Table of contents for Issue 284 in MOJO

“IT ALWAYS FEELS LIKE I ENTER A WORLD that is different from the world I am actually living in,” says Nick Cave, discussing his approach to music. And yet, even at his most phantasmagorical, Cave manages to touch the listener through his own understanding of emotion and humanity, alongside his own deep study of song craft. This month, as Nick talks to Keith Cameron following a period of unimaginable turmoil, MOJO is delighted to celebrate the musical adventures he has enjoyed with The Bad Seeds during the last three decades. Our story starts on page 68 and involves a remarkable cast of Bad Seeds past and present. If we were being trite, we’d call them lovely creatures but that may just be pushing it… Where saints in glory stand Many…

…country legend LORETTA LYNN (right) releases her new album Wouldn’t It Be Great in August. The set, which includes new songs and reworkings of classic material, is culled from recordings made over the last 10 years with her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell and John Carter Cash. “If you don’t write about everyday living you might as well hang it up,” says Loretta, adding, “I think you try to do better with every record you put out” … they’re supposed to be embarked on a farewell tour, but Joe Perry has said he believes AEROSMITH have two more albums in them. New music, however, will differ from 2012’s Music From Another Dimension! He told The Arizona Republic: “The next one will be a little more cohesive… the main thing is just…

“VAL KILMER GAVE ME A METEORITE, CALLED GIDEON.” I’d describe myself as… an alchemist. I work with any medium that comes my fucking way, and I’ll manipulate it in the way that I want. I’ve worked with gold, melted gold in a crucible, casted jewellery. I’ve studied the old guard, the old ways of doing art, hands-on, with linework and freestyle and hand drawn. Speaking as a person that does not engineer and does not play an instrument, I’d say the music I make is pretty fucking layered, and that’s alchemy. It’s not science. It’s a way of working with musicians and being able to pull the best out of them, that they would not pull out themselves. Music changed me… Indefinitely. It definitely changed me, in a good way,…

1 COMMODORES COMMODORES MOTOWN 2 LIVE AT THE LONDON PALLADIUM MARVIN GAYE MOTOWN 3 GO FOR YOUR GUNS THE ISLEY BROTHERS T.NECK 4 A REAL MOTHER FOR YA JOHNNY GUITAR WATSON AMHERST 5 UNPREDICTABLE NATALIE COLE CAPITOL 6 AHH... THE NAME IS BOOTSY, BABY! BOOTSY'S RUBBER BAND WARNER BROS 7 TEDDY PENDERGRASS TEDDY PENDERGRASS PHILADELPHIA INTERNATIONAL 8 PARLIAMENT LIVE/P. FUNK EARTH TOUR PARLIAMENT CASABLANCA 9 ANGEL OHIO PLAYERS MERCURY 10 RIGHT ON TIME THE BROTHERS JOHNSON A& M…

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF A QUIET VILLAGE in Surrey, off a narrow road lined by grand mansions, is a house that is the headquarters of the London Stereoscopic Company. Present on this sunny late spring afternoon is company director, Dr Brian May, CBE. The Queen guitarist’s residential home is close byyy, hidden behind security gates and thick woodland. But in this rather more modest house are the products of his long-running obsession with vintage 3-D-imaging cameras. In one room, stacked high, are cardboard boxes stamped with his company’s name. In the lounge where May greets MOJO are various antique cameras and a copy of his new book, Queen In 3-D, featuring hundreds of previously unpublished photographs that he shot on stereoscopic cameras throughout his career with the band. May turns…

