Table of contents for February 2025 in MOJO

ONE MONTH AFTER MICK TAYLOR JOINED The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger gave a measured assessment of his new guitarist’s skills to Melody Maker. “I had him down to a session and he was quite good,” Jagger praised, faintly. “Then he came to another and he was very good. I don’t know Mick so well I can say he’s as good as Eric Clapton, but anyway, that’s not what The Rolling Stones are all about.” What the Stones were all about with Brian Jones, of course, and what they became during Mick Taylor’s five years in the band, are slightly different things. “I read in all the newspapers that Brian was our lead guitarist,” Jagger continued, “well, I don’t think he was.” Taylor was a lead guitarist, though, if not quite…

FEBRUARY 7, 2025, finally sees a US and Canada IMAX cinema release for the longawaited documentary Becoming Led Zeppelin. Producer Allison McGourty and director Bernard MacMahon first approached guitarist Jimmy Page in 2017 about a film focussing on the band up to 1970. The surviving members duly signed up before Covid halted progress. In August 2021, Page told MOJO why he’d agreed: “They really understood… what elements there were that dictated what happened with the release of the first couple of albums.” At the time, McGourty described Becoming Led Zeppelin “as a feature film way of making a documentary”, with the band members solely narrating their story. A 137-minute workin-progress premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021, with Page in attendance, to a standing ovation but mixed reviews.…

2025 WILL rain blessings upon aficionados of departed spiritual jazz pioneer Alice Coltrane. February brings Monument Eternal, an exhibition at Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum displaying artefacts from Coltrane’s personal archive. The show will share rare items, including sheet music, video and previously unheard audio, alongside installations, sculptures and performance pieces by contemporary artists inspired by Coltrane. Meanwhile, an exhaustive biography of Coltrane is due later in the year. Cosmic Music: The Life, Art And Transcendence Of Alice Coltrane will be published by Hachette (and White Rabbit in the UK), and is the work of New York-based author Andy Beta, who wrote the sleevenotes to The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, the 2017 Luaka Bop compilation of work she recorded while spiritual director at her Shanti Anantam ashram during the…

SITTING IN her mother’s Edinburgh sitting room, Brooke Combe is lamenting the soul singer’s lot. “I fear the day I’m happy in a relationship, because I won’t have anything to write about,” the 24-year-old says. “My town is like a fishbowl, full of arses driving these big cars on finance, shagging every bird on the estate… and they’re still living with their ma.” She laughs at the memory. “The moment I open my mouth, people are like, ‘What the fuck? I wasn’t expecting that accent.’” Combe’s roots are vital to her music. Raised in Musselburgh and Dalkeith, satellites of the Scottish capital, where she and her mum were the only black faces – “We’d get the train to London every four weeks to get my hair done” – she…

IN 2023, scouring Decca’s archives for bonus material for the 50th Anniversary box set of Vagabonds Of The Western World, producer Richard Whittaker stumbled upon spartan, work-in-progress versions of Thin Lizzy songs from their first three LPs and August 1971 EP, New Day. This material – bolstered by Eric Bell’s fresh acoustic overdubs and processing tweaks which bring new clarity and intimacy to Lynott’s vocals – forms Acoustic Sessions, which is billed as the first new Lizzy album in 40 years. “I suppose it’s that ‘unplugged’ idea,” says Bell, “but it was a challenge to forget my original electric guitar parts and just ad lib. It was also very emotional hearing Philip’s voice isolated again. Stuff like Eire and Shades Of A Blue Orphanage reminded me of his more sensitive…

EVERY MANIC STREET PREACHERS ALBUM comes with a tone-setting quotation. On their latest, Critical Thinking, the American poet Anne Sexton does the honours: “I am a collection of dismantled almosts.” Many artists fret about their mortality and waning power but perhaps nobody else would advertise their concerns so loudly. “I know our time has come and gone,” James Dean Bradfield declares on the perversely exhilarating first single Decline And Fall. “But at least we blazed a trail and shone.” Then again, the group were dwelling on defeat even at their commercial high noon. Their 1998 album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours greeted its five million listeners with The Everlasting: “In the beginning/When we were winning/When our smiles were genuine.” The Manic Street Preachers suffer from a kind of…

