Home//MOJO/March 2024/In This Issue
MOJO|March 2024JET POWERED POP!“POWERPOP IS WHAT WE PLAY,” PETE TOWNSHEND told the NME’s Keith Altham in May 1967, coining a new name for the fabbest of genres. “[It’s] what the Small Faces used to play, and the kind of pop The Beach Boys played in the days of Fun Fun Fun, which I preferred.” What, though, did powerpop become? As the division between pop and rock became ever more pronounced in the ’70s, The Who, with their stadium brawn, their conceptually intricate rock operas, seemed to stray some distance away from the idea. Powerpop was concise, zippy, painted in bright colours. It was not averse to angst, as Big Star would testify, but the pain was generally delivered with an often overwhelming melodic sweetness. Powerpop was the sound of The Beatles, and specifically…7 min
MOJO|March 2024Let It Reid“WE LOVE doing what we do,” says the Jesus And Mary Chain singer Jim Reid from his home in Devon. “But we’re so f*cking lazy. We were back in the ’80s, and we were in the ’90s. It gets to a point where you just think, You have to get up off your arse and do something.” He’s talking about the group’s new LP Glasgow Eyes, their first since 2017’s Damage And Joy, which arrives in March. Its title was inspired by brother William’s sleeve image. “William’s gotten into digital art and stuff like that,” says Jim. “He was doing images for the front cover, and it was kind of a f*cked-up picture, someone’s eyes were all sort of distorted and scored out. He was interested in making the title…7 min
MOJO|March 2024DR JOHN COOPER CL ARKE CELEBR ATES 50 YEARS IN SHOWBIZ!“IT SOUNDED more cheerful than, What, He’s Still Around?” laughs venerable poet Dr John Cooper Clarke, savouring every vowel and consonant in inimitable timbres Mancunian. “It sounds like a celebration of something, and how often can you celebrate 50 years of showbiz?” Clarke came to prominence as an eloquent voice in the Norther n punk boom of ’76, but as the name of his imminent UK tour – Celebrating 50 Years In Showbiz – suggests, this poet’s odyssey began a few years earlier. His first paid gig was at north Manchester ’s Embassy Club, pie-and-ash lair of notorious comedian Bernard Manning, largely to prove to his sceptical father that it was possible to earn money from poetry. “It wasn’t very good,” recalls Clarke. “It was the poet’s worst enemy –…5 min
MOJO|March 2024MEET ØXN, LATEST GR ADUATES FROM L ANKUM’S AVANT- FOLK ACADEMY. “DARK CR AIC” GUAR ANTEED!“We’re not witches, but we’re all a little bit spooky.” BY SOME distance the most outré record ever to be released on ultra-orthodox Irish traditional music label Claddagh Records, the debut album from Dublin collective ØXN brings together Lankum’s Radie Peat, the band’s producer John ‘Spud’ Murphy, his collaborator in Dublin Krautrockers Percolator, Eleanor Myler, plus singer-songwriter Katie Kim. The title CYRM (pronounced ‘sigh-rum’) is an archaic word for an incantation, though Peat is keen to emphasise to MOJO that – despite the supernatural racket they make – none of the band are committed to the old ways. “We’re not witches,” she jokes. “But we’re all a little bit spooky.” Every bit as extreme as her other band’s much-fêted False Lankum, CYRM features the collective’s torrid takes on traditional slashers…3 min
MOJO|March 2024Accrington Stanley FC’s loss was prog rock’s gain when Jon Anderson found his inner Art Garfunkel and said ‘yes’ to Yes. Through spats and schisms he’s soldiered on, unbeaten, unbowed. How so? “I’m from the North, mate. Don’t mess with me.”IF YOU HEARD A DISTINCTIVELYL ANCASTRIAN voice shatter the hill-sheltered California idyll of San Luis Obispo one evening in November 2023, the chances are it was Jon Anderson watching the football. The former Yes vocalist has lived in this old Spanish mission town since the mid-’90s, and still follows his childhood team, Accrington Stanley FC, albeit from afar. “I found a TV channel that was showing their game against Wrexham,” says Anderson, in his soft North-western burr. “And we beat ’em two-nil,” he adds triumphantly. Anderson speaks in the same breathy high-tenor heard on all those vintage Yes LPs. He’s approaching his eightieth year, wants to “keep the energy moving” and claims to have “10 projects on the go.” His parents, county champion ballroom dancers Albert and Kathleen, christened their…20 min
MOJO|March 2024Mission AccomplishedONE AUTUMN NIGHT IN 1974, AN oddly proportioned Albanian appeared in silhouette in the doorway of the Old Firehall, the Toronto theatre that housed a struggling satellite cast of the famed Chicago improv comedy company, Second City. “He had a hexagonal driver’s cap on, and he had a white cable-knit sweater and a white scarf and a pack of cigarettes and a butt going, and sneakers, totally under-dressed for Canada,” recalled Dan Aykroyd, one of the Second City Canadians. John Belushi needed no introduction. He was Second City royalty, a breakout star of the Chicago troupe who had decamped to New York to attain even greater fame in a series of productions staged by the humour magazine National Lampoon. In Lemmings, a pioneering musical comedy revue that parodied Woodstock, Belushi’s…21 min
MOJO|March 2024Sometimes SalvaionPHIL LYNOTT POINTS HIS BASS GUITAR LIKE A MACHINE gun at Chris Robinson’s head. The framed photograph of Thin Lizzy ’s main man in attack mode hangs on a wall in the vocalist’s house in Marin County, California. “And I also have Darby Crash right here,” says Robinson, showing MOJO a picture of the Germs’ doomed singer. The Rolling Stones’ signature tongue appears in the crook of Robinson’s elbow as he pulls up his sleeve to reveal the “pot-head pixie” from Gong’s Flying Teapot album cover. “A memento of the psychedelic world we were living in,” he offers, with a lopsided grin. The photographs and body art are testament to Chris Robinson’s fascination with rock’n’roll in all its for ms. A few days earlier, he took the plunge and saw…16 min
MOJO|March 2024The Thing With FEATHERSMINUTES BEFORE PAUL McCARTNEY CALLS FROM BRAZIL, for an unusually lengthy explanation of how 1973’s Band On The Run saved Wings from crashing to the ground, news comes that Denny Laine has died. “I heard that Denny was getting better, there was hope for the future, but obviously not,” says McCartney of the singer and guitarist who stuck with him in Wings through good times and bad. “It’s very sad because Denny was great. Can you imagine trying to start another band after The Beatles? With Denny, we managed it.” Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo, Björn Larsson Ask/KB/TT/Shutterstock To get a sense of how Wings endured, how they overcame the seemingly insurmountable challenge of being the band nobody wanted Paul McCartney to be in, you only have to look at…27 min
MOJO|March 2024War and peaceIdles ★★★★ Tangk PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP IN ONE of the most thought-provoking entries in Aesop’s Fables, the North Wind and the Sun vie to prove themselves the stronger by attempting to strip a traveller of his clothing. Going first, the wind’s “violent gusts” only prompt the wayfarer to wrap his cloak more tightly around himself, and soon to put on another layer. Next up, the sun’s methods are more effective, its moderate rays enticing the fellow to shed his coat and then, at full blaze, to skinny-dip in a nearby river. This much-referenced tale str uck a deep chord with Idles’ firebrand frontman Joe Talbot. Perhaps reading Aesop to his daughter, Frida, now aged four, during his cogitations before devising the band’s fifth LP, he took on board its moral: “ver…6 min
MOJO|March 2024Hank Wangford & Noel Dashwood★★★★ Promises, Promises $INCERE $OUNDS. CD/DL/LP Father of Brit C&W and dobro folkie’s debut country album. Wangford, as any Brit who’s wept into their beer knows, is a beloved founding father of UK country music; Dashwood is an English folkie and a dab hand at the dobro. They started playing together a few years back then went into the studio, emerging with an LP as spare and honest as its 11 fine songs. For the most part it’s simply Wangford’s voice and guitar (and occasional uke) and Dashwood’s evocative dobro and unaffected harmony. There’s a timeless feel; only the lyrics of Jump In The River and Oil (Black Gold) pin it in the 2020s. Wangford has old country’s light-hearted despair down to an art (Way Of The World’s sweet, Jimmie…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Green Day★★★★ Saviors REPRISE. CD/DL/LP/MC The pop-punk reliables act their age even while playing like kids. Can a canonical punk trio stay interesting after its singer breaks 30, 40, even 50? That is the question Billie Joe Armstrong – the Green Day leader, now 51, whose sneer became world-famous at 22 – has been answering in assorted ways for three decades, whether through agitprop smashes or Norah Jones collaborations. Green Day are admirably assured, honest, and funny on Saviors,their fourteenth LP. They often sound like their adolescent pop-punk selves but satisfyingly write like adults, confronting American demons, including mass shootings and rampant inequality, and personal ones, like depressive spells and sobriety struggles. Reuniting with producer Rob Cavallo, Green Day find variety within these 15 tracks, conjuring Cheap Trick on Corvette Summer…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Grandaddy★★★★ Blu Wav DANGERBIRD. CD/DL/LP Jason Lytle’s first out-andout country LP. Though only partly autobiographical, Grandaddy’s first LP in six years is a break-up record of sorts. That’s Blu as in feeling blue, then, hence seven of these 13 songs are disconsolate waltzes laced with forlorn pedal steel, actual coyote calls, and a trippy measure of Spiritualized’s cosmic ruination. The singular, downtempo mood is widescreen and desolately pretty, the songs’ bruised protagonist retreating to a waterfall in East Yosemite, or watching his ex “and some dude knockin’ back the shots” while sat in his car outside (Jukebox App). “Some things just weren’t meant to fly,” reflects Lytle elsewhere amid the heavenly melancholy of On A Train Or Bus, while country’s affinity with black humour steers You’re Going To Be Fine…1 min
