Tabla de contenidos para October 2022 en MOJO

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk AROUND THE TIME RUNNING UP THAT Hill took over the world earlier this summer, Kate Bush spoke about the phe-nomenon on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme. As ever in her rare inter views, she was polite, solicitous and discreet. “I never listen to my old stuff,” she told the host, Emma Barnett. “I hadn’t heard it for a really long time.” For many of us in MOJO’s world, of course, Running Up That Hill and its parent album, Hounds Of Love, has been more or less a constant soundtrack for the past 37 years. This month, we dig deep into the mysteries of Bush’s uncanny classic, and uncover tr uths and insights that’ll hopefully surprise Kate Ultras as well as Kate…

“HE WAS a very dear friend of mine,” says musician and producer Larry Klein of the late Leonard Cohen. “About five years after he passed in 2016, I thought, there’s this wealth of great songs to work with, do a record and hopefully enable people to hear them in a new way. But the other reason was that I just wanted to keep him in the air around me, because I missed him so much.” He’s talking about Here It Is: A Tribute To Leonard Cohen. Released on Blue Note, it features 12 Cohen songs, two of them instru-mentals, the others sung by 10 different vocalists, each of them backed by the group of largely jazz musicians that Klein assem-bled. The songs span Cohen’s musical career and include the less…

LISTENING TO Jana Horn’s hushed, hypnotic interior ballads after discover-ing that she was raised in a strict Baptist community in Glen Rose, Texas, the tempta-tion is to draw a hard line of influence and connection. But when MOJO suggests to Horn that the Baptist faith or the writings of the Bible might have influenced her songwriting, she politely questions the simplicity of our argument. “I think very fondly of my religious upbringing,” she says, “but we had quite a literal approach to religion. There was no space for metaphor. It was more about memorisation. It was never about an embodied personal experience. It was just knowledge.” In fact, it wasn’t until Horn moved to Austin, Texas for college that she began to experience anything close to a personal spiritual epiphany,…

IT IS THE SUMMER OF 1971 AND MICHAEL ROTHER IS LOST IN THE moment. He’s on-stage with Düsseldorf group Kraftwerk, comprising Rother on guitar, Florian Schneider on flute, keyboards, electric violin and electronics and Klaus Dinger on drums (founder Ralf Hütter having temporarily left the group to continue his studies in architecture). Rother’s been playing with them since Februar y 1970, jamming in their studio on Mintropstrasse in between doing community hospital service as a conscientious objector and studying psychology at university. “I’d been detaching myself and feeling ver y lonely,” says Rother now. “But on-stage with Kraftwerk suddenly I was not alone. It was the opening to a completely new world. It was inspirational.” Previously, Rother half-imagined he’d soon be turning his back on music. Today, something changes. “I…

JANICE (from Doll By Doll’s Remember, 1979) Joe Shaw: “Mine and Jackie’s guitar arrange-ment and the syncopa-tion with the reggae-ish rhythm are fantastic. It’s very beautiful and was originally acoustic.” HIGHLAND RAIN (from Doll By Doll’s Gypsy Blood, 1979) JS: “It’s got everything. Some of it popped in my head the other day and I thought, ‘Where did that come from?’ It’s an incredibly complicated piece of music. Utterly, utterly, utterly stunning.” THOSE IN PERIL (from Doll By Doll, 1981) Henry Priestman: “It’s got mentions of the sea, a beautiful melody and it’s less abrasive Doll By Doll. It looks towards his musical future.” BRAID ON MY SHOULDER (Concrete Bulletproof Invisible B-side, 1988) Glen Matlock: “It still sounds good and it’s a great song. I put Joe’s guitars through reverb…

NO ONE COULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING. During the late spring and summer this year, Kate Bush’s 1985 hit Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God) enjoyed a barely credible commercial resur-gence, spot-lit by its usage in the fourth season of the Netflix sci-fi horror series Stranger Things. Over mul-tiple episodes, Bush’s Hounds Of Love keynote emerged as not just a groovy soundtrack inclusion but instead as an essential narrative device. Beleaguered tomboy teen Max Mayfield de-ploys the song as a sonic talisman; played through the headphones of her cassette Walkman, it strengthens her in her battles against a supernatural, serial-killing entity. The post-Stranger Things stats were staggering. Fuelled by an average six million Spotify streams per day in June and July, Running Up That Hill became the most-played…