Dewey Bunnell: My family moved from America to the UK in 1967 when my father was stationed at the US Air Force base at RAF West Ruislip. Gerry Beckley: I was born in Texas, but my family moved to the UK within a year, so I grew up near Croydon. When my father became commander at the base in Ruislip, I attended an American high school called London Central. Dewey, Dan [Peek] and I all played music: there was a circle of two or three bands who’d swap members every few months. DB: I first met Gerry when I saw his band The Corporation, who played Top 40 R&B covers – I remember he played a McCartney Hofner bass. I’d already locked into the surf music scene in California, and…

ASK BILL WYMAN TODAY WHETHER BRIAN JONES “HAD TO GO” and the deadpan Stones bassist trots out a familiar line: “Brian was the brilliant guitarist and instrumentalist who created The Rolling Stones but destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol.” Anna Wohlin, Jones’s live-in Swedish girlfriend from late spring 1969, painted a rather different picture when I spoke to her in 2008. “Brian was so happy with his country life,” she recalled. “He loved that house, he loved the area, he loved his garden, every fruit, every vegetable. He liked the quiet and ordinary people. He wanted to stay there for at least another year just to calm down. He’d had enough of the madness.” There’s one thing missing in Wohlin’s version of life at Cotchford Farm, where A.A. Milne wrote…

Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience) THE LEAF LABEL. CD/DL/LP Nefarious techno thrills from Fat White Family side-project. THERE MAY currently be a question mark over the future of the Fat White Family themselves, but the multiple groups orbiting the south London degenerates’ dark star appear to be in fine health. Following an excellent fifth album from FWFadjacent Warmduscher in November comes a second offering from Decius, who feature frontman Lias Saoudi (trading here as Meat Divine), Warmduscher’s Quinn Whalley and Trashmouth Records’ Luke and Liam May. As on 2022’s Vol. I, the feel is sweaty, late-night techno, and while the Detroit clatter and acid squelch is more alluring this time around, it’s Saoudi’s lascivious persona that really pulls you into the album’s netherworld. Jabbering and quivering over the likes…

Sam Amidon Salt River RIVER LEA. CD/DL/LP Folk, jazz and beyond: homespun strangeness from Mr Beth Orton. “When you make an album, it’s a chance to try some weird shit,” prolific folk fusionist Sam Amidon told an interviewer in 2024, and his first outing for Rough Trade’s River Lea imprint honours that maxim. A collaboration with jazz cats Sam Gendel and Philippe Melanson, Salt River warps Appalachian ballads, hymns and songs by Lou Reed, Yoko Ono and Ornette Coleman into a Bon Iver-compatible vision of 21st century folk, with Three Five, Golden Willow Tree and Cusseta delivering the right mix of impish inquiry and monkish reverence. Magic, moreover, is in the air at the end of garbled fairy tale Never as an Irish fiddle tune locks into spindly electronic melodies,…

The Last Poets Africanism AFRICA SEVEN. DL/LP IF NOT QUITE hip-hop before there was hip-hop, The Last Poets undoubtedly laid its groundwork, putting, as they tell it, “poetry on blast” with taut, politically-charged raps advocating radical action. Cultivated on street corners and refined at poetry workshops, its principal wordsmiths Abiodun Oyewole, Umar Bin Hassan and Jalaluddin Mansur Nuriddin were alienated ex-cons who flamed into The Last Poets at a 1968 show in East Harlem’s Mount Morris Park to celebrate Malcolm X’s birthday. Jazz producer Alan Douglas spent precious little cash recording 1970’s self-titled debut, simply capturing their prophetic spoken words over the tumbling hand drums of Nilaja Obabi. Stark and super-sparse, it was an acquired taste. Surviving Last Poets Oyewole and Hassan revisit six of its key tracks on Africanism,…

WHEN ERIC BURDON & War played London’s Hyde Park in September 1970, the NME ran a rave review headlined “Best Live Band We’ve Ever Seen”. The former Animal may have taken up all the promotional bandwidth – conjuring things like the banned rap PC3, which included the Queen dropping her bloomers to reveal her “burning bush” – but the band was a tight group of friends from South Central LA who knew what they were doing. Reviewer Richard Green predicted imminent superstardom for all. However, just a few months later, blues-freak Burdon suddenly declared his War was over mid-tour, telling reporters their second album, The Black-Man’s Burdon, was “a piece of crap”. “The American black I was looking for was not War,” he said, rather tactlessly. And went off to…

