Tabla de contenidos para October 2023 en MOJO

Kate Simon Photographer Kate’s subjects, for magazines including Disc, Sounds and Interview, have ranged from Elton John to William Burroughs, while her portraits of Bob Marley and other stars of Jamaican music are some of the most potent ever captured. The cream of them, and her commentary, can be enjoyed from page 32. Grayson Haver Currin While Grayson camped in Joshua Tree National Park one night near where the body of Gram Parsons was burned, a bobcat approached his tent, growling repeatedly. His exploration of Parsons’ two solo LPs (see page 50) was written in a tent, as he hikes the Continental Divide Trail across the US. Victoria Segal While working for Melody Maker in the ’90s, Victoria was introduced to Stephen Hawking; his opening gambit: “Blur or Oasis?” Her…

MEET ANTHONY EDWARD VISCONTI, A rock’n’roll fan raised in a poor Italian district of Brooklyn, who learned guitar and, in his teens, managed to make a living playing double bass for Jewish holiday-makers in the Catskill resorts. The jazzman’s life meant brushes with heroin, which he eventually resisted, but he avoided being drafted into the US army by making sure there were opiates in his system on the day of the medical, and thus being rejected as a junkie. Attracted to hippydom, he married singing girlfriend Siegrid Berman when they were both 21, and they enjoyed taking acid trips together ever y weekend. Their folk duo failed to connect but led to Visconti becoming in-house producer for a New York publishing company and, subsequently, the arranger for busy pop producer…

SOMETHING “PRETTY EXTRAORDINARY” HAPPENED TO BLAKE MILLS THIS morning. He’s feeling oddly jet-lagged after a “super-early” start, but that doesn’t quite explain the surreal haze collecting round the edges of his day. That’s something different – the special kind of disorientation that happens when you find yourself face-to-face with a Beatle before lunch. The guitarist, producer and – amazing, given his packed schedule – solo singer-songwriter was asked to play in a band at Ringo Starr’s birthday celebrations in Los Angeles’ Beverly Gardens Park, performing three Starr turns – Don’t Pass Me By, Photograph and Good Night – while the newly minted 83-year-old sat watching in the front row, right in his eyeline. “It was like a video game – you’re just collecting rings, or coins,” says Mills, laughing. “It’s…

IN JULY 1979, STEVEN MORRISSEY WROTE ONE OF HIS FREQUENT, precocious letters to the NME. “I’ve just seen The Cramps and they’re at that funny stage,” he announced. “This is the kind of group that start revolutionary outrages and all that.” Four years later, Morrissey was fomenting his very own revolutionary outrages (and all that), as The Smiths began their brief and extraordinary career. But while Morrissey’s rhetoric often revolved around his band’s isolated otherness, and the supposed paucity of good, honest guitar music to counteract glossy chart pop, The Smiths were not really that alone. Our latest MOJO compilation, You’ve Got Everything Now, provides a rich sampler of the alternative ’80s. It’s a time when the energies and angles of punk and post-punk were dovetailing into older and more…

H Bauer Publishing The Lantern 75 Hampstead Road London NW1 2PL Tel: 020 7437 9011 Reader queries: mojoreaders@ bauermedia.co.uk Subscriber queries: bauer@ subscription.co.uk General e-mail: mojo@ bauermedia.co.uk Website: mojo4music.com Editor John Mulvey Senior Editor Danny Eccleston Creative Director Mark Wagstaff Production Editor (Entertainment) Simon McEwen Associate Editor (Reviews) Jenny Bulley Associate Editor (News) Ian Harrison Deputy Art Editor Del Gentleman Picture Editor Matt Turner Senior Associate Editor Andrew Male Contributing Editors Phil Alexander, Keith Cameron, Sylvie Simmons Thanks for their help with this issue: Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Ian Whent. This month’s contributors: John Aizlewood, Martin Aston, Mike Barnes, Mark Blake, Glyn Brown, John Bungey, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Stevie Chick, Andy Cowan, Grayson Haver Currin, Tom Doyle, David Fricke, Andy Fyfe, Pat Gilbert, David Hutcheon, Jim Irvin, David Katz,…

IN ANDY McCLUSKEY’s Northern Electric studio – based at his home on the Wirral – there is Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s first, still-functional Korg M500 Micro Preset synth from 1979. “It sits on top of a chest of drawers,” says McCluskey, “reminding me of where I came from. When the band re-formed [in 2006] we bought another one to cannibalise for parts, but we forgot to tell each other we were bidding against each other on eBay for it…” McCluskey and OMD partner Paul Humphreys, who works out of his Bleep Works set-up in the south of France, have got over greater hurdles during their 45-year-with-theodd-hiatus career in synth-pop. In fact, they shouldn’t be readying new album Bauhaus Staircase at all. “Myself and Paul had swore blind to each…

