Índice para November 2020 em MOJO

Neal Preston Tour photographer for Led Zeppelin, The Who & Bruce Springsteen, Neal worked with Queen from the mid ’70s in a similar role. He was on the famed South America tour of ’81, at Live Aid in ’85, and on the final tour with Freddie Mercury in ’86. More, p72. Irwin Chusid Irwin administers the music estates of Sun Ra, Raymond Scott, and Curt Boettcher, as he strives to turn miracles for R. Stevie Moore, Beth Sorrentino, and The Mighty Sparrow. He’s hosted radio shows on WFMU since 1975 and now recommends mindexpanding Sun Ra LPs, p38. Jim Irvin MOJO’s founding Features Editor and calligrapher of our logo’s tag-line, today Jim concentrates on songwriting. On page 28, he meets one of that craft’s greats, Ray Davies. Jim also chats…

IN ALL HONESTY, EDITOR’S LETTERS can be a bit of a contrived business, as you grasp for threads among the eclectic contents of a typical MOJO. This month, though, our two major features have the kind of unlikely coincidence that happens by accident rather than design. Much of Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen, and Crocodiles, the debut album by Echo And The Bunnymen, were recorded at the same remote studio complex in Monmouthshire. It was here, at Rockfield, that Queen spent the late summer of 1975 stacking the vocals for what became one of rock’s most ambitious productions. “We had more tracks than The Beatles had,” remembers Brian May. “But, of course, it’s not enough when you’re trying to do the complex things we were trying.” And here, five short years…

Duran Duran A View To A Kill (Live Aid version) (FROM LIVE AID BOOTLEG, 2019) At the charity mega-gig in 1985, Simon Le Bon went legendarily flat while singing their Bond theme. “I hit the worst bum note I’ve ever hit in front of… two billion bloody viewers,” he later reflected. Cast not the first stone, etc. Big Youth Touch Me In The Morning (FROM NATTY CULTURAL DREAD, TROJAN, 1976) Trenchtown’s toasting legend has a spirited go at Diana Ross’s 1973 Number 1, with a dash of ‘crooning’ thrown in. Ultimately, he says ‘sod it’ and sings like no one’s listening - a wiggy dubular treat. Mrs Miller Downtown (CAPITOL 45, 1966) An O.G. of the off-note universe, this novelty vocalist-pianist- whistler who hailed from Missouri also innovated in a…

ONLY A SELECT few have been interviewed by MOJO 50 years after their death was first reported, and if knight of the realm Paul McCartney is the most famous, he shares that honour with genuine royalty, Trinidad’s Calypso King of the World, 85-year-old Slinger Francisco, AKA Mighty Sparrow. It was all Big Mouthed Lillian’s fault - in 1970 she said she’d seen Sparrow’s funeral on television. “People would say, ‘I heard you died,’” he says, sitting in his living room in New York. “‘Hey, you alive, what’s going on?’” He launches into one of his biggest numbers, Sparrow Dead: “I hear he have yellow fever/Something in the bladder… Who kill de Sparrow? Nobody know.” “What is it, 2020?” he laughs. “Sparrow still alive!” And, clearly, kicking, with a new album…

1 Anton Webern Cantata No.1 For Soprano, Chorus & Orchestra, Opus 29 (FROM THE COMPLETE MUSIC, COLUMBIA MASTERWORKS, 1957) 2 João Gilberto Saudade De Bahia (FROM JOÃO GILBERTO, ODEON, 1961) 3 Karlheinz Stockhausen Gesang Der Jünglinge (FROM GESANG DER JÜNGLINGE/KONTAKTE, DEUTSCHE GRAMMOPHON, 1962) 4 Miles Davis One And One (FROM ON THE CORNER, COLUMBIA, 1972) 5 Miles Davis He Loved Him Madly (FROM GET UP WITH IT, COLUMBIA, 1974)…