BETWEEN FEBRUARY and November of 1959 the Arizona-born jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus recorded three long-playing masterpieces that belong in the collection of any true jazz aficionado. They are Mingus Ah Um, Blues & Roots and Mingus Dynasty. The fact that only two of these records have made it into this list of 10 albums might give you some idea of what we are dealing with here. As he writes himself in his incendiary and often unreliable 1971 memoir, Beneath The Underdog, Charles Mingus was born in 1922 to “the daughter of an English/Chinese man and a South American woman [and the son] of a black farm worker and a Swedish woman.” His light skin, his two biracial parents, and his poor education were a constant source of discomfort…

WHEN A YOUNG jazz trumpeter, bandleader, arranger and studio producer named Quincy Jones met his musical idol Igor Stravinsky in the late ’50s, it didn’t go well. “He liked ragtime but was very withdrawn and gave the impression we were totally wasting his time,” the legend universally abbreviated to ‘Q’ recalled to me over a convivial lunch in 1991. “When I told him what I was doing he chuckled and I felt stupid, like I should have told him I was trying to write Firebird Junior!” Though Q may well have had subsequent occasion to feel stupid – having nearly died of a brain aneurysm aged 41, he nearly died again when he ignored doctor’s orders never again to pick up the trumpet – one doubts he ever again failed…

“WHEN GEOFF Travis and Jeannette Lee from Rough Trade said they wanted to put together the box set,” Incredible String Band singer and instrumentalist Mike Heron tells MOJO, “I was genuinely moved, and I don’t say this lightly, that there was a record label led by people who still cared about the songs Robin and I wrote back in the ’60s.” And so the serpentine progress of The Incredible String Band – a group rated by Robert Plant, McCartney and Dylan among others – goes on. An unquantifiable, acoustic facet of the psychedelic underground, wondrous strange albums such as The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion and Wee Tam & The Big Huge remain recommended both for those who mislaid their memories of the ’60s and…

BACK IN 2010, BBC6 DJ Steve Lamacq’s Punk Rock World Cup gathered pundits and connoisseurs in an attempt to name the finest group of the ’76 intake. Beating the Pistols, Clash, Ramones and 12 more to take the title was London punk institution U.K. Subs. Their most above-parapet British moment was two Top 30 hits with Stranglehold and Tomorrow’s Girls in 1979, but across the decades punk fans from the US, Japan, South America and beyond have embraced them as true, perma-gigging flamekeepers of the genre. Their leader and sole constant Charlie Harper smiles at the BBC6 recognition. “That was incredible,” he says. “I love it. But, also, I love to be underground – I love to be under the radar.” Born David Perez in London in 1944, he was…

1 AL GREEN EVERYBODY HURTS Released post-US elections, the Reverend Al Green remakes the R.E.M. track into a song of soulful hope and much-needed uplift. Find it: streaming services 2 P.J. HARVEY AND TIM PHILLIPS LOVE WILL TEAR US APART From the Apple TV show Bad Sisters, Peej plays Joy Division’s signature straight, her voice adding new facets of grieving. Find it: streaming services 3 PAUL McCARTNEY, JACK WHITE AND ST. VINCENT THE END The Abbey Road closing track live in Mexico City in November, with mob-handed duelling guitars. The love is palpable. Find it: YouTube 4 WILCO HANDSHAKE DRUGS (11/13/03 SEAR SOUND-NYC VERSION) From A Ghost Is Born’s impending reissue, an alt-take with kosmische glide, guitar static and street hassle. Find it: streaming services 5 FEMI KUTI POLITICS DON EXPOSE THEM Ahead…

Songhoy Blues Héritage TRANSGRESSIVE. CD/DL/LP THOUGH HARDLY a musical misstep, the Malian quartet’s third album, Optimisme, (released 2020), waved a number of worrying flags. It sounded as if it was finished to meet a schedule rather than their own satisfaction; hobbled, no doubt, by the departure of drummer Nathanael Dembélé, they did relatively little to promote it, which was odd for a band that had built its rep on the road. Their debut, 2015’s Music In Exile, broke a mould – here was a four-piece rock group from a country that customarily offers up bandleaders and their hired musicians. Two years later, Résistance encapsulated the mood of its title. “We are young,” it screamed, “and we look for fun on a Saturday night.” Perhaps what followed was a hangover… A…

