Содержание выпуска: March 2025 — MOJO

IT’S BEEN 30 YEARS SINCE PAUL WELLER first appeared on the cover of MOJO – 30 years which he’s filled with 15 solo albums, six live solo albums, eight Jam live albums, one Style Council album and one Style Council live album, plus plenty of box sets and deluxe reissues for good measure. Factor in his 18 years of ferocious productivity before 1995, and that’s a lot to choose from when you’re trying to construct a Top 50 of Weller’s greatest songs. “Have I even got that many?” he jokes, in a meaningful new interview that sits at the heart of this first MOJO of 2025. But as we canvass the extended MOJO family for their favourite Weller, Jam and Style Council songs, check in with his peers and accomplices…

IN EARLY 1972, the final year of Träd, Gräs Och Stenar’s first phase, the dual-guitar quartet played a pair of shows in a radical community space in Gothenburg. Named for trees, grass and stones, the band had become interested in macrobiotics and sustainable agriculture, ideas they took on tour through exhibitions and talks alongside their psychedelic rock sets. “We became missionaries for this belief system,” bassist Torbjörn Abelli wrote 40 years later, “which … we believed would solve the major problems facing humanity.” That, of course, hasn’t happened. But half a century later, their alternately hypnotic and explosive rock – borne of liberation philosophy and communal welfare – has enjoyed a renaissance. A string of reissues and excavations culminated last year in an engrossing 400-page tome, A Collective History. After…

“I didn’t think people’s reactions would be so goddamn toxic.”EARLY JAMES “I GOT DEATH threats,” says Early James. “It’s scared me from voicing even the tiniest bit of political leaning.” Chainsmoking Winston Lights outside his Birmingham, Alabama home, the singer is recalling the reaction to his take on The Band’s The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down at a Last Waltz tribute show in 2020. “I think it’s time we laid hate in its grave,” James sang in the last verse, one of several lyrical revisions that pointedly disrupted the classic song’s elegy for the Confederacy. “It was right after George Floyd [the African-American man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020],” the 31-year-old tells MOJO. “That was one reason it didn’t feel right to sing [Dixie]…

 IT IS THE EVENING OF MARCH 30, 1983. LOS ANGELES is at its most balmy. Ray Manzarek, once a Door but still a connoisseur, is slumped on his couch watching the new-ish in-concert programme, Rock’n’Roll Tonite. British newcomers Simple Minds pass him by and he’s been down the Eric Clapton road before, but when he sees INXS, the little-known Australians promoting their third album, the Number 46 US hit Shabooh Shoobah, Manzarek is galvanised. He swaps his armchair for his car and drives to the Pasadena studio where the show is filmed. “MICHAEL WAS DRINKING HEAVILY. HE WAS SO UNHAPPY AND WE COULDN’T WORK OUT WHY.”TIM FARRISS Accidentally blocking the studio’s green room is Andrew Farriss, soon to become INXS’s chief songwriter, but always the middle of the band’s three…

You’ll have seen that Ringo’s new album is country. What is it about his personality – and singing voice – that is so perfectly suited to country music? He always loved country from the first minute I met him. He liked the old country singers like George Jones and people like that, and he was a big fan of that. So I think, you know, maybe, it suits his personality. He’s a very sincere, straightforward guy, and I think that’s the sort of theme behind a lot of country music. Ringo was the perfect drummer for The Beatles. But why? Impossible to say why – he just was. When you first hit America, why do you think Ringo was so particularly endearing to the fans? And could you get behind…

We met at Shearwater school in Woking. He was always a bit apart from the crowd – he had a sort of ‘cool’ vibe going on even then. I’d mentioned to him that I was getting a guitar for Christmas and he said, “Oh, I’ve already got one – an electric. We should hook up.” It was probably within six months of learning three chords that we started writing songs. Probably the best of them were inspired by The Beatles, early Beatles, and their influences – Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry – were our influences too. A turning point for Paul was seeing Dr. Feelgood on this Saturday morning TV music show. That’s where we started seeing music a bit differently. The Jam went on to be great, but personally,…

Phonetics On And On MATADOR. CD/DL/LP Sounds of the underground: Cate Le Bon-produced second album from Chicago trio. LOOKING LIKE the Ghost World house band and sounding – at least on album opener Where’d You Go? – like Stereolab covering Roadrunner, Horsegirl’s “nonchalant cool” game is very strong indeed. Yet as Nora Cheng, Penelope Lowenstein and Gigi Reece prove on the follow-up to 2022’s Versions Of Modern Performance, they are more than a seamlessly synthesised set of indie influences (Kleenex and Young Marble Giants included). With their debut’s Sonic Youth static stripped away, Cheng and Lowenstein’s vocals suggest quiet alienation, smartest-kid-in-the-room watchfulness, and, on the cryptic simmer of In Twos, a strong working knowledge of The Raincoats and Electrelane. It’s possible, however, you might not be able to…

