Table of contents for September 2020 in MOJO

Over a decade and a half later, every time I listen to Marvin Gaye’s / Want You, I still leave feeling that it is the most perfect record. I was 17 when I got my first apartment on my own, and I had that feeling of freedom to do whatever I thought best. Around that time I started collecting vinyl, probably it “seemed” like the cool thing to do – little did I know how much meaning I’d find in the effort it takes to make an album made to listen in full. I found / Want You in the bargain bin. Up until that point, I only knew the Motown and Sexual Healing versions of Marvin. All of a sudden, I felt like I met him. It feels like…

1 PRINCE WITNESS 4 THE PROSECUTION The first of 45 – 45! – unreleased studio tracks from the forthcoming Sign ‘O’ The Times box; a heavy, P-Funkish workout. More, please! Find it: YouTube 2 DAVID GILMOUR YES, I HAVE GHOSTS His first new song in five years finds Gilmour channelling Leonard Cohen. It was written for his wife Polly Samson’s novel A Theatre For Dreamers, in which Cohen is a character. Find it: SoundCloud 3 SUN RA ARKESTRA SEDUCTIVE FANTASY Reworked from 1979’s On Jupiter, the first new Arkestra piece since 1999 juxtaposes chaos, delicacy and order, and swings. From a new LP out in October. Find it: YouTube 4 BILL CALLAHAN PIGEONS Sad mariachi trumpets, nods to Cash and Cohen, and a great short story about a philiosophical Texan limo…

THERE HE SITS, AT A GLASS TABLE IN A posh suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel – the well-dressed 88-year-old many have called The Last Of The Record Men. His name is Clive Davis, and he’s not completely comfortable with that description. “I don’t know what criteria there are,” he frets on this January afternoon. “And certainly with Jimmy Iovine and Clive Calder in the past, there are a few executives today that are coming up and creating their own history. So I’m just flattered by it. “I mean,” he adds, “it’s not for me to elaborate on that. It is for others to elaborate.” Consider this elaboration, then. In the mid-’60s, Brooklyn- born Davis arrived at Columbia Records as a Harvard Law School graduate with no obvious music hinterland…

SPRING, 1980, LA “WE’RE OUTCASTS,” JOHN DOE SAYS. “EVERYTHING WE DID was the opposite of what everyone thought Los Angeles was like.” We’re in John Doe and Exene Cervenka’s shoebox of a house off the hustler section of Santa Monica Boulevard. There’s baby Jesuses, various gods, an entire wall of those pamphlets that Christians used to hand out on Hollywood Boulevard, and Billy Zoom’s Club 88 Best Guitarist trophy. Zoom, who’s been crashing here for months, is on the couch. Cervenka is at the table doing some kind of artwork. No idea where drummer D.J. Bonebrake is. And I’m here interviewing X, the band that pioneered the LA punk scene and defined the best of LA rock, for UK music mag Sounds. X’s debut, Los Angeles, just came out on…

“EVERY PLACE I lived David Blue lived down the block. He’d come down and talk and talk. If he saw a movie he’d tell you about the whole movie: the camera angles, the director, the characters, the actors, probably even the cameraman. I enjoyed David Blue. I enjoyed his conversations. I The way he died was colourful. He was running and collapsed into the arms of a beautiful blonde. That’s what I heard. So even his death was colourful. He was a colourful character. I loved David. Here’s another story. Debbie Andersen, Eric Andersen’s wife, told of David coming to visit her right after her daughter Sari was born. They were living in New York and this one afternoon the whole building had been sprayed for cockroaches except for her…

London Bye Ta Ta (Recorded 1970, released on Sound + Vision, 1989) From Sundridge Park station, very close to his parents’ house in Plaistow Grove, it would have taken the teenage Bowie around 35-40 minutes to get to Charing Cross, an hour to get into Soho. Not far, but far enough. To an inhabitant of this ‘never never land’, London was a source of mystery and fascination: a place of transformation, of freedom, but also of temptation. You can hear it all in London Bye Ta Ta’s elliptical but, at points, heartfelt lyric that takes in the plight of West Indian immigrants (the source of the title phrase) and the delusions of Bohemia. It’s a song that Bowie kept on coming back to. Built around a gorgeous, circular D major…

Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) (Parlophone single, 2014) Of all the alternate realities open to David Bowie, jobbing saxophonist is one of the less indulged by students of his work. An aspiring Coltrane at 14, his catalogue of horn sessions for other artists is select and curious: Mott’s All The Young Dudes; Iggy’s The Idiot; a version of To Know Him Is To Love Him by Steeleye Span. The rigours and liberations of jazz, though, remained one of the few things out of Bowie’s reach, and it took a one-off collaboration tacked onto a 2014 greatest hits comp for it to come, finally, to fruition. Given the song’s reupholstering on Blackstar, the original version of Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) Bowie cut with the Maria Schneider…

WHAT A DIFFERENCE six years made. Back in 1971, Bowie was viewed as a one-hit wonder, whereas his frene my Marc Bolan was a glittering resident of the Top 2. By 1977, their fortunes had dramatically reversed. All of Bolan’s recent singles-save for the previous year’s I Love To Boogie – had stiffed, while Bowie was enjoying a peerless creative run. Summer’77 saw Bolan attempt to revive his career by accepting an offer to front his own six-part TV show for Granada, Marc, to be screened for a teatime, fish fingers-and-chips-scoffing audience of mainly kids. “It was the so-called new T.Rex,” remembers Herbie Flowers, “with Tony Newman on drums, Dino Dines on keyboard, Miller Anderson on guitar and myself on bass.” As a show, Marc spotlit Bolan’s punk-friendly affiliations with…

GAZING OUT FROM ALLAIRE Studios, situated remotely in 20 acres of mountaintop overlooking the Catskills range near Wood- stock, David Bowie knew he was in a good place. And simultaneously a bad place. Recording his 22nd album over the summer of 2001, Bowie was blissfully happy with second wife Iman and their daughter Lexi, not yet two years old. Both had joined him at Allaire; also present, Bowie’s most trusted sidekick, producer Tony Visconti, after 21 years apart. Yet Bowie admitted he was still stricken by the same feelings that had always fuelled his song writing: “nihilism, isolation, fear,” according to one interview. A brand-new century held promise but – thinking of his baby’s future – Bowie was despondent about humanity. “We’re not evolving... We are not going anywhere,” he…

Imagine how great one of Duffy’s iconic Bowie shots would look chez vous. Now imagine… 10! The David Bowie Silver print collection comprises two unique prints on Permajet Titanium silver gloss paper with a delicate metallic sheen. Print one is a nine-image contact sheet from the Aladdin Sane album cover session, limited to 500 embossed and authenticated copies. The second print catches Bowie (and Scottish terrier!) at a 1980 pre-production meeting for the Scary Monsters cover shoot. All prints are handmade in the Duffy Archive and printed from the original negatives The Limited Edition Bowie Silver Print Collection is £149.99 + p&p and is available exclusively from www.duffyarchive.com/store…

Romare Home NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP Canny samples, salvaged gear and dancefloor geniality. ARCHIE FAIRHURST’S music is the epitome of thrift. His first two albums as Romare – named after Afro-American collagist Romare Bearden – dealt in frazzled funk, indie disco and avant house music, employing subtle cut-and-paste techniques using charity shop records. While Home maintains a penchant for peppiness, Romare dials down the sampleadelics for real instrumentation, although prudence remains key. His dad’s old guitar, a vintage organ rescued from bric-a-brac and his childhood drum kit are all deployed as he makes a more purposeful stride towards the dancefloor. On The River, Romare leads you to the waterside accompanied by sliced-up gospel vocals and a drum roll fusillade. Home, at times, recalls Dan Snaith’s beaming, looping 4/4 exercises as Caribou;…

