Table of contents for February 2020 in MOJO

Jude Rogers Welsh-woman Jude’s been having brilliant adventures in music journalism since 2003: Chrissie Hynde painted her portrait, Lady Gaga danced on her lap, Robert Plant made her tea in Nashville, and this month she treks to Lewes’s pagan Bonfire Night celebrations with folk’s new torch-carrier, Sam Lee (see p52). Keith Cameron In 1995, MOJO’s Contributing Editor Keith interviewed Liam Gallagher and Bonehead, the self-styled “Morecambe & Wise” of Oasis. For this month’s cover story (see p74) he spoke to them again as Liam embarks upon the latest chapter of an incredible musical adventure. “Older, even a bit wiser,” Keith says. “But still rock’n’roll stars.” Tom Sheehan Leaving CBS Records 41 years ago to pursue the freelance life, Sheehan spent over two decades as chief photographer at Melody Maker. He…

REFLECTION IS NOT WHAT YOU GENERALLY associate with a Liam Gallagher interview. But there are moments in Keith Cameron’s insightful piece on the Oasis veteran this month when a certain poignancy jostles for space with the wit and bullishness; when thoughtfulness and attitude reach a kind of unlikely entente. “I think the rock’n’roll gods were going, ‘Man, we need him back in the zone,’” Gallagher says of himself. “‘He’s served us well over the last 20 years: he’s been a good ambassador for rock’n’roll – we’ll give him another roll of the dice.’” Ambassador For Rock’n’Roll. It’s a daunting honorific, but one which would also suit another key player in this latest MOJO – Ron Wood, whose tireless bonhomie masks a profound understanding of his craft and its history. Such…

…a new FOO FIGHTERS album is expected in 2020. Dave Grohl (right) told rock interviewer Eric Blair it will be “fucking weird”… STEPHEN MALKMUS releases his third LP in three years in March. It will be using instruments from Europe, Asia and Africa alongside North American forms… also due in 2020, CORNERSHOP’s England Is A Garden is the band’s first long-player in five years and promises “songs of experience, empire, otest and humour”… MADNESS are taking things slow for their thirteenth album: “We’re working towards one slowly,” confirms keyboardist Mike Barson. “We need to do some more rehearsing and get some more songs together.” Long-term producer Clive Langer has been involved, and adds, ”the last few songs we’ve done are really good. My angle, if I’m involved, is let’s really…

…Homegrown, NEIL YOUNG’s unreleased 1975 acoustic album about his troubled relationship with actor Carrie Snodgress, finally gets a release in early 2020. Says Neil (right): “a record full of love lost and explorations”… Ace Records release the JOHN  LEE HOOKER box set 70 Years Of Boogie Chillun in 2020: of the 1949-52 recordings made in Detroit, Michigan by Bernard Besman, 19 are previously unissued… OLDFRAPP’s (right) Felt Mountain gets a 20th anniversary deluxe box reissue set in autumn… the Cherry Red label’s reissue campaign of THE FALL’s catalogue will continue with an expanded edition of 2006’s Reformation Post-TLC… due in February, HANK WILLIAMS: Pictures From Life’s Other Side – The Man And His Music In Rare Photos And Recordings is a 6-CD, 144-track set collecting all of the country legend’s…

… LED ZEPPELIN’s official documentary will include input from all surviving members, with rare archive interviews with the late John Bonham. Unseen footage and images are promised. Bernard MacMahon, whose credits include American Epic, directs. Jimmy Page commented, “When I saw everything Bernard had done both visually and sonically on the remarkable achievement that is American Epic, I knew he would be qualified to tell our story”… a musical/ bio-pic of legendary enthusiasm-over-ability family band THE SHAGGS is being directed by Ken Kwapis, who directed the US version of The Office. Elsie Fisher stars, and the group’s Dot and Betty Wiggin are consultants… expected next summer, Jennifer Hudson will play the lead role in ARETHA FRANKLIN (left) life story Respect. Forest Whitaker plays Aretha’s father CL Franklin and Marlon Wayans…

EVEN IN THE age of the portfolio career, there’s something startling about Keeley Forsyth’s change of direction. Look her up on IMDB, and her CV includes appearances in Peak Practice and Coronation Street. Listen to her debut album, the elementally stark Debris, and the mainstream sitting-room rapidly vanishes from the frame. “I have, if I’m honest, always felt not quite right in certain elements of the acting world,” says Forsyth, “but I’ve had to navigate it because it’s my job and I have to earn a living. I definitely feel more comfortable on the artist side. But it’s a bit strange coming out to my family – ‘So this is who I am’ – when they’re like, ‘Where’s that girl who was in Heartbeat? We’d quite like her back, please.’”…

