Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i MOJO

DAVID GILMOUR, LIKE MOST OF US, MAY have reason to consider elements in his past with a degree of caution. “I tend to examine my nostalgia and think, Wow, it really wasn’t that great,” he admits to MOJO this month, before pointing out it’s now been nearly four decades since he was in a band with his nemesis, Roger Waters. In that time, Gilmour has steered Pink Floyd to a dignified end, and focused on a solo career that’s flourished to a point where he can call his new album, Luck And Strange, “the best record I’ve made going back to The Dark Side Of The Moon.” If he’s sometimes appeared to have a rather serene approach to work post-Waters, much of Mark Blake’s excellent cover story reveals a very…

CHRISTMAS wouldn’t be Christmas without a rousing Fairytale Of New York, so expect the roof to blow off Dublin’s 3Arena when tin-whistling Pogues MC Spider Stacy gathers an all-star cast there to perform it on December 17. The show is a celebration of The Pogues’ debut album Red Roses For Me at the end of its 40th birthday year so, as Fairytale… dates from 1987, Stacy hadn’t included it on his putative setlist for the show. But, as he was persuaded over a recent pint of Guinness 0.0 by The Mary Wallopers’ Charles Hendy, “It would be churlish not to.” The 3Arena performance is the climax of a process begun modestly last year at rising folk talent showcase nights, promoted by musician-impresario Campbell Baum, of the Broadside Hacks collective, at…

…HAWKWIND are recording new LP, There Is No Space For Us, out in ’25 …A$AP ROCKY said he wanted some collaborators his parents liked on his new album. “I got a track with Fat Man Scoop, Flavor Flav (right), Slick Rick, Morrissey and Busta Rhymes all on one,” he said. “It’s kinda nuts! We call that one Hood Happy” …WHITE DENIM’s 12 is released in December. Songs include Flash Bare Ass, Your Future As God and I Still Exist …PRIMAL SCREAM’s Come Ahead, their first LP in eight years, arrives in November. Produced by David Holmes, titles include Melancholy Man, False Flags and Settler’s Blues …IAN HUNTER has reflected to online questioners about following his Defiance Parts 1 & 2: “Part 3. Who knows if that will even happen?” He also pondered about…

SOME 38 YEARS after their split, cherished cow-punkers Lone Justice are back with Viva Lone Justice. Its refurbished archive recordings reunite frontwoman Maria McKee, guitarist Ryan Hedgecock and bassist Marvin Etzioni, while drummer Don Heffington appears posthumously. “These songs have so much fire – they’re like field recordings!” enthuses McKee down the line from Los Angeles. “Yeah, they’re a great representation of that early vision we had,” agrees Hedgecock separately via Zoom. “Some of them date from when we were still kind of untouched by the business…” Having rediscovered a wealth of demos, covers and live tracks in his personal archive, Etzioni was the ‘new’ record’s prime mover. “It came from a very pure place,” he says. “I sent the stuff to Maria saying she could put it out as…

“I’m a normal teenager, but The Beatles are the most poppy music I know.”MUIREANN BRADLEY “I NEVER actually touched an electric guitar,” confesses 17-year-old “I’VE blues prodigy Muireann Bradley backstage at Wales’s Green Man Festival. The Irish musician sits cradling the 1933 Gibson L-50 with which she’s just wowed the main stage crowd with a set covering “all the guys from the 1920s and ’30s”, plus John Fahey, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. Like Bradley’s debut performance on Jools Holland’s Annual Hootenanny at new year, it was the sort of fearless performance that’s encouraged a new audience to engage with songs written a century ago. It’s also proof that anyone who had their teenage years shaped by the coronavirus has every right to sing the blues. “I grew up listening…

JULY 4, 1976: THE RAMONES HAVE JUST MADE their UK live debut at the Roundhouse in north London and blood gushes in the dressing room, post-set. “That was horrible!” spits Dee Dee Ramone, nursing his bass-strumming right hand, still wrapped in a handkerchief. He blames a hostile sound crew unaccustomed to high velocity punk rock and more at home with retro headliners the Flamin’ Groovies. While punk rock in the UK is already underway, the Ramones are here to reinforce its still-alien template: stripped down, speeded up, insanely catchy and devoid of frills, amping up their recently released debut album with matching visual impact. Reactions at a soiree in the stars-and-stripes-festooned Round-house bar veer between ecstatic, dumbfounded and aggressively dismissive, although a small coterie of punks laying into the free…

