Table of contents for January 2016 in MOJO

ONCE AGAIN IT HAS BEEN A YEAR FILLED WITH glorious music. Whittling down the best of a bumper crop hasn’t been easy but, having asked MOJO’s vast array of contributors, we’ve managed to get the job done. The results appear on page 53 of this issue. From that Top 50 run down we’ve also managed to compile this exclusive collection to bring you MOJO’s Best Of 2015. We hope you’ll find tracks on here that will be new to you and some which are old friends. Indeed, we invite you to lose yourself in this unique compilation where we hope you’ll discover a collection of music that you can truly believe in… 1 Courtney Barnett Pedestrian At Best Driven by a super-fuzzed, high-powered riff, Pedestrian At Best is an instant…

1 ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER HE DIDN'T MENTION HIS MOTHER With a touch of Knocking On Heaven’s Door, Friedberger’s in sweetly melancholy mood, ruefully recalling an oblique encounter and its lasting effects. “Today I’m frozen but tomorrow I’ll write about you,” she confides. “I so wanted something to happen that day, and then what I wanted, it happened.” The title doesn’t appear in the song, but the question remains, why didn’t the unidentified dude mention his mother? And should he have? Maybe we’ll find out on the forthcoming album New View, out in January. Find it: SoundCloud 2 NEW ORDER TUTTI FRUTTI EXTENDED 12-INCH MIX New Order returning to their dancefloor roots? A very good idea, as the husky Italian playboy voiceover beckons you to the beachside Mediterranean club and Bernard Sumner…

1 ERROL DUNKLEY MOVIE STAR (from Darling Ooh!, Gay Feet, 1972) “I never knew he had hits in Britain in the ’70s – I heard this in a café in Japan where they only play one style of music. It’s like a ’70s reggae thing, a little laid back, but he really goes for it, he’s kind of like Horace Andy in some ways. The album all has a similar sound. This song, I live in Los Angeles and it reminds me of that whole movie star thing – it’s saying it doesn’t matter if you don’t drive a big car, he loves you anyway. I had to get it on eBay.” 2 SAD LOVERS & GIANTS COLOURLESS DREAMS (Last Movement 7-inch, 1981) “I know very little about this record…

FACT SHEET For fans of: The Fall, Viet Cong, Mars. An online T-shirt model for NOTS merch is the grandmother of synth player Alexandra. “She’s beautiful,” says Natalie. “I think she hasn’t heard the music, but she loves that Ali is in the band, so I think that she’ll love it no matter what.” NOTS turnover of members begs the question: is Hoffman basing the band’s hiring/firing policy on Mark E. Smith’s? “Oh my God, I’ve never thought of that before,” says Hoffman. “Maybe I am.” KEY TRACKS Reactor Televangelist Insect Eyes Regional Tennessee TV show Local Memphis Live usually covers such local interest stories as the US’s National Deviled Eggs Day, the Fred Astaire Dance Studio’s thoughts on Dancing With Stars or maybe an underwater pumpkin carving competition. But…

THE LEGACY Album: Rah! (Riverside, 1961) The Sound: Roaring big band fashioned by arranger Ernie Wilkins with Mark Murphy, cast almost like the lead horn at times, interpreting material by Miles Davis and HoraceSilverandcaressing such classy ballads as Spring CanReallyHang You Up The Most. Bill Evans, Clark Terry and Blue Mitchell figure among the stellar line-up. In 1956, an album titled Meet Mark Murphy tumbled into my life. Completely different to anything else around, it was filled with songs delivered with unique phrasing and an amazing sense of rhythm. I thought he was the greatest male singer I’d ever encountered. The years that followed did little to change my opinion. Capitol Records heard him, tried to turn him into a commercial proposition. But the ploy never worked. Mark Murphy could…

