Table of contents for May 2024 in MOJO

“I saw Eliza Carthy being a real badass and said, I want to do that.” WHEN KATHERINE Priddy released her first EP, Wolf, in 2018, she quickly gained one very auspicious fan. “She has a really pretty, expressive voice, and her songs are engaging – borderline poetry in the lyrics, so it isn’t all revealed at once,” Richard Thompson told MOJO, as he picked Priddy as the best thing he’d heard that year. “I love the echoes of the British tradition, and indeed the folk rock tradition.” In the six years between that first EP and her new second album, The Pendulum Swing, Priddy has built an impressive reputation and following for those accomplished, original folk songs and her pure, beautiful voice. Thompson asked her to join him on tour.…

Steve Scipio: Patrick Patterson and I had been in Metre, a jazz band, but our drummer was moving to Australia. Then we worked with Mike Rose in Ginger Johnson’s African Drummers while formulating Cymande. We didn’t want to do pop music or go back to jazz, we wanted to do something more expressive in terms of our personalities and messages we might communicate. Mike Rose: When I met them I was into percussion and African music. I was a fan of Roland Kirk and played flute but I took up saxophone seriously just before I joined Cymande. I introduced a Rastafarian flavour to the band and I brought in percussionist Pablo Gonsales, who had the Rasta vibe. Pablo Gonsales: I didn’t go to school to learn drums, it’s all coming…

IF SEATTLE was the explosive heart of rock’n’roll in the 1990s, the city’s mutinous pulse in the previous decade was located at Raison d’Être, a coffee house in the Belltown area where the local underground gathered and schemed over espressos. “It was the best place for me to land from Montana,” says Jeff Ament. He got a job there in 1983 and stayed seven years, working “five days a week” while meeting “all of the amazing characters” in the scene and making a pivotal racket, from 1984 to 1988, with Stone Gossard in pioneering lunatics Green River. Ament had his own punk band Deranged Diction when hardcore scamps Mark Arm and Steve Turner (another Raison d’Être employee) coaxed him to join their new enterprise. “I didn’t understand their sarcasm and…

The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis ★★★★ The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis IMPULSE! CD/DL/LP Exuberant collaboration between seasoned instrumental adventurists and rising tenor sax star. James Brandon Lewis first joined The Messthetics on-stage at New York’s 2019 Winter Jazzfest, his chemistry with guitarist Anthony Pirog (established via sessions with free jazz drummer William Hooker) augmented by Joe Lally and Brendan Canty (rhythm section of Washington DC legends Fugazi). Picking up where Fear Not, the anthemic closer to Lewis’s 2023 LP Eye Of I, left off, opening salvos L’Orso and Emergence are short but toothsome affairs with a vivid punk frisson as Pirog and Lewis diverge, double-up and undercut each other, sometimes indiscernibly, rather than idly shred and shronk. Elsewhere, inward-looking ballads Boatly and Railroad Tracks Home allow for more…

Nico ★★★★★ The Marble Index/Desertshore DOMINO. LP IN PETER DOGGETT’s exemplary linernotes to these reissues, he quotes an interview Nico gave shortly before her death in 1988, aged 49, where she explains her desire to make “archaic music… music you imagine from thousands of years ago. Cave music.” Many critics have referenced early church music in writing about The Marble Index and Desertshore, the two albums the former Velvet Underground singer recorded between 1968 and 1970, but this quote seems to suggest that the solo music composed by the woman born Christa Päffgen was reaching even further back to something ancient and primeval. The roots of Nico’s mysterious, visionary sound can be found in It Was A Pleasure Then, the closer on side one of her tentative 1967 debut, Chelsea…

Lost Angel: The Genius Of Judee Sill ★★★★ Dir. Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. C/S AT THE START of the 1970s, Los Angeles songwriter Judee Sill made two of that fertile scene’s most affecting and poignant albums, her self-titled debut and Heart Food setting the vagaries of love and the mysteries of God to a baroque interpretation of folk rock. Sill, after all, was the first person David Geffen signed to Asylum. But her idiosyncratic considerations of the cosmos never turned mainstream, with modest sales compounded by her reluctance to play industry games or adulterate her vision. Impoverished and nearly anonymous, Sill overdosed in 1979 at the age of 35, her life a black box of questions for the generations that steadily discovered her music’s power and…

