Inhaltsverzeichnis für March 2026 in MOJO

Bill DeMain A songwriter and half of the duo Swan Dive, Bill has recently returned from a successful tour of Japan. Back home in Nashville, he writes about music for MOJO, and in this issue, with the help of William Bell, Stevie Van Zandt and others, he eulogises Stax titan Steve Cropper on page 12. Andy Beta Andy’s award-winning writing on rock, jazz, experimental and electronic music has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post and more. An extract from his new book, Cosmic Music: The Life, Art And Transcendence Of Alice Coltrane, is to be found on page 56. Borja Bonafuente Borja is a fine art painter, illustrator, record sleeve designer and Beatlemaniac. Established within the figurative/hyperrealist style, his work is…

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 THERE WAS, I CONFESS, A MOMENT OF doubt as we pieced together the elements that’d make up MOJO 388. Would major features on the Small Faces and The Style Council prove to be too much Mod? Reading the stories by Tom Doyle and Ted Kessler soon put us right – if the Mod spectrum could encompass two albums as diverse as Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake and Café Bleu, then so could MOJO. And anyway, we could put them alongside artists unimaginably far away from the Mod world: Rob Halford, reflecting on his unique path through heavy metal with Judas Priest; Suicide’s Alan Vega, bloodstained avatar of…

“GUY, YOU’VE finished the booze/And you run out of speed,” went The Clash’s tender 1981 outtake Midnight To Stevens. “But the wild side of life/Is the one that we need.” They were hailing Guy Stevens, a purveyor of inspired anarchy who died in August 1981, less than a month before they recorded the song. As well as producing 1979’s Clash masterwork London Calling, Stevens was a sans pareil conduit and catalyst for American R&B in ’60s Britain, DJing at the Scene Club in Soho and ensuring releases for Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and more on labels including Sue and Pye International. In autumn 2026 his story is to hit the screens as Guy Stevens – The Apostle Of Rock & Roll. The filmmakers are Chris Hall and Mike Kerry of…

“I DIDN’T EXPECT this,” Dick Gaughan tells MOJO down the line from his Edinburgh home. “I thought it had gone forever. You’d put all these years of work in, and it just disappeared, sitting on a shelf somewhere. And it’s all come back again.” A radical, humane and fierce Scottish folk force admired by Billy Bragg, Richard Hawley and many others, he’s talking about the non-availability of most of his back catalogue, which seemed locked up forever in un-reissued, un-streaming limbo. This has been partially rectified by the imminent release of the 7-CD/1-DVD box set R/evolution: 1969-83. With 83 unreleased songs, its nine hours of music and two and half hours of film allow this rare and charismatic singer and guitarist to be appreciated properly again. With a programme of…

THE OTHER DAY, I CAUGHT MYSELF sitting on the couch watching The Weather Channel,” says Rob Halford, laughing. “Here I am, 50 million albums sold, the Metal God, watching The Weather Channel.” It’s a sunny December afternoon in Phoenix, Arizona – the city Halford has called home since 1981 – and he’s holding court in the control room of PMD Studios. At 74, Halford – tatted, pierced, and dressed head to toe in black – hasn’t slowed down, at least not professionally. He’s fresh off a tour leading Judas Priest on a co-headlining run with his pal and neighbour Alice Cooper, and planning a busy 2026 for the band he’s fronted since 1973. Now married to his partner of three decades, Thomas Pence, Halford has come to prize his “often…

Long Hot Summer (pre TSC demo) An early demo of what would become TSC’s third single, recorded in August 1982, when Weller was still in The Jam. Unlike the stomping, four-to-the-floor version of A Solid Bond In Your Heart also cut that day which surfaced on 1992’s Extras, the discordant anguish prodded at here on the piano bears almost no resemblance to the sparkling finished product. Boy Hairdresser Taking its name from a novel by Joe Orton, Weller co-wrote Boy Hairdresser for teenage protégé and Respond Records signee Tracie Young. Musically, this run-through lands pretty close to the B-side of Young’s 1983 single Give It Some Emotion, but Weller’s vocals lend a far more soulful depth to its Orange Juice-like pop squelch. Up For Grabs Although performed live (as captured…

