Table of contents for July 2020 in MOJO

Simon Goddard Writing about Marc Bolan’s T.Rex “Eureka!” moment for MOJO (p52) was a glam busman’s holiday for the author of Ziggyology. Simon has already been happily nailed to 1970 “binge-watching Callan and grooving to The Rattles” for his forthcoming Bowie Odyssey 70 (out August, Omnibus Press). Bill DeMain Bill is a songwriter, journalist, BBC correspondent and owner-guide of the Walkin’ Nashville music history tour. His songs have been recorded by such artists as Teddy Thompson, A Girl Called Eddy and Marshall Crenshaw. He says goodbye to Bill Withers on p42. PANiK PANiK started out as a spray can artist before studying at college, and his illustrations continue to be influenced by early hip-hop and contemporary street culture. A regular magazine contributor, he has also worked with Ministry Of Sound,…

WELCOME TO THE SECOND MOJO produced in lockdown, another miracle of home working and determination that, we hope, feels just as familiar and satisfying as our magazines from saner times. This month, we’ve decided to award a long-overdue first MOJO cover to Talking Heads, who guide us through their musical revolutions and personal schisms, 40 years after the wonderful Remain In Light was released. “If we kept the band together, we were gonna really make our mark in music history,” Chris Frantz tells Tom Doyle. “That was a good reason to keep going, despite some of David’s, shall we say, lack of humanity. We carried on because we knew we had a fucking good band.” Thank you to Tom, who filed his excellent cover story while recovering from COVID-19, and…

Bessie Smith Gimme A Pigfoot And A Bottle Of Beer (OKEH, 1934) Where the Empress of the Blues advises her gin-and-reefer Harlem friends to “Check all your razors and your guns/Do the shim-sham shimmy ’til the risin’ sun.” Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Sylvester and Diana Ross all covered it. The Lords Of London Cornflakes And Ice Cream (APEX, 1967) Toronto bubblegum psychers compare their love interest to the titular dish. Follow-up Popcorn Man maintained the stance. See Ween’s Chocolate & Cheese for a less appetising salivary-gland stimulator. The JB’s Pass The Peas (FROM FOOD FOR THOUGHT, 1972) After the spoken intro attests to soul food’s power to bring happiness, cue the fattest funk. On this album, Gimme Some More, Wine Spot and – in case of over-indulgence – The Grunt…

ON APRIL 30, 1978, 100,000 people marched from Trafalgar Square to East London’s Victoria Park where The Clash, Tom Robinson, Steel Pulse and X Ray Spex performed at the Carnival Against The Nazis. It was the climax of 18 months of action by Rock Against Racism, the movement set up by photographer-activist Red Saunders to fight fascism and the genuine electoral threat of the far-right National Front. After film-maker Rubika Shah found footage of The Clash and Sham 69’s Jimmy Pursey rampaging through White Riot in front of an energised audience that day, she was compelled to tell the story behind it. “It felt like I was watching Britain’s civil rights moment and I couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been celebrated,” says Shah, whose previous work includes the documentary shorts…

A WORKING Men’s Club gig is properly exciting. There are bass lines to massage your kidneys, brooding indie lyrics balanced by acid-rave swirls, hooks and drums. The singer has one foot in another dimension, banging his cowbell and glaring just above our heads, plus a deadpan lead guitarist (“Sometimes I put my shades on and I really ham it up,” she says), a young bloke with a quiff and a mullet on synths, a flop-haired bassist minding his own business, and a crowd invariably compelled to frenzy. “They pay you in alcohol…”SYD MINSKYSARGEANT “It’s all based on being from a small town and being really bored,” says that singer and songwriter, Syd Minsky- Sargeant. It makes sense that the small town is Todmorden, a millstone-grey place in the Calder Valley…

BASSIST MATTHEW SELIGMAN (below, b.1955) first came to notice as a member of Bruce Woolley And The Camera Club, who released the first version of Buggles hit and Woolley co-write Video Killed The Radio Star in 1979. The same year Seligman left to join The Soft Boys, appearing on 1980’s Underwater Moonlight: he later worked with The Fallout Club, The Thompson Twins and Thomas Dolby. He did sessions for Robyn Hitchcock, Tori Amos, Alex Chilton, Sinéad O’Connor and Morrissey, while in 1985 he played in David Bowie’s Live Aid band. He also worked as a human rights lawyer. DRUMMER/ VOCALIST PATRICK GIBSON (b.1956) was the middle brother in disco sibling trio The Gibson Brothers. Born on the West Indian island of Martinique before moving to France in the early 1950s,…