Nelson Mandela was free. APRIL 16 He’d been released from Cape Town’s Victor Verster Prison on February 11, after 27 years as a political prisoner. Two months later, today at Wembley Stadium, the veteran freedom campaigner’s years of principled struggle would be celebrated at the star-packed event titled Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute For A Free South Africa. It would also be his first high-profile public appearance in Britain. His embrace by the world of popular music had begun exactly six years before, when The Special AKA were in the UK Top 10 with Jerry Dammers’ song Nelson Mandela. Some of those diverted by its upbeat tune and township jive beat were surprised to learn what it was actually about. Imprisoned since 1963, Mandela was the most highprofile member of…

HELLO SUMMER 1986 Before Slint, the drummer Britt [Walford] and I had a band called Maurice in Louisville, Kentucky. I was replacing Brian McMahan who also played guitar with Squirrel Bait, who were kind of taking off. I was already a huge fan – I didn’t know Britt really, then I showed up at the first practice and I knew all their songs. I have a tape of that first practice and it’s crazy. We’d never played together but we had this almost jazz, psychic connection, where I would throw in this lick and he would throw in a drum fill at the same time and they’d be exactly in sync. I guess the Louisville punk scene kind of recognised me as a musician when I started playing in Maurice,…

I READ AN INTERESTING BOOK RECENTLY, Live Dead by John Brackett, with quite an intimidating subtitle: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings And The Ideology Of Liveness. Brackett’s argument is that the Dead’s early concert albums (like Live Dead itself) weren’t purely live, as they were augmented by studio overdubs, and with crowd noise mixed down. What Deadheads increasingly prized over the years were not necessarily better, but indisputably more real, warts’n’all recordings of entire live shows. Consequently, the racks of Dead bootleg tapes on the shelves were soon joined by hundreds of official live CDs, that made capital out of reproducing raw experience. This month, MOJO is proud to finally award Pearl Jam the front cover they’ve long deserved. We’re also thrilled to include with our magazine a CD of…

“EACH VOCAL was recorded as a recitation standing on the banks of the Hudson River,” says Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev’s latest. “That’s why you can hear steamboats going by and dogs barking.” Back on radar after their 2019 re-imagining of Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete and their cosmic-psych side-project Harmony Rockets’ 2018 instrumental set Lachesis/Clotho/Atropos, the Rev go spoken-word on their new LP. “We are again out of step with a pop-orientated world, and that can lead to some sleepless nights,” notes Donahue. “We’re just being ourselves, but you worry you’ll get buried under the TikTok and Spotify avalanche.” Largely recorded over the last year at the band’s Catskills studio, the record was mixed by Peter Katis (The National; Interpol). Working amid such treasured totems as the piano Rev…

It’s the month’s best Latin-Smiths, soul-rock and dub-poetics. 1 MARK KNOPFLER’S GUITAR HEROES GOING HOME (THEME FROM LOCAL HERO) For the Teenage Cancer Trust, Knopfler’s joined by players including Hank Marvin, Clapton, Ringo, Townshend, Duane Eddy, Brian May, David Gilmour, Springsteen, and in his last recording, Jeff Beck (above), for a beauteous reprising of the movie theme. Find it: YouTube 2 AFRICA EXPRESS FT. IMS PANIC Live in Mexico in February, Albarn ignites a Latin-ska take on The Smiths’ hit. A tribute to Radio 1’s Steve Wright? Find it: YouTube 3 HERMANOS GUTIÉRREZ LOW SUN From new LP Sonido Cósmico, Ecuadorian-Swiss guitar siblings hit an ineffable plateau. Find it: streaming services 4 JESSICA PRATT WORLD ON A STRING LA singer-songwriter reaches peak loveliness, sung in her silvery, Karen Carpenter…

LULLING MOJO INTO A FALSE sense of security, Anne Briggs agrees to answer a few more questions… It is 11pm on a Friday night in December; our telephone conversation with the Greta Garbo of the British folk revival started at an unconventional 9.30. The first miracle came when she answered the phone. The second is that she seems to be prepared to keep talking. “I’m enjoying it in a silly sort of way,” she says. Not exactly unguarded, the 79-year-old has agreed to speak as Topic prepare to release a new edition of her self-titled 1971 solo LP with a bonus 7-inch of out-takes: The Lost Tape. In the context of a modest back catalogue that comprises one EP, a few tracks on compilation albums and three full-length LPs (including…

ONE SATURDAY, IN EARLY SUMMER 1971, heads turned in the busy Evelyn Paget hair salon on Beckenham High Street. “Look at that!” said a stylist named Doris. “Whatever’s next…” Passing by the window was a tall, slim man with chest-length wavy blond hair. While he, David Bowie, pushed the pram, wife Angie strutted in black jeans and a furry jacket, her hair blonde and boyish. For the main attraction, David Bowie was wearing a flowing dull-gold midi dress, complemented by a floppy hat and knee-length boots. Suzi Fussey, a trained stylist at the salon, knew that Bowie was a local ‘name’, that he’d played regularly at The Three Tuns just down the high street, and that he was a one-hit wonder. As Suzi Ronson, she would become a crucial figure…