FOLLOWING THE RELEASE OF 2007’s THE BAIRNS, THE SECOND LP SHE HAD RECORDED backing her sister Rachel, second year art history student Becky Unthank approached her tutors in Manchester to ask for permission to defer for a year to dedicate herself to her music. “They were like: ‘Yeah, good luck, see you, have a good life,’” she tells MOJO. “And I was like: ‘No, I’m coming back.’ They didn’t believe me at all. I had hardly ever been there because I was always Fon tour.” Seven years Becky’s senior, Rachel had been working in schools while her and her then partner Adrian McNally worked on arrangements for the band – then known as Rachel Unthank And The Winterset. The reception for their records had been reasonably rapturous, but she was…

I WOULD have heard Suicide for the first time on John Peel – probably Ghost Rider or Che. Their music cast a spell on me because it was so repetitive. I’d never heard music that had so little in it before – just this one organ and someone saying “Che” with lots of echo! I didn’t see them back in the day when they were getting shit thrown at them, but I saw them play the Leadmill in Sheffield in 1988. Vega had a very weird way of moving around, very kind of jerky. And sometimes you were almost thinking it was a little bit ridiculous, but he was completely committed. It was like he was saying, “This is what I am, and you’re just gonna have to accept it.” After each…

THE GROUNDBREAKING circular artwork for Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake – with its cover based on a Victorian tin design lent to Immediate by the Liverpool-based tobacconists, and inner image of a pack of rolling papers bearing the word “Sus” (as in “suspect activity”) – has rightly been much-examined and celebrated down the years. Less explained is another feature of its fold-out design: the intricate psychedelic collage illustration, with its profusion of flowers and butterflies, shadow of a fly, and reclining figure smoking a hookah pipe. Nick Tweddell, co-creator of the imagery (along with Pete Brown) hasn’t spoken about his contribution to the artwork in the near-60 years since its creation. “No one’s ever asked,” he now laughs to MOJO. Tweddell and Brown were art school pals of Ian McLagan, also…

Embraced For A Second As We Die THE SATCHI SIX & ARKETYP. DL/LP Third album of high-sheen angst from Swedish singer-songwriter. “I’M SO SCARED of feeling nothing, for the last bits of my life,” sings Amanda Bergman on the track Groby. Her third solo album (Bergman is also in Swedish supergroup Amason) is drenched in the cold sweat of a midlife crisis. Ruminating on the small stuff (children growing up; feeling disconnected) and bigger issues (Trump; death; war) her songs cradle their existential angst in a blanket of hopeful, tasteful ’80s ambience. Bergman’s voice has a smokey warmth to it: her speak-sing phrasing recalls The Horses-era Rickie Lee Jones; while the sound is somewhere to the left of Blue Nile’s Hats, thanks to Rasmus Lindelow’s analogue synths and Petter Granberg’s…

If This Life Could Start Again PARANÁ. CD/DL/LP A taste of gothic South America as seen from the Home Counties. BORN IN Argentina but raised in Hemel Hempstead and now based in London, Zavala used her two previous albums to try to locate herself, investigating her identity from the perspective of a confused soul with feet in two camps. The second, La Yarará (2020), was her “Latino pop” LP, using rhythms from Latin America to suggest she would find herself on the dancefloor; its successor is a less upbeat affair, a feeling made explicit by the chill on the second track, Lost In The Depths Of The Andes. There’s more than a hint of folk-horror about that song, while Don’t Know What You’re Saying implies she has yet to recover…

Yes Tales From Topographic Oceans RHINO. CD/DL/LP/BR ONE DAY in September 1973, the producer Eddie Offord was rummaging for his car keys outside London’s Morgan Studios, and placed the master tapes of Yes’s new LP, Tales From Topographic Oceans, on the roof of the vehicle. Apparently, Offord forgot they were there and sped away, sending the precious spools flying into Willesden High Road, where they narrowly avoided being flattened by a bus. Was it a bad omen? Three months later, the usually partisan Melody Maker described the record as “distinctly boring” and “a test of endurance”. Now, over half a century on, the group’s contentious sixth album returns as a 12-CD, two-LP, Blu-ray box set. There’s a lot of Yes here: crucially, a remastered take on the original LP and…

