Home//MOJO/May 2024/In This Issue
MOJO|May 2024RECORD STORE DAY IS HERE – YOU NEED MORE VINYL – EVERYONE’S HAPPY!FOR 2013’s Record Store Day, there was speculation that Kate Bush would release her cancelled 1993 single Eat The Music. This year it’s finally happening, on a 10-inch picture disc (see above, bottom left).More miraculous, Bush has been announced as 2024’s Record Store Day (April 20) ambassador for the nation’s independent vinyl outlets. “I hope,” she said, “you get to celebrate music that’s been specially released for you.” This year, it’s easy to think it has. Who wouldn’t want a copy of David Bowie’s Waiting In The Sky (Before The Starman Came To Earth) (Parlophone)? Taken from Trident Studios 1/4-inch stereo tapes from December 15, 1971, it makes for an alt-tracklist, parallel universe version of Ziggy Stardust. Also reverse-engineering a classic, The 1975 Sire Demos (Rhino/Warner) by the Ramones collects…3 min
MOJO|May 2024PEAKY BLINDERS CREATOR STEVEN KNIGHT TAKES ON 2-TONE WITH THIS TOWNPEAKY BLINDERS, BBC’s historical Birmingham crime caper fronted by Cillian Murphy, was known for its first-rate musical cues, from using Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds’ Red Right Hand as its theme to other contributions from Bowie, P.J. Harvey, Radiohead and more. Now Peaky Blinders creator and writer Steven Knight has a new six-part series ready to go, in which music fulfils a more central and motivating role. Described as a “high-octane thriller and family saga”, it takes place in Birmingham and Coventry in 1981 just as the ska boom led by The Specials and the 2-Tone label was peaking, and riots were erupting across the country. Entitled This Town, The Specials’ complete lyric “is coming like a Ghost Town” seems apposite. “It’s about Birmingham, it’s about Coventry, and it’s…3 min
MOJO|May 2024ANOINTED BY FOLK ROCK ROYALTY, KATHERINE PRIDDY COMES OUT SWINGING“I saw Eliza Carthy being a real badass and said, I want to do that.” WHEN KATHERINE Priddy released her first EP, Wolf, in 2018, she quickly gained one very auspicious fan. “She has a really pretty, expressive voice, and her songs are engaging – borderline poetry in the lyrics, so it isn’t all revealed at once,” Richard Thompson told MOJO, as he picked Priddy as the best thing he’d heard that year. “I love the echoes of the British tradition, and indeed the folk rock tradition.” In the six years between that first EP and her new second album, The Pendulum Swing, Priddy has built an impressive reputation and following for those accomplished, original folk songs and her pure, beautiful voice. Thompson asked her to join him on tour.…3 min
MOJO|May 2024Art-rock’s affable Zelig has glammed up in Roxy Music, stretched out with Cale, Gilmour and Eno. With a memoir penned and box set looming, what’s next for the gentleman guitarist? “I’m wiping the slate clean,” says Phil Manzanera.IN 1973 SONG IN EVERY DREAM HOME A Heartache, Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry guides us around a luxury city flat, describing “penthouse perfection” like a crooning estate agent penned by J.G. Ballard or Dennis Potter, before capping one of Roxy’s dizziest peaks with a mike-drop punch line, triggering a guitar freak-out so unmuzzled it blows MOJO’s mind even now. Today, said freak-out’s architect receives MOJO in his London home. Like Roxy’s domestic dystopia, his boasts “open-plan living”, though any heartaches have been tidied away to accommodate wall-to-wall pseudo-frescos by Nick De Ville, sleeve designer of the glamorous, groundbreaking records Phil Manzanera made with long-term Roxy bandmates Ferry, reeds man Andy Mackay, drummer Paul Thompson and, on the band’s first two albums, pioneer of concepts and electronics Brian Eno. There’s…21 min
MOJO|May 2024With immaculate harmonies and ’70s hair, and fans including Weyes Blood and Todd Rundgren, THE LEMON TWIGS are throwbacks to a golden age of pop sophistication. They also do mid-air splits that make Paul Simon gasp. Is it time for them to seal the deal? “We’re aiming for something timeless,” they tell JAMES McNAIR.IN 2021, FIVE YEARS AND THREE ALBUMS INTO A PRECOCIOUS CAREER PURVEYING MULTIcoloured pop for connoisseurs, Long Island sibling duo The Lemon Twigs hit a wall. Despite abundant critical plaudits for their previous work, record labels were not exactly queuing up to release their latest batch of songs. “We had to shop for a new deal and a few companies who’d previously expressed an interest in us rejected the album outright,” elder brother Brian D’Addario tells MOJO. “Well, one of them quite liked it, but they wanted an outside producer to modernise our sound,” he adds, eyebrows raised. “Probably the worst thing we could do…” Beloved of Todd Rundgren, Colin Blunstone and Big Star’s Jody Stephens – all of whom they have backed in a live capacity – the D’Addario…9 min