PEARL JAM WERE ON THE ROAD, A WEEK AWAY FROM finishing a half-year blur of theatres and arenas for their second album, 1993’s Vs – two hours every night of guitar stampede and confessional howl for audiences as unhinged in their love as the band was in performance – when the darkness fell like a hammer. On April 8, 1994 in Seattle, Pearl Jam’s birthplace and rock’s chaotic ground zero for the last three years, Nirvana’s desperately troubled singerguitarist Kurt Cobain – struggling with drug addiction and an overwhelming fame – was found dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A few hours later, at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virginia, Pearl Jam opened with the mourning in Release from their 1991 multi-platinum debut, Ten. A pensive-to-frenzied march…

MUDHONEY Gossard and Ament’s Green River bandmates held a torch for punk and chaos and their own musical path even during their regulation major label dalliance. Mainman Mark Arm survived heroin, still works at Seattle lode star label, Sub Pop. Key album: Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (SUB POP, 1991) Status: Extant. Last year’s Plastic Eternity was their 11th studio album SOUNDGARDEN Masters of epic, inventive hard rock fired by Chris Cornell’s Plantian pipes and Kim Thayil’s art-metal riffs, the early-doors North-west pace-setters remain arguably underrated despite the vast success of 1994’s Superunknown. Key album: Badmotorfinger (A&M, 1991) Status: Defunct since Cornell’s shock 2017 suicide MELVINS For the extent of mid-’90s major label grunge fever, look no further than the ultra-sludgy Seattle scene godfathers’ four albums on Atlantic. Their hardcore-filtered…

Niamh Bury ★★★★ Yellow Roses CLADDAGH. CD/DL/LP Petal power: wistful twistful debut from Ye Vagabondsapproved auteur. Claddagh Records focused on traditional Irish music for much of its existence, but the revived label has taken a rather broader outlook; first the glowering debut from Lankum-related ØXN, and now this pastel-shaded pastoral from Niamh Bury, produced by Ye Vagabonds’ Brían Mac Gloinn. Another session regular at Dublin’s Cobblestone, Bury sings straight folk beautifully on Lovely Adam – a gender-switched Lovely Hannah – but tacks toward more hazy, surrealist Narnia on her own material; as she sings on the title track: “A pride of lions underwater, all is not as it seems.” Gatefold sleeve enthusiasts will spot shades of COB’s Moyshe McStiff on the banjo-decked Bite The Bridle, and traces of Jackson C…

KOREAN STUDENT Kim Chang-wan was 17 and on his way to college in Seoul when he made an impulsive, lifechanging decision. Near his bus stop, a music shop had a classical guitar in the window that caught his eye. He walked in and bought it for the equivalent of a month’s wages from his part-time job. He didn’t know how to hold it, tune it or anything, so he also purchased a pitch pipe and a guitar tutor. Back home, he sat strumming D for hours, transfixed by the sound. He started practising every day. Older brother Chang-hoon also bought a guitar. Younger brother Chang-ik joined in, playing rudimentary drums with spoons on a book. The brothers formed a band called Mul, doing well enough in a local contest to…

10 Chrissie Hynde Standing In The Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan BMG, 2021 You say: “Always a brilliant interpreter of other people’s material, Chrissie tackles the songbook of the great master.” Kieran Heneghan, via mojo4music.com Inspired by Bob Dylan’s 2020 release of Murder Most Foul, Chrissie Hynde and Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne embarked upon the Dylan Lockdown Series project, releasing home-recorded versions of her favourite Bob tunes, including previously unloved compositions such as In The Summertime from Shot Of Love. Elsewhere she lent that voice to a truly haunting Blind Willie McTell, explored the spiritual dimensions of Every Grain Of Sand, and made You’re A Big Girl Now sound like a note-to-self. 9 Pretenders Hate For Sale BMG, 2020 You say: “The start of the Pretenders’ creative renaissance… it…

IT’S 30 DEGREES in Hargeisa, and Sahra Halgan is spending a slow Friday afternoon recovering from a concert she hosted in Somaliland’s capital the night before. “During the war, we lost all our musicians,” she laments. “Today, if you are a bad singer, you use a producer, they give you a nice voice. You sing like someone who can sing, but you can’t sing live. At my arts centre you have to sing live. Tell everyone to come. I invite them.” It’s an enticing proposition: musically, Hargeisa lies at the heart of Africa’s funkiest region, bordered and influenced by Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia, the latter claiming Somaliland as its own. With decolonisation, Somaliland (compact and British) and Somalia (sprawling and Italian) were united in 1960, with an Italy-approved government that…

