MOJO December 2018

Sylvie Simmons MOJO Contributing Editor Sylvie, has written for the magazine since it began. She’s also written books – including I’m Your Man: The Life Of Leonard Cohen. In recent years she’s been writing sad songs and playing a ukulele. Sylvie has just finished recording her second album, with Howe Gelb/Giant Sand. Thomas Moore An illustrator based in London, Thomas Moore aspires to capture today’s society through drawing. Influenced by British cartooning, he uses satire to describe his subjects. Working mainly in pen and ink, Thomas makes complex works based on his observations of life in the capital. This month he illustrates our Lead Album (p83). Mark Blake Mark’s new book, Bring It On Home, a biography of Led Zeppelin’s fearsome manager Peter Grant, was just praised in MOJO as “meticulous, entertaining and as expansive…

THE LEGEND OF LED ZEPPELIN OFTEN REVOLVES AROUND A SENSE of how brutally imposing rock’n’roll could be. Fifty years on from their formation, however, what also endures is their range; not just heft and force, but nuance and subtlety, too. In our interview with Jimmy Page this month, he talks about “the extremities of being on the road,” then coming home to an uncanny quiet, and settling back into “a completely different way of life”. That way of life involved sessions at Bron-Yr-Aur, a Welsh cottage without running water or electricity. It manifested in Page’s portrayal of himself as The Hermit, climbing high above Loch Ness beneath a full moon in the film The Song Remains The Same. And it can be heard in the Led Zeppelin acoustic music that drew…

Brix Smith Start UNCANNY PERSON What music are you currently grooving to? Sparklehorse, It’s A Wonderful Life. I knew Mark Linkous, he was an extraordinarily gifted writer, player and visionary. If I’m in the gym, or before going into the studio, Straight Outta Compton by N.W.A. And something that’s kind of new for me is The Lovely Eggs. I’m fascinated by them, they’re so free and quirky. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Hunky Dory! It’s a masterpiece and it just transported me. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Carole King’s Tapestry, probably from Hyde Park Records in Chicago. The hippy counsellors who drove us to summer camp always had the radio on, and those songs were always playing. I must have…

EVEN BY THE FRANTIC STANDARDS OF the decade, the week of November 22, 1968, was a busy one for British rock. The Beatles released a self-titled album. The Kinks unveiled The Village Green Preservation Society to an initially apathetic world. And Led Zeppelin were in the midst of their first UK tour, heading towards Sheffield en route to immortality. Led Zeppelin had only rehearsed for the first time in August. Yet by November, their debut album was in the can, and Jimmy Page’s ambitions for his band seemed more logical extrapolation than over-confidence. “It was an overwhelming experience for all of us,” Page tells us this month, of that first session. “It was life-changing, and we all knew it.” Over the next 50 years, Led Zeppelin changed the very fabric of rock’n’roll.…

“The whole thing affected us emotionally all the time.” BRIAN MAY “THIS WAS never a documentary,” says Brian May. “It’s more like a painting, or a poem, or a song.” He’s talking about Bohemian Rhapsody, the long-gestating Queen biopic released this month. As well as being a producer, Brian was on set with his Fuji stereoscopic camera in hand, capturing photos for a new edition of his career-straddling book Queen In 3-D. Such documents of the band in its lifetime, plus his and co-producer/Queen drummer Roger Taylor’s input, were crucial to the realisation of the film, which traces Queen’s story from their origins to the extraordinary triumph of Live Aid in 1985. Production started almost nine years ago, with May and Taylor working with scriptwriters Peter Morgan and, later, Anthony McCarten. Sacha…

“THERE WAS a run of old horror films on TV, one was Bela Lugosi playing Dracula in 1931,” recalls Bauhaus bassist David J Haskins. “He was in my head as I cycled home from my job in a factory. I kept stopping to write lines.” “We’d only been together a month,” vouches guitarist Daniel Ash. “I told David, I’ve got this haunting riff and he replied, ‘I’ve got this lyric about Bela Lugosi…’” At Bauhaus’s next rehearsal, on January 26, 1979, at a teacher-training college in their home town of Northampton, Ash scratched at his guitar, Haskins’ sibling Kevin started drumming a bossa nova beat, the bassist joined in and vocalist Pete Murphy recited the lyrics pretty much as they’re heard on the record. Nine minutes and 37 seconds of dub-enhanced, spooked…