The Fallen By Watchbird (Expanded Edition) FIRE. CD/DL/LP Cosmic seeker’s uncanny fourth album celebrates 15th anniversary. LAYERING UP childhood recollections of Eastern European kids’ TV and half-remembered fairytales over heavy electronic grooves, ectoplasmic drones and acoustic space-shanties, Jane Weaver’s 2010 album The Fallen By Watchbird shook the psych-folk kaleidoscope to fascinating and unnerving effect. While My Soul Was Lost, My Soul Was Lost And No One Saved Me and Turning In Circles sound like Jacqui McShee emerging from a river at dawn or Little Red Riding Hood embarking on a post-wolf freak-folk career, Europium Alluminate and the title track bear the vaporous traces of the Manchester-based singer-songwriter’s youthful fondness for Hawkwind-style free festivals. Taken together, it’s stellar confirmation of Weaver’s gift for spinning different threads of counter-cultural memory into beautiful…

Highway Of Diamonds: Black America Sings Bob Dylan ACE. CD/DL/LP Sequel to 2010’s How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan. AS JIMI HENDRIX demonstrated with his psychedelic transmogrification of All Along The Watchtower, Bob Dylan’s songs seem infinitely malleable. They can be radically reshaped to amplify or even transcend their original message. While there’s nothing as wildly flamboyant as Hendrix on this second instalment of Black America Sings Bob Dylan, Highway Of Diamonds contains 20 quality Dylan interpretations, ranging from Billy Preston’s jazz-infused It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) to Solomon Burke’s roof-raising gospel belter Quinn The Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) and Natalie Cole’s funked-up Gotta Serve Somebody. Other soulful nuggets come from Nina Simone, The Staple Singers, Aaron Neville, Bettye LaVette, and a more recent recording by Lizz…

IN JULY 1976 Bob Marley & The Wailers were, at last, in the US Top 10 with Rastaman Vibration. But Marley was not the first reggae star to break the music in America and internationally. Three years earlier, Perry Henzell’s movie crime parable The Harder They Come had won acclaim at midnight showings across the country, as its superb soundtrack turned on viewers to Jamaican artists including The Maytals, Desmond Dekker and Jimmy Cliff. Cliff played the lead role of aspiring singer-made-bad Ivanhoe Martin and contributed gold-standard, now canonical songs including You Can Get It If You Really Want, The Harder They Come and secular hymnal Many Rivers To Cross. “In the States and a lot of Europe they didn’t know what reggae was [then],” Cliff told MOJO in 2012.…

“SO WHAT DO I DO now that I’m 65?” Neil Young pondered in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. “Retire? Nope. I can’t stop moving long enough to do that.” Throughout the 21st century, Young has generally kept moving so relentlessly, and so quickly, that his fans can be forgiven for suffering from a little whiplash. There have been 20 studio albums, six live albums, two memoirs, approximately 30 obsessively curated Archives releases, at least seven movies, innumerable tours, a revolutionary car, a Toblerone-shaped rival to the iPod, an energetic sideline in political activism, some business with model railways, and a brain aneurysm. For starters. It’s a level of productivity that puts his contemporaries to shame, but the speed and urgency of it all means the quality control hasn’t always…

I was interested to read that Don Henley’s 1984 hit The Boys Of Summer almost appeared on Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ album Southern Accents, but that Petty decided not to record the song. What other examples of hit-avoidant behaviour are there? Andrew Yates, via e-mail MOJO says: Henley wrote new words for Mike Campbell’s music for The Boys Of Summer, but we know what you mean. One song which was a huge hit but was turned down repeatedly was Tina Turner’s 1984 smash What’s Love Got To Do With It: songwriters Terry Britten and Graham Lyle had previously pitched it without success to Cliff Richard, Bucks Fizz and Donna Summer. Turner, meanwhile, passed on the 1981 song Physical, which was then a big hit for Olivia Newton-John. Similar tales…