THE SOLO SMASH Linda Ronstadt Heart Like A Wheel ★★★★ (CAPITOL, 1974) Ronstadt first heard the McGarrigles’ song that became the title track of her fifth solo album years before, on a demo tape. It wasn’t country-rock like many of her previous covers, but appealed to the ballad singer she always felt she was. She could rock too: The Everly Brothers’ When Will I Be Loved was one of a slew of hit singles in the pop, adult contemporary and country charts from her first Number 1 album. THE TRIPLE THREAT Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris Trio ★★★★ (WARNER BROS, 1987) In which one of the greatest female singers of the time teams up with two of the others: country singer Dolly and country-rocker Emmylou – the last of…

★★★★★ (A&M, 1971) A stunning debut from the insistent drive of opener Harlem, as Withers’ scene-setting lyrics are lifted by producer Booker T. Jones’s arrangement. The , Ain’t No Sunshine followed by Grandma’s Hands, each line dripping truth in Withers’ warm, conversational tone. All human life is here including the suicidal desolation of closer Better Off Dead, which ends, shockingly, with a gun shot. ★★★★ (A&M, 1972)  The one with Lean On Me, an uplifting anthem for all times, Bill on piano. Also, funky Use Me, a man helplessly in love; Let Me In Your Life, persuasive and affectionate; the angry and disappointed Who Is He (And What Is He To You and excited Kissin’ My Love. Self-produced with his excellent band – Ray Jackson (keys) Benorce Blackman (guitar), Melvin…

IN MOST OTHER RESPECTS IT was an average working day in the life of 22-year-old Marc Bolan. It began with his wife and manager, June Child, driving them the four miles from their Notting Hill flat to the heart of Soho – Bolan ready with his beloved Gibson Les Paul and one of the many spotted Woolworths’ notebooks crammed with poems, stories and lyrics in his jagged, dyslexic hand. Around 10am they arrived at Trident Studios, where producer Tony Visconti and Mickey Finn, Bolan’s new percussionist foil in Tyrannosaurus Rex, were waiting to roll tape. Just after 1pm they broke for lunch, turning the three short corners past pub, perv-shop and massage parlour to their favourite table at Cranks vegetarian restaurant. An hour later, stuffed with organic fare, they returned…

“How far Weller has travelled since his days as an angry teenage new wave icon.” Paul Weller ★★★★ On Sunset POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP SOME ARTISTS seemingly have a gift for seeing into the future, like Morgan Robertson, whose 1898 novel Futility appeared to predict the sinking of the Titanic, or Dean Koontz, whose book The Eyes Of Darkness foresaw in the 1980s a deadly virus emanating from Wuhan. In reality, there’s probably little preternatural about future events realising past imaginings – but nevertheless we should tip our hats to Paul Weller, whose fifteenth studio album, On Sunset, completed last autumn, is flecked with hard-won wisdom uncommonly fitting for the strange realities of 2020. “In this time of confusion, hang on to what is real,” the Modfather sings huskily on Old Father…

SLACKENING INTEREST around Graffiti Bridge – a chart-topping double album nobody liked much – indicated that Prince might find the 1990s tough going. His messy divorce from Warner Bros – renaming himself a symbol in 1993 so they didn’t have access to his lucrative brand – eventually bored the public, and by the time he was finally free to release the music he wanted – dense, sprawling albums like 1996’s Emancipation and the 4-CD Crystal Ball – he’d effectively toppled into the echo chamber of his hardcore fan-base and become increasingly irrelevant as a pop force. Thing was, his music just wasn’t pop any more. Focusing less on hooks and instantly appealing ideas, more on technique, groove and nuance, some argue he was intentionally shaking off his (white) pop audience,…

Be-Bop Deluxe ★★★★ Axe Victim ESOTERIC. CD/DVD Fresh charm and ambition abound on Bill Nelson’s glamera band’s ’74 debut. Backed by soon-to-be-sacked-off old schoolfriends, he plays lots of guitar, and then plays more guitar, on smart Bowie-shaded art rock: 41 bonus tracks add to box-set lunacy. IH Dr. Dre ★★★★★ The Chronic EONE. DL Dre’s 1992 G-Funk hit and inaugural Death Row release, now streaming. While cocking a snoot (to put it mildly, which Dre didn’t) at former N.W.A mate Eazy-E and Ruthless Records, Dre’s solo debut also introduced the world to Snoop Dogg and gangsta rap. JB Nat Turner Rebellion ★★★★ Laugh To Keep From Crying ORG MUSIC. LP 1970s Philly soul band who split before their debut LP was finished; this 12-song set of 45s and outtakes finds…

