Tabla de contenidos para December 2024 en MOJO

WE REJOIN DAVID BOWIE IN 1974, IN A CITY on the cusp of musical revolutions. Bowie had moved to New York in April, the same month Television played their first gig at a newish club on the Bowery called CBGB. By August the Ramones, an even fresher and more ramshackle phenomenon, had debuted there too (hopefully you read the full story of that one in MOJO 372). For now, though, Bowie’s voracious taste detectors were focused elsewhere. If his 1970s often seem a relentless and brilliant series of reinventions, 1974 can appear that decade’s most radical year. But as Mark Paytress illustrates in his MOJO cover story this month, Bowie was constantly evolving as much he was completely transforming. R&B had subtly informed Diamond Dogs, and within days of arriving…

“IT FELT LIKE we had to do it: if we didn’t, no-one else was going to,” says Jamie Ellul, a musician-turneddesigner and branding specialist who has co-authored Logo Rhythm – a sumptuous 450-page history of music logos. More than five years in the making, the book spans everyone from Aretha Franklin to Franz Ferdinand, plus these forensically-told highlights… The Yardbirds Arguably the first proper rock emblem, in that it was used on just about all their output. The designer – in 1963 – was Hamish Grimes: fixer, photographer, and suspected author of the infamous ‘Clapton is God’ graffito. He aimed at “quirky and comical”, but it suited all their artistic phases. “They had a consistent logo on everything, just like Love,” says Ellul. The Beat The Beat Girl’s story is…

STEELEYE SPAN meets Henry Cow meets the Wu-Tang Clan? London folk experimentalists Shovel Dance Collective have been delivering an esoteric combination of traditional song, improv and political consciousness-raising since they were drawn together for the first time by the concept of drone folk around Christmas 2020. Drawn from a pool of hearteningly young musicians, Slade art college students and dissident anarcho punks, there are nine Shovel Dancers in total: in alphabetical order, Mataio Austin Dean (guitar, vocals), Joshua Barfoot (bodhrán, hammered dulcimer, percussion, vocals), Jacken Elswyth (banjo, shruti box, vocals), Daniel S Evans (drums, cello, cittern, guitar, piano, pipe organ), Nick Granata (organs, vocals), Oliver Hamilton (violin, vocals), Fidelma Hanrahan (harp, vocals), Tom Hardwick-Allan (harmonica, trombone, vocals), Alex McKenzie (accordion, burdola, clarinet, flute, whistles, vocals). Some come from folkie backgrounds,…

THE SAINTS Messin’ With The Kid (from (I’m) Stranded LP, Harvest, 1977) The Saints’ debut album was a pulse-racing blammo affair nodding to The Stooges, early Stones and Aussie ’60s-garage brutes The Missing Links, except for this spectacularly elegant hymn for the downtrodden, evoking that broken feeling in the Faces’ Debris. “It makes you crawl,” indeed. THE SAINTS This Perfect Day (Harvest single, 1977) The Antipodean emigrés’ first London recording was written by Kuepper in Brisbane the previous Christmas Day while his parents were out at church, on his dad’s classical guitar. Its breakneck chord changes and Bailey’s ferocious attitude have attracted covers by The Fall and Tropical Fuck Storm. THE SAINTS Know Your Product (Harvest single, 1978) Disgusted by the orchestrated brass deployed by early-’70s musos such as Chicago,…

ADAM GRANDUCIEL (THE WAR ON DRUGS) ON YOU WRECK ME: “In high school, Wildflowers [1994] was a Top 40 rock record. And Tom was, what, 44? And You Wreck Me was my song when I was coming of age, eighth or ninth grade. I wore corduroy pants, always thrifting for a pair of cool corduroys. I never wore a pair of jeans until I was 29. So the line about ‘I’ll be the boy in the corduroy pants,’ that was fucking me. And then worlds collided when Dave Grohl played with them on SNL. I remember Mike Campbell playing the big red Gibson 335, and I thought, These guys are cool as shit. I was starting to play guitar, and it was so easy to play along to those songs. It…

