MOJO August 2020

FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS SEPTEMBER, THE FIRST GLASTONBURY Festival – or the Pilton Pop, Blues & Folk Festival, as it was then known – took place in Somerset, with a bill featuring Steamhammer, Quintessence, Stackridge and, at the top, Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex. Since then, the celebration of live music in bucolic surroundings has become a critical part of our summers: a chance to binge on a surfeit of bands, and other things, far away from our normal lives. This year of course, that traditional escape isn’t possible. But as a small consolation, MOJO’s intrepid bookers have secured a heavily-stacked line-up for this very special CD. Welcome, then, to The MOJO Festival 2020, a compilation of live tracks from many of the world’s biggest and best artists. The risk of bad…

Billy Gibbons ZZ TOP’S ENDLESS BOOGIER What music are you currently grooving to? The best! All the usual suspects starting with, and, most likely ending with, Jimmy Reed. Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmie Vaughan, The Red Devils… gotta love the guitar meanderings from Jimmy Nolan on James Brown’s tracks. Venturing into some unexpected lofty realms with the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Rodney Crowell, Graham Bond, Long John Hunter, The Specials, Madness, Chrissie Hynde, Elvis Costello, even the real ZZ Top Rhythmeen recording from ’96. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Some Girls, Rolling Stones. Released in ’78 after we appeared with ’em in Hawaii in ’72. The mesmerising effect takes hold as soon as the platter takes off. Really good stuff… I’m a fan! Hell, any disc from The Rolling Stones. What was…

WHEN WE BEGAN PUTTING TOGETHER this issue of MOJO, lockdown was still, fatefully, over a fortnight away. On Thursday, March 5, Paul Weller turned up at a West London photo studio full of energy, moves and ideas. “Music is something you’ve always got to be thinking about,” he told Danny Eccleston that afternoon. “Like an athlete or a boxer, you have to keep training.” In the long intervening months, I’m sure we’ve all stayed in the game, one way or another, by tending to our musical obsessions. Playing records and editing MOJOs have been as much of a pleasure as ever, regardless of the challenges of our new working environment; thank you, once again, for all your support. A gig or festival would be nice, though, and so this month’s CD…

“None of us would want to be less than we were.”PHIL MAY ETERNAL DELINQUENTS The Pretty Things and their magnetic frontman Phil May, who has died following hip surgery after a cycling accident, were never short on influential admirers. Bob Dylan included them in Tombstone Blues in 1965, while fan David Bowie covered their songs and allegedly listed May as ‘God’ in a ’60s address book. When May’s chronic emphysema obliged the Pretties to retire their electric formation in December 2018 at London’s Indigo at the O2, Van Morrison and David Gilmour were there to pay homage. Yet this outsider group could never be fully rehabilitated. Born on November 9, 1944 in Dartford, and raised between his mother and her half-sister, May’s was a complicated childhood. A student at Sidcup Art College,…

1 ROSALYN (Fontana single, 1964) It’s hard to convey the shock, outrage and sheer glee that greeted the band’s punk-attitude R&B, as Rosalyn announced The Pretty Things to the world by mutating Bo Diddley’s hoodoo shimmer via May’s borstal snarl and Taylor’s scything slide guitar. A Number 41 near-hit, its anarchy-presaging impact was cemented by frantic 45s like Honey I Need and Midnight To Six Man. 2 DEFECTING GREY (Columbia single, 1967) Just as they’d taken R&B to primal extremes, the Pretties went feet-first into psychedelia with this Norman Smith-produced, five-minute hallucinogenic Anglo-answer to Good Vibrations, traversing park bench whimsy, reversed guitars, freak-beat frugging, California harmonies, acid-rock squalls and a closing pub knees-up. The mature follow-up, Talkin’ About The Good Times, upped the vocal harmonies and provided an early taste of their magnum…

I’m a bit of a fan of Tom Waits.”YUSUF/CAT STEVENS AS THE 50th anniversary of Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman looms this November, the 71-year-old singer has chosen to mark it not with the typically lavish remaster/outtakes/demos box set. Instead, at the suggestion of his son and manager Yoriyos, he has re-recorded the multi-platinum 1970 album in its entirety. “It made sense to me to update and reimagine the album, according to the way I feel today,” the singer tells MOJO from his home in Dubai. “I’ve just had such fun and such joy revisiting these songs. They’re incredibly relevant to me now, and to the world, I would say.” Reassembling key members of the original team for the making of Tea for the Tillerman² – namely producer Paul Samwell-Smith and time-served…