Sommaire pour February 2024 de MOJO

MUSIC FANS, AS WE KNOW, LIKE TO ARGUE, and one of our favourite beefs has long been over the best r un of albums in musical histor y. My stock answer is usually Fairport Convention’s hot streak of What We Did On Our Holidays, Unhalfbricking and Liege & Lief, made more remarkable by all three being released in the same calendar year of 1969. If a friend in the pub, or a random stranger on the inter net were to counter with Stevie Wonder’s 1972-1976, however, it’d be a tough one to dispute; a fivealbum sequence with a kaleidoscopic sonic and lyrical range, and one which proved radically experimental music could also sell millions and millions of records. Picking another fight, I might actually contend the r un didn’t end…

OTHER NAMES may eclipse his, but John ‘Hoppy ’ Hopkins was an essential catalyst in London’s high 1960s and beyond. His for ward-thinking initiatives included co-founding the London Free School and the UFO club, conceiving and naming proto-rave The 14 Hour Technicolor Dream, and co-launching the Inter national Times, plus later activities democratising filmmaking. Now new, long-gestating documentar y Hoppy – Underground Head tells his stor y. Why is he not more celebrated, wonders MOJO? “He restlessly moved on and let others reap the rewards from ideas, movements and organisations he left behind in his wake,” says filmmaker Malcolm Boyle, who met Hoppy in the mid-’90s while doing his one-man Syd Bar rett show The Madcap. “One of the few direct inter ventions he made in the film was to…

IT’S NO SMALL matter being an experimental organ composer. You can hardly own one, but must negotiate with wary custodians to access churches containing specialised instruments. Rehearsals are often by night or paused for mass. Or, say, you’re in Prague and “there were 30 children sleeping over at the church screaming and running around,” says Kali Malone. “There’s no consistency.” “The threat is real…. But the experience is so rewarding that I’m willing to take it.” Despite – or perhaps because of – these challenges, Malone, 29, has cultivated an uncommonly patient catalogue, breaking through with 2019’s The Sacrificial Code. Her music favours unconventional tunings and mathematical composition processes that lend her glacial notes a gripping, hypnotic quality, not to mention a profound meditative cast. It’s been a prolific few…

PROLOGUE TEN YEARS INTO HIS DRUMMING CAREER, JIM Gordon was at the peak of his powers. His scintillating Latin groove to Rikki Don’t Lose That Number would soon be propelling Steely Dan into the Billboard Top 5 – and it was just one of many recent Jim Gordon-powered hits. There was Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown, Maria Muldaur ’s Midnight At The Oasis, Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain. And Derek & The Dominos’ epic Layla, on which Gordon had played dr ums and piano and scored a co-writing credit. Gordon was the dr ummer other dr ummers wished they could be – at once militarily precise, musically intelligent and wildly imaginative. Raised in the San Fernando Valley, he’d come of age under the wing of the Wrecking Crew’s Hal Blaine, playing on…

STEVIE WONDER 1950 -1970 The Young And The Restless The rise, fall and rise again of ‘Little’ Stevland Judkins, a talent never contained by Motown’s straitjacket. By DAVID HUTCHEON. STEVIE WONDER was r unning out of time and friends. Just tur ned 15 in the spring of 1965, it was two years – too long in Motown boss Berr y Gordy ’s eyes – since his only significant hit. None of the label’s premier backroom teams wanted to touch him and there was nothing ready for release. With Mar vin Gaye, The Supremes, Temptations and Four Tops all raising the ante in the charts, the Hitsville machine was no place for a lightweight whose forte was youthful pranks and destr uctive behaviour. “He was bar red from the studio,” noted…

Bill Ryder-Jones ★★★★ Iechyd Da DOMINO. CD/DL/LP “I’M THE SAME as I’ve ever been,” Bill Ryder-Jones croaks ruefully on his Groundhog Day address, It’s Today Again. With the producer and former Coral guitarist’s fifth studio album, that’s once more a blessing and a curse. The finest piano-in-the-sandpit songwriter of his generation, Ryder-Jones’s deft blend of heart-rending and transcendent has earned him usual suspects comparisons to Nick Drake and Elliott Smith in the course of a triumphant run of LPs: 2013’s baroque monster A Bad Wind Blows In My Heart, 2015’s grungy West Kirby County Primary, 2018’s Yawn. However, as with Cat Power or Ryder-Jones’s boyhood hero, Euros Childs, the intense beauty rarely comes without a troubling undertow. Odessey And Oracle via Band On The Run, Iechyd Da (“good health” in…