MID-APRIL 1974: 22-YEAR-OLD EARL Slick was hungry for work. He’d recently auditioned for Dr. John on a tip from Michael Kamen, his sometime band leader, but it hadn’t led to much. Nevertheless Kamen, Slick’s mentor of sorts, had a good feeling about this one. “You’re gonna get a call from somebody,” he told the guitarist. “It’s a big one, so get your shit together.” “First of all, I’d expected a rehearsal place,” says Slick, “not a dark, empty room at RCA studios in midtown New York City.” After some small talk with an assistant who introduced herself as Coco, he plugged his 1965 SG Junior into one of the two amps there, before a voice came over the monitor: “Put the headphones on. We’re going to play you some tracks.…

Michael Kiwanuka Small Changes POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP TWICE DURING his spellbinding set on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury this summer Michael Kiwanuka attempted to perform the intro to Solid Ground, the penultimate track on his last album Kiwanuka, before his malfunctioning synth forced him to abandon the song. “This is like my worst nightmare,” he sheepishly grinned, before quickly recomposing himself and seamlessly carrying on. But it was a glimpse of the diffident, anxious man – a self-confessed “overthinker” – so often apparent in his songs. Five years have passed since that Mercury-winning third album and this long-gestated successor reflects the hopes and fears of a 37-year-old father of two now living on the English south coast having quit his native London. If the singer has always been confessional, even when…

Dreamer’s Motel TEMPLE OF LEAVES. CD/DL California dreaming on solo LP four. BROADLY A concept LP about fondly-remembered places now impossible to revisit, Dreamer’s Motel sometimes conjures the questing intricacy of Paul Simon’s early ‘world’ music ventures (see Sight And The Sound). Cooder’s Array mbira playing – think a more versatile cousin of the African thumb-piano – is the prominent colour in a joyful, largely major-key palette, while dad Ry’s rich but subtle input on guitar, mandolin and banjo is also EQ’d with a softer focus. Consequently, Joachim and Juliette Commagere’s airy harmonies on Let Me See My Brother Walk and Godspeed Little Children… feel untethered, un-occluded, and the head-clearing, almost tangibly nourishing music of Dreamer’s Motel really breathes. It’s all over in 30 minutes or so, seven quietly exotic songs…

Primal Scream Come Ahead BMG. CD/DL/LP PRIMAL SCREAM were never a band reasonably destined for “mature work”. From 1988’s Stooges/MC5 black-leather ramalama, and ’91’s disco-psych Screama-delica, through to the brutal agit-electronica of 2000’s XTRMNTR, Bobby Gillespie’s team were always too single-minded in their experimental rock’n’roll crusade to reflect upon life beyond it. Thirty years since Motown-stomping Rocks, however, the war-torn Scream are a very different proposition these days from that Glaswegian gang of old, their creative core long since reduced to just Gillespie and guitarist Andrew Innes. After 2016’s Chaosmosis chased the synth-pop Zeitgeist to little commercial reward, Bobby G says he struggled to summon the motivational purpose for another long-playing transformation. It was Belfast producer/soundtrack maestro David Holmes, overseer of 2013’s More Light (their best since XTRMNTR), who cajoled…

The Beatles 1964 US Albums In Mono APPLE CORPS LTD/UMR. LP AMERICA AND BRITAIN are two nations separated by salt water, a common language (per George Bernard Shaw) and different Beatlemanias. The UK phenomenon in 1963 remains the gold standard for pop hysteria, a massive rush of love at the speed of light detonated by a handful of singles and an album, Please Please Me, almost half of which was covers from the club sets. The former colonies were late to the party – EMI’s Yankee arm, Capitol Records, spent that year exercising its right of first refusal – but we caught up fast. And this deluxe, vinyl set of The Beatles’ first six American studio LPs from mono-master tapes in period sleeves (also available separately) – is hardly the…

SPOOKED AS a child by The Gift, John Cale’s claustrophobic tale of a guy posting himself to a lover, with (spoiler!) fatal results, on White Light/White Heat, your correspondent developed an early wariness towards The Velvet Underground and Cale’s voice. Now I enjoy its chewy languor, rolling like Welsh hills, but for a surprisingly long time I found it unsettling, and gave his 1970s records the swerve while being aware that, stylistically, it was a restless decade for him. Now, a chance to fix the gap in my knowledge. I enjoyed recent exposure to flawed but addictive 1970 solo debut, Vintage Violence, but I knew its country-rock quirkiness dissatisfied Cale, so he’d flipped into avant-garde territory, collaborating with composer Terry Riley on 1971’s Church Of Anthrax, an album that haunted…

