Sommaire pour June 2023 de MOJO

Henry Diltz Henry’s Chinese animal is the Tiger, and tigers like to hide in the bushes and watch the other animals, and that’s what he does. Henry watches quietly, and when it looks real good, he pushes the button. He documents things he likes and he likes music. (See Henry’s photographs of Judee Sill on page 34.) Martin Aston Partial to a dose of doom-laden sunshine pop, Martin endured a wet Monday morning in Manchester in order to meet and commiserate with BC Camplight (see page 56). Back in London, he caught up with Lou Reed associate Fred Maher for MOJO’s Lou/VU cover feature (see page 66). Martin has pale green eyes. John Harris John has been writing for MOJO since 2000. A few years ago, he turned 60 hours…

FACT SHEET Title: The Feminine Divine Due: July Production: Pete Schwier and Toby Chapman Additional production: Kevin Rowland, Sean Read and Mike Timothy Songs: I’m Going To Get Free/The One That Loves You/ My Submission/ Coming Home The Buzz: “It’s as clear as day that there’s a narrative. There’s a guy who’s pretending to be completely macho and he ends up somewhere else completely. Is he happier? Yeah.” Kevin Rowland “A guy who’s pretending to be completely macho ends up somewhere else completely.” KEVIN ROWLAND’s last LP was 2016 covers set Let The Record Show: Dexys Do Irish And Country Soul. “The whole experience around that, I just found really draining,” Rowland tells MOJO today. “I had no interest in doing music. I mean, like, 2017, 2018, 2019, no ideas…

THE THIRD album by singer-songwriter Sarabeth Tucek opens with a devastating line courtesy of her mother, Joan, as she hands her an old photograph. “It is the way I wish you could have always stayed,” she says, “fearless and full of love.” As Tucek – now operating as SBT – makes clear, however, that’s not how life works. Joan Of All is her first record since 2011’s Get Well Soon, that delay suggesting its existence was never a given. “When I stopped writing music it was at a time in my life when I really had to figure out whether or not I was going to have children,” explains Tucek, fighting through a cold at home in Los Angeles. “I kind of just put everything else to the side. Around…

"HOW WARTY DOES MOJO LIKE TO GO?” ASKS BRIAN CHRISTINZIO. “Because my stor y is pretty warty.” For instance, there’s the state he was in in 2012. The New Jersey-born singer and songwriter (“don’t say ‘singer-songwriter’, that makes me think of James Taylor on a stool and I’m not that guy”) was squatting an abandoned church in Philadelphia, siphoning electricity from neighbours and selling equipment that he’d borrowed off friends. “I was an absolute scumbag,” he says, staring down at his coffee. “I was drinking, doing way too many drugs, losing friends and feeling angr y and bitter.” On two albums as BC Camplight, Christinzio’s elegant and eloquent piano-based pop – equal parts Brian Wilson, Harry Nilsson and Lou Christie – had been met by critical bouquets but demoralising sales.…

I, AS A SIXTEEN-year-old, was actually an upset high school student. I was walking around Harvard Square a few days before a Velvet Underground show at the Boston Tea Party, and a guy with a guitar case was walking through on that beautiful spring afternoon. And I said, “Excuse me. Are you Lou Reed?” And he says, “Yes.” I told him that his music meant so much to me, and he said, “Can I ask what you like about it?” And I said, “For one thing, you use the guitars as percussion instruments.” He says, “Really? You get that from it?” I said yes. And he said, “You mean use them as drums?” I said, “Yeah. In certain songs, yeah.” I guess he liked what I said, so I was…