CRITIC, poet, novelist and memoirist CLIVE JAMES (b.1939) amused the nation, intelligently, for decades on television and with his journalism. He also collaborated on six long-players with singer-songwriter Pete Atkin from 1970 to 1975, the last of which, Live Libel, featured knowing musical parodies attributed to “Gladys Graveyard”, “Leonard Conman” and others. The duo, who also wrote Julie Covington’s 1971 debut The Beautiful Changes, later reunited to play live and record new music, including 2015’s The Colours Of The Night. James also co-presented Granada TV’s So It Goes when the Sex Pistols appeared in 1976, and used his TV influence to popularise Cuban comedy singer Margarita Pracatan. BASSIST DOUG LUBAHN (above, b.1947) was working as a ski instructor in Colorado when he met Mama Cass Elliot, who advised him to…

BREAKTHROUGH The Supremes Where Did Our Love Go ★★★★★ MOTOWN, 1964 Eddie’s sole US Top 30 solo hit Jamie and Leaving Here, much covered in the UK, only hinted at the artistic brilliance and commercial deluge to follow. To get the ‘no-hit’ Supremes up and running, Eddie provoked Diana Ross’s sulky lead on the title track. The storming When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes, Run, Run, Run (the flop between them), Number 1s Baby Love and Come See About Me – this second LP was a ‘greatest hits’ in all but name. CONSOLIDATION The Four Tops Reach Out ★★★★★ MOTOWN, 1967 In the Tops’ canon, both this LP and Second Album function as ‘greatest hits’. The drama of Levi Stubbs’s stunning leads on H-D-H originals Bernadette, Standing In…

“I MET SAM not long after his first album came out [in 2012], which I’d loved. We really intrigued each other, and spent an afternoon improvising together. I loved Sam’s voice, and his lack of reference points for my old indie world. (Laughs) I always love that! Five years later, he rang me up. I’m so glad he did. “I did a lot of work with Bert Jansch – we were good friends, and hung out as much as we played – but I’ve never really cared about the scholarship of folk. I just use my ears. And Sam’s not a musician as such – I feel bad saying that – but he’s not showing me his Fairport Convention collection or obsessing about specific guitars. He’s an artist. He lives…

Drive-By Truckers ★★★★ The Unraveling ATO. CD/DL/LP THE TRUCKERS’ twelfth studio album starts off with a solo piano – a simple, stripped-down succession of chords that make up the foundation of a very pretty song. Rosemary With A Bible And A Gun, it’s called. It feels like a memory and sounds a bit like Bruce Springsteen. A girl driving down a highway, the wind in her hair, chasing the dream or escaping a nightmare, but getting out of Memphis either way. It’s one of those old-school, all-American story songs – or would be if the listener could work out if it’s a love song to a city or a love song to a girl. “One kiss could charm the dark to light the dawn/This rollercoaster highway can’t compare to the…

Hildur Guðnadóttir ★★★★ Joker WATERTOWER MUSIC. CD/DL/LP Back in 2019, the Icelandic composer and musician received an Emmy for her atmospheric and haunting score to Craig Mazin’s mini-series Chernobyl. This is something different. Joker is not a good film, but Guðnadottir’s skulking, reptilian cello-based score lends it a defeated gravitas, an eerie power that unsettles and beguiles. Mark Jenkin ★★★★ Bait INVADA. CD/DL/LP  Edited in camera, on a 16mm 1978 Bolex, then hand-developed to look cracked and coarse-grained, Mark Jenkin’s Bait is a story about time, boundaries and ownership that resembles an ancient relic washed up on a beach. Jenkin’s self-penned droning score exists as a central character; deliberate, watchful, uncertain, profound. Mica Levi ★★★★ Monos INVADA. CD/DL/LP Alejandro Landes’ film about a group of South American child soldiers is…

Taking the format to the year’s end are a handful of US digital EPs. First up, unsinkable Californian Weyes Blood posted Rough Trade Session – four alternative takes of songs from Titanic Rising that reveal Natalie Mering’s strong, songwriterly core. Stripped of its chamber pop arrangement, in just piano and voice, Everyday is a highlight; brighter and louder than on the album, it taps directly into its nostalgic seams of inspiration. Mindful of his own muse, Beck donned a purple ruffled shirt to take up an invitation to visit Paisley Park, yielding a three-track EP for Amazon Music (video on Vevo): a super-loose Up All Night (from Colors ) and a high camp Where It’s At. But this party is all about the absent host and a spinning, dipping Prince…