Alex Koo Blame It On My Chromosomes W.E.R.F. CD/DL Belgian-Japanese pianist spars with Ambrose Akinmusire and betrays classical roots on fifth LP. Billed as an introspective journey into self-acceptance, Alex Koo’s fifth album reflects the classical music child prodigy’s deep immersion in jazz. He sets the tone early with Hey Man, We Should Play Sometime, the first of two serene Ambrose Akinmusire collaborations, the trumpeter’s lyrical delicacy contrasting cutely with Koo’s haunted motifs and supple grace. Elsewhere, his symbiosis with bassist Lennart Heyndels and drummer Dré Pallemaerts allows them to explore ragged sanity (Slowly), dance with abandon around a centrifugal bass line (Doritos Everywhere) and juxtapose ’60s Marvin Gaye with spaghetti western symphonics (Eagle Of The Sun) as subtle shades of Chopin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and Reich pass through. Contemplative yet…

Richard Dawson End Of The Middle WEIRD WORLD. CD/DL/LP OVER TWINKLY cruise ship synth-strings, the protagonist in More Than Real – the final track on Richard Dawson’s new LP – remembers a great false dawn. “In the moment I first gazed upon my bonny lass through a tangle of wires, tubing, sticking tape and fibreglass I swore on her little life I’d change my woeful ways,” the Tyneside eccentric sings. It doesn’t quite turn out that way as – not for the first time on this exceptional exercise in musical storytelling – one of Dawson’s characters finds faulty personal wiring short-circuiting their best intentions. After two more portentous pieces – 2021’s Henki and 2022’s The Ruby Cord – Dawson envisaged End Of The Middle as “small-scale and very domestic”. Musically,…

NO RECORD producer ever guaranteed a hit, but in the ’70s and ’80s Richard Perry came close. Barbra Streisand, Harry Nilsson, Carly Simon, Andy Williams, Art Garfunkel, Diana Ross, Leo Sayer, Ray Charles, Rod Stewart and, on the only post-Fabs album to reunite The Beatles, Ringo, all enjoyed some of their greatest hits thanks to the producer. His first album job was Captain Beefheart’s 1967 debut Safe As Milk, and his belief that no talent was too outré to have a hit was borne out by his second effort, 1968’s God Bless Tiny Tim, which took the trilling vaudevillian Top 10. Born on June 18, 1942, to a household full of music, the teenage Perry was a Brooklyn Paramount regular, thrilling to DJ Alan ‘Moondog’ Freed’s shows starring Chuck, Fats,…

THE ARRIVAL OF THE JAM, AND A BUNCH OF SHARP suited bands in their wake, heralded a new wave of Modernism in the late 1970s. Away from the mainstream, though, a sect of British music obsessives had been keeping the faith in their own, distinct, way. Northern soul disciples generally eschewed Italian tailoring in favour of vests and bags. But their devotion to raw, emotional, thrilling R&B, to rare records and all-night dancing as an escape from working-class routine, made them torch-bearers for Mod ideals through the late 1960s and 1970s. On the sleeve of Beat Surrender!, our latest MOJO comp, you can see Paul Darby, a legendary dancer from Wolverhampton, out on the floor at the Wigan Casino in the mid-’70s. On the CD itself, you can hear 15…

“DIFFICULT JOB it’s been looking at this face and listening to #JeffBuckley music for the last 6 years…” reflected director Amy Berg on Instagram in December, as she confirmed the release of her film It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley. The long-awaited full-length documentary on the late artist, who drowned in 1997, debuts this month at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. It’s showing alongside other tempting music docs including Questlove’s Sly Lives! (AKA The Burden Of Black Genius) and early-’70s portrait One To One: John & Yoko. According to Buckley estate “gatekeeper” Jack Bookbinder, the film has been in the works since Berg finished her 2015 Janis Joplin documentary Little Girl Blue. “Amy spent a good chunk of her life immersed in Jeff ’s work, and building a relationship with…