MOJO|May 2024CYMANDE PUT UK FUNK ON THE MAPSteve Scipio: Patrick Patterson and I had been in Metre, a jazz band, but our drummer was moving to Australia. Then we worked with Mike Rose in Ginger Johnson’s African Drummers while formulating Cymande. We didn’t want to do pop music or go back to jazz, we wanted to do something more expressive in terms of our personalities and messages we might communicate. Mike Rose: When I met them I was into percussion and African music. I was a fan of Roland Kirk and played flute but I took up saxophone seriously just before I joined Cymande. I introduced a Rastafarian flavour to the band and I brought in percussionist Pablo Gonsales, who had the Rasta vibe. Pablo Gonsales: I didn’t go to school to learn drums, it’s all coming…10 min
MOJO|May 2024GREEN SHOOTSIF SEATTLE was the explosive heart of rock’n’roll in the 1990s, the city’s mutinous pulse in the previous decade was located at Raison d’Être, a coffee house in the Belltown area where the local underground gathered and schemed over espressos. “It was the best place for me to land from Montana,” says Jeff Ament. He got a job there in 1983 and stayed seven years, working “five days a week” while meeting “all of the amazing characters” in the scene and making a pivotal racket, from 1984 to 1988, with Stone Gossard in pioneering lunatics Green River. Ament had his own punk band Deranged Diction when hardcore scamps Mark Arm and Steve Turner (another Raison d’Être employee) coaxed him to join their new enterprise. “I didn’t understand their sarcasm and…2 min
MOJO|May 2024JAZZThe Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis ★★★★ The Messthetics And James Brandon Lewis IMPULSE! CD/DL/LP Exuberant collaboration between seasoned instrumental adventurists and rising tenor sax star. James Brandon Lewis first joined The Messthetics on-stage at New York’s 2019 Winter Jazzfest, his chemistry with guitarist Anthony Pirog (established via sessions with free jazz drummer William Hooker) augmented by Joe Lally and Brendan Canty (rhythm section of Washington DC legends Fugazi). Picking up where Fear Not, the anthemic closer to Lewis’s 2023 LP Eye Of I, left off, opening salvos L’Orso and Emergence are short but toothsome affairs with a vivid punk frisson as Pirog and Lewis diverge, double-up and undercut each other, sometimes indiscernibly, rather than idly shred and shronk. Elsewhere, inward-looking ballads Boatly and Railroad Tracks Home allow for more…2 min
MOJO|May 2024My nation undergroundNico ★★★★★ The Marble Index/Desertshore DOMINO. LP IN PETER DOGGETT’s exemplary linernotes to these reissues, he quotes an interview Nico gave shortly before her death in 1988, aged 49, where she explains her desire to make “archaic music… music you imagine from thousands of years ago. Cave music.” Many critics have referenced early church music in writing about The Marble Index and Desertshore, the two albums the former Velvet Underground singer recorded between 1968 and 1970, but this quote seems to suggest that the solo music composed by the woman born Christa Päffgen was reaching even further back to something ancient and primeval. The roots of Nico’s mysterious, visionary sound can be found in It Was A Pleasure Then, the closer on side one of her tentative 1967 debut, Chelsea…26 min
MOJO|May 2024PretendersCHRISSIE HYNDE has always gone her own way and, as a result, stood apart. Not for her a guitar, but a baritone ukulele when learning to play as a 14-year-old in her bedroom in Akron, Ohio. Still, the chances of actual success in a group seemed a remote possibility. “Like saying, ‘Wow, wouldn’t it be great to play baseball?’” she told MOJO in 2014. Hynde moved to the UK in 1973, wrote for the music press, worked at McLaren and Westwood’s SEX shop, played with Johnny Moped and Mick Jones, but struggled to make inroads into the music scene, partly because her songs came from another stylistic place. “I was a little too musical for that punk scene,” she reflected. “I came here talking about Bobby Womack and they’d just…2 min
