MOJO的April 2026目录

Nate Chinen Nate is the author of Playing Changes: Jazz For The New Century, and the editorial director at US jazz and classical radio station WRTI. A former critic for The New York Times, he maintains a Substack newsletter called The Gig. He writes about Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet on page 74. Gus Van Sant Gus Green Van Sant Jr is an American filmmaker, photographer, painter, and musician. His films typically deal with themes of marginalised subcultures. “I met Flea as part of our cast of characters on the film My Own Private Idaho,” he recalls. He shoots the Chili Peppers’ bass dynamo for the MOJO Interview on page 28. Joe Wilson Joe is an award-winning Illustrator, designer and printmaker. His detailed and graphic work attract a wide variety…

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 THE MYTH OF THE LONE GENIUS IS A persistent one whenever great art is discussed, and MOJO’s certainly leaned into it from time to time. Miles Davis, for example, embodies a certain maverick spirit in the popular imagination; a single brilliant, ferociously uncompromising man against the world. “He makes Lou Reed look like a pussycat,” Stevie Van Zandt noted after Davis graced his Sun City protest album in 1985. But a more complicated truth about Davis is equally relevant to just about any other legendary creator you’d care to mention. This month, we celebrate Miles Davis’s 100th birthday with a weight of brilliant writing on him…

Frank Zappa Jazz From Hell (BARKING PUMPKIN, 1986) The last new album released in Zappa’s lifetime was mostly made using the Synclavier. Consequently its algorithmic complexities of chaos and order prods, maddeningly, with pitchforks from every angle. Suitable sounds for Hades’ elevator down? The Sweet Hell Raiser (RCA VICTOR, 1973) Part of the glorious glam bubblegum streak that included Teenage Rampage and Block Buster, The Sweet’s 13th single was kept off UK Number 1 by Tie A Yellow Ribbon… by Tony Orlando And Dawn. The charts are a cruel mistress, etc. John Lee Hooker Burning Hell (RIVERSIDE, 1964) To sparse acoustic country blues strumming, John Lee reflects on Heaven and Hell before declaring, “Where I die, where I go, nobody tell.” Dig the fuller, wilder band version with Canned Heat…

EASY RYDER Shaun’s fistful of dynamite. A. Woman (ELEKTRA, 1971) WHEN MOJO calls Shaun Ryder, he’s watching Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War in between interviews. “History repeats itself all the fucking time,” he observes. “We never fucking learn.” Not learning when it’s time to jack it in has served Ryder well. As comparisonfree singer and lyricist with mutant Manchester dance-rockers Happy Mondays, he enjoyed commercial and artistic success at the turn of the ’90s, but too much too soon brought druggy self-immolation in 1992. A brief comeback with Black Grape followed, before history repeated. But Ryder endured: with a side gig as a UK TV personality, he continues to lead both bands in his inimitable, scabrous fashion. His healthy use of the ‘F’ word has been edited for reasons…

1 PETER GABRIEL PUT THE BUCKET DOWN (BRIGHT-SIDE MIX) From forthcoming album o\i, rhythmic cross-hatching and a husky narrative of cerebral phenomenon. A Dark-Side Mix follows on the next new moon. Find it: streaming services 2 BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN STREETS OF MINNEAPOLIS Recorded after Alex Pretti became the second Minneapolis citizen shot by “Trump’s federal thugs”, the Boss’s Chimes Of Freedom/Ohio-styled response is both raw and artful. Find it: streaming services 3 AL GREEN I FOUND A REASON Soulful as ever, the Reverend Al takes the 1970 Velvets track out of the city and into the sun. Find it: To Love Somebody EP (Fat Possum) 4 ARCTIC MONKEYS OPENING NIGHT Recorded for War Child’s Help 2 charity LP, a foreboding clockwork vision which veers into baleful West Coast dread. Find it: Help 2 (War Child Records)…

