MOJO December 2020

Al Kooper A musician and songwriter, Al recalls his contributions to Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited on p66. Meanwhile, at age 77, he fights a never-ending battle to keep himself out of the Real Gone section of MOJO while preparing Unreleased - a 70-plus-track box set - for release on the Omnivore label. Niall Doherty Digging into the labyrinthine making of Radiohead’s Kid A (see p56) took Niall back to standing in the rain at the band’s huge homecoming show in 2001, mouthing the holy words… “They’re playing Creep!” A writer and former Deputy Editor of Q, he previously interviewed Radiohead in Paris in 2016. Alan Berry Rhys Alan is a graphics artist and illustrator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both in his personal work and work for brands, his love of typography and letters, as…

TWO MONTHS AFTER KID A, THE FOURTH RADIOHEAD album, was released, Jonny Greenwood talked to an American magazine about the band’s radical reinvention. “The album as a whole is a distillation of our favourite records,” he said, with self-deprecating candour. “It’s basically a band copying styles of music they can’t really play.” Twenty years ago, Kid A sounded like a band on the run from stadium-sized expectations, from the oppression of rock orthodoxy. Now, it feels more the work of five men who were imbibing the best and most adventurous old music and surging towards something authentically new. As this month’s anniversary feature on the record makes clear, Radiohead listened intently to electronica, jazz, 20th century classical composition, avant-rock and much more, then collaged elements of them all into a forward-thinking…

Stevie Nicks GOLD DUST WOMAN What music are you currently grooving to? Since May, putting this film together [deep-cuts concert movie 24 Karat Gold], mostly my own. But if I was listening to music and dancing around the house, since this pandemic I started listening again to Crosby, Stills & Nash, and Joni Mitchell. Huge, huge influences for me. And I go back to Haim and Harry Styles. I’m very current! I love The 1975. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? I have different favourites - I listened to Harry’s Fine Line for three solid months, over and over. But if I go all the way back, Court And Spark, the first Crosby, Stills & Nash… What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? My grandad,…

IF NOTHING ELSE, 2020 HAS BEEN helpfully configured for private study, and many of us have spent these long months trying to unpick the secrets of Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways. What connects the Greek muses with eminent American generals? Where is the Conch Republic? What’s the dirtiest joke in Ancient Roman poetry? Who was Ward Hill Lamon? And what, ultimately, “would Julius Caesar do?” In this MOJO, we present the results of our findings, as part of our latest and most expansive Dylan Odyssey. Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks take us back 55 years, to the epochal sessions for Highway 61 Revisited. Another insider reveals all about the ’80s night Dylan went new wave. And the staunch Alan Jackson tells us about his multiple audiences with the Great Man…

"I’VE REFERRED BACK to Wildflowers as a sonic reference more than any other album I’ve produced.” Rick Rubin is assessing what Tom Petty’s Wildflowers - newly reissued in remarkable, hugely expanded editions as Wildflowers & All The Rest - means to him. Petty’s third solo album, immediately famous for both its warm, intimate sound and the high quality of the material, appeared in 1994 after two years of writing and being reduced from a proposed double to a single disc. Petty’s first solo release, 1989’s Full Moon Fever, made with Jeff Lynne, had been a huge success, and an obsession of Rubin’s. “I played it in my car every day for a year,” he recalled. But after working with Lynne in Traveling Wilburys and, in 1991, on the Heartbreakers album Into…

THERE’S NOTHING like a well-curated archival release to make music junkies drool, as the opening of the vaults of Prince, Neil Young and Bob Dylan demonstrates. For fans of visionary British producer Joe Meek, such a moment of revelation is looming, more than 52 years after the tape library of his 304 Holloway Road studio was bought and sealed. The 1,856 tapes, originally stored in 67 tea chests, were sold when Meek’s assets were liquidated after he shot his landlady and committed suicide in February 1967. Cliff Cooper, who played in Meek-produced band The Millionaires and founded august amp manufacturers Orange in 1968, paid somewhere between £300 and £400 for them. Tracks by Marc Bolan, Ray Davies, Rod Stewart, Steve Marriott, Gene Vincent, Alvin Lee, Billy Fury, Francis Rossi, Georgie Fame…