“THERE WAS A LOT OF RESISTANCE to the name This Is The Kit,” revealsits owner, with an unmistakablygleeful smile. “I’d tell promoters andthey’d still bill me as Kate Stables. ButI’m quite contrary by nature - whenpeople think something’s a bad idea, I usually cling to it.” Inside her second-floor flat in Paris’s busy 10th arrondissement, a wiry and exuberant Stables is entertaining MOJO, dressed in baggy pants and a T-shirt advertising Hull’s Adelphi venue. Her unruly mop of hair, arbitrarily pinned up, suggests a determination to go her own way. “People used to call me Kit - they still do,” she says. “The name speaks about my relationship with words, about assonance and alliteration - to me, This Is The Kit is one word, not a sentence.” The literal translation…

FAN WAYNE COYNE, THE FLAMING LIPS SONG OCEAN RAIN (ON OCEAN RAIN, 1984) “Being a young guy in America at the time, they were kind of like our Beatles. For me, the peak was Ocean Rain closing that album. I thought, We’re living in a new world here. No other English band from that post-punk/new wave scene was doing that kind of emotional music. The Cutter had that string thing going on before the more ornate arrangements on Ocean Rain, and that was like, ‘Fuck, what insane beauty!’ Ian McCulloch is such a great singer and lyricist, and I always liked their understated power. The Bunnymen were a huge inspiration.” FAN KELLEY STOLTZ, SOLO ARTIST/LIVE BUNNYMEN GUITARIST 2016-2018 SONG GOING UP (ON CROCODILES) “The Bunnymen are masters of mood. It’s…

The Beach Boys Good Vibrations (Capitol single, 1966) Multi-movement pop in excelsis, where the leaps are so Bach-like in their perfection you barely see the join. The psychedelic “…tations” section from 1:40 and the churchy “gotta keep…” segment from 2:14 are insanely bold. How do you fit so much ecstasy into 3:39? The Who A Quick One, While He’s Away (from A Quick One, 1966) Nine minutes of sinister Who madness, packing in a folk ballad overture, Beach Boys harmonies, baroque pop and revoltingly predatory Ivor The Engine Driver bit. Early indication of Pete Townshend’s operatic ambitions - best enjoyed in its visceral Rock’N’Roll Circus incarnation. The Beatles A Day In The Life (from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967) The ultimate expression of the John and Paul yin…

Matt Berninger Serpentine Prison BOOK/CONCORD. CD/DL/LP WHAT DOES a burned-out touring musician do when they’re forced to stop? For Matt Berninger the solution has been: carry on and write about it. Although The National singer’s first solo album was made in the months pre-pandemic, it’s still very much about being frozen in a moment and trying to process dysregulated emotions. The mood is one of deep soul mining, and sometimes prescience too. As he puts it in Distant Axis – audibly vulnerable and baritone-crooning over a backing track that is Roy Orbison refracted through The E Street Band – “There’s a pattern to the way the world is tearing up/I think it’s happening to me”. Serpentine Prison grew out of another album. Throughout Berninger’s childhood in Cincinnati, Willie Nelson’s 1978…

Transferring his frontman skills, Manic Street Preacher James Dean Bradfield presents a three-part podcast on the influence of Chilean musician-activist Victor Jara, subject of JDB’s Even In Exile. Part one looks at Jara’s influence on musicians, speaking to Simple Minds’ Charlie Burchill and Calexico’s Joey Burns, who agree that Jara’s abstract lyrics and emotional weight make covering his songs virtually impossible (only Bruce Springsteen emerges unscathed). Parts two and three expand the remit to dance choreographer Christopher Bruce, whose 1981 Ghost Dances made a big impact on Jara’s cultural legacy. Actress/writer Emma Thompson is brilliant: frankly discussing a film script she tried and failed to write about Jara; even learning Spanish before several trips to Chile to meet his wife Joan. Thompson’s painful tale starts as a pupil at Camden…