★★★★ Signature Songs DARK HORSE. CD/DL/LP Leon Russell’s songbooksung solo. The late Leon Russell was like Hoagy Carmichael after a hundred acid trips: a masterful composer of the latter-day Great American Songbook with a visionary, mystical manhandle. A member of the studio musicians dubbed The Wrecking Crew, he did sessions for Frank Sinatra and Phil Spector, but was dubbed ‘The Master of Space and Time’ when he became ringleader of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen for his ability to play outside the sonic box. This collection of originals was initially self-released in 2001 and is being reissued on George Harrison’s label, co-run by George’s son Dhani. The top-drawer material is astonishing – ASong For You, Tight Rope, Delta Lady, This Masquerade, Hummingbird – with Russell’s raw and mostly solo…

★★★★ Man On A Swing WEWANTSOUNDS. LP Multi-faceted score for understated 1974 thriller gets vinyl debut, dotted with unreleased outtakes. Having had every note of his menacing, atonal score for The Exorcist removed by director William Friedkin the previous year, Lalo Schifrin reasserted his chameleonic worth with Man On A Swing. Recorded alongside the Wrecking Crew’s Emil Richards, Bud Shank and Howard Roberts, breakbeat-rich jazzy numbers like Juke Box Source, Factory Vibe and Radio Source marry bossa nova shuffles with easy bass lines, frenzied Hammonds and widdle-tastic wah-wah. And while there’s hints of Herrmann’s Psycho in the squirrelling violins of Rosehaven Motel, it’s Schifrin’s series of avant-garde trance sequences that steal the show, the ideal foil to Joel Grey’s off-kilter turn as flaky clairvoyant Franklin Wills. A smattering of bonus…

★★★★ Fuzzy CHRYSALIS. LP A 30th anniversary celebration of their stark Gothic-country debut. Dynamics-rich power-trio Grant Lee Buffalo made quite the impression playing Jools Holland’s TV show Later… in 1993 – and not just because of Grant-Lee Phillips’ waxen cheekbones. The debut album they’d hatched in a century-old San Francisco steel foundry incorporated choice elements: 12-string acoustic guitars overdriven to squally extremes, impassioned, sometimes falsetto vocals, and what Phillips has since described as “the old world churn of pump organs and parlour pianos.” Though you really had to see the trio live and Phillips would later trust in sheer craft as much as instinct, Jupiter And Teardrop, Fuzzy’s title track and the R.E.M.-like Wish You Well lend some credence to Michael Stipe’s contemporaneous contention that Fuzzy was “the best album…

EARLIER THIS century, avid crate-digger Paul Hiller y had car ved out an agreeable career as a promoter and jobbing DJ, not the floor-filling kind, but the kind who played whatever he fancied before the band came on. But this stopped abruptly, 13 years ago, when he suffered a breakdown. Subsequent problems, including being diagnosed with a complex form of PTSD, effectively made him housebound in Northampton, UK, and changed his relationship with the music he’d enjoyed spinning for people. “Music became therapy for me,” he says. Using it not only to heal, but to connect with the outside world, Hiller y zeroed in on the sounds he truly loved rather than what had worked when played out in public. “As I suffer from anxiety, anything with a heavy BPM…

★★★ Wandermüde SAMADHISOUND. CD/DL/LP Ambient remix of Sylvian’s 2003 LP Blemish; on (double) vinyl for the first time. Sylvian’s sixth solo album Blemish was an important marker; a response to the end of his relationships with wife Ingrid Chavez and with Virgin Records that promoted the singer’s desolate presence and more personal (rather than oblique) words by reducing the arrangements to a solemn, ambient drift provided by electronics expert Christian Fennesz and jazz guitarist Derek Bailey. Sylvian cared enough about Blemish to remix it for 2005’s The Good Son Vs. The Only Daughter, and again in 2012 as Wandermüde (literally, “tired of wandering”), where another digital specialist, Stephan Mathieu, stripped out Sylvian’s vocals and thickened the ambient layers. There are still eight tracks, but Wandermüde is essentially a 64-minute immersion…

