Tabla de contenidos para September 2021 en MOJO

John Aizlewood John has been writing for MOJO since 2018. Before that, he wrote for Q, Tracks, Melody Maker, Sounds and other publications no longer with us. He writes about sport too and so was delighted to talk Queens Park Rangers with Tony Hicks of The Hollies in his first major MOJO piece. Turn to page 32. Andrew Collins The Northampton-born art student designed pages for NME in 1988, moving diagonally via inkies and glossies, Radios 1, 2, 4, 5 and 6, Classic FM and Radio Times. Billy Bragg’s Boswell, he played drums for Cud at Brixton Academy and suggests how to buy fellow East Midlander Kevin Coyne on page 100. Danny Eccleston MOJO’s Senior Editor learned much of what he knows about music mags from the two gentlemen on…

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN HISTORY IS being made? For Woody Woodmansey, sat in the kitchen at Haddon Hall, his initial response to Life On Mars? being composed in the room next door was, “Fucking hell that’s a bit weird.” Soon enough, though, Woodmansey and everyone else in David Bowie’s orbit would intuit the significance of what they were hearing. “I remember speaking to people at the time,” Rick Wakeman tells us, “and I said, ‘It will be one of the greatest albums ever made.’” This month’s MOJO turns the spotlight on yet another epochal album celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2021: Hunky Dory. Tom Doyle speaks with the players, producers and even Bowie’s elusive manager Tony Defries to reconstruct the album’s making, and to understand the…

Nancy Sinatra Boots (REPRISE, 1966) The album bearing Lee Hazlewood’s anthem of nemesis, These Boots Are Made For Walkin’. For more musical boots, see Patrick Macnee and Honor Blackman’s Kinky Boots, The Nips’ Venus In Bovver Boots and, most intriguingly, Kid Congo’s Dracula Boots. Run-DMC My Adidas (PROFILE, 1986) A classic of the sneaker rap genre: “I like to sport ’em, that’s why I bought ’em.” Word. See also Schoolly D’s Put Your Fila’s On, Worthy D’s Nikes On My Feet and Reg E Gaines’ hard-hitting Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans. Carl Perkins Blue Suede Shoes (SUN, 1956) Zero hour for rock’n’roll footwear. For rocking outlaws, see also Leiber & Stoller’s oft-covered greaser death disc Black Denim Trousers And Motorcycle Boots; for woe untold in the youth club of…

GARY KEMP should have spent the last few months touring with Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, singing and playing guitar on early-period Pink Floyd songs. Instead, he’s been preparing Insolo, his first solo album since 1995. Its sophisto-rock vignettes reflect on solitude and past selves and, he intimates, draws a line under Spandau Ballet, whose story involved huge ’80s pop success with 1983’s True, a bruising High Court royalties battle in 1999 and an against-the-odds reformation in 2009. “I’m a great dabbler,” he says from home in London, “and I love a pompous rock statement.” New song Waiting For The Band recalls seeing Bowie at Hammersmith in 1973. I got to see him at the Marquee club in 1973, as well, when I had this moment, where I pass the…

THE FIRST ONE! Manic Street Preachers ★★★★ Generation Terrorists (COLUMBIA, 1992) Yes it’s overlong, and some songs had already been better represented elsewhere, but the debut Manics album offered an essential inventory of the band’s rock’n’roll culturecide. The Wire/Edwards lyric writing partnership was perhaps at its symbiotic best, while the diamond-tipped James Dean Bradfield riff mine repeatedly struck pure gold: no one else has ever written a song quite like Motorcycle Emptiness, the doomed youth anthem to end them all. THE NUMBER ONE! Manic Street Preachers ★★★★ This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (EPIC, 1998) After Everything Must Go’s heroic relaunch of the bereaved trio, commercial vindication: a chart-topping album, anchored by glacially bleak songs inspired by Welsh poet R.S. Thomas, heralded by If You Tolerate This Your Children…

FAYE WEBSTER CRUNCHES ACROSS THE GRAVEL OF THIS SPRAWLING SPACE THAT is not quite sure what it is. Outside former factory warehouses, one of which hosts something called the Immersive Van Gogh Experience and is painted with an interpretation of Starry Night two stories high, there are half a dozen shipping containers serving burgers, wine, beer, and slushy alcohol-based drinks. It’s a short walk from Webster’s house in the Kirkwood neighbourhood of Atlanta, past fast-rising construction sites and billboards that promise luxury retail and residential units – new additions since she moved in with her partner here at the end of 2019. “I’d like to get to stay here for maybe… two more years?” Webster says of this ominously upscaling part of her hometown. Atlanta is hot on this June…