Davy O' Brien (Leave That Baby Alone) (Duffy Power A-side, Parlophone, 1967) This cautionary tale, all French horns and Kinksian irony, admonishes said titular gadabout for seducing a girl “as young as his own sister” before our narrator reveals his own sinister plans: to take the “child” home himself and, yes, possibly murder her. Not a hit. Davy The Fat Boy (from Randy Newman, Reprise, 1968) Against mournful Jewish klezmer, our man promises Davy’s dying parents he’ll take care of his childhood pal. A jaunty piano refrain reveals the truth: Davy is now the prize exhibit in a freak show. A very dark reprise of Simon Smith…, with a human being substituted for a dancing bear. Sail Away (from Sail Away, Reprise, 1972) The honey-dripping sales pitch of a North…

NOVEMBER 1978, NEW YORK CITY, Tribeca. Inside the Mudd Club, The B-52’s are doing a soundcheck. They’re trying not to be distracted by Beat writer William Burroughs, who’s at the bar in a private eye trench coat and fedora, eyeballing them and scribbling notes. He’s flanked by two companions in matching outerwear. The five-piece band from Athens, Georgia love Fellini movies, and here they are in what could be a scene from one. They’d been asked to be part of a benefit, for Semiotext(e), a deconstructivist French magazine, and the night’s theme was outer space. “That’s probably why they picked us, because we had a few outer space songs,” says Kate Pierson, with a laugh. She’s being modest. That summer, The B-52’s, with their elemental but ferocious dance grooves, thrift…

“A FEW YEARS ago I was driving on a road trip through America, stopping to get a tattoo in a small town in Colorado, when a friend put on Square Dance by Tucker Zimmerman as I was getting my tattoo done. I loved it instantly. From there I was listening to Tucker almost exclusively for several months, and he has that rare blend of writing something that can make you laugh and cry in the same breath. Michael Hurley does that for me, John Prine and Bob Dylan too, and here was this guy who was on that level and yet completely unknown. There is so much in every line, like this one from Half Crazy: ‘I’ve got a different movie in each of my eyes.’ There are complex nuances in…

Do You Want To Marry Me? (Two Weeks In September soundtrack, released on À Cœur Joie EP, Barclay, 1967) While a private press 1965 EP by his first band Jokers Wild was Gilmour’s debut appearance on vinyl (their cut-glass harmonies on Why Do Fools Fall In Love are something to hear), his contributions to two soundtrack songs by French composer Michel Magne were where he found his voice. The Brigitte Bardot-starring romp from which it came was a dud. But even if Gilmour’s tuning wavers on this ’60s Euro groover, it’s unmistakably him. Let There Be More Light (Pink Floyd, A Saucerful Of Secrets, Columbia, 1968) Gilmour’s first guitar solo on a Pink Floyd record arrived three-and-a-half minutes into the sci-fi opener of their second album, as a blend of…

Thurston Moore Flow Critical Lucidity DAYDREAM LIBRARY SERIES. CD/DL/LP/MC THURSTON MOORE has spent the past 15 years trying, with varying degrees of success, to outstrip his past. The co-founder of one of rock’n’roll’s most singular bands, his guitar playing – forever slanted, holding onto reality as if by tenterhooks – helped redefine the form’s codex and possibilities. Sonic Youth are now an institution, a piece of the path to whatever comes next. Moore’s solo material since the band’s difficult split has never cleared the hurdle of that legacy. Flow Critical Lucidity – the best record Moore has been involved in since Sonic Youth’s The Eternal, 15 years ago now – feels as close as he’s come to something new. Penned almost entirely by London writer Radieux Radio (actually, a pseudonym…

Jack White No Name THIRD MAN. DL/LP LITTLE ROOM isn’t, perhaps, the most celebrated song in The White Stripes catalogue, appearing halfway through 2001’s White Blood Cells and lasting a mere 50 seconds. But it effectively summarises a paradox Jack White has been grappling with for over two decades. A portrait of the lo-fi artist “working on something good” in his Little Room, it finds White contemplating what happens next when, “If it’s really good/You’re gonna need a bigger room.” Bigger rooms, of course, bring their own challenges: in them, “You might have to think of how you got started/Sitting in your little room.” When The White Stripes became a global phenomenon in the early 2000s, White initially remained evangelical about recording in the most primitive environments. “The most punk…