1965-1969 MOJO 1 WHATCHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT (Live at The Twenty Club, Belgium, 1966) The first Small Faces 45 was released in August 1965, an R&B vamp modelled on Solomon Burke’s Everybody Needs Somebody To Love. This take is from a January 1966 date in Mouscron, Belgium, with Ian McLagan having replaced Jimmy Winston on Hammond. Written by Brian Potter/Ian Samwell. BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd. ℗2021 Nice Records Limited Licensed courtesy of Nice Records Limited. ISRC GX46J2100014 2 MY MIND’S EYE (The Autumn Stone 1969 version) An early manifestation of SF’s psychedelic baroque, as Marriott and Lane’s ability to transcend their Mod roots becomes apparent. Released in November 1966 without the band’s permission – it was unfinished – this precipitated the end of their relationship with manager Don…

“When you can only afford one guy and there were no overdubs, my job was to be two guys at one time.” STEVE CROPPER IN AUGUST 1967, Steve Cropper was at Stax studio in Memphis one night, mixing a track, when Isaac Hayes burst in. “He said, ‘David [Porter] and I’ve just written something I think might be a hit!’” Cropper told me in 2023. “‘But we need an intro – can you help?’” Telecaster in hand, Cropper listened to their song, and immediately started playing the now-famous double-string lick that starts Soul Man. Later, using a Zippo lighter as a slide, he tossed in a few more memorable parts. “I didn’t ask for a songwriting credit,” Cropper said. So really, Sam Moore’s cry of “Play it, Steve” on Sam…

The Purple Gang Granny Takes A Trip (BIG T, 1967) Stockport lite-psych/vaudeville quintet wield washboard, piano and kazoo, with Joe Boyd producing, and fall foul of BBC censors who think it’s about pensioners on LSD rather than one going to California. Syd Barrett and John Peel were fans. Junie Granny’s Funky Rolls Royce (WESTBOUND, 1975) Complete with loose-dentured ‘old person’ voice and vocoder, a funky strut wherein granny gets a road cruiser of distinction, as befits Walter ‘Junie’ Morrison, an instrumentalist who’d been in The Ohio Players and Funkadelic. Moby Grape Hey Grandma (COLUMBIA, 1967) A rolling boogie with wailing guitars, where multi-talents the Grape kindly observe how young-looking grandma is. The narrator also admits “SF freak scene was on my mind” and that he’d been getting high on cough…

Charles Hayward This Heat’s drummer salutes Ornette Coleman’s Chappaqua Suite (Columbia, 1966). It must have been 1966 or ’7. Just down the road from my home was the Camberwell Public Music library. I’d been going there twice a week for a year or so. I’d already moved away from the post-war jazz my dad had introduced me to and the pop music of the time, and had started to find my own music. The library offered a panorama of new possibilities. Record covers were stored in crates in alphabetical order; genre was ignored, Stockhausen, Miles Davis, Phil Ochs, Feldman, Dylan, Cage, Sun Ra, Coltrane were all given equal importance. None more so than Ornette Coleman, his music was astounding to me, and the different trios and quartets each had distinct flavours…

COMING OUT Judas Priest Sin After Sin (CBS, 1977) Judas Priest’s third album helped blueprint heavy metal for the ’80s. But Halford’s co-written ballad, Last Rose Of Summer, was the flipside to session prodigy Simon Phillips inventing the genre’s twin-bass drum gallop on Dissident Aggressor. Meanwhile, Raw Deal was Halford unambiguously hymning New York’s Fire Island queer club scene. “I cased the joint, straining at the seams,” he declared. “Sex like a hurricane… love knoweth no laws.” SMASH HITS! Judas Priest British Steel (CBS, 1980) Recorded at Ringo Starr’s Tittenhurst Park, Priest’s sixth broke them in the UK, thanks to three Top 20/30 hits that saw Halford – in bullet belt and chainmail shinpads – invading front rooms via Top Of The Pops. The singer’s the star of the infectiously…