IT IS APPROACHING CHRISTMAS 2008, A crisp sunny day in Camden. Indoors, in the living room of Alan Mair’s neat and tidy alms-house-style abode, crumpled in a chair, is the somewhat less than neat-and-tidy figure of Peter Perrett, the songwriter and singer of The Only Ones. Perrett, bassist Mair, guitarist John Perry and drummer Mike Kellie are just 18 months into a sporadically committed reunion for the non-conformist, nominally new wave group, but with Perrett suffering a debilitating lung condition, the legacy of decades of hard drug use, he’s already struggling. “You don’t appreciate oxygen,” wheezes Perrett at one juncture. “Oxygen is brilliant stuff. If I could breathe properly and walk to the corner and not feel dizzy, hot and sweaty… I’d love it.” In his sunglasses and dyed thatch,…

(Mute, 1984) Blixa Bargeld (guitar, 1984-2003): “I’d played on the final Birthday Party EP, Mutiny, and Nick had already decided that for his next solo project I should play guitar. I wasn’t really aware of the Bad Seeds becoming a band. I just thought Nick was doing a solo record [working title, Nick Cave: Man Or Myth], so I played guitar, Barry Adamson played bass, and Mick Harvey played drums. On the first day at John Foxx from Ultravox’s studio, there was no drum kit, so Mick just played on the black cardboard packaging for bass drums, which happened to be there. It was pretty loose. There was always a goal to achieve intensity in what Nick and all of us were doing. Nick was constantly still writing and rewriting…

LTO &#9733&#9733&#9733&#9733 Storybook INJAZERO. DL/LP Atmospheric alt-classical meets introspective experimental electronica. LTO’s LISSOM melodies are constructed from moving piano passages, fragments of indistinct vocals, synth loops and found sounds. There’s some commonality with that ever-expanding group of neo-classical practitioners, headed up by Messrs Richter, Arnalds, et al, but this Bristolian piano teacher augments several of Storybook’s poignant vignettes with fluttering beats or wonky musical metres. LTO found his feet with Old Apparatus, a collective who veered between electronic experimentalism, bass workouts and shoegazey miasma. His solo work is constructed more traditionally, but there’s plenty of intrigue to be found here. The floaty lo-fi electronica of Change has a hymnal quality to it, but buried deep within is what sounds like a ghostly game of ping-pong. Elsewhere, the title track has…

Ho99o9 &#9733&#9733&#9733&#9733 United States Of Horror TOYS HAVE POWERS. CD/DL/LP Hip-hop and hardcore punk collide on New Jersey duo’s explosive state of nation address. Ho99o9’S INITIAL mission was to intimidate. Masked men daubed in house paint; TheOGM and YetiBones’ garish Grand Guignol theatrics (with videos of copulating priests and dismembered torsos) were a crude wake-up call that later found its locus of discontent in America’s president. Occupying similar sonic territory to Death Grips or Clipping but with a jackhammer’s sensitivity, spine-chilling shots across the bow such as War Is Hell, Street Power and the anthemic title track summon up real petrol emotions. Yet they cannily temper the vitriol with PiL-like dirges, sarcastic trap and Bomb Squad bricolage. It’s a moot point whether hip-hop has the political incision to trouble Trump’s…

Various &#9733&#9733&#9733&#9733 Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production ACE. CD/DL HIS VERY BEST productions crackled and fizzed with in-the-room energy, excitement and a live vigour that made Shel Talmy, an American in London, at times seem invincible in the mid ’60s. Born in Chicago, educated in Los Angeles, Talmy arrived in the UK in ’62 and bluffed his way into Decca to cut his teeth on unpromising MOR slop like The Bachelors’ Charmaine, a UK Number 6 hit. But in ’64 he scored commissions to produce The Kinks and The Who. Helping to give their recordings an electricity and presence that still bursts with vitality, invention and rebellion, he lifted the Beat Boom to a new level. As an independent producer, Talmy was then able to take a wide-ranging path,…