WHEN WAYNE KRAMER SLIPPED away quietly in early February, felled by pancreatic cancer at the age of 75, he’d lived many lives. If you’d asked him, he might tell you he began his journey as an abandoned son. It was what fuelled him to become a rebel, a rocker, a revolutionary. He might confess that he’d lost his way too – been a junkie, a jailbird, a journeyman. And that, ultimately, he’d evolved into the role of activist, author, torchbearer, and most importantly, a father himself. Kramer was all that, as well as the co-founder, lead guitarist, and catalyst of Detroit rock legends the MC5. Though he prized the group’s legacy – and tended to it carefully – Kramer’s real triumphs weren’t gold records or hit songs, but more human…

Shabaka ★★★★ Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace IMPULSE. CD/DL/LP THE LEADING British saxophonist of his generation retired, after a fashion, on December 7, 2023. That night Shabaka Hutchings, on the cusp of 40, played what he promised would be his last gig on the instrument, performing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at London’s ICA. Hutchings’ valedictory run had lasted nearly 12 months, ever since he announced on New Year’s Day he’d be abandoning the saxophone. There would be farewell shows for his Sons Of Kemet band and, on September 23 in Hollywood, an evening when Hutchings took on another auspicious repertoire – that of Pharoah Sanders – to re-imagine Promises alongside Floating Points. Hutchings’ decision to put down what he calls “the big metal horn”, and pick up a…

Stan Ridgway The Big Heat IRS, 1986 BARSTOW-RAISED Stanard Ridgway fronted LA eccentrics Wall Of Voodoo, whose malarial MTV hit Mexican Radio promised great things in March ’83. But two months later at Steve Wozniak’s US Festival folly in San Bernadino – a few hours before The Clash’s last gig with Mick Jones – Ridgway played his final show with the group. “I felt the band had been taken over by the record company,” says Ridgway today. “They put us on the road for nine, 10 months, and then said, ‘Do it again’. Everybody was pretty burned out, and I felt a lot of weirdness because of my status as the singer, you know – ‘Who does he think he is?!’ There was lots of dysfunction and things just weren’t…

All You Need Is Love: The End Of The Beatles ★★★★ Peter Brown and Steven Gaines OCTOPUS. £25 IN 1983, A MIXED reception greeted The Love You Make by Brian Epstein’s management assistant Peter Brown, of The Ballad Of John And Yoko fame, and writer Steven Gaines. Mocked as ‘The Muck You Rake’, the book was based on interviews conducted in 1980 with almost every A-lister except Lennon, murdered that December; months later, the widowed Yoko had her say. From this prime source material the authors spun an account long on sensation, short on nuance and non-existent on the actual music; Paul and Linda McCartney ceremonially burnt their copy. Four decades on, we now have a better book: the original unfiltered interviews, including Peter Brown as just one more witness.…

“IF BY ACCIDENT something happens, for me it’s much better and more interesting than if I plan to do something,” Damo Suzuki told MOJO in 2018. “Then,” he added with a look of terrible boredom, “it’s getting really like work.” He put this philosophy into practice like few others, staying true until the end to his ideals of spontaneous performance, and the wordless whisper/scream vocalising he once described as “the language of the Stone Age”. This millennium, across the world, he went on stage with like-minded strangers without rehearsal and let whatever was possible manifest. Dubbed Damo Suzuki’s Network, these ad hoc line-ups of ‘Sound Carriers’ ranged from trios to formations of over 50, and ages from 15 to over 80. Suzuki, a Liverpool FC fan who compared these performances…

Encased in a zinc-plated Dark Blue powder-finished body, its Reactance and effects pedal from Lo/Hi Speed controls are your passport to classic phaser effects. The winner bags a Hylight Phazer MK II RIGINALLY FOUNDED by British worth £349, made and signed by Gary Hurst audio engineer David Reeves, himself! How to enter: take the letters from OHylight Electronics built high each coloured square and rearrange them to quality, famously sturdy amps that helped form the name of a musician. Visit www. shape rock in Britain in the 1960s, 1970s and mojo4music.com/crossword and fill out the after. Now back in business, the firm form, along with your answer, in the continues to offer guitarists the best in provided field. Entry is free and closes at amps and effects units. Which brings…