New, New Minglewood Blues (from The Grateful Dead, Warner Bros, 1967) Weir is in full rock’n’roll voice, a raver beyond his years, in this bullet-train cover of a 1928 relic by Cannon’s Jug Stompers, one of two on the Dead’s debut LP. He shares the lead with Garcia in the other, Viola Lee Blues. Sugar Magnolia (from American Beauty, Warner Bros, 1970) Written with Hunter and streaked with Garcia’s angeldance pedal-steel guitar, Weir’s powerpop valentine became one of the Dead’s most beloved and performed songs – nearly 600 times, often with that Sunshine Daydream coda as the evening’s singalong finale. One More Saturday Night (from Bob Weir – Ace, Warner Bros, 1972) Weir sang many of the Dead’s rock’n’roll party pieces: Johnny B Goode, Johnny Cash’s Big River. He lets that…

GIL EVANS DIDN’T CARE WHAT HIS Mahattan apartment did or didn’t have. In 1946, when the Canada native returned to New York after enlisting in the US Army during World War Two, he only wanted to be close to the new jazz action. His basement space at 14 West 55th Street – little more than a bed, a piano, and a record player – quickly became an all-hours hub. Evans’s place was three blocks north of Swing Street, the jazz epicentre where clubs including the Three Deuces and Onyx helped birth bebop. He had fallen for the explosive jazz strain while playing in military bands during the war, so he began incorporating those sounds into the Claude Thornhill Orchestra, the unconventional ensemble for whom he’d been arranging since the decade’s…

The saxophone is back, but on this record it has to know its place. “I think, for me, the romanticisation around the sax has been taken away; it’s just an instrument amongst other instruments, and it’s got a particular tonal quality that means that it occupies a space above the flutes. It’s something that I didn’t necessarily miss, but when I came back to it, it really added to the sonic range at my disposal. When [in June 2025] I played at [South African jazz drummer] Louis Moholo’s memorial concert I wanted to play the saxophone in his honour. Afterwards I had to sit down and really think, What’s my relationship to the instrument? Because I really didn’t touch it at all for a year and a half.” You’ve mentioned…

The Beach Boys We Gotta Groove: The Brother Studio Years CAPITOL. CD/DL/LP FOR A FEW minutes in 1976 – America’s bicentennial year and the 15th anniversary of California-sun ambassadors The Beach Boys – the hype was right: Brian Wilson was back. On November 27, the group’s resident, troubled genius was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. And he was solo, his first TV appearance without brothers Dennis and Carl, Mike Love and Al Jardine since a legendary recital of Surf’s Up in the 1967 documentary Inside Pop. Brian’s three SNL songs included an eerie Good Vibrations – alone and skittish at a piano in a fauxsandbox set – and Back Home, a jaunty original from The Beach Boys’ latest LP, 15 Big Ones, with the SNL band even though…

Genuine Negro Jig NONESUCH. CD/DL/LP An incredible string band’s finest hour. BACK ON vinyl for the first time since 2010, this so-called 15th-anniversary edition with previously unreleased outtakes may owe its belated re-release to last year’s movie smash Sinners, which hinted what had already been asserted by Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and placed squarely on the record in Ken Burns’s documentary series Country Music: despite its vanilla image, country’s roots are also black. Genuine Negro Jig is no dusty antiquarian project, however, but as ear-popping as was Liege And Lief in 1969, Carolina Chocolate Drops as rambunctious a collective as Fairport Convention, launching multi-instrumentalist singer Rhiannon Giddens just as Richard Thompson was launched. Indeed, the traditional werefox ballad Reynardine features on both records. But perhaps this sizzling album’s highest lights are…

Clifton Chenier King Of Louisiana Blues & Zydeco SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS RECORDINGS. CD/DL/LP THE CROWN, the shock of hair, the glinting diamond tooth, the cape, the relentless drive of that diatonic piano accordion and the clacking polyrhythms of his brother Cleveland’s frottoir – the vested washboard that Clifton Chenier invented along with himself and an entire genre – here is one of the great sights and sounds of American music during rock’n’roll’s glory years. Chenier liked to say he’d come from a hole in the ground, and you can almost taste and smell the mud that never left his music however far afield he travelled. But his bluesy, surging groove belongs as much to the Texas oilfields and the burgeoning city as it does to the old Cajun country styles. As…

