Sommaire pour July 2024 de MOJO

1 GENE CLARK Past Tense “The Byrds were done when Gene left,” David Crosby is quoted as saying on page 69. Not quite, but they did lose the elegiac folk-tinged powerpop Clark had mastered. The gorgeous Past Tense is from 1967’s long-lost Gene Clark Sings For You; a tentative first solo effort, equal to his early Byrds classics. To the best of Clark’s sons’ knowledge, Gene Clark is the sole writer of the song and it is published by Gene Clark Music. 2018 Gene Clark Music, Inc. under exclusive licence to Omnivore Recordings, A division of Omnivore Entertainment Group LLC. QMWHB1810957 2 THE SCOTTSVILLE SQUIRREL BARKERS Reuben While many Byrds did early time in clean-cut folk groups, Chris Hillman apprenticed in this rowdier San Diego group. Maximum-velocity bluegrass was their…

“He was at the height of his creative powers but rock bottom and confused as a human being.” “EVERY ARTICLE about Marvin Gaye starts with words beginning with ‘D’ – debts, divorce, drugs, depression, death. Let’s put those words in the grave and bring Marvin back.” So says Alex Trappeniers, a seasoned music business lawyer who has spent the past five years meticulously annotating a time capsule of 216 personal effects left by the troubled Prince of Motown from his 18-month exile in Ostend. The tale is a familiar one. After a calamitous European tour Gaye met Belgian concert promoter Freddy Cousaert in London, in February 1981. Cousaert arranged a show at Ostend’s Kursaal Casino and offered the singer a chance to detox in peace at the fifthfloor seafront apartment…

“THE GREATEST Kraut-gospel-funk party album ever,” promised MOJO when we reviewed the second Aircooled album, Eat The Gold, a couple of issues ago. But to hit that jackpot, the four members of the South Coast band soldiered through decades of service in disparate, often unheralded corners of British music. Synth player and covocalist Riz Maslen, for instance, started out singing with early-’90s electronicists The Future Sound Of London, then moonlighted with The Beloved and 4Hero before working long-term with Ninja Tune under the solo alias Neotropic. Living in the musical hotbed of Hastings and St Leonards just before the pandemic, she was introduced to Oliver Cherer, another belowthe-radar trooper who first materialised in the late-’90s big beat act Cooler, alongside EMF’s James Atkin, and had recently supersubbed in Piroshka, alongside…

"THIS IS THE DAY IT ALL STOPS.” IT’S A line that Warren Ellis often hears running through his head “like a mantra”, but in an American hotel room 25 years ago, those words were ringing in his brain at alarming volume. Dirty Three, the instrumental trio the violinist formed with drummer Jim White and guitarist Mick Turner in Melbourne at the start of 1992, were on a short US tour. “The shows were the first time I tried to get back on the stage after cleaning up,” Ellis explains, “and the thought of being on-stage was so terrifying because I’d never been there not in some kind of altered state. I thought, OK, Warren. Listen to your body. Listen to what you need to do to get through this. And…

Stuart Murdoch: In that first year [1996] we made two LPs [Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister] and wrote songs for a bunch of EPs. In 1990 I’d seen a medical specialist: “You’ve got post-viral ME – chronic fatigue syndrome.” I’d had a really active 1980s, running marathons. Then I couldn’t even get out of my room. Next I was back at my folks’ house and I’d started writing songs. With Tigermilk I was scared somebody would say, “No, you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to go back to your pit.” The catalyst for the band was when I was asked to put an LP together at Stow College – a small college in Glasgow that had a music business course I was on. Alan Rankine [formerly of The Associates]…

Richard Thompson ★★★★ Ship To Shore NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP SPIDERING HIS way into the bleakest corner of his first album in six years, Richard Thompson sees through the eyes of a soldier struggling with PTSD on the quietly crushing The Fear Never Leaves You. “Numb is heaven, oblivion wealth,” sings the 75-year-old master of the dark arts in his customary hangdog fashion. “The spring never uncoils itself.” A folk rock Sisyphus with a guitar that tends to speak its mind infinitely clearer than he ever can, the lugubrious Fairport Convention founder has once more rolled his immense ball of gloom to the top of the hill for Ship To Shore. It is a record about defeat, despair and humiliation delivered with an unsettling avuncular twinkle, and a lingering sense that…