A YOUNG GENERATION’S urge to look smart, and in a different style to their parents, was scarcely a new phenomenon in the early 1960s. As recently as the mid ’50s, that newly discovered tribe, teenagers, had adapted Edwardian fashions and were dubbed ‘teds’ by an outraged media. If the teds’ soundtrack was rock’n’roll, other contemporary UK music phenomena tended to be either earnest (the beatniks’ trad jazz and skiffle) or groomed, parent-friendly pop. “An elite world of inscrutable secret signs and pecking orders.” But other influences from the US – the modern jazz of Blue Note, new soul labels Motown, Tamla and Stax, the blues of Chess, the multifacets of Atlantic – would flourish in the late ’50s and early ’60s, turbo-boosted by the arrival of The Beatles, proliferating nightlife…

• When Dave Ball was at Leeds Polytechnic in the late 1970s, he knew a lot of the bands at Leeds University, including the Gang Of Four, Mekons and Delta 5. • Ball also met Tony Wilson after he gave a guest lecture at the Poly, took him to the pub, and gave him a Soft Cell demo. Wilson never got back. • Soft Cell never made money out of Tainted Love because its B-side was also a cover. Tainted Love’s writer, Ed Cobb, took them out for cocktails, however, after its success, and tried to get them to cover The Standells’ Dirty Water (another song he wrote).…

TOTP TONITE 6has Tonight the ’s Top Of The for Pops The promo clip Rolling Stones’ (above) Number 1 single Jumpin’ Jack Flash, The Equals’ Baby Come Back, This Wheel’s On Fire by Julie Driscoll, Brian Auger And The Trinity and more. GADDA HEY! 14Iron San Diego hard rockers release Butterfly their single In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. It’s edited down from a 17-minute original and later rises to Number 30 in the US. POCKET CHANGE 22‘ A Pocket 4-inch Disc , 33 ’ rpm is vinyl announced. At 49 cents, it is sold from a vending machine to cut down on theft and the format is to be tested in the US north-west in September. KING ON 25 Elvis Presley conference holds in a press Burbank, California, to talk about his December NBC…

HELLO AUTUMN 1984 Kurt Cobain and I went to the same high school in Montesano, Washington. He would draw these really un-PC pictures of our art teacher (laughs). We both had very dark senses of humour; we loved stuff that would offend, that was brutal. We were both ostracised by the local yokels, and the future didn’t look bright for either of us. We were working class – not destitute, but our families were two paychecks away from being homeless. “It was clear Kurt wasn’t happy.”BUZZ OSBORNE After we finished high school, around 1984, my band Melvins would rehearse at our drummer Dale Crover’s house in Aberdeen, and Kurt and Krist Novoselic would often be around. We really liked those guys, and we’d often all end up jamming lots of…

“AN AMBIENCE IS DEFINED AS AN ATMOSPHERE, OR A surrounding influence: a tint,” wrote Brian Eno in his 1978 sleevenotes to Ambient 1: Music For Airports. “My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations.” This month’s MOJO compilation, Music For Homes, features a couple of tracks that could be described as ambient, but it is not an ambient album as such. When we began to conceive this set, the aim was to bring together some of the best new music of 2020, predominantly from new or less-heralded musicians. Over time, though, the brief subtly evolved – as has everything, one way or another, these past weeks and months. Music For Homes still focuses on many of our favourite records of 2020 so…

“He’s got his guitar and a poncho on, overlooking Machu Picchu… it’s beyond prog!”JAMES DEAN BRADFIELD SUNDAY NIGHTS used to have a routine for Manic Street Preachers frontman James Dean Bradfield: get the domestic front in order, and drive to see his dad in the valleys, for lamb ribs. On the way home to Cardiff, stop in to see poet Patrick Jones, brother of Manics bassist and lyricist Nicky Wire. One evening in August 2018, Jones mentioned he was reading a biography of Victor Jara – the Chilean socialist theatre director, poet and singer-songwriter brutally murdered by the Pinochet regime in 1973 – and was writing free-form lyrics about him. He also played some of Jara’s songs on vinyl. “I knew quite a lot about Victor Jara but I’d never…

