Table of contents for June 2024 in MOJO

“MANIC ACCELERANDO,” IS WHAT THE YARDBIRDS’ FIRST manager, Giorgio Gomelsky, called it; the rave-up, the way his protean band would bend rhythm’n’blues into radical new shapes. As The Yardbirds blazed a trail across London – from Eel Pie Island to the Crawdaddy Club, from Studio 51 to the Marquee – their sound got wilder and more untethered from its roots. They were not, of course, alone. MOJO Working!: The UK R&B Explosion! captures a crucial mid-’60s moment, as a generation of blues scholars, dashing young Mods and garage rock tyros let rip. It’s the sound of the British beat boom becoming louder, feistier, crazier, manifesting a proto-punk spirit before psychedelia sent bands off on a very different freak-out. Future legends are here in putative form – not least Eric Clapton,…

“The Stones were bourgeois by comparison to Anita!” “I ’VE BEEN CALLED a witch, a slut and a murderer,” wrote Anita Pallenberg in the memoir composed during the sober years before her death at 75 in 2017. Now, that unpublished script – titled, with typical defiance, Black Magic – forms the basis of a two-hour documentar y, Catching Fire: The Stor y Of Anita Pallenberg. It hits British cinemas this month. Inevitably, as First Lady of The Rolling Stones, the doc weaves the personal with the musical. There’s her testy 18-month relationship with her doppelganger Stone, Brian Jones. Then the union with Keith Richards from 1967 to 1980. Raw testimony from the pair’s children, Marlon and Angela, off-screen contributions from Richards, plus Pallenberg’s own obser vations shed new light on…

…last month Flavor Flav (right) told the TMZ site that he’s been recording with PUBLIC ENEMY partner Chuck D. He also revealed, “I’m gonna surprise y’all with an-all instrumental album… it’s gonna be all played by myself. Keyboard, bass, guitars” …SQUEEZE are recording new music. Reported Chris Difford from the studio, ”recording two songs from 50 years ago, they sounded like slippers found under the bed… comfy, warm, rewarding” …DOOBIE BROTHERS’ Pat Simmons revealed last month that the band were close to finishing their first LP in 40 years with vocalist Michael McDonald: “in my humble opinion it’s turning out to be some of the best music we’ve ever made together,” he added …The Sun says ELTON JOHN will release his new LP before the year is out. “[His] finger…

“CHARLES WAS IN the trenches, always right down in front,” says Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic in his foreword to Charles Peterson’s Nirvana, which handsomely compiles the photographer’s images of the group from 1989 to 1993. Novoselic also reflects on Peterson’s black and white, long exposure style, as “the musical technique of dropping a guitar’s low E string down to the D note, while sending the signal through a vintage Fuzz box. That’s basic Grunge.” There is something raw, immediate and, yes, amplified about Peterson’s photographs of Nirvana playing live, between gigs and doing magazine shoots. The book also contains 30 images never before seen, including the wild accompanying shot of the band at the Motorsports International Garage in Seattle on September 22, 1990. “My informal title for this image is…

CASSIE KINOSHI relishes her role as part of the UK jazz renaissance, collaborating with Nubya Garcia, Sons Of Kemet and Ezra Collective. But while her own work with big bands and orchestras operates on a grander scale to the smaller ensembles led by contemporaries like Shabaka Hutchings, the composer/saxophonist knows you can have too much of a good thing. Back in 2020, juggling Afrobeat group Kokoroko, all-star septet Nérija, her own SEED Ensemble – since renamed seed. – and scoring for theatre, Kinoshi found herself suffering “deep burnout”. “I needed to rest, to reconnect with my creativity, with myself,” she remembers. Respite came with the Covid lockdown, which gave her “space to cook, to read, to think. And then I started writing material for myself again.” From these restorative writing…

JUNE 6, 1973, AND THREE British pop stars find themselves staying in the same hotel, the Hallam Tower in Sheffield, on the same day. David Bowie is in town to play two shows with the Spiders From Mars at the City Hall on the Ziggy Stardust tour. Lulu, at the time a prime time TV star and household name, encounters the cocaine-withered Bowie in the lobby and is shocked by how “emaciated” he looks. Still, before the night is out, they’ll have begun a brief affair and hatched a plan to record together. Earlier that afternoon, the phone had rung in the room at the Hallam Tower occupied by Labi Siffre, a 27-year-old west London singer-songwriter with a handful of hits. “I got the cold call from David,” he recalls…