PERI’S SCOPE (from Portrait In Jazz, Riverside 1960) Written for his then girlfriend, Peri Cousins, who’d complained that no one ever dedicated songs to women called Peri. A deceptively simple 4/4 dance, it’s enhanced by the spaces that Evans leaves open and what bassist Scott LaFaro does with those spaces, adding a down-low walking-bass groove. WALTZ FOR DEBBY (from Waltz For Debby, Riverside 1962) As Peter Pettinger writes in his definitive Evans biography, How My Heart Sings, Bill envied the family life of his brother Harry, and adored Harry’s young daughter, Debby. This delicate swirling dance of melodies is complexly structured, with space for improvisation, but never at the expense of its beauty. RE: PERSON I KNEW (from Moon Beams, Riverside 1962) Following the death of Scott LaFaro, Evans began…

R.E.M. Out Of Time (Warner Bros, March 12) The ascent of former alt-favourites to mainstream cosiness created a vacuum a new wave of gnarlier bands would fill. By May ’91, thanks to Losing My Religion, they were omnipresent. DE US CHART PEAK: 1 SMASHING PUMPKINS Gish (Caroline/Hut, May 17) The Pumpkins’ debut melded metal to a gothier, sensitive pop, inspired by The Cure, Banshees etc. Recording was intense, but Butch Vig’s gilt (co-)production set a template that would fill stadiums. JB US CHART PEAK: 195 SKID ROW Slave To The Grind (Atlantic, June 11) Singer Seb Bach’s ‘AIDS Kills Faggots Dead’ T-shirt epitomised the hard rock culture Nirvana anathemised. Blues and punk roots show in the Guns N’Roses-indebted mix, but a Number 1 album? Really? DE US CHART PEAK: 1…

IT IS THE SPRING OF 1971 AND WORKS-IN-PROGRESS ARE EMANATING FROM THE room where the 24-year-old songwriter sits at his grand piano. Fragments of lyrics and melodies leak out into the spacious lobby, replete with grandly sweeping stairway, of the enormous ground floor Flat 7 at Haddon Hall, 42 Southend Road, Beckenham, Kent. Floating through a serving window into the tiny kitchen, these sounds reach the ears of guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey The pair – in the singer’s band since early 1970 – are busy making breakfast. “You’d hear him piecing things together,” Woodmansey tells MOJO today “We’d hear, ‘Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow’ coming through the butler’s hatch. We’d be there going, ‘Fucking hell that’s a bit weird, innit?’ (laughs) Y’know, ‘Lennon’s on sale…

Villagers ★★★★ Fever Dreams DOMINO. CD/DL/LP IT’S NOT ALL Conor O’Brien’s fault if he’s perceived as a Connoisseurs’ Choice kind of artist. An Ivor Novello award – very much the songwriter’s songwriter accolade – for 2010’s Becoming A Jackal, his first single as Villagers, set the trend. An Ivor for an entire album, 2015’s Darling Arithmetic, was to follow. Here’s a musician with chops his peers envy – Paul Weller once made O’Brien sign a Villagers album for him – and a writer skilled at pinning melody to a free-flowing stream of lofty ideas and sophisticated vocabulary. He’s an Elvis Costello de nos jours. So why isn’t he a household name? Perhaps there’s a categorisation issue. In the first line of its entry on Villagers, the ever reliable Wikipedia has…

Clint Mansell ★★★★★ In The Earth INVADA. CD/DL/LP Possible career peak for the Coventry-born film composer. FOLLOWING HIS disappointingly bland adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, English horror auteur Ben Wheatley has returned with a short, savage eco-nightmare that almost recaptures the grimy claustrophobia of his early work. But if In The Earth occasionally feels like a classic it is almost certainly down to Mansell’s unheimlich kosmische score. Moving from the hazy electronic chorales of prime Popol Vuh and the analogue blood pulse of ’80s-era Tangerine Dream, Mansell then starts to develop themes within the film, playing with sonic frequencies that seem to have an unsettling psychological effect on your inner ear. Wheatley, to his credit, has created narrative spaces for Mansell’s score that allow it to assume the status…

Paintings Kevin Coyne was an unstoppable fine artist who exhibited far and wide. He graduated from Derby Art School (these days University) in 1965 and continued to paint and draw to his dying day. Coyne designed the majority of his almost 40 LP sleeves. Childlike in the empowering sense of the word, he was essentially a bawdy cartoonist in paint who clearly loved Marc Chagall. Very much in the primitivist or Edenic style, which ennobles the untrained and favours the untaught, he exhibited in the UK, Netherlands, Switzerland and across his adopted Germany. After giving up drinking, he went on to find a market for his colourful, psychedelic daubs, all for sale on his website.…