Bob Dylan & The Band The 1974 Live Recordings COLUMBIA LEGACY/THIRD MAN. CD/DL/LP IN THE IMMEDIATE wake of Bob Dylan’s 1974 return to stage 50 years ago, it seemed inevitable to label his wild romp through North America alongside The Band a cash-grab. He had not performed in a substantive way for the better part of a decade, and, at least until David Geffen and Bill Graham conspired together to create one of the biggest rock spectacles of all time, he had not recorded with The Band in nearly that long, too. The tickets produced mail-order pandemonium, and the album, Planet Waves, topped the charts – a rarity for Dylan, always – despite being almost no one’s idea of definitive Dylan. That summer’s subsequent release of Before The Flood, which…

Dog Man Star 30 DEMON. CD/DL/LP Complicated triumph remastered for a new generation. SPECULATION ABOUT Suede’s future after Bernard Butler’s departure drew significant focus from Dog Man Star’s contents on its release in October 1994. Introducing The Band’s unholy chant suggested they had prematurely accelerated into their Thomas Jerome Newton era, yet for all their second album’s insular paranoia, Suede were grappling with something bigger than themselves. Letting their psychedelic side run with the dogs – Brett Anderson immersed in Lewis Carroll, William Blake and “an awful lot of acid” – they picked through the ’90s dystopian debris, turning up the nightmare filter on We Are The Pigs, rising from the ashes on New Generation. The ballads raised eyebrows, but Still Life’s orchestral meltdown now seems central to their…

GROUND DOWN by failure after their three singles and a mini-LP took them nowhere, Nottingham indie band Asphalt Ribbons decided to give it one last shot in the summer of 1992. Changing their name after their singer Stuart Staples found a German matchbox on a beach, the six members – Staples, keyboardist David Boulter, guitarist Neil Fraser, violinist, guitarist and ace arranger Dickon Hinchliffe, drummer Al Macaulay and bassist Mark Colwill – stopped thinking about “making it” and resolved to ignore the world beyond their rehearsal room. Like kindred spirit Jarvis Cocker, who co-directed the Soho-based video for 1993 single City Sickness, their years of obscurity were a valuable finishing school. “We’ve been in too many rehearsals where nobody cares. Done too many gigs with four people there,” Staples said…

HELLO EARLY 1982 I had a band called The Unclaimed, a ’60s punk band for want of a better term. We were breaking up and the bass player Barry Shank and I were going to form a new band. It was going to be, if you will, a regular band, that maybe people wouldn’t have noticed until we found Stephen McCarthy [guitar] through an ad in an LA supermarket rag called The Recycler, which is responsible for everybody from The Bangles to The Go-Go’s to X. We met him at Ross Bagdasarian’s rehearsal hall in Hollywood, run by Ross Bagdasarian Junior. Ross Bagdasarian Senior was David Seville, who’d invented Alvin And The Chipmunks, so there were Alvin And The Chipmunks posters and gold records everywhere. It was small and clean…

15 FLASHBACKS to THE GOLDEN AGE OF BRITISH PSYCH SOFT MACHINE, THE PRETTY THINGS, BLOSSOM TOES & more 1 SOFT MACHINE FEELIN’ REELIN’ SQUEELIN’ From the peak of the UFO era, a convention-busting freakout courtesy of Soft Machine. This B-side of their February 1967 debut, Love Makes Sweet Music, amps up the weirdness: Robert Wyatt is blue-eyed soul incarnate on the chorus; Kevin Ayers the twisted MC on the verse. “This is a feeling from the ceiling of my dreams!” Written by Kevin Ayers. Published by Warner Chappell Music Ltd. 1967 Soft Machine. Licensed courtesy of Cherry Red Records Ltd. ISRC GBBLY2404171 2 RUST YOU THOUGHT YOU HAD IT MADE A real rarity, from Rust’s solitary 1969 album, originally only released in Germany. John Driver, singer and writer of this…

Refuge Of The Roads Joni Mitchell’s Archives – Volume 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980) captures a genius in perpetual motion, speeding ever further away from musical expectations. Victoria Segal hitches a ride. “IT’S KIND OF like running away from home to join the circus,” says Joni Mitchell from the stage of the Montreal Forum. It’s December 4, 1975, she’s about to introduce the audience to a work in progress called Coyote – “I think it’s finished but I don’t know, maybe there’s a couple more chapters to go” – and sounds slightly bemused she’s still entangled in the motley rock’n’roll carnival that is Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, three weeks after she first joined the tour in New Haven, Connecticut, on November 13. Joni Mitchell Archives – Volume 4: The Asylum…