Frank Zappa ★★★★ The Hot Rats Sessions ZAPPA/UME. CD/DL IN OCTOBER 1969, Frank Zappa announced the demise of The Mothers Of Invention. For three years, the group had gone where no other dared, mashing up modern classical, contemporary jazz and doo wop, employing pastiche, collage, satire and anything from belches to Boulez. They were (relatively) old men going pop, (relatively) young men crossing cultural wires and watching them spark. Everything about the Mothers signified ‘counterculture’, yet hippies and radicals were targets for ‘Grand Mother’ Zappa’s ire. He always insisted that the group were hopelessly misunderstood. “Peaches En Regalia had grown more peculiar still, like some enchanted New World fanfare. But fanfare for what?” Speaking to the IT’s Miles in June 1969, Zappa paused to address the moment. “They don’t know…

Various  ★★★★ Mogadisco – Dancing Mogadishu (1972-1991) ANALOG AFRICA. CD/DL/LP MOGADISHU WAS not immune to disco fever. The 1970s residents of Somalia’s otherwise tense, politically turbulent capital made their allegiance known via towering afros, bicycle-chafing flares and impractical platform shoes. The local musicians who reflected this welcome explosion (and leapfrogged chaotically from one outfit to another) made luxury hotels like Jubba, Al-Uruba and Al Jazeera their stamping grounds, mixing up well-worn covers of James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye with the incoming sounds of Bob Marley, Fela Kuti, Michael Jackson and a smattering of expectant originals. Much of Mogadisco … is lifted from those performances, rescued by Analog Africa founder Samy Ben Redjeb during a month-long sift through over 20,000 crackly radio station reel-to-reels and discarded recordings. First to…

Beat Happening ★★★★ We Are Beat Happening  DOMINO. LP Dormant Olympia WA trio’s daring meld of guileless minmalism and tuff attitude gets the remastered 7-LP box set lavishness their deep influence merits (Kurt Cobain cited 1988’s Jamboree in his Top 50). All five albums plus a rarities set: endless Indian summer. KC Charles Curtis ★★★★ Performances & Recordings 1998-2018  SALTERN. CD/DL Ostensibly a sternly lovely roundup of the American cellist, Curtis’s hefty comp neatly draws affinities between classical, the avant-garde and minimalism: a broad church encompassing La Monte Young, Messiaen and 14th century hipster Guillaume de Machaut. JM Françoise Hardy ★★★ Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles  NEW CONTINENT. LP Her hit 1962 debut with four bonus cuts in Italian. Within, cool yé-yé pop meets rock’n’roll, jazz and blues with…

FEELING REDUNDANT at the age of 27, post-Beatles Paul McCartney would compare his predicament to that of the astronauts who’d returned from the moon: “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?” he mused. His was to be a bumpy re-entry, characterised by a nagging doubt that was at odds with the apparently super-confident figure the public had seen on the cinema screen in Let It Be. “My career is certainly not carefully considered.”PAUL McCARTNEY From the low-key beginning of his first solo album McCartney, via a procession of variously slick or odd records throughout the 1970s, Paul built a band, Wings, as an extension of his travelling family, before they crashed following his still-bizarre weed bust/imprisonment in Japan in 1980. Like most of his ’60s…

• Having recorded 2011’s Let England Shake, Harvey invited a group of record label executives to her house to hear the album. She made them tea, pressed ‘play’, then went out to do some gardening while they listened. • “That sounds like you’ve got a lot of screaming children in there,” Harvey tells Terry Edwards during the recording of The Ministry Of Social Affairs. “That’s what you like,” shrugs Edwards. • Harvey kept a tidy studio at Somerset House, instructing her band to clear coffee cups and water bottles away so it didn’t look scruffy.…

Sleater-Kinney Paramount Theatre, Seattle SLEATER-KINNEY are familiar faces in the Pacific Northwest – but it’s a different band that walks out at the Paramount tonight. There are superficial changes. Singer/guitarist Corin Tucker has a drum pad to pound next to her microphone. S-K have upgraded their stage set to include a massive backdrop with an eyeball surrounded by lip-shaped eyeliner, a nod to The Rolling Stones’ logo, but more knowing. Weightier still is their evolved line-up. Tucker and singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein are up front as always. Behind them are synth and guitar players Katie Harkin and Toko Yasuda – and behind them sits drummer Angie Boylan, in place of fan-favourite Janet Weiss. Surely it’s a dream gig for Boylan – but just as surely it’s an unenviable one. Days before,…