★★★★ Music For Stowaways COLD SPRING. CD/DL/LP Stylish 1981 cassette release from deposed Human League duo Martyn Ware and Ian Craig-Marsh gets a deluxe reissue. After Martyn Ware was booted out of The Human League in 1981, he and fellow bandmate Ian Craig-Marsh regrouped as production company The British Electric Foundation. Appropriating Eno’s ambient ethos, their inaugural release – developed alongside Heaven 17’s debut LP – was this cassette-only collection of utopian instrumentals. Originally intended as a lifestyle soundtrack for the Sony Stowaway (later renamed the Walkman), Music For Stowaways moves from Uptown Apocalypse’s eerie Cabaret Voltaire electro-funk and the manic doomsday disco of Groove Thang (an instrumental version of the Heaven 17 debut single) to the basement giallo clatter of Music To Kill Your Parents By and Decline Of…

★★★★ Lou Reed FABER. £30 Compelling, surprising portrait of a quest for physical and spiritual power. Odd book, this. For a start, it’s not exactly by Lou Reed: his voice appears in old interviews and e-mails, but mostly The Art Of The Straight Line is a patchwork of posthumous conversations with his friends and associates, who explain the intimidating genius via his passion for Tai Chi. The story that emerges is one of how martial arts replaced Reed’s more problematic addictions in the early ’80s, and how Tai Chi sustained him through his final illness. But also, we get a new picture of a legendarily difficult man: a kind and supportive friend, hungry to find calm; “A mountain of scar tissue. And flowering,” according to Anohni. Reed exhorts Iggy Pop…

★★★★ Claire Dederer SCEPTRE. £20 What to do with the art of monstrous men, asks Seattle essayist. Miles Davis, Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen? Can you hate the artist but love the art? That is the central question at the heart of Dederer’s enthralling and self-reflexive collection of essays. At the heart of the book is Dederer’s own relationship with complicated male artists “whose behaviour disrupts our ability to apprehend [their] work”. Conceived at the height of #metoo, the book addresses the hard-to-resist pull of the art of bad men, how it is always in conflict with “the stain” of their actions and also, as in the case of Miles Davis, the undeniable beauty of the art bad men can create. Dederer also analyses the notion of…

ON AUGUST 25, 1967, photographer Terence Donovan went to Upper Berkeley Street, London W1, to take portraits of Jimi Hendrix for The Observer’s colour supplément. The accompanying interview detailed Hendrix’s recent guitar-arson at Monterey Pop, and added “the Daughters of the American Révolution complained that he was too sexy.” It was a less frantic Hendrix captured that dayby Stepnev-born Donovan, who, vit h David Bailey and Brian Duffy made up the so-called ‘BlackTrinity’ of snappers exempli-fvingworking-class attitude and dash in the 1960s and beyond. “Compare the calnmess of that image against Jimi Hendrix’s actual behaviour and life and ail the things that were going on around him,” says Donovan’s widow Diana, who’s discussing tire newbook Terence Donovan: One Hundred Faces. “Itwouldbe interesting to be able to askTerrvhow on earth he…

THE MOJO reader knows Andrew Lauder’s works. In his decade tenure at the Liberty/UA label, he oversaw a diverse catalogue ranging from the Groundhogs and Can to pub rockers Brinsley Schwarz and Dr. Feelgood, on to The Stranglers and Buzzcocks. After he left in 1977, his later imprints included Radar and its successor F-Beat (Costello, Nick Lowe), Demon/Edsel (whose catalogue curation presaged the MOJO mindset) and Silvertone (The Stone Roses). These tales and more are told in his frabjous new memoir Happy Trails, which details a young Hartlepool music nut seeking his fortune in London in 1965. “I got very, very lucky,” says Lauder, a genial and modest presence, from his home in France. “One thing after another fell into place, in a ridiculous manner…” The book details how you…