CAST YOUR VOTES… This month you chose your Top 10 Jonathan Richman LPs. Next month we want your ‘60s Motown Albums Top 10 (no Greatest Hits!). Send your selections to www.mojo4music.com or email your Top10 to mojo@bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ’How To Buy ‘60s Motown’ and we’ll print the best comments. IN JUNE 1978, during a short British tour post-UK Top 20 hits Roadrunner and Egyptian Reggae, Jonathan Richman appeared on a Granada TV arts programme, What’s On. During the interview, presenter Tony Wilson highlighted a then-popular criticism of the 27-year-old singer, that his songs were considered simplistic or naïve. “What about William Blake?” asked Wilson, rhetorically. “If that makes me simplistic, liking stuff like [Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?],” says Richman, “good!” Forty-two years on, the music of Jonathan…

Desolation Center Dir: Stuart Swezey MU PRODUCTIONS. ST Barren nights: document of LA punk’s original desert sessions. In 1983, LA punk Stuart Swezey decided to escape the LAPD’s brutal targeting of live shows by school-bussing dozens of scenesters out to the Mojave Desert to see Minutemen and Savage Republic. Subsequent field trips included wilderness pyrotechnics with Einstürzende Neubauten; a musical voyage around San Pedro harbour and Sonic Youth and Meat Puppets playing to a tripping audience under a full moon. Rich in interviews and archive footage, Swezey’s film captures the creative anarchy, not least Survival Research Laboratories’ attempt to blow up a mountain (“people in their twenties are sociopaths,” says Janet Housden of Redd Kross). The death of Minutemen’s D Boon darkens the clouds, while Perry Farrell’s presence in original…

Madonna’s appearance last year as Madame X jogged my memory. Didn’t another famous singer once appear as Madame X on a release that was quickly withdrawn? Charles Kapowski, via e-mail Fred Says: The record in question was 1978 single Little G.T.O by The New York Blondes featuring Madame X. It was a chirpy cover of Ronny & The Daytonas’ 1964 surf rocker G.T.O., and was actually recorded by Blondie, the idea being that Debbie Harry’s guide vocal would be erased in favour of Rodney Bingenheimer’s dulcet tones for release on Bomp! Records. But it appeared in the UK on London, with the Blondie singer’s voice intact and heavy hints – including the cover art and a run-out groove message reading “I’m Just Wild About Harry” – as to who was…

Green Gartside SCRITTI POLITTI’S PERENNIAL What music are you currently qroovinq to? My favourites at the moment are Tisakorean’s Bate Onna Bo and Warhol.SS’s Blicks. Tisakorean is a young rapper from Houston whose whip-smart dumb-fun minimalism is fabulously on point. Warhol.SS is in Chicago. I’d really like to work with him. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? This question can only be answered provisionally or dishonestly. That said, I’m gonna go for the Trojan Records Beatles Tribute box set, a magnificent compilation of 50 cover versions of Fab Four magic from the ‘60s and ‘70s. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? A budget-priced Island label sampler, Nice Enough To Eat, only long-player I could afford with my…

…THIS IS THE KIT’s Off Of On is out in late October. It was recorded at Real World Studios with Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman producing. TITK’s Kate Stables (right) said of their collaboration, “It was a lovely mixture of ‘wow, you’re exactly in my brain and exactly at the opposite end of my brain ”. …ORBITALs Phil Hartnoll and Murray Lachlan Young have released their single i’m Going Shopping for NHS Charities Together: but will there be new music? “For sure,” says Phil. “Not sure when though... we thought we were finishing last week but we’re having too much fun reacting to the madness around us to stop! Could be the concept triple album in the making!” … BOOTSY COLLINS’ The Power Of The One, with guests including George Benson and…

ONE OF THE many fascinating items in new documentary Ronnie’s (subtitled ‘The Life Of Ronnie Scott And His World Famous Jazz Club’) is an invitation from 1965. It reads, “Ronnie Scott cordially invites you to what promises to be the balls-up of the year at his new club 46/47 Frith Street W.l. any night from October 3 onwards.” How wrong can you be. Inspired by visits to New York jazz venues and founded in 1959 in a Gerrard Street basement in Soho, Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club has operated from its Frith Street premises for six decades now. Musical revolutions have come and gone, but jazz and its infinite possibilities endure. This hallowed space has been one of its outstanding venues. “Everyone knows the place, where it is, and what it…