I picked up the latest reissue of Felt’s Ignite The Seven Cannons and found out that the song Serpent Shade had been removed and another song had been shortened. Do lots of groups bin tracks from their records? Jon Williams, via e-mail Fred says: To be honest it is uncommon, but among those who have taken songs off albums for artistic reasons are David Bowie (who dropped Too Dizzy from 1987’s Never Let Me Down), Manic Street Preachers (who lopped Underdogs off 2007’s Send Away The Tigers) and Morrissey, who removed the songs Papa Jack and Roy’s Keen from 1997’s Maladjusted. Others choose to edit tracklists for pragmatic reasons, including Guns N’Roses (who jettison’d the racist and homophobic One In A Million from 2018’s Appetite From Destruction box set), David…

“COSMIC SOUL? I’ll take that…” grins Paul Weller in riposte to MOJO’s two-word précis of his next, as yet untitled, album, due in June 2020. Braving lashing night-time rain and a drive through pitch-black country lanes, MOJO has been summoned to the Modfather’s Black Barn HQ in rural Surrey to enjoy a preview of his 15th solo studio adventure, recorded here over the past 18 months. As has become customary in Weller world, it is a radical departure from the album that preceded it; while 2018’s True Meanings was a woody, acoustic- guitar-led outing, this affair is a sonic salmagundi of trippy psychedelic funk and lopsided Cockney knees-ups; strange, atmospheric balladry, classic Weller Mod-pop and experimental electronica. Several tracks have been clearly designed to get your feet moving. “It’s taking…

1 Sing Backwards And Weep Mark Lanegan Where Lanegan takes us back “to the sinister, needle-ridden streets of Seattle” in the mid-’80s and recounts the Screaming Trees’ rise and his own fall in the ’90s. Due: April 2 All Or Nothing: The Story Of Steve Marriott Simon Spence  An authorised biography of the tragically fated but wildly talented Small Faces and Humble Pie voice, by the author of admired books on the Immediate label, Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses and Bay City Rollers. Features over 100 new interviews. Due: August 3 Remain In Love: Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Tina Chris Frantz In “warm, candid, funny and heartfelt” style, the drummer reflects on New York punk, the bands of his life and his marriage to bassist Tina…

FROM MARCH to November 1972, an 18-foot fibreglass King Kong stood outside Birmingham’s Bull Ring shopping centre. Created by pop artist Nicholas Monro, the statue was part of a public arts initiative to bring modern sculpture to British cities. Birmingham declined to buy the statue. The looming effigy stayed in the minds of two Midlanders: comedian and satirist Stewart Lee (right, on right) and cult alt-rocker Robert Lloyd (on left) of The Nightingales and The Prefects. In 2018, a plan was hatched to make a documentary portrait of Lloyd and his 40-plus years in music, with the mighty ape as metaphor for this prophet without honour on his own turf. “ Stewart’s got this thing, sort of, that Birmingham’s got a history of not knowing its culture when it’s got…

1 NADIA REID BEST THING The first track from Reid’s Spacebombrecorded Out Of My Province, scans as a hymn to love, especially maternal love, with its womb-like, heartbeat drums and a PJ Harveyish string-led melody that swoops. Find it: YouTube 2 SANGOKAKU (FT BONNIE PRINCE BILLY & KATE STABLES) CABANE Belgian Thomas Jean Henri recruits Oldham and This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables. Their voices make a lovely, Sufjan-ish blend: Sean O’Hagan adds strings. Find it: SoundCloud 3 LAURYN HILL GUARDING THE GATES Her first in five years; a reassertion of her business-confounding MO, first performed in 2005: “You can laugh at me/But I’m in love!” Find it: streaming services 4 MOSES SUMNEY VIRILE Harps, flutes, beats and full-on falsetto critique gender…

IN AN AFFECTIONATE, poignant foreword, Galen Ayers recalls the last time she saw her father Kevin, the lotus eater of British psychedelia who died in February 2013. Over a pre-noon pint in London’s West End, she was asking him for advice when he told her, “I don’t know anything of value – all the best of me, I’ve given to my songs.” Out now, Shooting At The Moon: The Collected Lyrics Of Kevin Ayers is, then, a kind of autobiography of the ex-Soft Machine voice and bass, golden underachiever, eternal flâneur. From 1969’s solo debut Joy Of A Toy, his oddly spatial, colour-flecked songs of wine, the sea, bananas and pondering the inconsistencies of living are deceptively simple, poetic and nuanced, shot through with irony, surrealism and a sort of…

