Table of contents for Issue 278 in MOJO

Mat Snow Writing this month about James Booker, the acclaimed style guru, bantamweight Wikipedia entry, artiste manager of singer-songwriter Ese and bow-tied impresario of London's Payday Salon is available for weddings, parties, anything. Jim Irvin When biscuit radio crumbled, this budding west London DJ turned to singing for his supper. When Furniture splintered, music journalism filled his table. These days, songwriting with others (Lana Del Rey, Lissie, Nothing But Thieves) is what mostly butters his parsnips. But this month he achieves a life goal by interviewing Kate Bush on p80. Vince McIndoe Vince McIndoe was born in Canada. After graduating OCAD in 1985,he became a celebrated illustrator as well as a successful fine artist. Vince's clients include Moet and Chandon,Stolichnaya Vodka, Barclay’,BBC and Levi's. http://www.debutart. com/artist/vincepastiche…

SUCH WAS THE SENSORY OVERLOAD provided by Kate Bush’s Before The Dawn live show, it’s hard to fix one moment in the mind’s eye. Musically thrilling, visually arresting, utterly absorbing in its sheer theatricality, her 2014 comeback overwhelmed all who saw it. A visual keepsake of that 22-night run in London would be wonderful. Why there isn’t one is a question we put to Kate, who for the first time ever reveals the show’s inspiration and looks back at the performances. From hypothermia to the ‘helicopter’, our Kate cover story begins on page 80 and crowns an issue where once again we celebrate a year in music. We thank you for your support during 2016 and invite you to join us on December 27 as we look forward to the…

DECEMBER 2 As befits the coming season, Ed Harcourt presents a benefit night for child refugees at the Union Chapel in Islington, in conjunction with kids’ entertainment charity The Flying Seagull Project. Also on the bill are Sophie Ellis-Bextor (above), Carl Barât, The Magic Numbers and Simon Munnery, AKA The League Against Tedium and Alan Parker, Urban Warrior. More guests are promised! DECEMBER 9 The Doors’ live album London Fog 1966 is released. Featuring the earliest known concert recording of the group, when they were house band at the Sunset Strip club of the same name, its seven tracks include songs by Muddy Waters and Little Richard, plus an early version of Strange Days. It comes in a special box set, containing a CD, a facsimile 10-inch test pressing, memorabilia…

Formerly of Brighton rumbling goths The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, bassist Sym Gharial and frontman Andy Huxley once roved the rock’n’roll highway in a flame-painted vintage roadster. Though that group ended in a messy wreck not once but twice, the two are now back motoring with riffing, tortured punk-pop foursome PIANO WIRE (left). After August’s predatory double A-sider Get A Life/All Roads Lead To God, their debut Dream Underground, with production by Gil Norton, comes in January. Lyricist Gharial promises “twisted love and being a loner and going mad. Feeling detested. And fear.” Let the party commence. Clive Prior The biggest claim to fame made so far by Yorkshire electronic duo worriedaboutsatan is probably that the band’s Gavin Miller (left, on right) is music supervisor for documentary film-maker Adam Curtis.…

1 PLEASE MR POSTMAN THE MARVELETTES TAMLA 2 TURN ON YOUR LOVE LIGHT BOBBY BLAND DUKE 3 GYPSY WOMAN THE IMPRESSIONS ABC-PARAMOUNT 4 SOOTHE ME THE SIMS TWINS SAR 5 THERE’S NO OTHER (LIKE MY BABY) THE CRYSTALS PHILLES 6 JUST GOT TO KNOW JIMMY McCRACKLIN ART-TONE 7 JUST OUT OF REACH (OF MY TWO OPEN ARMS) SOLOMON BURKE ATLANTIC 8 SEPTEMBER IN THE RAIN DINAH WASHINGTON MERCURY 9 TOWER OF STRENGTH GENE McDANIELS LIBERTY 10 IN THE DARK LITTLE JUNIOR PARKER DUKE…

When Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash in Iowa in February 1959, the 15-year-old Robert Thomas Velline and his band The Shadows were one of the groups chosen to replace the fallen rockers at the next date of their scheduled tour, in Minnesota. Such was the poignant beginning of Bobby Vee’s career. Born in Fargo, North Dakota, he would go on to enjoy huge successes as a clean-cut pop idol in the days before the British Invasion, scoring his first US hit with Devil Or Angel in 1960, and finding international acclaim soon after with the perky Rubber Ball. Take Good Of My Baby, Run To Him and The Night Has A Thousand Eyes carried on his winning streak, and he recorded regularly…

1 West London boy: the young Steve Jones, looking for the football pitch, near Riverside Gardens. 2 Princes of punk: with Johnny Rotten at the height of Sex Pistols fame. “If he was a bit cooler it would have been easier to carry on.” 3 Snakes alive!: Jones with Gaye Advert. “I’m a lot more accepting of women than I used to be.” 4 Paid off: the Pistols, March 13, 1977 (from left) Paul Cook, Jones with A&M cheque for £75,000, Sid Vicious, JR, Malcolm McLaren. 5 Reunited: Pistols ’96, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, with bassist Glen Matlock (far left). “If we was getting Rolling Stones money we’d put up with each other.” 6 Have Mercy: Jones at Joshua Tree, March 31, 1987, the year his solo debut came out. 7…

BY 1976, The Band was riven by drugs and alcohol and apathy – particularly affected was the big-hearted, big-voiced, raw-nerved Richard Manuel. Robbie Robertson had become the de facto spokesman and was determined to go out on a positive note. Director Martin Scorsese had been an assistant director and co-editor on the epic concert film Woodstock and shown a great flair for source music in his early feature Mean Streets. Despite being busy shooting New York, New York, he loved The Band and couldn’t miss the chance. Still, the set-up was haphazard and Robertson remains amazed the film wasn’t a complete disaster. “First of all, the guys in The Band played 21 songs that we didn’t have time to rehearse and didn’t screw up once. Levon sang The Night They…

IN BOSSWorld, 2016 has been The Year of The River. From Pittsburgh in January to Foxborough, Massachusetts in September, via the stadia of Europe, the E Street Band toured in honour of Bruce Springsteen’s sprawling 1980 double album, a mere 35 years after the first time. For the US stretch, they played The River in its entirety, every night opening with Meet Me In The City, a song that didn’t make the final cut but now had pole position in the set and was also opener on a 22-track outtakes album, the beating heart of The Ties That Bind: The River Collection. For Springsteen, this box set was an opportunity to reflect on a pivotal period in his story. As he said on the 2016 tour’s opening night, The River…

David Bowie’s press officer calls MOJO to enquire after the publication date of the issue on sale November 24. This follows a drip feed of rumours about new Bowie material since April, when it was announced he was collaborating with Irish playwright on a musical sequel to , called . It’s official. Bowie will write new music for the SpongeBob Squarepants musical. Sky Atlantic post the credit sequence of their new TV crime series, . It has one minute and six secondss of a newly composed d song by David Bowie ie.. Director , says “the music [is] dark,, brooding, beautiful and d sentimental… I stilll can’t fathom what actually happened.” Bowie’s press officer plays MOJO two tracks from the forthcoming album and shows us some of the album artwork…

“EVERYTHING WAS BIZARRE AT THAT TIME. BUT IT WAS VERY EXCITING.” JANUARY 1978. I WAS 18, SHE WAS 19. OUR EYES MET IN A CRAMPED, yeasty-smelling record library in Osterley, west London. “Look,” I said, handing her a thick stack of postcards requesting that her debut single be played on UBN, the only British radio station ever to broadcast exclusively to biscuit factories, where I’d landed my first music biz gig as junior DJ and playlist compiler. “All these are for your song.” “Wow,” she said, leafing through the requests from Manchester, Liverpool, glasgow and London, people packing custard creams, Jammie Dodgers and Penguins, people working in mailrooms and offices, each of them wanting to hear Wuthering Heights, which, ignoring the record label’s official February 1978 release date, United Biscuits…