MOJO|March 2024His Lordship★★★★ His Lordship PSYCHONAUT SOUNDS/PIAS. CD/DL/LP Post-millennial Pretenders guitarist garage-rocks out. North Londoner James Walbourne has been British rock’n’roll’s great hope for 20-odd years now; here, he finally steps out front to fill the ever-deepening void in UK ramalama ding-dong. After last year’s self-explanatory Play Rock’N’Roll Volume One EP charted the beginnings of his duo alongside Danish drummer Kris Sonne in covering pioneers like Link Wray and Billy Lee Riley, this self-composed debut LP roams beyond rock’s 1950s launchpad. The pair variously detonate breathless, Hives-like garage-punk (All Cranked Up), instrumental surf (Cat Call), twisty new wave (Buzzkill) and even, on The Repenter, a classy songwriterly character assassination worthy of Elvis Costello or, indeed, Walbourne’s sometime employer, Ray Davies. As such, His Lordship swerves possible White Stripes comparisons (Walbourne contributes bass…1 min
MOJO|March 2024John Bramwell★★★★ The Light Fantastic TOWNSEND. CD/DL/LP Former I Am Kloot frontman’s second solo LP. It was unlikely that the 2017 break-up of eternal Manchester bridesmaids I Am Kloot was going to be the last we heard of band leader John Bramwell, and now, two solos LPs in and pushing 60, his much-lauded songwriting is anything but diminished. With songs mostly written around early-morning recollections of the night before’s dreams, during the months after losing both his parents, mortality looms large on The Light Fantastic. The man once known as Johnny Dangerously doesn’t really ‘do’ morbid, however, the upbeat melodies and close harmony backing vocals blowing off most of the existential angst on tracks such as A World Full Of Flowers and 2019 single I Am The Sky, the gently wafting…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Torres★★★ What An Enormous Room MERGE. CD/DL/LP Many-chambered sixth album from Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter. The title of this record comes from its wistful track Jerk Into Joy: “what an enormous room/Look at all the dancing I could do.” There’s no doubt Mackenzie Scott never stops moving here, switching between gothic sway, grungy stomp and electro-pop gyration, but it can make it hard to catch her eye in a meaningful way. The jittery fading to grey (Happy Man’s Shoes) and wired St. Vincent nursery rhymes (Life As We Don’t Know It) set the uneasy tone, but there are moments when there’s space for connection. I Got The Fear picks up the Elliott Smith adoration where Phoebe Bridgers and Soccer Mommy left off; there’s a world of pain in the way she articulates…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Fer Franco★★★ Ritos De Paso FER FRANCO. DL/LP Pop, prog and post-rock join hands on Guatemalan artist/ producer’s solo debut. As keyboardist for out-there Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti and veteran of Manchester alt-rockers Cosmos Collapse, Fer Franco is used to straddling several sonic worlds. Nonetheless, Ritos De Paso Andy Cowan heads further out there than many debuts, whether offsetting Gary Burton’s Frippy guitars with dense thickets of reverb and synths on Ya No Vivo Aquí, or building Asumir Forma’s sci-fi techno pulse into a swirling thrall of tension and release. Guests Hector Tosta and Fratti add to its air of risk. While Fratti’s captivating voice is to the fore on Tu Señal, Tosta’s bass bridges Eliminar Lo Innecesario’s buzzing synths and cavernous soundscapes to create something both jazzy and Eno-esque. Blessed…1 min
MOJO|March 2024ALSO RELEASEDLondon Afrobeat Collective ★★★ Esengo CANOPY. DL/LP Fourth album from a group whose name says everything you need to know. The nonet have been adding to their repertoire, however; so while openers Topesa Esengo Na Motema and My Way are worthy of the Afrika 70, El Ritmo De Londres is a funky slice of salsa. In a genre short of female stars, vocalist Juanita Euka is a real find. Bounaly ★★★★ Dimanche À Bamako SAHEL SOUNDS. CD/DL/LP Not the Amadou And Mariam album of the same name, Ali ‘Bounaly’ Traoré’s debut was recorded at what must have been quite the wedding in the Malian capital. It features six lengthy takamba guitar workouts of the sort Niger’s Mdou Moctar specialises in, though Bounaly plays his six strings with such a ferocity…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Dylan John Thomas★★★★ Dylan John Thomas IGNITION. CD/DL/LP Fast-rising troubadour’s feisty but expansive debut. Growing up in the Glasgow care system and diagnosed with ADHD, Dylan John Thomas hasn’t had things easy. But having honed his craft busking his city’s streets before attracting the attention of Gerry Cinnamon, he’s built a fervent cult following. On the evidence of an earworm-heavy debut which both sparkles with optimism (there’s actual jaunty whistling on Melancholy’s Cure) and sinks with despair, he’s built to last. Thomas may have the most Caledonian vocals since The Proclaimers and his most obvious forebears, The View, but he’s much more than an ordinary Joe Strummer. The twinkling Now And Then merges impossible catchiness with bleak lyrics (a calling card it transpires); Champs-Élysées shows he can spin a yarn and the…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Cabane★★★ Brulée CABANE. CD/DL/LP Belgian Thomas Jean Henri’s second batch of lovelorn ballads, with special guests. Thomas Jean Henri has mastered the art of wistful ballads in a classic Gallic style, though he clearly doesn’t rate himself as a singer. The debut Cabane LP Grande Est La Maison was fronted by This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables (channelling Françoise Hardy) and Will Oldham (channelling Will Oldham), plus Sean O’Hagan’s Melody Nelsonevoking string arrangements. Stables and O’Hagan return for Brulée alongside Tunng frontman Sam Genders (channelling some of Robert Wyatt’s fragile heartache) as Henri fuses folktronica to Michel Legrand’s soundtrack to Les Parapluies De Cherbourg. Martin Aston The song titles (Melodies Of Love; The Italian Mysteries; Amour(s)) underline Henri’s love for love (the word is sung over 30 times) and paint…1 min
MOJO|March 2024C Diab★★★★ Imerro TONAL UNION. LP Canadian multiinstrumentalist’s fifth suite of immersive ‘post-classical grunge’. Titled after an archaic word for desire, Caton Diab’s latest attempt at capturing the wilderness of his Vancouver Island home finds him widening his palette. Best known for his bowed guitar figures, on Imerro Andy Cowan he experiments with other instruments “to see if they had anything to say”. Quite a lot, as it turns out: a lonesome trumpet setting the celestial direction of Lunar Barge, hoopoe bird calls intersecting Quatsino Sound’s long, bowed flourishes, screaming saxophones layering Erratum’s fanfare from the edge, bagpipe-like horns dominating Surge Savard, an insistent three-note figure and crunchy, broken-ice percussion microtonally infusing The Excuse Of Fiction. Diab isn’t short on feeling, either, his impactful minimalism drawing parallels with Colin Stetson, Arthur…1 min