1 If You Could Read My Mind (FROM SIT DOWN YOUNG STRANGER, REPRISE 1970) Covered by: Johnny Cash, Neil Young 2 Early Morning Rain (FROM LIGHTFOOT! UNITED ARTISTS 1966) Covered by: Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley 3 Sundown (FROM SUNDOWN, REPRISE 1974) Covered by: Scott Walker, Ed Kuepper 4 The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald (FROM SUMMERTIME DREAM, REPRISE 1976) Covered by: Tony Rice, Laura Cantrell 5 Carefree Highway (FROM SUNDOWN, REPRISE 1974) Covered by: Arbouretum, Tony Dekker…

1 BOB DYLAN I CONTAIN MULTITUDES In which his re-energised Bobness quotes Walt Whitman, compares himself to Anne Frank and Indiana Jones, and takes mythical self-obfuscation to the next, unlikely level. Find it: streaming services 2 TULUUM SHIMMERING BLACK SATIN Shady psychedelic Brit stretches Miles Davis’s tune into a mantric 35-minute groove. His 41-minute Horse With No Name is nuts, too. Find it: Bandcamp 3 NAEEM YOU AND I Baltimore’s Naeem Juwa turns Silver Apples’ proto-synth wibble into a powerful ballad of Prince-level emotional supplication. Find it: streaming services 4 THOM YORKE PLASTICINE FIGURES Live and subdued on the Jimmy Fallon show, a shadowed voice-and-piano blues with fearful notions of predestination and sin. Find it: YouTube 5 OASIS DON’T STOP…

SITTING AT THE TABLE IN THE LIVING ROOM of her modest San Francisco home, Linda Ronstadt, dressed in sweatshirt, jeans and Ugg boots, is tackling a burrito. Her cat jumps onto the table to watch. It’s not as easy as it looks – nothing is, since Ronstadt developed progressive supranuclear palsy, a rare form of Parkinson’s disease. “Leave it to me to get the weird kind,” she says, beckoning MOJO over. She gives a soft, wry laugh. Any other kind of laugh is hard. “So is washing my hair or brushing my teeth. It affects movement. It’s why it sounds like I’m drunk, because my tongue doesn’t work very well.” And it’s also why she can’t sing – an impossibly cruel outcome for one of the best and biggest-selling singers…

WHEN MID-’60s AUSTIN scenester Tary Owens introduced fresh-faced local frontman Roky Erickson to notorious drug-evangelist-about-town Tommy Hall, fate did cartwheels. “It’s maybe the worst thing I did in my life,” Owens would reflect. “Tommy was a manipulator and, frankly, I never trusted him. He thought drugs were the key to the universe… It affected Roky the most, but there wasn’t a single person in that band who wasn’t physically and/or mentally damaged by what happened.” he extraordinary and tragic story of the group Hall and rickson formed is definitively told in 13th Floor levators: A Visual istory. By psych expert Paul rummond with editorial assistance from Johan Kugelberg and OJO’s own Jon avage, it corrals new interviews, unseen photographs and rare ephemera in a stately package that’s a feast for…

RIPLEY JOHNSON IS TELLING A story about one of his first really intense psychedelic trips. At high school in Connecticut, he and his friends would take a boombox into the woods, sit round bonfires and let the music, as he says, “infuse itself into you”. This particular time, they found themselves freaking out to an old Johnny Cash cassette. “We were listening to Don’t Take Your Guns To Town,” he remembers, “and we all intuitively started doing this synchronised dance together. These very specific experiences are tied to music. Neil Young records are like your good friends – you turn to them when you need them. When you make records later, it’s there. When I hear notes a certain way, it’s because of Keith Richards or Neil Young, or because…

MARK FELD At Once 64 released as Madman ngle, 2008) eld/Bolan’s earliest known ecording sees the pop-mad 7-year-old would-be model and (if you believe te Townshend) occasional t boy take on convenal croony pop… and lose. hint of the fluttery vibrato d become a calling card. TOBY TYLER Blowin’ In The Wind (1964, released as Archive Jive single, 1993) A sunny and clean-limbed demo recording that’s more Donovan than Dylan, from Marc’s jumpers’n’pea coat earnest folknik phase. And yet there’s some character in his funky wing and the vibrato – an evolution on’s? – is coming along, too. MARC BOLAN The Wizard Decca single, 1965) dramatic Mike Leander/Jim conomides production sits Bolan’s st release on the edge of mercial pop and freakbeat, with n’s visions – his wiz knows “why…