Eyes on the prizes: Clive Davis snapped. 1 It’s a family affair: the young Clive at a Davis family gathering, 1941. 2 Old school: Davis (far right) presents Angela Lansbury, star of Marne on Broadway, 1966-67, with a gold disc for the Original Cast album. CBS president Goddard Lieberson is far left. 3 “I made it my mission to sign Janis Joplin": Clive with Big Brother And The Holding Company’s singer. 4 “It would never have occurred to me": as CBS’s lawyer, Clive Davis watches Johnny Cash sign up. 5 “You just make them feel comfortable": Davis with Patti Smith, 2007. 6 Clive with re-signed Carlos Santana and the armful of Grammys they won for the 1999 album Supernatural. 7 A young Whitney Houston signs to Arista, 1983: “The full…

NUBYA GARCIA IS DESCRIBING an early musical epiphany. She was at London’s Barbican watching Sonny Rollins play the saxophone, the instrument with which she had just fallen in love, and started playing. She was 10 or 11. “I remember being surrounded by sound coming directly from people,” she says, “watching their breaths making the music. I could feel the history in that experience, watching these elders, but also felt very present in that moment.” Garcia was at the Rollins show thanks to her mother and stepfather: enthusiastic music lovers who encouraged their children to play, sing, create and listen. Her stepfather also collected unusual instruments, like the First World War metal clarinet Garcia found lying around one day, and started to teach herself to play. Her mother then surprised her…

BY THE TIME a reluctant CBS agreed to release Sandinista! as a triple-album set, the November 1980 production deadline was looming. The job of creating the artwork fell to 22-year-old Stiff Records alumnus Jules Balme, who had that year designed the sleeves for the UK Bankrobber single and the 10-inch Black Market Clash rarities compilation. In keeping with the Sandinista rebels of the LP’s title, Balme’s brief from the group was to “imagine revolutionaries stuck in the jungle producing propaganda material”. “The front cover type I hand-drew, loosely based on Russian propagandaart,” Balme recalls today. “I wasn’t that worldly, and they were the only revolutionaries I was aware of (laughs). I xeroxed the Letraset-ed track titles over and over again, to give them a scuzzier look, and there were inks…

IGGY POP HAS two especially vivid memories of his time holidaying with Bowie in Switzerland in the early 1980s. The first is their shared love of the Australian medical soap A Country Practice. “A big favourite of ours,” he recalled to this writer in 2010. “We watched it all the time in Switzerland. David loved that show.” So much that Bowie would later invite its lead actor Shane ‘Dr Terence Elliot’ Porteous to meet him backstage during the Australian leg of 1987’s Glass Spider tour. The second is when Iggy nearly died the day Bowie taught him to ski. “This was in St Moritz. You know what snow ploughing is? It’s the beginner’s basic thing, making a V shape with your skis to stay balanced. Well, he’d been teaching me…

DAVID BOWIE WAS NEVER meant to be in Omikron: The Nomad Soul. In fact, he would never even have recorded a note of music for it had it been solely up to its creator, French video game auteur David Cage. “Cage’s list of bands went ‘Björk, Radiohead, Future Sound Of London, Garbage’,” Omikron’s Portrush-bred senior designer Phil Campbell tells MOJO today. “I threw Bowie on there because I’d been in the fan club since I was 11 – and I knew he would complement the world we were creating.” In 1998, Cage’s company Quantic Dream had partnered with Campbell’s employers Eidos – the makers of Tomb Raider – to develop one of the world’s first ‘open world’ games: an alternate reality to explore, run about, to shoot and get shot…