MOJO|March 2024The Loveless★★★★ Meet The Loveless CADIZ. CD/DL/LP Marc Almond’s underdog glam-garage combo. Initially convened in the late 2010s by Almond as a club-level party band where he could wrap his quavering tonsils around some choice rock tunes, The Loveless are powerfully staffed by Sigue Sigue Sputnik guitarist Neal X and Iggy Pop’s touring rhythm section. While early shows saw them covering glam big-hitters by Bowie and The Sweet, this debut takes a more recherché deep-dive into mid-’60s garage and ’70s hard rock, where The Kinks’ I’m Not Like Everybody Else can comfortably co-exist alongside a full-raunch Under My Wheels by Alice Cooper. Neither Wild In The Streets (one of two in-house compositions, which opens like AC/DC’s Let There Be Rock), nor Hot Hard And Heavy, a Montroseesque hog anthem by LA…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Helado Negro★★★★ Phasor 4AD. CD/DL/LP Florida songwriter’s blend of alt-pop and folktronica peaks on eighth LP. This spiritual successor to 2019’s breezy This Is How You Smile finds Ecuadorian-American Roberto Carlos Lange pressing reset after a restorative move from New York to North Carolina. Homespun, carefree songs such as I Just Want To Wake Up With You and Best For You And Me are warm, hopeful chugs that fuse electronica, folk and chamber pop to harness his light, intoxicating vocals. Lange excels when pushing the boat farther out, whether singing offbeat on Echo Tricks Me, negotiating the fractured horns and jumping grooves of Out There or sonorously offsetting the skittering electronica of Wish You Could Be Here, a seeming collision Kieron Tyler with a cache of old rave demos. Rendered with…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Tony Christie★★★ We Still Shine UMR. CD/DL/LP Sentimentality well-earned as a life in song fades away – his first album in 12 years. When middle-of-theroad belter Anthony Fitzgerald renamed himself after the Darling star Julie Christie, he paid lip service to the Swinging Sixties while bringing Vegas-style razzmatazz to the Northern pub and club circuit. His catchy 1971 chart breakthrough (Is This The Way To) Amarillo hit even bigger when revived in 2005, with fellow Yorkshiremen Jarvis co*cker and Richard Hawley championing him to a retro-hungry younger crowd; strong and confident LPs in the lounge, Northern soul and Irish folk styles would follow. As ever bringing the sound of the Big Country to Blighty, Christie has, at the age of 80, cut a countrified album in Nashville. Despite a recent dementia…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Orgōne★★★★ Chimera 3 PALM. CD/DL/LP Irresistible grooves for parties, orgies and cultural studies. The band backing Say She She on their instant-classic second album Silver and current world tour, guitarist Sergio Rios (who also produced Silver) and keyboardist Dan Hastie have their fingers in other pies, including the LA jam band Orgōne. Their run of records since 2001 combines instrumentals with numbers sung by, among others, Adryon de León, Kelly Finnigan and, on this thirteenth studio album, Terin Ector, Jamie Allensworth and the Congolese Mermans Mosengo. Audibly in thrall to Isaac Hayes’ blaxploitation soundtracks, Funkadelic, Curtis Mayfield, The Meters, The JB’s and the Afrobeat artists building on those foundations, Orgōne range from hip-shake to stoned sway, their punchy, sensual grooves relying on strong arrangements, chops and rehearsal rather than lavish…1 min
MOJO|March 2024EXTENDED PLAYIn search of space Dorothy Moskowitz: Rising To Eternity TOMPKINS SQUARE. DL The former singer with The United States Of America had a remarkable 2023, releasing the acclaimed Under An Endless Sky with The United States Of Alchemy, and this digital-only album, celebrating the second anniversar y of the launch of the Webb Space Telescope. Fif ty-six years after the self-titled album by the pioneering psychedelic electronic group The United States Of America, she’s still out there exploring. Initially, Moskowitz wanted to record an instr umental album of electronics and her own viola and piano, but on each track her voice, sometimes overlapping with her vocalist daughter, Melissa Falarski, hangs over shif ting abstract soundscapes that include sequencers and NASA recordings. “What seemed so alien before is so close”, she…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Plan EBill Fay Group ★★★★ Tomorrow, Tomorrow And Tomorrow SECRETLY CANADIAN. CD/DL/LP “AFTER ALL these years I emerged from the darkness,” sang Bill Fay on Isles Of Sleep sometime around the turn of the 1980s, a spasm of spiritual revelation that somehow anticipated the Londoner’s resurrection as a Jeff Tweedy and Jim O’Rourke-endorsed outsider artist in the 2000s. Now expanded with bonus versions, this collection of scraps recorded from 1978-81 previously surfaced in 2005, at a time when Fay’s first albums – Bill Fay (1970) and Time Of The Last Persecution (1971) – were starting to be feted as minor masterpieces. Since then, Fay has made three excellent records for Dead Oceans – Life Is People (2012), Who Is The Sender? (2015) and Countless Branches (2020) – his understated songs of…5 min
MOJO|March 2024Merle HaggardTHE FIRST THING most people know about Merle Haggard is his million-selling 1969 signature song, Okie From Muskogee. A seeming attack on liberal hippies and Vietnam war protestors, it saw the 33-year-old California-born country singer held up as a figurehead of right-wing working-class America. But the song was as much a satirical parody as righteous howl of protest, and while it undeniably secured some much-desired wealth and stardom for Haggard, it presents a distinctly misleading portrait of the man. Born to Oklahoma migrants James and Flossie Haggard in 1937, and raised by his mother after his father died from a brain haemorrhage, Merle spent his childhood in and out of juvenile detention. “Songs of freedom, escape and the working man… a deeper kind of autobiographical sincerity.” Following an encouraging backstage…9 min
MOJO|March 2024Live And DirectFOR MUSICIANS, hearing is essential. With the AM Pro X10, you no longer have to choose between dedicated in-ear monitors and an in-the-room sonic experience. With a unique design, the Am Pro X10 deliver accurate and detailed sound: Westone Audio’s patented ambient technology adds passive ambient sound, allowing you to enjoy both a clear monitor mix and to hear and feel the energy and interaction of the audience and your fellow players on-stage. Plus, their ergonomic design means you can wear them for prolonged periods without ear discomfort. Retailing at £250, we have TWO sets up for grabs for this month’s crossword prize. How to enter: take the letters from each coloured square and rearrange them to form the name of a musician. Visit www. mojo4music.com/crossword and fill out the…1 min
MOJO|March 2024ALL BACK TO MY PLACEAnna Calvi ART ROCKER, PEAKY BLINDERS SOUNDTRACKER What music are you currently grooving to? Mitski’s The Land Is Inhospitable And So Are We. Her melodies are really strong and I love her voice. I saw her do a stripped-back show in north London recently and even just on guitar, these songs are like mountains. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. I bought it when I was nine and it changed my life. The chord changes, the melodies, his incredible face. I was completely bewitched. The piano playing by Mike Garson is amazing. I got to duet with him a couple of years ago which meant so much to me. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you…5 min
MOJO|March 2024BACK AFTER 26 YEARS! DEE CLEE HAS THINGS TO SAY“My voice went after not singing for so long and giving it loads without warming up.” JUST SOMETHING is Dee C Lee’s first album since 1998’s Japan-only Smiles. She recorded it at Chicken Shack studios in Bromley, the home set-up of producer Sir Tristan Longworth. “It is a chicken shack,” says the former Style Council vocalist and Wham! backing singer, speaking from the east London offices of her label Acid Jazz. “He’s got chickens in the back. If I was going for a note and couldn’t get it, I’d go and sit in the garden and chill out with the chickens for five minutes… after that, I’m getting it right.” Her return to recording is partly the consequence of the 2020 documentary Long Hot Summers: The Story Of The Style…4 min
MOJO|March 2024FUGITIVE SONGWRITER SCOTT fa*gAN SCORNS OUTR AGEOUS FORTUNERichie Matthews, Dolly Faibyshev/New York Times/Eyevine “I WAS A FAIRLY radical young dude who was not interested in compromise,” Scott fa*gan tells MOJO, explaining how his deter mination to tell the unvar nished tr uth about his impoverished, bohemian upbringing in the US Virgin Islands helped to steer his mighty 1968 debut South Atlantic Blues towards the rocks. “I take a per verse pride in the fact that I never sold out. Of course, I’ve had to apologise to my children and their mothers for that.” The sun-soaked Jimmy Webb that nobody got to hear, fa*gan was born in New York to be-bop besotted parents, but was taken to the island of Saint Thomas by his eccentric mother as a child, where he received a schooling in calypso and Puerto…3 min
MOJO|March 2024MOJO PLAYLIST1 LIAM GALLAGHER AND JOHN SQUIRE JUST ANOTHER RAINBOW Liam dons his vintage Ray-Bans (with brown lenses) for a Rain/I Am The Resurrection roller that brings the Oasis/Roses mind-meld into glorious actuality. Find it: streaming services 2 STEVEN WILSON INCLINATION (EWAN PEARSON REMIX) Just out on 12-inch, glittering disco for Moonbase Alpha, with a hint of prog and Fourth World trumpet. Find it: streaming services 3 ITASCA MILK A “misty castle dream” begins Kayla Cohen’s new LP with a vision of Genevieve, painted in her soft, burnt umber voice and shivery guitar. Find it: streaming services 4 HOUSE BAND SPINNERS A wonky LA jamming collective celebrate the dance style of the Grateful Dead’s wildest fans, like a dubbed-out Can. Find it: streaming services 5 SAM EVIAN WILD DAYS Saucer-eyed,…1 min