Sam Morton ★★★★ Daffodils & Dirt XL. CD/DL/LP WHETHER IT’S natural suspicion of mission creep, the fear of tattooed Hollywood A-listers fulfilling boorish rock fantasies, or the in-timefor-Christmas trail of celebrity blues albums, it’s hard not to flinch when actors announce a pivot into music. It only takes a moment of Daffodils & Dirt’s uncanny thr um, however, to realise that Sam Morton is no oxygen-stealing vanity project. A collaboration between producer Richard Russell and actor Samantha Morton – they take the Alice Cooper approach to band-naming – Daffodils & Dirt rakes through time and memor y, a disturbing but often beautiful collage of past and present, fantasy and reality. The pair met after Russell heard Morton’s Desert Island Discs (Spiritualized, Suicide, Einstür zende Neubauten) and, impressed by her love…

Angeline, Cohen And Jon ★★★★ Grace Will Lead Me Home INVISIBLE FOLK. CD/DL/LP A three-handed voyage to Amazing Grace-land. Adopted as an African-American spiritual, Amazing Grace has a troublesome backstory: written in 1772, its author John Newton was a parish priest in Olney, Buckinghamshire, but also an ex-slave ship captain. With echoes of Peter Bellamy’s ballad opera The Transports, this thoughtful project finds Sorrow Songs auteur Angeline Morrison, concertina maestro Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne and Jon Bickley wrestling with Amazing Grace’s roots while honouring its message of redemption. Morrison gets inside Newton’s process on the Rusholme Ruffians-alike Turn Round Newton and whips out a glorious autoharp-accompanied take of Zoe Mulford’s The President Sang Amazing Grace, while Braithwaite-Kilcoyne’s Fantasia On A West Indian Burial Theme is nobly elegiac. Bickley’s gruff Sorry, meanwhile, posits…

“The entire project, from the music to the ideas Bowie attached to it, marked a genuine shift from pop’s past.” David Bowie ★★★★ Rock ’N’ Roll Star! PARLOPHONE. CD/DL/BR AFTER ENDLESS reissues, Ziggy Stardust returns under cover of Rock ’N’ Roll Star!, a 5-CD, one audio-only Blu-Ray, two-book box set. It closes in October 1972 at Boston on the first US tour. But it’s where it begins that’s the real bombshell. Likely guided by the hand of Bowie, who watched over his archive, the entire Ziggy Stardust escapade – song, album, live show, get-out-of-jail alter ego – can now be traced back to one stridently strummed acoustic demo sketched out in February 1971 in a San Francisco hotel room. Titled So Long ’60s, its chords and melody are instantly recognisable…

Bent Wind Sussex TREND, 1969 ONE OF vintage psychedelia’s most unhinged and highly valued long-players, Sussex by Bent Wind emanated from a low-life hippy hang-out at 75 Sussex Avenue in Toronto’s university district. In the basement there in spring ’69, shaggy-maned stoner Gerry Gibas was woodshedding with his rhythm section when nearby headshop proprietor Marty Roth popped in, and within minutes was filling in for the combo’s absentee rhythm guitarist. For a few hours, they ran through Gibas’s repertoire, but after their leader nipped upstairs for his supper, he returned to find the trio working on a Roth composition. “Gerry plugged his guitar back in, turned his wah wah on, and before you knew it, we had another song happening,” recalls Roth today from his home in Toronto. “After we’d…

Let It Be ★★★★ Dir. Michael Lindsay-Hogg DISNEY+. S LET IT BE, the film, was always a strange epilogue to The Beatles’ career, and one that they immediately disowned. None of the four turned up at any of its three premieres, held in May 1970 in New York, Liverpool and London, the latter nonetheless attracting the likes of Spike Milligan and Lulu plus exes Jane Asher and Cynthia Lennon. Only a month after the Daily Mirror ran the screaming front page headline, “Paul Is Quitting The Beatles”, emotions within the camp remained understandably raw. Since then, the documentary has undergone a weird afterlife: released on video tape and LaserDisc in the early ’80s; revisited in 1992 ahead of parts of it being used in the Anthology TV series, with a…

SONGWRITER IS the fifth posthumous album of unheard Johnny Cash material to be released since the Man In Black passed in 2003. And it strongly challenges the idea that his artistic powers were in decline at the time of their early-’90s creation. Its 11 tracks are, as its title suggests, all selfcompositions (in itself quite unusual for Cash) recorded at Nashville’s LSI studios and his own Cash Cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee in spring 1993 – a year prior to the first, career-resurrecting American Recordings album helmed by producer Rick Rubin. Rubin told MOJO in 2022 that a dejected Cash was “surprised that anybody cared” at that juncture. His son, John Carter Cash, who co-produced Songwriter, begs to disagree. “Dad certainly didn’t feel that way,” he says, speaking from the Cash…