APRIL 24, 1945. A TRUMPET-PLAYING KID FROM ST LOUIS, a few weeks short of his nineteenth birthday, skips classes at the Juilliard School of Music in New York to play on his first studio session. The four tracks, backing a rambunctious singer called Rubberlegs Williams, might not be the best-known jazz recordings of the 1940s. But a career that began there would, with no hyperbole, change the sound of 20th century music. Within a year, Miles Davis would quit Juilliard and embark on a radical, sensuous and uncompromising path. Soon enough, there would be masterpieces to spare: Sketches Of Spain; Kind Of Blue; In A Silent Way; Bitches Brew. First, though, there was a wealth of music made in the company of Davis’s bebop seniors and peers: Charlie Parker, Sarah…

IN LUSCIOUS SUPER-saturated colour, in an artful shot by top Vogue snapper Peter Rand, The Kinks look about as glamorous as they ever would. A shame, perhaps, that it’s taken nearly 60 years for the picture to appear in print (although the sharp-eyed Kinks konnoisseur may recall its use on a black-and-white NME cover, advertising the June 1968 release of Days). Wrangled from a collector’s trove by Andrew Sandoval and Doug Hinman, and included in The Kinks: All Day And All Of The Night – The Day-By-Day Story Pt.1 1940-1971, the shot was intended to grace the cover of a US-only Kinks album, a stopgap while Ray Davies dithered over the tracklist for The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society. Although acetates exist, the album, to be entitled Four…

FACT SHEET Title: TBC Date: August/September Production: Faust, Gunther Buskies Songs: TBC The Buzz: “Each member has his own strong points. Jean-Hervé has always been very song orientated, maybe a bit folky. Irmler and Wüsthoff were more avant-garde and into the technical stuff. All of the records lean a bit to the side of what those musicians brought into the Faust picture.” Gunther Buskies AS ANYONE who picked up Faust’s violent, omnivorous album The Faust Tapes – a 48p bargain in 1973 – will know, this group was an unruly entity, possessed by multiple creative urges as if they were many bands in one. This year, this no-leaders principle will take on a powerful new form. Later in 2026, Faust’s Zappi Diermaier, Hans Joachim Irmler, Jean-Hervé Peron and Gunther Wüsthoff…

Joan Shelley The indie-folk singer salutes Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s Master And Everyone (Drag City, 2003). It was spring in Louisville, Kentucky. I was in my early twenties and painting a lot – the walls mostly, but also on pieces of wood and small canvases. I gardened obsessively and had a small flock of chickens. The house I lived in used to be a farmhouse for a potato farm but now stood as one of many in a residential neighbourhood. I played one album on a non-stop loop that spring: Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s Master And Everyone. I had this one eyelet curtain. I can still see clearly how it blew in the breeze, dispersing little clusters of light over my bed as Will sang in a whispery high voice, “You do…

ON A SUNNY WINTER’S MORNING HIGH in the Hollywood Hills, MOJO’s Uber comes to a halt by a gated road. While the driver figures out how to get to the other side, a man wearing shorts, T-shirt and a big smile appears out of nowhere. It’s Flea, back from his morning run. Sixty-three years old – sober for the last 30 – he’s as wiry, compact and intense as he ever was, with a seemingly indefatigable energy. “I run in the wild places up here,” he says as we walk down the long lane that leads to the house where he lives with his wife and their three-year-old son. None of the easy paths for Flea: “I go to places people don’t know about,” he tells MOJO. Thinking about it,…

Thinking Of You (from The Colour Field’s Virgins And Philistines, 1985) Hall’s biggest chart success outside The Specials and Fun Boy Three came with this pop triumph, all Tropicália chords and lilting, instant-smash chorus. But, predictably perhaps, on closer inspection it’s misery that binds our troubled lovers: “Maybe tomorrow, we can share each other’s sorrow.” Virgins And Philistines (from The Colour Field’s Virgins And Philistines, 1985) Hall’s almost spoken delivery perfectly fits this waltzing, acousticstrummed confessional: “I was thrilled by the ecstasy/But that was the evil that conquered the purity.” Another intriguing roman-à-clef, feasibly from the same wellspring that gave us Sorry and Our Lips Are Sealed. Goodbye Sun Valley (Studio Davout Version) (from Sound Of The Colourfield box set, 2026) This less-varnished version of the Deception closer bottles even more…