Beth Gibbons ★★★★ Lives Outgrown DOMINO. CD/DL/LP “GOD KNOWS how I adore life,” sang Beth Gibbons on Mysteries, the opening track on Out Of Season, her 2002 collaboration with Talk Talk bassist Paul ‘Rustin Man’ Webb. Such hello-birds-hello-sky sentiment isn’t generally associated with Portishead’s singer – not unless the birds are the kind that circle hungrily overhead and the sky is falling down. Her sparse output since Out Of Season underlines how her voice has become a prized totem of misery, a gift for those wishing to convey despair, desolation – or just sometimes – fragile hope. Inevitably, she was the presiding dark spirit of Portishead’s starkly contorted 2008 comeback Third, but neither genre nor language obstructed Gibbons’ ability to communicate. When, in 2014, she courageously performed Górecki’s…

T Bone Burnett ★★★★ The Other Side VERVE FORECAST. CD/DL/LP PLAYING GUITAR on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue; bringing the O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack to life; producing everyone from Roy Orbison to B.B. King to Brandi Carlile: however high the stakes, T Bone Burnett has always delivered. Indeed, the diversity of this 76-yearold son of St Louis, Missouri’s canonical output boggles the mind, and sparks a thought: how do you tread pastures new when you’ve already been pretty much everywhere? Burnett did so, though, on 2019’s The Invisible Light: Acoustic Space, and on 2022’s The Invisible Light: Spells. Made with drummer Jay Bellerose and film composer Keefus Ciancia, these unnerving, sci-fi-oriented LPs tapped electronic and spoken-word elements, and were part influenced by a dystopian dream about tech-ruined humanity Burnett…

Sister Rosetta Tharpe  ★★★★ Live In France: The 1966 Concert In Limoges DEEP DIGS/ELEMENTAL MUSIC. LP IN NOVEMBER, 1966, Britain’s founding class of rock guitar gods was in high-speed ascent. Eric Clapton and Peter Green juggled studio dates, BBC sessions and one-nighters with Cream and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers respectively. Jimmy Page toured the US with The Yardbirds while former bandmate Jeff Beck was about to launch his own group, and the American émigré Jimi Hendrix was blowing minds in his first gigs with the Experience. That same month, the mother of all rock’n’roll guitar was working in France without a band, like history in twilight on a cruelly tight budget. At 51, the gospel star Sister Rosetta Tharpe was many hard miles from her 1940s and ’50s hitrecord prime and…

IT’S FAIR to say that in 2024 Curtis Mayfield is still under rated. The Chicago-bor n singer-songwriter, producer, guitarist and record label boss died back in 1999, aged just 57, after having spent a whole decade as a quadriplegic, paralysed from the neck down after a stage lighting rig fell on him at an outdoor concert in Brooklyn in August 1990. That decade-long slide into silence may have had something to do with it, but even within rock and soul literature he’s never mentioned in the same breath as Stevie Wonder, Al Green, Sly Stone, Aretha Franklin, James Brown or Mar vin Gaye, though he arguably achieved more than all of them. Raised in poverty, a high-school drop-out and teenage gospel singer in his grandmother ’s church, Mayfield formed The…

INITIALLY, STEVE HARLEY was known for his assurance, self-possession and drive as well as his accomplishments as a songwriter. In his first Melody Maker interview, he claimed, “There’s a buzz in Cockney Rebel saying we’re on the brink of being big, being leaders... a musical force that others will follow.” But like Marc Bolan, Harley was inspired not only by rampant self-belief and a wild, onomatopoeic style of wordplay but what he envisaged as a new sound for a new age. Born Stephen Nice in Deptford, south London, on February 27, 1951, Harley endured childhood polio and frequent hospitalisation, which he says only strengthened his resolve to succeed, and gave him ample time to lose himself in music and poetry. He later worked as a journalist on local newspapers, but…

“I had to be a songwriter. I knew it would do me good.” MAYDAY, THE TITLE of Myriam Gendron’s new album, is a word with two meanings – one announcing the hopeful start of spring, the other a cry for help. Both ideas unite in this beautiful collection of variegated folk songs, some happy, some deeply sad, some sung in English, others in French, an album caught somewhere between catharsis and lullaby. “The whole record is about that,” says Gendron from a room of guitars, books and music-stands in her Montreal home. “How hard things are in the real world and the safe space you have to find within yourself. My mother died in May 2022, while I was on tour and I’d quit my job as a book dealer.…