It was the days of blacklight posters and incense. I was a surfer chick and I liked John Denver and Barry Manilow. My twin sister Marie was the very popular, prettier and cooler one, I was just very innocent, introvert, the runt. When you’re 14, 15, trying to find your identity, it’s difficult when you’re a twin. I was in my bedroom in Encino with my friend Paul L’Esperance, and he brought Diamond Dogs for me. I literally escaped, then. It was like watching a sci-fi movie in my head, one I could be in. Every song took you to a different place and allowed you to re-imagine yourself. The bisexuality – my gosh, being the daughter of a World War Two gunny sergeant, I wasn’t raised with that kind…

“The influence there was David Bowie’s Low and Miles Davis’s In A Silent Way.” OISÍN LEECH has lived a life surrounded by music. “I was lucky growing up,” says the red-headed 43-year-old singer-songwriter from a bedroom in his family home in Navan, County Meath. “My mum and dad are both singers who surrounded us with music but never forced it on us. They’d just let the magic be around us. When I was messing about in punk bands as a kid, my grandmother, who grew up in the famed Plaza Ballroom in Buncrana, would always stress the importance of melody.” From melodic punk gigs in his shed aged 14 and trips to UK street punk festivals, Leech moved into the world of folk, thanks to the gift of Bob Dylan’s…

Guy Webster DAVID CROSBY TAUGHT ROGER MCGUINN HOW to drive. It was July 1960 in Los Angeles, and Crosby, the son of a cinematographer, was playing a lead in Samuel Beckett’s play Endgame at the Ash Grove. He would emerge from a trash can, spout some lines, and descend again. McGuinn was a teenager on tour with The Limeliters, a grinning group of commercial folkies in town to cut a live album, also at the Ash Grove. A son of Chicago who’d matriculated to the then-new Old Town School of Folk Music before he was 15, he loved Leadbelly and Josh White, Earl Scruggs and Pete Seeger. Crosby was relatively new to music, having played just a few shows in coffee houses, so McGuinn showed him some chords. McGuinn –…

Richard Hawley ★★★★ In This City They Call You Love BMG. CD/DL/LP IT’S A SIMPLE but seductive theory: the older the recording, the more magic locked within. Seemingly down with that notion, Richard Hawley has long repurposed the spirit of ’50s and ’60s balladry with style and great affection, his quiff, tailoring and fondness for the lonesome twang of a Gretsch guitar badges of nostalgic allegiance. Tapping influences from both sides of the Atlantic, and viewing the topography and humanity of his native Sheffield through the prism of yesteryear’s special sauce, Hawley hit peak wide-screen wistfulness on 2005’s Coles Corner. A true romantic then, but 2009’s Truelove’s Gutter, with its themes of loss and mourning, was sometimes black as the Kellingley colliery pit shaft; a sobering, if beautiful dose of…

Jake Long ★★★★ City Swamp NEW SOIL. CD/DL/LP Maisha drummer/composer’s dystopian jazz suite harks back to electric-era Miles Davis. Reassembled from extended improvisations with a clutch of top-drawer UK instrumentalists, the four winding tracks here move beyond the spiritual jazz Long’s band Maisha are bracketed with. Billed as a meditation on London’s regeneration, there’s a compelling beauty to opener Ideological Rubble as rippling keys and percussive clatters ride an indomitable bluesy groove, before a tender breakdown shifts the direction of travel. While Binker Golding and Nubya Garcia play with artful restraint amid Celestial Soup’s abstractions, the many-splendored Silhouette and slow-building Swamp are funky from the off, pulses like ticking bombs as small motifs slowly move into focus, guitarist Shirley Tetteh in captivating form. City Swamp taps unashamedly into ’70s fusion,…

Staples Jr Singers ★★★★ Searching LUAK A BOP. CD/DL/LP IN THE 1970s the Staples Jr Singers spent every weekend celebrating their Lord at churches and talent competitions all across the Bible belt. Teenage members of the Brown family from Aberdeen, Mississippi (the group named themselves after Pops, Mavis and co., their idols but not their relatives), the Singers recorded their 1975 debut album When Do We Get Paid in a pokey studio in Tupelo. Its 12 funky, soulful devotionals were something special, but the group could only afford to press 500 copies, which they sold at concerts or to friends and neighbours – hardly a path to stardom. If it was nothing short of miraculous that Luaka Bop plucked When Do We Get Paid from obscurity by reissuing it in…