Sarah Cracknell Saint Etienne’s singer hails Blondie’s Parallel Lines (Chrysalis, 1978) I was about 12, at an all-girls convent school. I’d had such an interest in music from when I was really young, like David Essex and Althea & Donna, and I knew I wanted to do something in music. I’d been really blown away by [1978 hit] Denis and seeing Blondie on Top Of The Pops, and when Parallel Lines came out I stupidly thought Denis was on it. I got it at Woolworths in Windsor, and listened to it on an ancient Disc Jockey Junior that my mum gave me – I wasn’t that bothered about sound quality then. It was just immediate, and from the first moment I was in. I hadn’t heard music like that before,…

HEARTWORMS RECENTLY supported Jack White in London, the second time Jojo Orme – who, essentially, is Heartworms – had met the singer. “I was talking about RAF Hendon,” says Orme of their earlier meeting in Nashville. “He was talking about a big model P-51 Mustang he has in a bar somewhere.” In this context, discourse on the RAF and classic US fighter planes isn’t surprising – Orme is an autodidact aviation enthusiast. Besides overseeing a Heartworms agenda that stretches from The Sisters Of Mercy to Michael Jackson, she volunteers at the Royal Air Force Museum London at Hendon, helping with aircraft upkeep. The Spitfire has become a Heartworms leitmotif. Their first release was 2023’s A Comforting Notion, a limited number of the EPs accompanied by an Airfix Spitfire model kit…

SITTING IN THE DOWNSTAIRS BAR AT HACKNEY’S OSLO CLUB ahead of a support slot with Fucked Up, Owen ‘O’ Williams smirks slightly as he talks MOJO through his reasoning behind the stark picture that features on the cover of The Tubs’ fiery new LP, Cotton Crown. “Part of me was like, if you have a black and white image of your mother who’s committed suicide, breastfeeding you in a graveyard, would you not use it as an album cover?” The singer’s mother was Charlotte Greig, a music writer, broadcaster, some-time rapper and folk singer, whose much-admired 1998 debut LP Night Visiting Songs was rereleased on vinyl in 2023. Back in 1992, she released a single under the name Crow Country which featured the same image that is now on the…

Donovan: I was born in Glasgow. My mum, uncles and aunts sang Irish songs and Scottish songs and my father read poetry and monologues. When we moved to Hatfield, I listened to The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. I discovered the Beats and jazz, met Gypsy Dave [Mills, artist and trusted friend] and joined the St Albans Bohemian scene. The incredible revolution of ideas – I’d blend [it] with jazz, blues, folk music, poetry and pop music. It didn’t matter to me whether it would be popular. Peter Eden: I worked at the Studio Club in Southend, and managed [R&B group] the Cops ’N Robbers. I said, There’s room for an English Bob Dylan, and they said, “We know a guy.” They got Donovan down and he had the Dylan…

When I was 12 I got obsessed by Pity Poor Alfie, the B-side to The Bitterest Pill. It had me in the first two seconds – the brass hook, and the way the vocals are covered in reverb and low in the mix. It was intriguing, melodic, with that big stomping beat, so unlike the shiny pop music of the day. I think I played it every day for the next 20 years. I’ve been working with Paul since The Weaver on Wild Wood and if there’s a constant it’s this wonder about life and love. He seems amazed by the beauty of life. I remember once he told me that he’d been having a smoke outside the house and he felt this breeze. It was almost Biblical, how he…

Sunny War Armageddon In A Summer Dress PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP BARELY TAKING a breath as she rattles through One Way Train, the opening track on her eighth LP, Sydney Ward is captivated by the possibility of a post-greed planet. “I swear once you’re there you won’t want to leave,” she sings. “You’ll be fed, you’ll be loved, you’ll have all you need.” A psychedelic hayride which channels Gen X’s Dancing With Myself, Jim Carroll’s People Who Died or R.E.M.’s It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine), it’s a thrilling testament to hope. A reformed street singer with roots in blues and punk, Ward dropped out of the straight world after hearing Crass as a teenager, and overcame addiction issues to pursue her Woody Guthrie-via-Bad…

Renascence BMG. CD/DL/LP Beloved UK veterans return, older and wiser, but thankfully with their funk intact. FOLLOWING TIM MacKenzie-Smith’s acclaimed documentary Getting It Back: The Story Of Cymande, the oft-sampled Afro-Caribbean-British group return for a well-deserved victory lap. And, aside from the occasional rote workout (Sweeden, enlivened only by Denys Baptiste’s squalling sax), Renascence finds Cymande firmly in the pocket. The widescreen funk and rumble of hand-drums make slow-burn opener Chasing An Empty Dream of a piece with their original trilogy of albums. Elsewhere, they tailor the groove to who they are now: older men making peace with the darkness they can’t overcome or negotiate away. Road To Zion, a rumination on mortality and morality, conjures the eerie, moving vibe of Parliament’s The Silent Boatman, while the soulful, string-driven Only One…