“IT’S THE BEST NOISE THE STONES HAVE MADE IN DECADES.” BACK STORY: BLUES WITH A FEELING • Blue And Lonesome , the Stones’ first studio album since 2005, grew out of a break during the band's attempt to record new material. The title track, recorded as a kind of “palate-cleanser”, grew into an album of blues covers, songs from the band’s heroes including Little Walter (pictured above), Jimmy Reed and Otis Rush. Produced by Don Was, the album also features friend and rival Eric Clapton on two songs. KEY TRACKS • Blue And Lonesome • Hoodoo Blues • Little Rain The Rolling Stones Blue And Lonesome POLYDOR. CD/DL/LP It takes a superhuman imagination to remember the distant days when playing the blues was dangerous. And perhaps the Stones are…

Alex Turner and Miles Kane’s new EP offers two reworked LP tracks plus some favourite covers. Les Cactus honours the wild abandon of Jacques Dutronc’s original, Glaxo Babies’ This Is Your Life becomes a vicious spy theme, while Turner revels in wearing Leonard Cohen’s clothes – and telling his jokes! – tackling Is This What You Wanted. Best of all is the pair’s bounding, string-driven, psych rewind of The Fall’s Totally Wired, prompting wry smiles and admiration in equal measure. (Apple, Spotify, etc) PS Ólafur Arnalds Study For Player Piano (ii) The brittle yet evocative moody bonus track from recent album Island Songs is now available to stream. (Apple, Spotify, etc) Joe Fox Autopilot With Elliott Smith and Pixies influences, the singer discovered busking by A$AP Rocky offers something new…

World famous recording facility Abbey Road Studios is offering one lucky MOJO reader a chance to win its exclusive Revolver 1966 merchandise range, and the TG2-500 microphone pre-amplifier – all worth a total of £850! Celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Beatles’ landmark album and comprising a T-shirt, linen tote-bag, notebook and mug, the Revolver 1966 range is emblazoned with a bold 1966 graphic using Klaus Voormann’s iconic LP artwork. And for musicians and producers seeking vintage Abbey Road sonic character, the TG2-500 is essential. Designed by Chandler Limited, it’s an authentic recreation of the original EMI TG12428 microphone pre amp used on the Abbey Road Studios recording and mastering consoles during the sessions for The Beatles’ Abbey Road and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon LPs. So complete…

 I describe myself as… a molecule drifting – an atom afloat. Part overgrown teenager, part old man. Creatively restless. Still searching for the spark, but nonetheless with a generally positive disposition, and an odd blend of outgoing enthusiasm and inward-looking solitude. “I’M A MOLECULE DRIFTING – AN ATOM AFLOAT.” Music changed me… by being a part of my life since the age of four, and the dominant part of my life since I left university and got my first record deal at the age of 19. So in many ways rather than just changing me, music has made me who I am. I guess as long as I still have a certain hunger for trying and learning new things in music I will continue at full pace. When I’m not…

SPEED KING 2 ( Elvis above Presley ) fills in an automobile insurance form that lists a pink 1955 Cadillac sedan, a 1958 Harley-Davidson, a 1960 Rolls-Royce and a 1950 Chevy one-ton truck, which he uses to drive around Memphis incognito. HIGH RAY 4 on Ray trial Charles , after goes a November 14 drugs bust, when a raid on his Indianapolis hotel room yielded marijuana and heroin. The case is dismissed due to evidence being obtained illegally. EARL CRAZY 4 Duke Gene Of Chandler Earl is ’s released by Vee-Jay. A doo wop throwback, it will be Chandler’s biggest hit, selling over a million worldwide. ROSS LEADER 8 now The Supremes to a trio since , Barbara Martin’s departure, cut their second Motown 45. Titled Your Heart Belongs To…

