Table of contents for January 2023 in MOJO

THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO HAVING TURNED 90 in the summer of this year, illustrious pop artist Peter Blake is to have a concert staged in his honour, on December 2 at London’s Royal Festival Hall, organised by fan-turned-collaborator, Paul Weller. “I just thought, We’ve got to do a tribute gig for him,” Weller tells MOJO. “So, I just called round a few people, to see who was up for it.” Appearing alongside Weller are Madness, Noel Gallagher, Roger Daltrey, Chrissie Hynde and Baxter Dury. Notably, most of the musicians on the bill have worked with Blake on cover art down the years (ranging from Oasis’s 2006 compilation Stop The Clocks, through to Madness’s Oui Oui, Si Si, Ja Ja, Da Da in 2012, and The…

1 ROBERT FORSTER TENDER YEARS Knowing restraint and shimmer from the ex-Go-Between’s new LP The Candle And The Flame; about time, living out a novel and the love of a life. Find it: streaming services 2 JAMES BRANDON LEWIS SOMEDAY WE’LL ALL BE FREE The Buffalo jazz sax ace – with electric cello and drums – channels Donny Hathaway’s song of spiritual survival with grit and compassion. New album Eye Of I in early 2023. Find it: Bandcamp 3 ALTIN GÜN LEYLIM LEY Long, louche, and super-catchy new single from the Netherlands-based Turkish sextet: a deeply percussive, highly groovy blend of sax and synths. Find it: streaming services 4 QUEEN FACE IT ALONE Sparse, cloistered woe rescued from the vaults, as the late Freddie reflects on finality with smouldering…

FEATURING: Nick Cave, Weyes Blood, Wet Leg, Michael Head, Crazy Horse, Paul Weller, Oumou Sangaré, Jeff Tweedy, Brett Anderson, Giles Martin, “Johnny Rotten” and more! 50 MOOR MOTHER Jazz Codes (ANTI-) A layered and intellectually curious investigation of black musical history, Camae Ayewa’s eighth solo album as Moor Mother interrogated ideas of jazz, blues and rap without ever coming remotely close to nostalgic cliché. And while the Philadelphian’s uproarious instincts – seen so explosively in her free jazz group, Irreversible Entanglements – were still tangible, her poetics and theorising elided into something more amniotic, drifting closer to the nu-soul of Erykah Badu at her most abstracted. Standout track: Evening 49 MIDLAKE For The Sake Of Bethel Woods (BELLA UNION) Nine years after the Texans’ last album, and 10 since the…

40 THE MARS VOLTA The Mars Volta (CLOUDS HILL) Omar Rodríguez-López and Cedric Bixler-Zavala appeared to have shut down their frantically extravagant Mars Volta project in 2012; subsequent reunions were as a new group, Antemasque, and their oldest one, At The Drive-In. The Mars Volta were rebooted, however, for this surprising and excellent seventh album – one which largely replaced the hardcore prog derangement of old with glossier, funkier, Latin-tinged FM rock. The band’s “Style Council moment”, claimed Bixler-Zavala. Standout track: Blacklight Shine 39 ELVIS COSTELLO & THE IMPOSTERS The Boy Named If (EMI) Some fine, mitigated retrospection from D.P. McManus in 2022, as he resurrected his first band, Rusty, to complete the album they never made in 1972. Solo album 32, The Boy Named If also drew on ’70s…

1 THE BEATLES Revolver (Special Edition) (UNIVERSAL) WITH NO REPUTATION to massage à la Let It Be, Apple’s Revolver reboot faced a tougher task: adding value to many fans’ favourite Beatles album – almost as many people’s pick for Greatest Album Ever. The formula was familiar: a Giles Martin/Sam Okell remix added presence and breadth, a powerful picture of The Beatles getting heavy, plus fascinating outtakes that included sizzling fuzz guitar versions of Got To Get You Into My Life and poignant Yellow Submarine demos. Full-fat Super Deluxe editions (5-CDs or 4-LPs according to taste) included a mono version for groovy Luddites and a lavish and detailed book. All but the 1-disc versions featured new stereo mixes of Paperback Writer and Rain, but again you needed to go Super Deluxe…