Various ★★★★ Sam Cooke’s SAR Records Story 1959-1965 ABKCO. DL/LP BY SUMMER 1959, when Sam Cooke formed SAR Records with his road manager S Roy Crain and music publisher JW Alexander, he’d already been through the financial ringer courtesy of Specialty Records and the short-lived Keen label. With Specialty, the Mississippi-born Soul Stirrers’ frontman and rising pop star was on a 0.5 per cent royalty that earned him $2,500 for every million records sold, and with the disorganised Keen set-up Cooke’s unpaid royalties for chart-topping solo records, like 1957’s You Send Me, were effectively keeping the label solvent. Cooke realised he could do a lot better both as a label boss and business manager. Plus, in his time at Specialty and Keen, the singer had grown in confidence and ability,…

FROM PURE, the Evoke Home is an all-rounder delivering powerful sound in a sleek design. With a powerful 100W audio output and a choice of over 85,000internet radio stations, plus access to national and regional programming via DAB+/FM, it’s a winning alternative to a classic Hi-Fi system. The front display is covered with a high-quality fabric made of eco-certified and recycled wool, giving the system a stylish look while remaining virtually odourless in any environment. The Evoke Home also offers a CD player, Bluetooth, plus Spotify Content to ensure you can enjoy your sounds of choice via streaming services. Worth £399, we have one in Coffee Black to give away as this month’s crossword prize. How to enter: take the letters from each coloured square on the grid below and rearrange…

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. Write to us at: MOJO, H Bauer Publishing, The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London, NW1 2PL. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk WE RECEIVED A GOOD LETTER THIS month from Jeff Ash in Wisconsin, admiring how the stories we tell in MOJO frequently intertwine with one another. Plenty of artists we cover have an air of the Lone Genius about them. But it doesn’t take much effort to see beyond the myths and locate them in a vast network of collaborators, kindred spirits, disciples, influences, and unlikely connections. Sometimes, we anticipate these links. For our Paul Weller feature, we spoke not just to Weller, but to the illustrious guests who co-wrote songs with him for his new album, among them Noel Gallagher and Suggs. “On day one of…

“I’M JUST waking up, so if I behave erratically that’s why”, Stephin Merritt tells MOJO. Sporting a ‘Rock Me Amadeus’ T-shirt, The Magnetic Fields’ linchpin has risen to talk about 69 Love Songs, the epic and wondrous triple-LP he’ll be performing in its entirety at this year’s Edinburgh Festival and at London’s Barbican. “Sometimes audiences don’t seem to understand we are performing the songs in order and they call out requests,” Merritt notes, lugubriously. “But I have an official response to requests, which is – Fuck off.” Merritt will celebrate 69 Love Songs’ 25th anniversary as part of a septet which includes two of the original LP’s guest singers, Claudia Gonson and Shirley Simms. Gonson’s also on piano alongside Chris Ewen (synth), Sam Davol (cello), John Woo (guitars; banjo) and…

1 NEIL YOUNG & CRAZY HORSE CORTEZ THE KILLER San Diego, April 24, and Neil opens the Horse’s comeback tour with a tectonic 15-minute Cortez, reinstating lost verses left on the cutting room floor 50 years ago. Find it: YouTube 2 PAUL McCARTNEY & THE EAGLES LET IT BE Played at a Jimmy Buffett tribute at the Hollywood Bowl, Macca soulfully reprises the secular hymn with heavy friends, noting that he sang it to the ailing Jimmy before he died. Find it: YouTube 3 THOM YORKE KNIFE EDGE The theme to Italian thriller Confidenza, hazy voice and keys balance tenderness with mania: “this to me is life or death.” Find it: YouTube 4 LINDA THOMPSON FEAT. JOHN GRANT JOHN GRANT Deliciously meta: written by Thompson about meeting Grant,…

BLACK BARN STUDIO IN SURREY IS, AS A DISPLACED ROAD SIGN perched on a beam above the doorway tells us, Wellers Town. Pass the toilet to the left, with its faded photograph of the Faces in their early-’70s prime, and the kitchen to the right, with its boxes of prawn cocktail crisps and Cadburys Mini Eggs, and you’ll come to the control room, where a vast mixing desk stands a few feet apart from a Wurlitzer jukebox. Big Youth’s Hit The Road Jack, Donovan’s Barabajagal, Bob Lind’s Elusive Butterfly and, naturally, The Beatles’ Taxman are a few of the 45s in there, waiting to be fired up between rehearsals. A small office holds the gold discs: 500,000 sales for The Jam’s Going Underground, 1.2 million for Stanley Road. In the…

John Cale ★★★★ POPtical Illusion DOMINO. CD/DL/LP TAKE A trip down memory lane with John Cale, and it’s unlikely to be a serene path, sheltered and shaded from any hint of a storm. With 2023’s Mercy, he stared straight into the glare of his remarkable past, addressing his nocturnal New York rambles with David Bowie (Night Crawling), his relationship with Nico (Moonstruck, or the passage on Story Of Blood where he said Weyes Blood became a “dead ringer” for his “moonstruck junkie lady”), and a raft of less clearly defined phantoms. The results were implacably chilly, tethered to the present by his choice of younger collaborators – Natalie Mering, Animal Collective, Fat White Family – yet still hemmed in by ghosts. Spectres still rise up on POPtical Illusion – Fear…