MOJO|March 2024A LIFE IN PICTURES1 Pride of Accrington: Jon Anderson aged five. 2 Wild at heart: Anderson (standing, second left) with The Warriors, 1964. 3 In the affirmative: the original line-up of Yes in 1968 (clockwise from left) Peter Banks, Tony Kaye, Jon Anderson, Chris Squire, Bill Bruford. 4 Getting closer: Yes play the Crystal Palace Garden Party, London, September 2, 1972 (from left) Steve Howe, Anderson, Squire, Alan White, Rick Wakeman. 5 One from the heart: Anderson on-stage with the new model Yes, 1984. 6 Find the way home: Vangelis and Jon Anderson at Polydor Records, London, December 7, 1981. 7 Don’t say yes: (from left) Anderson, Howe, Bruford and Wakeman, otherwise known as Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe, 1989. 8 Still hearing those wonderous stories: Jon and Rick on-stage with Yes Featuring Anderson,…1 min
MOJO|March 2024a man you don't meet every dayTHE HORSE-DRAWN CARRIAGE which led Shane MacGowan’s funeral procession through the streets of Dublin on December 8, 2023, could have been taken straight out of a scene from James Joyce’s festive masterpiece, The Dead. A lone piper, a marching band and the rapturous applause of hundreds of onlookers, as the glass-sided carriage bearing the singer’s coffin was pulled along by four black-plumed horses, gave MacGowan’s send-off the look and feel of a state funeral. As a Garda escort led the cortege out of Dublin’s Southside to make the two-hour journey to MacGowan’s spiritual heartland of Tipperary, a rainbow suddenly broke through the grey gloom of the city’s skyline. It was a momentary flash of green and gold to match the Irish tricolour flag draped over the singer’s coffin – a…26 min
MOJO|March 2024"Everybody Was On Fire"“THE MAIN thing Iremember the most was Chris Robinson’s voice. It was just unbelievable…” Jimmy Page is recalling when he first performed with The Black Crowes. It was an evening in June 1999 at London’s Café De Paris, ashow in aid of his Brazilian Children’s Trust charity. Four months later, the surprise pairing of Page and The Black Crowes played their debut gig at New York’s Roseland Ballroom. No-one was more surprised than Page when, at their first rehearsal, the band struck up Ten Years Gone from 1975’s Physical Graffiti. “There’s some tricky chords on that and they were playing them exact,” says Page in wonderment. “They had all the harmony guitars with the solo.” Page credits the Crowes’ then guitarist Audley Freed for drilling the rest of the band:…3 min
MOJO|March 2024Flight PATTERNWildlife ★★★ (Apple, 1971) Inspired by Dylan’s swift creation of New Morning the previous year, McCartney booked only aweek at Abbey Road in August ’71 for Wings’ debut, determined – as drummer Denny Seiwell remembered – “to give the world a real true look at a new band.” Opening tracks Mumbo and Bip Bop were maybe too loose and jammy, and side two was where the real action was: Lennon truce ballad Dear Friend; Paul and Linda channelling the Everlys in the lovely Some People Never Know. Red Rose Speedway ★★★ (Apple, 1973) The result of protracted sessions during what Linda later described as “a terribly unsure period”, Red Rose Speedway is best remembered for its gold standard Macca ballad My Love (featuring a great, improvised, one-take guitar solo from…3 min
MOJO|March 2024Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry★★★★ King Perry FALSE IDOLS/!K7. CD/DL/LP Perry’s fourth and final collaborative LP with producer Daniel Boyle. While the late Upsetter’s reputation rests on his visionary ’70s productions, for the ensuing four-plus decades he largely stepped back from the console to work as an artist, in-the-moment rapper and in-studio avatar. At best, he’d leave the heavy lifting to the Mad Professor or On-U’s Adrian Sherwood, who sculpted 2019’s valedictory highlights Rainford/Heavy Rain. Amongst myriad other team-ups, Perry’s outings with Boyle have slipped by undervalued, especially 2018’s Black Album, recorded at Abbey Road’s Studio Two (birthplace of The Beatles’ White Album, geddit?). Here, Boyle, who generally works at his Rolling Lion facility in Puglia, strikes a crisp spacious groove somewhere between dubstep and ’90s digi-dub, for Perry to voice croakily alongside co-vocalists…1 min
MOJO|March 2024J Mascis★★★★ What Do We Do Now SUB POP. CD/DL/LP “J goes electric” shock; Dinosaur Jr guitarist’s fifth solo LP. For someone who hates writing lyrics, J Mascis sure knows the power of simple words. Recorded in the last days of lockdown, his fifth solo LP is a study in the confused emotions that have been universal this decade. From the title track to single Can’t Believe We’re Here and the country-tinged I Can’t Find You and You Don’t Understand Me, or the spectre of a wasteland on Old Friends, it’s an LP of insight and empathy, a hand on the shoulder that says: “Yeah, me too.” The most notable feature, however, is that Mascis has plugged in: though acoustic guitars shape the songs throughout, this is his first solo LP…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Full beamFrank Lebon The Smile ★★★★ Wall Of Eyes XL RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP UPON THEIR ar rival in 2021, it was clear that The Smile weren’t just a Radiohead side-project. Their debut album, A Light For Attracting Attention, was way too good for a start, with many of the tracks (Pana-Vision, Speech Bubbles, the beautiful Free In The Knowledge) stylistically segueing from the misty moods of A Moon Shaped Pool. Wall Of Eyes finds them moving further into their proggier side. Recorded at an undisclosed location in Oxford, and at Abbey Road, it involves a change of producer from Nigel Godrich (presumably busy overseeing the new Idles album) to Sam Petts-Davies (who worked with Yorke on his 2018 Suspiria soundtrack) but retains the inventive ar ranging skills of Hugh Br unt conducting…2 min
MOJO|March 2024Kevin Richard Martin★★★★ Black BANDCAMP. DL Electronic eulogy to the late Amy Winehouse from the Bug/King Midas Sound industrial sound architect. “Black is a heartfelt memorial,” writes Kevin Martin on his Bandcamp page, “an album of predominantly beatless ambience possessed by the ghost of Back To Black.” Although never a fan of the late singer during her lifetime (“I never cared for Mark Ronson’s poptastic productions,” he writes), there was something about Amy Winehouse’s tragic death that struck a chord with Martin, and caused him to listen again to her beautiful world-weary voice and reassess “the scale of her greatness”. Utilising slow dub, ambient jazz ghosts and choirs of blurred drone, Black is a kind of brooding threnody, a sonic companion-piece to Asif Kapadia’s 2015 Winehouse documentary that captures in dark sound…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Vera Sola★★★★ Peacemaker CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP Second album from Danielle Aykroyd, daughter of Dan. A PROTÉGÉ of Elvis Perkins – who guests on a couple of tracks here – Vera Sola wrote and played ever ything on her 2018 debut, Shades. Second time around, her for merly black and white world is now in blazing Technicolor. To that end, she’s not only recr uited Milk Carton Kid Kenneth Pattengale as co-producer and inter mittent co-writer, there’s a full band, a stringsection, Swar matron and brass. Reassuringly, the songs are strong enough to carr y the new load. She evokes Patsy Cline on the lonesome Waiting (“Turn on the lights before you go/I want to watch you close the door ”); before the last-seconds lyrical twist to the percussive, vitriolic I’m Lying,…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Maya Shenfeld★★★★ Under The Sun THRILL JOCKEY. CD/DL/LP Synth, classical and choral music collide in an ode to a sick planet Earth. A rich synthesis of drone, ambient, field recordings and modern classical, the music of Maya Shenfeld induces a regular flip-flopping of your emotions. At times portentous, disturbing and bleak, at others sunlit, optimistic and soothing. Whatever it is, it’s deeply affecting. Earth and its deteriorating climate is the primary focus here. Recorded in Shenfeld’s adoptedhometown of Berlin and in the depths of a cavernous marble quarry in Portugal at the height of summer, the Jerusalem-born artist knits together analogue synths, woodwind, church organ, a choir and found sounds that pivot between Tehom’s intense industrial throb to the intricate, Wendy Carlos-style electronic lament of Interstellar. For all the intense synthesised…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Blue planetHurray For The Riff Raff ★★★★ The Past Is Still Alive NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP BACHMAN’S WARBLER; the Mariana fr uit bat; the bridled white-eye, the “dear dodo”: on Buffalo, a lovely countr y lament on Hurray For The Riff Raff ’s ninth album, Alynda Segar ra lists just a few bright and beautiful things driventowards total extinction. It’s not just glowing colours and tiny wings vanishing, though: written after Segar ra’s father died, The Past Is Still Alive is a record that also confronts the idea of human obliteration, whether as a species or as individuals. “I used to think I was born into the wrong generation,” sings Segar ra on Ogallala, a track that shares an apocalyptic roar with Phoebe Bridgers’ I Know The End, “but now I know I…2 min