“YOU’RE ON THE SPINE-TINGLING ROLLER COASTER OVER THERE AT THE AMUSEMENT PARK, WHILE ALL OF MANKIND CRIES MERCY.” NTHIS SONG YOU’RE HEMMED IN, GOING round and round the loop, doing full turns – emp-ty-headed, blind to where you’re going and stum-bling through the dark. You’re loaded to the rafters, smacking, and slapping at things, buttoned down, no holds barred, going non-stop in a direct line, and everybody’s patting you on the butt. You’re on the spine-tingling roller coaster over there at the amusement park. Thumbing a ride on the Ferris wheel, shooting ducks and winning kewpie dolls, while all of mankind cries mercy – every race, creed, and colour – rich and poor, from all quarters, from all over creation. Funny thing you’re detached from it all, scoffing at everything…

Marcia Aitken/ June Lodge ★★★ Reggae Impact/ Someone Loves You Honey DOCTOR BIRD. CD Top value reggae twofer (both Joe Gibbs productions) pairs expanded versions of Marcia Aitken’s 1981 LP with June ‘JC’ Lodge’s 1980 LP, titled for her cover of Charley Pride’s hit. JB Black Sabbath ★★★★ Mob Rules BMG. CD/LP From 1981, Ronnie James Dio’s second Sabbath album deserves more kudos for its proto-grunge raw bludgeon, especially on hi-aggro standouts Turn Up The Night and the title track. Now remastered with bonus live discs; as is 1980’s more celebrated Heaven And Hell, featuring the peerless Neon Knights. KC Hot Hot Heat ★★★★ Make Up The Breakdown SUB POP. CD/DL/LP Victoria BC quartet’s 2002 debut LP met The Strokes’ NY cool head-on with West Coast exuberance. Recorded with veracity…

Surrender ★★★★ Bono HUTCHINSON HEINEMANN . £25 THE DAMP feeling between his legs woke Bono from his slumber, followed quickly by a fast-dawning terror. Had he wet himself? Had he wet himself on Frank Sinatra’s settee? The moment encapsulates the charm of Surrender – the U2 singer’s memoir resounds with the clang, bang, smash of VIP name-dropping, but is undercut with constant admissions of the writer’s uncoolness and capacity for cringe. In the end, Bono, smashed on Rat Pack-sized Scotches, had just spilt his drink, but still: Frank Sinatra’s settee. At over 550 pages long it is not a humble thing, but Bono’s book – part ballad of the band, part personal-growth handbook – is a confession of sorts. He concedes the 1997 PopMart tour’s parody of consumerism was tin-eared;…

DECEMBER 9 “It started becoming a bit of a bore,” grumbled Who drummer Keith Moon in the month’s Rolling Stone. He was talking about Tommy, the spiritually searching double-LP rock opera of “that deaf, dumb and blind kid” who “sure plays a mean pinball” which was released to huge success in 1969. “We played it 18 months non-stop.” Yet, earlier in the year, all the band except Moon had teamed up with Chicago-born Rod Stewart producer Lou Reizner to record a new version of Tommy with the London Symphony Orchestra and the English Chamber Choir. Joining Pete Townshend and titular lead Roger Daltrey was a plethora of guest stars: Sandy Denny sang It’s A Boy, while 1921 saw Daltrey, Maggie Bell, Steve Winwood and Graham Bell do the honours. Otherwise,…