★★★★ Swirling Violets BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP County Armagh songwriter with props from Stephin Merritt and John Grant gets his hooks in on debut LP. HARMONICALLY SPEAKING, the consensus is that the pop songs de nos jours are getting simpler. Conchúr (pronounced ‘Conor’) White can certainly eke pleasurable mileage from a modest chord sequence, but his debut has a lyrical sophistication and thematic weight that lends the clearly signposted choruses of neat, starkly-arranged songs such as Fawn and I Did Good Today real impact. Exploring mortality, addiction and compulsion from the informed background of a mental health youth worker, White is adept with mood and dynamics, has a falsetto that recalls that of Angelo De Augustine, and brings an unlikely, ’50s rock’n’roll via The Bay City Rollers sensibility to tragic romance tale…

Mott The Hoople ★★★★ All The Young Dudes: 50th Anniversary Edition MADFISH. CD/DL/LP ONE DAY IN spring 1974, Mott The Hoople’s frontman Ian Hunter gave Brian May a pep talk. Queen were supporting Mott on an American tour, and their guitarist was homesick. Hunter listened to May’s tale of woe before explaining that if Brian couldn’t cope with sharing hotel rooms and being away from his girlfriend, then he was in the wrong job. “Even then, Ian was the sage old man of rock’n’roll,” said an admiring Brian. Hunter was 34 at the time. It’s a recurring thought while listening to this 50th anniversary (51st, really) edition of All The Young Dudes. Hunter may have been an elder statesman, but his music sounded totally now in 1972. Even with the…

★★★★ The Seeds Deluxe BIG BEAT. CD/LP Repress of 2012’s excellent deluxe edition of the garage-punk set text from 1966, all in mono. FROM LA, The Seeds wrote the garage band creed with their 1966 eponymous debut LP. Its 12 songs, including the anthemic Can’t Seem To Make You Mine, Pushin’ Too Hard and No Escape, are raw, compressed bursts of proto-punk, all fuzz, distortion, weedy organ and elemental drums, with free spirit and cult hero Sky Saxon’s distinctive howl and whine the defining touch. The bonus cuts here are thrilling too, from an early version of B-side Out Of The Question that’s more frantic than that issued, to Dreaming Of Your Love, the perfect Nuggets pop ballad. Best of all though is the 16-minute full-length version of Evil Hoodoo,…

★★★★★ New Drifters NUMERO GROUP. LP Five-LP box documenting the early years of the Texan psychedelicists. THE SOUND made by The American Analog Set, during their initial 10-year existence from 1995 to 2005, was a kind of loping, countrified kosmische that, much like their adopted hometown of Austin, blended the sedately rural with the gently weird. The albums assembled here, 1996’s The Fun Of Watching Fireworks, 1997’s From Our Living Room To Yours and 1999’s The Golden Band, were all recorded on an Otari MX5050 reel-to-reel in the Fort Worth home of guitarist-frontman Andrew Kenny’s grandparents. That homespun technique, its flaws, limits and ambience, came to shape the group’s sensibility; sedate, linear, imperfect yet dreamlike. You could call it slowcore, and draw parallels with Galaxie 500 and Acetone, but listened to…

1 THE BELLRAYS HIGHWAY TO HELL At the start, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was actually AC/DC. Soon enough, though, The BellRays reveal themselves, thanks to singer Lisa Kekaula sounding as much like Betty Davis as she does Bon Scott. The California band have been cranking out MC5-ish garage rock for over 30 years: this spectacular version of the Bon-era swan song comes from their 2016 Covers EP. Written by Young, Scott, Young. &©2016 The BellRays. From the EP Covers. Currently available on all digital services 2 LOBBY LOYDE ROCK AND ROLL SUNSET Long before AC/DC even existed, Lobby Loyde was already a master of no-bullshit Australian boogie, playing guitar in key bands like The Aztecs and Coloured Balls (later, he would join another Oz-rock institution, Rose Tattoo). Rock…

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO IN 2023 Nick Cave played solo US dates accompanied by Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood, toured the bookshops of North America with Seán O’Hagan to sign their acclaimed lockdown meditation Faith, Hope And Car nage, and revisited the Second World War songbook for Apple TV+’s upcoming drama of fashion in Nazi-occupied Paris, The New Look. He also worked on his eighteenth album with The Bad Seeds. As he told MOJO earlier this year, “ever ything circles back to music.” Thanks to his regular online confessional/advice column The Red Hand Files, Cave’s thoughts on the process have been regularly shared. He began work, he said, on Januar y 1, 2023, and five days later was already wrestling with it. “It’s the same with ever…