JULIE TIPPETTS is keeping warm by her Rayburn oven at home in Gloucestershire this windy March morning. “I better check the bin’s not blown over,” she laughs. She’s unused to doing inter views these days – “They got too invasive in the ’60s so I stopped,” she explains – but she’s called MOJO to talk about Sound On Stone, the exceptional third volume in her and her late husband Keith Tippett’s Couple In Spirit duet series. While their previous work captured the pair’s spontaneous improv-sparring, Julie was left to construct the album alone after Keith’s passing in 2020. Multi-tracking her vocal over previously unissued concert performances, the result is a powerful exploration of grief and healing. “I tried to listen to it before the inter view,” she says. “I started…

Lester Chambers: We grew up picking cotton in Echo Hills, Mississippi. [In 1949] I was expected to do a man’s work at nine years old. Music was the only joy. We sung in the fields, that was where me and my brothers George, Joe and Willie practised our four-part harmonies and then when we got home, we sung around the fireplace. That was our life. Willie Chambers: Home was a makeshift house, there was no electricity, a leaking roof when it rained. But we had a battery radio and listened to the Grand Ole Opry on a Sunday. Country and gospel were our influences. We sang in the Mt Calvary Baptist Church then George got drafted, and on his return he went to LA. The whole family followed in 1954…

THE 50 GREATEST LOU REED AND THE VELVET UNDERGROUND SONGS IT WAS A DIRTY JOB, BUT SOMEONE HAD TO do it. Possibly he had no choice. Lewis Allan Reed’s contributions to rock’n’roll were unique and compelling, but it also seemed that he was compelled. The steady gaze he trained on the sides of life others found uncomfortable – drugs, sex, violence, poverty, human folly and desperation – seemed at times his real addiction, although there were others. Born in Brooklyn in 1942 but raised in exile in suburban Freeport, Long Island, he was electrified first by doo wop and R&B, then by ECT as his parents sought a cure for what were considered aberrant behaviours. Later, his fluid sexuality, narcotic experiments, brooding defiance and zeal for fearless literature were embodied…

★★★ Tied Down NUMERO GROUP. CD/DL/LP The 1970s housewife who dreamt of country stardom. Still a teenager when she stepped off the bus in LA from her native Mississippi, the then-Joyce Spence wanted to be the new Bobbie Gentry. Instead, she married and became a mom who occasionally recorded some of her songs, but always for tiny labels such as Hollywood’s Reena, or Sonobeat in Austin. Just like Bobbie she wrote her own songs, but her voice had more in common with Loretta Lynn, a pure country warble that didn’t have quite enough ‘pop’ in it for wider success. It’s a shame bigger labels didn’t pick up the singles and demos collected on Tied Down, because when she hits a countrypolitan sweet spot on Life Ain’t Worth Livin’ (If I…

★★★★ The Roots Of Dub GREENSLEEVES. DL/LP Remastered limited vinyl of a superlative dub LP. The electronics technician and transformer specialist Osbourne Ruddock was crowned King Tubby for the sound system he operated in the Waterhouse ghetto of western Kingston, JA, earning the epithet ‘The Dub Inventor’ in the early 1970s for the sonic remix experiments he undertook on customised equipment in a converted front room. Released in 1975, The Roots Of Dub was among the first long-players issued in his name and it remains one of the best dub albums of all time, the gritty Aggrovators rhythms supplied by Bunny Lee stripped down to their core of drum and bass, with just a smattering of top-end phasing and snatches of studio dialogue keeping the listener firmly gripped throughout. Outstanding…

★★★ Hear & Now REAL GONE. LP Avant-garde trumpeter’s ’70s fusion excursion; a fascinating curio. A nomadic free spirit who travelled the world absorbing the music of other cultures to build a uniquely personal sonic language, Don Cherry was a supremely versatile horn player who didn’t recognise musical boundaries. Though mainly known for his pioneering work in the avant-garde and world music spheres, in 1977 Cherry ventured into jazz fusion territory for a one-off LP for Atlantic Records produced by Narada Michael Walden. The album wasn’t a critical or commercial success but, as this vinyl reissue reveals, it was certainly adventurous, blending mystical, Easterntinged heavy rock (Mahakali) with Santana-style Latin grooves (California) and Weather Report-influenced funky fusion (Karmapa Chenno). The best track is the atmospheric Universal Mother, where Cherry’s prescient…

