MOJO December 2019

Laurie Anderson Anderson’s music, words and ideas have bewitched since 1981’s O Superman. Her moving essay on late husband Lou Reed’s lyrics – taken from I’ll Be Your Mirror (Faber) out in November – starts on p56. Songs From The Bardo, her LP with Tenzin Choegyal and Jesse Paris Smith, is out now. Ethan Russell The first band Russell photographed was Blue Cheer, but the California native was still a novice lensman when he arrived in the UK in 1968. Less than a year later, he had become court snapper to Britain’s rock aristocracy. His shots of The Rolling Stones – telling the story of their watershed Let It Bleed LP – are previewed from p44. Quinton Winter Quinton is an award-winning and New York Times best-selling illustrator. A proud MOJO contributor since 1998, he’s…

HE JAM GOES ON FOREVER! THIS MONTH, TO COMMEMORATE the return of Neil Young and Crazy Horse, MOJO has rounded up 15 acts still dedicated to the transformational power of electric guitars. Here are the Children Of The Horse, unfettered by a need to keep their sound neat and tidy, dedicated to the most rugged and elemental of freak-outs. “Crazy Horse are willing to jump off a cliff with Neil,” their producer and engineer John Hanlon tells MOJO in our cover story. “It’s like improvisational jazz, but it’s not jazz.” So it is with these liberated players, all of whom have been inspired by the longform explorations of Crazy Horse, and those of other untrammelled free spirits like the Grateful Dead. “[Crazy Horse] should’ve been shot at birth,” David Crosby once…

Stuart A. Staples VOICE OF TINDERSTICKS What music are you currently grooving to? Mac Miller’s Swimming. It’s a great piece of work, obviously tinged with sadness, but it doesn’t make it better because he died so young. The composition, the depth, the feeling – there’s a real joyousness in that creativity. I’m trying to extricate myself, but my wife likes it. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Nina Simone’s Wild Is The Wind. She kept it so minimal, though she could do everything. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Showaddywaddy’s Under The Moon Of Love, from a shop called Simons in Gedling in Nottingham. I don’t know if I was a fan, but I was glued to Top Of The Pops and I had…

“THE MORE YOU THINK, THE MORE YOU stink” might not be the ideal motto for a magazine with MOJO’s aspirations to authority and wisdom. Nevertheless, the instructions of Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s old producer David Briggs have a certain raw appeal. How can a group of musicians untether themselves from expectation, and tap into the most intuitive and spontaneous forms of expression? According to what Young tells MOJO’s Tom Doyle this month, the means to that end for Crazy Horse are manifold: high altitude, no setlists, no rehearsals, a little weed. “That’s the focus, y’know,” he reveals, in a wide-ranging and entertaining new interview. Rather like Crazy Horse jams, this latest edition of MOJO contains many unexpected digressions. In the midst of our epic interviews and reviews, you’ll hear of…

OCTOBER 1, 2019, and on a rainy night in Highgate, north London, inside the Gatehouse theatre pub, The Kinks launched the 50th anniversary edition of their oft-overlooked concept album, Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire). As Ray Davies, Dave Davies and drummer Mick Avory milled around, noticeably keeping a slight distance from one another, guests were treated to ales and portions of fish and chips served in newspaper pouches. The follow-up to ’68’s The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur was originally conceived as a Granada TV play, which never materialised due to the collapse of financial backing. Instead, in October ’69, the album stood alone as Ray Davies’s most personal work up to that point, documenting the post-war working-class lives of his sister Rosie…

“I’D SPENT SO much time in studios and tour buses I’d cut myself off from being feral,” says Sam Lee, folk singer, heroic song collector and environmentalist (he co-produced this year’s RSPB Top 20 birdsong hit Let Nature Sing). “I went on a journey to the wilds of Scotland in 2014, trying to reconnect with nature. In a moment of despair, on a mountainside, this buzzard just dropped down onto me, with the message… it’s all right.” The phrase ‘Old Wow’ would enter his mind, titling his third album. It was deftly produced by Bernard Butler (Geoff Travis introduced the two in 2012), and the guitarist also plays on four tracks. Remarkably, Elizabeth Fraser, elusive voice of the Cocteau Twins, lends an eldritch vocal to non-religious blessing song The Moon Shines…