• “Last night I was down in the lab,” Iggy sang on Funtime. “Talking to Dracula and his crew.” If Bowie was Drac, who were the crew? Basic tracks for The Idiot were laid at Château D’Hérouville with studio engineer Laurent Thibault on bass and Michel Santangeli on drums, while Bowie summoned Phil Palmer with a late-night phone call to the guitarist’s mum. Moving to Munich’s Musicland, the sessions became nocturnal, as Thin Lizzy had the studio booked during the day. Finally, Iggy and Bowie took the tapes to Berlin’s Hansa Studio for overdubs, and Tony Visconti’s final mix.…

Prince Charles And The City Beat Band Stone Killers VIRGIN, 1983 TODAY, PRINCE Charles Alexander is a smartly turned out professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Back in 1983, though, he could be seen on the sleeve of his album, Stone Killers, as a cyber-clarinet-toting, Mad Max-a-like leather-clad warrior flanked by flames, skulls and ladies in bikinis. As he reflects on his days leading his City Beat Band, it becomes clear that the latter identity, and the wild synth funk of the record, were themselves the result of careful study and calculation, and that both personae were sides of the same coin. “I was losing my mind… Am I supposed to evolve like David Bowie?”PRINCE CHARLES More even than George Clinton’s Computer Games, and rivalling Herbie Hancock’s…

Visually, Franc Roddam’s Who album-based movie Quadrophenia is the O-level starting point, though YouTubing episodes of TV’s best-ever weekend starter, Ready Steady Go!, specifically 1965’s Sounds Of Motown and, in 1966, James Brown and Otis Redding specials, opens a window on the era’s invigorating live music. In the short space available here, many bands – from The Creation and Chris Farlowe & The Thunderbirds to Herbie Goins And The Night-Timers and Ronnie Jones & The Blue Jays – have gone unmentioned, as have clubs that sprang up around the UK. A wider cultural view can be found in the pages of Richard Barnes’ Mod! (2009), Mods: The New Religion by Paul Anderson, and Terry Rawlings’ Mod: A Very British Phenomenon (both 2001).…

JUNE 15 James Brown has two singles on the US charts – Licking Stick, Licking Stick at Number 17, and America Is My Home at 64. The same month he entertains US troops fighting in Vietnam: he and a small group are appointed honorary lieutenant colonels in the army and play bases in Tan Son Nhut, Phan Rang and Long Binh. As well as avoiding air crashes and threats from the ever-present Viet-Cong, Mr Brown has trouble styling his hair in the punishing heat. Yet the three-shows-a-day tour is a massive success, and the Godfather claims the enemy also caught his act, noting, “We had a voluntary ceasefire on both sides. I guess everybody was peepin’.”…

I remember not buying a 7-inch test pressing of The Smiths’ Reel Around The Fountain at a record fair in Liverpool in about 1985 because I thought the price was too high (about eight pounds – it’s now worth about £2,000). Not that I’m haunted or anything, but what are the rarest cancelled singles that actually exist? Justin Wright, via e-mail Fred Says: The world of the pulled 45s pressed in tiny quantities is a fascinating corner of record collecting. While the A&M pressing of the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen is probably the most famous example, other bank balance-busting cases include The Rolling Stones’ Poison Ivy, intended as their second 45 in 1963 but supplanted by I Wanna Be Your Man, a spiked 1969 7-inch edit of Led…

Tim Burgess CHARLATANS’ VIBES-BRINGER What music are you currently grooving to? This morning we had Pom Pom by Ariel Pink on super loud. Me and my seven-year-old son were marching around, punching the air. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Wu-Tang Clan Forever. An absolute masterpiece, featuring all the original members plus Cappadonna. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Long Haired Lover From Liverpool by Little Jimmy Osmond, back in 1972. I was seven. All the girls loved it and, between Little Jimmy and Bay City Rollers, I saw this ‘job’ I’d like. It was from the indoor market in Northwich. Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? Not sure I’ve ever wanted…