BASSIST JUAN NELSON (b.1958, below) played with Ben Harper’s Innocent Criminals on albums from 1995’s Fight For Your Mind to 2016’s Call It What It Is. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Nelson moved to California in the 1960s where he took up bass as a child, becoming a skilled and soulful player as well as an extravagant performer. Known for his virtuosic solos, Nelson was also noted for his work with Big Advice, Brenda Russell, Charles Wright, Yanni and more. MAGAZINE EDITOR ALAN LEWIS (b.c.1945) was a tireless and inspirational figure at the forefront of British music journalism for over four decades. Beginning at Melody Maker in 1969, in the ’70s he founded Black Music magazine before moving on to edit Sounds, NME and, later, Record Collector. He also launched Kerrang!…

Wikipedia browsing makes me wince when it reminds me about how the 2008 Universal fire destroyed so many artists’ master tapes. But who out there destroyed their music intentionally, like Brian Wilson reputedly did with the Smile tapes? Olly Murray, via e-mail MOJO says: The most famous example is Jean Michel Jarre, who took a stand against what he called the CD age’s “industrialisation of music” when he pressed one copy of 1983’s Musique Pour Supermarché and destroyed the master and vinyl stamper. But there are numerous other examples. When John Fogerty’s 1976 long-player Hoodoo was rejected by his Asylum label, he flew from Los Angeles to San Francisco and chopped up the tapes with razors a few songs excepted, though an in-house cassette was later bootlegged. In 1977, Elton…

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO JIMI’S JONI TAPE IN FULL 1 Night In The City 2 Come To The Sunshine 3 Chelsea Morning 4 The Pirate Of Penance 5 Conversation 6 The Way It Is 7 The Dawntreader 8 Both Sides, Now 9 Marcie 10 Nathan La Franeer 11 Dr. Junk 12 Roses Blue 13 Michael From Mountains 14 Go Tell The Drummer Man 15 I Don’t Know Where I Stand 16 Sisotowbell Lane 17 Ladies Of The Canyon IT’S ONE OF rock’s most mysterious Lost Tapes legends: what happened to the recordings made of Joni Mitchell by Jimi Hendrix at Le Hibou Coffee House in Ottawa, Canada on March 19, 1968? It’s a tantalising tale of two rising genii from different ends of the ’60s…

At The Bunkhouse Coffeehouse (INTERNATIONAL RECORDS, 1965) A telling glimpse of time, place and mindset. Compelling covers of Four Strong Winds, Don’t Think Twice and Muleskinner Blues, alongside his own Slice Of Life remind you why the album was so sought after. David Wiffen (FANTASY, 1971) Beside famous songs Lost My Driving Wheel and More Often Than Not, there’s Mr Wiffen Is Incommunicado, later covered by Harry Belafonte as Ol’ Harry Is Incommunicado. “I find it quite pleasing,” Wiffen says, understatedly. Songs From The Lost & Found (TRUE NORTH, 2015) Originally planned as the follow-up to 1973’s Coast To Coast Fever, these 2015 bluesy reveries – including Fugitive – partly explained why he bailed when he did.…

1 DAMON ALBARN THE NEARER THE FOUNTAIN, MORE PURE THE STREAM FLOWS To sweetly shimmering frost tones, a soliloquy on loss and the heartache of those left behind. From new solo LP of the same name. Find it: streaming services 2 ASHLEY SHADOW FOR LOVE Deep contemplation in the Pacific Northwest from Black Mountain co-singer. A VU thrum underpins its multi-layered, darkly folky arrangement and rolling groove. Find it: YouTube 3 KHRUANGBIN & QUANTIC PELOTA (CUT A RUG MIX) After overhauling Macca, the Texan trio have their own remix LP: Will ‘Quantic’ Holland brings a gyrating Latin groove lost outside time. Find it: YouTube 4 SCOTT HIRSCH MUCH TOO LATE Honeyslide-smooth hybrid of JJ Cale and Curtis Mayfield vibes from Ojai, California. Carolyn Dennis – formerly Mrs Bob Dylan – adds significant backing…