FOLLOWING ON from exhaustive explorations of Fisherman’s Blues (2013’s Fisherman’s Box) and Room To Roam (The Magnificent Seven, 2021), next year will see the release of 1985, a 95-track box set chronologically tracing the creation of The Waterboys’ towering third album, This Is The Sea. The band’s founder and ringleader, Mike Scott, tells MOJO he takes a lot of pleasure in rooting around in the attic of his musical past. “It’s a good r ummage,” he grins. “There’d be instr umentals I’d completely forgotten about, jam sessions that I didn’t remember. I still have all my old cassettes, and they ’re in great condition and I transfer red them digitally.” “Songs are just another kind of spell.” This Is The Sea was the full realisation of the sweeping, passionate rock…

ROCKING READERS may have checked out Born Fighters, the Rockpile ITV documentar y featuring Dave Edmunds, Graham Parker, Nick Lowe and others, hard at it in smoky Eden Studios in Chiswick in ’79. At one memorable moment, guitarist Albert Lee lends his virtuosity to countr y rocker Sweet Little Lisa, leaving Edmunds awestr uck. “Albert Lee is my hero,” says Edmunds. “It will be a ver y long time before there is a guitarist to match Albert’s ability.” “I’d played on [Sweet Little Lisa co-writer] Hank DeVito’s demo, then Dave asked me to play on the Rockpile recording,” explains Lee today. “I didn’t even have time to take off my motorcycle jacket. I plugged in and they loved it!” Like many musicians of his generation, south-London-raised Lee fixated on skiffle.…

“THIS BAND absolutely has a mission,” says James Walbourne, His Lordship’s zealous singerguitarist, “and that’s to rip people’s heads off with blistering rock’n’roll. It’s something we haven’t seen for way too long.” The besuited duo, Walbourne alongside Danish drummer Kris Sonne, this month drop a thrilling 30-minute debut which variously nods towards ’50s rockabilly, chartbound new wave, surf instrumentals, post-punk and scorching millennial garage rock. It’s the culmination of a quarter-century career for the lanky north Londoner, whom many may recognise as the Pretenders’ lead guitarist since 2008. Walbourne first materialised aged barely 18, when UK country-rocker Peter Bruntnell flew him over to Boston to record 1999’s Normal For Bridgewater with members of Son Volt. Thereafter, the hotshot guitarist acquired his stripes touring America frequently alongside both Jay Farrar and…

LATE AUGUST, 1977. IT WAS QUIET ON THE ROOF of the Hyatt House – or the Riot House, as the infamous Sunset Boulevard hotel was known to visiting rock bands. A little chilly too in the early hours of the mor ning after a show. On a sunlounger by the roof top pool Angus Young nursed a cup of tea and lit a cigarette from the stub of the last one. A few feet away, his brother Malcolm swigged from a bottle of beer. AC/DC had just played their first gig at the Whisky A Go Go. Ear-splitting, good-time rock, the small but enthusiastic crowd cheering as Bon Scott, the wir y, tattooed, topless front man, scooped tiny Angus onto his shoulders, jumped off-stage, and paraded him through the audience,…

AT BILLY BRAGG’S FARMHOUSE, WHERE A glass-walled kitchen looks out onto the Dorset Ridgeway and the kestrels that swoop and glide across the rolling hills, a storm has brought the rains. “I’ve been putting out sandbags to stop the water coming in,” says Bragg, a silverhaired 65-year-old in dressed-down unifor m of grey trousers and fleece, completing an image of a practical fellow, capable of taking on anything. Then he adds, “By that, I mean my son Jack has been putting out the sandbags,” and the image is r uined somewhat. This is someone who admitted, on 2013 song Handyman Blues, it takes him half an hour to change a fuse. Bragg may not be a natural-bor n man of the soil. As The R oaring Forty, an album and…

Ambrose Akinmusire ★★★★ Owl Song NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP Trumpeter’s intimate exploration of open space with Bill Frisell and Herlin Riley. The first of three new albums in the next 12 months underlines Ambrose Akinmusire’s refusal to be pigeonholed. A reaction against modern life’s information overload, this sparely wrought affair has a freshness that reflects the minimal rehearsal time with guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Herlin Riley, the Californian’s languidly purring long notes on Owl Song 1 and Flux Fuelings drawing listeners in with simple themes and passages of undeniable beauty. While the trio’s nimble interactions sparkle with empathy on Mr Frisell – as trumpeter and guitarist double-up and diverge – their melodic skills are most acute on slower numbers like the impressionistic Henya, summoning haunting themes that match Akinmusire’s unmistakable timbre…