“BUSY PIANO, PATTERING PERCUSSION, BURSTS OF BRASS AND VOCALISTS SINGING ‘ZOOM, ZOOM’.” In 1996, for an occasional feature we used to run called Conference Call, MOJO’s Barney Hoskyns invited Jeff Buckley to interview his hero Juan Garcia Esquivel, the Mexican king of ‘Space Age Bachelor Pad Music’, marking a faddish revival, 20 years ago, of music from 40 years earlier. Buckley loved the dotty arrangements using tightly scored percussion, manic pianos and perky vocal groups. Playing piano and conducting his Mexican orchestra of 40 musicians, Esquivel told Buckley it might take him a year to perfect 12 arrangements because each musician would have to be coached individually, so intense were some of the demands his writing placed upon them. “I went to make my first recording in Hollywood [in 1957].…

…showing that there’s no way of anticipating what’s going to be hot in the world of pop, last month MC NICKI MINAJ included scenes of Buckingham Palace on the video for her tune No Frauds, soon after Lady Gaga did a web chat with Prince William. If royalty is in , the Duke Of Edinburgh’s available for guest spots … The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that there’s a MADONNA (right) bio-pic in preparation. Titled Blonde Ambition, the film will portray Madge as she works on her 1983 debut LP: no actors have been named, but with suggestions to the BBC including Amy Schumer, Marion Cotillard and Nicolas Cage, maybe a multiple lead-actor model like 2007’s Dylan-opic I’m Not There might be in order… spare a thought for NORMAN COOK ,…

1 Whipper-snapper: with his first camera, 11-year-old Brian in Dorset, 1956. 2 What are the odds?: at the Kempton Park gee-gees, ’76 (from left, back row) May, John Deacon, Peter Brown; (centre) Roger Taylor, Jo Morris; (front) Freddie Mercury, John Reid. 3 “This is a global jukebox”: Queen don’t get clever and play the hits to conquer Live Aid, Wembley Stadium, July 13, 1985. 4 We are the champons: Queen get stuck into Japanese soup in a hotel garden, Tokyo, April 22, 1975. 5 Brian campaigning for animal welfare during the 2015 general election, London April 23. 6 “He was a great guy”: Brian and George Michael, on-stage at the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, Wembley Stadium, April 20, 1992. 7 May with current Queen vocal foil Adam Lambert, Sydney, Australia,…

“As a teenager in Alabama in 1994, when I started studying songs, the road led to Bob Dylan. It started with Kurt Cobain and it ended with Dylan. If you play basketball are you influenced by Michael Jordan? Of course you are. So, yes, of course, I have a Bob Dylan tattoo on my arm. Don’t you? Where’s yours? It’s that last line from Boots Of Spanish Leather: “Just carry yourself back to me unspoiled/ From across that lonesome ocean.” I was at the beginning of the relationship with my wife Amanda, and that song [really resonated with me]. It has that ambiguity, this line in particular. Dylan knows that he’s being desperate and whiny and overbearing and masculine and wrong. I like the beauty of that. It has a…

“THE MUSIC MAPS PECKNOLD’S EMOTIONAL STATE, JOYOUS ONE MOMENT, FULL OF SELF-DOUBT THE NEXT.” Fleet Foxes &#9733&#9733&#9733 Crack-Up NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP If parting is sweet sorrow, that’s because it also promises a delicious reunion. And passions of those who’ve missed the Fleet Foxes will doubtless be inflamed by a return that’s as epic as it is overdue. For in the intervening years spent as a student in New York, Robin Pecknold has rebooted, reprogrammed his muse, to crank the intensity several notches higher than 2011’s Helplessness Blues. From the opening murmurs of I Am All That I Need, whispered as if heard in a dream before a cascade of pounding triplets beat out a lover’s march, a thread of the epic and devotional runs through this album. The segue of mini-symphonies…