MOJO|May 2024Broken wingsLost Angel: The Genius Of Judee Sill ★★★★ Dir. Andy Brown and Brian Lindstrom ONWARDS AND UPWARDS. C/S AT THE START of the 1970s, Los Angeles songwriter Judee Sill made two of that fertile scene’s most affecting and poignant albums, her self-titled debut and Heart Food setting the vagaries of love and the mysteries of God to a baroque interpretation of folk rock. Sill, after all, was the first person David Geffen signed to Asylum. But her idiosyncratic considerations of the cosmos never turned mainstream, with modest sales compounded by her reluctance to play industry games or adulterate her vision. Impoverished and nearly anonymous, Sill overdosed in 1979 at the age of 35, her life a black box of questions for the generations that steadily discovered her music’s power and…3 min
MOJO|May 2024APRIL 1990 …Wembley salutes Mandela’s freedomNelson Mandela was free. APRIL 16 He’d been released from Cape Town’s Victor Verster Prison on February 11, after 27 years as a political prisoner. Two months later, today at Wembley Stadium, the veteran freedom campaigner’s years of principled struggle would be celebrated at the star-packed event titled Nelson Mandela: An International Tribute For A Free South Africa. It would also be his first high-profile public appearance in Britain. His embrace by the world of popular music had begun exactly six years before, when The Special AKA were in the UK Top 10 with Jerry Dammers’ song Nelson Mandela. Some of those diverted by its upbeat tune and township jive beat were surprised to learn what it was actually about. Imprisoned since 1963, Mandela was the most highprofile member of…6 min
MOJO|May 2024David Pajo and SlintHELLO SUMMER 1986 Before Slint, the drummer Britt [Walford] and I had a band called Maurice in Louisville, Kentucky. I was replacing Brian McMahan who also played guitar with Squirrel Bait, who were kind of taking off. I was already a huge fan – I didn’t know Britt really, then I showed up at the first practice and I knew all their songs. I have a tape of that first practice and it’s crazy. We’d never played together but we had this almost jazz, psychic connection, where I would throw in this lick and he would throw in a drum fill at the same time and they’d be exactly in sync. I guess the Louisville punk scene kind of recognised me as a musician when I started playing in Maurice,…3 min
MOJO|May 2024Theories, rants, etc.I READ AN INTERESTING BOOK RECENTLY, Live Dead by John Brackett, with quite an intimidating subtitle: The Grateful Dead, Live Recordings And The Ideology Of Liveness. Brackett’s argument is that the Dead’s early concert albums (like Live Dead itself) weren’t purely live, as they were augmented by studio overdubs, and with crowd noise mixed down. What Deadheads increasingly prized over the years were not necessarily better, but indisputably more real, warts’n’all recordings of entire live shows. Consequently, the racks of Dead bootleg tapes on the shelves were soon joined by hundreds of official live CDs, that made capital out of reproducing raw experience. This month, MOJO is proud to finally award Pearl Jam the front cover they’ve long deserved. We’re also thrilled to include with our magazine a CD of…7 min
MOJO|May 2024MERCURY REV DEFY THE ALGORITHM WITH LP 10“EACH VOCAL was recorded as a recitation standing on the banks of the Hudson River,” says Jonathan Donahue of Mercury Rev’s latest. “That’s why you can hear steamboats going by and dogs barking.” Back on radar after their 2019 re-imagining of Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete and their cosmic-psych side-project Harmony Rockets’ 2018 instrumental set Lachesis/Clotho/Atropos, the Rev go spoken-word on their new LP. “We are again out of step with a pop-orientated world, and that can lead to some sleepless nights,” notes Donahue. “We’re just being ourselves, but you worry you’ll get buried under the TikTok and Spotify avalanche.” Largely recorded over the last year at the band’s Catskills studio, the record was mixed by Peter Katis (The National; Interpol). Working amid such treasured totems as the piano Rev…3 min