★★★★ A Gift From A Flower To A Garden THE STATE51 CONSPIRACY. LP Psych poet laureate’s 1967 album presented in an autographed, replica handmade box with illustrated lyric insert. THIS REISSUE of Donovan’s 1967 double LP in mono is lavish, but limited to just 500 copies, each one hand-signed, it’s also pricey at £180. The album – the first disc addressing his generation; the second their future children – has never had its proper due though, its stock reduced as Donovan unjustly became shorthand for hippy idealism. Yet it’s up there with the previous year’s Sunshine Superman for innovative vision: his fairy tales, lullabies, and songs inspired by friends escaping borstal and American banjo players, along with his reading of Shakespeare’s Under The Greenwood Tree, all capture both the moment…

Living The Beatles Legend: The Mal Evans Story ★★★★ Kenneth Womack MUDLARK. £25 FOR ALL THE dark glamour of their Satanic Majesties, it’s the lovable Moptops whose story is clouded by tragedy. Rudderless after The Beatles stopped touring, their manager Brian Epstein was the first to go. No less emotionally invested, in 1976 their loyal roadie, bodyguard and factotum Mal Evans was the second. Unable to bounce back from the comedown that followed the break-up, this “lovely, big, huggable bear of a man”, as Paul McCartney described him, engineered his end in a hail of LAPD bullets. “They were all damaged,” as Evans’ sister June recalled, by Beatlemania’s “totally unreal world… a horrendous, wonderful, terrible place. They suddenly could have anything they wanted.” “Seduced by LA, booze and coke… Evans’ death…

FOR YEARS NOW, Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and Kenney Jones have all spoken of reconvening the Faces, the blues, soul and folk knaves who burned brightly and boozily from 1969 to 1975. There’s still no news, but Faces freaks will take ample comfort from a new reissue campaign kicking off in ’24. Appetites were whetted by last month’s Record Store Day release Had Me AReal Good Time… With Faces Live In Session At The BBC 1971-1973, which collected primo-sounding radio rarities. It was put together by Faces specialist Rob Caiger, who’s worked closely with the surviving members and the estates of the late Ian McLagan and Ronnie Lane since 2020 to dig their personal archives for treasure. While the Faces’ 2004 box Five Guys Walk Into ABar… was assembled by…

C APTAIN BEEFHEART’S career in music ended in 1982, though his last three LPs showed where he was going next, with each one featuring his painting on the cover. It’s this side of his creative life that new London exhibition Don Van Vliet: Standing On One Hand will illuminate. Held at the Michael Werner Galler y in Mayfair, it r uns until Febr uar y 3, 2024, and will feature Beefheart art from the ’80s and ’90s. On hand to witness Van Vliet at work in all his guises was guitarist and collaborator of note Gar y Lucas, who first met Beefheart in 1971 and who worked with him from 1980’s Doc At The Radar Station to 1982’s Ice Cream For Crow. “He couldn’t shut off the volcanic flow of…

1 MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND CIAO CIAO BAMBINO The consummate songwriter prefaces his sequel to MOJO’s album of 2022 with this nostalgic swinger. Lyrical allusions to Aladdin Sane; musically, though, he’s still besotted with Love. Find it: streaming services 2 JIMMY PAGE RUMBLE Live at the R&R Hall of Fame, Link Wray’s menacing instrumental for cosh boys on public assistance comes alive, again. Find it: YouTube 3 THE LEMONHEADS FEAR OF LIVING Dando’s first new song for aeons brings jangle, thwack and angsty foreboding, admitting, “I could really use a pick-me-up.” Find it: streaming services 4 THE SMILE WALL OF EYES The Yorke-Greenwood project as postpunk diversion seems even wider of the mark now: this, with its brooding strings, sounds closer to an A Moon Shaped…

Juan de Marcos González: In the 1960s, Cuban music had become isolated, though not our spirit of creativity, but people who were ‘old fashioned’ fell out of favour. I played rock’n’roll guitar in the 1960s and 1970s but then we decided to fight the influence of the music from outside Cuba that young Cubans were playing. “YOU NEED SOMEBODY WHO IS 90 YEA RS OLD, AND GOOD.” Ry Cooder: I’d been there in the 1970s, I wanted to learn through hanging out. Before I’d got there they had recorded the classic repertoire. There are a lot of songs, all of them good. And there are different periods of songs, there’s 19th century, then there’s the early 20th century son, the defining Afro-Cuban form, very distinct, song-driven rather than dance. In…