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Nathan Salsburg, Tyler Trotter ★★★★ Hear The Children Sing & The Evidence NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP WHEN WE sing to our children, are we tr ying to soothe them towards sleep, or embedding our excellent musical taste in their minds? Maybe a bit of both, as the creative parent can make a workable lullaby out of the unlikeliest source material. Take Nathan Salsburg, the Louisville guitarist and folklorist, who as a new father would sit in a rocking chair with his guitar held in one arm and his infant daughter Talya in another. His favoured song was, of all things, The Evidence by Lungfish, a gnarly band from Baltimore whose music from the 1990s and early 2000s could usefully be described as shamanic post-hardcore. The Evidence first appeared…

The Fall Slates Live! BELLA UNION/POPSTOCK. EP 1981 six-track EP Slates is one of the essential Fall documents, where every irregular element tessellated into visionary, satiric malevolence. Now former members Craig Scanlon, Marc Riley and the Hanley brothers have advanced through the badlands of Fall archive reissues to re-curate Slates on its original 10-inch format, cherry-picking contemporary live versions from Britain and Europe. The audio quality varies a bit – a doubled-in-length Prole Art Threat sounds like it was recorded in an aircraft hangar – but the dredger bass, poltergeist guitars and rockabilly-Burundi-beats power through, with late psycholector Mark E Smith at peak form, adding a dig at “fat English dicks in Mexican hats” to Middle Mass, giving it up for “extreme nit-picking” in Slates, Slags Etc, and injecting exuberant spleen…

LET US now praise Czechoslovakian guitars. In the 1950s, electric guitars made by a Czech company called Resonet were steady sellers in the UK when American guitars weren’t being allowed into the country. Resonet’s ‘Grazioso’ model, styled on the Fender Stratocaster and marketed here as the Futurama, was a popular beginner’s choice, with youngsters George Harrison, Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton supposedly among its satisfied customers. The British embargo on American imports was lifted in 1959, although it still took a while for them to show up and become affordable. But in the communist bloc that never happened and Czech guitars continued to dominate, though Resonet gave way to the Jolana factory, which opened its doors in 1960 and was soon producing popular models called Tornado, Typhoon and Hurricane. These…

Rebel Girl: My Life As A Feminist Punk ★★★★ Kathleen Hanna WILLIAM COLLINS. £20 MANY WOMEN will recognise Kathleen Hanna’s description of sitting alone with a book in a café, only to have a man ask, “Whatcha reading?” They might empathise, too, with the image of dancing at a gig before unwanted attention spoils the fun. Sexism, argues the Bikini Kill singer (later of The Julie Ruin and Le Tigre), drives women from public life: why not avoid hassle by staying home? When Hanna yelled “girls to the front!” during her band’s early-’90s shows, it was about reclaiming that space, stopping women being pushed back inside. “Rebel Girl is the story of a survivor, but also an agitator, an instigator, a catalyst.” Titled after Bikini Kill’s defining call-to-arms, Rebel Girl…

JUNE 2 Having been fired from Black Sabbath in 1979, Ozzy Osbourne had his solo debut Blizzard Of Ozz to promote. And to add to the heavy metal havoc of the US leg of his Blizzard Of Ozz tour, British rockers Budgie, Def Leppard and Saxon were booked as support. Another UK group – the loudest and grimiest of them all – were also engaged. After years slogging around the motorways of Britain and Europe, Motörhead were touring America for the first time. This June 2, they were putting the headbangers at the Kansas City Memorial Hall through their paces. “We don’t like to be called heavy metal music,” drummer ‘Philthy Animal’ Taylor had told Trouser Press in May. “It’s more like hard, fast, nasty, disgusting rock.” Now settled on…

HELLO 1987 This was the beginning of my senior year, so I just turned 16. I lived in south-east Washington DC and I was bussed uptown to this little place where I went to school, in a house across the street from where Ronald Reagan was shot. One day I didn’t go home after school, I went to a show in this neighbourhood, I didn’t know anything about it except for my friend, Mitch [Parker], who was in Government Issue, was there. The band was The Jetboys Of N.W. That’s the first time I ever saw Neil [Hagerty, guitar]. Immediately, I was like, I just knew that we were going to be friends. There was a painter that I knew, Dane, and it turned out he and Neil shared the…