Robert Hood &#9733&#9733&#9733&#9733 Paradygm Shift DEKMANTEL. CD/DL/LP After a rousing reception for last year’s Floorplan release – breathless, euphoric house, made with his daughter, Lyric – doyen of Detroit techno Hood returns to the raw, metallic minimalism of his earliest work on Paradygm Shift. This is an album that celebrates techno’s simple, repetitive pleasures; jarring beats, brutal rhythms and emotional intensity. A true master at work. Peaking Lights &#9733&#9733&#9733 The Fifth State Of Consciousness TWO FLOWERS. CD/DL/LP The fifth album from the Wisconsin-based husband and wife team is framed, like its predecessors, by a lo-fi, dubby psychedelia. To that, they fold in motorik grooves, reggae phrasing, splashes of house and new wave. Clocking in just shy of 80 minutes, it’s not the easiest to digest in one sitting, but its…

Freddie Gibbs &#9733&#9733&#9733 You Only Live 2wice ESGN/EMPIRE. CD/DL/LP Recently acquitted of rape in Vienna, those charges cast a heavy pall over YOL2. Gibbs and long-time collaborator Speakerbomb favour a trippy, reined-in take on Madlib’s psychedelia across a powerfully conversational ode to personal resurrection (check its cover) winningly contrasted against past druggy misdemeanours. Gibbs’ reputation as a shape-shifting rap omnivore is cemented by Amnesia. ZotheJerk & Frost Gamble &#9733&#9733&#9733 Black Beach 22 ENTERTAINMENT. CD/DL The pairing of seasoned Detroit rapper and untried Winnipeg producer comes dripping with gorgeous horn-blasted vintage soul. ZotheJerk’s wide-eyed, thoughtful and engaged tales of oppression, systemic racism and positive parenting don’t preclude club bangers, as he successfully pits lyrical wits against Sadat-X (Risk Vs Reward) and local behemoth Guilty Simpson (My Negus). He scores acute political…

BLACKFOOT GYPSIES TO THE TOP Across the fifteen tracks, the Blackfoot Gypsies fuse their influences, swamp blues cool, downhome hillbilly funk and homegrown punk panache, into a lean, mean machine invoking such classic musical malcontents as The Rolling Stones, The Faces and Mott The Hoople, while sparking and spitting 21st-century fire. It’s the type of record that could only come from a band that learned to rock the old-fashioned way, one sweaty, full-throttle live performance at a time. PLOWBOY RECORDS TOM RUSSELL PLAY ONE MORE: THE SONGS OF IAN & SYLVIA Great songwriters recognize great songwriters and Tom Russell is one of the most recognized. He’s been covered by Johnny Cash, Doug Sahm, Nancy Griffith, K.D. Lang, Iris Dement, Joe Ely and a hundred others. With Play One…

Hank Marvin THE SHADOW KNOWS What music are you currently grooving groov to? Som metimes classical radio or classic ro ock in the car, and sometimes I feel guilty about not listening to o what’s happening now. Sometimes gypsy jazz, big bands, boogie woogie stuff from the ’40s – Louis Jordan’s almost like a precursor or to to rock’ n’roll. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Wow! What do you say, Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper? I honestly would find it hard to pick one! If forced to do so… I’d have to be shot. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? A New Orleans jazz record by Bunk Johnson , When The Saints Go Marching In . I…

Recalling the hardcore ferocity of Germs and Bad Brains, the sub-industrial grind of Throbbing Gristle and the electro-anger of Death Grips, New Jersey duo HO9909 (left, an inversion of ‘666’, pronounced ‘Horror’) are a suburban American nightmare. With death-tripping songs guaranteed to offend the humourless, members theOGM and Yeti Bones’ goth-hop beats are deliciously dark, while their slasher movie shtick and wantonly chaotic live shows suggest cult appeal could be theirs. “Our fans are a cult,” says theOGM of debut album United States Of Horror. “They’re blood thirsty and hungry for this beautiful music we bring, and nobody will stop them.” Ben Myers As teenagers, south Londoners Benji Compston (guitarist/vocal), Jon EE Allan (bass/vocal) and Ash Cooper (drums) grooved to “mid-noughties indie, straight down the line”. Later, they thrilled to…