“WHERE’S ERIC?” WONDERED THE AUDIENCE, AS THE OTHER YARDBIRDS ARRIVED ON-STAGE to be inducted into the 1992 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Eric Clapton had declined the invitation, but his successors, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, had joined the rest of the group for the ceremony in Cleveland. Original bassist Paul Samwell-Smith, drummer Jim McCarty and guitarist-turned-bassist Chris Dreja trooped up to the podium to accept their awards. Then came Jimmy Page, who promised to “keep it short” before introducing vocalist Keith Relf ’s widow, April, and their son, Jason. This just left Jeff Beck, who’d missed the memo about wearing a suit and was studiedly casual in jeans and a kaleidoscopic patterned waistcoat. “Somebody told me I should be proud tonight,” he said, with a sly grin and…

Mike Watt: I got into music to hang with DBoon. We met when we were 12, when my family moved to San Pedro. We were both outsiders. D’s neighbour Roy Mendez Lopez lived in his car and taught Dguitar. I got a bass, and we made a bunch of noise. D’s ma was fine with that. She preferred us staying indoors and not getting into trouble. Joe Carducci: San Pedro was a very working-class port town, full of sailors who looked like Popeye going from bar to bar starting fights. But Mike and Dwere readers; Mike’s brain just won’t stop, he’s always absorbing knowledge from books and people. MW: First gig we saw was T. Rex in 1973. They looked so little from so far away – arena rock was…

Kamasi Washington ★★★★ Fearless Movement YOUNG. CD/DL/LP KAMASI WASHINGTON’s album covers feel like feints, singular portraits of his imposing figure that give the onlooker the sense that his music is egocentric and self-interested. But since his toddling days in a casual family band that featured Ronald and Stephen ‘Thundercat’ Bruner, the second-generation Los Angeles saxophonist has depended upon the collaboration of community, of musicians chasing strains of transcendence together in a room. From his days as a “Young Jazz Giant” and his inaugural tour with Snoop Dogg to his sprawling two prior albums, each rendered by a cast of dozens, Washington has indeed functioned as a very bright star in his artistic constellation but never the one around which everyone else revolves. “Each of the musicians I have with me…

★★★★ La Fleur AGITATED. CD/DL/LP San Fran’s psych-pop wizard continues to cast his spell. LATELY BUSIED producing an LP for former Osees keyboardist Brigid Dawson and by session-sitar stints for Robyn Hitchcock, Kelley Stoltz also became a first-time dad recently. The latter fact is pertinent since La Fleur’s itchy psych-pop evokes the sleep-deprived world of new parenthood, the mind racing, but fatigued. If Reni’s Car, a two-minute jangler about borrowing a BMW owned by The Stone Roses’ drummer, is pure escapism, Losing My Wild’s brilliantly sliced and diced guitars seem to propel a tale of wings newly clipped, but our new dad dotes and philosophies on About Time, pondering his baby daughter’s future. Jason Falkner (Jellyfish; Beck) helps out on two songs, but La Fleur is your typical Stoltz as multi-instrumentalist splurge,…

Shane Parish ★★★★ Repertoire PALILALIA. DL/LP Journey In Satchidananda and Europe Endless, John Fahey-style? Yes please! In his notes to this album of solo performances, Shane Parish refers to an Andrés Segovia quote about the guitar being “an orchestra in miniature”. Parish has lately been on manoeuvres in an actual guitar orchestra of sorts, as part of the heavy-duty, electrified Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet. Here, though, he uses exceptional fingerpicking technique on acoustic to tackle a canon of mostly non-guitar tunes: jazz by Mingus, Dolphy, Ornette, Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra; electronica by Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk; prepared piano by John Cage. Parish’s label boss Orcutt made experimental capital out of the Great American Songbook on 2013’s A History Of Every One, but on Repertoire Parish is almost flipping those…

AC/DC ★★★★ AC/DC 50 Reissues COLUMBIA/SONY LEGACY. LP THINK OF EVERYTHING you expect from an AC/DC album – and get each time, with varying degrees of headbanging transcendence, because there is no deviation in formula and execution: the chugging power-chord assault and flying-gravel tone of the rhythm guitar; the train-kept-a-rollin’ beat; howlin’-wolf singing and macho-lyric lust. Then think of what lead guitarist and duck-walking stage imp Angus Young brings to that controlled mayhem – the curt razor-wire fills and frantic, crabwalk solos – and imagine this: he does it all, in rehearsals and in the studio, sitting down, head bent in concentration as he plays. Honest – I’ve seen it. “I have to have substance first, to feel it in me, before I can do the show,” he told me…