YOU MAY never have been to ’60s gigs at the Speakeasy or the Flamingo, let alone seen heroic never-weres at the Woolwich Tramshed or the Ambulance Station on the Old Kent Road. Yet these London music spaces’ vibrations live on. Paul Talling, creator of the fascinating Derelict London website and author of new book London’s Lost Music Venues, understands this more than most. “About 20 years ago, I saw venues and pubs were being demolished or turned into flats,” he explains. “So I started taking a few snaps and researching these places, just for myself. Even if you went to them you can’t always remember where they were, and the people in them now probably don’t know the history of them. It grew from there.” “People say, ‘That place was…

…The xx’s Romy Madley Croft is working on her debut solo set. Last month, she promised the “more upbeat” record was not going to be “guitar music, but it’s going to be fun” … PETE TOWNSHEND (right) has informed the BBC that during lockdown time at home in Wiltshire he was thinking about, “starting work early on writing new songs for another Who album, as the last one did so well” … GORILLAZ opened up the Daily Star about their ongoing Song Machine releases and new studio work, with guitarist Noodle observing, “I don’t know what album is any more. The British say ‘make do’ so we make and we do.” Drummer Russel Hobbs said, more reassuringly, “Expect more songs” … THE WAR ON DRUGS debuted three new songs, Victim,…

I first heard Head Hunters on Robbie Vincent’s Saturday evening radio show in 1973 and it was like a bomb had been dropped on me. It’s hard to explain today that music used to be arranged very neatly in shoebox genres and nobody ever mixed up what was in one box and put it in another – that is, until the early ’70s when things just started to cross over. I had been listening to a lot of jazz and a lot of funk, and then suddenly Herbie makes this and puts it all together. From the opening notes of the bass line to Chameleon – arguably the funkiest bass line of all time – and when Harvey Mason starts playing the drums with such an unbelievable feel, this record…

1 Even cowgirls get the blues: young Linda, home on the range in Arizona, 1950. 2 “We were just this acoustic trio”: Linda with Stone Poneys Bobby Kimmel (left) and Kenny Edwards, Los Angeles, 1967. 3 Silver threads and golden needles: Ronstadt on the Johnny Cash Show, 1969, in “dress number two”. 4 In harmony: Linda on-stage with the Eagles, 1976 (from left) Glenn Frey, LR, Jackson Browne, Joe Walsh. 5 “They worked well with my voice”: Ronstadt tours for Hasten Down The Wind , on-stage in London, November 13, 1976. 6 “He just kept turning up”: flying into Liberia at the start of a 10-day safari with Governor of California Jerry Brown, April 1979. 7 Poor wandering one: Linda in the Pirates Of Penzance film with co-stars Kevin Kline…

ONE DAY IN OCTOBER 1971, BILL WITHERS received two letters in the mail. The first one he opened was from Weber Aircraft, his former employer in Burbank. A few months earlier, he’d been laid off from his job as a mechanic, making toilets for 747s, and they wanted him to come back to work. Withers had been earning $3.50 an hour, twice the minimum wage of the day – money that enabled him to have a decent apartment, buy a guitar and, more importantly, pay for studio time to make demos of the songs he’d been writing between shifts. At the ripe old age of 32, he’d been signed to Sussex Records, an indie label that released his debut album Just As I Am that spring (the cover photo of…

WOODEN SHJIPS WOODEN SHJIPS (Holy Mountain, 2007) A notable debut, on which the SF quartet roughly resemble the clubhouse band at a Hell’s Angels love-in. Already, the formula is in place: springy rhythms, fuzzed-out drone, and Johnson’s serpentine guitar solos cutting through the murk. MOON DUO CIRCLES (Sacred Bones, 2012) Johnson and Yamada hit their stride on their third album of Suicide and Silver Apples-indebted synth-psych. A relative mellowing is evident, thanks to a temporary relocation to the Colorado wilderness: “It was so eerily quiet, we didn‘t want to disturb it and get loud.” WOODEN SHJIPS V (Thrill Jockey, 2018) After a six-year hiatus, the bug-eyed Shjips hypno-grind is as compelling as ever, but Johnson’s “more laidback, groovy, brighter songs” also give a clue to his next departure: the airy…