ON JANUARY 10, 1997, Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers took the stage in San Francisco’s Fillmore Audito-rium, opening with a pair of hits, I Won’t Back Down and Jammin’ Me, before veering way off their usual arena-show script into a full even-ing of deep tracks and bar-band covers. And it was like that for the next four weeks: a historic residency of 20 nights in that psychedelic in-timacy packed with songs by Bo Diddley, The Zombies and Ray Charles; Petty rarities and guest slots by idols such as John Lee Hooker and The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn. Petty wanted to “get away from the land of videos and records for awhile,” he told Bay Area journalist Joel Selvin ahead of the run, quoted in the latter’s linernotes in new box set,…

LONDON-BASED duo Jockstrap accept their name is a polarising one. “Some people have said the name’s perfect,” offers producer/keyboard-player Taylor Skye. “Some have said it’s horrendous. It was inspiing for us because it was quite rebellious to begin with.” That rebellion involved a part-rejection of the academic musical values that were instilled in Skye and singer/ violinist Georgia Ellery at the Guildhall School Of Music And Drama, where the pair met in 2016. The former was studying electronic composition, the latter jazz, and for some of their lecturers the stylistically restless music they began making as Jockstrap – which veers wildly between traditional singer-song-writing approaches and dubstep-inspired cut-ups – seemed like a joke. “My teachers sort of turned their noses up at it,” laughs Ellery, who also plays in Black Country,…

RUST NEVER SLEEPS and neither, it would seem, does Neil Young. Over the past 12 months the 76-year-old has released a steady glut of music, both old and new, at a Stakhanovite work rate. In less than a year we’ve had two brand new Crazy Horse albums – Barn and the recent, Rick Rubin-pro-duced WorldRecord – plus a legendary unreleased Crazy Horse set from 2001, Toast (see MOJO’s Best Reissues Of 2022 on page 56). In May, Young dusted off two live LPs recorded in 1971, plus one from 1974, then in August put out Noise & Flowers, a fourth live set, this one recorded in 2019 with Promise Of The Real. Not to mention taking on streaming service Spotify and compiling a bespoke CD for MOJO readers, it’s been…

FEW PEOPLE CAN have thought they would ever witness a Joni Jam. Paul McCartney, Elton John and Chaka Khan were among the music icons who, off and on since 2018, have been summoned to Mitchell’s Bel-Air living room to join her and a loose confederation of singers, songwriters and session aces as she worked to sing or play guitar with friends for the first time since a brain aneurysm in 2015 almost killed her. But would ordinary fans ever see the like? Writer and film director Cameron Crowe offered up tantalising titbits in a rare interview with Mitchell for the Los Angeles Times, linked to the 50th birthday of her first masterpiece, Blue. He described Elton John, sat on a couch with David Furnish, stunned to hear Mitchell’s voice singing…

1 MICHAEL HEAD & THE RED ELASTIC BAND Dear Scott (MODERN SKY) THE HISTORY OF popular music is rich in tales of triumph over adversity. Michael Head, however, has been a master of that narrative for 40 years. In his previous bands, The Pale Fountains and Shack, he overcame heroin addiction, grief, financial apocalypse and even the loss of an album’s master tape in a hire car to deliver a string of cult classics. Butfor Dear Scott, the Liverpudlian’s second solo album without his guitarist brother John by his side, Head faced a new array of adversaries, including a broken heart and alcoholism. “That was close,” he recalls, “the detox almost killed me, but getting off the sauce gave me a chance.” Clean and sober, Head teamed up with producer…

Rick Wakeman: My dad was a great pianist. He said classical training will give you technique, but play in as many different styles as you can, so I did: dance bands, jazz, folk, blues, even country and western, to understand why people liked it. Chas Cronk: Dave Sims, who owned the Music Bargain Centre in Ealing, told me about this great keyboard player. I saw Rick play the likes of Mustang Sally in a little dancehall, and in a posher band at the Top Rank ballroom, and he was astounding. I gave Rick his first session, for the soul singer Jimmy Thomas, produced by Tony Visconti [in 1966]. Rick had this arpeggio thing, even when he was playing a soul classic, which blew everyone away. RW: I told [Visconti’s boss]…