Run & Tell ★★★ (Self-released, 2013) The spare solo-guitar bedroom-folk debut, channelling and cautiously exploring where she fit (or didn’t) into her supportive family’s country music leanings. Complete with Springsteen cover (Dancing In The Dark), it telegraphs the 16-year-old’s self-awareness and precocious wit. Even before high school was over she knew she was funny, haha. Faye Webster ★★★ (Awful, 2018) Soulful, intimate and confident, this tuned fans into a quirky, perceptive lyrical mind – creatively awakened by finding her tribe at the hometown hip-hop collective that inspired her development as a writer. Laden with horns and steel, it marries your internal narrator with the backing ensemble it likely always craved. Atlanta Millionaires Club ★★★★ (Secretly Canadian, 2019) A dreamy, introspective meditation cosily tucked into the crossroads of folk-pop and Southern…

IN 1971, GEORGE Underwood had been friends with David Jones since the late ’50s. It was an alliance that had famously survived the notorious incident at Bromley Technical High School where George – rivalling David for the attentions of one Carol Goldsmith – had punched the future star in the eye, resulting in the permanently dilated pupil that would later fuel the singer’s otherworldly aura. Bandmates in George & The Dragons and The King Bees, they had continued to bond over music, and Bowie held onto the hope that his pal could be a pop star too. In 1970-71, with Bowie’s help, Underwood recorded Song For Bob Dylan, Hole In The Ground and We Should Be On By Now under the name Calvin James. “It was the name Mickie Most…

Barrabás ★★★ ¡Soltad a Barrabás! GUERSSEN. LP Guerssen issue the first three albums by the ‘70s Latin rock sensation led by Spain’s funkiest drummer, Fernando Arbex. Their third LP was recorded in the US and aimed squarely at the disco market, with less heat and howl in its grooves. Hi-Jack was later jazzed up by Herbie Mann. JB Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers ★★★★ Angel Dream WARNER BROS. CD/DL/LP Petty’s first-rate soundtrack to 1996 Jennifer Aniston vehicle She’s The One was ostensibly off-cuts from Wildflowers. Now ‘remastered and remixed’, five new additions include Dylan-aping Thirteen Days, fantastic organ jam 105 Degrees and the exquisite title track in the raw. JB Thalia Zedek ★★★★ Been Here And Gone THRILL JOCKEY. LP The former Come singer/guitarist’s solo debut remastered on vinyl for…

Jakob Dylan WALLFLOWER, BLUE-EYED SON What music are you currently grooving to? Joe Henry’s The Gospel According To Water. Joe’s as good a songwriter as I’m aware of. A really moving record – he had a lot of health issues and it’s a brutal look into a personal journey, and what the beyond looks like, I suppose. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? You might think I was on the payroll I speak about The Clash so much, but I don’t think there’s a better rock’n'roll record than London Calling. It’s still it. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? I had older brothers who’d started a pretty large record collection, and they had records I liked, 999,…

…Robert Smith (right) told The Sunday Times that the new CURE LP amounts to “10 years of life distilled into a couple of hours of intense stuff… I can’t think we’ll ever do anything else” …PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING release their new LP Bright Magic in September: an impressionistic portrait of Euro-metropolis Berlin, mainman J. Willgoose, Esq. says, “The whole shape and structure of the record is very much in debt to [David Bowie’s] Low” … ROGER TAYLOR’s Outsider arrives in October. Locked down with studio time, he “suddenly found myself with an album… [the songs] came out one after the other” …BRIAN ENO promises new material on The Lighthouse, his new Sonos Radio channel …after deleting the digital files, composer ERLAND COOPER buried the ¼-inch magnetic tapes of new LP…

I was 12 when I found the record somewhere in my house in Montreal, on cassette. I hadn’t heard his other songs, and I felt like I had really fallen on the most incredible thing. The album was absolutely captivating. The songs were not pop songs and the lyrics were so vivid and descriptive. Nothing about his music was too overt. The sexuality of it is beautiful, soft and not intimidating, the politics of it were not hurtful or angry. It was a view into the complexity of adult life. I remember my mum took me to see Leonard Cohen at the Théâtre Saint-Denis in Montreal, and she said, “He grew up in Westmount,” which is where I grew up. I was certainly one of the youngest people there, but…

I’LL GIVE YOU A LIFT BACK TO THE STATION.” The last place MOJO expects to be after interviewing Nicky Wire is in a car driven by Nicky Wire. A previous visit to the Manic Street Preachers’ bassist, lyricist and spielmacher at home in Newport saw him recruiting brother Patrick Jones and bandmate Sean Moore as chauffeurs; his failure to pass even the theory test rankling for someone whose academic success at school came easily. Yet here he is now, humming along to Lloyd Cole & The Commotions’ Rattlesnakes, navigating the hills near the Manics’ Door To The River studio, then easing onto the motorway with only the slightest clench of the steering wheel. “I’m a very instinctive person, really poor on technical stuff – that’s why I’m such a shit…

