MOJO January 2020

Sylvie Simmons Sylvie has been with MOJO since Issue 1. I’m Your Man: The Life Of Leonard Cohen, her definitive biography, was updated in 2017. On her book tour, she took along a ukulele and sang Cohen songs – it led to a record deal. She’s just finished making her second LP with Howe Gelb/Giant Sand. Alan Light Alan’s interest in Leonard Cohen began when he learnt the singer was a college classmate of his father. He’s the author of The Holy Or The Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, And The Unlikely Ascent Of Hallelujah, which is being developed as a documentary. He writes for us about Cohen on page 70. hitandrun hitandrun is a creative studio run by Greg and Zennor Meeson, specialising in CGI illustration and animation. More of their work can be…

Weyes Blood HERE COMES THE FLOOD What music are you currently grooving to? Joni Mitchell’s Night Ride Home. Maybe some of the best baby boomer music from the ’90s. There’s a special weird nostalgia I get from it. I also think it’s the point where she completely returned to the kind of songwriting that everybody really loved. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Joni Mitchell – Hejira. A lovely road record, and I spend a lot of time in the van. She plays electric guitar with flange and there’s a lot of pedal steel, it’s like a proto-Daniel Lanois record. The lyrics are gorgeous, especially Amelia, about Amelia Earhart, a strong independent-style woman who chose a career over motherhood. I can just really relate. What was the first record you ever…

THE FIRST SONG THAT LEONARD COHEN intones on Thanks For The Dance begins, “I was always working steady/But I never called it art.” The modesty, perhaps, is a little disingenuous. Cohen was a poet whose forays into songwriting seemed to miraculously enhance his cultural credibility rather than diminish it. Over the 14 albums he completed in his lifetime, he created a kind of popular music that made sense to the gatekeepers of high art, while at the same time understanding the radical bohemian spirit of a new generation. “Cohen’s rebellion was not of the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll kind,” writes his biographer Sylvie Simmons in this issue of MOJO, “though he was a longtime fan of the first two.” Sylvie is among a crack team of MOJO aesthetes who celebrate the…

SUDDEN DEATH leaves loose ends, and so many did Jimi Hendrix leave that one of his posthumous albums had that very title. Among the most fabled is the fate of the never-released footage of him and the Experience live at the Royal Albert Hall, London, in February 1969. At last, we have the answer. After rumours that a completed movie would be released in 2016, The Jimi Hendrix Experience: The Royal Albert Hall had its world premiere on October 21 at that very venue. Tickets cost up to £35 each, compared to as little as the 7/6d in old money (less than the price of a 45rpm single), which music writer Kris Needs paid for what in his new book Just A Shot Away he describes as, “the best show I’ll…

PAUL WELLER may always be the Modfather, but his career’s never been short of stylistic experiment, whether it was The Jam’s 1981 oddity Pop Art Poem, The Style Council’s 1989 embrace of house music or more recently, the Moog, folk and tape textures of 2015’s Saturns Pattern. Arguably the most extreme of these leftward turns arrives in January, when Weller releases his In Another Room EP on UK indie label and design nexus Ghost Box. Home of such hauntological underground enigmas as Belbury Poly, The Focus Group and Broadcast, the discreet imprint is in the business of reconstructing an eldritch parallel reality of post-war British futurism and myth via electronics, folk, tape-splicing experimentalism and superb packaging. Arena-packing it is not. Were they surprised to find Weller on their release schedule? “It was quite a…

Ram John Holder Wimpy Bar Blues (FROM BLACK LONDON BLUES , BEACON, 1969) A sauntering, literal account of visiting a Wimpy Bar on the Edgware Road and nodding off, with parping sax accompaniment, from the groovy cat who later played Porkpie in Channel 4 barber-com Desmond’s. Pub Crawl Blues is also a must. Stephen Grey Moonlight Over McAlpines (FROM INDUSTRY VOLUME 2 , KPM, 1975) Haunting reeds hover in the dark for this library cue for the great night-time empty building site of the mind (description: ‘LETHARGIC, STATIC – CLARINET’). Also includes Deserted Factory, Desolate Warehouse and Industrial Waste. Various Songs From The Bull Ring (BIRMINGHAM MARKETS EP, 1985) Celebrating 21 years of Brum’s shopping centre, local acts Salty Dog, Milestone Express, The Open Roaders and Malcolm Stent bring folk, pop, country and novelty. Milestone Express’s Take A Trip promises, “You’ll…