Toumani Diabaté Kaira CHRYSALIS. CD/DL/LP MUCH TRADITIONAL music was facing extinction in Africa in the second half of the 20th century as, with few defenders, the old was phased out by those leaping on modernising bandwagons. When Toumani Diabaté, a 21-year-old Malian kora player, arrived in London in 1987 to appear at the Southbank with his father, Sidiki, what may have been tradition’s last stand miraculously turned into a revolution. It’s not common for Malian griots to pass on their talents; the new generation must watch and play along. In his book And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain, Joe Boyd, whose Hannibal label originally issued Kaira, notes that “Toumani paid very close attention” to his father’s playing. According to people who worked with him in the UK then, he absorbed…

Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat Dir: Johan Grimonprez MODERN FILMS. S CHALLENGED TO think up an elevator pitch for Johan Grimonprez’s innovative music-driven documentary, the best I could come up with was, “Imagine a jazz version of Summer Of Soul which also deals with the harshest realities of colonialism… and it’s two and a half hours long!” But such a daunting capsule formulation would be unlikely to attract the very wide audience that this sensationally syncopated piece of film-making deserves. For while Soundtrack To A Coup D’Etat does deliver a heftier dose of geo-political detail than any of its rivals on the Top 10 music documentaries of all-time list, I can think no film which does a better job of drawing out the stories that were already there inside the…

“I NEVER KNEW what it actually meant to be a Beatle until we split from each other,” said Paul McCartney, somewhere on Wings’ American tour of 1976. “I sort of died for a while. If you want to talk about nightmares, I could fill volumes.” Now, two gallant superfans have filled those volumes for him. Allan Kozinn, classical music critic for the New York Times for 38 years, and Adrian Sinclair, a British documentary editor and producer, decided 10 years ago to compile a sessionography for McCartney’s solo years. Sinclair was to supply recording detail and Kozinn was to write wraparound essays outlining their context. But once they’d started, they realised they had so much data the altogether bigger project would see their roles increasingly overlap. They delivered three times as…

1 APHEX TWIN T16.5 MADMA WITH NASTYA From new compilation Music From The Merch Desk, RD James keeps it off-world and mechanoid, as of old. Find it: streaming services 2 MACCA AND RINGO HELTER SKELTER The living Beatles reunited at London’s O2 for the end of Paul McCartney’s Got Back tour: the song’s still full of malevolence. Find it: YouTube 3 BROWN SPIRITS MIND ROCKER The Melbourne kosmische-trio bring a skull-opener that’s shimmered in from Mother Sky with blood on its eyes. Find it: Cosmic Seeds (Soul Jazz) 4 AL GREEN AND MORGAN FREEMAN LET’S STAY TOGETHER Live in Mississippi on NYE, the Rev Al and friend take a rare duet, with words of faithfulness gaining added lustre. Find it: TikTok 5 SUSANNA HOFFS FT. ELVIS COSTELLO CONNECTION Marking Keith Richards’ 81st,…

When The Style Council was starting, Paul really liked Jimmy Smith and Art Blakey. We both liked Horace Silver a lot. And some of our focus on jazz was from film soundtracks: things by Michel Legrand. I thought Cannonball Adderley was a really soulful sax player, and I could link him and Junior Walker. And Paul was listening to a lot of Kenny Burrell. All those things fed into Café Bleu. A good signpost to it all was The Jam’s last EP. Shopping is kind of a jazz waltz, and the cover of [The Chi-Lites’] Stoned Out Of My Mind is a soul-y thing with a drum machine: they both point to things on the horizon. A bit later, we worked with Gil Evans on Have You Ever Had It…

Nadia Reid Enter Now Brightness CHRYSALIS. CD/DL/LP “I WOULD LIKE to go to Canada/I have never been before,” sang Nadia Reid on her third album, 2020’s Out Of My Province, quietly tipping her hat to her inner Joni Mitchell. “All of the travelling I have done/I don’t know what I’m looking for.” Since making that record with the assistance of Virginia’s Spacebomb crew, there have been deep shifts in the New Zealand singer-songwriter’s life – the birth of two daughters, a move to the UK – the kind of changes that suggest new roots, new foundations. The anxiety and sadness that shivered under her first two albums, 2015’s Listen To Formation, Look For The Signs, and 2017’s Preservation, has largely evaporated from Enter Now Brightness, but it doesn’t mean Reid’s…