LED ALERT 3 A Tampa Stadium concert by Led Zeppelin (Robert Plant above) to a 70,000 crowd is cancelled when a thunderstorm breaks. Police disperse unhappy fans and 50 people are injured, 22 arrested. SLEEPY JOHN 5 Country blues man Sleepy John Estes dies, aged 77, after a stroke in Brownsville, Tennessee. IT’S STEVIE 6 Stevie Wonder lectures to a UCLA class, then plays a brief set – his first in the US in 18 months. HAVE MERSEY 16 Beatlemania, the musical revue based on the songs of Lennon & McCartney with four Beatle lookalikes, opens at New York’s Winter Garden. UFO NO 17 UFO lead guitarist Michael Schenker goes missing after a Leeds concert. It is feared he’s dead or abducted by Moonies. German-born Schenker just wanted to quit…

BLUES harmonica player JAMES COTTON (above, b.1935) began mastering his instrument by mimicking the sounds of chickens and locomotives while growing up in rural Mississippi. The young Cotton played with Sonny Boy Williamson II before heading to Beale Street where he accompanied Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters (he can be heard on Muddy’s 1956 version of Got My Mojo Working), as well as recording for Sun. In 1966, he was leading the Jimmy Cotton Blues Quartet and found employment at the hippy-blues intersection, opening for Janis Joplin and Grateful Dead, among others. Later he played on Muddy’s 1977 LP Hard Again and recorded solo into his late seventies, winning a Grammy for ’96’s Deep In The Blues. In 2006, he was inducted into the Blues Hall Of Fame. FINNISH electronic…

THE CORONATION! Queen Sheer Heart Attack (EMI, 1974) &#9733&#9733&#9733&#9733 The third Queen album defined a grandiose vision and anything-goes ethos, with shades of Abbey Road in cleverly interwoven tracks. Mercury’s Killer Queen was the fey pop hit, while May brought the heavy artillery in Now I’m Here and Brighton Rock. THE JUBILEE! Queen News Of The World (EMI, 1977) &#9733&#9733&#9733&#9733 Begun with two quintessential stadium rock anthems – May’s We Will Rock You, Mercury’s We Are The Champions – this is nonetheless the group’s most underrated record. Among its brilliant deep cuts: It’s Late, another hard rock tour de force from May. THE INTERREGNUM! Brian May Back To The Light (PARLOPHONE, 1992) &#9733&#9733&#9733 Created in the years when Mercury, and Queen, were slipping away from him, May’s first solo album…

“There would have been no Fleetwood Mac without Peter Green.” “IT’S BEEN VERY POIGNANT,” SAYS MICK Fleetwood calling from his home in Maui, describing the experience of compiling Love That Burns: A Chronicle Of Fleetwood Mac, Volume One: 1967-1974, a luxurious scrapbook of photographs and memorabilia covering the band’s early era. Inspired by Genesis Publications’ similarly painstaking edition of I Me Mine, the 1980 autobiography of George Harrison (Fleetwood’s former brother-in-law), the tome is a labour of love and a family affair, assembled with the assistance of his daughter, Amelia, and his nephew, Kells. But while other members of the band and their retinue – even the infamously elusive Peter Green – contribute to the accompanying text, the story is told mainly through the words of Fleetwood, a man who…

Nick Cave frowns and pauses to read the message that’s just appeared on his iPhone. “Um, yeah, sorry,” he says, eyebrow raised. “That always… hmm…” His gaze returns to a maroon wedge on the table: Lovely Creatures: The Best Of Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, an attempt to summarise 30 years of his recorded history. Cave is 60 this September: the box set he’s holding represents almost half his life. Yet it doesn’t cover his many film soundtracks, mostly written since 2005 in collaboration with Bad Seed Warren Ellis, or the two albums made by Grinderman, the Bad Seeds’ feral bastard offspring. Then there’s the two novels, the film scripts, the acting… In a life lived at times to dangerous extremes, Cave has maintained a diligent work ethic. “Choo-Choo!”…