“I NEVER WANTED A NUMBER 1... EVERYTHING AFTER IS A DOWNWARD SPIRAL.” Hoo-hoo, have you got the rough end of the stick!” That was the first thing Pete Burns said to me when I phoned him on September 21 to talk about the forthcoming release of Sophisticated Boom Box MMXVI, a 19-disc set, covering almost the entire recorded output of Dead Or Alive, the thigh-booted Mersey Hi-NRG platoon Burns fronted, in various forms, from 1980 onwards. It really should have been a chance for us to discuss a music career that was overtaken in 2006 by an admittedly astonishing performance on Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother, and a subsequent life measured out in breakfast TV appearances and shock tabloid headlines taking in financial insolvency, his tempestuous marriage, and failed attempts…

BELFAST singer-songwriter BAP KENNEDY (b.1962, pictured above) released four LPs with Energy Orchard before going solo. His 1998 debut Domestic Blues was produced by Steve Earle, and over eight more albums he would work with Van Morrison, Mark Knopfler and Shane MacGowan. When diagnosed with cancer in May he began to write a frank and courageous online diary in which he revealed that his Asperger’s Syndrome was “the engine of my creativity”. His last album, Reckless Heart, was released on November 18. SONGWRITER CURLY PUTMAN (b.1930) wrote and co-wrote a brace of classic, emotion-plumbing country hits, including D-I-V-O-R-C-E for Tammy Wynette in 1968 and He Stopped Loving Her Today for George Jones in 1980, both written with Bobby Braddock. His solo compositions included Green, Green Grass Of Home, turned into…

THE CLASSIC LP! Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols (VIRGIN, 1977) If Johnny Rotten’s vocal snarl remains an inimitable expression of personal rage, then the sound of Jones’s overdriven Les Paul is a source of universal inspiration. Drawing on Mott The Hoople’s punctuating powerchords, the guitarist’s layering adds a chromed edge, his oft-overlooked subtlety evident on opener Submission – its Morse code undertow adding to the track’s urgency. THE ‘LOST’ LP! The Professionals I Didn’t See It Coming (VIRGIN, 1981) Formed in ’79 by Pistols drummer Paul Cook and Jones, The Professionals found themselves beset by internal strife, legal turmoil and Jonesy’s ongoing drug problems. The latter finally contributed to the band’s demise, but I Didn’t See It Coming is a valiant collection of post-Pistols anthems…

Lodestar (COOKING VINYL) The Source (ECC) Upcetera (NIAG) The Gloaming 2 (REAL WORLD) Every Bird That Flies (SHELLS IN THE OCEAN) Manchester’s Improving Daily (CADIZ) Cactacus (AVELINE) Chaim Tannenbaum (STORYSOUND) Forgotten Kingdom (HANDS ON MUSIC) Shadows (NO MASTERS)   Big Black Coat (CITY SLANG) The Bells (STUDIO BARNHUS) EARS (WESTERN VINYL) elseq 1-5 (WARP) Elasticity (ELASTIC DREAMS) Sketches From An Island 2 (INTERNATIONAL FEEL) Under The Sun (WARP) Motion Graphics (DOMINO) Sirens (OTHER PEOPLE) Plum (BRUNETTE EDITIONS) Compiled by CHRIS INGHAM Alexander Scriabin’s Ragtime Band (MISTER SAM) Four Plus Three (KWJAZZ) Together, As One (EDITION) Notes From New York (IMPULSE) In My Room (QWEST/MEMBRAN) Twisted Toons Vol 2 (CADIZ MUSIC) The Bopped & The Bopless (33) Tetra (WHIRLWIND) The Royal Bopsters Project (MOTEMA) Country For Old Men (IMPULSE) Coloring…

WITH TYPICAL full-on commitment, Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen entered the rock memoir fray determined, it seems, to offer the insight into his private motivations – “the real me I knew who resided inside my easygoing façade” – that his engaging yet rarely-deflectable interviews tend to lack. So we get cold-sweat anxieties over his marriage to Julianne, the emotional legacy of his uncommunicative father, acknowledgment of his bouts of clinical depression, a lovely anecdote where E-Street Band sax staple Clarence Clemons demands a pay rise “for being Clarence” – all in a style that strains at the bit (with occasional fervent outbreaks OF CAPS LOCK) in way that’s as much a signifier of this driven man as the stories themselves. But Springsteen always was a writer, inspired by writers (like Dylan,…

