MOJO June 2022

Lois Wilson “A genuine thrill,” is how Lois, who has been writing for MOJO since 1999, describes the experience of talking to Patti LaBelle and Nona Hendryx about Labelle’s pioneering Nightbirds this month. She also bids farewell to Timmy Thomas and navigates Gil Scott-Heron’s back catalogue in How To Buy. Ted Kessler This month’s cover story is a rematch between Ted and Liam Gallagher – who first met in 1994, when the Gallaghers visited NME on promo business and five hours later ended up in a bundle with greasers in Camden’s Underworld. For more tales of Ted’s adventures in the music press, his book Paper Cuts is published July 21. Jim Irvin “Mighty Baby had a strong connection that made their music special, and they speak of one another with great warmth,” says Jim, who…

WHERE TO BEGIN WITH THE GRATEFUL DEAD, THE MOST beloved and daunting of great American rock bands? The extraordinary depth of their catalogue can be intimidating to newcomers, even as Deadheads vigorously debate the individual merits of, say, every gig the band played on their spring tour of Europe, 1972. Don’t worry, readers – MOJO’s got your back. This month, with the invaluable help of Rhino Records, the Grateful Dead organisation and the band’s official archivist David Lemieux, we present From The Bay To The Pool, an essential primer of the Dead’s ’70s live manoeuvres. The Bay refers to the San Francisco area, of course, and there’s plenty of action on the Dead’s home turf. The Pool is the Empire Pool in London, where that storied European tour began 50 years…

Fatoumata Diawara MALI BLUESER What music are you currently grooving to? A lot of traditional music, music from my roots, music from my region of Wassoulou. I’m also listening to lots of old songs from Mali. I love listening to the old grooves and the old voices. They really inspire me. Especially the voices of Malian women. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Nina Simone’s The Very Best Of… I always get inspiration from her. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? In Mali I couldn’t buy a record because of my background, so the first record I bought was Nina Simone’s best-of when I came to Paris. When I got my freedom, leaving my family to run away and come to Europe, she was…

E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk IT HAS, ASTONISHINGLY, BEEN 334 ISSUES since Liam Gallagher first loped into the pages of MOJO. Jim Irvin, still on our team, spots him fronting Oasis at London’s Marquee club in the summer of 1994, “Impassively cocksure, quietly convinced of [his] roughly distilled essence of Everything Rock Delights In.” “Our kid’s not got the faintest idea what’s going on,” Noel Gallagher tells Jim later. “He’ll be one of the greats because he doesn’t know.” Twenty-eight years later, Liam Gallagher is nudging 50, seemingly in need of double hip surgery, and still to a preternatural degree untroubled by self-analysis. It’s disingenuous to suggest that Everything Rock Delights In is purely instinctual; Pete Townshend might like a word with you about that, for a start. But still, the triumph of Liam…

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO THE SEX PISTOLS have been portrayed by actors on screen before – briefly in Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 movie 24 Hour Party People, and more fully in Alex Cox’s 1986 film Sid And Nancy. Now new six-part TV drama Pistol promises another screen vision of the group, this time from the direct perspective of one of the main protagonists, namely guitarist Steve Jones, whose extraordinary 2017 autobiography, Lonely Boy, the series is based on. For Jones, watching an actor playing him on-screen was a strange experience – particularly when that actor was a boy re-enacting the moment the Sex Pistols guitarist was sexually abused by his stepfather. “It is what it was,” he explains down the line from his Los Angeles home. “Which was…

“I’VE SEEN myself as a cult hero since the age of five,” smiles John Reis, amid his San Diego home studio. “It’s nice to finally be acknowledged as someone who gets no acknowledgement!” Beneath the humour, Reis characteristically makes a serious point. Even in Rocket From The Crypt, the horn-handed sextet which delivered his one taste of mainstream success, it wasn’t the name ‘John Reis’ that mid-’90s audiences chanted but ‘Speedo’, the alias he took to become the extrovert frontman for that band’s bar-busting fusion of greaser punk and ‘50s rock’n'roll. Now, after over 30 years at the post-hardcore blast furnace in myriad ensembles – most notably Drive Like Jehu, Rocket FTC and Hot Snakes – he’s finally releasing an album under his own name, or thereabouts: Ride The Wild Night…