You once told me that you were of the opinion that “sometimes David left the best tracks off his albums”. For instance? For the Heathen album, Wood Jackson was actually on the playlist. But at the last minute it was relegated to a bonus track. This would’ve been great on the main album. The same with [another Heathen B-side] When The Boys Come Marching Home – very atmospheric, hypnotic. I think if vinyl, which was making a big comeback then, wasn’t a big issue, then we would’ve had a longer CD. Both songs were so well written, with great chord changes. David was always proud of his chord changes. We put a lot of work into them, all the Heathen session songs. Reality wasn’t everyone’s favourite album, but I like…

When The Wind Blows (Virgin single, 1986) 1986 brought the wilfully weird, glossy apex of Bowie’s writing about nuclear apocalypse, a theme which had buzzed through his work for years: from 1970’s Bombers (“A-bombs, H-bombs... ripped apart the sand”), to 1973’s Drive-In Saturday (“this fallout saturation”) and then 1979’s Fantastic Voyage, (“that’s no reason/To shoot some of those missiles”). When The Wind Blows was meant to be only his first track for the 1986 film adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ graphic novel about an old couple not understanding that the bomb was on its way, and dealing with its aftermath. But Briggs fan Bowie had to step away from the project after pressure to finish 1987’s Never Let Me Down; Roger Waters, Genesis, and Paul Hardcastle were among those who filled…

Fontaines D.C. A Hero’s Death PARTISAN. CD CS DL LP WHO’D BE a five-piece rock’n’roll band in 2020? Splitting your dribble of Spotify increments five ways, gig earnings kicked to the kerb? Worse if you’re locking down in Dublin while your gear’s locked up in London. Then there are the more traditional challenges faced by a certain type of group, the sort that attracts a throng desperate for young voices of defiance and authenticity, aching for a new Clash, a new Jam or Arctic Monkeys, an audience who can’t not be disappointed, or worse, when – surprise, surprise – their heroes turn out not to be gods. Call it another British disease. Call it an Irish one, too. Dogrel, Fontaines D.C.’s 2019 debut LP, had songs that asked for that…

The Lemon Twigs Songs For The General Public 4AD .CD/DL/LP WE WANT OUR pop stars flawed. We want them headstrong and keen to throw ridiculous shapes in dubious garb. If they’re young and gifted too, so much the better. Two years on from Go To School, their audacious/ridiculous Todd Rundgren- endorsed concept album about a chimp called Shane raised as a human, Long Island-born brothers Brian and Michael D’Addario still tick all the boxes. And even if the title of their third album suggests a vetting system, some secret stash of more out-there recordings too kooky for over-the-counter consumption, Songs For The General Public astonishes and delights. There is no volte-face from all that is joyous and vitalising about ’70s rock and powerpop here, but there is a progression. Or…

James Booker Classified CRAFT RECORDINGS. LP Remixed from 1983’s original, a masterful New Orleans piano romp through boogie, blues, R&B, r’n'r and Roger Miller’s King Of The Road. Inventive on Hound Dog and Lawdy Miss Clawdy, Booker’s runs and decorations on his own Three Keys and Classified are hard to resist. GB Vince Guaraldi Trio Peanuts Greatest Hits CRAFT RECORDINGS. LP Limited vinyl pic disc (Snoopy on A-side; Woodstock on the flip) of the San Francisco piano trio’s scores for TV’s version of Schultz’s beloved characters. Varied delights range from the Van Pelts’ iconic boogie (Linus & Lucy) to Woodstock’s Guaraldisung funk groove, Little Birdie. JB Pixies Bossanova 4AD. LP Now in a limited 30th anniversary red vinyl edition, Pixies’ glossy third full LP betrays intra-band stress (Kim Deal, almost…