Jean Claude Vannier Et Son Orchestre De Mandolines IPECAC. CD/DL/LP SYMPHONIC, ROMANTIC, conceptual, tender, melodic – and bonkers. You can see why composer/arranger Jean Claude Vannier and Serge Gainsbourg got along so well. Outside of France, Vannier is probably best known for his work with Gainsbourg, in particular their brilliant, hugely influential collaboration on Histoire De Melody Nelson. But since the late ’60s, Vannier has worked with artists from Johnny Hallyday to Sean Lennon to Astor Piazzolla, as well as a long list of soundtracks and various albums of his own. Vannier’s last album Corpse Flower (2019) was a collaboration with Faith No More/Mr Bungle’s Mike Patton, whom he met 13 years ago at a Serge Gainsbourg tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Patton released that album, and this…

Wardruna Birna MUSIC FOR NATIONS/SONY. CD/DL/LP Norse explorers have been searching for the voice of the bear. Over the course of five albums, Einar Selvik and Lindy-Fay Hella’s Norwegian ensemble have created their own universe, using natural sounds to complement traditional wind, string and percussion instruments (tagelharpa, kravik-lyre, bukkehorn), and taking Odin and runes as source material. This is a concept that, despite the spirit animals and sorcery, has much to say about what the old ways could teach an ignorant and uncaring modern world. Album six finds them searching a dying forest, threatened by the invasive march of progress and abandoned by the she-bear (Birna in Old Norse) that once protected it. The tempo is fixed to the pace of a hibernating bear’s heart (nine beats per minute); harmonically,…

RECORDED ON February 2, 1961 and released just a month later, The Bill Evans Trio’s second and final studio album Explorations (Craft Recordings) became a landmark in jazz trio recordings, though no one was expecting such a thing as the music went down. Evans was recovering from hepatitis and in the throes of a heroin addiction. He’d composed nothing for the album and complained of a tension headache as the tapes started rolling, perhaps because young bass player Scott LeFaro was giving him a hard time about his drug use while also complaining about having to use an unfamiliar bass, as his usual instrument was being repaired. Meanwhile, producer and label owner Orrin Keepnews was stressing about the cost of hiring Bell Sound studios because Evans hadn’t liked the piano…

Eccentric Soul: The Cobra Label NUMERO GROUP. LP Spanning 1961-’67, Tex Mex R&B, soul and rock’n’roll from Abe Epstein’s influential label. OPERATING OUT of San Antonio, Cobra was a small label but a magnet for huge talent. Founded by producer and local real estate mogul Abe Epstein, it was instrumental in the shaping of the ‘West Side Sound’, a culturally diverse mix of vocal harmonies, R&B and rock’n’roll that is currently undergoing a revival with groups such as Thee Sacred Souls today. This label cherrypick, then, is timely, and a superb mix of the genre’s founders like Doug Sahm, The Royal Jesters and Sonny Ace & The Twisters – the latter here with a rowdy Wooleh Booleh sung in Spanish. Plus lesser knowns such as the brilliantly monikered Mad Mods…

LOOKING FOR classic British Tone? Long-established amp manufacturers Orange have it covered. The stylish, white Limited Edition Orianthi Crush 20RT amp delivers a versatile, crystal-clean sound. With the gain turned down and with the “dirty channel” selected, it can unleash high levels of detailed distortion to full saturation. Then there’s Orange’s tiniest amp, the Crush Mini, which uses simple controls to make it easy to crank up for heavy distortion or clean sound. You can also listen via Orange’s Crest MKII Wireless Headphones, which are designed for outstanding sonic performance. They use Bluetooth 5.0 technology and can run up to 40 hours on a single charge. Slim and lightweight O Edition MKII headphones fold easily into their carry pod. All are up for grabs in this month’s crossword! How to…

HELLO FEBRUARY 1986 I’d had a career doing a pop sort of thing [in one-single band Kingdoms]. I’d been on RCA, and they dropped me in 1985. I started going in a completely different direction and followed my instincts. People were getting into the Velvets again, and I went back to them. What kick-started the group was, I wrote Christine and demoed it pretty much as the record is, so I knew exactly how I wanted the group to sound. I put an advert in the Melody Maker for a guitarist into ’60s underground music, and Terry [Bickers, guitar] replied. I was living in a bedsit in Islington, and he came down and I played him my songs, Christine and Real Animal and things like that, and he really liked…