’d heard this remarkable musician playing some jazz and Indian and North African music, and he thought it would be interesting for me to hear him and perhaps sing some songs with him. I sort of dismissed it instantly because the word ‘jazz’ came up – I really, really loathe jazz! – but John insisted. “He wouldn’t travel on the same train as me.”SHIRLEY COLLINS So Davy came to our little Span house. I think it was in the afternoon,…