MOJO|May 2024Buck DharmaLike so many people of my era, seeing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time [on February 9, 1964] was life-changing. It was when I heard She Loves You for the first time! They were clearly phenomenal creators and performers, but it also made me think, I could do this too, this is possible. I knew I was never gonna be Elvis Presley, just like I was never gonna be Prince, but The Beatles looked to me like regular guys, like I was. So I got every record after that, which is just an incredible progression of great, great music. Then you got to Rubber Soul, and the breadth of the music on it, and how it was a 40-minute, two-sides experience. It was phenomenal, and…2 min
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Page 5252 – Christianity TodayMOJO|May 2024MOJO PLAYLISTIt’s the month’s best Latin-Smiths, soul-rock and dub-poetics. 1 MARK KNOPFLER’S GUITAR HEROES GOING HOME (THEME FROM LOCAL HERO) For the Teenage Cancer Trust, Knopfler’s joined by players including Hank Marvin, Clapton, Ringo, Townshend, Duane Eddy, Brian May, David Gilmour, Springsteen, and in his last recording, Jeff Beck (above), for a beauteous reprising of the movie theme. Find it: YouTube 2 AFRICA EXPRESS FT. IMS PANIC Live in Mexico in February, Albarn ignites a Latin-ska take on The Smiths’ hit. A tribute to Radio 1’s Steve Wright? Find it: YouTube 3 HERMANOS GUTIÉRREZ LOW SUN From new LP Sonido Cósmico, Ecuadorian-Swiss guitar siblings hit an ineffable plateau. Find it: streaming services 4 JESSICA PRATT WORLD ON A STRING LA singer-songwriter reaches peak loveliness, sung in her silvery, Karen Carpenter…1 min
MOJO|May 2024I Thought I Saw You AgainLULLING MOJO INTO A FALSE sense of security, Anne Briggs agrees to answer a few more questions… It is 11pm on a Friday night in December; our telephone conversation with the Greta Garbo of the British folk revival started at an unconventional 9.30. The first miracle came when she answered the phone. The second is that she seems to be prepared to keep talking. “I’m enjoying it in a silly sort of way,” she says. Not exactly unguarded, the 79-year-old has agreed to speak as Topic prepare to release a new edition of her self-titled 1971 solo LP with a bonus 7-inch of out-takes: The Lost Tape. In the context of a modest back catalogue that comprises one EP, a few tracks on compilation albums and three full-length LPs (including…16 min
MOJO|May 2024THE GLITTER TWINSONE SATURDAY, IN EARLY SUMMER 1971, heads turned in the busy Evelyn Paget hair salon on Beckenham High Street. “Look at that!” said a stylist named Doris. “Whatever’s next…” Passing by the window was a tall, slim man with chest-length wavy blond hair. While he, David Bowie, pushed the pram, wife Angie strutted in black jeans and a furry jacket, her hair blonde and boyish. For the main attraction, David Bowie was wearing a flowing dull-gold midi dress, complemented by a floppy hat and knee-length boots. Suzi Fussey, a trained stylist at the salon, knew that Bowie was a local ‘name’, that he’d played regularly at The Three Tuns just down the high street, and that he was a one-hit wonder. As Suzi Ronson, she would become a crucial figure…18 min
MOJO|May 2024BROTHERS GONNA WORK IT OUTPEARL JAM WERE ON THE ROAD, A WEEK AWAY FROM finishing a half-year blur of theatres and arenas for their second album, 1993’s Vs – two hours every night of guitar stampede and confessional howl for audiences as unhinged in their love as the band was in performance – when the darkness fell like a hammer. On April 8, 1994 in Seattle, Pearl Jam’s birthplace and rock’s chaotic ground zero for the last three years, Nirvana’s desperately troubled singerguitarist Kurt Cobain – struggling with drug addiction and an overwhelming fame – was found dead in his home of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A few hours later, at the Patriot Center in Fairfax, Virginia, Pearl Jam opened with the mourning in Release from their 1991 multi-platinum debut, Ten. A pensive-to-frenzied march…24 min
MOJO|May 2024FOLKNiamh Bury ★★★★ Yellow Roses CLADDAGH. CD/DL/LP Petal power: wistful twistful debut from Ye Vagabondsapproved auteur. Claddagh Records focused on traditional Irish music for much of its existence, but the revived label has taken a rather broader outlook; first the glowering debut from Lankum-related ØXN, and now this pastel-shaded pastoral from Niamh Bury, produced by Ye Vagabonds’ Brían Mac Gloinn. Another session regular at Dublin’s Cobblestone, Bury sings straight folk beautifully on Lovely Adam – a gender-switched Lovely Hannah – but tacks toward more hazy, surrealist Narnia on her own material; as she sings on the title track: “A pride of lions underwater, all is not as it seems.” Gatefold sleeve enthusiasts will spot shades of COB’s Moyshe McStiff on the banjo-decked Bite The Bridle, and traces of Jackson C…2 min
