MOJO May 2020

Sebastian Artz Born in Romania, raised in Germany, a college exchange at UCLA’s film school took Sebastian to Los Angeles. He’s become an award-winning photographer and director known for work in advertising and portraits such as those of this month’s cover stars the Foo Fighters (see p72). www.sebastianartz.com Paul Rees A former Editor of Q magazine, Paul has spent the past 18 months holed up in his wooden house on the Isle Of Skye working on the authorised biography of The Who’s bassist John Entwistle. You can read a piece adapted from his finished book, The Ox: The Last Of The Great Rock Stars, which starts on page 48. Tom Doyle Tom has been a MOJO writer for over 20 years, with cover stories on Neil Young, Paul Weller, Nick Cave and more under his…

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER GRUNGE? IN 1995, AS DAVE Grohl embarked on an unexpected new life as frontman of the Foo Fighters, it was a question which reverberated around American music. For a glut of emerging guitar bands, the promise of stardom and major label windfalls had diminished, but the sense of a supercharged college rock scene remained. Hence the diverse bunch of American rock insurgents we’ve gathered together for this month’s MOJO CD, This Is A Call. Among them, you’ll find revitalised veterans of the ’80s hardcore underground, some of whom would find themselves thrust into the spotlight thanks to their association with Nirvana. There are uncompromising DIY activists, harbingers of emo, rock’n’roll rabble-rousers, scuzz-blues evangelists, forgotten contenders and indie lifers. As Britpop reached its apotheosis, these bands provided a genuine alternative:…

Yola BRISTOL COUNTRY SOUL What music are you currently grooving to? Michael Kiwanuka’s Kiwanuka, Brittany Howard’s Jamie, Weyes Blood’s Titanic Rising, LP’s Lost On You and Gary Clark Jr’s This Land. And I always have Sheryl Crow on heavy rotation, and The Kinks. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? If I could only save one album from a fire I’d stay in that fire and burn. It’s my personal hell to listen to one record only. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? I wanted to buy Push It by Salt-N-Pepa but my mother thought it was too dirty for me, instead I had to get Ice Ice Baby by fricking Vanilla Ice! It didn’t take very long for that record to never…

INSPIRED BY THE FOO FIGHTERS’ SILVER jubilee this month, I went digging in the archives to find my review of their debut album for NME. “A massively important record,” I hyperbolised. “At heart, there’s a refusal to brood, so that the impetus to create seems to stem not from Kurt’s death, but from the demise of Nirvana.” Twenty-five years on, our exclusive new interview finds Dave Grohl admitting to Tom Doyle that he still has a “disconnect” between Nirvana and the Foos, “so I never worried about the expectation. But, still, I was fucking terrified. It becomes a baptism.” Our celebration of the Foo Fighters proves just how far Grohl has successfully pushed his career this past quarter-century. There are other nostalgic echoes of the mid ‘90s with this month’s CD…

IN A SUITE at London’s Langham Hotel, there is a sight which six months ago few could have foreseen: Chris and Rich Robinson, the fraternal partnership which drove The Black Crowes to rollercoaster success between 1990 and 2013, are not merely to be found in one room, but crammed onto the same two-seater sofa. No one is holding hands or anything, and the body language is peculiar, as Rich, the 50-year-old guitar-slinger, slumps in one corner with a slightly withdrawn air (he attributes this to OCD), while Chris, now 53, tethers his notoriously barbed humour, clearly on best behaviour so as not to scupper this highly lucrative détente. They’re in town to promote a tour with a new Black Crowes line-up, which reaches the UK in October. “We didn’t do an interview…

“It was like the songs went to boot camp.”TOM RUSSO FACT SHEET Title: tbc Due: this year Songs: Cars In Space The Buzz: “We could become a drone band or something, but we alllikepopsongstoo much, so we inevitably condense these big unwieldy jams into pop songs as well.” Joe White LAST APRIL, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever drummer Marcel Tussie was playing in a charity football tournament in Melbourne when he ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee. A once career-ending injury – sufferers speak of hearing a sickening ‘popping’ sound at the moment of disaster – the Manchester City-supporting Tussie was treated and back on the road within the month. “He could play drums, he just couldn’t run or change direction very quickly,” says vocalist/guitarist Tom Russo. “Now, he’s completely match-fit.” Sporting metaphors…