★★★★ Approach BBE. CD/DL/LP Latest instalment in the J-Jazz Masterclass series is a spacey lounge/fusion monster. Originally released in 1986, this ear-poppingly diverse four-way collaboration united three of the (then) most established names in Japanese jazz with younger guitarist Akira Shiomoto to counterintuitively coherent effect. As Hideo Ichikawa’s subversive hotel lobby-style piano threatens to close in on a great lost Mike Post theme-tune, Isao Suzuki’s looping bass ushers him over the threshold into a spur-of-the-moment Penguin Cafe Orchestra reunion. It’s thrillingly unpredictable stuff with perhaps one too many solos on Togashi’s specially adapted drum kit. But the pioneering free-jazz percussionist (paralysed from the waist down after an accident in the late ’60s) redeems himself with a majestically unrepentant cowbell jam on standout track Long Straight Road. Ben Thompson…

★★★★★ The 1970s Dub Albums Collection CHERRY RED. CD LLOYD BRADLEY’s definitive reggae chronicle, Bass Culture, vividly describes the impact of Joe Gibbs & The Professionals’ African Dub All-Mighty Chapter 3 on its release in 1977. This abstract and mesmerising long-player became a sine qua non for London punk’s inner circle, and still ranks amongst the best dub albums of all time. Bradley rightly mar vels at how its creators “completely rebalance [a] tune four or five times in the space of a minute,” likening its alchemy to the local ‘obeah’, a spellcasting ceremony. Almost 50 years later, we accept digital manipulation of music as standard, and it’s easy to forget dub’s revolutionar y genius. While names like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, King Tubby and Bunny ‘Striker’ Lee have enjoyed near-exhaustive…

★★★★ The Clearing INDEPENDENT PROJECT. CD Vital underground electronica from 1980s LA. First issued in 1988, the debut solo LP by synth-music explorer A Produce (real name Barry Craig) came after nearly a decade of experiment and local initiative: in the post-punk band Afterimage, then as the driving force behind two landmark anthologies of trance and noise, L.A. Mantra I and II. On The Clearing (“an album of conceptional musical space,” according to the old mail-order flyer reproduced here), A Produce casts the enriched-Eno spell of Another Green World through a California anxiety of stark, modal guitar and dire, repeated keyboard hooks. There are striking touches: the street-party conga running through the desert aura of Farming In Arabia; the operatic-vocal and viola spasms contradicting the percolating certainty in Pulse. A…

★★★ Simon Wright SHAKSPEARE EDITORIAL. £12.99 Extraordinary backstory to Peter Perrett combo’s debut. It’s well documented that Peter Perrett funded The Only Ones via his ‘day job’ as a drug dealer, meandering for six-plus years before nailing his first album. This fan’s investigation reveals no gory details on the narcotics front, with Perrett himself a slightly elusive voice. Instead, there’s ripping testimony on how the other three landed up with him: “terrifically Midlands” drummer Mike Kellie via prog nearly-men Spooky Tooth, bassist Alan Mair’s north-ofthe-border mid-’60s stardom with The Beatstalkers and friendship with David Bowie (1967’s Little Bombardier was written for Mair’s son), and eloquent guitarist John Perry’s graft in Bristol wedding bands. Gigging bolstered Perrett’s confidence and his connections lifted them (Keith Richards almost produced; Sandy Denny offered to…