MOJO|May 2024Pump up the volumesKOREAN STUDENT Kim Chang-wan was 17 and on his way to college in Seoul when he made an impulsive, lifechanging decision. Near his bus stop, a music shop had a classical guitar in the window that caught his eye. He walked in and bought it for the equivalent of a month’s wages from his part-time job. He didn’t know how to hold it, tune it or anything, so he also purchased a pitch pipe and a guitar tutor. Back home, he sat strumming D for hours, transfixed by the sound. He started practising every day. Older brother Chang-hoon also bought a guitar. Younger brother Chang-ik joined in, playing rudimentary drums with spoons on a book. The brothers formed a band called Mul, doing well enough in a local contest to…3 min
MOJO|May 2024HOW TO BUY10 Chrissie Hynde Standing In The Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan BMG, 2021 You say: “Always a brilliant interpreter of other people’s material, Chrissie tackles the songbook of the great master.” Kieran Heneghan, via mojo4music.com Inspired by Bob Dylan’s 2020 release of Murder Most Foul, Chrissie Hynde and Pretenders guitarist James Walbourne embarked upon the Dylan Lockdown Series project, releasing home-recorded versions of her favourite Bob tunes, including previously unloved compositions such as In The Summertime from Shot Of Love. Elsewhere she lent that voice to a truly haunting Blind Willie McTell, explored the spiritual dimensions of Every Grain Of Sand, and made You’re A Big Girl Now sound like a note-to-self. 9 Pretenders Hate For Sale BMG, 2020 You say: “The start of the Pretenders’ creative renaissance… it…7 min
MOJO|May 2024A Teenage Symphony To Hank?WHEN BRIAN WILSON called Beach Boys manager Fred Vail in early 1970, Vail figured it was to discuss business. Sometimes called ‘The Sixth Beach Boy’, he’d worked with them since 1963, and was a fly on the wall for such memorable moments as the writing of The Warmth Of The Sun and the first playback of Pet Sounds. “Brian said, ‘I want to do a country album, and I want you to be the vocalist,’” recalls Vail, who had no recording experience but adds, “I’m no Carl Wilson, but I can carry a tune.” As they talked, Vail realised that Wilson didn’t have a plan. “I asked, Did you write any songs? ‘No.’ Do you have a band? ‘No.’ He said, ‘You pick the songs, you get the musicians, and…3 min
MOJO|May 2024Richard Hawley“MY DAD used to say, ‘Son – stay on the surfboard.’” Ever philosophical, north country guitar man Richard Hawley has ridden his wave as a solo artist since 2001, using his smoky croon, melodic potency and steady hand to express the beyondness of the everyday, with full fealty to the romance and roots of rock’n’roll. New album In This City They Call You Love continues this tradition, with its sweet but sturdy songs of love, dreams and hope. Additionally, his Sheffield-set musical drama Standing At The Sky’s Edge has now opened in the West End. “Great music never disappoints,” he says. “It’s like the tablets from the f*cking mountain. It’s the thing I believe in passionately and truly…” Hello, Richard. What are you doing? I’m trying to learn to sing…4 min
MOJO|May 2024JAZZ GUITARIST BILL FRISELL ON LEARNING HOW TO BEAVANT TRUMPETER Ambrose Akinmusire needed an encore. It was in early 2024, during a short European tour of Akinmusire’s Owl Song trio, alongside guitarist Bill Frisell and drummer Greg Hutchinson. Akinmusire called out Tenderly, a 1946 romantic waltz made a standard by the likes of Sarah Vaughan, Bill Evans, and Nat King Cole. Frisell had to admit that – in spite of his half-century spent becoming one of music’s most distinct and influential modern guitarists – he had never played it. When the gig was done, he downloaded 50 versions. “I’ve just been obsessing over that song,” Frisell admits from his home in Brooklyn. “I’m just trying to learn.” A Colorado clarinettist who came to guitar rather late, Frisell steadily emerged with a singular instrumental voice – patient and thoughtful,…3 min