ON SPEED-DIAL AT THE RANCHO DE LA LUNA STUDIO IN JOSHUA TREE IS somebody called “The Snake Girl”. She’s the person that residents of the famous desert recording facility call if they need to distinguish a benign mouse-eater from a sidewinding mortal threat, and while most snakes who find their way inside the studio are harmless, there are venomous exceptions. Courtney Barnett was there recording her fourth album, Creature Of Habit, when a rattlesnake came too close for comfort. “The Snake Girl doesn’t believe in killing them,” explains Barnett admiringly. “She rehouses them somewhere far away. Oh my god, she’s fearless. She just picks it up with a little stick thing, you know?” Nature has tried to kill the Sydney-born Barnett before – Avant Gardener, the deadpan stand-out from her…

Fables KRANKY. CD/DL/LP Canadian string-player gets her debut together in the country. THE ORIGIN story behind Isabel Pine’s first album has a rustic, Bon Iver-like purity to it: wanting her music to be steeped in the sounds of nature, the composer recorded these pieces in a remote cabin in British Columbia, working outside to pick up as many wilderness vibrations as possible through the strings of her double bass, viola, cello and violin. It’s possible to hear that air moving gracefully through A Flickering Light or Sun Dog, yet Pine’s way with big-picture ambience doesn’t stop her being alert to the tiny thrumming recalibrations around her. Butterfly Lands On A Flower’s carefully adjusted surges and evaporations are as sensitive as an antenna or leaf-hair, while the wintery lattices of Bare…

Top Jimmy And The Rhythm Pigs Pigus Drunkus Maximus BLIND OWL. CD/DL/LP AS PUNK ROCK dives go, Hollywood’s Cathay de Grande was a cut above the rest – or below, depending on your tolerance for nuked-speakeasy ambience. Located in the basement of a Chinese restaurant with perilously loose ceiling tiles and overflowing toilets, the club was LA’s post-punk central (Fear, Minutemen, The Gun Club) with flashes of the Paisley Underground. But Mondays, a dead zone for most rock’n’roll bars, belonged to the alcohol-fuelled roots-and-blues uproar of Top Jimmy And The Rhythm Pigs. Founded in 1980 by singer Jimmy Koncek, guitarist Carlos Ayala and bassist Gil Isais – Top Jimmy, Carlos Guitarlos and Gil T., respectively – the band was an electrifying throwback to the local acid-blues era of Canned Heat…

Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky Tonks Jimmy McDonough WOLF + SALMON. £34.99 THIS BOOK, McDonough says, will be his last. Understandable when it took him 40 years to write, and “the infidels that occupy current-day publishing”, as he rages in the credits, “refused to put it out.” In no way siding with the infidels, you might understand a major publisher wondering if there’s a call for a hefty, 555-page book on a dead honky tonk singer. Having read every page, there were times when I almost cried uncle, but it was too interesting to give up. It’s not a simple biography of an influential, under-appreciated artist who had the respect of his peers, wrote some classic country songs and had a run of hits in the ’70s. Jimmy…

SINGER MARGARET ROSS (below, b.1943) joined the second incarnation of Brill Building stars The Cookies in 1961. The Coney Island vocal trio hit the US Top 20 twice, with 1962’s Chains (later covered by The Beatles) and 1963’s Don’t Say Nothin’ Bad (About My Baby). The Cookies’ exquisite backing vocals lent teen drama to other hits including Little Eva’s The Loco-Motion and Neil Sedaka’s Breaking Up Is Hard To Do. JAZZ FUSIONIST MICHAL URBANIAK (b.1943) was born in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. He studied violin and later played saxophone with a Dixieland jazz group in communist Poland. A state-sanctioned tour of the US in 1962 broadened his horizons: in the decades that followed, he worked with Krzysztof Komeda, formed his own Michał Urbaniak Group and Fusion, performed internationally, emigrated to America in…