KEEP ON MOVING Bob Marley and Carlton Barrett, Exodus tour, Europe, May-June 1977. “That band,” marvels Kate Simon. “I mean, Carlton and [bassist] Family Man Barrett, that rhythm section, and Tyrone Downie on keyboards and the I-Threes with their harmonies and then Bob’s voice – his phrasing, his syncopation and his lyrics. I mean, unbelievable! He just wiped everybody else that I’d ever photographed away.” WAKE UP AND LIVE Marley on-stage during the Exodus tour, Europe, May-June 1977. Kate Simon: “Bob was incredibly intelligent. And if a subject has that kind of depth, you can really go somewhere. You’re not going to shoot him in some kind of showbiz commercial way. I mean, it’s a real opportunity. He was serious, and obviously thoughtful. But he was sensitive at the same…

IN THE BRIGHT LIGHT OF A NASHVILLE SPRING AFTERNOON, GLEN Dee Hardin pushes the papers, pill bottles, and paper weights to the side of the bulky brown desk he has owned for nearly 60 years. Hardin, 84, leans in close, inspecting the woodgrain and running his fingers over ever y scuff and stain. He is looking for the remains of one specific spill: the first night Gram Parsons came to visit Shipwreck Lounge, the home office Hardin kept at the corner of Ethel and Sarah, just outside Hollywood. “Phil Kaufman and Gram came over to my house, another hang-out session. We were doing cocaine and whiskey right off my desk there,” Hardin explains as he peers down, referring to the road manager and singer since joined in musical infamy. Hardin…

Interpol Interpolations MATADOR. DL Remix albums can be tricky: too much reverence for the originals and you risk redundancy; too little of the source material and you alienate the fanbase. The producers re-imagining Interpol’s 2022 LP The Other Side Of Make-Believe for this digital collection, walk that tightrope with grace. Makaya McCraven’s redux of Big Shot City is the most subtle interpolation, paring the track back to brittle funk guitar and itchy rhythms, ceding the spotlight to Paul Banks’ world-wear y vocal. Elsewhere, Daniel Avery chucks most of Greenwich in the bin, recasting the remaining elements as some thrilling, nihilistic club banger, while Jeff Parker re-envisions Passenger as alienated trip-hop, his smudgy breakbeats lending new tension to Banks’ alienated croon. Elsewhere, Water From Your Eyes and Jesu remake their tracks…

WRITING IN the introduction to his recent Bee Gees biography, Children Of The World, Bob Stanley makes what might be the defining point about this deeply strange group. “They never fitted in, never really made sense.” A trio of curious, insecure Isle Of Man-born brothers, Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb were undeniably songwriting geniuses, part of a multimillion-selling pop group with over 20 Top 20 US hits and nine Number 1 singles between 1967 and Maurice’s death in 2003. Yet they were also regarded as figures of ridicule throughout their 35-year career. Even at the peak of their success the Bee Gees were mocked for numerous reasons (Barr y’s falsetto, their toothy smiles, the medallion-man fashions, their defensive, bruised stance in inter views) and never allowed the cachet of cool…

Out Of The Depths Once-in-a-generation voice of pain and catharsis Sinéad O’Connor left us on July 26. IN 2014, SINÉAD O’CONNOR told MOJO, “I guess I’m someone who from the beginning of being a songwriter, I was singing because I had things to get off my chest.” It was something of an understatement. Arguably no singer since John Lennon – one of her chief influences, whom she admired for being “angry… sad, too… and brave” – seemed to be able to alchemise their trauma and pain so boldly into such cathartic and frequently stunning music. Remarkably, there were only six months between the death of O’Connor’s mother – at whose hands she’d suffered years of physical abuse – in a car crash in February 1985 and the 18-year-old singer (born…

Something’s been puzzling me for quite a while. Apart from Bohemian Rhapsody and Unchained Melody (and obviously every instrumental), are there any other big-selling records that don’t mention the title in the lyrics? David Tags Taylor, Thurnscoe, South Yorkshire MOJO says: Excellent question, David. It’s an uncommon situation but it’s not unheard of. Chart hits whose lyrics don’t include the song title include David Bowie’s Space Oddity, Dave & Ansel Collins’ Double Barrel, Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit, The Beatles’ The Ballad Of John And Yoko, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, The Band’s The Weight, Keith West’s Excerpt From A Teenage Opera, Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit, The Smiths’ How Soon Is Now? and Cardiac Arrest by Madness (we were going to include The Legend Of Xanadu by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky,…