MOJO|May 2024NURSE. FIGHTER. GARAGE-ROCK REBEL ON THE SOMALILAND FRONTLINE… MEET SAHRA HALGANIT’S 30 DEGREES in Hargeisa, and Sahra Halgan is spending a slow Friday afternoon recovering from a concert she hosted in Somaliland’s capital the night before. “During the war, we lost all our musicians,” she laments. “Today, if you are a bad singer, you use a producer, they give you a nice voice. You sing like someone who can sing, but you can’t sing live. At my arts centre you have to sing live. Tell everyone to come. I invite them.” It’s an enticing proposition: musically, Hargeisa lies at the heart of Africa’s funkiest region, bordered and influenced by Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia, the latter claiming Somaliland as its own. With decolonisation, Somaliland (compact and British) and Somalia (sprawling and Italian) were united in 1960, with an Italy-approved government that…3 min
MOJO|May 2024TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS?aT MIKE JEFFERY’S OFFICE at 39 Gerrard Street in London’s West End, the cupboards were crammed with artefacts and documentation pertaining to the notorious rock manager and club owner’s clients: The Animals, Soft Machine and, most notably, Jimi Hendrix. But when bailiffs came calling – the inevitable upshot of Jeffery’s tendency not to pay for things – they weren’t interested in the archive of demo and master tapes, or the future memorabilia, only the objects of immediate visible value: the furniture. Everything else they dumped on the floor. “When I went in and saw the mess I nearly died,” says Trixie Sullivan, then Jeffery’s assistant. Tipped off by the building owner – “a nice Jewish guy; someone said he had a crush on me, I had no idea” – Sullivan…8 min
MOJO|May 2024"IT WASN'T ENOUGH TO PLAY KICK OUT THE JAMS... YOU HAD TO LIVE IT"WHEN WAYNE KRAMER SLIPPED away quietly in early February, felled by pancreatic cancer at the age of 75, he’d lived many lives. If you’d asked him, he might tell you he began his journey as an abandoned son. It was what fuelled him to become a rebel, a rocker, a revolutionary. He might confess that he’d lost his way too – been a junkie, a jailbird, a journeyman. And that, ultimately, he’d evolved into the role of activist, author, torchbearer, and most importantly, a father himself. Kramer was all that, as well as the co-founder, lead guitarist, and catalyst of Detroit rock legends the MC5. Though he prized the group’s legacy – and tended to it carefully – Kramer’s real triumphs weren’t gold records or hit songs, but more human…23 min
MOJO|May 2024STICKY CONTENTAll the Pearl Jam studio albums, rated by KEITH CAMERON. TEN ★★★★ (Epic, 1991) Six months after singer Andrew Wood fatally overdosed, the core of Seattle hard rock hopefuls Mother Love Bone auditioned a singer who’d written lyrics to two of their new band’s songs while surfing. Pearl Jam’s debut was duly conceived out of tragedy, infused with a mystic spirit, and offered a Valhalla feast of hot fret action. The bombast got tempered on 2009’s remix, but songs like Alive and Even Flow endure for good reason. VS ★★★ (Epic, 1993) Whatever your definition of ‘grunge’, Ten was more along-forthe-ride than driving-the-bus. Possibly stung by purist opprobrium, Vs dressed down the Bad Company licks and permitted distortion, without ever conveying the sense the band were certain this was how…4 min
MOJO|May 2024Every breath you takeShabaka ★★★★ Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace IMPULSE. CD/DL/LP THE LEADING British saxophonist of his generation retired, after a fashion, on December 7, 2023. That night Shabaka Hutchings, on the cusp of 40, played what he promised would be his last gig on the instrument, performing John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at London’s ICA. Hutchings’ valedictory run had lasted nearly 12 months, ever since he announced on New Year’s Day he’d be abandoning the saxophone. There would be farewell shows for his Sons Of Kemet band and, on September 23 in Hollywood, an evening when Hutchings took on another auspicious repertoire – that of Pharoah Sanders – to re-imagine Promises alongside Floating Points. Hutchings’ decision to put down what he calls “the big metal horn”, and pick up a…52 min