WHEN RHODA Dakar was a teen-age punk in London, her social circle included the Sex Pistols, Shane MacGowan and painter Lucian Freud’s daughters Bella and Rose Hoyt. She later found out that her pals’ famous dad had gone to the Caribbean Club off Piccadilly, which was run by her Jamaican-born father André Dakar in the late ’40s. “My dad did telly as well,” says Dakar. “He was in Danger Man and The Avengers! He never mentioned it. When he did mention stuff, it sounded so outlandish, like, ‘Oh, when I knew Louis Armstrong in Paris…’ and it was all true. It’s like people are drawn to each other no matter where they are in time or space, almost, and I was drawn to the people who were making waves.” Raised…

THREE YEARS ago, a track called R&B heralded the arrival of a notable new band called English Teacher. Over an angsty knot of post-punk guitars, singer Lily Fontaine sardonically documented her experiences as a mixed-race woman in an indie rock scene largely dominated by white males. “Despite appearances,” she dryly intoned, “I haven’t got the voice for R&B.” “It’s about that feeling of being in-between,” Fontaine explains to MOJO now. “I’m black and I’m white. I make indie music but I’m not what some people would perceive as someone who makes that music. There’s so many in-betweens. I’m not from Yorkshire, I’m not from Lancashire. I’m neither here nor there.” The success of R&B catapulted the Leeds-based quartet – Fontaine, guitarist Lewis Whiting, bass player Nicholas Eden and drummer Douglas…

Bill Berry (R.E.M.) “The B-52’s paved the road for us, and so many other Athens artists. They absolutely fuelled what we all did. They had this cool DIY thing, they were playing pawn shop guitars with inverted tunings, and they had an attitude of ‘Let’s just go out and play whether there’s a paycheque in it or not.’ And Kate, she’s a beautiful person who carries a wonderful instrument everywhere she goes – her voice. She sang on three of our songs – Me In Honey, Fretless, and of course, that horrible Shiny Happy People (laughs). She was there in the studio, she was smiling the whole time and, what can you say – her voice speaks for itself. The B-52’s laid a foundation and made it possible for me…

GUY PRATT HAS played bass guitar with Pink Floyd and David Gilmour’s groups for over 35 years – “Man and boy,” he tells MOJO – and is back in the fold for Luck And Strange. Over time, he’s observed the boss’s development as a bandleader. “It’s not that David had to become a different person,” he reflects. “He had the toolkit, but he hadn’t had to use the tools, because of the personalities in the band before. There are people who thrive on that responsibility – like Mick Jagger, Madonna and, yes, Roger. But for others it must be like you’re sitting at home and then one day you become the Chairman of Coca-Cola.” In contrast to Gilmour’s upcoming four-city world tour, Pratt has just played all over Europe with…

Elkhorn The Red Valley VHF. DL/LP New York duo map out new psychedelic landscapes. There are a few artists whose intense productivity means they could figure in most of our MOJO Experimental columns, and Elkhorn are certainly in that bracket; Drew Gardner, half of the duo, had a solo album reviewed as recently as MOJO 369. No apologies for including them again, though, as The Red Valley is a sensational record. Elkhorn started carving out an underground rep nearly a decade ago, fundamentally as duelling guitarists pushing folk forms into ever headier, more psychedelic territory. As the releases have racked up, though, their range has extended, with zithers and vibraphones often joining the party and an increasingly ecstatic trajectory: I mentioned Alice Coltrane in relation to Gardner’s Cygnus A set,…

Nubya Garcia Odyssey CONCORD JAZZ. CD/DL/LP AS RECOGNISABLE a lightning rod for new London jazz as Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia has been far from idle since the release of 2020’s sprawling debut Source. Aside from delivering star turn collaborations with Nala Sinephro, Makaya McCraven, Poppy Ajudha, DJ Yoda and Jake Long, her double act with Hutchings on 2023’s London Brew – a vivid reimagining of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew – became the high watermark of the UK jazz renaissance. Cut from a different cloth entirely, Odyssey distinguishes itself via the lush string arrangements Garcia created for the ethnically diverse Chineke! Orchestra. They dominate from the off, enlivened by intricate brass interplay with trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey and trombonist Rosie Turton on spiritual opener Dawn (also featuring esperanza spalding), and come into their…

Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 Heavier Yet (Lays The Crownless Head) RECORD KICKS. CD/DL/LP The return of Nigeria’s king of the three Rs: resistance, resilience and revolution. Though the implication in the title is that Kuti would somehow be increasing the intensity of his Afrobeat, this fifth album, helmed by Lenny Kravitz, initially goes in a more soulful direction, with opener T.O.P. giving the impression of a man approaching life in a slightly relaxed frame of mind, even when complaining that society values money over people. There’s a song (Love & Revolution) about how much he fancies his wife! Fear not, however – Seun hasn’t gone soft in the six years since his previous album, and it doesn’t take long before the heavy artillery steps in: Dey (which features Damian…

WHILE PART of the USSR, Ukraine clung on to a distinct musical identity, not just at the wedding receptions or wakes where traditional songs were sung. “Music is really important to us, like daily bread, native language, and grandma’s hands. This is our core value,” writes chronicler Vitalii ‘Bard’ Bardetskyi in his notes to Even The Forest Hums: Ukrainian Sonic Archives 1971-1996 ★★★★ (LITA), a fascinating compilation of 18 gems extracted from deep dives into the pop music produced either side of Ukraine’s independence. Early on, only artists who’d gone through the torturous permit system could record at one of the few state-run studios. In the 1970s, after a slight easing of the regime, some of those approved artists started to experiment with things that felt less like sanctioned music,…

Melancholy Undercover: The Book Of ABBA Jan Gradvall FABER. £20 AFTER ABBA GOLD, Mamma Mia! and the “ABBAtars”of ABBA Voyage, you might be forgiven for thinking that the band has always been universally adored. After all, even Sid Vicious was a fan, chasing after them through an airport in his vomit-stained leather jacket to declare his love (he did not get close). Yet as Swedish music journalist Jan Gradvall stresses in Melancholy Undercover, the quartet were by no means championed by all in their homeland. In 1975, the year after the band won The Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton with Waterloo, Swedish broadcaster TV2 screened an “alternative” Eurovision. As well as Kevin Coyne playing with future Police guitarist Andy Summers, there was an appearance from a character called Sillstryparen, or…

Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision Dir: John McDermott ABRAMORAMA/EXPERIENCE HENDRIX. BR/CD/DVD BY LATE 1968, Jimi Hendrix was rock’s most explosively creative force. His latest album, double set Electric Ladyland, showed that innovation and commercial success could be achieved simultaneously. But the masterpiece had been months in the making and achieved at great financial cost. Serendipitously, the Generation Club at the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village had just gone bankrupt. Over the next 18 months, this basement wreck was purchased by Hendrix and his management, then rebuilt as a recording studio. The concept was simple: Electric Lady would save on recording costs and nurture Hendrix’s creativity in a “soft and curvy” environment he’d help shape. But as this 90-minute ‘talking head’ documentary reveals, its making was beset by…

DRUMMER CARL BEVAN (below, b.1973) brought propulsive power and fun-loving antics to Newport trio 60ft Dolls, whose debut 1996 LP The Big 3 combined British punk and US post-hardcore legacies in open-hearted songs lauded by gatekeepers as diverse as Select magazine and the New York Times. After the demise of the band, Bevan, whose father Ray remains a popular evangelical pastor, produced local acts including Exit_ International and formed his own group, The Lash, before reinventing as a painter, specialising in otherworldly landscapes. DRUMMER MICK UNDERWOOD (b.1945) played with several groups during the ’60s and ’70s including The Outlaws, The Herd, Quatermass and Gillan. Born in Middlesex, Underwood left school at 16 to join Shadows bassist Jet Harris on tour. At Screaming Lord Sutch’s suggestion, he successfully auditioned for Joe Meek’s…

Get in! This month’s top motorik rock, trance and radical dance. 1 AMYL AND THE SNIFFERS BIG DREAMS The usually buoyant Sniffers in uncommonly wistful mood. Rising drums and guitar rally Amy’s empathetic vocal from stuck-in-arut ballad to punk rock torch song.  Find it: streaming services 2 MANIC STREET PREACHERS DECLINE & FALL A scissor-kicking acceptance of growing old heralds the Manics’ latest triumphant return. “I know our time has come and gone,” sings James, looking back to move on over emo-sleek Ultravoxy musik. Find it: streaming services 3 KRAFTWERK MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR LAWRENCE Live at Fuji Rock in July, KW play poignant tribute to Ralf Hütter’s late friend Ryuichi Sakamoto with their first ever cover version. Find it: YouTube 4 BRYAN FERRY STAR Ferry’s patented smouldering gets a techno upgrade from…