Esbjörn Svensson ★★★★ HOME.S ACT. CD/DL/LP Recently unearthed solo album from late EST founder and pianist is a philosophical revelation. Recorded in his basement, weeks before his sudden passing in 2008, HOME.S is Svensson’s only known solo recording. Renowned for his spine-tingling alchemy with Dan Berglund and Magnus Öström in e.s.t., Svensson’s knack for conjuring haunting memorials is strikingly vivid amid the tinkling Bach-like melodies of Alpha and tear-lashed melancholy of Gamma, mini-symphonies of invention that capture its creator at his most philosophical and conversational. Untethered from e.s.t.’s dramatic build-ups, frenetic hooks and rhythmic propulsion, the interweaving patterns and high-wire sleights of hand of Theta and Eta similarly fizz with Monk-like idiosyncrasies, the latter marrying a dissonant bass figure and a stately top line with goose pimple-raising intensity. Less reliant…

The Id The Inner Sounds Of The Id RCA VICTOR, 1967 APPEARING ON such gnarly ’60s psych comps as Mayhem & Psychosis, Turds On A Bum Ride and Mind Blowers Volume 1, The Id’s oedipal berserker Boil The Kettle, Mother has sat for decades next to the acid-garage likes of The Chob, The Jelly Bean Bandits and The Lollipop Shoppe. However. “When we started this project, there was no mention of ‘psychedelic,’” says no-nonsense bassist Glenn Kastner today. “Shit, we didn’t even know what ‘psychedelic’ was. We weren’t into drugs and all that kind of crap… we didn’t go in with the idea of recording a psychedelic album at all, we went in to record an album with a new beat!” The key musicians in the group met in Green…

A persuasive new biography explores musical innovation, racism and toxic masculinity. By Mat Snow. Chuck Berry: An American Life ★★★★★ RJ Smith OMNIBUS. £25 THERE’S A chilling incident detailed in this new Chuck Berry biography when the middle-aged rock’n’roll legend picks up three local girls – “simple people, not worldly” – near his native St Louis, Missouri where the Midwest shades into the South. They go back to his place and an orgiastic good time is had by all, but suddenly his mood switches to angry and glassy, with the shocked, crying girls ordered to grab their things and go: “Now you know what it feels like to be t reated like a nigger.” The great strength of this thought-provok-ing biography is not just that it’s a thorough chronicle, nor…

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. Write to us at: MOJO, Bauer Media Publishing, The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London, NW1 2PL. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk IT’S BECOMING SOMETHING OF AN ANNUAL tradition to frame the year’s music, and the year of MOJOs, as a respite from the anxieties and iniquities of the world right now. But here we are again, surveying the artists and records that kept us more or less sane in 2022, and hoping that our magazine has provided a similar service for you all. This MOJO, like all MOJOs, is an unabashed celebration of the culture we love. But if there’s a prevailing theme that emerges from our Review Of 2022, it’s one of artists triumphing against the odds, working their way through various tragedies and adversities, and…

WHEN DEAD Kennedys romped through Elvis’s Viva Las Vegas for 1980’s Fresh Fruit For Rotting Veg-etables, they lampooned America’s favourite adult playground. But what goes around comes around, and The Punk Rock Museum opens there in January. Its mission statement: to “proudly shove in your face the history, culture, and absurdity of rock’n’roll’s bastard step-child.” Admiring precious rock-related objects with historic provenance is no new thing, of course, and the world’s institutions have long curat-ed the broad gamut of musical inter-ests, from Cleveland’s top-drawer Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum P(where aesthetes can see Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper’s jacket, Hendrix’s couch and the ZZ Top Eliminator car) down to the more specialist likes of the sadly defunct Tokyo Wax Museum, which boasted effigies of Ash Ra Tempel, Faust and Zappa, among…