As @dazedbee tweets, 1986’s It’s Time For Jonathan Richman And The Modem Lovers – one of his finest – is “criminally hard-to-find on CD”. Hear it on YouTube or vinyl. Precise Modern Lovers Order (Rounder, 1994) captures the first band live at their accurate awful best while Modern Lovers Live (Beserkley, 1978) is the perfect mid-point between lifeaffirming and outsider art. Sean Maloney’s book The Modern Lovers (33 1/3) is a great portrait of Richman’s Boston in the early ‘70s. The Take Me To The Plaza DVD captures JoJo’s 21st century live act, and there is a lovely 1978 Dutch TV performance on YouTube.…

E-mail to: mailto:mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk IN LATE 1966, A BRITISH ROCK MANAGER called Kenneth Pitt returned from a trip to New York with an acetate of an unreleased album. According to one of his clients at the time, David Bowie, he had been given the demo of The Velvet Underground & Nico by Andy Warhol. “[Pitt] said, ‘This is crap but you might like it,’” Bowie told Paul Du Noyer in 2002. “As usual it was, Oh Bowie likes the weird shit. And I played it and thought, Oh God, manna from heaven.” Welcome, then, to this month’s MOJO exploration of Bowie’s very own weird shit and manna from heaven; a forensic hunt for the esoteric, the undersung and the unseen in the Dame’s capacious archives which has fished up art happenings,…

Inspecteur Raymundo C’est Lui (OHEM, 1993) Where Belgian football coach and noted Mark E Smith lookalike Raymond Goethals’ thoughts on the game are sampled and grafted onto whistle blowing New Beat, in time to celebrate Marseille winning the European Cup in 1993. Jah Thomas Cricket Lovely Cricket (MIDNIGHT ROCK, 1979) The reggae deejay takes his girlfriend to see a match at the famous Sabina Park ground in Kingston, and gives it up for eminent right-handed batsman Lawrence ‘Yagga’ Rowe over the tinkling ’My Conversation’ rhythm. Perfect contentment follows. The British Darts Team 180 (SMILE, 1981) Bobby George, Jocky Wilson and more mill about for a keyboard chant-along about, er, darts. See also Cooldown Cafe’s 2005 tune Winter Wonderland (Darts Mix), where the Dutch Hard House crew invite commentator Martin Fitzmaurice…

“I TOOK THE scenic route down the rock‘n’roll highway,” says Ian Gillan today. He joined heavy rock pioneers Deep Purple, aged 24, in 1969. He first left four years later, but has fronted the band, uninterrupted, since 1993. His journey has also included fronting his own band, eclectic rockers Gillan, who scored a run of hits in the early 1980s, and waking up drunk one morning to discover he’d joined Black Sabbath: “That was an interesting detour.” In the meantime, a new Purple album, Whoosh!, joins the catalogue, alongside such high watermarks as Deep Purple In Rock and Machine Head. “We’re still here,” he sighs. “Still alive…”. There’s a song on the new album called Man Alive, which sounds like it’s about the end of the world. The album was…

SINGER NEIL LANDON (below, b. 1941) was in Kent group The Burnettes with Noel Redding, cut two’66 pop solo singles and sang with The Ivy League before joining The Flower Pot Men, who scored a hit with Let’s Go To San Francisco in 1967. In ‘68 he and Redding formed psych-prog project Fat Mattress, who toured the US with The Jimi Hendrix Expe- rience, played the Isle Of Wight Festival and released two albums. After a spell in the US, Landon moved to Hamburg, where he recorded solo, starred in musicals and in 2001 released the house track Dinner For One (Party All The Time), sampling voices from the Freddie Frinton-starring German New Year’s Eve TV favourite Dinner For One. VOCALIST SANDRA FEVA (b.1947) began her career as Sandra Richardson,…

THE TONE-SETTER Santana Santana (COLUMBIA, 1969) Davis recurs crucially in Santana’s story. His duets wheeze – later rinsed by other ‘legacy’ artists – for 1999’s Supernatural (Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas et al) was a game-changer. And if it felt heavy-handed, Davis had earned the right – giving Carlos Santana his head on his group’s smoking debut, basically their live set, and resetting Columbia as an artists’ label á la Warners’ Reprise. Woodstock, and the charting Evil Ways, proved him right. THE ROUGH DIAMOND Patti Smith Horses (ARISTA, 1975) At Columbia, Davis had Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and (though briefly) Bruce Springsteen, and never lost his nose for writers or a sense of their long-term value to a record label. Smith might seem a bit scrappy for a smoothie like Davis,…