NOTWITHSTANDING HIS APPARENT LACK OF POP STAR LOOKS or rock star cool, Randy Newman’s star was rising as a solo singer-songwriter. This scion of a Hollywood movie music family, with roots in New Orleans, had made strides since his craft had found him a home at Warner Bros’ hip and ambitious Reprise label – a favourite of boss Mo Ostin and his young, artist-focused A&R Lenny Waronker. After penning hits for Gene Pitney and Alan Price and partnering Van Dyke Parks in the engine room of baroque pop sensations Harper’s Bizarre, Newman’s solo albums were succès d’estime until Sail Away dented the Billboard chart in 1972. Stunningly written and arranged, and elegantly produced by Waronker and Russ Titelman, it wove exquisite spells and asked thorny questions, not least in its…

ON THE EDGE OF A VILLAGE, A FEW miles from the city of Liège, an hour or so from Brussels, Tucker Zimmerman has lived for the past 40 years with his Belgian wife Marie-Claire in a dacha-style timber house on a forest hillside. “We’re not used to visitors,” says Zimmerman, a rangy 83-year-old with a shock of longish grey hair and a loose denim shirt. He’s sitting by a wooden table in the cluttered living room, bookshelves groaning under the weight of the Jack Kerouac, Richard Brautigan and Stephen King novels behind him. “Now Adrianne has introduced me to a whole new world.” That’s Adrianne Lenker, singer of ragged folk rockers Big Thief, who have made a rough-hewn, deeply emotional album called Dance Of Love with this Zelig-like American singer-songwriter.…

IN MARCH 2024, DAVID GILMOUR VISITED ELY CATHEDRAL FOR THE first time in a while. Thirty years ago this historic edifice, dating from just after the Norman Conquest, appeared on the sleeve of Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell, in a nod to the band’s geographical roots 20 miles away in the city of Cambridge, where Gilmour, plus Floyd founders Syd Barrett and Roger Waters were raised. Now Gilmour had returned, with his new co-producer Charlie Andrew, to record Ely’s cathedral choir. Stood under its sweeping arches and twinkling stained glass windows, Gilmour looked a bit like a visiting priest in his clerical black coat. Instead, he sang and strummed the guitar and helped guide the Kings Ely Singers though The Piper’s Call, the first single from his new album, Luck…

Paul Heaton The Mighty Several EMI. CD/DL/LP/MC YOUR DUA LIPAS and Coldplays may have nabbed the prime slots and confetti cannons, but at Glastonbury 2024 Paul Heaton felt the love, too. Formerly with The Housemartins, then The Beautiful South, this mellifluous kitchen-sink dramatist has become synonymous with a less showy, more egalitarian mode of pop stardom. Heaton likes to share the spotlight, likes his anorak, and has affordably-priced shows. Hell, he’s even put cash behind the bars of venue-proximate pubs so his ticket holders can enjoy subsidised drinks. The term ‘national treasure’ – also the title of the opening track here – seems apposite, then, but Heaton won’t wear it. “I’ve got my one award, thanks!” he recently said, referring to 2022’s criminally overdue Ivor Novello for songwriting. His song…

City Lights TRANSGRESSIVE. CD/DL/LP Second album from duo featuring Graham Coxon and partner Rose Elinor Dougall. COXON AND Dougall’s lockdown coupling was celebrated last year by The Waeve’s self-titled debut LP and, now blessed with baby Eliza May, City Lights draws further inspiration from their domestic nirvana and love’s extraordinary powers to heal. But a honeyed Double Fantasy this certainly is not – a fact apparent from the title track’s jagged splinters of zigzagging guitars, as Coxon goes the full Fripp over a thinly disguised rewrite of Bowie’s It’s No Game (No.1). This might be deemed a ‘Graham track’, as you would equally adjudge the pulsing, Numanesque Moth To The Flame, or the curdled industrial grind of Broken Boys (in Waeve world, men are always “boys” and women “girls”). But…