Michael Imperioli CHRISTOPHER FROM THE SOPRANOS What music are you currently grooving to? Heavy Metal by Cameron Winter is a really great album. Also Morrissey’s Make-Up Is A Lie, and lots of Miles Davis. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder was a huge one for me. When I first heard it, I was like, 18. The sound was really of the time but very original, and I’d never heard anybody singing about things the way Morrissey did. Him, Lou Reed and Bowie – that’s my Mount Rushmore of lyricists. I absolutely stopped eating meat because of it. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Queen’s A Night At The Opera from a record…

…The Sun reported that JOHN SQUIRE has asked LIAM GALLAGHER (right) to work on another album after 2024’s collaborative effort. “John has told Liam that he has a batch of songs ready to record,” revealed a source, who added that Liam now needs to find the time… at the end of 2025, GANG OF FOUR announced their current line-up were “recording together in January.” A source told MOJO this was not to be an album, however …SUNN O))) release their tenth long-player in April. The self-titled record was recorded at Bear Creek Studios in Washington: “We could go hiking and be out in the woods,” said Stephen O’Malley. “That became a big part of it” …it was announced online last month that “work is under way on new PiL recordings by…

WHEN YOUNG English graduate Geoff Travis started teacher training at a girl school’s drama department, he wasn’t to know the real drama lay ahead. On an innocent US trip, he’d accumulated a lot of records. “A goldmine of languishing gems,” he recalls. “A friend said, ‘Why not ship them back to England and start a record shop?’ It seemed a good idea at the time.” Locating a spot on west London’s Kensington Park Road, Travis opened Rough Trade on February 23, 1976 – eight months before The Damned’s New Rose launched punk and the independent label revolution. Fifty thriving, if turbulent and occasionally panic-stricken years later, Rough Trade shops – now found in east and central as well as west London, plus Nottingham, Bristol, Liverpool, New York and Berlin –…

THE FUNKY JUGGERNAUT Red Hot Chili Peppers Blood Sugar Sex Magik (WARNER BROS, 1991) Written and recorded in the old mansion in Laurel Canyon where Houdini once lived, with Rick Rubin producing, the band’s fifth album was their breakthrough, their first to go platinum. Songs ranged from the tight, funky supergroove of Give It Away to the unexpectedly introspective Under The Bridge, as well as a wild acoustic skiffle cover of Robert Johnson’s They’re Red Hot, recorded under the stars at 3am, Flea’s idea. THE REDEMPTIVE ROCKER Red Hot Chili Peppers Californication (WARNER BROS, 1999) Despite the success, the vibe around RHCP was pretty dark. The drugs and motorbike accidents didn’t help, nor did having to swap ravaged guitarist John Frusciante for Dave Navarro. But Frusciante, now sober, was back…

SOMETIMES I SIT AND THINK, AND SOMETIMES I JUST SIT (Marathon Artists/Milk!, 2015) Following her EP compilation A Sea Of Split Peas, Barnett’s debut confirmed her storytelling gifts. Elevator Operator is a modern comedy of manners involving botox, SimCity and “soy-linseed vegemite crumbs”, while the house-hunting drama of Depreston turns a shower handrail into a devastating symbol of mortality. An excellent consolidation of her post-grunge talents. LOTTA SEA LICE (Matador/Marathon Artists/Milk!, 2017) Proof that long-distance relationships can work, this charmingly languid collaboration with Kurt Vile unfolded like a series of dreamy phone conversations. The mutual appreciation culminated in reworkings of each other’s old songs: Peepin’ Tom, from Vile’s 2011 record Smoke Ring For My Halo, and Out Of The Woodwork from Barnett’s second EP How To Carve A Carrot Into…