"THE MATERIAL on the companion disc presents a portal to the time of the recording of Led Zeppelin,” reads a quote from Jimmy Page that appears in each of the reissues of the band’s nine studio albums, outlining the guitarist’s desire to offer new insight into the working process which Zep employed during their 12-year career. Once the remastering of the entire catalogue had been completed from the original tapes by Page, the year-long reissue campaign began in earnest in June 2014 with the release of Led Zeppelin I, II and III, all of which benefited from single companion discs which (with the exception of I) offered near-alternate versions of the albums themselves. The reissues of 2015 largely continued that approach but it is Coda – the very last album…

THE COMFORT ZONE IS A NICE PLACE TO LIVE, BUT A BAD PLACE TO MAKE music. That was the mission statement of David Bowie throughout the 1970s, a mission statement that had been formalised, almost, when friend and production guru Brian Eno wrote out random instructions for the musicians to follow when making Lodger , the final panel of what Bowie would call his Berlin Triptych. But the random can become predictable – and by the end of 1979, David Bowie’s radical new experience would be normality: a move to New York, immersion in the theatrical scene, and an album recorded by rota, like clockwork. The comfort zone, it turned out, could be fertile territory. “It was a wonderful, wonderful time,” says Carlos Alomar, Bowie’s then-bandleader. “Everybody was happy. On…

Tortoise The Catastrophist THRILL JOCKEY. CD/DL/LP MILLIONS NOW Living Will Never Die, Tortoise’s second album from 1996, remains the Chicago instrumental combo’s wonderfully eclectic, art-rock-meetselectronica-meets-classical minimalism chef-d’oeuvre. While that notion preoccupies critics and fans, the band maintain a studied indifference to the idea of the album as albatross. That insouciance is, perhaps, responsible for Tortoise’s ever more lateral evolution – toward transcendentally cinematic heights on 1998’s TNT, but with an increasing lack of spark on 2001’s Standards, 2004’s It’s All Around You and 2009’s Beacons Of Ancestorship, all of which err toward a default setting of synthetic noodling drizzled over stentorian beats, with only the tellingly titled The Brave And The Bold, their 2006 covers collaboration with Will Oldham, letting some unconstrained light into proceedings. The multi-instrumentalist quintet – Dan…

Tinariwen Live In Paris: Oukis N’Asuf WEDGE/PIAS. CD/DL/LP IN THE late noughties, it really looked as if Tinariwen, dispossessed Tuareg freedom fighters-cum-bluesmen from the southern Sahara, might become full-blown Anglo-American rock stars. Reports of their electric-haired guiding light, Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, romping around Bamako with Led Zeppelin blaring from his 4x4 nominated him as the most viable ‘world’ poster-boy since Bob Marley. Such a Faustian transaction definitely suited us better than it suited them. After cutting their second international album, 2004’s Amassakoul , under French patronage, then 2006’s Aman Iman with British producer Justin Adams, these inscrutable nomads recoiled from tainting ensuing records with too much Western influence. When the simmering conflict between the Tuaregs in northern Mali and the south’s government erupted into war in 2012, that all changed.…

Buena Vista Social Club Buena Vista Social Club WORLD CIRCUIT Released in 1997 and capturing, in Ry Cooder’s words, “the tail end of the comet” that was Cuba’s golden generation, Buena Vista Social Club was an unlikely hit – when other plans foundered, recording old-timers was just a way of not wasting studio time – but long before sales passed the eight-million mark, every elderly musician on the island found themselves in demand, whether for recording sessions or international tours. Vinyl barely contributed to this bonanza, however, as only limited numbers were released (in the US and Japan), but this belated five-star release sounds and looks like the format the music always deserved. The mastering is ear-opening – Cooder’s slide guitar on Chan Chan and the spaces Rubén Gonz‡lez leaves…

WHAT WE’VE LEARNT Bascom Lamar Lunsford, author of the best-known recording of I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground, was, variously, a seed salesman, a lawyer, a beekeeper, a newspaper editor, and worked for the US Justice Department tracking down draft dodgers during World War I. The notoriously poor-quality ‘shellac’ used by Paramount Records in the ’20s and ’30s – on which Geeshie Wiley’s Last Kind Words was released – contained lamp black, cotton filling and clay from the banks of the Milwaukee river. Evidence of Randy Newman’s drollery, Pt. A Million. Newman on Sail Away, as gleaned from NPR by Marcus’s Real Life Rock Top 10 of October 22, 2003: “It ended racism in this country. Kids today don’t remember, now that it’s gone away…” “WILEY SOUNDS…