MC5: An Oral Biography Of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band Brad Tolinski, Jaan Uhelszki, Ben Edmonds OMNIBUS. £25 THE STORY of the MC5 – the pioneering Detroit band who blazed a trail that pointed toward punk – is riddled with missed opportunities, bad breaks and self-sabotage. The book that became MC5: An Oral Biography Of Rock’s Most Revolutionary Band nearly became a posthumous chapter in that doomed saga. Former Creem editor and MC5 confidante Ben Edmonds started work on a biography way back in 1990, labouring on the project until his death in 2016. Edmonds’ Creem colleagues Brad Tolinski and Jaan Uhelszki have turned his research into a finished book every bit as alive as the group itself. Death nevertheless hangs over this oral history. Founding guitarist Wayne Kramer died earlier…

DANCER, SINGER AND choreographer CAT (below, b.Catherine Glover, 1964) worked with Prince from 1987 to 1989. Among her credits was choreographing the U Got The Look video, taking part in the Sign ‘O’ The Times and Lovesexy tours, and rapping, at Prince’s insistence, on hit single Alphabet Street. She also appeared on the withdrawn Black Album, though a mooted Prince-produced solo LP did not appear. She later worked with Bomb The Bass’s Tim Simenon. BASSIST DICK DIAMONDE (b. 1948) co-founded Australian pop group The Easybeats in 1964. Born in Hilversum, the Netherlands, Diamonde’s family emigrated to Australia when he was four. He formed The Easybeats with fellow emigres including Harry Vanda and George Young, who later produced AC/DC. The group found international success with 1966 single Friday On My Mind before…

NOVEMBER 28 John Lennon joins Elton John on-stage at Madison Square Garden for three songs, having lost a bet that recent 45 Whatever Gets You Thru The Night would not be a hit. In his last public live performance, Lennon plays the hit, Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds and I Saw Her Standing There. Elton and Lennon have contributed to Ringo’s Goodnight Vienna, which is out this month. On November 2, George Harrison’s North American tour, the first ex-Beatle US jaunt, began in Vancouver. Ravi Shankar supports. This month, Paul McCartney & Wings chart with Junior’s Farm: on November 13 McCartney appears on ITV’s This Is Your Life in honour of his boxer pal and Band On The Run cover star John Conteh.…

HELLO SEPTEMBER 2013 King Crimson was about the third concert I saw, at Watford Town Hall [on July 15, 1971]. I was 13. A mate had played me 21st Century Schizoid Man and it completely freaked me out. I left thinking that somehow my life had changed. Later I worked with [King Crimson co-founder] Peter Sinfield, and in 2002 there was the idea of ex-King Crimson members playing the older material [as the 21st Century Schizoid Band]. They didn’t have a singer or someone to play Robert [Fripp]’s guitar parts and Pete said, “Well, I know this guy…” – that’s how I ended up, ironically, being the only non-King Crimson member. It was a bit of a nightmare, but it became a bonding thing with Robert, who became like my…

WHEN DAVID BOWIE SAT DOWN WITH MOJO IN 2002, he described Diamond Dogs as encapsulating, “My usual basket of apocalyptic vision, isolation, being terribly miserable.” Paul Du Noyer, the interviewer and MOJO’s founding editor, pressed the self-deprecating Bowie on a certain strain of apocalyptic visions that had recurred throughout his work. “Dystopian, absolutely,” he smirked. “I went to the doctor’s for it.” As in so many ways, Bowie was both a trailblazer and a product of his times. Nuclear dread, urban alienation, chemically-induced anomie and a strong reading list all fed into his work; preoccupations shared by many of his contemporaries and descendants. This, then, is the blasted megalopolis inhabited by our latest MOJO CD, Future Legends, a musical interzone where art-rock, glam, prog and futurism meet and mutate. Where…

Haunted by bereavement and disintegration (and Disintegration), The Cure’s Songs Of A Lost World – their first album in 16 years – is finally with us. But what’s it all about? And will it be Robert Smith’s last? “Often seen as the soundtrack to an eternally doomy adolescence,” judges Victoria Segal, “The Cure might just be coming of age.” “I know in my head that I am the sum of a multitude of younger versions of me… but there are moments when I just can’t accept it.”ROBERT SMITH THERE IS NO blue plaque at The Railway in Crawley, no photographs celebrating the most culturally significant moment in the pub’s history: the first official gig by The Cure (formerly Easy Cure) in 1978. The band’s original drummer, Lol Tolhurst, has spoken…