RICH RUTH is telling MOJO the story of how he moved to Nashville. “I’d played in bands in high school in Toledo,” he explains, “then in college I was in a group called Kansas Bible Company with 12 people in it. We started to take ourselves seriously so we moved to Nashville. It was cheap. Jack White had just moved there. We stuck at it for a solid six years. We made a record in a studio with the producer, we went out on the road for 120 days a year…” At a certain point he starts laughing at what, in 2022, now sounds like the most unsustainable business model for a band. He’s talking to MOJO from the lobby of a hotel in Langenthal, Switzerland, on a solo tour,…

THE BARTENDER WITH THE BUSHY BROWN BEARD DOES NOT KNOW WHAT TO make of his club tonight. It is a Thursday evening in early September inside the New Orleans landmark Tipitina’s, an American institution that has served as a hub for the city’s hybridised funk and jazz for nearly 50 years. Gig posters from The Meters, Dickey Betts and The Neville Brothers line knotty wooden rafters, while a massive painting of the club’s patron saint, Professor Longhair, perches above the stage, a sentinel in silent chiaroscuro. This is the sort of place that begets regulars, where that bearded bartender, Zack Thompson, says he often knows 50 customers by name. Tonight, despite the capacity crowd of 800, he recognises maybe four. And then, just as he’s handing a patron a gin…

Various ★★★★ Live Forever: A Tribute To Billy Joe Shaver NEW WEST. CD/DL/LP A fine tribute to one of the great Outlaw Country songwriters. If you’re going to make a Billy Joe Shaver covers album it had better be good. During his lifetime, which ended two years ago at age 81, he was covered by Waylon, Willie, Cash, Kristofferson and Elvis. Thankfully this is really good. Produced by Charlie Sexton and former Shaver collaborator Freddy Fletcher, its 12 songs – among the Texan’s best known – are sung lovingly by some of the best around. Willie Nelson sets a high bar with opening song Live Forever, which features Lucinda Williams on backing vocals, equal parts tough and poignant. My only beef is that Williams – unlike Miranda Lambert, Edie Brickell,…

WITH SAIL On Sailor – 1972 (UMC) ★★★★, the enjoyable Beach Boys archive series arrives at an unusually bizarre period, even by their standards. By late ’71, they’d struggled to sell two excellent records in their deal with Reprise (Sunflower and Surf ’s Up) and were wondering how to refocus themselves as rock became the dominant thing. “It’s safe now to listen to The Beach Boys,” ran one of hipster manager Jack Rieley’s pithy slogans. A frustrated Bruce Johnston had departed and two members of South African band The Flames, drummer Blondie Chaplin and guitar-ist Ricky Fataar, had been recruited to beef up the sound (Dennis Wilson had injured his hand and couldn’t drum). Some thought the new line-up required a new name. One sug-gestion was simply, The Beach.…

BEATLES REMASTERS have given fans extraordinary archival treats over the years, but even in distinguished company the new edition of Revolver is a mind blower. A blazing transmission from when the pop era met psychedelic drugs – and the world duly exploded – additional material includes an empathetic Giles Martin remix, a tranche of in-studio rehearsals with chat and laughs, and exemplary sleevenotes. Little wonder it’s MOJO’s Reissue Of The Year. Want one? We have a Super Deluxe CD box and two vinyl editions to give away this month. All you have to do is complete the MOJO crossword and send a scan of it to mojo@bauermedia.co.uk, making sure to type CROSSWORD 350 in the subject line. Entries without that subject line will not be considered. Please include your home…

HELLO 1982 I first met Jason [Pierce] at the art college in Rugby. He was already in a band – ‘gothic’ might be a bit strong, but they were quite Bauhaus-influenced, I would say. I could see Jason was an interesting character and we started hanging out. I don’t really remember quite how we decided to form a band, but one day in ’83 we decided to have a jam, I guess you’d call it, with a couple of our friends – Tim Morris [drums] and Pete Bain [bass], who I don’t think had played before that. It was at Tim’s parents’ nice, big Victorian house in Kilsby outside Rugby. I’m sure his dad was a little wary at having devious-looking characters traipsing through the house, but we weren’t too…