I get melodies stuck in my head after one listen, so thank you, , for Cheap Thrills. I couldn’t get it out of my head from the moment I heard it. She’s an astonishing songwriter and it’s a great pop song. I saw perform in Berlin. It was amazing. And I saw at Madison Square Garden. Amazing showss both h off them m – so vulnerable and really surprising. I’d never seen Kanye perform. I’ve seen Polly Harvey perform for decades and she never disappoints. She’s such an amazing songwriter and an amazing performer. She really knows how to capture the moment and throw it back to the audience. Kanye displayed a degree of humility that I did not anticipate. A beautiful, complex, layered performance – it was incredible. 2016…

“SHE APPEARED SO SELF-ASSURED AND FEARLESS ON-STAGE. OFF-STAGE SHE WAS THIS QUIET CREATURE.”Guido Harari EVEN BEFORE she became famous, Kate Bush had an unusually strong and playful sense of how to present herself visually. Thanks to childhood modelling sessions for her photographer brother John Carder Bush – in which she appeared as if a character in an Arthur Rackham illustration, or sometimes a junior member of The Incredible String Band – the future recording artist was already entirely comfortable in front of the lens. This penchant for dressing-up continued into the photo sessions with Gered Mankowitz for her early LPs: the leonine costume of Lionheart; the moody ’40s Hollywood star poses, and of course the dancer-in-leotard shapes which revealed her passion for performance, sparked in 1976 in the Covent Garden…

Peter Doherty Hamburg Demonstrations CLOUDS HILL/BMG. CD/DL/LP THE PETE Doherty of mid-’00s tabloid infamy, glassy-eyed and sweating, was not a likely candidate to be still making albums in 2016. Yet, here he serves up his eighth in the 14 years since The Libertines’ Up The Bracket – a solid work-rate, by any stretch. Where the Libs channel his punchier songcraft, and Babyshambles allows him to be more free-form, one might imagine his self-attributed records to be sketchy, indulgent, incoherent. Far from it: like 2009’s Grace/Wastelands, this second solo outing is all about tight tunes, minimally instrumented, with affectingly open-hearted lyrics – respite, perhaps, from the exhausting narrative of his frictional co-writing with Carl Barât. In early 2016, with Libs reunion operations intermittently ongoing, Doherty filled a scheduling gap by turning…

Head Liffey Valley Unit 15, Liffey Valley Shopping Centre Fonthill Road, Clondalkin Dublin 22 Facebook: www.facebook.com/ Headliffeyvalley/ Tel: 00353 (0)16236661 HEAD Liffey Valley Dublin is ready to serve the good people of Dublin with all their Music & DVD needs. What we are most proud of is our Vinyl section covering all New Releases, classic albums, indie releases & all points in between. We’ll be holding ‘In Store P.A’s’ and of course gearing ourselves up for RSD 2017. Happy Christmas!!…

“I COMPLAINED A LOT, AND WE FOUGHT A LOT.” HELLO LATE 1984 Bill [Gould, FNM bassist] and I had played together in our first band The Animated, playing super-fast pop songs, kinda like The Dickies. Then he went to university in Berkeley, where he and Roddy [Bottum, keyboards] met Mike [Bordin, drums], and they started Faith No More. They always had h d trouble t ble hanging h i onto to singers si , so whenever they played LA, Billy would ask me to sing. I wasn’t a singer, I’d just go up there and rant and yell. For a while Faith No More had Courtney Love singing with them, but that didn’t work out. I had my own band, Haircuts That Kill, and I’d met a girl from Holland…

Bette Midler STILL DIVINE! What music are you currently grooving to? Well, if I could get the damn hi-fi to work… I listen to Nat King Cole – he was a fucking genius and his daughter [Natalie Cole] was a genius too! I listen to Adele and Amy Winehouse. I mostly listen to women. I listen to Rosanne Cash and Emmylou Harris. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Rubber Soul. No… any Aretha album. Wait, wait… I’m rushing here. I would have to say Gonna Take A Miracle, the album Laura Nyro made with Labelle. It’s so wonderful and so New York. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? I grew up in Hawaii and we had no…