RACHEL UNTHANK & THE WINTERSET The Bairns (Rabble Rouser, 2007) Album Of The Year at the 2008 BBC Folk Awards, The Bairns’ sheer number of songs about dead children was much commented on in contemporary reviews, along with its exploratory jazzy arrangements and Rachel’s eerie ability to inhabit a song. The bouncy Blue’s Gaen Oot O’The Fashion remains a live fave. THE UNTHANKS Last (Rabble Rouser, 2011) “Last is kind of relentlessly dark,” says McNally of the fourth Unthanks album, though Rachel calls it “one of the prettiest” records they have made. Gan To The Kye, The Gallowgate Lad and Close The Coalhouse Door do Geordie gothic, while the title track despairs at modernity: “The great unlearning has begun.” THE UNTHANKS Mount The Air (Rabble Rouser, 2015) “It’s important not to limit…

THE FUNERAL FOR JOHN COLTRANE WAS held four days after his death, on July 21, 1967. Over a thousand people convened at St Peter’s Lutheran Church in Midtown Manhattan. Hundreds stood outside the church. Upstairs in the balcony, saxophonist Albert Ayler and his quartet played Truth Is Marching In, and the primal cry of Ayler sounded the angst and grief of the gathered. “Rarely have so many musicians congregated in one place,” the Rev John G Gensel sermonised. Coltrane’s casket could barely be seen under the profusion of yellow roses and white lilies. Bouquets sent by Duke Ellington, Nina Simone, Stan Getz, Max Roach and others crowded the altar. In the following days, the silence inside the Coltranes’ home at 247 Candlewood Path, Dix Hills, Long Island was deafening. Alice…

AS WAS SOON TO BECOME THE STUFF OF LEGEND, Steve Marriott really didn’t get on with his long-suffering neighbours in Eyot Green, Chiswick. To be fair, residing next door to the pint-sized, turbo-charged Small Faces singer in 1968 was surely a living hell. “Of course it was!” splutters drummer Kenney Jones today. “I’d have hated to be his neighbour.” Day or night, Marriott blasted music from an enormous pair of wall-rattling Wharfedale speakers he’d bought in a clear-out sale from Olympic Studios, where the Small Faces’ record label Immediate had afforded the fast-developing group virtually unlimited recording time. Suspiciously fragrant smoky odours tended to emanate from the singer’s property. Dodgy-looking Mods and longhairs were coming and going at all hours. Annoyed by his neighbours’ noisy protestations, Marriott furtively tried to…

Bill Callahan My Days Of 58 DRAG CITY. CD/DL/LP WARY, MAYBE, of ending up like the platitudinous late-night TV singer he lambasts on his 2020 track Protest Song (“I’d vote for Satan/If he said it was wrong”), Bill Callahan rarely chooses to comment explicitly on the problems and perils of modern life. Over 35 years, Callahan’s songs have been more likely to emerge from dream landscapes, a surreal America of drovers and horses or – increasingly since his 2019 album Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest – the domestic cocoon of love and family, than any ripped-from-the-headlines complaints about the world outside. Yet on My Days Of 58, the ninth album he has issued under his own name since retiring his Smog alias in 2007, there’s a track called Computer, a…

Shaking Hand MELODIC. CD/DL/LP Manchester trio’s debut; a time machine to ’90s alt-rock. Expect “loud louds, quiet quiets”. AS IF THEY’D been there at the time, the three whippersnappers known as Shaking Hand have tapped and conjoined the most fertile of guitar scenes bridging the late ’80s and ’90s – post-hardcore, slowcore, post-rock – to create a sublime fusion. Guitarist George Hunter’s plaintive vocals and elliptical words (“I met a match with the calibre of a static bug/Pray for mandibles”, anyone?) are part of the mix, but the trio’s key facet is their instrumental nous, all hypnotic tension and release with abrupt chord/gear shifts. Sonic Youth are their guiding light, but multiple paths are taken: Sun Dance splices the New Yorkers’ Murray Street with muted Slint-like precision, Night Owl broods…

Tales From Topographic Oceans was inspired by the Indian teacher Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography Of A Yogi. Did you read the book? “No. Jon [Anderson, vocalist] did and I may have read some of it, but I wasn’t a great bookworm. The only books I usually read at that time were self-help books, which stimulated me to do something about my life, create your own universe, if you like.” Was Tales… yours and Jon Anderson’s baby? “Yes. Jon and I spent a lot of time writing it on the road. We put most of the structures together, but then invited the other guys to have some input.” You and Jon wanted a rural vibe while making the album, so Yes’s road crew customised Willesden’s Morgan Studios with hay bales, and wooden…