“It’s been a while since we last made an Underworld record,” says Rick Smith. “2009, was it?” “No…” quips his long-time foil Karl Hyde. “1809.” These multifaceted electronic veterans have not been idle, though. Since their last album proper, Barking, came out in 2010, they’ve soundtracked Danny Boyle’s stage production of Frankenstein in 2011, worked on the London Olympics’ opening ceremony in 2012, and also recorded apart. But it was the 20th anniversary reissue of their 1994 breakthrough dubnobasswithmyheadman album and recreating it live that engendered new creation. “It was the most enjoyable tour I’ve ever been on,” says Hyde. “The buzz off of that brought to life something that was carried on, I think, in the making of this record.” Work began in summer 2014 in Essex, in the…

DON’S BOMBS Henley’s hot five 1.The Beatles Rubber Soul (PARLOPHONE, 1965) 2.Ray Charles Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music (ABC-PARAMOUNT, 1962) 3.Randy Newman Trouble In Paradise (WARNER BROS, 1983) 4.Merle Haggard The Way I Am (MCA, 1980) 5. Led Zeppelin IV (ATLANTIC, 1971) and II (ATLANTIC, 1969) “This is an historic place, so many hit records have been recorded here: Frank Sinatra, Beach Boys, Nat King Cole. You can feel the vibes.” We’re in Studio A, on the ground floor of Capitol Tower, the giant record stack on Hollywood and Vine. Don Henley, who’s been a Dallas resident for decades, is in Los Angeles, the city where he co-founded the Eagles 45 years ago, to promote his new solo album and first in 15 years, Cass County. Capitol Records…

HOUSTON-BORN tenor saxophonist WILTON FELDER (b.1940) rose to prominence in the ’60s with The Jazz Crusaders, whose blues, bop and funk grooves enjoyed acclaim with catchy classics like 1971’s Put It Where You Want It, penned by pianist Joe Sample. They later dropped the ‘Jazz’ and reached wider success when Randy Crawford’s vivacious vocals breathed even greater life into 1979’s Street Life. Felder, who also played bass, recorded solo albums including Inherit The Wind, Bobby Womack singing the title track. Felder died on September 27. MANAGER and beatnik JOE MOSS (b.1943) was running influential Manchester fashion line Crazy Face when he met the 17-year-old Johnny Marr. Later he would become The Smiths’first manager, guiding them through their crucial early phase then leaving in late 1983 before the group’s first trip…

Often tagged as a ‘slacker hero’, Kurt Vile is actually the latest in a long line of great American songwriters using wry observation to dissect himself and paint resigned pictures of the world as he sees it. His sixth album sees him adding depth (more banjo, more piano) and fine-tuning his melodic style on his most satisfying set to date. PA Start with: Pretty Pimpin’ Daughters of famed Cuban percussionist Anga Diaz, 20-year-old Paris-born twins Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz were signed to XL by label boss Richard Russell after seeing them on a YouTube video. He helped the sisters sculpt a richly textured, post-R&B sound that frames carefully interwoven vocals. This is a meditative and gracefully debut with an oblique pop heart. PA Start with: River Moody, melodic and everything…

New Order are MOJO’s band of the year! SM: Thank you! It’s very exciting and fun, and unusual – my money wasn’t on that. Just shows you. I shouldn’t do bets should I? GG: I’m surprised yeah, genuinely. You shouldn’t blow your own trumpet, really, should you? Pride comes before a fall and all that! Music Complete is a remarkable restatement of all that made New Order great. SM: The last time it was this exciting to put a record out was probably mid to late ’80s, probably about Low-Life. It’s weird, this record really did come out of gigging, and seeing the reaction to the synthy, dancey numbers. GG: I don’t think we took anything for granted with this one. It was like, oh my God, when we played…