… THE XX are making their third album, declaring, “It feels so good to be together making new music.” They also shared a playlist of current listening, including Crimson And Clover by Tommy James & The Shondells, How Long by Ace and Sketch For Summer by The Durutti Column – is this how the record will sound?… Titled Spirit, the next album by DEPECHE E MODE (Dave Gahan, left) will be produced by James Ford and Matrixxman… Liverpool’s IT’S IMMATERIAL are finishing off their unreleased 1992 album, House For Sale. Having rediscovered the multitracks, they’ve “reshaped, honed down and written new parts for many of the songs. It sits somewhere between the more rhythmic approach of [1986 debut] Life’s Hard And ThenYouDieand the cinematic story-telling qualities of [1990 follow-up] Song.”…

… BOB DYLAN was suspected of aloofness when he made no public comment on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in October: one Swedish Academy member even called him “arrogant”. But it seems Bob was simply so gobsmacked at the honour he was left speechless, and says he will attend the December ceremony if he can … speaking of great literature, ALEX BARTSCH’s Covers: Retracing Reggae Record Sleeves In London is a series of 42 photographs re-situating reggae LP art in its original setting (see below). It’s being kick- started by One Love books over at tinyurl.com/ zdb4kpw …the world rejoiced when ERIC B AND RAKIM , hip-hop trailblazers behind classics like Paid In Full and Follow The Leader, announced they’d tour internationally in 2017. They’ll also remaster…

“They were turbulent times. A lot of drugs involved. We should never have made that record then. From Knebworth, we have a couple of weeks off, then that American tour collapses halfway through… Relationships between people in the band were either non-existent or fractious. Instead of going, ‘We should go our separate ways for a year or two’, we decided like idiots to go straight into Abbey Road, arguing. [The session] didn’t last too long. There’s a bar in there! We were getting pissed all the time. I wasn’t there when we got kicked out, I’d hazard a guess it was summat Liam had been up to. We moved to Ridge Farm [in Surrey]. It took ages to get going. The press had followed us, and because it’s on a…

“I would turn my younger brother onto Bob Dylan, The Band and Van Morrison,” reflects Joe Henry, looking back to his formative years. “He turned me onto Billy Bragg and The Clash.” The pair met in person in Warner Brothers’ London office in 1988, where Mrs Henry was an international publicist. They bonded over Astral Weeks and Woody Guthrie, and six years later were duetting on Merle Haggard’s Dark As A Dungeon. In 2013 Henry produced Billy’s Tooth & Nailil album. “Joe is someone who’s perfected what he does and taken it beyond what I do,” says Bragg. “I’ve learnt to listen to him, [how] to follow your impulse and not be restrained by the way you play or learn the song.” The learning cuts both ways. Says Henry, “I’ve…

‘‘YOU’RE LISTENING... TO JONESY’S Jukebox… on K-l-O-s.” it’s just past noon on a Friday and steve Jones is where you’ll find him five days a week: behind the microphone on los Angeles’ iconic classic rock station, hosting the popular free-form music and chat show he’s helmed since 2004. At 61, the sex Pistols’ guitarist and founder cuts an expansive figure in dark shades and flowing lavender shirt (with monogrammed “sJ” cuffs). the shepherd’s Bush boy has been an lA resident for more than 35 years; he’s also decades sober, an ardent member of Alcoholics Anonymous, and a keen practitioner of transcendental t t Meditation… “i’ve done therapy for years, done a lot of stuff,” he says. “i’m always up for tryin’ to better meself.” it’s also been a long time…

DEckEd OuT IN AN ALL-bLAck suit, Robbie Robertson exudes elegance and a well-read intelligence, – the latter all the more fascinating given his teenage education chickenpickin’ in honky-tonks where – in the words of his first major employer Ronnie Hawkins – “You had to show your razor and puke twice before they’d let you in the door.” We’re meeting at his small office in a nondescript Los Angeles neighbourhood. Propped against a wall is the Martin d-28 acoustic on which he wrote The Weight and in a corner the Fender Twin T T Reverb ampp that survived Woodstock and The Last Waltz. “T T Talking-one-two, talking-talking-talking,” Robertson says into MOJO’s tape recorder, checking levels in a raspy baritone. The recorder is working and Robertson’s been too. He’s penned a new…