Tracks: Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains) / Johnny’s Brother / Roving Woman / Down This Road / The Clover Saloon / John Brady / We Lived Alone / Playboy Of The Western World / Unknown (A Little Louder, Love) / One By One / Father Neptune / Man In The Sky / Empty Pocket Waltz / Honeybee / There Is A Vine / How Sad, How Lovely / Trouble Personnel: Connie Converse (voice and guitar) Restoration/ production: Daniel Dzula and David Herman Recorded: By Connie Converse and Gene Deitch Chart peak: n/a Current availability: connieconverse. bandcamp.com…

TROMBONIST HELEN JONES WOODS (b.1923, below) played with the International Sweethearts Of Rhythm, the first integrated all-female swing orchestra. The big band was founded as The Swinging Rays Of Rhythm in 1937 by her adoptive father Dr Laurence C Jones at the Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi (also the birthplace of The Five Blind Boys Of Mississippi). They shared bills with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, played for the troops during the Second World War and were praised by Down Beat, but were mismanaged. They disbanded in 1949, and Woods gave up music when the all-white Omaha Symphony Orchestra fired her because of her race. She later worked as a nurse and social worker. BASSIST and guitarist PAT FAIRLEY (b.1946) formed The Gaylords in Glasgow in 1961. The…

GERMAN SINGLES OCTOBER 5 1 LAMBADA KAOMA (CBS) 2 SWING THE MOOD JIVE BUNNY (BCM) 3 FRENCH KISS LIL LOUIS (FFRR/METRONOME) 4 PUMP UP THE JAM TECHNOTRONIC FEATURING FELLY (BCM) 5 THE BEST TINA TURNER (CAPITOL) 6 RIDE ON TIME BLACK BOX (zyx) 7 IF ONLY I COULD SYDNEY YOUNGBLOOD (CIRCA) 8 PERSONAL JESUS DEPECHE MODE (MUTE) 9 FRENCH KISS HONESTY 69 (BCM) 10 TOY SOLIDERS MARTIKA (CBS)…

I recently discovered the French mono Blonde On Blonde with unique reverb-y mixes on sides two and three. Why would a major artist want alternative recordings of this sort to be released on what looks like a standard version of an album? It seems to make little sense. Neil Humphreys, via e-mail Fred Says Dylanologists have long obsessed over Blonde On Blonde, which can be enjoyed in an estimated 10 or more different mixes, both stereo and mono, as well as with different sleeve art permutations. The 18-disc version of 2015’s box set The Bootleg Series Vol.12: The Cutting Edge 1965-1966 even included released Blonde On Blonde songs alongside even more alternate takes. Is there method in the madness? Well, there probably wasn’t when a 1997 reissue of Dylan’s Biograph box…

THE ORIGINAL – and iconic! – Sony Walkman® blew minds in 1979. Building on that classic original, Sony’s NW-A105 Walkman® pays tribute with its vintage cassette tape user interface and screensaver complete with the most cutting-edge technology. Blending the old and the new, with outstanding Hi-Resolution Audio and a premium compact design available in five stylish colours, it’s supported by Android™ with Wi-Fi, and grants you access to millions of songs. You can also access download services directly from the NW-A105 Walkman® to store your favourite tracks. And with a battery life of up to 26 hours, the Walkman can keep going as long as you do. Its RRP is £320, and we have two to give away! For a fighting chance to win, fill in this crossword and send…

“I WAS SUPPOSED to wrap up an album in the spring,” says Todd Rundgren from his base on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. “And I also expected to be through with a tour already…” With time on his hands he’s continued to finesse the album in question - Space Force. “It seemed a funny idea in the first place, Trump starting a space force and patrolling in outer space,” he says. “But it all had to be done remotely, so we are essentially making records in space - you never see anyone else, you are just sending files.” Including remote contributions from The Roots, Neil Finn, Sparks, Iraqi-born rapper Narsee, Thomas Dolby and Weezer’s Rivers Cuomo, the album is conceptually similar to 2017’s collaborative album White Knight and will be…