Makaya McCraven ★★★★ In These Times INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM/NONESUCH/XL RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP W HEN MIDWEST DIY-punk scene veterans Scottie McNiece and David Allen founded Chicago-based label International Anthem in 2014, they began by documenting the emerging community plying their trade at Curio, a basement club beneath the city’s Gilt Bar. There, the energy mirrored that of the underground punk scene, even if their music paid greater heed to the avant-garde instincts of Chicago institution AACM (Association For The Advancement Of Creative Musicians). International Anthem duly laid down its manifesto to challenge existing musical classifications, beginning with 2014’s Alternate Moon Cycles by Rob Mazurek, a lavish, Kickstarter-funded vinyl press of abstract cornet improvisations over swooshing ambient drones. Eight busy years later they have developed a progressive roster that includes the breezy R&B-laced fusions…

Beth Orton ★★★★ Weather Alive PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP BETH ORTON was driving when a rather large record label dropped her – and, with that, plans to collaborate with a marquee producer – more than six months into the pandemic. Rather than despair, Orton, then on the cusp of 50, seems to have taken pre-emptive rejection as a challenge, or perhaps even a promise that the twinkling gloom of her new songs was so stunning it sent clueless executives scurrying. For the first time in her 30-year career, she opted to produce her songs herself, recruiting a top-shelf cast of musicians like multi-instrumental mensch Shahzad Ismaily and intuitive horn players Alabaster dePlume and Stuart Bogie to command. The result, Weather Alive, is a complex rumination that looks across false binaries – how…

Wilco ★★★★★ Yankee Hotel Fox trot (Super Deluxe Edition) NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP IN FEBRUARY 2002, speaking to MOJO in a New York hotel room a few weeks before its release, Wilco’s founding singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy explained the eccentric genesis of the country-soul confession, assured-if-bent pop hooks and startling, contrarian noise on his band’s fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. “I was taking this approach of documenting each song as accurately as possible,” Tweedy said, “spending six months coming at each of [them] from another direction… trying to find something else in there that was more exciting than those six chords strung together with a bridge and chorus.” The improbable, star-crossed saga of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is now established music-business legend: the zealous turn into textural experiment and lyric surrealism; the high cost…

Charlie’s Good Tonight ★★★★ Paul Sexton HARPER COLLINS. £25 CHARLIE WATTS’ passing after a short illness in August 2021 felt particularly sorrowful because, as his obituaries hammered home, the Stones’ drummer wasn’t just one of the nice guys in rock’n’roll, he was most probably the nicest. Who couldn’t love this shy, dapper, intensely private homebird who openly admitted his band’s music “wasn’t really his cup of tea”? He preferred jazz, of course, and in 1966 levelled with Rave magazine that his gig in a group, then only second to The Beatles in popularity, was “just a job that pays good money”. All of which means writer Paul Sexton has his work cut out to turn Watts’s stor y into anything other than a big, fluffy Charlie love-in, a task…

FANCY A NEW turntable? Luckily, we have two models from the venerable house of Victrola to give away this month. First up, the CES Innovation Award-winning, fully portable record player the Revolution GO is powered by the company’s signature VinylStream technology, allowing records to be played via any external Bluetooth speaker (you can use headphones or connect stereo speakers too, of course). With a built-in Bluetooth speaker delivering stereo sound and a passive bass radiator, its Audio Technica AT-3600LA moving magnetic cartridge and an anti-vibration enclosure ensures clear, smooth audio. The Victrola Eastwood hybrid turntable, meanwhile, combines vintage audio charm and convenience with modern hi-tech streaming features. We have a Revolution GO and two Victrola Eastwoods up for grabs, to be assigned at random, so vanquish this month’s crossword brainteaser…

1 Roy Harper You (The Game Part II) To begin: Kate Bush! That, unmistakably, is her voice at the start of this duet with the antic Harper. 1980 found the pair collaborating on Bush’s Breathing and on You, a dramatic highlight of Harper’s tenth album, The Unknown Soldier. Another auspicious Bush connection, too, as the song’s co-writer and guest guitarist is David Gilmour, her first patron. Written by Roy Harper. Published by Science Friction Ltd. District 6 Publishing. ©Roy Harper. From The Unknown Soldier. https://www.royharper.co.uk/ 9 Planxty Smeceno Horo Bush’s love of folk music extends towards Ireland as well as England, and her association with the Irish group Planxty began with several of them guesting on 1982’s Night Of The Swallow, before playing key parts on Hounds Of Love and…