DANCE SINGER JUDY CHEEKS’ (below, b.1954) self-titled 1973 debut was produced by Ike & Tina Turner. After a stint as an Ikette, Cheeks, the daughter of Florida gospel singer Julius Cheeks, moved to Germany where she sang on sessions including Donna Summer’s 1977 LP Once Upon A Time before finding success with albums such as 1978’s Mellow Lovin’. In the mid ’90s she had five UK Top 30 hits with house tracks including 1994’s Reach. Her 2020 LP Love Dancin’ included song co-writes with Stevie Wonder and Betty Wright. PRODUCER PHIL VINALL (b.1959) started out as engineer for bands including The Damned, Squeeze and XTC, and graduated to production as Britpop gathered steam. He would helm key records by Pulp (Razzmatazz), The Auteurs (New Wave) and Placebo (Nancy Boy). Gene remembered…

Dave Mustaine MEGADETH MUTHA What music are you currently grooving to? The latest Megadeth LP, of course. I’m very excited because every time I listen to it I hear something new. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? AC/DC, Let There Be Rock. When the needle touched the vinyl, my life changed for ever. I was the only one in my circle of friends who had ever heard of AC/DC, but it wasn’t long until my friends knew I had discovered a supergroup. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? I stole it, and it was Kiss’s Hotter Than Hell. I was hanging out at an ice-skating rink and a record store was right next to it… I had…

1 EDDIE FLOYD Knock On Wood (STA X, 1966) Floyd and Cropper co-wrote this in Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, with a thunderstorm raging outside. After channelling that mood in the roiling intro, Cropper and Duck Dunn peel off into tandem syncopation – guitar knocking steadily against upper register bass whorls. Floyd frets that his loved one might be susceptible to whims and weather, but the unshakeable groove beneath says otherwise. 2 WILSON PICKETT Ninety-Nine And A Half (Won’t Do) (STA X /ATLANTIC, 1966) Cropper called this “one of my best rhythm guitar parts.” From the stuttering intro, it struts, pivots and kicks like a pair of Cuban heels against a dancefloor, playfully nudging Al Jackson’s snare, and egging on Pickett’s raspy vocal. “Got to have a hundred!” Pickett shouts. Cropper gives him a…

FURMAN’S FAVES Ezra’s current five earworms G. Goodman Heaven Song (SLOUGH WATER/THIRTY TIGERS, 2025) “I LOVE BOSTON,” Ezra Furman says of her current home, where her wife’s latest job has taken them after periods in their home city of Chicago and then Oakland. “We can walk everywhere: to my kid’s school, to the grocery store, to the Rockwell Theatre where I keep playing shows; about 10 times so far. I love local music and seeing bands again and again.” An inveterate gig-player herself, except on Fridays because of the Jewish shabbat, Furman is on tour again, bringing her fired-up mix of garage rock and Springsteen-inspired anthems to the UK in early February. As her popularity has soared, Furman has found the confidence to come out as a trans woman, inspiring…

MIGHTY LIND Three of Bob’s best. Don’t Be Concerned (WORLD PACIFIC, 1966) Produced by Jack Nitzsche, Lind’s debut reveals a sensitive, rangy soul via breezy/sad folk rock, folk-blues and …Butterfly-style dreaminess. The Dylan-esque I Can’t Walk Roads Of Anger would have made a great follow-up hit. Since There Were Circles (CAPITOL, 1971) Lind’s last album for four decades is a sparse, gentle collection of songs rather than wannabe singles. Gene Clark and Carol Kaye guest star. “Enormous scope with a sharp eye for observations,” enthuses mega-fan Richard Hawley. Finding You Again (ACE, 2012) The first come-back album feels fresh and vital, and all four Ace releases pursue Lind’s familiar, heartfelt folk rock/blues, albeit with a richer sound. Producer Jamie Hoover adds incisive guitar flashes to the songwriter’s wry observations. “I…