IN 1985, the Manic Street Preachers had their first rehearsal and wrote their first song, Aftermath, about the miners’ strike. How does it feel to be on the cusp of 40 years’ active service, asks MOJO, when checking in with James Dean Bradfield? “To be honest,” he says, “I feel an immense sense of freedom.” This sense of open vistas is ingrained in their latest long-player, whose title was still unknown at press time. The group convened at their Door To The River studio in Caerleon outside Newport in late 2022, working in chunks of time as gigs, family life and bassist Nicky Wire’s 2023 solo LP Intimism took precedence. That said, Bradfield adds, “we started with a bit more urgency than usual. Without knowing it, we had five or…

Elkie Brooks The Grand Dame of blues, rock and jazz hails Dino & Sembello’s Pearl’s A Singer (A&M, 1974). It was 1976. I was in AIR Studios in London with my producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. We were looking for songs for my second LP [1977’s] Two Days Away. Jerry said he had one to play me, he knew I liked blues and jazz so he wasn’t sure if I’d like it because it was more in a country style, but he knew I was open-minded and I already liked some country. So he put on Pearl’s A Singer by Dino & Sembello. Ralph Dino and John Sembello were singers and writers in America. They’d already written songs for The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Turtles and Tim Hardin and they…

1 WILLIE NELSON DO YOU REALIZE?? Aged 91, reed-strong Willie sees anew the tripping-balls revelations of The Flaming Lips’ 2002 gem. Beautiful. Find it: streaming services 2 STEVIE NICKS THE LIGHTHOUSE A grave call to defend women’s rights after the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe Vs Wade, this moves from a whisper to a roar. Find it: YouTube 3 KAKTUS EINARSSON GUMBRI (WITH DAMON ALBARN) Intriguing Icelander and friend rhyme wryly about life’s magic over mulchy dance-pop. From Lobster Coda, out this month. Find it: YouTube 4 P.J. HARVEY HOLLOWAY From Dickens stage adaption London Tide, actor Bella McLean voices Our Mutual Friend’s cash-strapped Bella Wilfer, reflecting on what’s valuable, to a pure-P.J. soundtrack. Find it: YouTube 5 EX-VÖID SWANSEA The Richard and Linda Thompson of 2020s indie grot follow…

“I AM AS BROAD-MINDED AS THE NEXT man, but I was surprised to see bare breasts on the cover of Supertramp’s Indelibly Stamped album. I was also astounded to see contraceptives on the cover of Birth Control’s album. Are album covers going to get more obscene? If so, something should be done about it.” So began a letter from outraged reader C Allen of Tooting that appeared in the issue of British weekly music paper Melody Maker published on July 1, 1971. The week previously, Supertramp had released their second album – its sleeve featuring the bare, heavily tattooed chest of one Marion Hollier – and receiving, as Sounds newspaper pointed out, “a noticeably cooler reception” than the band’s self-titled debut a year earlier. Salacious artwork aside, the 10 tracks…

Billy Duffy: We’d had a hit with She Sells Sanctuary and were in pre-production for the Love album. Nigel Preston, our drummer, had got into some serious Class A drug use, so Mark Brzezicki from Big Country stepped in. The last two songs we worked on were Love and Phoenix, and Mark lit up these heavy riffs with his playing. Ian [Astbury] heard it, and thought it was the best thing ever, particularly Phoenix. Jamie Stewart: Suddenly we regained our focus. There was a lot of pendulum-swinging in our career, coming in and out of sync. But with those tracks we seemed to get it together. BD: We began to develop this idea of mixing rock, goth and disco. But Love was a weird set-up: the album was recorded on…

THE WAY BOWIE told it, there would be no Diamond Dogs if not for George Orwell’s widow Sonia. In September 1973 he began working on a musical adaptation of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with playwright Tony Ingrassia. The following month he debuted a song-inprogress, 1984/Dodo, on-stage in London at the punningly titled 1980 Floor Show. In November he told William S Burroughs it would be a TV special. He was to play Orwell’s unhappy rebel Winston Smith, with Marianne Faithfull rumoured for his hedonistic lover Julia. Yet within weeks the project was dead and Bowie was building a new home for the orphaned songs: Diamond Dogs. Speaking to Circus magazine in 1976, Bowie blamed Sonia Orwell for the change of plan. “She was the biggest upper-class snob I’ve ever met in…