IT’S A COLD, DAMP NOVEMBER AFTERNOON IN central London and in a glass-walled library at the offices of Omnibus Press, Eddie and Brian Holland are bundled up in their leather jackets, taking the chill off with some spicy spinach soup and explaining to MOJO why it’s taken these two legendary songwriters and producers nearly 50 years to commit their story to paper. “Well,” says the 80-year-old Eddie, “I never wanted to talk about it before, because I thought it was too personal.” Fifteen years ago, Paramount Studios approached the brothers with the idea of making a biopic about their time at Motown Records, as two-thirds (Lamont Dozier made three) of a peerless songwriting team banging out hit after hit for The Four Tops, The Isley Brothers, The Marvelettes and The…

JO WOOD’S INITIATION into The World Of The Stones was not for the faint-hearted. Having hooked up with Ronnie at a party in Kensington in ’76, she was invited to meet up with him again in Paris. Borrowing money from her dad for a ticket, she pitched up at the designated hotel to find no Ronnie, and no reservation. “They gave me the maid’s room at the top,” she recalls. “I had no idea how I was going to pay for it. I went to sleep thinking, What an idiot I’ve just been!” Her new beau turned up at 6am the next morning, having been held over in Shannon due to a blown engine on Concorde. He had brought with him a friend. “Keith walked straight past me, sat down,…

APRIL 27, 1966: THE MAMAS & THE PAPAS ARE working in Western Recorders Studios on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles. Fresh from a reception for The Hollies, Graham Nash has crashed the session. Quietly, he fancies his chances with Michelle Phillips, but the archetypal Californian blonde is overdubbing vocals with her songwriting husband John Phillips and Denny Doherty, the group’s mellifluous tenor. Instead, Nash ventures outside and strikes up a conversation with the woman the world was just getting to know as Mama Cass. “She had a huge crush on John Lennon,” Nash recalls, so she asked the Englishman what the Beatle might think of her music. “He’d probably put you down,” Nash replied candidly. Cass was crestfallen. “Within 15 minutes of meeting, she was in tears,” Nash says. “That upset…

JOHNNY CASH STOOD ON THE MAKESHIFT STAGE at Folsom Prison, set up in the cafeteria behind death row. Almost a hundred men had been executed in this maximum security facility, one of the first in the country, and there he was, singing 25 Minutes To Go, Shel Silverstein’s grimly comic countdown sung by a prisoner awaiting his own hanging. “The sheriff said, ‘Boy, I’m gonna watch you die’ – got 19 minutes to go…” Cash intoned. “So I laughed in his face and I spit in his eye – got 18 minutes to go…” Two weeks earlier, some of the Folsom convicts had held a guard at knifepoint, and Cash’s captive audience had been warned that the show would be stopped if anyone so much as left his seat. Armed…

(Definitely Maybe, 1994) After a six-year battering from techno levellers, the notion of British rock stardom was instantly resuscitated with Oasis’s materialisation, and when a nasal Liam yowled, “Toniiiight, I’m a rock’n’roll star!”, an aspirational era was unfurled, and its shamanistic party-starter unveiled. (Definitely Maybe, 1994) From the off, Liam also proved himself the channeller of subtler emotional electricity. Here, as on the more celebrated Live Forever, his combination of sweetness and grit, combined with sure but idiosyncratic phrasing, transmitted a romantic urgency supercharged by existential desperation. ((What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, 1995) Noel Gallagher penned this career-defining ballad for his first wife Meg Mathews, but vocal duties devolved to Our Kid. We already knew Liam could do ‘mad for it’ and starsailing angst; this was him nailing warmth and…

• The Drive-By Truckers’ principal songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley, have a history that goes back to 1985 when, living in Muscle Shoals, they formed the band Adam’s House Cat. Their sole LP (above), recorded in 1990, remained unreleased until 2018, between the Truckers’ previous album and this. In spite of their long friendship, they prefer to write separately. But both experienced writer’s block with their twelfth album when trying to express in song the dire state of affairs in the US. “They’re literally putting children in cages,” says Hood. “Writing silly love songs just seemed the height of privilege.”…

SCOTLAND Assai Records 33 Union Street Dundee DD1 4 BS 01382 205671 1 Grindlay Street, Edinburgh EH3 9AT 0131 228 3943 Europa Music 10 Friars Street, Stirling FK8 1HA 01786 448623 Mo Fidelity 126 Murray Street Montrose, DD10 9JG 07870 491240 NORTH WEST 81 Renshaw Street Liverpool L1 2SJ 01517071850 Action 47 Church St, Preston PR1 3DH 01772 884 772 / www.action-records.co.uk Five Rise Records 30c Park Road Bingley, West Yorks BD16 4QF 01274 512867 Piccadilly Records 53 Oldham St, Manchester M1 1JR 0161 839 8008 Vinyl Cafe 44 Abbey St, Carlisle CA3 8TX 01228 522845 X Records 44 Bridge St, Bolton BL1 2EG 01204 384579 TNT Records Ltd 86 Duke St Barrow in Furness Cumbria LA14 1RD 07428171256 Wax at Moorgate 643, Chesterfield Road,Sheffield S8 0RY 01142 275 6048…