Joni Mitchell makes her live comeback with a star-packed jam at Newport! ON A THURSDAY afternoon in late July, Blake Mills received a text confirming that what had seemed impossible only a year earlier: that Sunday, July 24, Joni Mitchell would take the stage to play an unannounced set at the Newport Folk Festival. Mills would be one of the guitarists flanking her. “On this text thread, we get a picture of them all buckled up on a plane, including Joni – Ithought, ‘Oh my god, this is actually happening,’” Mills told MOJO days later, during an Illinois tour stop. “But so many aspects of this were left up to the final moment: How much is she going to sing? What would her voice allow her to do? And is…

“THERE WAS a tribe system at school,” remembers Miles Romans-Hopcraft, “everyone asking, ‘What are you?’” In thrall to Nirvana and Slipknot, the Brixton polymath was “a ‘grunger’. I didn’t wear Nikes – Iwore Vans. But I had a double life. Outside school, my rude boy mate George would school me in grime, and my skater mate Remy taught me about dub, and my uncle played me Public Enemy records. And through the soundtrack to the Tony Hawk skateboarding video games, I discovered Bad Brains and Madlib.” This riot of apparently conflicting influen-ces shaped the music Romans-Hopcraft makes as Wu-Lu. His debut album, Loggerhead, is a powerful fusion of alt-rock noise, dubby textures, inventive production and simmering urban frustration. It’s a defiantly post-genre sound that’s struck a chord. Romans-Hopcraft Zooms MOJO…

Pete Doherty: I remember reading The Severed Alliance, Johnny Rogan’s book on The Smiths. That was the ultimate dream for me – to go to London, form a band and sign to Rough Trade before I was 23. I was conscious that Morrissey was 23 when he got a record deal. That seemed important. Carl Barât: I met Peter through his sister [in 1997], we were at Brunel University together. I wanted to be an actor. PD: I don’t know what Carl saw in me but we had this connection. I thrust myself upon him, playing an acoustic guitar outside his window. I’d hang around the stage door of the Old Vic and badger him to work with me. He was an incredible musician, a mysterious grumpy fella always trying…

AFEW YEARS AGO, BYRDS bassist Chris Hillman was work-ing on his memoir, Time Be-tween, when he managed to gain access to the band’s photo archive at Columbia Records. “All these old Byrds pictures just jumped out at me,” says Hillman of the trove of several thousand rare images. “Some of them I didn’t remember, some of them I hadn’t ever seen before. But they were so great, it seemed like we really should do a photo book.” Now, the sur viving original members of The Byrds – Hill-man, Roger McGuinn and David Crosby – have collaborated on a coffee-table tome, The Byrds: 1964-1967, published by BMG. It collects some 500 images across 400 pages – including pics by noted rock snappers Henr y Diltz, Barry Feinstein, Jim Marshall and Linda…

THOUGH IT shares cinematic roots with other songs on Hounds Of Love, Hello Earth, the penultimate segment of The Ninth Wave, proves the least explicit in giving up its influences – as a result, however, it’s the most otherworldly and unsettling. Given the provenance of the Richard Hickox Singers’ input, it could hardly be otherwise. Bush discovered Vocal Ensemble Gordela’s recording of Zinzkaro (or Tsintskaro – transliter-ating the title from the Georgian Mikhedrull script allows for variation) on the soundtrack to Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu The Vampyre, starring Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s expres-sionist remodelling of Dracula. The original recording is readily available on a Russian compilation, Georgian Folk Song And Dance Ensemble, released on the Melodiya label in 1969; that its title in…

Lambchop ★★★★ The Bible CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP FOR SUCH a profoundly unassuming man, Kurt Wagner has given Lambchop’s new album quite the title. It’s the kind of thing you could imagine Nick Cave getting away with, the veteran preacher-showman in elegant bat-black, but not Wagner, the former carpenter in his ever-present animal feed supplier’s cap and heavy rimmed glasses. Yet since Lambchop’s debut release, I Hope You’re Sitting Down in 1994, Wagner has been just as likely to worry at the meaning of life as any more f lamboyant rock philosophers, seeking out the moments of transcendence that poke through the chipboard scenery of everyday life. If Lambchop originally played out like an expansive alt-country Tindersticks, Wagner’s MO has become increasingly experimental, 2016’s FLOTUS marking a distinct shift into electronica…