NÉRIJA Nérija EP (Self-Released, 2016/Domino reissue 2019) Heavy-hitting first EP from the all-female septet, also featuring Cassie Kinoshi, Sheila Maurice-Grey and Rosie Turton on horns as well as the exceptional guitarist Shirley Tetteh. A follow-up long-player from 2019 doesn’t quite make good on the collective’s adventurous promise. NUBYA GARCIA Nubya’s 5ive (Jazz Re:freshed, 2017) The first of Garcia’s two solo EPs (it’s as long as many LPs) manoeuvres the confident but unostentatious saxophonist into the spotlight, fronting another crack roster of emergent UK jazz talent: Joe Armon-Jones on piano, Theon Cross on tuba, a drums tag team of Moses Boyd and Femi Koleoso. Vinyl copies reputedly sold out in a day. MAISHA There Is A Place (Brownswood, 2018) A ravishing London take on spiritual jazz, with Latin dance undercurrents, Alice…

I was 16 when I first listened to Sandinista! - hearing Washington Bullets and thinking, “The Clash are singing about something serious…”! wanted to know what the lyrics were about. By the time we’d all got Sandinista! and had a discussion, [future Manics’ drummer] Sean [Moore] said it was his favourite Clash album so far. Me, Nick [Wire] and Richey [Edwards] weren’t so sure. Like everybody else – big cliché – we thought there was a killer single album in there. In fact, we played that game on the Manics tour bus in 1991: The Magnificent Seven/Hitsville UK/ Rebel Waltz/Somebody Got Murdered/One More Time/ Lightning Strikes/Up ln Heaven/The Call Up/Washington Bullets/Lose This Skin. That’s my single album Sandinista! tracklisting. I loved Hitsville UK. That linked into my bitter sweet vision…

“I THINK THE MOST CREATIVE OF THE EARLY STUFF WAS PROBABLY THE MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD.” DAVID BOWIE’S CAREER SPANNED SO YEARS AND FOR MOST of those he was hyper-active, amassing a list of titanic achievements. But let’s not overlook one small, important entry in that storied CV For a single month, around May 2002, he was the Editor of MOJO. We who served under Bowie during his brief tenure recall a mostly benevolent guv’nor, who took his “guest-editor” gig seriously. True, he became tetchy as the weeks wore on and the printers’ deadline drew horribly close. But all editors are like that. Across the transatlantic phone line from his New York office to MOJO HQ in London, he spoke to me for several hours over two days. There…

HE TRANSITION POINT between The Man Who Sold The World and Hunky Dory, Holy Holy was rush-recorded in November 1970 and released in the first month of ’71 when it was decided that – d’oh! – there wasn’t an obvious single on the former album. As a composition, Holy Holy was considered so strong that it had sealed a new publishing deal for Bowie with Chrysalis, whose head at the time, Bob Grace, deemed the song “fantastic”. In the wake of the sessions for TMWSTW, Bowie and producer/bassist Tony Visconti had drifted apart and guitarist Mick Ronson and drummer Woody Woodmansey had returned, deflated, home to East Yorkshire. Visconti thus suggested star session bassist Herbie Flowers as the arranger/producer for Holy Holy. Flowers first met Bowie the year before when…

We Are Hungry Men (from David Bowie, 1967) In August 1966, not long before Bowie began recording his debut album, the science-fiction magazine SF Impulse began serialising Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room! Making hay with post-war anxiety about overpopulation leading to mass starvation and environmental catastrophe, it became the basis for the movie Soylent Green. As Bowie scholar Chris O’Leary suggests, We Are Hungry Men was most likely the sci-fi-loving singer’s response. It’s as much a radio comedy sketch as a song: Harrison via The Goon Show. To a perversely jolly melody, Bowie plays both an increasingly frustrated eugenicist"messiah” and the surly populace, who end up dispatching him with audible slurps and gulps. Producer Mike Vernon voices a panicky newsreader and engineer Gus Dudgeon takes the role of…