(Duke, 1959) Ace blues loper with the saw-voiced Davis nudged by Booker’s half-sympathetic, half-mocking punctuation. Future JB’s man Jabo Starks keeps time. (Peacock, 1960) Booker’s butterfly hands coax cocktail-hour invocations from his Hammond B3 for Don Robey’s Houston-based label. Let the good times roll, as Hunter Thompson had it. (from Ringo, Apple 1973) Aka Hold On: an unlikely alliance of Booker’s slopping-everywhere piano chaos and Marc Bolan’s cast-iron right hand. The great man really lets rip from 2.23. (from Junco Partner, Island 1976) Chopin soaked in file gumbo from his most satisfying, Joe Boyd-produced album. Hear his left hand dipping it in the mud. (from Spiders On The Keys, Rounder 1993) A Booker signature, at NO’s Maple Leaf Bar, from a hoard of console tapes made…

ON THE morning of January 11, 2016, Blackstar, released three days earlier, underwent a miraculous transformation. Just hailed one of the most ambitious works in David Bowie’s career, reports of his death meant it now became his last will and testament. Nothing since Lennon’s Double Fantasy had such a sting in its tail. Only this was different. Bowie knew it was coming. “David changed the game 100 per cent for this in a way he’d not done before,” says co-producer Tony Visconti, accepting MOJO’s Album Of The Year laurels on behalf of them both. “We’d broken all the rules on Low but this was an even higher level of liberation. This was dropping the rock context majorly.” Bowie had long admired Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Valedictory masterpieces of Late…

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As a fan, what’s your history with The Ninth Wave? I ‘acquired’ my brother’s cassette of Hounds Of Love when it came out in 1985. When I was living in Japan I bought it on CD and discovered it sounded even better in 2000. I loved The Ninth Wave’s juxtapositions of style and mood: from dreamy to sinister, from fluid choral to nightmarish ritual, from climactic to subdued, from despair to hope. I played it a lot when I was writing at night, hoping some of its sonic atoms might attach themselves to my second novel, whose chapters I thought of, self-flatteringly, as tracks. How did you understand the narrative? I thought then (and think now) that it treads that fine line between too much and too little. We know…

“WHERE FLUTE AND SAX SPARRED WITH LATIN, JAMAICAN AND AFRICAN RHYTHMS, AND ANYTHING WAS POSSIBLE.” BACK STORY: DARK MAGIC • Chris Wood had a deep interest in magic and astrology going back to his Traffic days. Among his favourite books was the five-volume A Treatise On The Seven Rays by British author Alice Bailey. Some of Wood’s songwriting, including Moonchild Vulcan on his solo album, was said to have been inspired by the books. “Chris was into mysticism and magic,” recalled Island Records’ Suzette Newman. “He was way ahead of [Traffic] on that.” In 1970, Wood, his wife Jeanette and Traffic’s Jim Capaldi took part in a séance in which Wood later claimed they made contact with the late Brian Jones, whose spirit told them he’d been murdered. KEY TRACKS…

“EVERYTHING HERE… SERVES TO UNDERLINE THE SCALE OF RUSSELL’S UNFATHOMABLE GENIUS.” CAST YOUR VOTES! This month you chose your Top 10 Arthur Russell LPs. Next month we want your Curtis Mayfield and groups Top 10. Send your selections to www.mojo4music.com or e-mail your Top 10 to mojo@bauermedia.co.uk with the subject ‘How To Buy Curtis’ and we will print your best comments. If the first question is how to buy Arthur Russell, the next question is surely which Arthur Russell do you buy? In 20-plus years of making music, from the late 1960s until his death from AIDS in 1992, aged just 40, Russell moved from organic Indian-influenced American minimalism to transcendental forms of New York disco (released under numerous different names including Dinosaur L, Loose Joints and Indian Ocean), and…