★★★ (Sire, 1977) Preppy clothes, clean sonics, blank expressions: early Talking Heads’ affected banality was key to the intrigue surrounding songs like Pulled Up or Don’t Worry About The Government, and the extent to which they were celebrating or satirising the American dream. TH: 77 played with that tension, most effectively on Psycho Killer, while offering clues to contrasting future directions the still-formative band might take: from Uh-Oh, Love Comes To Town’s unctuous steel drum jollity, to No Compassion’s churning psychedelic currents, the latter song highlighting the sinister aspects of David Byrne’s preoccupations (“Be a little more selfish, it might do you some good”). ★★★★ (Sire, 1978) Enter producer Brian Eno, but – just as importantly – Jerry Harrison’s keyboards and guitar were now embedded in a warm tonal armoury.…

WITH A GENUINE Talking Heads reformation as far off as ever, Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew have revealed a tantalising new project. They’re uniting with nine-piece Brooklyn funk band Turkuaz to perform many of the songs from Remain In Light, along with other Heads favourites. “I had the idea for a long time that Adrian and I would be a great pairing for representing [the music],” says Harrison. “Since we’re not doing a Talking Heads reunion.” “Turkuaz is a band that Jerry produced,” Belew explains. “That got his wheels turning. He realised they had the same attributes as the extended band of Talking Heads.” For Dave Brandwein, Turkuaz’s singer and bandleader, it was an exhilarating proposition. “Jerry felt that we kinda understood how to perform this music live in the…

Some Candy Talking Podcasts to make isolation more splendid include season two of Striped: The Story Of The White Stripes, picking up the story in 2000 with the release of De Stijl, anointment by John Peel and their first tour. The pace is slow and ruminative, with pleasing minutiae: like the Afghan blanket knitted by Ben Blackwell’s mum that was used to wrap Jack’s vintage Airline guitar (worth $100,000s). Third Man Records’ Blackwell drives the narrative with his reliable eyewitness testimony. Calvin Johnson, Janet Weiss and Corin Tucker give voice to the US indie network who helped along the way. But Meg and Jack’s absence is notable, notwithstanding a wobbly cassette interview clip of Jack with MOJO’s Pat Gilbert in 2014. Absence, of course, is key to My Brother Richard,…

Rush ★★★★ Permanent Waves 40th Anniversary UMC/MERCURY. CD/DL/LP THERE WAS so much in The Spirit Of Radio, the opening song and hit single from Permanent Waves. In the music: euphoric hard rock, a little reggae, an echo of Hendrix in a spiralling guitar solo, and a time signature change so tricky that guitarist Alex Lifeson admitted, “It was always a bugger to play.” In the words: a meditation on the life-affirming power of music and the battle for its soul, with a cute riff on Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound Of Silence. This song – a lament for a lost golden age of radio, the music jumping fast from one style to another as if the listener were dial surfing – was “a deliberate metaphor”, as drummer and lyricist Neil…

Tracks: Don’t Fake The Funk / Cash (Cash Money) / Big Chested Girls / Cold As Ice (NYC Blues) / I’m A Fool For Love / Jungle Stomp / Bush Beat / Video Freak (Defend It!) Personnel: Charles ‘Prince Charles’ Alexander (various), Reggie Ayers, Jerome Bates, Michelle Becham Baker, Michael DeBenedictus, Gina Dee, Doctor Funkenchain, Therez ‘The Finest’ Fleetwood, Gun Man, Robin Hood, Bob Howard, Charlie Jones, Steve Jones, CL Kelly, Gabrielle McCollins, Sammy Oliveras, Billy Pringle, Tony Pringle, Joe Ramos, Elaine Rhasheed, William Rhinehart, Ruth Winley, Charles Street (vcls, perc), Greg B (drms), Sureshot (perc), Lord Of The Universe (drms, synths), Baby Cakes (keys), Jay Burnett, Baron Of Funksilliness, Darryll Hard Rock (vcls, perc, synths), Dark Vader, Tony Bowie, Doomsday (gtr), Edmond Harris (bs, vcls), Dewayne Omar (gtr, bs,…

• Shortly after Zappa signed the Alice Cooper band to his record label in 1968, their namesake singer moved into a house just up the hill from Zappa’s. Cooper’s next-door neighbour was Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees. • Mark Volman of The Turtles went to high school with two girls who ended up in the Manson Family. “The Manson murders were close to everybody” in the Canyon, the singer says. • The Eagles’ Don Henley moved to Laurel Canyon in 1973, into a house perched on stilts that shook in high winds. The previous tenant was Roger McGuinn of The Byrds. “I took that as a good omen,” Henley says.…