FOR CERTAIN BECAUSE… (Parlophone, 1966) Their second album of 1966 was their fifth in all, but the first wholly written by the Clarke/ Hicks/Nash axis. Cleverly, they combined artistic evolution such as the sparse, harmonies-free Tell Me To My Face with the trademark supertight pop of Stop! Stop! Stop! and the marvellous Pay You Back With Interest. BUTTERFLY (Parlophone, 1967) Nash’s last stand as a ’60s Hollie was their most psychedelic outing (even Hicks declared, “I’m Pegasus the flying horse”), but they gave it a Hollies twist on the CSN forerunner Elevated Observations?, the dramatic Would You Believe and, especially, Step Inside. The band were travelling in different directions, but it didn’t sound like it. HOLLIES’ GREATEST (Parlophone, 1968) An expertly curated hits resume, from 1963’s Stay to 1968’s Jennifer…

ELIOT ZIGMUND WAS 29 WHEN HE FIRST played with Bill Evans. A classical music graduate of New York City College, the Bronx-born jazz drummer had spent his high school years hanging out in the New York clubs, checking out kit heroes such as Philly Joe Jones, Art Blakey and Paul Motian, before moving to San Francisco in the early ’70s and playing with the Vince Guaraldi Trio; that’s his soft brush style you hear on those Charlie Brown TV soundtracks. But Evans was a step up. “I’d listened to Bill since I was a teenager,” says Zigmund today. “Plus, my trio chops were kind of honed, thanks to Vince. I was lucky to audition and also calm enough to do the audition.” Auditions were held at the Village Vanguard –…

RIGHT ON MOTHER Written in early 1971, and recorded by Peter Noone, this piano-based song (think Martha My Dear Beatles, even Gilbert O’Sullivan) was demoed by Bowie but never properly finished. The story of a man coming of age and informing his mother that he has moved in with his girlfriend, the lyric contains a serious twist (a liaison between empowered son and curious mother is indicated). RUPERT THE RILEY The subject here is Bowie’s car (a Riley Gamecock), in an unreleased song recorded at Trident during April 1971 under the guise of The Nick King All Stars, with Bowie sharing vocals. This is glorious David Bowie, very silly of mood and catchy of song, complete with “Zoom beep beep/Beep beep” hook, and “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” THE SHADOWMAN Remade…

John Francis Flynn ★★★★ I Would Not Live Always RIVER LEA. CD/DL Powerful leftfield take on tradition as the Irish march continues. THE OBVIOUS routes are rarely the most fulfilling or enduring and Flynn – latest in an impressive line of Irish artists following in Lankum’s footsteps to challenge the tried and trusted – offers an intriguing variant on familiar themes. Singer/guitarist/flautist with Skipper’s Alley, Flynn goes for a hardy mix of tradition – Lovely Joan; Cannily, Cannily – plus a couple of MacColl songs (a great version of Come Me Little Son) and a haunting take on the great shanty Shallow Brown. The blend of occasionally wayward singing with disarming arrangements is remarkably effective. Sean-nós singer Saileog Ni Cheannabhain, Italian Consuelo Nerea Breschi (of the duo Varo) and keyboardist…

The Beach Boys ★★★★ Feel Flows: The Sunflower & Surf’s Up Sessions 1969-1971 CAPITOL/UME. CD/DL/LP “WE’RE JUST updating ourselves a little,” Al Jardine told NME in November 1970, as The Beach Boys arrived in Britain on tour. A month earlier, the band had played the Big Sur Folk Festival, realigning themselves with the hippies and roots music fans who’d long found their music anathema. A week earlier, The Beach Boys had headlined a series of dates at Los Angeles’s Whisky A Go-Go, as part of a plan by their new manager Jack Rieley to make them, of all things, “hip”. The preppy stage outfits had been retired; the beards were getting longer. Environmental politics would be a priority. And while the working title for that August’s Sunflower had been dropped,…

NOT ENOUGH of us lie awake wondering what Tom Waits would have sounded like had he been raised not in Pomona, California, but Derby, in Derbyshire. The answer is rattlebag bluesman Kevin Coyne, whose discography runs – by his own count – to “just under 40” albums, including live recordings between 1969 and his death at 60 from lung fibrosis in 2004, having relocated to Nuremberg where he nourished his fine art in a city that also accepted him for his blues. Hailed by Rolling Stone as “peculiar… even by relaxed standards”, Coyne never imitated his heroes Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker, preferring the warmly parochial improvisational cabaret that suited his German bolthole. From paint-caked fingernails to qualifications as a counsellor, he broke with blues band Siren and went…