MOJO|March 2024James Elkington★★★★ Me Neither NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP At last, the guitarist’s playful personality sweeps into these instrumental delights. James Elkington was bored by himself. After releasing 2020’s stately and assured Ever-Roving Eye, his next set of burgeoning guitar compositions made him feel as if he’d driven into a rut that led nowhere else. Fits and starts followed, as did a string of brief pieces rapidly made each morning, just for personal bemusem*nt. The result of those experiments, Me Neither, Grayson Haver Currin is Elkington’s most relaxed and disarming album ever, its 29 instrumentals arriving, delighting, and fading as quickly as whatever mood in which he happened to wake. Though he likens it to his library music, available to score the next meet-cute sensation or reflective battlefield scene, his versatility as a…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Jon Langford & The Men Of Gwent★★★★ Lost On Land & Sea COUNTRY MILE. CD/DL/LP Mekons founder back on home soil; recorded mostly live in rural mid-Wales. Like the saying goes, you can take the boy out of Wales, but even if you send him to Chicago for decades and keep him busy painting pictures and fronting no end of bands, it won’t stop him coming home to make an LP with friends. This is Langford’s third with The Men Of Gwent, a sextet including former members of The Darling Buds (Matt Gray), Pretty Things (Barkley McKay) and Give Me Memphis (Julian Hayman). Its 12 songs are a pretty perfect balance of pub rock, jangly punk and ballads, keyboards, mandolin and jagged guitar. They abound with local characters, real and mythical: Ruby, the woman who used…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Omni★★★★ Souvenir SUB POP. CD/DL/LP Atlanta, Georgia post-punks bring more perfectly-formed curios. “The Sphinx, The Nile… I ordered it all”, drawls Omni’s singer/bassist Philip Frobos on Plastic Pyramid, an arch, emotionally unreadable duet with Automatic’s Izzy Glaudini. Omni’s universe comprises other wonders: absurdist poetry, angular, Wire-meets-Talking Heads guitars, and an exacting flair for the tricky subdivisions of maths-rock precision. In succinct, ideas-crammed winners such as Exacto and INTL Waters, Frankie Broyles’ screwy guitars and Frobos’s motor-mouth parade of imagery and non-sequitur invigorate. Plus we get Easter eggs; stylistic lane-switches such as that which sees Compliment invoke Big Star for a few seconds, and Plastic Pyramid briefly feints at T.Rex’s Hot Love. Souvenir James McNair is Omni’s first LP in five years; their first with Chris Yonker as their full-time drummer.…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Office Dog★★★★ Spiel FLYING NUN. CD/DL/LP Dunedin trio hark back to NZ indie’s ‘golden age’. If you knew nothing about Office Dog, their dark indie noise would still likely point you immediately towards fabled New Zealand label Flying Nun and some of their less forgiving ’80s acts such as Children’s Hour and The Skeptics. Led by Dunedin songwriter and guitarist Kane Strang, who has released solo LPs on Dead Oceans and Ba Da Bing!, the trio bludgeon their way through their debut LP, from the rippling black pool of opening track Shade to single Big Air, which extracts every ounce of pop from its grungy post-punk bounce, not unlike a Kiwi Fontaines D.C. Mostly, however, Spiel’s Andy Fyfe jagged and often surprising changes of direction keeps the listener firmly on…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Nadine Shah★★★★ Filthy Underneath EMI NORTH. CD/DL/LP A brave catharsis – and the inaugural release of new imprint EMI North. BRILLIANTLY-EXECUTED with Shirley Bassey-like surety in an ar resting, always distinctive, lyrical voice, Filthy Underneath is defined by the “unprecedented turbulence” visited upon Nadine Shah since 2020’s Kitchen Sink. Having retur ned to Whitbur n, South Tyneside to nurse her ter minally ill mother, Shah grieves for Heather in beatbox gothic remembrance See My Girl, and recalls her own mar riage-ending suicide attempt amid the stark, pulsing bells of French Exit. These bold and candid diar y entries are set to percussive tribal grooves, or splashy, jazzy ones with exotic clangs of zither, fat synth and spectral vocal har monies. Amid it all, Shah fashions fine, free-associative hooks gleaned from counselling…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Katy Kirby★★★★ Blue Raspberry ANTI-. CD/DL/LP Cryptic love songs and rapturous melodies from Texan-born singer/ songwriter. The follow-up to Kirby’s acclaimed 2021 debut Cool Dry Place, Lucy O’Brien this album has a more emphatic, ambitious sound. Recorded in Nashville and her new home in Brooklyn with co-collaborators Logan Chung and Alberto Sewald, Kirby’s rich arrangements add pop-soul drama to songs about mind games of love and friendship. Lurching guitar, chiming piano and stabs of overdubbed choral harmony are combined with vocals that swing from sweetly intimate to dry and flippant. Kirby has a way with effortless melody, particularly on Cubic Zirconia, a song about falling in love with a woman which, given her evangelical upbringing, conveys a moment of sensual release. Other tracks like Salt Crystal and Wait Listen peek into…1 min
MOJO|March 2024William Doyle★★★★ Springs Eternal TOUGH LOVE. CD/DL/LP Abandon hope: former East India Youth jumps into the life/death battle. THERE CAN be few times in histor y that the words “a strangely deathlike grip” have been uttered with such jauntiness as they are on Springs Eternal, William Doyle’s third album under his own name. The singer-songwriter ’s brain-in-a-jar art-pop seems tightly controlled, but Doyle can’t stop fear of extinction events – global and local – seeping into his beautifully ar ranged music. There’s a twitchiness that honours a line of uptight pop thinkers – XTC, Robyn Hitchco*ck, Brian Eno (who contributes electronics on Relentless Melt and Sur render Yourself) – but oblivion lurks round ever y corner, in a bank loan’s terms and conditions, an imagined obituar y, a recur ring dream.…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Junodream★★★★ Pools Of Colour AWAL. CD/DL/LP British quartet’s debut: dazzling pop meets existential dread. In the sleevenotes, Junodream claim Pools Of Colour tackles, “the insignificance of the human experience through four prisms: emotional, social, spatial and dreams.” You might expect an equally portentous soundtrack, but instead we get lush, elevated pop-rock landing between Radiohead (the missing link between Pablo Honey and The Bends?), Martin Aston Coldplay and The 1975. Each song purportedly addresses one facet of pain, from confusion (Kitchen Sink Drama) to depression (The Beach, with ironically the LP’s most euphoric chorus), alienation (Close Encounters, channelling Radiohead) to tech billionaires (the title track laments the lab monkey fatally implanted with Elon Musk’s Neuralink ‘brain chip’). The weight of angst in Ed Vyvyan’s lyrics is born lightly in his honeyed…1 min
MOJO|March 2024MGMT★★★★ Loss Of Life MOM+POP MUSIC. CD/DL/LP Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser’s latest opaque fix; their first for six years. Still exponents of the less-info-equals-moremystique approach, MGMT ‘announced’ Loss Of Life via a pic of a test-pressing and the anagrammatic caption “elf of soils”. Cryptic lyrics mentioning “the pain of the bubblegum dog” don’t exactly clear the mists, but their fifth LP’s spectacular, oracular pop-psych is reward/ information enough. Like fellow kosmiche-nauts Flaming Lips with Miley Cyrus, MGMT open the door to ‘proper’ pop here, hence Christine And The Queens’ excellent duet on Dancing In Babylon, which is as perfectly ’80s as Cyndi Lauper. Elsewhere, their ongoing penchant for the coolest, most fatigued-sounding synths informs Loss Of Life (Part 2), People In The Streets is the prophetic-sounding stand-out, and the…1 min
MOJO|March 2024JA ZZMary Halvorson ★★★★ Cloudward NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP Optimism streaks through Brooklyn guitarist’s third LP with improvisatory sextet Amaryllis. The singular voice Mary Halvorson developed with early mentors Anthony Braxton and Joe Morris has spilled into her unpredictable compositions for Amaryllis. While Halvorson’s instantly identifiable tone, carefully amped so it sounds both slithery and naturalistic, drives the creeping figures of The Tower and affectless two-note motif of Desiderata, most of Cloudward cedes space for the eloquent improvising of her sextet. The dovetailing interplay of trombonist Jacob Garchik and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill excels on Tailhead and Ultramarine, anchored by Tomas Fujiwara’s drums and Nick Dunston’s bass as Patricia Brennan’s vibes dance around them. The resulting sound is high-contrast, with graceful melodic resolutions, slippery pitch-bends and experiments with form. Curios that hit at once,…1 min