Life Of The Party LAUNCHPAD/EMI NORTH. CD/DL/LP Leeds-born multi-instrumentalist/BC Camplight band member dazzles on LP two. FRANCESCA PIDGEON’s nom de guerre Dilettante seems both accurate and conspicuously modest. She’s certainly playful, but there’s nothingsell remotely beginner-like about her unique, sometimes dazzlingly skewed pop vision. Intricate, deftly played and programmed arrangements are go on Fun (part inspired by her falling out of love with roller derby) and outlandish synth-pop gem Easy Does It, while vocally she has all the excitable animation of a Lene Lovich or a Rus Mael. Similarly adept with sound processing/sculpture, and playing everything from piano to trombone to saxophone to guitar, Pidgeon also explores lyrical themes less plundered (polyamory; neurodivergence; societal expectations) via unsecond-guessable songs you can hum. Prince seems an audible influence, Harry Nilsson and Milan…

Dennis Bovell Sufferer Sounds DISCIPLES. CD/DL/LP THERE’S AN extraordinary scene in director Steve McQueen’s 2020 Lovers Rock TV episode which perfectly encapsulates the appeal of the Barbados-born dub producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell’s music. Revellers gather at a house party in west London in 1980, the DJ drops Janet Kay’s immortal lovers anthem Silly Games (written and produced by Bovell), and the place ignites, the crowd ecstatically singing the tune long after the needle’s left the record. It’s a joyous moment, this yearning love song transformed into a defiant expression of the black British experience, with Dennis himself making a cameo appearance as one of the dancers. A similar blues-party communal spirit runs through Sufferer Sounds, a superb 15-track deep dive into Bovell’s output from 1976 to 1980 when he was…

Sleep Now Forever NIGHT SCHOOL. LP Dreamy second album from Rose McDowall’s post-Strawberry Switchblade project. ORIGINALLY RELEASED in 1999, the second album from Sorrow – Rose McDowall, her co-songwriter Robert Lee, and a cohort of players from the blurry borders of the industrial scene – drifted gently ahead of the new millennium’s alt-folk curve. As with McDowall’s more famous band Strawberry Switchblade, there’s a lot of girlgroup melancholy on these songs, but it’s become diffuse and abstracted, more like The Shangri-Las hovering round a cradle, or Julia Holter covering Some Velvet Morning. Nigel McKernaghan’s uilleann pipes and whistles, Lawrence Franknel’s cor anglais and John Contreras’s cello add to the ambience of damp brocades and Eve Of St Agnes disturbance, Turn Off The Light and Angel hitting a sweet but disturbing…

Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made The King Preston Lauterbach HACHETTE. £25 THAT ELVIS Presley’s rock revolution was built on raw materials mostly learned from black blues, gospel and R&B artists will be news to no-one. But luckily that’s only the starting point of Preston Lauterbach’s illuminating study. In pooling the lives and careers of Presley’s key influencers – among them, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, whose version of That’s All Right began Presley’s ascent, and Big Mama Thornton, whose Hound Dog rocket-powered it – he frees them from the files of the ripped-off and victimised (although they were those things, too) and affords them their own agency. Crudup, for one, emerges as a prodigious shifter of units in his own right. In 1949, notes Lauterbach, his That’s All…

BEING A FREE spirit on a radical trajectory was more or less the job description to become a member of the Grateful Dead. But even within that alliance of wild-roaming improvisers Phil Lesh, who has passed aged 84, was out on his own. He had never played bass guitar when Jerry Garcia invited him to join The Warlocks – soon to transmute into the Grateful Dead – in 1965. For the next 30 years, he rarely played bass like anyone else, navigating an idiosyncratic path through the band’s sound, contributing counter-melodies and low-end explosions as well as powering, in his own way, the band’s surging rhythms. “I knew I could play [the bass] differently than I had so far heard it being played,” Lesh wrote in his 2005 memoir, Searching…

JANUARY 27 It was the time of disco on the US charts. Chic’s Le Freak was at Number 1, Village People’s Y.M.C.A. at 3 and Hot Chocolate’s Every 1’s A Winner at 9. Yet, even among such dancefloor-pleasing company, a greater song was rising fast. Earth, Wind & Fire’s September had entered the Top 10. The story had begun in 1969. Born in Memphis in 1941, band architect Maurice White had been a session drummer for Chess records in Chicago and played with the Ramsey Lewis Trio before striking out to Los Angeles and forming The Salty Peppers. He was, he wrote in his 2016 memoir, motivated when “a series of dreams… which I believe were given to me from the Divine inspired me to form a band that would…