1 GORILLAZ DAMASCUS FEATURING OMAR SOULEYMAN AND YASIIN BEY Omar Souleyman and the former Mos Def voice this synth-balm/Arabian rap-rave-up around the Syrian capital. Includes disses to Starbucks coffee. From impending album The Mountain. Find it: YouTube 2 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, STEVIE VAN ZANDT AND THE DISCIPLES OF SOUL I DON’T WANT TO GO HOME Live at the Stone Pony, a jocular take on Southside Johnny’s late-night singalong. Initially stymied by a fire alarm, but the band played on. Find it: YouTube 3 AFGHAN WHIGS FAKE LIKE A multi-generational Minneapolitan love-in as Greg Dulli’s beloved Whigs recast Poliça’s languid hip-hop original as dark electric soul. Find it: streaming services 4 LUCINDA WILLIAMS FEATURING MAVIS STAPLES SO MUCH TROUBLE IN THE WORLD Bob Marley’s 1979 track gets a topical reggae-blues reanimation with help…

Huntington Ashram Monastery (Impulse!, 1969) Coltrane’s second solo album is a tight trio set, one side harp-led, the other piano. The track titles indicate her ongoing spiritual conversion, but the roots here are still in modal jazz: note how Coltrane’s harp glissandos play off the driving thrum of Ron Carter’s bass on Paramahansa Lake and the gorgeous title track. Journey In Satchidananda (Impulse!, 1971) 1970’s Ptah, The El Daoud enriched her sound with horns, but it’s the added drone of Tulsi Reynolds’ tamboura on Journey… that makes it the high point of Coltrane’s Indo/jazz fusion phase. The melding of Coltrane’s ethereal calm with Pharoah Sanders’ measured fire on soprano sax is a wonder; for more fire, check 1971’s Carnegie Hall Concert, with Archie Shepp bolstering Sanders on the frontline. World Galaxy (Impulse!,…

Move On With The Year MOSHI MOSHI. DL/LP Moving solo debut of dark, surreal art-pop from half of Big Deal. A CASE OF the needle and the damage done: done to somebody else. Costelloe, previously of Mute-signed duo Big Deal, uses this album to work through the pain of having a dad with addiction issues, delivering ethereal, ’60s-flavoured melodies with clear-eyed lyrical stoicism. Stately mellotron opens the honeyed Anywhere Else, flute and recorder lending child-like innocence. The vocal is cut-glass, echoingly detached as yet again she’s summoned to a bedside. Occasionally, as with Too Late Now, there’s the rhythm of an ominous nursery rhyme or, as with Damned If You Do, a faux-naïve Euro-pop flex where Costelloe (a granddaughter of painter Lucien Freud, incidentally) makes things bright, like she’s France…

Tilaye’s Saxophone With The Dahlak Band MUZIKAWI. DL/LP First reissue of a late-’70s Ethiopian classic. ALTHOUGH BEST known for his work behind vocalists Mahmoud Ahmed and Muluken Melesse, the name of tenor sax titan Gebre is woven through all strands of Ethiopian soul. Trained in the national theatre school, he had formed the Equators Band in the early 1970s – appearing on Ahmed’s 1975 single Gizié Dègu Nègèr – before they morphed into The Dahlak Band, the kings of the hotel scene. Based in the Ghion – still there and barely altered 50 years on – they would play all-night sessions, 11pm-5am, to get round the military government’s curfew, occasionally recording their sets onto cassettes to sell. With Dawit Yifr u on organ, this is classic Swinging Addis: the reggae…

The Beatles 1963 concert bill Value: $20,000 (est.) Held by Boston’s RR Auction, December’s Marvels Of Modern Music sale was packed with head-spinning artefacts, including original Dylan art, some signed Jimi Hendrix Experience documents and Prince’s silk robe, gloves and cufflinks. Fabs fans were also particularly well catered for. Among the booty was an EMI internal reference Mono Acetate for Please Please Me, an acetate of the unreleased 1964 Capitol LP Best Of The Beatles, a ‘First State’ mono Yesterday And Today butcher sleeve and a 1964 Mono Acetate for the extended-jam ‘Take 7’ of She’s A Woman. We were also knocked sideways by this original poster for The Beatles’ Leyton Super Baths concert of April 8, 1963 -also the date of Julian Lennon’s birth. Great to see the bus…