MOJO|March 2024A bigger splashLynn Goldsmith/Getty, Getty The Waterboys ★★★★ 1985 CHRYSALIS. CD/DL ASEARCH FOR infor mation about an old New York shop called Magickal Childe, closed since 1999, can take you to some interesting places on the inter net. One site suggests John Lennon was a regular visitor to the occult and esoteric store on West 19th Street, though whether he participated in the “over-the-top rituals in the back”, or was scolded by the intemperate co-owner, Hor rible Her man, remains unknown. Mike Scott, questing head of The Waterboys, visited Magickal Childe in Januar y 1985, noting the “shr unken skulls”, “warlocks’ cloaks” and “some seriously out-there books, beyond even the usual outer limits of what I’d read myself ”. The hardback volume he bought that day for $9.60 had nothing at all…5 min
MOJO|March 2024More of lessIN 1994 a 7-inch single, Three-Quarters Blind Eyes b/w Found A Little Baby, by Plush, introduced a new old-school pop craftsman in the mode of Webb, Wilson or Bacharach, deploying a deluxe arrangement featuring horns, woodwind, mellotron and choral vocals. Said craftsman was Liam Hayes, a Chicagoan unknown quantity quickly tipped as a putative all-time great. However, the resolutely off-grid Hayes wasn’t going to give up much, be it music or information. There were soon rumours he’d got lost in the Australian bush or joined a religious cult. Half-truths, as it turned out. It was four years before a second single and a debut album arrived (and four years seemed a lot longer then), but More You Becomes You ★★★★ (Weird Vacation) surprised anyone who’d been waiting expectantly. Those…8 min
MOJO|March 2024FILTER BOOKSTeddy Boys ★★★★ Max Décharné PROFILE. £25 The post-war youth revolution dissected in microcosm. Max Décharné is both historian and lexicographer. Ever since his first non-fiction work, hipster slang dictionary Straight From The Fridge, Dad, the former Gallon Drunk drummer and frontman of garage punk balladeers, The Flaming Stars, has immersed himself in the argot of the late 20th century. His exemplary 2005 history of the King’s Road (expanded in 2023) was as much about the language and folklore of the former royal thoroughfare as it was about its artistic, musical and sartorial developments. So while this rise-and-fall chronicle of the New Edwardians, from the early- ’50s cosh boys to the Notting Hill Riots of September 1958, contains numerous historical delights (the first person to popularise suede shoes with inch-thick…6 min
MOJO|March 2024TIME MACHINEFEBRUARY 1969 …The Move’s Blackberry Way hits Number 1 FEBRUARY 11 It was a fruity time in music all right. The Banana Splits’ The Tra La La Song (One Banana, Two Banana) was in the US Hot 100; in Britain, The Beatles were soon to peak at Number 2 with the double A-side Penny Lane/ Strawberry Fields Forever, and a few months later, Peter Sarstedt’s Frozen Orange Juice reached the Top 10. At the vanguard of pop’s celebration of nature’s bounty were Birmingham’s The Move. Their sixth single, the sweetly sad Blackberry Way, was at Number 1. It was the latest in an armful of hits that stand with those of any successful group of the 1960s. Apart from ’68’s heavy Wild Tiger Woman, all The Move’s UK 45s had…7 min
MOJO|March 2024Shaun Ryder and Happy MondaysHELLO 1983 I watched [David Essex-starring cautionary yarn] That’ll Be The Day and Stardust on a double bill in ’75 and I thought, I fancy some of that rock’n’roll lifestyle. Me and our Matt [Ryder, brother] formed a group… well, we had a name – Avant-Garde – which we then changed to No Exit, and Matt got us a support slot with Salford Jets. This was around ’79, but we had no instruments or songs and we were rubbish. It changed overnight when my dad [Derek] bought our kid [Paul] a bass. He learned quickly and we started recruiting band members. I was the singer because I was the best of the bunch at singing, although I saw myself more like Bob Dylan than a singer-singer. We rehearsed twice a…3 min
MOJO|March 2024Theories, rants, etc.MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. Write to us at: MOJO, H Bauer Publishing, The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London, NW1 2PL. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk “HEROES LIVE FOREVER,” IS HOW SPIDER Stacy ends the memorial to Shane MacGowan that we’re so proud to include in this month’s MOJO. But it’s also a guiding principle for much of what we do every month: old music and musicians, whether legendary or lost, often remain as vital as the new music and musicians we present alongside them in all of our issues. This month’s castlist, then, celebrates relative newcomers like Idles, Brittany Howard, Hurray For The Riff Raff, Real Estate, Jalen Ngonda, ØXN and the pancontinental, all-female supergroup Les Amazones D’Afrique. We catch up with two sets of fractious real brothers in The Jesus…7 min
MOJO|March 2024Hurray For The Riff RaffRIFF RAFF’-N’ROLL Five Segarra specials. 1 Youth Lagoon Prizefighter (FAT POSSUM, 2023) 2 Youth Lagoon Rabbit (FAT POSSUM, 2023) 3 MJ Lenderman Rudolph (ANTI-, 2023) 4 Tom Waits Time (ISLAND, 1985) 5 Charles Mingus Jump Monk (DEBUT, 1956) RAISED IN the Bronx, hardcore punk fan Alynda Segarra left the city at 17 to map their own America, jumping freight trains and playing with “hobo band” Dead Man Street Orchestra. In 2007, Segar ra formed renegade folk collective Hurray For The Riff Raff in New Orleans; their nine albums include 2014’s breakthrough Small Town Heroes, 2017’s The Navigator, where Segar raspotlit their Puerto Rican heritage, and 2022’s elegiac Life On Earth. Segar ra admits previously worrying about commodifying their free-range past as industry-friendly “bohemia”, but with new album The Past Is…3 min
MOJO|March 2024Magnificent Seventies"I DIDN’T WANT to be intrusive,” says ex-photographer Ginny Winn. “There are so many photos I didn’t take when I was backstage with bands like Fleetwood Mac or The Rolling Stones — other people were trying to grab shots, and I sort of bent over too far the other way, not wanting to be paparazzi. I was sitting right in front of Mick Jagger and didn’t take a picture, which was insane.” Yet the approach had its compensations, as demonstrated by her new collection Grievous Angels, Trout Masks, And American Beauties, which collects 197 Os images she took as staff photographer for Warner/Reprise and after. Within are unguarded portraits of Bob Marley, Joni Mitchell, Gram Parsons, Captain Beefheart, the Grateful Dead, Alice Cooper and many more. “They’re close up and…3 min
MOJO|March 2024GET READY: NEW SOUL SENSATION JALEN NGONDA DELIVERS FROM TEMPTATIONS!JALEN NGONDA, eyes bright, is telling MOJO about the time he met Martha Reeves backstage at Liverpool’s Arts Club after he supported her at a 2015 show. “She’s a hero and I wanted to tell her,” he says. “She was like, ‘Was that you up there?’ When I nodded she said, ‘Oh man, you really sang.’” Affirmation from the Motown legend couldn’t have come at a better time for Ngonda, a soul singer from Maryland. He’d just finished a songwriting course at Liverpool’s Institute Of Performing Arts and, having run out of money, couldn’t afford his plane ticket home. “Having Martha say she liked what I did really helped.” It’s no surprise Reeves dug him. Back then, Ngonda already tapped into the emotional ache of Marvin Gaye and David Ruffin,…3 min
MOJO|March 2024EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL IS FAR AWAYTO HEAR HIM TELL IT, JASON LYTLE HAS BEEN SEEKING REFUGE most of his life. As a kid he found it listening to his favourite records. As a teenager he sought it in the world of competitive skateboarding. Later, he achieved it by making his own beautifully cracked pop music. These days, the veteran singer-songwriter and Grandaddy leader gains solace in the great outdoors. “You know, I’ve had issues with drinking over the years,” Lytle says unprompted, a couple of hours into a video interview with MOJO. The plan had originally been to meet him at his Los Angeles home to discuss Grandaddy’s forthcoming album, Blu Wav. But a series of personal matters have come up; Lytle’s been caring for his ailing mother and, as it transpires, he’s been recovering…17 min
MOJO|March 2024THE SHADOWS STEP OUTBruce Welch: Lonnie Donegan arrived in 1956 and he said, “Anyone can do this music, all you need is a couple of guitars, a string bass and a washboard.” Hank and I were 14 and like so many others, we started our own skiffle groups. Hank Marvin: Bruce and I were at [Rutherford Grammar] school in Newcastle. He brought in his steel bodied guitar and we started talking. I was in the Crescent City Skiffle Group. We played youth clubs for a cup of tea and a biscuit. Bruce was in The Railroaders. They got paid for their shows and he invited me to join them. BW: The Railroaders played in a talent contest at the Regal in Edmonton, this would have been April 1958. We didn’t win –came third…9 min