Peter Perrett The Cleansing DOMINO. CD/DL/LP YOU WOULD need to be made of marble not to pick up on the deep regret that churns underneath The Cleansing. “You’re just an old man/Who went too far out to sea,” Peter Perrett sings on Mixed Up Confucius, while All That Time doubles down on that sorrowful drift. “All that time I thought I was having fun,” the former Only One sighs over enervated piano and strings, “just another wasted life.” That’s before Art Is A Disease, a cautionary tale about flogging yourself for a dream that might never pay out more than a handful of buttons and a pile of dead calendars. The highs and lows of Perrett’s life are well-defined: a bright bolt of success with The Only Ones and their…

Stick In The Wheel A Thousand Pokes FROM HERE. CD/DL/LP Crafty Cockneys reject the English pastoral. The pearly queen and king of modernist London song, Nicola Kearey and Ian Carter deliver a filthy pea-souper with their fourth studio album, a determinedly ungentrified vision of misrule from the capital’s margins. With thudding percussion, distorted guitars and eerie Auto-Tune deepening Stick In The Wheel’s slightly gleeful vision of a world galloping out of control, A Thousand Pokes stirs up old ballads and broadsides (Brisk Lad or sucker’s lament Cracks), sentimental street songs (Lavender; What Can The Matter Be?) and political material (Watercress-O) into an apocalyptic Bertolt Brecht stew: knees up, Mother Courage. “We’re born to walk on rotten ground,” Kearey states mournfully on Burnt Walk, and here Stick In The Wheel are…

Juliet Lawson Boo SOUVENIR, 1973 IN 1971, London-born singer-songwriter Juliet Lawson was looking at a five-album deal with Island Records. “I did a wonderful session one afternoon with Paul Samwell-Smith, the first time I’d ever been into a studio,” she says today. “Then he left to produce a Carly Simon album in America, and it all fell through…”Had the Island deal come off, and put her in the company of John and Beverley Martyn, Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, it’s likely Lawson’s debut album Boo would have found itself a celebrated strand in that storied, folk-informed moment of British music. Instead, it sank without trace. In her early twenties, Lawson says she had only the vaguest notions of making it in music. Having listened to Broadway musicals as a kid,…

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band Dir: Thom Zimny DISNEY+. S WHEN DIRECTOR/EDITOR Thom Zimny’s latest collaboration with Team Springsteen premiered mid-September at the Toronto Film Festival, Patti Scialfa’s quiet admission midway through the film that she has multiple myeloma, a blood cancer that attacks the immune system, stole the headlines. A week later, Bruce turned 75. Back in February, Springsteen’s 98-year-old mother Adele died and a clip of them dancing to Glenn Miller’s In The Mood is the coda to this methodical account of the E Street Band’s post-Covid world tour. The Boss has been reassessing his work and reflectingon “the white hot light of an oncoming train” rushing his way since the loss of bandmates Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici, his 2016 autobiography and 2020’s…

…after STEVIE WONDER’s (right) September single Can We Fix Our Nation’s Broken Heart, film has emerged of him and George Clinton duetting on The Parliaments’ 1967 single (I Wanna) Testify …of his new 2025 LP, Bauhaus’s PETE MURPHY says, “it’s produced by Youth and has big names guesting” …PETE TOWNSHEND may have assured MOJO that The Who “aren’t done yet,” but he’s admitted that, “I am in a period of writers’ block” …work goes on for the long-gestating BRIAN WILSON/FRED VAIL country album Cows In The Pasture. As well as a documentary featuring Wilson and Van Dyke Parks among others, a live show is also planned …guitarist Carmen Vandenberg has confirmed to Total Guitar that she is playing on new recordings by MORRISSEY …in September, Liam Gallagher posted that OASIS…