Craig Finn: Our second album Separation Sunday [2005] had blown things open for us in the States. I did interview after interview. We were excited with a real commitment to being on the road, but that put some of our personal lives in turmoil. I had been married, but that marriage didn’t make it to Boys And Girls In America. Tad Kubler: Craig and I had been in [postpunkers] Lifter Puller together back in Minneapolis, where everybody around us was a friend. With The Hold Steady you’d walk on stage to a packed crowd, and I’d be like, “Guys, I don’t know any of these people! Do you?” It was obvious we were clawing our way to another level. Bobby Drake: The shows were getting bigger but we were still…

THE JANUARY 7, 1960 ISSUE OF JAZZ’S Bible, DownBeat magazine, carried a banner headline: “MILES DAVIS: THE TWO FACES OF THE ENIGMA.” Inside, this cover story drew battle lines: “There is no room for the middle stance,” Barbara J Gardner declared. “You choose up sides, and you play on your team.” What followed was more polemic than profile, depicting the trumpeter as a lightning rod and a knot of contradictions, hard to reconcile and even harder to ignore. This is how Miles Davis entered the ’60s: irrefutable, disreputable, conspicuous, opaque. He seemed to stand in shadow even with the spotlight fixed on him. For Gardner, a contributing editor at DownBeat (and one of the few black women empowered to cover jazz at the time), his persona presented a conundrum so…

The Black Crowes A Pound Of Feathers SILVER ARROW. CD/DL/LP WHILE MAKING A Pound Of Feathers, The Black Crowes’ vocalist Chris Robinson rented a place in East Nashville, where he refused to listen to any music other than reggae. “Super hardcore, Rasta dub music from the ’70s,” he stresses. Robinson thought this wouldn’t overly influence the songs his group were writing. By day, The Black Crowes worked on ideas in a rehearsal space. At night, their frontman returned to his Airbnb to compose lyrics, while spiriting himself back half a century to Kingston’s Black Ark Studio. One evening, Robinson heard an unfamiliar sound punctuating the low-end bass. He followed the noise and discovered it coming from a frog in the back yard. Robinson recorded the amphibian on his phone’s Voice…

Al Green To Love Somebody FAT POSSUM. DL AL GREEN likes a cover version. After all he made his 1969 Hi Records debut with his innovative styling of The Beatles’ I Want To Hold Your Hand. This covers EP is in good company then. Two of the tracks have been out before: 2024’s take on R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts and an alternate take on his 2023 cover of Lou Reed’s Perfect Day with Raye. But remakes of The Bee Gees’ To Love Somebody and VU’s I Found A Reason are new. “I felt an instant connection,” Green said when he heard the original songs, and you can hear it as, reunited with the Hi Rhythm Section – those unhurried, familial grooves sounding gorgeous – he takes ownership. His silvery voice may…

The Supremes The Supremes At The Copa MOTOWN. 1965 Value: TBC Live at the fabled NY nightspot in August ’65, this album adds showbiz and showtunes to the soul hits, making it a must-hear for Supremes fans. But what distinguishes this US mono copy, bought for one British pound in a south Wimbledon Oxfam shop 20 years ago by reader Rose Collis, is the fact that it’s autographed in black pen by all three Supremes and Motown boss Berry Gordy Jr, who also writes the words ‘Thanks, Sammy.’ “As Sammy Davis Jr wrote the album’s sleevenotes it’s entirely possible that this copy actually belonged to him, though how it turned up in a charity shop in Wimbledon remains a mystery,” says Rose, who has authenticated the autographs. Previously valued at…

Which major headline artists have yet to revisit their archives for deluxe reissues that contain unreleased material? Kraftwerk and Steely Dan stand out – although Steely Dan’s 1993 Citizen Steely Dan box set includes one unheard demo (Everyone’s Gone To The Movies). As for Kraftwerk, they’ve put out four box sets, but none seem to contain unreleased material outside of the obligatory Atmos remixes. Has anyone else of note resisted the temptation to plunder their archives? Mike Hamilton, via e-mail MOJO says: Numerous eminent names have opened the vaults, including The Beatles, the Stones, The Who, Bowie, Pink Floyd, Can, Prince’s estate and many others. But which refuseniks have spurned the Super Deluxe route? It’s likely that the appetite for demos and unheard music by Kate Bush, Dire Straits or…