MOJO|March 2024We’ve Already Said GOODBYESUNDAY, JUNE 4, 1967: a packed nickname) and Laine (after his sister’s decade – not as leader but as sidekick, a Saville Theatre in London raved favourite singer Frankie). multi-instrumentalist who could write and over three acts seizing the moment. Rebranded Denny Laine And The Diplomats – to whom he had lured Bevan from album a year plus marathon gigs. His sub-sing and so share the Wings’ workload of an Their debut album a sensation, The Jimi Hendrix Experience were Ronnie And The Senators – they prospered altern status was confirmed in the muted heading to Monterey; Procol Harum were on the local circuit with Denny-penned response to two solo albums, the Dylanesque Ahh… Laine! (1973) and a Buddy Holly about to hit Number 1 with A Whiter Shade originals…4 min
MOJO|March 2024Anna Calvi★★★★ Peaky Blinders: Seasons 5 & 6 (Original Score) DOMINO. CD/DL/LP Accomplished soundtrack to BBC drama elevates the lowlife. The disconnect between Peaky Blinders’ peculiar pop-cultural role – day-at-the-races cosplay, threatening ‘banter’ – and its black-arts soundtrack is striking. It’s hard to imagine singer-songwriter Anna Calvi ever smashing a pint glass and yelling “Peaky f*ckin’ Blinders!”; her score for the final two series of Steven Knight’s gangster drama is instead a sensitive response to all the show’s gathering storms. She covers totemic theme song Red Right Hand by stripping back Nick Cave’s grand guignol to a less theatrical menace, a close-up, claustrophobic approach echoed in these tracks’ percussive heavy breathing, strung-out guitar and thrumming piano. The shadow of fellow Peaky Blinders associate P.J. Harvey, meanwhile, falls heavy over Tommy’s Plan…1 min
MOJO|March 2024“The boring get bored.”Idles’ Joe Talbot talks to Andrew Perry. The beginnings of Tangk involved Nigel Godrich. Were Idles seeking their Kid A moment? “f*ck, yeah. We came from the school of Nigel Godrich. Kid A is one of my favourite albums. To work hard as an artist, you have to challenge yourself, make yourself uncomfortable, look at the ugly parts and make them beautiful, by connecting to the world, for you, not for anyone else. As my mum always said, ‘the boring get bored.’” This time, you’re singing, more than rapping or raging. “I have sung before, but I wasn’t confident. If you listen back to Slow Savage on Brutalism, and other slow ones before, I’m fighting it by trying to be aggressive behind it, not allowing myself to be completely tender,…2 min
MOJO|March 2024New tricksBrittany Howard ★★★★ What Now ISLAND. CD/DL/LP DURING A nine-minute stretch on the back half of What Now, the compulsive second solo album from Brittany Howard, the former Alabama Shake showcases just how boundless her music can be. She first saunters above a Moroder disco pulse for Prove It To You, swirling alongside blown-out dr ums and fluorescent call-and-response keys as she pledges her devotion like Donna Summer in the summer of ’77. But she sinks deeply into Samson just a track later, her romantic confusion reflected back at her by the sighing tr umpets and dizzying keys of a could-have-been On The Corner outtake. Howard commands in both roles with a power that one is tempted to call braver y, save for the way it suggests she’s doing this…2 min
MOJO|March 2024Chelsea Wolfe★★★ She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She LOMA VISTA. CD/DL/LP Dark-side singer-songwriter stretches herself on Dave Sitek-produced seventh album. “This world is not designed for us,” hisses Chelsea Wolfe on Whispers In The Echo Chamber, the opening track on She Reaches Out To She Reaches Out To She. Since her 2010 debut The Grime And The Glow, the LA-based singersongwriter has fought to forge spaces that will hold her unconventional form, using folk, industrial and metal as tools to cut and excavate. While she dials down both the goth-folk of 2019’s Birth Of Violence and her Cthulhu-core electronics here, there are still spasms of noise and glitch. Eyes Like Nightshade starts with a mangled church bell clatter; Place In The Sun’s trip-hop torch song is aerosolised into…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Kali Malone★★★★ All Life Long IDEOLOGIC ORGAN. CD/DL/LP More adventures in eternity with Stockholm-based composer. The artwork for All Life Long Victoria Segal shows Kali Malone standing ankle-deep in snow, ruined concrete and wire around her. Composed for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, her sixth album operates in a similarly stark, glacial space, a world that slams you against implacable forces of time and space. Choral tracks Passage Through The Spheres and All Life Long (For Voice), sung with stony precision by the Macadam Ensemble, combine with the antique pipe organs played by Malone and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley to create an ostensibly ecclesiastical mood. Yet there’s an astringent, rough-spun quality to Fastened Maze or No Sun To Burn (For Brass), Malone slipping the collar of refined spirituality to carve…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Brown Horse★★★★ Reservoir LOOSE. CD/DL/LP Alt-country debut from Norwich-based sextet. Sad and melancholic is often the default setting for Americana, and it’s certainly the case for the debut by Norwich ensemble Brown Horse. Beginning life as a folk quartet before expanding both their numbers and musical palette to an Americana six-piece, all members of the band write songs collectively and individually, making the music deeply collaborative. Although short in the tooth, they are remarkably on-message with each other, whether shimmering through the dreamlike, Jayhawksinfluenced Everlasting, the metaphor-rich Stealing Horses, or Paul Gilley, a tribute to the writer of I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’s lyrics. Americana’s traditional elements – minor chords, fiddle, lap steel, banjo – are given a subtle twist by Nyle Holihan’s guitar, which steers towards post-punk territory as…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Nouvelle Vague★★★ Should I Stay Or Should I Go? PIAS. CD/DL/LP Fifth LP from Parisian covers band. This time it’s the ’80s. Having spent albums turning punk, post-punk and new wave songs into dark, louche bossa novas, Nouvelle Vague have turned their film noir eye to the ’80s. And so here they grapple with 13 songs unrelated by anything except time, from the poppy – Dead Or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like A Record), the inevitable Only You – to the more intriguing (The Associates’ Breakfast, Bauhaus’s She’s In Parties). The strength and weakness is a broadly similar approach, where songs are slowed down and assorted female singers offer breathy vocals which glide over leader Marc Collin’s wry but edge-free backdrop. The more they twist the song, the better they…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Les Amazones D’Afrique★★★★ Musow Danse REAL WORLD. CD/DL/LP Impactful seize-the-moment third album from the West African supergroup formed in 2014. This excellent follow-up to 2020’s Amazones Power Lois Wilson welcomes two new members – Alvie Bitemo, the activist and actress originally from Congo-Brazzaville, and Ivorian artist Dobet Gnahoré – to the core of Mamani Keïta, Fafa Ruffino and Kandy Guira, and their voices add to the group’s already abundant vocal range. Produced by Jackknife Lee, the songs – dedicated to bringing about gender equality and the eradication of ancestral violence – are delivered with boundless energy and a terrific force, as Lee aligns them to a more contemporary pop sound with hip-hop, trap and Pan-African influences coming together. There are 808s and sensory synths galore, but it’s the powerful message and those…1 min