KNOWN FOR years as a voice on Scottish radio and TV – as well running his own Radio Six International station – broadcaster Tony Currie has a new objective. To wit, he’s resurrected historic British label Pye, erstwhile home of The Kinks, Sandie Shaw and Petula Clark, among many others.“I always cherished Pye,” says Currie from the label’s headquarters in the Inner Hebrides. “I was heavily into big pop instrumentals, and they had John Schroeder, Laurie Johnson, Tony Hatch… I was very sorry in 1980 when the Pye trademark disappeared. I found out later that the owners were too mean to pay the £2,000 to renew it.” Fast forward to 2016 and an idle search on Companies House, and learning that Pye Records had been dissolved, he duly established his…

“People think, ‘These guys must be really fucked up.’”BEN ROMANS-HOPCRAFT, WARMDUSCHER “I TOOK A LONG hit on the pipe,” intones a lugubrious Edinburgh brogue. “The 5-MeO-DMT is smoother than the conventional stuff… I felt my body slowly dissolve into digital dots…” Describing the “pre-birth experience” of a short but profound DMT trip is Irvine Welsh, providing a spoken-word intro to fifth Warmduscher album Too Cold To Hold. The Trainspotting novelist is a big fan of the south London band, having met frontman Clams Baker and synth-prodder Quinn Whalley on a spree in Miami some years back. “It was us, Irvine and the producer Arthur Baker,” recalls the singer. “It turns out Irvine’s really into boxing. We text each other about the fights.” Along with languid Warmduscher bassist Ben Romans-Hopcraft, Baker is…

ON A MUGGY EVENING IN SUBTROPICAL BRISBANE IN JUNE 1976, A surly band of late-teenagers collectively known as The Saints entered a local studio, in a despairing effort to make their roar of frustration heard. Even within Australia, their home city was regarded as a backwards country town by the more sophisticated folks in Sydney and Melbourne, and its state government under Queensland’s right-wing premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen was notoriously repressive, using state-of-emergency measures to quash trades union and anti-war demonstrations. After convening at Corinda State High School in 1971, singer Chris Bailey, guitarist Ed Kuepper and drummer Ivor Hay had already been chiselling at a fierce aural response to the geo-political situation for five years, their dissatisfaction further exacerbated by Brisbane’s moribund music scene. Lame boogie-rock covers combos prevailed, and…

“I NEVER LISTENED to the first two Supertramp albums, and I still haven’t,” says Ken Scott. That was probably a good thing; in truth, neither suggested a band capable of making an era-defining album. And yet, Crime Of The Century is just that. The legendary producer is quick to state that there was no master plan when he entered Trident Studios with the band in 1974. His instinct, encouragement and deft touch proved enough. “I knew the band were special, the material was special, so the album had to be special,” he tells MOJO today. “We had to go above and beyond for it to stand a chance. Which is exactly what we all did.” By his own admission, producer Scott is “a pain in the arse” when it comes…

STAN LYNCH WAS ON THE BEACH IN Santa Monica when he realised his life had changed, that his adolescent rock star dreams were suddenly real. Lynch and another drummer friend, Robert Williams, had been jogging down the California shoreline when they heard one of Lynch’s drum breaks blasting from a transistor radio. Tickled, they stopped to listen. That’s when the duo noticed that three nearby radios were each playing separate singles from Damn The Torpedoes, the third album by Lynch’s band, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers: Refugee, Here Comes My Girl, Don’t Do Me Like That. In the dawning days of 1980, this wasn’t a blip; this was a phenomenon. “I’m from fuckin’ Florida, and the last thing I remember, I’m playing in a titty bar for 50 bucks a…

ON THEIR current 8424 tour, Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy celebrate 40 years since they retired their Death Cult moniker and embraced an unknown future. “I don’t think of it as a retrospective, or an anniversary, though,” Astbury tells MOJO. “I don’t need a cake. ‘8424’ is just a convenient moniker. I like how it looks like it could be a year in the future, like a date out of Blade Runner or something.” As far as Astbury is concerned, even at 62, the same fire burns within that produced the songs on Love and Electric. “I’ve never felt that sense of entitlement,” he insists. “I was always the most earnest person in the room. And I’m pushing for a future for this band where we can really, truly incubate…