• In the accompanying 28-page booklet, photographer Andee Nathanson recounts the iconic Hot Rats cover shoot (above), featuring The GTOs’ Miss Christine and a swimming pool in an abandoned villa in Holmby Hills above Sunset Boulevard. She changed into her self-crocheted full body suit, then, “She became a character like none I’d ever seen,” he says. The 22-year-old took a few shots from within the pool, then clambered out, inviting Christine to step forward. “OK, lower yourself slowly down… right… there!” Frank was “fixated”. “As they say, when it’s right, it comes together effortlessly,” says the photographer.…

2018’s Egypt Station – especially the evocative and doubt-filled I Don’t Know – proved that McCartney’s gift for melody has not deserted him one iota. Those hankering for the rawer-edged Macca will find much to love in rock’n’roll covers album Run Devil Run (1999), while digging through his early post-Beatles LPs unearths many forgotten gems such as Some People Never Know (Wings’ Wild Life, 1971) and Little Lamb Dragonfly (Red Rose Speedway, 1973). 1982’s Tug Of War (a reunion with George Martin) is well worthy of reappraisal, while concert film Rockshow captures the arena- and stadium-filling 1976 Wings line-up at their wondrous, mullet-y peak. Book-wise, biographies and encounters by Miles, Philip Norman and Paul Du Noyer – (and don’t forget that guy Tom Doyle –Ed) – all get closer to…

Blood: A Memoir ★★★★ Allison Moorer DA CAPO. £20 Possibly the most country and western tragedy ever. Think you’ve got problems? As teenagers, future country stars Allison Moorer and her sister Shelby Lynne heard their father first shoot their mother and then turn the gun on himself. The murder-suicide has, unsurprisingly, shaped both singers’ lives ever since as they have attempted to make sense of the senseless through their music. Blood, and its accompanying album of the same title, fills in the before and after of that horrific moment, pulling no punches, varnishing nothing, making the brutality of Moorer’s honesty sometimes hard to read. But she is also filled with love and, if not exactly forgiveness, at least some understanding of her father’s weaknesses and motives, particularly the thwarted musical…

Graham Coxon ILLEGAL SPEED GUITAR What music are you currently grooving to? For quite a while now, I have been stuck in a Steely Dan obsession. At first I didn’t have a clue how I felt about that stuff, but on the third listen of a big best-of album, it suddenly hit me as being the most brilliant music ever made. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? It would have to be The Beatles, for sure. And if I had to pick one, it would be Rubber Soul. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Roxanne by The Police, when it got in the charts. The Police were huge in my junior school… I vividly remember that I…

IN 2018, Robert Smith said he would quit music if a new Cure album didn’t appear in 2019, ideally around the time of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. That possibility looks slight at press time, but in the meantime ambitions for the first Cure record since 2008’s 4:13 Dream have amplified. Speaking to Rolling Stone in October, Smith revealed that the album, working title Live From The Moon , would comment on the excitement and optimism of the 1969 lunar mission, and the following disappointment that the technological world it promised never arrived. He also admitted that the political, social and ecological crises affecting the planet have shocked him out of the age-unaware reverie of a successful childless rock star. Though he…

throwing muses (4AD, 1986) Their debut was wholly at odds with trends (Smiths, C86, Sonic Youth) and still sounds uniquely pent-up, fiery and exhilarating. Among the tempo-shifting twists and turns, staccato beats and shrill, edgy vocals, are anthems (Soul Soldier), pop songs (Stand Up) and the incredible Vicky‘s Box. Donelly’s contribution Green holds up too. hunkpapa (4AD, 1987) Hunkpapa was the name of Sitting Bull’s Sioux tribe; Dizzy’s paean to a Comanche girl was one strand of Hersh’s feminist/underdog theme. Hersh may lament the absence of “sharper edges”, but the relatively smooth topography doesn’t diminish the greatness of Bea, Say Goodbye, Mania and Donelly’s two-part Dragonhead. the curse (4AD, 1992) Released three months after Red Heaven introduced the new trio format, this 17-song live document was a…