The Yardbirds The Ultimate Live At The BBC REPERTOIRE. CD/DL “PLEASE DO not adjust your sets,” instructed BBC DJ Brian Matthew before a Saturday Club session with The Yardbirds. “All the sounds you are about to hear are completely deliberate.” Drummer Jim McCarty liked this announcement so much he asked Matthew to re-record it decades later as an intro tape for the new Yardbirds tour. In 1965, this avuncular warning was partly due to what The Yardbirds’ first manager, Giorgio Gomelsky, called the group’s “manic accelerando”. “At first, the BBC couldn’t get our sound. It was all too loud for them,” explains McCarty, whom, along with former bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, curates this 4-CD box. The ‘ultimate’ part of the title alludes to the fact that this is every surviving, usable…

Thelma Houston Sunshower ABC/DUNHILL, 1969 “WHEN SHE started singing, I had to pick myself up off the floor,” says Jimmy Webb, recalling the day he auditioned Mississippivia-California singer Thelma Houston. “I never heard anybody sing like that, except maybe Aretha Franklin.” The year was 1968 and Webb, a wunderkind songwriter from Oklahoma, was high on success. Just 22, he had penned big hits for Glen Campbell (By The Time I Get To Phoenix) and Richard Harris (MacArthur Park), and had collected two Grammys for penning The 5th Dimension’s psych-soul classic Up Up And Away. Describing Mississippi-born Houston’s fiery gospel-reared voice as “the perfect instrument,” he convinced ABC/Dunhill Records to sign her and let him write, arrange, and produce her debut LP, Sunshower. “It was wonderful working with Jimmy,” Houston told…

DUNEDIN, HOME to The Chills’ Martin Phillipps who died at the end of July, is an Antipodean Manchester: more often than not damp and grey; its nightlife attuned to a vibrant, student-led culture; rich in sport and musical heritage. But mostly damp and grey. Phillipps believed Dunedin’s climate and geography helped shape his songwriting. Asked in 1986 if The Chills’ Pink Frost, a spectral single of intangible loss, longing, confusion and despair, was “a touch gloomy”, he replied: “But that’s where we live.” Likewise, the brash, wide-eyed psychedelic pop of 1982 debut 45 Rolling Moon evoked the windswept, rugged hilltops and remote beaches of the Otago Peninsula, just a short drive outside Dunedin in old cars packed with stoned teenagers ready to party around all-night bonfires. The son of Methodist…

OCTOBER 28 The Spencer Davis Group, in their most celebrated formation at least, were living on borrowed time. Even before August’s third LP Autumn ’66, bassist Muff Winwood and his vocalist/organist/guitarist brother Steve had agreed that they were going to leave. Steve was growing tired of the road and the group’s R&B formula; older sibling Muff was eyeing life as an A&R man. The irony was, on this day the Birmingham quartet released one of their most admired songs. Storming soul conflagration Gimme Some Lovin’ would soon reach UK Number 2, and also put them on the map in America as their debut Stateside hit. Steve had started his trip to glory younger than most. Born in Handsworth in 1948, he’d played piano with his dad’s dance band aged just nine.…

Further to Bands Sharing Names (Ask MOJO 367). For ages I thought that John Williams the guitarist and John Williams the film composer were one and the same. I also thought Dave Stewart from Eurythmics was the same Dave Stewart who had a Number 1 with Barbara Gaskin covering It’s My Party in 1981. What are the other unintentionally shared IDs of rock? Chris Palmer, via e-mail MOJO says: There are many. While few people will confuse The Clash’s Mick Jones with Mick Jones from Foreigner, or the respective Andy Bells from Ride and Erasure, some examples are more easily mistaken. Examples ripe for making your brain doubt itself include the late Average White Band drummer and the Pretenders/Paul McCartney guitarist both named Robbie McIntosh, the Bernard Herrmann who wrote…

Yes We Cans Win! Melomania P100 noise-cancelling headphones from Cambridge Audio. CAMBRIDGE AUDIO’s Melomania P100 noise-cancelling headphones are the latest addition to its award-winning Melomania series. Building on over 50 years of audio expertise and an unwavering adoration of music, the headphones were designed at the brand’s very own London music venue and headquarters. With a huge 60-hour battery life with noise-cancelling switched on, extending to a mega 100 hours with noise-cancelling switched off, these headphones are built to last. An ideal travel companion for music lovers, the accompanying app allows you to customise the EQ settings so you can enjoy your sounds your way. Worth £229 each, we have TWO sets to give away. How to enter: complete the crossword and take the letters from each coloured square and…