I first heard this [a compilation of Bikini Kill’s self-titled 1992 EP and their half of ‘93’s split LP Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah] when I was at college in a tiny town in a Minnesota corn field. I was a part of a small punk scene there, getting interested in ways to combine feminism and music. I hadn’t heard this kind of passion and rage and energy from women before - I grew up in Colorado Springs where I knew of no girls playing in bands, nor did I ever go out to see live music, and I had no awareness of the DIY punk scenes in places like the Pacific Northwest and Washington DC. I love Tobi Vail’s aggressive drumming on this. I also love the feedback guitars, and…

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND “It wasn’t just their energy, but also the way Lou Reed used gender interchangeably, playing with who he was in his songs, or who was telling the story. I hadn’t come across that before and it really appealed.’ P. J. HARVEY “She has this crucial ability to create a physical sound with just her voice and her guitar. And I don’t think people realise how witty her lyrics can be. She’s a brilliant example of a woman not getting funnelled into what other people think she should look or sound like.” JONATHAN RICHMAN “I’m excited and inspired by his decency, how he’s stuck to his principles and how eccentric and weird he is but emotionally open and so clever and witty. He’s also a complete punk without…

AS A FOUR-YEAR-OLD, TURNING FIVE, SEAN LENNON WAS a regular visitor to The Hit Factory in New York between the months of August and October 1980, where his father and mother were recording their joint return album, Double Fantasy. Now, 40 years on, he’s revisited those sessions as an adult, overseeing the remixing of those tapes from scratch, plus many others spanning the 11 years of John Lennon’s sporadic post-Beatles solo career, for a new 36-track deluxe box set: Gimme Some Truth. The Ultimate Mixes. “There’s a lot of songs on Double Fantasy that I really love,” he tells MOJO from his home in New York. “But when I listen to them, another part of me thinks, Maybe this wouldn’t have been my favourite song if I hadn’t been there…

EARLY IN 2020, Queen + Adam Lambert, like many others, saw their tour planning whiteboard wiped clean. Following a leap year show on February 29, at the Metricon Stadium in Australia’s Gold Coast, the European leg of their The Rhapsody Tour was hopefully kicked ahead to May 2021. Fatefully, though, the tour would likely have been cancelled even without Covid-19. In late May, Queen’s guitarist Brian May, only weeks after tearing his glutes (in a not-fully explained bizarre gardening accent), suffered a heart attack. Three blocked arteries were subsequently propped open with stents. “I’ve been really sick,” May tells MOJO. “There was a part of it where I couldn’t even crawl across the floor.” “He’s had it rough,” confirms Queen drummer Roger Taylor. “He’s better, he’s improving, but he’s had…

• Matt Berninger first hooked up with Booker T. Jones (above, left) when the latter asked the former to be among the guests on his 2011 album The Road From Memphis, specifically to duet with Sharon Jones on Representing Memphis. “There were all these people coming around,” Berninger recalls, having been particularly impressed by Booker T.’s skills as a studio ringmaster. “All The Dap-Kings and Questlove were there. Lauryn Hill was in and out and Lou Reed had just left the building.”…

Lou Reed New York RHINO. CD+LP+DVD RIGHT FROM the beginning, Lou Reed wrote about New York. Brought up in Long Island and moving to Manhattan in his early adulthood, he had a fascination with the city’s brutal environment and the devices through which its denizens sought escape. Parsing the terse cadences of both literary and street language, he delivered and sang lyrics that often sounded like bullets in a war zone – with a very specific location: up to Lexington 1-2-5, down to 47th Street and Union Square. Reed could be lyrical about Coney Island, wryly wistful about Long Island, but Manhattan was at the centre of his life and work after 1965. Already installed in the Lower East Side, he was thrust into the centre of the city’s social…