MOJO|May 2024EXTENDED PLAYCosmic Analogue Ensemble Les Grandes Vacances Lebanese music producer Charif Megarbane is an ultra-prolific shapeshifter who, over the last decade, has released 100 albums on his own independent label and digital platform Hisstology, recorded in various locations – Beirut, Nairobi, Paris, Lisbon – and appearing under various names, but mostly all his own work. In 2020 alone he uploaded 10 albums using this particular banner, each featuring a discrete instrumental style. “It’s a very spontaneous, playful, diary-like approach,” he says. “I trust my instinct because instinct is based on experience.” On Les Grandes Vacances (also available in physical formats through Jakarta Records) he offers up a neat distillation of the Ensemble’s aesthetic across 18 tracks beamed in from Paris in the ’60s, so we get John Barry-like melodies, baba-da vocals,…1 min
MOJO|May 2024Burnt OfferingStan Ridgway The Big Heat IRS, 1986 BARSTOW-RAISED Stanard Ridgway fronted LA eccentrics Wall Of Voodoo, whose malarial MTV hit Mexican Radio promised great things in March ’83. But two months later at Steve Wozniak’s US Festival folly in San Bernadino – a few hours before The Clash’s last gig with Mick Jones – Ridgway played his final show with the group. “I felt the band had been taken over by the record company,” says Ridgway today. “They put us on the road for nine, 10 months, and then said, ‘Do it again’. Everybody was pretty burned out, and I felt a lot of weirdness because of my status as the singer, you know – ‘Who does he think he is?!’ There was lots of dysfunction and things just weren’t…5 min
MOJO|May 2024Things we said todayAll You Need Is Love: The End Of The Beatles ★★★★ Peter Brown and Steven Gaines OCTOPUS. £25 IN 1983, A MIXED reception greeted The Love You Make by Brian Epstein’s management assistant Peter Brown, of The Ballad Of John And Yoko fame, and writer Steven Gaines. Mocked as ‘The Muck You Rake’, the book was based on interviews conducted in 1980 with almost every A-lister except Lennon, murdered that December; months later, the widowed Yoko had her say. From this prime source material the authors spun an account long on sensation, short on nuance and non-existent on the actual music; Paul and Linda McCartney ceremonially burnt their copy. Four decades on, we now have a better book: the original unfiltered interviews, including Peter Brown as just one more witness.…9 min
MOJO|May 2024Brother Sky“IF BY ACCIDENT something happens, for me it’s much better and more interesting than if I plan to do something,” Damo Suzuki told MOJO in 2018. “Then,” he added with a look of terrible boredom, “it’s getting really like work.” He put this philosophy into practice like few others, staying true until the end to his ideals of spontaneous performance, and the wordless whisper/scream vocalising he once described as “the language of the Stone Age”. This millennium, across the world, he went on stage with like-minded strangers without rehearsal and let whatever was possible manifest. Dubbed Damo Suzuki’s Network, these ad hoc line-ups of ‘Sound Carriers’ ranged from trios to formations of over 50, and ages from 15 to over 80. Suzuki, a Liverpool FC fan who compared these performances…16 min
MOJO|May 2024Who swapped instruments on live TV?I saw a 1995 Top Of The Pops performance of Oasis playing their hit Roll With It, when Liam Gallagher pretended to play the guitar and Noel sang. What are the other good examples of groups changing their line-ups to freak out TV viewers? Andrew Pell, via e-mail MOJO says: The does-not-compute factor has always been a rewarding phenomenon watching bands on TV. There are lots of good examples from Top Of The Pops: how can we forget John Peel miming Ray Jackson of Lindisfarne’s mandolin part when Rod Stewart played Maggie May in 1971? Other instances include a roadie standing in for Can guitarist Michael Karoli when they played 1976 hit I Want More; The Specials and The Beat switching bassists when they both appeared on a 1980 episode,…4 min
MOJO|May 2024Phazer To StunEncased in a zinc-plated Dark Blue powder-finished body, its Reactance and effects pedal from Lo/Hi Speed controls are your passport to classic phaser effects. The winner bags a Hylight Phazer MK II RIGINALLY FOUNDED by British worth £349, made and signed by Gary Hurst audio engineer David Reeves, himself! How to enter: take the letters from OHylight Electronics built high each coloured square and rearrange them to quality, famously sturdy amps that helped form the name of a musician. Visit www. shape rock in Britain in the 1960s, 1970s and mojo4music.com/crossword and fill out the after. Now back in business, the firm form, along with your answer, in the continues to offer guitarists the best in provided field. Entry is free and closes at amps and effects units. Which brings…1 min