Gavin Clark & Toydrum Evangelist UNDERSCORE. CD/DL/LP GAVIN CLARK, a prolific songwriter and beguiling vocalist whose work could fly – though mostly under the radar – died last February, aged 46. Clark’s creative life began fairly late, picking up a guitar at 18 following the death of his father. He didn’t discover his voice until his twenties, and always harboured anxiety about his gifts. Like his songs, he didn’t sell himself, but let you find him. He had a combative relationship with alcohol, which alcohol often won. It affected his creativity, his relationships and, eventually, his voice. The novelist John Niven, a former A&R man who signed Clark’s first band Sunhouse to Go! Discs for one excellent album, Crazy On The Weekend, says: “He had the voice of an angel…

Lush Chorus 4AD. CD/DL/LP UNLIKE THE other blissed-out boys and girls of the shoegazing scene, Lush always knew how to look their audience in the eye. While their fringed contemporaries were going blank again and again, the quartet, headed by school friends Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson had plenty of side to them. They came from a fanzine-writing, Siouxsie & The Banshees-loving past, undoubtedly besotted with the Cocteau Twins’ cloud-pictures but still tethered to the earthier qualities of duffel-coated indie and punk. (It’s telling that they recorded Zounds’ Demystification, included on this five-disc box, as a B-side; even more notable that Wire’s Colin Newman, recently picking his Top 10 Wire covers, chose Lush’s versions of Mannequin and Outdoor Miner, also here, as his two favourites.) This collection, featuring two compilations…

WHAT WE’VE LEARNT Fans could write to Orion at his grand house, Dixieland, in the fictional Ribbonsville, Tennessee. Between 1979 and 1984, he released nine albums. At one point his fan club claimed it had 400,000 members. Debut album Reborn had to be recalled because of a tasteless sleeve that showed the singer climbing out of an open casket. The Jerry Lee Lewis “and friends” single Save The Last Dance For Me made Number 26 in the US country charts. The man in the mask once tried to expand his fan base by touring with Kiss. “THE AMOUNT OF SEX HE WAS GETTING SEEMED TO KEEP HIM ON THE ROAD.” Orion – The Man Who Would Be King Dir: Jeanie Finlay CREATIVE ENGLAND/FFILM CYMRU/BBC STORYVILLE. C/TV With his death, Elvis…

SETLIST Airlane / Metal / Films / M.E. / Tracks / Observer / Conversation / Engineers / Complex / Cars / Down In The Park / Me! I Disconnect From You / I’m An Agent / We Are Glass / Remind Me To Smile / Are ‘Friends’ Electric? / I Die: You Die / Friends / My Shadow In Vain Gary Numan Forum, London There was no road map when Gary Numan became the first bona fide electronic pop star. The steady seven-week climb of Tubeway Army’s discretely alien Are ‘Friends’ Electric? to Number 1 snowballed into a sustained bout of testy critical hand-wringing when, just five months later, Numan did it all over again, solo, with Cars. The middle of three consecutive Forum shows dedicates its first half to…

TIBO Electronics, makers of cutting edge equipment, is thrilled to present the Plus series of Bluetooth speakers. These easy-use speaker systems use Bluetooth 4.0 technology, sound great and offer a variety of sizes – the Plus 2 and 3 ‘book shelf’ speakers being compact and portable, while the floor-standing Plus 4 provides power for bigger spaces. The range can also be connected to other sound sources via digital optical (Toslink), RCA (AUX) and analogue 3.5mm inputs as well as offering a USB port to charge smartphones and tablets during use! To give away we have two pairs of the Plus 2 Speakers (RRP £150 a set), one pair of Plus 3 speakers (RRP £200) and one pair of Plus 4 speakers (RRP £300). To be in with a chance to…

Darrel Sheinman still remembers the night Gearbox Records was conceived. “I was watching N.E.R.D. at the Indigo O2,” he remembers. “I thought, This sounds so much better than their records! I tried getting the rights to it but, of course, lawyers. So it didn’t work, but I had an idea…” That idea was a new record label, a hobby outlet for previously unreleased live recordings. However, when their first LP release, BBC Jazz For Moderns , a recording of a previously unreleased 1962 Tubby Hayes BBC session sold out, Sheinman reconsidered the scale of the project. “I thought, This kind of works.” Things have come a long way since then. In 2011, overseeing a vinyl reissue of the Jazz Jamaica All Stars’ Massive Vol. 1 , watching mastering engineer Ray…