MOJO|March 2024WORLDLenka Lichtenberg ★★★★ Thieves Of Dreams (Zloději Snů) SIX DEGREES. CD/DL Gorgeous tribute to the poet (and the singer’s grandmother) Anna Hana Friesová. Between 1942 and 1945, Friesová was a prisoner in the Theresienstadt ghetto and concentration camp; there she kept two notebooks to record her experiences and thoughts on the breakdown of her marriage, romantic fantasies, betrayal. She never passed on her stories before her death in 1987, but the notebooks endured, to be discovered by the Toronto-based Lichtenberg in 2016. Despite clues in some of the titles – translated from Czech as I Wanted To Curse You, Bitter Land, or Run, Run, You Little Human – you’d never guess the background from the resulting album, however, as it is an utterly beguiling, immersive listen, with the singer clearly…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Lime Garden★★★★ Lime Garden SO YOUNG. CD/DL/LP Brighton indie-rockers are gloriously tuneful, but listen closely to the words too. Lime Garden’s melodically compelling and rhythmically complex indie rock is so expertly crafted it almost doesn’t bear discussion. Let’s focus instead on singer Chloe Howard’s lyrics, which invest the group’s effervescent, corrosive tunefulness with an equally expert balance of anxiety and insight, her words a tool sharp enough to pick apart the welter of parasocial phantoms that is Millennial life in the 21st century. Howard composes portraits in acid wit with clear purpose: Nepotism (baby), an amusing little story that also spells out something rather chilling about power imbalances along the way. And when she cloaks herself in irony, she’s often at her most vulnerable, as on Fear’s ambivalent couplet, “I fear…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Uptight , all rightReal Estate ★★★★ Daniel DOMINO. CD/DL/LP “HEY BUDDY, what’s got into you?” asks Martin Courtney repeatedly on Somebody New, the opening track of Real Estate’s new album. That’s ver y much the question that hovers over Daniel, the band’s follow-up to 2020’s The Main Thing, its songs steeped in the kind of gentle beauty that tends to exacerbate nagging existential anxiety, poignantly blur ring the lines between euphoria and cr ushing sadness. It’s not an entirely new issue for the New Jersey quintet: since their self-titled 2009 debut, Real Estate have been sensitive to the dappled flicker of nostalgia and memor y, to transience and uncertainty. Green Aisles, from 2011’s Days, captured the r ush of sunbeams through leaves, even as the car heads towards a colder – and inevitably…2 min
MOJO|March 2024Shed SevenAndy Cowan ★★★★ A Matter Of Time COOKING VINYL. CD/DL/LP/MC The Britpop comeback kings come back again, with first album in seven years. Wrongly – if widely – regarded as the runts of the Britpop litter, Shed Seven’s reunion and subsequent album Instant Pleasures were remarkably and surprisingly successful. They’re playing their biggest ever shows and A Matter Of Time is the sound of a band for whom the lights are turning green. Like its predecessor, it was recorded at Youth’s studio in Spain (one of his dogs, Mr Scruff, graces the sleeve) and the tone is more euphoric still. Rowetta (Happy Mondays) does a tub-thumping vocal turn on In Ecstasy, while Pete Doherty duets with Rick Witter on the galleon-paced closer Throwaways. With its November Rain-style guitar solo, Throwaways…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Lizzie No★★★★ Halfsies THIRTY TIGERS. CD/DL/LP Shimmering third album from Brooklyn-based songwriter, harpist and activist. Lizzie No uses bittersweet Americana that leans heavily towards country – hardly a genre known for its embrace of black artists – to tell her story: that of a queer black woman. In its melody and tone, her new album sounds like an intriguing lost gem from Joni Mitchell or Suzanne Vega. On the title track, picked guitar and whip-cracking drums herald her laconic vocal, and it’s beguiling stuff: “I keep mourning friends I never had.” Sleeping In The Next Room, with its Appalachian harmonies, has the crystalline intensity of Nanci Griffith’s From A Distance. There are alt-rock stormers like Lagunita (Dandy Warhols crossed with a young Roseanne Cash); there’s resilience in gently strummed The Heartbreak…1 min
MOJO|March 2024El Perro Del Mar★★★★ Big Anonymous CITY SLANG. CD/DL/LP Swedish sonic adventurer wrestles with the impact of loss. In autumn 2019, Sweden’s Sarah Assbring – who records as El Perro Del Mar – issued a version of Please Stay as a single. In early 1966, Liverpool beat group The Cryin’ Shames’ ghostly rendition of this Burt Bacharach song became the last hit produced by Joe Meek – in chart terms, his memorial. Evidently fascinated with Please Stay, the glass-voiced Assbring has re-recorded it in suitably wraithlike fashion for her eighth album, Big Anonymous. Its themes are grief, survival guilt and a concomitant sense of mortality. On the final track, she sings, “I’m living with the kiss of death.” Musically, the spectral sound lies between Fever Ray at their least forbidding and the shadows…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Kula Shaker★★★ Natural Magick STRANGE FOLK. CD/DL/LP/MC Their seventh album, but the first this century with the original line-up. Having not only re-recruited original keyboardist Jay Darlington, but the management team from their golden years, Kula Shaker are reclaiming some of the ground which was lost so long ago. Crispian Mills remains the master of a heroically daft lyric (“It was Mahatma Gandhi, or it might have been Groucho Marx, who said in one of their more lucid moments, ‘f*ck war’”); and his oft-ridiculed fondness for Eastern culture continues, most successfully on the catchy Indian Record Player, while the rip-roaring title track shows they can still kick up a storm. If Idon’twannapaymytaxes (sic) is as childish as its title suggests (presumably its protagonist doesn’t ‘wanna’ use the NHS or drive on…1 min
MOJO|March 2024Laura Cannell★★★★ Midwinter Processionals BRAWL RECORDS. CD/DL Eighth solo album from the UK composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist. When first reviewing the music of Laura Cannell back in 2015, I wondered whether she might be a magician, so well was she able to reanimate ancient medieval musics and invest them with uncanny power. Of course, part of Cannell’s skill lies in her intelligent musicianship, her ability to blend the experimental with the composed and the improvisatory in a manner that feels simultaneously earthly and unworldly, but it’s also there in her virtuosic choice of place. Improvised on violin and recorder in the high resonant space of Norwich Cathedral nave, and then later blended with epic synth drones, these seven, imagined, secular recitals buzz, drone, scrape, chatter and pulse with an ageless, eternal…1 min
MOJO|March 2024The Pineapple Thief★★★ It Leads To This KSCOPE. BR/CD/DL/LP Bruce Soord’s dreamy Somerset progressives return. Along with Big Big Train and Porcupine Tree, The Pineapple Thief are the vanguard of a mini but very 21st century prog-rock revival. With European cultdom longassured, leader Bruce Soord is in thrall to Up-era Peter Gabriel and, especially, Elbow, while, perhaps uniquely in pop music, Rubicon muses upon how Julius Caesar was tempted into tyranny. At their lavishly textured best, on the stately Put It Right and the harrowing To Forget, there’s warmth and vulnerability against a backdrop of warped guitars and quietly clattering beats from one-time Porcupine Tree and King Crimson drummer Gavin Harrison. Everything comes together on the title track, where an almost funky guitar twang expands into a dense, intense wall of sound…1 min
MOJO|March 2024FILTER REISSUESLou Reed ★★★★ Hudson River Wind Meditations LIGHT IN THE ATTIC. CD/DL/LP Think Metal Machine Music, re-imagined for the Dream House. WHEN LOU REED issued his hourlong clutch of revolving drones on a small DIY label in 2006, it was largely ignored, a Tai Chi trifle from a sexagenarian str uggling with his health. But when Hudson River Wind Meditations became Reed’s final solo album after his 2013 death, the set engendered new poignancy, a slow wave goodbye from a departing colossus. Amid our endless acceleration, stigmas around New Age philosophising or ambient escapism have cor roded into a patina of cool, too, no longer an OutKast. Thing is, Reed’s slow-motion pieces were interesting from the start, their density and sculptural finesse making them feel like koans, worth revisiting for…5 min
MOJO|March 2024This Is A LowCHARISMA, 1975 “MY ALTER EGO, Nadir, took me over,” read Peter Hammill’s handwritten notes for his fifth solo LP, released as punk began to seethe and prog waned: “this loud, aggressive perpetual 16-year-old… I can only submit, gladly, and play his music.” To Hammill listeners, notions of possession and exorcism were not new: as leader of cabbalistic art-rock hydra Van der Graaf Generator from 1967 to 1972, he’d turned psychological disturbance into an art form. In late 1974, VdGG reconvened, with one more Hammill solo record as a starter for their second lease of life. The players – drummer Guy Evans, organist Hugh Banton and saxophonist David Jackson – would be led by Hammill into different musical terrain from such check-the-exits VdGG mindbombs as Pawn Hearts or H To He,…5 min
MOJO|March 2024Miracle workersSimple Minds: Everything Is Possible ★★★★ Dir: Joss Crowley BMG/PARAMOUNT +. ST INEARLY 1978, shortly after their debut gig, Simple Minds were interviewed by Glasgow local newspaper reporter Billy Sloan. Asked about the band’s goals, Jim Kerr issued a list of “not small demands”: they wanted to “break nationally… put on a good rock show… not rely on good reviews for our success”. What struck Sloan most was the 18-year-old’s confident parting shot. “We’ll do it,” Kerr said, “because we’re convinced we’re too good to be ignored.” Sure enough, four years after promising Billy Sloan a miracle, Kerr was singing it on Top Of The Pops. Three years further on, his band were Number 1 in America, playing to 90,000 at Live Aid, and Kerr was Mr Chrissie Hynde. Simple…3 min