Amyl And The Sniffers Cartoon Darkness ROUGH TRADE. CD/DL/LP MOJO WAS straight out of the traps in early 2018 when, with their first two EPs packaged as the Big Attraction LP, Amyl And The Sniffers were set to visit these shores for the very first time. Our profile caught them full of youthful piss and vinegar, their fashion-defying rat’s-tail mullets as fresh and nasty as their old-school street punk sounds. That was over six years ago, after which two more studio albums have revealed steady growth – the last, 2021’s Comfort To Me, providing a noticeably thicker, heavier, marginally more metal-y backdrop for Amy Taylor’s profane, bolshy, sex-charged diaries of life in the goon-sack sewer of Melbourne’s punk demimonde. Which begs the question: how do you continue to develop…

Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, Hans Kjorstad Dream Trio LEAVING. CD/DL/LP Three avant-jazz improvisors push the boundaries on intimate set recorded in Japan. Having reworked Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill on The Doober (with bassist Sam Wilkes) and explored bossa nova on The Room (with guitarist Fabiano do Nascimento), Sam Gendel’s third collaborative album of 2024 is his most unorthodox yet. Alternating between wind controller and soprano sax, his dexterous cascades of notes are punctuated by unexpected flashes of skronk as he weaves between Bock’s udo synth and Kjorstad’s subtle violin. While a cheerful sense of abandon runs through the liquid phraseology of India and glitchy, microtonal Charango, it’s often hard to determine where one player ends and the other begins – particularly amid the Sakamoto-like drift of FallsLake. Elsewhere, the…

Retrospective: Selected Recordings 1973-2023 BMG. CD/DL/LP 81-track celebration of the former Roxy frontman’s 50-year solo career, plus outtakes CD. THERE’S ALWAYS been something of Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes about Bryan Ferry; the meticulous technique, the suave style, and those rare moments where we glimpse the flawed individual behind the performance. Listening to this 5-CD journey through Ferry’s past, from ’70s cover-artist alchemist, to ’80s ambient ghost and the arch ’20s jazz trickster of The Bryan Ferry Orchestra, it’s easy to be dazzled by the smooth, immaculate surfaces. Thankfully, the collection’s fifth CD, a selection of recent experiments and old outtakes, shakes us out of our reverie. From a brilliantly tense 1977 cover of the Detroit Emeralds’ 1972 disco hit Feel The Need, to a Velvets-drone re-murking of Dylan’s She Belongs…

1976 UMR. CD/LP Lizzy’s pivotal year, heard across five CDs of remixes, demos, outtakes and live tracks. REMARKABLY, MORE Lizzy gold surfaces. This time it’s from 1976, year of both Jailbreak and Johnny The Fox, the best studio LPs featuring both Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson. Jailbreak’s piano-led outtake Brian’s Number finds the truculent Gorham in unusually tender mode, while alt. take 2 of Don’t Believe A Word drips with confessional danger. May 1976 had seen Phil Lynott’s hepatitis nix a US tour that would have cemented The Boys Are Back In Town’s hit single status, but he wrote parts of Johnny The Fox in his hospital bed, later finessing songs about old flames of Robertson and Gorham (Borderline; Sweet Marie). Fiery radio sessions and seedling demos bring context, while sleevenotes by…

HE PLAYED bass lines generations of listeners can recognise in a heartbeat, but session musician Herbie Flowers was no gear fetishist. He said that he’d only ever owned three instruments: a secondhand tuba, an English-made double bass and a Fender Jazz Bass. By such modest means, musical history was made. Born Brian Flowers in Isleworth on May 19, 1938, he recalled an early encounter with a pair of headphones, and pressing the earpieces close to better hear the low end. He started his national service in the RAF aged 18, where he earned his nickname. He stayed for nine years, playing tuba and then double bass as a bandsman. As a civilian he played jazz and worked on the Queen Elizabeth cruise liner, acquiring an electric bass in New York.…

FROM LEGENDARY rock’n’roll audio specialists Marshall, Minor IV earbuds Fare small in size but big on sound. Featuring the classic Marshall look, the Minor IV brings outstanding acoustic performance and expertly balanced sound, while their snug fit can be worn for long periods. They also pack 30-plus hours of wireless play time, connect to multiple devices, and allow easy playback navigation and call management. Interaction is also customisable in the Marshall app, and they’re geared up for next-generation Bluetooth LE Audio. Worth £119 each, we have FOUR sets to give away. How to enter: complete the crossword and take the letters from each coloured square and rearrange them to form the name of a musician. Visit www.mojo4music.com/crossword and fill out the form, along with your answer, in the provided field.…