TWILIGHT ON BONFIRE Night. A half-moon gleams above the swampy River Ouse towards Lewes, East Sussex, a route chosen specifically by tonight’s wayward Pied Piper. Up ahead, the town is coming alive with flaming crosses and effigies, revealing Britain’s folk heritage in its most primal form. “Bonfire is everything,” Sam Lee says excitedly, holding out a hand to stop MOJO sliding into a puddle of mud. “Music, people, history, the landscape. It’s my night of the year.” British folk’s most adventurous artist is about to release his third solo album, Old Wow , which confounds expectations from the off, as Lee often does. It’s produced by Bernard Butler, once of Suede, who has called it “probably the best record I’ve ever produced”. The notoriously shy Elizabeth Fraser sings on it,…

The Mugwumps (Warner Bros, 1967) Issued on the back of The Mamas & The Papas’ success, this nine-song session from summer ’64 is far from the finished article. But against a British Invasion-style backing, Cass and future Papa Denny Doherty test drive the harmonies that would become central to the M&P’s sound, most effectively on Everybody’s Been Talkin’ and Do You Know What I Mean. If You Can Believe Your Eyes And Ears (Dunhill, 1966) Cass had only been a Mama for a matter of weeks before Lou Adler rushed them into the studio. No matter: this debut set proves they were fully formed from the start. John Phillips (mostly) wrote the songs; Cass and Denny dominated the harmonies. California pop was growing up fast. Dream A Little Dream (Dunhill,…

(Columbia, 1968) With Bob Johnston producing and a band that included Carl Perkins and June Carter, this is raw, brilliant, moving, dark, funny, holy – and badass, particularly on opener Folsom Prison Blues. A 2008 Legacy edition includes many excellent extras, including the Perkins showcase, Blue Suede Shoes. Still amazing that provocative material like Cocaine Blues made the cut. (Columbia, 1969) A year after At Folsom made Number 1, Cash extended the franchise, with more knowing nods to the minutiae of prison life – like “the closed-circuit television that you have here” – and a bespoke anthem in San Quentin (“I hate every inch of you”). Treasures of 2006’s Legacy versh include a Carter Family mini-set, and restores Cash’s bleeped-out words. (Columbia, 1974) More a curio than a classic, this…

“The first shoot I did with them was at Out Of The Blue studios in Manchester [in 1993]. I walked in and thought, Fucking hell, is that the lead singer? He just looked fantastic – this fully-formed 20-year-old rock star. Andrew Loog Oldham once said that every great band needs a great face, and Oasis without that wonderful face would have been something totally different. I tried to get a Liam shot on the cover of the Wonderwall single – Liam’s vocal was so brilliant, so lonely – but Noel wouldn’t have it.” Michael Spencer Jones’s Oasis photo exhibition, Masterplan 25, runs until January 12, 2020 at h Club, London.…

A second Truckers album in a row expressing anger at contemporary USA? “From day one, our way of working was if we do one record one way, the next one we’ll do something very different. So our first inclination was to head in the other direction and do something much more personal. But right now, when it’s all breaking down around us, it’s hard to separate the personal from the political. There was another shooting today in California. A friend of mine’s daughter goes to that high school and knew at least one of the teenagers that was killed. And when people at shows are being shot at, you’ve got to believe that hits home.” Why did it take three and a half years? “A crazy lot has happened. Our…

Gigi Masin ★★★★ Calypso R&S/APOLLO. CD/DL/LP Now in his fourth decade composing music, with Calypso the Italian ambient spearhead Gigi Masin bathes us in pure sunlight for 90 minutes. Emotional but never over-wrought, it passes through syncopated micro rhythms (Khalifa Golf Club) on to scuffed-up chilled drone (How To Disappear In A Kiss) and twisted grooves. Squarepusher ★★★ Be Up A Hello WARP. CD/DL/LP Tom Jenkinson’s eleventh Squarepusher studio album for Warp maintains his reputation as a calibrating tool for the label’s mood. As restless and fidgety as ever, its terroir is ravey hyper-beats and face-melting breaks, while offering moments of respite – like the Vangelis-meets-Satie lament, Detroit People Movers – that are executed with subtlety and poignancy. Andras ★★★ Joyful BEATS IN SPACE. DL/LP Scratchy samples, the DNA of…

Animal Collective ★★★ Ballet Slippers DOMINO. CD/DL/LP Ten years since Merriweather Post Pavilion’s psychedelic mix of looped guitars, electronics and Beach Boys harmonies, this 2009 live comp shows how testing their sets can be, with long glitchy interludes between colourbursts of song. JB The Harlem Gospel Travelers ★★★★ He’s On Time COLEMINE. CD/DL/LP/MC Produced by Eli ‘Paperboy’ Reed, each of the four young New York singers sing lead, have a confident grasp of both tradition and new directions – Motherless Child rearranged; the brisker Brighter Day and On The Right Road. Promising. GB Brainstory ★★★ Buck BIG CROWN. CD/DL/LP A bucking bronco cover image does not prepare one for the soft soul and relaxed groove of the California trio’s work. From Smokey (Mnemophobia) and Bread (Dead End) influences to jazz-pop…