Suede ★★★★ Autofiction BMG. CD/DL/LP SPEEDING DISASTERS, flash boy killings, broken bones in council homes: ever since Brett Anderson demanded a gun in the opening seconds of Suede’s debut The Drowners, a sense of doom has lurked at the edges of their music. Even at their most delirious or numbed, there was always trouble rumbling through their tower block walls, sex-and-glue psychos around every corner. Since their 2011 reunion, however, that blurry existential threat has come into sharper focus, more specific, grown-up fears jolting through their music. 2016’s Night Thoughts cold-sweated through the terrors that flood in just before dawn; 2018’s The Blue Hour ran even further with Brett Anderson’s fatherhood anxieties, a spectacular folk-horror forage through England’s grotty hedgerows. The singer’s evocative memoirs, Coal Black Mornings and Afternoons With…

CREDITS Tracks: Birth, School, Work, Death/ If I Only Had Time/ Tell Me Why/It’s So Hard/When Am I Coming Down/ ’Cause I Said So/The Strangest Boy/S.T.B./Just Like You/ Obsession/Love Is Dead Personnel: Peter Coyne (vocals), Chris Coyne (bass, vocals), Kris Dollimore (guitar, vocals), Michael Gibson (guitar, vocals), George Mazur (drums, vocals), Bobby Valentino (violin) Producer: Vic Maile Released: January, 1988 Recorded: Elephant, Wapping Available: Cherry Red CD reissue The Godfathers Bir th, School, Work, Death EPIC, 1988 WITH CLIENTS including The Kinks, The Who and Led Zeppelin, producer Vic Maile recorded the punchiest, hard-as-nails British rock’n’roll on albums including Motörhead’s Ace Of Spades and Dr. Feelgood’s Down By The Jetty. In the summer of 1987, with The Godfathers’ Birth, School, Work, Death, he would add another LP to the hit…

WHEN HAPPY MONDAYS played 1990’s Rock In Rio II festival in front of 198,000 people, a torrential downpour threatened to stop the show and, worse, electrocute the band. Unfazed, Paul ‘Horse’ Ryder began the next song’s bass intro. “Rain,” he later mused to Mondays biographer Simon Spence. “No big deal to us, we’re from Manchester.” Born on April 24, 1964, and raised in the Salford suburb of Worsley, he drove the band in other ways. His father Derek was a postman and played the clubs as half of a music and comedy duo; his mum Linda was a school nurse. After he and his elder brother Shaun obsessed over the Stones, The Beatles, Bowie, Motown and Joy Division, Paul got his first bass in 1980. He said he learned using…

HELLO 1965 I’d met Sly Stone, and I knew that my way was to keep going in the music business. Then Charles Sullivan, the person that owned the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, invited me to audition for some people. I didn’t know who, but I just showed up that night and it was Ike and Tina Turner. An Ike & Tina Revue flyer had come to my home when I was still in high school, and I remember just staring at it. I was familiar with some of their music, and they had a great revue. Very professional, with tip top singers, top of the market, as far as Tina goes. So I auditioned right there on the spot, in front of the Fillmore audience. I didn’t have a…

I was 18 and it was the heatwave summer. The tarmac was melting. I was living at my mum and dad’s house in Menlove Gardens in Liverpool. I had these Wharfedale Linton speakers in my bedroom I was very proud of – me and my mates would get stoned and listen to music. Frank Zappa, Beefheart, Tangerine Dream, Faust… then I heard the first Ramones album which, in a way, would have ruined the whole dream. Growing up in the ’60s in Liverpool, obviously there was the Beatles thing, then I got into The Velvet Underground, I was playing guitar, all that. Disco and prog rock were still going on. But this was an emotional reaction, like, I’m sick of everything and this is my music. I couldn’t imagine being…

IN 1979, WHEN BILL NELSON DELIVERED SOUND ON SOUND, the first and only Red Noise album, Capitol Records’ Rupert Perr y didn’t ‘get’ it. “He told my manager he thought I’d gone crazy,” says Nelson today. In the UK, EMI had already sanctioned release of Nelson’s avant-garde vision of a futurist dystopia – but only after he’d agreed to call his new act Bill Nelson’s Red Noise. Maybe that way, the bean-counters surmised, fans would make the link back to Nelson’s previous band Be-Bop Deluxe. Back in the US, Perr y remained dubious. He mailed Sound On Sound to DJs across America and courted feedback. “This nationwide sur vey came back,” says Nelson with a laugh, “and it was this thick (mimes hefty wad of paper). All of the…

Includes! Running Up That Hill The story of the song Hounds Of Love How they made it The Ninth Wave Prog pop’s Trojan horse The Horror! Kate’s scary movies…