THE IO-8 HEADPHONES are made by DALI, a speaker maker from Denmark who have been in the business for 40 years and even have a Danish record label to boot (DALI-Shop.com). The IO-8 have been designed by the same team responsible for DALI’s flagship KORE Loudspeaker. Drawing upon over four decades of experience as a global manufacturer of audio equipment, DALI have engineered a pair of headphones that can be used both wirelessly and wired to deliver true hi-fi quality sound. With noise-cancelling included and a dedicated hi-fi mode, the IO-8 are the ideal pair of headphones for use at home or on the go. Worth £599, we’ve got a pair up for grabs! How to enter: complete the crossword and take the letters from each coloured square and rearrange…

PARSING LANA Del Rey’s social media announcements since 2023’s Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd might lead onlookers to one conclusion: her attention had turned to straight-ahead country music. One summer clip featured her driving to She Had Me At Heads Carolina by Georgia singer Cole Swindell; a meeting in Nashville with Manuel Cuevas of Manuel Couture, meanwhile, pictured her with the tailor who worked with Nudie Cohn and designed unique outfits for George Jones, Ernest Tubb, Porter Waggoner and many others. In late ’23, she released a cover of John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads, and was filmed singing Tammy Wynette’s Stand By Your Man at a karaoke night. It was a direction she would readily confirm. Soon after a snippet of a voice-and-guitar…

OF ALL THE gigs to see in 2025 one bittersweet experience will be the final show ever by Electric Light Orchestra. Part of the BST concert series at London’s Hyde Park, the famous ELO flying saucer will land one last time on July 13 for the climax of the world jaunt aptly-named The Over And Out Tour. The voyage goes all the way back to 1972, when leader Jeff Lynne played his first gigs with the band. After the group’s dissolution in 1986, with some false starts around the millennium, the group’s mastermind fully refitted the band for touring after establishing Jeff Lynne’s ELO in 2014. Now comes the farewell that was originally planned for 2020, but which was derailed by Covid. “It will certainly be an emotional show for…

“Storm clouds amass, then lightning tears out of them, illuminating your situation.”TUNDE ADEBIMPE IN 2019, after five albums and 18 years together, New York art-rockers TV On The Radio quietly went on hiatus. “If we wanted to keep on liking each other, we had to get the fuck away from each other for a while,” grins founding member Tunde Adebimpe. “That cycle of recording and touring was beltsanding my creativity away to nothing. My mindset was, I’m not going to make any music for a long time.” Adebimpe spent several months parenting his young daughter and pursuing his long-term side-hustle as an actor, before returning to his recording gear. But work on a long-mooted solo project was scuppered first by the pandemic and then, a year later, by the sudden…

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THE WEST IS THE BEST From left: Robby Krieger, Ray Manzarek, Jim Morrison, John Densmore at the beach house, Venice, 1966 ROBBY KRIEGER: “Somehow, Ray talked us all into paying for this beach house where he and his wife Dorothy lived, and that was really where we started rehearsing. Jim especially didn’t appreciate that deal too much. One time Jim and I took some acid, and we brought these two girls over there in the middle of the night, just to get back at Ray.” JOHN DENSMORE: “The rent thing used to annoy the shit out of me. But from there, we could see planes taking off at LAX. And I’d never been on a plane. I thought, God, someday, maybe, we’ll go see the world and play music.” DOUBLE…

Ex-Vöid In Love Again TAPETE. CD/DL/LP IT’S NOT ALWAYS easy to take artists seriously who call themselves Lana Del Rabies, or Bob Vylan. They look like one-joke wonders – and that was this writer’s suspicion when a band named Joanna Gruesome enjoyed a bit of a buzz 10-odd years ago. Joanna Gruesome were a young, Welsh, combustible cross between riot grrrl and early My Bloody Valentine; a righteous DIY racket, for sure, but not likely to stick around for long. Well, how wrong can you be? Joanna Gruesome split in 2017, but the bands that have evolved out of them – chiefly The Tubs and Ex-Vöid – are currently making some of the most exciting and substantive UK indie rock in years. The Tubs’ debut album, Dead Meat, landed in…