★★★★ Sylvia Patterson FLEET. £20 Music writer’s second memoir centres on her cancer: “the colossal swizz of it all…” A hilarious entertainer, inspired stylist and romantic idealist, one of music journalism’s towering talents Sylvia Patterson has long looked to pop for the big answers in the belief that “something beautiful” glimpsed in a “flashbulb moment” was a “prophecy”, as she approvingly quotes Lester Bangs in her previous memoir, 2016’s brilliant I’m Not With The Band. Always more interested in the human trapped in the star-making machinery than how it all came together in the studio, she’s had high times but none lower than a diagnosis of breast cancer just as Covid swept the world. Unsparing yet ultimately uplifting, every sentence cuts a caper even as it delivers a gruelling detail…

The recent death of blind piano tuner Marshall Tucker reminded me how the Marshall Tucker Band got their moniker, which led me to recall how Lynyrd Skynyrd and Greta Van Fleet also borrowed the names of living people. Who else has done it? There must be more. Michael O’Neill, via e-mail MOJO says: Greta Van Fleet (allegedly) adapted the name of one Gretna Van Fleet, but we know what you mean. The obvious example is Jethro Tull, named after the 18th century agricultural innovator: other historically derived group names include prog harmonisers Capability Brown (a landscape gardener), Texas rockers Cotton Mather (the puritan witch-finder), and Glasgow indie band Franz Ferdinand (the assassinated Archduke). Some names are so familiar you almost forget their derivation, as with Engelbert Humperdinck (originally a German…

HELLO 1979 I was lucky because I was [Fela Kuti’s son] Femi’s best mate in high school in Lagos. So with Fela, I have a double privilege of being an extra son and working in the band. When I met Fela for the first time [in Ikeja, location of Kuti’s Afrika Shrine nightspot, at the house of his friend J.K. Brimah] I was going on 14. Femi said, “Fela, you remember my friend, the son of the banker [Oyekunle Sosimi] that was assassinated?” Fela was, “Quick, come, sit down, tell me what exactly happened.” I was touched. On my dad’s side, everybody was scared shitless. But Fela was like, you know, “My house was burned and I’m fighting the case, I’m gonna win and I’m gonna fight for your family.”…

Judy Collins FOLK STORYTELLER, LEGEND What music are you currently grooving to? I like to listen to Jimmy Webb, Adele, some classical, usually Bach cello suites played by [Pablo] Casals. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan. I think it’s the perfect LP. I was there at a party at Al Grossman’s home in Woodstock when I first heard Dylan working out Mr Tambourine Man. It was late at night, and I heard singing, so I left my room and sat on the stairs by myself listening to him write the song. What a magical moment! What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? It was called The Gypsy Rover, I bought it in…

ON ASUNNY FEBRUARY AFTERNOON, PAUL Gustave Simonon opens the door of his home in Paddington, shooing away his two dogs Snoop and Peanut. With a firm handshake and trademark Terry-Thomas grin, the bass player ushers MOJO into his lair, a modest three-floor mews house that doubles as his painting studio and rehearsal room. Art books and pictures line the walls, but apart from three guitars – including his battered Clash-era Fender Precision with ‘PAUL’ car ved into its body – there’s little to suggest he’s the sur vivor of the world’s pre-eminent international punk group. Simonon’s disdain for the trappings of success almost borders on the ascetic: he doesn’t own a TV, or a car, though he does ride a black Triumph Bonneville motorbike, which squats outside the front door.…

JASON ISBELL’s SEVEN-YEAR-OLD daughter, Mercy Rose, was unpacking a new toy when she finally offered up her review of her father’s charged and tumultuous new album, Weathervanes. “Daddy,” she reported in their home 30 minutes south of Nashville, “this record sounds sadder than your other records.” The pair had just returned from a short dinner-andshopping run, cr uising to town in the 2019 BMW M5 Isbell bought because, as he laughs, “it’s the fastest car you can get with a CD player.” Whenever they make such a trip, Mercy Rose knows to ask to hear his new music. Isbell peppered her for track-by-track feedback, but she demurred, requesting silence to ponder countr y-soul shuffles about self-pity and slicing Southern rock about overdoses. But back home she finally offered the take…