DECEMBER 9 The switch to microgroove was well under way. Atlantic Records had released their first 7-inch 45 single, Teardrops From My Eyes, in October 1950. Featuring the voice of Ruth Brown, the record had hit Number 1 in the R&B charts by December. “A piece of history,” Brown hailed it. Ruth Brown had previously charted with So Long, her first-ever record, in September 1949. Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson were ecstatic: it was the label’s second release to notch a place in the charts. Atlantic was not to be a one hit wonder but a real record company. Teardrops From My Eyes was the icing on the cake. The single was not only a hit but, in terms of black music, a super-hit as it topped the R&B…

DAN PENN AND SPOONER OLDHAM STILL REMEMBER THE day everything changed.“I was in American Studios in Memphis working on The Box Tops,” recalls Penn. “The producer Chips Moman called me up, said, ‘Get out of there, they’ve shot Martin Luther King’.” Well I knew what that meant, and by the time I turned everything off and got out to my car and headed home, you could taste the anger and confusion.” “They hung an effigy of Jerry Wexler at the National Association of Radio and Television Announcers convention,” remembers Oldham. “We drove up outside but I was too scared to go in. People were traumatised. It was unspoken, but it was in the air.” We are half way through an afternoon which began with Penn and Oldham welcoming MOJO with…

Sick On You is MOJO’s book of 2015 Bloody hell! That’s really quite something! When did you start writing the book? What was the spark? Two Februarys ago. People had always asked me about “those days” and I’d tell them something and they either wouldn’t believe it or they’d just laugh, so I just decided one day, it was winter, to just get cracking, so from February to June, I wrote. I had diaries, and also Brady from the band gave me diaries, so I could cross-reference everything, even to hours. I just began at the beginning and it all rolled quite quickly. There are a lot of bad rock memoirs out there. Did you know the pitfalls to avoid? What sort of pitfalls? Boredom? Self-glorifying sludge? No, no, none…

Love & Mercy is MOJO’s Film of The Year. Congratulations! Brian: Wow! Melinda: I can’t even believe it! It’s a deserved winner. Unlike most biopics it captured something very human and very real. B: Yeah! Very real. I agree with you. That’s right. I thought the movie was very real and very well cast. The casting for me was just brilliant. Paul Dano and John Cusack both did great jobs. They spent a lot of time with me. They wanted to know how I produced records, the way I would move my body around, things like that. For the first time in a fictional rock biopic it felt like you were really watching music being made. Those scenes where you’re recording Pet Sounds were incredibly emotional for that reason. B:…

DAVID BOWIE RECORDS With Jazz Combo. The headline conjures an idea of a sound, but it’s almost certainly not the one that you’ll hear on Blackstar. “Well that’s true, man,” says saxophone player Donny McCaslin, “because the first thing it makes me think of is Tony Bennett!” And as McCaslin confirms, the sound of Bowie on Blackstar “could not be more opposite.” McCaslin – and guitarist Ben Monder – came to Bowie‘s attention on the 2014 Maria Schneider Orchestra session for Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime). Bowie then investigated McCaslin’s album Casting For Gravity and was drawn to its tough grooves and internalisation of electronica styles, from Boards Of Canada to Deadmau5. “Occasionally David would use our album as a reference,” says McCaslin. “On ’Tis A Pity She…

Ian William Craig Cradle For The Wanting RECITAL. DL/LP Eagerly anticipated follow-up to one of MOJO’s Top 50 Albums of 2014. FOR 2014’s A Turn Of Breath, his debut release on Sean McCann’s Recital label, classically-trained Canadian singer and composer Ian William Craig spent two years transforming layers of guitar, harmonium, found sounds, quarter-inch tape loops and his own lonesome falsetto into a shifting labyrinth of corroded rhapsodies, imbued with uncanny power. Recorded in Vancouver over two months last winter, with voice the only source laid to tape, Cradle For The Wanting is an ostensibly simpler yet no less stunning work. Unlike A Turn Of Breath, which played on ideas of sonic decay, Cradle… shimmers like something ghostly and eternal, ragged fragments of Craig’s forlorn songs, that float, fade and…

