MOJO September 2020

IF ONE THEME RUNNING THROUGH DAVID BOWIE’S CAREER was relentless, radical change, he was also notable for his consistency. Tony Visconti, for instance, worked with him, on and off, for nearly 50 years. Mike Garson played piano for Bowie on 10 studio albums and countless tours. Brian Eno was on call in the 1990s as well as the 1970s. Bassist Gail Ann Dorsey was a fixture in his band for two decades. All of these key figures turn up on Crash Course For The Ravers, an audio companion to this month’s deep trawl through the lesser-visited zones of Bowie’s career. Here you’ll find loyal companions and obscure inspirations, protégées and acolytes, tributes from old friends and invocations from much newer ones, from lan Hunter to Donny McCaslin. It is, as one…

Green Gartside SCRITTI POLITTI’S PERENNIAL What music are you currently qroovinq to? My favourites at the moment are Tisakorean’s Bate Onna Bo and Warhol.SS’s Blicks. Tisakorean is a young rapper from Houston whose whip-smart dumb-fun minimalism is fabulously on point. Warhol.SS is in Chicago. I’d really like to work with him. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? This question can only be answered provisionally or dishonestly. That said, I’m gonna go for the Trojan Records Beatles Tribute box set, a magnificent compilation of 50 cover versions of Fab Four magic from the ‘60s and ‘70s. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? A budget-priced Island label sampler, Nice Enough To Eat, only long-player I could afford with my pocket money. I bought it at W.H.…

E-mail to: mailto:mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk IN LATE 1966, A BRITISH ROCK MANAGER called Kenneth Pitt returned from a trip to New York with an acetate of an unreleased album. According to one of his clients at the time, David Bowie, he had been given the demo of The Velvet Underground & Nico by Andy Warhol. “[Pitt] said, ‘This is crap but you might like it,’” Bowie told Paul Du Noyer in 2002. “As usual it was, Oh Bowie likes the weird shit. And I played it and thought, Oh God, manna from heaven.” Welcome, then, to this month’s MOJO exploration of Bowie’s very own weird shit and manna from heaven; a forensic hunt for the esoteric, the undersung and the unseen in the Dame’s capacious archives which has fished up art happenings, digital dystopias…

“SOME RELATIONSHIPS are face-to-face, poking into each other’s brains,” notes Alfreda ‘Alfie’ Benge of Robert Wyatt, her creative and domestic partner for the last 50 years. “But ours has worked because we’re sitting side by side, watching the world together, and talking about it.” MOJO is also sat side by side with Alfie, socially distanced on side-adjacent sofas in her friend Julie Christie’s flat this June afternoon, to discuss new book Side By Side: Selected Lyrics. With, respectively, 60 and 48 Wyatt and Benge lyrics, it focuses on his early band ventures (Soft Machine, Matching Mole) and later solo work, for which Benge provided illuminating cover art. Benge’s first contributions to Wyatt’s work went unheralded: “improvised banter,” she says. “My little verse on [1974 album] Rock Bottom was never meant to be…

IDLES’ SECOND ALBUM, Joy As An Act Of Resistance, transformed the Bristolian bruisers from a cult concern to the nation’s favourite Mercury-nominated riot-starters. But as touring duties wound down, the band were ailing. “We’d played 190 shows last year, and 180 the year before,” remembers frontman Joe Talbot. “We were dead, physically and mentally not well.” The solution was rest, but for Talbot the healing process truly began when he conceived the title and concept for Idles’ third album, Ultra-Mono, due in September. Inspired by Eckhart Tolle’s The Power Of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment, Talbot says the album embodies “the idea that you only have the present, and that you need to embrace that. I’ve never wanted to be a spokesperson for anyone other than the broken. I am…

Inspecteur Raymundo C’est Lui (OHEM, 1993) Where Belgian football coach and noted Mark E Smith lookalike Raymond Goethals’ thoughts on the game are sampled and grafted onto whistle blowing New Beat, in time to celebrate Marseille winning the European Cup in 1993. Jah Thomas Cricket Lovely Cricket (MIDNIGHT ROCK, 1979) The reggae deejay takes his girlfriend to see a match at the famous Sabina Park ground in Kingston, and gives it up for eminent right-handed batsman Lawrence ‘Yagga’ Rowe over the tinkling ’My Conversation’ rhythm. Perfect contentment follows. The British Darts Team 180 (SMILE, 1981) Bobby George, Jocky Wilson and more mill about for a keyboard chant-along about, er, darts. See also Cooldown Cafe’s 2005 tune Winter Wonderland (Darts Mix), where the Dutch Hard House crew invite commentator Martin Fitzmaurice to freestyle. Alex ‘Hurricane’ Higgins One-Four-Seven (SOLID, 1982) A countrytrucking sing-along feel here, as…