AMONG THE astonishing 250-plus shows that The Beatles played in 1963, a couple were especially poignant. On April 8, The Beatles were entertaining the Swimming Baths in Leyton, east London, while Cynthia Lennon was alone in Sefton General Hospital, Liverpool, giving birth to Julian. It was not yet necessarily the custom for fathers to attend births in 1963, but even so, Lennon would not have a moment to meet his first-born until April 11, squeezed between shows in Birkenhead and Middleton. Another significant gig was the August 3 booking at their former proving ground, The Cavern. Since the most recent of their 280-plus previous engagements at the Mathew St cellar on April 12, the tenor of the fans had changed. Quoted in Spencer Leigh’s book, The Cavern, club doorman Paddy…

Rattlesnakes ★★★★ Easy Pieces ★★★ Mainstream ★★★ PROPER/UMC. LP I NTHE mid-1980s, when most of the British music scene was in thrall to synth-pop and looking east to Europe, many in Glasgow looked west to America. As the decade progressed, emerging groups wore their US influences overtly: Deacon Blue (Steely Dan and Bruce Springsteen), Texas (Ry Cooder), Love And Money (Steely Dan again). Even Wet Wet Wet were so devoted to soul traditions that they had a first stab at their debut album in Memphis with Al Green producer Willie Mitchell. For better or for worse, as an Americana-obsessed English outsider in Glasgow, where he’d gone to study (see Back Story), Lloyd Cole was a forerunner of this trend, making his band The Commotions – guitarist Neil Clark, keyboard player…

★★★★★ The Smell Of Our Own ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP Toronto “gay folk church music” collective mark notable birthday. “I’ve got a whole bible in me,” sings Joel Gibb on the homophobiadefying Fear Of ’Zine Failure, one of the fine B-sides included on this expanded 20th anniversary reissue of The Hidden Cameras’ second album. Go-go dancing between the sacred and profane, the grad-student-ish Gibb and his frequently balaclava’d co-conspirators subverted angelic choral rushes and Sunday school clap-alongs into songs of gay sex, love and trauma that sought absolutely no credit in the straight world. The deep melancholy of Shame or Boys Of Melody is tempered by the euphoric orchestrations of Golden Streams or The Man That I Am With My Man’s carnal joy, while Ban Marriage’s filthy challenge to heteronormativity still…

★★★★ Mother Nature REAL GONE MUSIC. LP 1980 rare disco funk with powerhouse vocals. From Dillon, South Carolina, Mary Mundy made one album and a few singles before turning to academia. 1980’s Mother Nature, originally on the obscure New York Image label, currently goes for ridiculous prices, so this first ever vinyl reissue is welcome. Produced by Lew Hanson, it’s full of end-of-the-night disco verging on hi-NRG anthems, peaking with exultant Love Me, Love Me, with Mundy delivering full-throated gospel diva exhortations and breathy whispers over taut funk guitar and big horns. Yet she was no one-trick wonder. Each Other is adrenalised pop, while the climactic title track proves she has enough razzmatazz to galvanise Broadway, had she so desired. Lois Wilson…

★★★★ Muzik Fantastique! CTI. DL/LP The electronic pioneers’ heady past in coloured vinyl form. By their tenth album, ex-Throbbing Gristle members Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti had come in from the cold of their experiments in electronic primitivism, which began in 1981, and were instead paralleling techno’s sleeker, sequenced machinations. From 1992, Muzik Fantastique! remains a minimalist work of shadowy intent, often infused with Cosey’s sensual charge: an erotic Donna Summer on the nightclubbing Fantastique, suitably ethereal and giddy on the marimba-laced Afrakira, a spectral presence through the folds of Hidden Man. Carter is equally chameleon-like, re-purposing a spectrum of sound that the pair had witnessed and immersed themselves in for decades. Also released this month: 1984’s sinister soundtrack to the duo’s own film Elemental 7 and 2007’s Feral…