Hounds Of Love M.R. James’s Casting The Runes reworked as a love story? Only Kate, says ANDREW MALE. Lyrically, it begins as a short stor y, told in the first person, about a child convinced she is being hunted by dogs who, like an image from a medieval bestiar y, embody the imagined pain and responsibility of romantic love. Musically, it is a rhythmic, pagan invocation of those hounds, the studio as its site of conjuration. That summoning begins with an appropriate snatch of dialogue – “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” from Jacques Tourneur’s 1957 horror film, Night Of The Demon, based on M.R. James’s 1911 tale of demonic possession, Casting The Runes. It is the voice of a dead professor (Maurice Denham) speaking through a medium (Reginald Beckwith),…

IN OCTOBER 1956 THE AMERICAN ACTOR DANA Andrews met the young Queen Elizabeth II at a Royal Com-mand Performance in London. She asked him about the movie he was making. “Well, it’s about witchcraft in England,” he replied. Her Majesty wrinkled her nose. “Good heavens! Don’t bring that back again!” The movie was Night Of The Demon, in which Andrews plays Dr John Holden, a sceptical psychologist who investigates Aleister Crowley-esque cult leader Professor Karswell. Based on Casting The Runes by M.R. James, the Edwardian maestro of the super-natural stor y, it was a tonal bridge between the chillers that director Jacques Tourneur had made for RKO’s Val Lewton in the 1940s and the lurid new wave of Hammer Horror. Tourneur and screenwriter Charles Bennett wanted to respect James’s taste…

The Proclaimers ★★★★ Dentures Out COOKING VINYL. CD/DL/LP THE UNBEARABLE shiteness of Britain has persistent currency in rock’n’roll: from the twin piques of Anarchy In The UK and The Queen Is Dead, through multiple contributions by the Manic Street Preachers, on to Brexit-era wrath from the likes of Sleaford Mods and Idles. Yet in all those 40-odd years, Perfidious Albion has rarely been so comprehensively or eloquently lampooned as by the 13 short songs, full of both punch and age-conferred wisdom, that comprise the new album by The Proclaimers. Dentures Out’s opening title track rips along waves of electric six-string eff lorescence, ear-catchingly styled after Johnny Marr and played by none other than James Dean Bradfield. The lyrical metaphor is straightforward: Britain’s a toothless old crone, living in the past,…

Double LP of home recordings from the revolutionary American record producer and composer. Abandoning his preconceptions, Andrew Male. Charles Stepney ★★★ Step On Step INTERNATIONAL ANTHEM. CD/DL/LP GO BACK just 10 years, and there is a good chance that the four-track recordings on this record would have ended up on a bonus CD, accompanying a Best Of Charles Stepney. But times change and so do music narratives. From his time as a staff arranger at Chicago’s Chess Records, to his production and writing work with Earth, Wind & Fire, Minnie Riperton and Terry Callier in the 1970s, Charles Stepney specialised in a lush, expansive style that might best be described as “psychedelic baroque”; a heavenly, up-scale sound that perfectly represented the aspirational goals of America’s new, prosperous Black middle classes.…

OVER THE course of a six-decade career, the Staple Singers moved from Southern gospel to topical folk, from deep soul to hit pop, while the family’s larger journey took them from post-slavery to the Great Migration, the Civil Rights era to the birth of Black empowerment and beyond – with their music documenting those many changes, upheavals and triumphs. Led by patriarch Roebuck ‘Pops’ Staples, the Mississippi-rooted, Chicago-based group – including daughters Mavis, Yvonne and Cleotha, and son Pervis – began playing in local Windy City churches in the late 1940s, before scoring a hit in 1956 with the spiritual Uncloudy Day. They cut their early gospel tracks – elemental numbers featuring little more than their voices and Pops’ quavering, ethereal guitar – for United and Vee-Jay, before moving on…

Let us assist you in solving your rock ’n’roll queries, puzzling enigmas and niggling mysteries. I recently picked up the Record Store Day edition of Nick Lowe’s Wireless World – arecord given a third title after being called Pure Pop For Now People in the US and Jesus Of Cool in the UK. What other LPs had different titles when released abroad? Craig Farrell, via e-mail MOJO says: If we can overlook minor-ish tweaks in tracklistings, you’re on. The rock-era starting gun for retitled international editions was arguably fired by With The Beatles/Meet The Beatles!. Some have been inadvertent, like Morrissey’s Viva Hate being called its working title Education In Reverse in Australia, or the first Electric Light Orchestra LP being renamed No Answer in America (the US label couldn’t…