Gruff Rhys ★★★★ Sadness Sets Me Free ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP THOUGH IT stops well short of the ardent self-loathing that fired Radiohead’s Creep, a pronounced seam of self-criticism runs through Gruff Rhys’s latest. It’s there in the frank fessup which offsets Bad Friend’s spry, buoyant chamber-pop, and it’s embedded in I Tendered My Resignation, an inventively-titled break-up song which builds and builds around piano and pedal-steel while its protagonist deems himself “unworthy” of his partner’s love/commitment. Is the resignee Rhys? Was this one of the “bad policy decisions” he alludes to in the LP’s accompanying notes? What’s clear is that fucking up – or thinking we have – gets good people down. What to do, then, but embrace the sweet sadness ’til it sets you free? If you’re already striking…

Amor Muere ★★★★ A Time To Love, A Time To Die SCRAWL. DL/LP Mexico City left-field supergroup’s time has come. Mabe Fratti, a Guatemalan singer and cellist currently working out of Mexico City, is one of the rising stars of the global avant-garde. A couple of months ago, she turned up in MOJO’s Jazz column as half of Titanic alongside pianist/guitarist Hector Tosta. This time, she’s resurfaced in Amor Muere, four female improvisers who combine cello, violin, synth and tape manipulation into a kind of radical reinvention of the string quartet. If the capsule description suggests stern compositional austerity, this five-track debut is an often playful, often ethereal, constantly inventive pleasure, where the angular improvisations come together in micro-detailed harmony; 19-minute closer Violeta y Malva – think Julia Holter circa…

★★★★ The Yes Album (Super Deluxe Edition) RHINO. CD/DL/LP/BR Prog-rock royalty’s third album stripped down and rebuilt. THERE’S A purity to Yes’s early work. In 1971, their respective egos were still in check and their musical ambition hadn’t yet cost them their songwriting. That year’s The Yes Album exemplifies this. It also broke in their new recruit, ex-Tomorrow guitarist Steve Howe (whose live solo turn The Clap still jars in the studio setting), and showcased the evergreen Yours Is No Disgrace and Starship Trooper. Remixer-to-the-stars Steven Wilson dials up the Yes-ness on this four-disc set, which includes live tracks, single and mono mixes and an instrumental version of the original LP. Stripped of vocalist Jon Anderson’s choirboy trilling, Yes’s folk, classical and jazz roots are laid bare. The push and…

ATLANTIC PARTNER and producer Jerry Wexler was in the studio breaking up a violent quarrel between Percy Sledge and Wilson Pickett when the phone rang and a mutual friend told him that Aretha Franklin was ready to sign to Atlantic. Mindful that she hadn’t been A&R’d adequately during her time with Columbia, Wexler let Franklin select material and work out how she wanted to sing it for her first Atlantic recording session in 1967. They did a handshake deal. Franklin’s partner/manager Ted White dismissed the crack team of Memphis players Wexler had booked as “fuckin’ honkies” during a row that halted the first session. But they’d already caught, in just two hours, I Never Loved A Man, which became a millionseller, so a winning formula was established. Wexler had signed…

JANUARY 28 In the UK Top 10, the pleasant and hygienic tunes of Sandie Shaw, Gerry And The Pacemakers and Sounds Orchestral. Just below them was the sound of fury, abandonment and near-mystical intensity. Belfast’s hardnut rhythm’n’bluesers Them were at Number 11 with their sizzling Baby, Please Don’t Go, a cover of a song made famous by Big Joe Williams in 1935. On the flipside was Gloria, 19-year-old singer Van Morrison’s driving, mantric invocation of the supernatural ineffable. It was inspired by his cousin Gloria Gordon, who died aged 29 of cancer, and in time it would become a rock’n’roll standard, covered by Hendrix, Patti Smith, The Doors and others. In its 16-year history, the humble 45 rpm single had rarely packed such concentrated power. A few weeks earlier, Them…

HELLO MARCH 1978 I was playing lead guitar in the Subs and Jim Kerr [Simple Minds frontman] used to come and see us all the time with Jaine Henderson, his girlfriend. Our drummer from the Subs, Ali MacKenzie left, and Brian McGee, the original Simple Minds drummer, said he’d do a gig at Strathclyde University with us. Then, when Tony Donald [original Simple Minds bassist] left, Jim, Charlie [Burchill, guitar] and the other guys in the band asked me to join. I wanted to get back to lead guitar, but I do enjoy playing bass. I’d had an audition with The Rezillos but they got this good-looking guy called Simon Templar instead. Also, my Gibson Les Paul got stolen. So I thought, I might as well join Simple Minds, and…