MOJO May 2022

Simon McEwen MOJO Production Editor Simon’s first ever foreign trip was for sister mag MOJO Collections in 2002, interviewing Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in the reggae maverick’s Secret Laboratory near Zurich. It was the highlight of a life-long affair with Jamaican music. This month he reviews Horace Andy’s new album on page 84. Andy Cowan Long before he became MOJO’s jazz columnist, Andy edited rap monthly Hip-Hop Connection, where he witnessed Cypress Hill’s rise from underground chancers to rap superstars at close quarters. He tells their tale on page 34. Away from music, his hands are full juggling super fluffy animals (see Klaus, pictured). Ben Wardle Before embarking on Mark Hollis’s biography (extracted from page 50), Ben had warmed up with books including The Art Of The LP and a novel based on Wire’s Pink Flag.…

OVER 20 YEARS INTO AN EXTRAORDINARY CAREER, Jack White’s range of influences shows no sign of getting any narrower. In fact, studying the credits for his forthcoming Fear Of The Dawn, the guests and samples are more diverse than ever: Q-Tip and Cab Calloway; the Manhattan Transfer and The Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison. What might appear random eclecticism in the hands of many, however, seems infallibly coherent, a skill that makes White such a potent connector to the great music of the past. In his cover versions, too, you can see that same kind of scholarship, energy and invention – a way of honouring tradition without being deferential to it. Hence this latest MOJO CD, compiled with the help of White’s Third Man label, draws together the original versions of 14…

Jimmy Webb THE SORCERER FROM WICHITA What music are you currently grooving to? I’ve been having fun with [Amazon virtual assistant] Alexa, asking her to play rare stuff like Duane Eddy’s wonderful Theme For Moon Children. You say, “Alexa, play Southern Man by Neil Young” and there it is, instantly. It’s a bit addictive, like a drug. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Probably Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Sings Newman. It’s precious in the most positive sense of the word. What was the first record you ever bought, and where did you buy it? I borrowed a dollar bill from my father and drove about 20 miles from Laverne, Oklahoma to Beaver, Oklahoma to buy a single I’d heard on the radio by Glen Campbell called Turn Around, Look At Me. What musician, other…

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk THERE’S A STRIKING MOMENT AT THE end of Jack White’s new album, Fear Of The Dawn. “This is the real me,” he sings plaintively in Shedding My Velvet. “I’m not as bad as I was/But I’m not as good as I can be.” For those of us who may have been unhealthily fixated on White’s long juggle between honesty and artifice, it marks the start of a new era. “Everything I’m doing right now,” he tells us this month, “is all rebirth.” A great time, then, to catch up with this most compelling of modern artists. For this issue of MOJO, White gave us unparalleled access to his domain and processes. If you’ve seen the video for Fear Of The Dawn, it was even worked…

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO SO OFTEN HAD Mark Lanegan cheated death, it became easy to assume the man was indestructible. Unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Layne Staley, friends and musical peers, he survived years of brutal drug addiction, a horror show unflinchingly recounted in his 2020 memoir Sing Backwards And Weep – written at the behest of Anthony Bourdain, another friend lost to the demons. Lanegan had also survived Covid, which in March 2021 saw him hospitalised in his new domain of south-west Ireland. For three weeks he lay in a coma. Only the intervention of his wife Shelley prevented doctors performing an emergency tracheotomy; she feared he might lose the ability to sing, and thus also the will to live. Yet months later, Lanegan…

TAJ MAHAL, 80 in May, and Ry Cooder, who’s just turned 75, are rejoicing in a reunion 55 years since they last recorded together. “We’re now in the position of the guys we liked when we were coming through. We’re the old-timers now!” laughs Taj. “We’ve been around long enough to come full circle and create a project like this with a front porch, back porch, relaxed feel… showing what it’s like to be re-inspired by what started us out in the first place.” He’s talking about their first ever duo album, recorded in just three days with Ry’s son Joaquin on percussion in Cooder Jr’s front room. Get On Board: The Songs Of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee pays tribute to a duo of a previous generation, one that lasted…