★★★ Cleveland Blues COLEMINE. CD/DL/LP Rare jazz blues from Cleveland, Ohio’s thenghetto, Hough. Fred ‘Dave’ Davis lived the blues story. A promising singer, guitarist, pianist from Kansas City, his talent was derailed by violence and time spent in jail. At 49 he ended up shot and killed in a liquor store car park while running a hustle. He’d be forgotten if he hadn’t worked alongside blues fan Howard Husock in Cleveland’s Harco factory in the late ’60s. Husock recorded him and some of his friends in his living room in August ’69 so Davis could use the tape to get gigs; he subsequently formed Dave And The Blues Express and performed at the local joints. That tape, issued here as Cleveland Blues, comprises 11 tracks, nine self-written, that reveal a…

★★★★ Space Is The Place: Music From The Original Soundtrack MODERN HARMONIC. CD/DL/LP Interstellar bandleader’s 1972 movie and soundtrack reissued with previously unheard bonus material. Not to be confused with his 1973 studio album, Space Is The Place was a movie Ra made a year earlier; a bizarre collision of documentary film and science fiction drama presented with a touch of blaxploitation swagger. The soundtrack wasn’t released until after Ra’s death in 1993 but has now been restored for this deluxe reissue that includes the film in both Blu-ray and DVD formats. What makes this audio-visual feast even more desirable is the inclusion of a mind-blowing unreleased LP called The Mathematics Of The Altered Destiny. It contains four spoken-word pieces outlining Ra’s cosmic vision of “another order of beings.” The…

KNOWN NOWNAS ‘Mr Weird’ in high school, and as ‘Mr Gone’ amongst his peers, Wayne Shorter was a jazz musician of enigmatic individuality, his style gradually moving from a nervy, overly-detailed soprano sax squall heavily in thrall to John Coltrane to something more oblique, elliptical, melancholic, and enchanting. Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, he grew up a quiet, introspective child, loving Mar vel comics and science fiction, both of which would later influence and infuse his work. After discovering music in his late teens with his elder brother Alan, Shorter moved from clarinet to tenor sax before taking a music education course at New York University, where his evenings were spent checking out Lester Young and Charlie Parker, but also the ‘cool school’ likes of Lennie Tristano, Lee…

★★★★ Adele Bertei ZE BOOKS. £19.99 A pulsing, feverish memoir from the Ze Records alumnus. Long before her later life as an author and pop co-writer (for Scritti Politti, Jellybean, Tears For Fears) and youth in New York’s No Wave scene with openly gay all-female punk-funk band The Bloods, Adele Bertei was navigating a tough childhood, first in the troubled care of her mother, then nun-run reformatories and foster homes. In Twist: An American Girl, Bertei excavates the gnarly roots of her life up to 1973, writing in a startling present-tense style that’s simultaneously poetic and no-nonsense. Music presents itself as a lifeline throughout, from Lulu’s To Sir With Love accompanying same-sex slow dances, to songs from Hair and Cabaret giving Bertei a place to perform. Fans of Viv Albertine,…

Howard Fishman ★★★ WILDFIRE/DUTTON. £25 The ur-singer-songwriter (arguably) becomes a person in full. The core of Connie Converse’s fabled songs – alien acoustic transmissions from New York’s Greenwich Village in the early ’50s, years before its singer-songwriter archetype existed – was always mischief. Her uncanny picking patterns, her licentious boastfulness, her solitary existence: Converse’s music, which was finally distributed 60 years after it was made, mastered subversive aplomb. For many years and in multiple media, from the New Yorker to an album of Converse’s salvaged piano tunes, musician and writer Howard Fishman has worked to connect that sense to the person behind the songs. A considerable challenge, given that she vanished entirely in 1974. This long-gestating Converse corpus succeeds through Javert-like doggedness and deduction. She becomes not just a prescient…