Angélique Kidjo FRANCO-BENINESE TRAILBLAZER What music are you currently grooving to? I am always listening to music, all sorts, non-stop, but at the moment it’s KC & The Sunshine Band and The O’Jays – (sings) “Money money money!” [For The Love Of Money] What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Survival. It is so powerful, from the cover with the African flags to a song like So Much Trouble In The World, it still speaks the truth. When I first heard Bob Marley it was a shock. I was at high school and what he was saying and his messages, it was like talking to a friend. And when he died, it was like the light of hope and freedom was…

IIT’ST’S9AM IN California, and Herb Alpert’s taking a break from playing trumpet to take MOJO’s call. Born in 1935 in Los Angeles, he began his professional life in 1957, writing songs for Sam Cooke, Jan & Dean and others. In 1962 he co-founded the storied A&M label, and the same year began a dizzying run of chart success with his Tijuana Brass, hitting US Number 1 as a vocalist with This Guy’s In Love With You in ’68. Accompanied by Lani Hall, his wife of 50 years, he’s still gigging and recording, his embouchure as unmistakable as ever on next month’s Wish Upon A Star, his forty-ninth LP. “I was at the right place at the right time,” reflects Alpert, artist, philanthropist and true hipster, on his musical life. “Which…

“WEWERE these dark weirdos, always standing out,” says Bush Tetras’ singer Cynthia Sley from her home in Queens, NY, assessing the confrontational DIY ensemble she spirited up alongside guitarist Pat Place on the turn-of-the-’80s no wave scene. “Three women up front, and we weren’t the Go-Go’s? We weren’t even The Slits – we were even more androgynous.” Having left behind an occasional but allkiller discography across four decades, Bush Tetras recently highlighted their lasting excellence via 2021’s Rhythm And Paranoia box set. Sley and Place now resurface with only their third LP proper, They Live In My Head, and an umpteenth line-up completed by ex-Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, and, for an upcoming tour, bassist Caitlin ‘Rocky’ O’Riordan, formerly of The Pogues. “We didn’t know how to play… there was…

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1969. THE PLAN had been for the US folk singer Tom Rush to support Fairport Convention at their headlining gig at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls. Then, at the last minute, Rush pulled out. For his two inexperienced replacements – acquaintances from the Soho folk scene – it was a break, but a daunting one. “I’d already played with Nick Drake at Les Cousins [in London’s Soho],” explains Bridget St John today. “We’d sat on the same stoop, not talking together, both ver y comfortable in our silence.” Like Drake, St John was a young, London-based singer-songwriter with mellow pipes and a recently released debut solo LP. Much like Five Leaves Left, Ask Me No Questions was a hushed and introspective collection, rich in images of nature and passing…

Dave Brock: We had a hit with Silver Machine [Number 3 in August 1972]. That opened so many doors for us. The money that we got, we invested back into our live show. It was jolly handy. Doug Smith: It was wonderful when Silver Machine was a hit, and you saw the opening straight away. The BBC made a film of it for Top Of The Pops, at the end of a show at the Dunstable Civic, with the lights on – very unatmospheric. The two cameras were the size of Daleks, with three people on each one and an enormous broadcasting unit outside, the kind you saw at football matches. Andrew Lauder: Things were going very well by then. [Albums] X In Search Of Space had done well [Number…

SEPTEMBER 1967 …Natural Woman Aretha arrives SEPTEMBER 30 She’d spent six years singing jazz, pop and soul on the Columbia label, but the awesome genius of Detroit-raised, churchschooled Aretha Franklin had failed to break through to the record-buying mainstream. Now, nestled in the bosom of Jerry Wexler’s Atlantic Records, and embracing her gospel roots, her career was fully on the ascendant. The title track of her album I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You had been her first Top 10 entry in April; its parent LP had reached Number 2 in May. Then, in June, Franklin had hit US Number 1 with her cover of Otis Redding’s Respect (its writer happily admitted she had made the song her own). Soon after, noted Franklin biographer David Ritz, soul…

HELLO LATE 1986 In 1982, me and my girlfriend were promoting bands at a pub in Sheffield called The Hallamshire. I’d sit at the top of the stairs taking the 50p door money. One night these two lads said, “Can we just sit here and listen?” It was Jarvis Cocker and his mate, Tim Allcard, who had a kind of weird-looking beard. Fast forward a couple of months and we heard about this group Pulp playing at the Crucible – not the one where the snooker’s played. So we went [on October 4, 1982] and it really did blow me away. There was piano, acoustic guitars, tooting trombones, and this lanky git wearing glasses doing this shoulder shuffle dance, talking to the audience between songs. I was gobsmacked, and we…