Solomon Burke The King Of Rock ’N’ Soul SOULMUSIC. CD/DL For all the excellent LPs of his career’s late flowering post 2002, these 79 tracks on 3-CDs are his true legacy. Subtitled The Atlantic Recordings 1962-1968, it offers Stupidity, Down In The Valley, great country soul, great gospel steals, great pop covers. GB Kellee Patterson Maiden Voyage BLACK JAZZ/REAL GONE. CD/DL/LP With her swooning voice, the first black Miss Indiana might have felt at home at Motown, who offered to release her 1973 soul-jazz debut, but she went with the politically astute Black Jazz. Flautist George Harper elevates the Herbie Hancock-penned title track. JB Various The Last Shall Be First BIBLE & TIRE. CD/LP Pastor Juan Shipp of Memphis had a gospel label, D-Vine Spiritual. Groups deemed not good enough…

“SOMETIMES BEING a brother,” American children’s author Marc Brown famously wrote, “is even better than being a superhero.” Sibling rivalry has certainly driven the brothers Gallagher to extraordinary heights, both together within the uneasy alliance of Oasis, and thereafter in their solo capacities since the band split in 2009. What they shared while growing up in suburban Burnage, south Manchester, was a passion for two rock idols, The Beatles and the Sex Pistols. After much in-studio huffing, puffing and pugilism, 1994’s Oasis debut, Definitely Maybe, delivered a confident amalgam of those two influences, and almost single- handedly reinstated home-grown rock in the British pop charts. For the next couple of albums, Noel drew on a stockpile of anthems composed pre-fame, but the problems started thereafter, when he felt increasingly straitjacketed…

HELLO SUMMER 1972 We were essentially already a band. We just didn’t know it yet. Myself, Lol Creme, Graham Gouldman and Eric Stewart were a production team and the house band at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. A few years prior to that, myself, Lol and Eric were briefly in a group, Hotlegs, and we had one hit record, Neanderthal Man, and a flop album. The idea of doing a band again hadn’t really cropped up. We were doing an album for Neil Sedaka, called Solitaire. Why was he working with us? Good question. But we got on extremely well. One day we were probably in the live area of Strawberry - drum kit in one corner, microphones, amps, grand piano at the other end - talking about the next take,…

Robert Plant SPACE SHIFTER OF STRANGE SENSATIONS What music are you currently grooving to? Bob Dylan, Rough And Rowdy Ways. From Judas to Jehovah - beatified and crucified comes the Ragged Phoenix. This is vital stuff. From the richest vein… reflections at sunset from the Voyage of Sinbad. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Love, Forever Changes - no surprise here. Through all my zig-zag times I run for shelter to this incomprehensible masterpiece. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Shop Around by The Miracles, from Mark & Moody’s record shop in Stourbridge. Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? My grandad Robert Shropshire Plant. He played trombone, piano and fiddle. Leader of…

…Fall guitarist BRIX SMITH START (right) is recording a new LP with producer Youth. “We were doing it remotely,” she says. “He’d e-mail music and I’d write the lyrics and music and send it back, and now we’re together in London. It’s pretty fucking special, probably what I’ve always wanted to do” … The Independent reports that Geoff Lloyd, of podcast Reasons To Be Cheerful, said Björn Ulvaeus told him ABBA have, “recorded five new songs… he promised me that the new Abba music will be out in 2021” …NICK HEYWARD is recording a new album at home in Tampa, Florida. Tracks include Northern Souls and The Mudlarks. “No idea what I’m doing,” noted Heyward, who’s also playing drums, “but it feels good.” …MICK JAGGER gave Radio 2’s Zoe Ball…

“MY BRAIN’S NOT wired up properly,” cautions 83-year- old sonic explorer Jon Hassell. “My schedule is either press interviews or MRI scans, and I’ve started mixing them up…” The scans relate to a broken thighbone sustained in a studio fall in spring. Hospital bills had the Memphis-born innovator on his uppers, but salvation arrived via a crowdfunding campaign, publicised by collaborators including Brian Eno. It’s over 40 years since the latter heard Hassell’s psychotropic Vernal Equinox and recognised a fellow traveller in imaginary ambient worlds, but with his recent Listening To Pictures and Seeing Through Sound LPs, Hassell remains relevant. “I’ve got enough ideas to keep me working for a decade,” he enthuses. Your recent albums are badged as volumes in a ‘Pentimento’ series - named after the practice of…