Prequel Tapes Inner Systems R’COUP’D/NINJA TUNE. CD/DL/LP Wintry, immersive, analogue electronica creates seductive atmosphere. IN HIS youth, Prequel Tapes – real name unknown – would wander into the forest, take mushrooms and yearn to live in the British industrial cities, like Sheffield, where his electronic heroes dwelt. Brought up in Germany, his early musical dabblings referenced Teutonic techno, drone, industrial and ambient, all housed on a set of recordings long since forgotten. Until now. Rediscovered by their creator, they form the basis of this grand, cinematic album of organic, analogue electronica. Its roots twist around sensual ambient techno and hulking electro-classical opulence. Default pace is glacial, its pervading mood ethereal. The sweep of Untitled Memory and A4J8-D inhabit an industrial wasteland pummelled by heavy equipment and lit by powerful arc…

The 5th Dimension 4 Classic Albums 1970-73 RAVEN. CD Four mid-period LPs of sunlit sounds on 2CDs from the crack soul/jazz vocal crew paired with pop writers like Laura Nyro (Save The Country from 1970’s fine Portrait) or Nilsson (Open Your Window) from 1973. CP Mike Fiems I Would Dream MAPACHE. LP Hard-to-find sunshine folk pop, produced by Link Wray’s brother Vernon at his Arizona Desert Record Factory in 1974. Remastered from original tapes, it is a mellow dusty groove, with just a twist of bad dune buggy vibes. AM Ronnie Spector The Very Best Of SONG. CD/DL Adding six tracks to last year’s version, including Baby Please Don’t Go with the E Street Band (Say Goodbye To Hollywood’s B-side), Marshall Crenshaw’s rollicking Something’s Gonna Happen and Amy Rigby cover…

SETLIST Seven-Mile Island / Go It Alone / Flying Over Water / Palmetto Rose / Something More Than Free / Alabama Pines / Dress Blues / Codeine / Different Days / Streetlights / Traveling Alone / The Life You Chose / Speed Trap Town / If It Takes A Lifetime / Stockholm / Cover Me Up / Children Of Children / Flagship / 24 Frames / Outfit / Decoration Day / Super 8 Jason Isbell Ryman Auditorium, Nashville No matter what thrills past and future there will be in Jason Isbell’s career, there surely won’t be many comparable to getting a standing ovation at this famous former home of the Grand Ole Opry simply for walking onto the stage. Isbell is country’s coming man. His latest album, Something More Than…

Who is the lady in whose eye Scott Walker is reflected on the sleeve of [1969 album] Scott 3. I asked Keith Altham, who wrote the sleevenote, but even he doesn’t know. Lyndon Morgans, via e-mail Fred says: I’d heard several conflicting answers – one suggested it was Scott himself! So I checked with the owner of the site at www.philips records.co.uk who worked with Scott’s producer, Johnny Franz, at the label. He claimed: “My first thought was that the heavily mascara’d lady on Scott 3 was any one of the array of models who featured on Philips’ budget labels (Contour etc). But I recently heard from one-time record promotion man Barry Holt, who says, ‘It was my girlfriend, Pamela McCarthy, an aspiring model from Manchester. I remember going to…

HELLO SUMMER 1987 At the age of two when first hearing The Beatles, I knew that I wanted to be a Beatle. I didn’t know the logistics of it, but figured that that could be figured out later along the way. I came to London in 1986 shortly after Live Aid. I was living at the time between Frankfurt and Munich. I came to England with (most of) the songs already written for that initial project [Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D’Arby, released July 1987]. Martyn Ware [producer] was a gift from God. I vividly recall having a meeting with master Martyn at his request at the then CBS building in Soho Square where he told me that he was the man to let me make the record…