My Death (from various shows 1972-1997) Learned from Scott Walker’s 1967 cover, Bowie assimilated Jacques Brel’s My Death into Ziggy Stardust’s act, delivered as a transfixing acoustic interlude (“Shhhh... be quiet! This is a quiet song,” he reprimanded the crowd at the Hammersmith finale), his voice undulating through images both harrowing and fruity. Bowie never recorded a studio version, but My Death was important enough to be showcased on his chat show debut (Russell Harty, 1973). Once part of Ziggy’s band, Mike Garson’s piano fed My Death’s cabaret (Parisian and Weimar) roots, and he was present again when Bowie unexpectedly resuscitated the song in 1995, as another breather during an otherwise manic 1.Outside setlist – the sole reminder of where Bowie had been (Ziggy/melody) as opposed to where he was…

THE DRURY LANE ARTS LAB WAS founded by Jim Haynes in 1967 as an accessible central London platform for artistic activities and performance – the antithesis of the starchy, formal approach taken by contemporary guardians of high culture. The idea spread, and by 1969 David Bowie was running the Beckenham Arts Lab, which he had initially co-founded as a folk club. It took place on Sundays in the Three Tuns pub on Beckenham High Street. Roger Wootton and Glenn Goring of progressive folk group Comus lived up the hill from Bowie on Southend Road, Beckenham, and he put them on at the Arts Lab. It was the first ever gig for Comus’s 16-year-old singer Bobbie Watson, now Bobbie Seagroatt. “There were no special decorations. I have to say it was…

• The first plan for the LP’s videos, says Conor Deegan, was “one long, continuous video. But we spent all our budget on A Hero’s Death!” Locked down in west Ireland, Deegan directed I Don’t Belong, with Chatten as the star. “It would be cheaper for a start,” he laughs. “But I had to learn how to write a script, a shot list, and talk to the cinematographer, the editor. So we did the shoot and… it didn’t work at all.” But Deegan learned. “We regrouped. I explained everything in way more detail. Then it turned out as I’d imagined. I was hoping to bring out the pensive feel of the song, a lost feeling. Shooting in Skerries where Grian is from, the beach environs reflect what’s going on in…

Jason Molina Eight Gates SECRETLY CANADIAN. CD/DL/LP IT BEGINS with birds. Literally. Birds singing the intro of the opening song, Whisper Away. The birdsong returns, for varying lengths of time, on more than half the tracks on this short, spellbinding, almost painfully beautiful album. London birds, to be specific. Jason Molina claimed they were the direct descendants of the two pet budgies that Jimi Hendrix set free on Carnaby Street in the ’60s. He recorded them on his 4-track in the garden of the house where he lived on Brick Lane. Molina had left the Midwest for London in 2007, after recording his second full-length solo album, Let Me Go, Let Me Go, Let Me Go (2006), in Indiana, and a Magnolia Electric Co album, Fading Trails (2006), in Chicago.…

CORAL’S LAURELS 3 The Coral (above) go straight in at UK Number 1 with second album Magic And Medicine. Live shows this month include the Benicássim and V festivals. STONES GET WEB’D 18 The Rolling Stones’ back catalogue is legally available for online streaming and downloading. The band play a surprise mini-date at the London Astoria on August 27. “We were treated to a nice, old-fashioned R&B set,” opines Mick Jagger’s bro’ Chris in The Independent. UN-MELLOW JELLO 19 Jello Biafra declines a Dead Kennedys reunion offer at LA’s Key Club. “Are they having that much trouble selling tickets to a bar that holds less than 600 people?” he thunders. BYE WESLEY WILLIS 21 Outsider musician/artist Wesley Willis, whose fans include Eddie Vedder and Henry Rollins, writer of songs such…