Was it a conscious decision just to drop out of view, and how has it affected you? “Sometimes I think of my life as an experiment I’m running on myself. I was trying to put myself in the opposite situation of where I’d been, to see what effect it had. I haven’t really had time to think about how it affected me. Other than making the process of recording feel free and joyous.” The album title references F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Crack-Up: in which he said of the writer, “within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied.” Would you agree with that? “Well, that’s a good way to put it. Although I try to be more accepting – I try and replace dissatisfaction with boundless curiosity for where…

Bert Jansch It Don’t Bother Me (ft Johnny Marr) As a taster for the Living In The Shadows Part 2 box, which features his work between 2000-2006, this gem catches the spirit of Bert Jansch’s final recordings. Despite 40 years at folk’s vanguard, Jansch was still bright and inventive, as a new generation of musicians embraced his music. The collection, featuring Bernard Butler, Hope Sandoval, Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart et al, includes the Johnny Marr collaboration Crimson Moon. Previously unreleased (and included on the set’s outtakes disc), It Don’t Bother Me captures their distinctive guitar-playing gently intertwining to chiming perfection. Paul Stokes Find it: SoundCloud Artificial Pleasure Like Never Before Lead track from the new London band’s latest EP, this is menacing art rock. Guitars, crooned vocals threaten, then charm.…

Evan Dando Baby I’m Bored FIRE When Dando’s sole solo LP was first released, back in 2003, his cultural stock couldn’t have been lower. In his own words, the former Lemonhead had become “a fucking nuisance” at the end of the ’90s, and had decided to disappear. But, thanks to a new girlfriend, Elizabeth Moses, the patience of fellow songwriter and friend Ben Lee, and the help of Howe Gelb, Jon Brion, and Calexico’s John Convertino and Joey Burns, Dando assembled one of the loveliest albums of his career, a seemingly effortless collection of wise, gentle, self-deprecating pop songs about failure and recovery that glow with a warm inner light. This deluxe, double-vinyl “hardback” reissue comes with an extra disc of singles, B-sides and rarities that reveal just how damned…

“FRICKE’S GROUP SET OUT TO MAKE A NEW KIND OF DEVOTIONAL MUSIC.” Florian Fricke never had to worry about who bought his music. Born in 1944 into an independently wealthy family on the Bavarian island town of Lindau, as a teenager he studied piano at Freiburg and Munich conservatoires, a pupil of Rudolf Hindemith (brother of German composer Paul Hindemith), before dropping out to work as music and film critic for Der Spiegel, where he befriended the young New German Cinema director Werner Herzog. Fascinated by the rituals of worship, Fricke travelled to Africa, the Middle East, India and Nepal, studying Tibetan choral music, and numerous myths and folk tales. Caught up in 1968’s mood of student rebellion and spiritual revolution, Fricke bought a gigantic Moog III for 800,000 DM,…

“THE SONGS’ SAVAGE WIT CARRIES A DEEPER CHILL WHEN THE US PRESIDENT COULD DELIVER THEM WITHOUT IRONY.” A Nonesuch Celebration Brooklyn Academy Of Music, New York Record label presidents bankroll a musician’s work, but how many inspire their art? It’s doubtful many have to the degree Nonesuch Records honcho Robert Hurwitz has – at least judging by the hosannas sent his way during this three-hour concert salute at the Brooklyn Academy Of Music. The ardour isn’t limited to on-stage declarations from label mainstays Laurie Anderson, k.d. lang, Devendra Banhart, and Natalie Merchant, but also in musical pieces written by a host of composers to honour their benefactor. A Nonesuch Celebration debuts 12 instrumental works by the likes of Anderson, Pat Metheny, Brad Mehldau, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, each delivered…