Mogwai The Bad Fire ROCK ACTION. CD/DL/LP AGAINST THE ODDS, Mogwai had a remarkably good pandemic. As the world fell quiet, like many musicians they found extra time and space to think and write, resulting in their tenth album, As The Love Continues, recorded in Warwickshire in 2020 with Dave Fridmann remotely producing via Zoom from upstate New York. Released in the winter of the following year, it even scored the Glaswegian band their first Number 1, a quarter of a century after the release of their debut 1996 single, Tuner/Lower. In characteristically self-effacing style, bandleader Stuart Braithwaite marvelled at this latest plot twist as being “totally surreal, completely unexpected”. In sharp contrast, the period that immediately followed plunged the group into darkness, via personal losses and multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns’s…

Water Damage Reel LE LONGFORM EDITIONS. DL 37-minute meditative pummelling from Texan noise ritualists. “Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation” is the snappy MO of this Austin collective operating on the margins of rock and minimalism. Their latest release is 37 minutes of unrelenting mantric throb, as a Cro-Magnon riff cycles again and again – and again! – over the brawny groove. Beneath the brutalism, though, there’s a lot of gripping avant detail, not least Mari Maurice’s violin, which occasionally encourages the question: what would The Velvet Underground have sounded like if Tony Conrad, rather than John Cale, had hooked up with Lou Reed? Other guitarbased reference points might include Glenn Branca and Swans (drummer Thor Harris is an alum of the latter), but Water Damage mostly avoid the doomy signifiers which…

Dory Previn: On My Way To Where Dir: Julia Greenberg and Dianna Dilworth RECORD BREAKER FILMS. C/ST OUR FIRST GLIMPSE of the subject of this fascinating documentary is on a TV show in LA. It’s the early ’70, she’s wearing aviator glasses and an enormous auburn Afro, and the host is asking her about her new album. Did it all come about from the hospital therapist handing her a typewriter and telling her to write? Well it was a better option than making baskets, she replies. Her doctor suggested she write down what she was thinking and feeling, and that’s what she did, in the most honest, uncensored and unique way. She wrote the words as lyrics, then taught herself to play guitar and wrote the music. “I died in…

“IF YOU’RE reading this now, this is my final vignette, as I am no longer residing on this plane of existence,” ran Shel Talmy’s strikingly upbeat, pre-prepared farewell for the online readers of his production yarns. “I’ve had a good run, and I am delighted it lasted as long as it did. I’m also delighted that I am told I have a legacy that will last even longer.” His was indeed a bequest for the ages. Among his productions were The Kinks’ debut smash of 1964 You Really Got Me, whose distorted ur-riff razored into the decades that followed, and, a year later, The Who’s auto-destructive, year-zero explosion My Generation. Like other Talmy credits such as The Easybeats’ frantic Friday On My Mind and the raw psych 45s of The…

BEE GEES DRUMMER COLIN PETERSEN (b.1946) was a successful child actor when he met the Gibb brothers at Humpybong State School in Queensland, Australia. He was invited to join the band in 1967, and played on six early Bee Gees LPs. In August 1969 he left to form short-lived act Humpy Bong with Irish singer Jonathan Kelly and Tim Staffell of Smile (soon to become Queen). Petersen later became a painter. MINNEAPOLIS SINGER TYKA NELSON (above, b.1960) was the younger sister of Prince, and released four albums between 1988 and 2011. Produced partly by Prince collaborator David Z, her 1988 debut Royal Blue yielded the minor hit Marc Anthony’s Tune. Amid rumours of eccentric behaviour and drug addiction, Nelson withdrew from music until 2008’s gospel A Brand New Me. She…

HELLO DECEMBER 1962 I was leaving the group that I was with, The Coasters, because they didn’t want to go professional and I did. Obviously, I was concerned about what I was going to do. So Brian Epstein introduced me to The Dakotas, which was a bit strange, because they were from Manchester and I was from Liverpool. So we met at Brian’s office. I’d seen them on shows but I didn’t know them at all. I didn’t really realise at the time, but it was more of a business thing than anything. Then we went down to the Cavern, which was empty apart from John [Lennon] and Paul [McCartney], and we did our first rehearsal together, just a bit of a jam to see how we got along, playing…