IN 1970, THE starkly beautiful image of a giant, autumnal aspen leaf hinted that Pete Jolly’s Seasons ★★★★ (Future Days Recordings) might be different from his previous releases. Indeed, the record inside came as a surprise even to the people who made it. Jolly (born Peter Ceragioli Jr), was a highly respected pianist who’d worked with Art Pepper, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker, and been reasonably prolific under his own banner with a string of albums for RCA and CBS – starting in 1955 when he was 23. Musician and label boss Herb Alpert spotted him at Sherry’s, a nightclub on Sunset Boulevard, and, deeply impressed by his sensitive playing, produced and endorsed Jolly’s 1968 debut for A&M, a collection of standards, which went largely unnoticed, as did its…

Guitar: Playing With David Bowie, John Lennon And Rock And Roll’s Greatest Heroes ★★★ Earl Slick with Jeff Slate PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH, £25 ASTRUGGLING YOUNG guitarist gets the nod in 1974 to attend a big-name audition. He is met by an inscrutable young PA named Coco, invited into a darkened studio and asked to play along to several backing tracks. Twenty minutes later, in walks a skinny, pale figure, “dressed the way an English rock star might think a Harlem pimp would dress”. It’s David Bowie, in need of a guitarist for his first touring band since the Spiders. The next day, 22-year-old Earl Slick is invited to Bowie’s hotel suite and given the go-ahead. What he hadn’t expected was a makeover: a hairdresser removed his long locks, a stylist…

THE HALF MOON PUB IN PUTNEY, SOUTH London, has seen some pretty special musical performances over the years. The summer of 1977, for instance, found it hosting an artist whose theatrical pretensions and grandiose ambition would dominate British music over subsequent decades. Besides Steve Harris and his early line-up of Iron Maiden, though, the KT Bush band also played the Half Moon that summer, on June 3. It’s one of the many strange details of Kate Bush’s career that over 47 years she’s essentially played three ‘tours’: 2014’s 22-night residency at the Hammersmith Apollo; 1979’s two-month Tour Of Life; and roughly a dozen dates around June 1977, taking in various London pubs – The Black Cat, Catford! The White Hart, Tottenham! – as well as a Sunday afternoon out-of-town gig…

Listen up! For the month’s blues, dub and Arabic rave. 1 NICK CAVE & THE BAD SEEDS WILD GOD Cave gets the old gang – plus Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood – together for a rousing return to the environs of Jubilee Street. “HERE WE GO!” Find it: streaming services 2 BOB DYLAN WHEN I PAINT MY MASTERPIECE Blue? Don’t know where to go? How about Fort Lauderdale, where His Bobness restarted The Rough & Rowdy Ways tour by grafting his 1971 classic onto the tune of Puttin’ On The Ritz. Super duper! Find it: YouTube 3 THE SPECIALS FAMILY WHEN A LIGHT GOES OUT Lynval Golding’s dubby reggae tribute to Terry Hall and John Bradbury, with help from Sir Horace Gentleman. Find it: YouTube 4 JOHN GRANT THE CHILD CATCHER Grant…

ON WEST BERLIN’S LATE-’60s SCENE, where left-field musicians gathered to smoke weed and blow minds at Kreuzberg’s Zodiak Free Arts Lab, burly, moustachioed guitarist Edgar Froese cut a forbidding figure. Between 1965 and 1967 he had led beat group The Ones, but moved between psych and jazz into free rock as early line-ups of his Tangerine Dream waxed and waned. The first TD album, 1970’s Electronic Meditation, featured Froese, drummer Klaus Schulze and multi-instrumentalist Conrad ‘Conny’ Schnitzler, and alternated meditative balms with intense pile-ups of guitar and organ. As the ’70s progressed, Froese’s group replaced their more conventional instrumentation – notably, the organ of Steve Schroyder, then Peter Baumann – with electronics, pioneered initially by drummer Christopher Franke. Their albums on the German Ohr label, and then Virgin Records, grew…

St. Vincent ★★★★ All Born Screaming VIRGIN/FICTION. CD/DL/LP AFTER THE out-of-time 1970s masterpiece that was 2021’s Daddy’s Home, it was perhaps inevitable that Annie Clark would feel the pull of bubbling synths, dirty guitars and conspicuous modernity once again. Entirely self-producing for the first time, here Clark has made a more difficult record than its predecessor – at least in its first half – and one created in the wake of unspecified loss. The spiralling English folk rock of Hell Is Near, in which Clark assumes vocal tones clearly indebted to Beth Gibbons, is a misdirecting opener. Second cut, Reckless, is where the darkness begins to close in, in an impressionistic depiction of bereavement, watching someone fade away in the “London sun” as the narrator begins “cracking up”. It’s one…