Considered one of the most fun record shops to visit in the South West, offering old-style browsing of new and pre-loved vinyl of all styles and types, Clocktower stocks many rarities and does not sell online. In an off-the-beaten-track location (in the town’s historic industrial and vintage quarter), with a listening booth, pinball machine and a cuppa always available, this highly individual shop opens 10-5 Monday-Saturday. Tel 01308 458077 clocktowermusic.co.uk…

Ian, were you surprised so much material still exists? IU: “I have zero surprise because Frank saved everything.” Did he set out with a plan? IU: “Yes, he contractually needed to do an album. The Mothers weren’t playing any more so he was moving on with a smaller group of musicians.” Frank said at the time that rock needed to be taken seriously. Was he tailoring the music to a new rock audience? IU: “I don’t feel comfortable with that [idea]. Frank was simply going ahead with the project he wanted; he wasn’t adjusting to the market. He would have noticed changes, but I don’t think that had anything to do with how he went forward with the record.” Much of the album mixes Cream-like blues-rock improvisation with vigorous jazz…

Supergrass The Strange Ones:1994-2008 BMG. CD/LP EXTENSIVE new essays on each of their LPs; all six of Supergrass’s studio albums on vinyl picture-disc; 13 CDs, including seven crammed with live shows, outtakes, acoustic versions, demos and rarities – money and time has been spent on this all-encompassing box. Timed to mark both the 25th anniversary of Supergrass’s debut I Should Coco and the band’s return to the live stage, it also includes 7-inch single Caught By The Fuzz/Richard III 2020 remix, a 52-page book, four colour posters and eight button badges. Lovely that the ’Grass’s zestful cover of The Police’s Next To You packs something of Jimi Hendrix’s Fire, and giggly stoner B-side Sometimes We’re Very Sad is great. It’s galling that a band so palpably dripping with ideas until…

Tracks: Charity Ball / What Kind Of Lover / Cat Fever / A Person Like You / Special Care / What’s Wrong With Me? / Soul Child / You’re The One / Thinking Of You / Place In The Country / A Little While Later Producer: Richard Perry Released: 1971 Recorded: Village Recorders, Larrabee Sound Studios, Sunset Sound, Los Angeles Personnel: June Millington (guitar), Jean Millington (bass), Nickey Barclay (keyboards), Alice de Buhr (drums) Chart peak: US 150 Current availability: CD, vinyl (Real Gone Music)…

Le Guess Who? 2019 Utrecht HIDDEN BEHIND YUCCA plants, wearing a face mask of coral nodes and a black dress with an exoskeleton of artificial whalebone, Björk played a secret, internet-tickling DJ session in Utrecht’s experimental Cloud 9 venue on Friday night. Yet Le Guess Who? 2019 was already such a diverse interzone of unlocked musical possibilities that Björk’s set of Charli XCX, Mary J Blige and Indonesian rave oddities Gabber Modus Operandi was just one glimmering moment of sonic murmuration in four whole days of them. In fact, it fitted right in. Now grown to more than 250 acts across 30 venues in this winning Dutch city, the refreshingly non-corporate LGW? is manageable in crowd sizes but huge in ambition and experiment. Curated by Kevin ‘The Bug’ Martin, Thursday…

HALEY LOITERING 7Bill Rock Haley Around above The Clock hits by the ( ) UK charts for the first time. NME hails it as “the frantic new pop style known as rock’n’roll.” ELVE O’CLOCK ROCK 8 On Shreveport radio show ’s Louisiana Elvis Hayride , Presley is introduced as the “Memphis Flash”. BIRD FLIES 9Greenwich Charlie Parker plays ’s Village Open Door jazz club, site of his September 1953 jam session with Thelonious Monk, Roy Haynes and Charles Mingus. Parker dies in March ’55. ACHTUNG BEEBY 11entertainment Today’s musical on the BBC Light Programme includes Housewives’ Choice (9.10am), Billy Thorburn’s Piano Playtime (5.30pm), and Come Dance at The Gaucho Room of The BBC Latin-American Ballroom with Edmundo Ros And His Band (10.20pm). SWEET SOIL MUSIC The Penguins’ Earth 15 the…