NEAL PRESTON BELIEVES ONE THING, other than a knack for a snap, helped him gain access to the world of Queen. “It was having the words ‘Led’ and ‘Zeppelin’ on my resumé,” he tells MOJO from his home in Las Vegas. Preston began shooting gigs as a teenager in his native New York, before moving to Los Angeles in 1971. He landed a retainer with Atlantic Records, which led to him becoming Zeppelin’s official tour photographer in 1975. Two years later, Preston was dragging his shoulder bag stuffed with Nikons across North America with Freddie Mercury and co. “Queen all wanted to hear stories about Zeppelin and their organisation,” he recalls. “I told them, Let me work with you the way I do with them. Allow me to go where…

Your initial idea was to make a covers album inspired by Willie Nelson’s Stardust. What is the appeal of that record for you? “It was such a part of my childhood. My parents didn’t have a lot of records, but they had about 10. A Judy Collins record, a Roberta Flack record, a Waylon Jennings record, Stardust and a handful of others. All those records, they were just on repeat, it felt like for years. Stardust, every time I hear it, there’s a glow. There’s a warmth inside. I feel safe and I feel like my whole life is ahead of me.” When it came to Serpentine Prison, what did Booker T. Jones bring to the party? “Well, when I sang on his record [2011’s The Road From Memphis], he…

Luke Abbott Translate BORDER COMMUNITY. CD/DL/LP Norfolk synth magician navigates upheaval with striking results. BY LUKE ABBOTT’s own admission, the six years since his previous solo album were personally turbulent. Then, just as he was about to release this, his third album since 2010’s vivid debut Holkham Drones, Covid happened. It may be late arriving, but Translate is, serendipitously, entirely in tune with today, while returning to the twisted, motorik grand sweep that characterised his early work. The heavily-distorted Our Scene is a tantalising exercise in build and decay, the gloriously portentous Flux a surge of storm-tossed heavy ARPs, while Earthship - like a slow yomp across tundra - is John Carpenter-like in breadth and mood. Every so often, Abbott weaves in foley recorded outside the west London studios of…

• New York is littered with references to then contemporary figures, like Kurt. Waldheim, the then Director General of the UN, and Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, both of whom Reed thought were anti-Semites. Sick Of You also mentions the Ayatollah (above) and Oliver North – leading figure in the Iran-Contra scandal of the time – but also excoriates “the Trumps” and Rudy Giuliani: some of the same ‘men’ still running and ruining the world.…

Oasis are better served with rock-docs than any other band of the past 30 years. A definitive hour-long Definitely Maybe documentary is available free on the band’s official Vevo page, but Mat Whitecross’s unmissable movie about the road from Burnage to Knebworth, 2016’s Supersonic, requires payment. For the full jaw-dropping spectacle of Oasis in their stadium pomp, head to YouTube’s complete 2005 concert from the City of Manchester Stadium. Also on YouTube, there is abundant fraternal silliness in the full audio from 1994’s Wibbling Rivalry interview. The best book, Paul Mathur’s Take Me There (Overlook, 1997), is currently out of print but well worth seeking out.…

GAME ON, DAMON 4 Young indie band Seymour play the Garage University College London (UCL). In December, Food Records’ Dave Balfe persuades them to change their name to Blur (above) and makes drummer Dave Rowntree promise to stop playing in pyjama bottoms. I’D RATHER FAÇ 14 Factory Classical, offshoot of Manchester’s Factory label, launches with LPs by Steve Martland, Robin Williams and others. Oddly, Factory never have a bespoke dance imprint. GUNS STONED 18 Opening for The Rolling Stones at the Coliseum in Los Angeles, Axl Rose threatens to split Guns N’Roses if certain members of their outfit don’t stop “dancing with Mr Goddamn Brownstone.” He’s referring to heroin use, it is alleged. MACCOLL DIES 22 Ewan MacColl (born James Miller in Salford in 1915) dies. A folk singer, Marxist…