★★★★ I’m Totally Fine With It; Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore ROCK ACTION. CD/DL/LP Falkirk duo fuse modern disconnection with dramatic pop on their second LP since re-forming. THE GLOVES are off on Arab Strap’s eighth album. While Aidan Moffat skilfully dissects social media addiction (Allatonceness) and postlockdown social anxiety (Summer Season), his unflinching depictions and grizzled meditations are backed by some of Malcolm Middleton’s most out-there scores, with fuzzedup bass and thrash metal chords to the fore. Whether intoning over analogue techno (Bliss), fingerpicked melancholy (Molehills) or ornate Scottish gothic (Dreg Queen), Moffat poetically eschews the obvious as he essays the horror of ageing alone (Safe & Well) and discovers “the truth isn’t out here” after all (Turn Off The Light). Thrillingly raw, it captures the pair at their…

Jessica Pratt ★★★★ Here In The Pitch CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP BACK IN 2012, when her self-titled debut became something of a word-ofmouth sensation, Jessica Pratt explained that her yen for a slightly distant sound was down to growing up listening to music on cassette. “That real dreamy, cloudy sound,” she said. “That’s kind of always what I wanted to go for.” One way and another, Pratt has stayed true to that vision. Here In The Pitch is only the fourth LP the perfectionist songwriter has managed to let go of, but on the belated follow-up to 2019’s much-feted Quiet Signs, her ethereal songwriting, uncannily pitched vocals and penchant for Shangri-Las séance music continue to mark her out as an eerie one-off: Laura Nyro as painted by Joan Miró. Pratt calls…

★★★★ Opus Dei MUTE. CD/DL/LP Slovenian provocateurs’ Freddiepowered 1987 hurrah. L AIBACH’S AUDACIOUS first LP for Mute made an impact with a Wagnerian, Ger man-language reinvention of Queen’s One Vision. The titanic, martial posturing suggested subversion of a Leni Riefenstahl film (“Ein Fleisch, ein Blut”). Forming in Tito’s Yugoslavia, between communism and capitalism, Laibach’s self-proclaimed “totalitarian” rock music featured adaptations of Stalinist socialist realism and “Nazikunst”, but their long game has revealed much more of Mel Brooks’ Springtime For Hitler than any kind of Third Reich apologia. Meanwhile, pop music’s twin infinities of awe and absurdity would be investigated across entire re-workings of The Beatles’ Let It Be album and the Sound Of Music soundtrack. Here, the astronomic ambiguity is underscored on The Great Seal, featuring recitation of Churchill’s “fight…

Broadcast ★★★★ Spell Blanket – Collected Demos 2006-2009 WARP. CD/DL/LP Raw vignettes act as moving reminder of Broadcast’s splendour. THESE CAPTIVATING demos – some full songs, some mere sketches – were the source from which Broadcast were due to create their fifth studio album. Tragically, the 2011 death from pneumonia of co-founder Trish Keenan – who formed Broadcast in Birmingham with James Cargill in 1995 – means that this is how they’ll remain. It lends added poignancy to the 36 songs and part-songs and a tantalising insight into what would have been. Spell Blanket meanders through Broadcast’s singular world of psych, folk, avant pop and haunting electronica. Opener, The Song Before Spell-bound: these Broadcast demos are a fitting memento of Trish Keenan’s poetic songwriting and unimpeachable voice. The Song Comes…

AFAMOUS ELVIS quote runs as follows: “My fans want my shirt. They can have my shirt. They put it on my back.” The chance to own a piece of Elvis’s shirt comes with a new range of luxury sunglasses from revived ’60s label Renauld. The Elvis ‘Tupelo special’, worth a cool £695, contains an actual piece of one of Elvis’s shirts, housed within the lens. This patented and radical Renauld precision lens engineering seamlessly integrates a wafer-thin, transparent and vacuum-sealed compartment into the aerodynamic shape of the lens. That compartment forever encapsulates part of Elvis’s actual wardrobe. Each sunglass arrives with a Renauld and Graceland certificate of authenticity. We have one pair to give away to a lucky reader with a stylish summer to look forward to. How to enter:…