MOJO February 2021

Jon Savage A MOJO contributor since 1993, Jon is the author of This Searing Light: The Oral History Of Joy Division and the curator of Do You Have The Force? (Jon Savage’s Alternate History Of Electronica 1978-82), released by Caroline True Records on limited double vinyl. He revisits the golden age of synth music from page 46. John Harris John is a political(ish) columnist for The Guardian — but also a long-standing MOJO contributor and music writer, currently editing transcripts from The Beatles’ Let It Be sessions into the book that will accompany Peter Jackson’s Get Back movie. He writes about the aftermath of John Lennon’s murder from page 64. Sam Hadley Sam has worked with clients all over the world on a huge variety of projects, from illustrating and designing film posters and packaging,…

WHEN LENNY KAYE COMPILED THE ORIGINAL NUGGETS album in 1972, much of the exhilarating music it contained was only five or so years old. Nevertheless, his tone in the sleevenotes was as nostalgic as it was exuberant. “Whether you want to use [Nuggets] to remember that bittersweet moment when you first decided to let your hair grow/ take up a picket sign/wonder what a deadly toke would feel like,” he wrote, “well, that’s ‘your trip’.” Some of the music on Psych Ops, the high-energy freakout CD that comes with this issue of MOJO, is a decade old, but still feels radically current. Some of it sounds like it could have been made by contemporaries of The Shadows Of Knight and The Pink Floyd, and captures that sense of rock’n'roll’s primal impulses…

Tori Amos STILL EARTHQUAKING What music are you currently grooving to? I’m listening to the Beatles catalogue again. I found George Martin’s With A Little Help From My Friends: The Making Of Sgt. Pepper, which details how the songs were recorded. I’m on that part where they did two very different takes of Strawberry Fields, and how they were resolving it. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? I don’t know if there’s such a thing, but one I adore is Blue by Joni Mitchell. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? To tell you the truth I can’t remember. My mother, a minister’s wife, had an amazing record collection. When my father would go to church, she would take off her pinny and play Billie…

IMAGINE A WORLD WHERE JOHN LENNON never existed: it isn’t easy, is it? MOJO, for a start, probably wouldn’t be here, not just because we’d have been short of one or two cover stories over the years, but because Lennon and The Beatles changed the way people thought and wrote about music and culture. The Beatles didn’t invent a grown-up discourse about pop, but their very existence made it a necessity. Under their influence, rock’n’roll was revealed as both ubiquitous, and profound; a three-minute thrill, and a subject worthy of lifelong obsession. This month, MOJO charts the multitude of ways John Lennon changed our world, and remembers how that world changed again in the wake of December 8, 1980. The morning after, I woke up to the news of Lennon’s death…

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO “I MISS LIVE SHOWS so much,” says Annie Clark, the force behind St. Vincent. “I miss the sweat. I miss the people. I miss the danger. I miss the communion. I miss everything about it.” Yet as the year ends, Clark — who has partly spent her downtime learning tennis and reading about Stalin — has a new live outlet. “I’ve taken to writing musicals for my family,” she says, laughing. “There was a tradition where we would go and see A Christmas Carol and it was always hilariously bad but just wonderful. I half-remembered some of the songs, then I’ve rewritten them to be family specific. Then I’m insisting that everyone dress up in full costume. I’m making one of my nephews…

WHEN DAVE Grohl played MOJO a selection of songs from the upcoming Foo Fighters album, Medicine At Midnight, back in February at his Los Angeles studio, he of course had no idea that a global shutdown would arrive the next month. Now, he’s already thinking about a swift follow-up long-player. “We started talking about maybe recording another record in the downtime,” he says. “But who fucking knows?” During the long months of lockdown, Grohl did some remote drumming recording for others and wrote short stories posted up on Instagram. Foo Fighters reconvened at their Studio 606 rehearsal room in September and thrilled once again in making loud noise together. “It will be the most emotional, cathartic, fucking beautiful release.”DAVE GROHL “When the six of us sit in our rehearsal space and play, it feels…