Table of contents for September 2025 in MOJO

Will Hodgkinson Still recovering from Street-Level Superstar: A Year With Lawrence, his warts-and-all study of the complex Felt/Denim/Go-Kart Mozart man that was MOJO’s 2024 book of the year, Will was only too happy to dive into the more gentle world of Nashville songwriting great Mickey Newbury for MOJO this month (p54). Kevin Westenberg Kevin has been taking pictures for MOJO for over 25 years, and this month photographed Suede (see p46). Known for his dramatic lighting, rich colours and authentic compositions, Kevin’s work has helped immortalise many cultural icons. Go to his Instagram feed to see more. Andy Bourne Andy is a UK-based illustrator and designer. His work spans multiple fields, with music at its core. Andy’s bold, surreal style blends vintage comic influences with high-energy design. See his brilliant…

MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. Write to us at: MOJO, H Bauer Publishing, The Lantern, 75 Hampstead Road, London, NW1 2PL. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk LATE APRIL, 1995, AND MOJO IS INTERVIEWING Brian Wilson for the first time. The writer is Bill Holdship, and he’s asking Brian about his ongoing fragile relationship with The Beach Boys. It’s one of those days when Brian is generous to his old bandmates – “The other guys don’t get fair credit for what they’re capable of doing,” he tells Holdship – but also where he is clear-sighted about his own genius. His role in The Beach Boys, he thinks, is best explained as “the creative force”. Then he comes up with a better and more evocative job title: “The sonic architect.” This past month, we…

…DAVID BYRNE (right) releases Who Is The Sky? on September 5. St. Vincent, The Smile drummer Tom Skinner and Paramore singer Hayley Williams guest. “At my age,” says Byrne, “there’s a ‘don’t give a shit about what people think’ attitude that kicks in… every song, even, is a new adventure.” Tracks include Everybody Laughs, I Met The Buddha At A Downtown Party and I’m An Outsider …BIG THIEF’s Double Infinity arrives the same day. Recorded live in Manhattan, with minimal overdubbing, Laraaji guests …DURAN DURAN have been working with Nile Rodgers at Abbey Road Studios …Bono has talked about making a new U2 LP with Brian Eno in US GQ. “Everyone in the band seems desperate for it,” he said, and calls Larry Mullen Jr “a drummer who has returned…

I WAS LIVING in Maine, where it was like, 10 years behind all modern activity. I was a bored student. Things were sliding into a financial downturn and there was a general attitude of discouragement. Also, I was the youngest of seven and had hung on to my Catholic upbringing for my parents’ sake, but I’d realised that was almost suicidal, so I began staying home on Sundays and listening to records. Then Rickie Lee Jones showed up in the house when my brother brought it back. I had an immediate response. It was kind of familiar and brand new. I loved singer-songwriter stuff but I hadn’t heard white lady singer-songwriters that I totally connected to. This was astonishing storytelling. You can see the lyrics, you can see the movie. My…

COMING TO THE END OF THE JAMIE OLIVER PETROL STATION, A TRACK FROM HER imminent third album, Euro-Country, CMAT looks out into the audience at south London’s Wide Awake festival for a long, meaningful moment before wiping her face. “It’s snot,” she says, blaming allergies rather than emotional overload. “You have to call it what it is. But I’m only telling you because I want to prove I’m a real human girl.” Nobody watching her tonight could doubt the song’s emotional force – or the impact it has on its writer. CMAT – the pop-star alias of Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson – has been storming around the stage in her flame-coloured shirt, hitting herself in the head and thrashing at an acoustic guitar as what seems like a satirical “diss track”…

I MET THIS woman in Dublin through the punk community when me and my brother Ian were playing in the proto-Lankum band, Lynched, and sleeping on people’s couches, and she put a few albums on my computer. One was Another Green World by Brian Eno, which I got obsessed with, and then there was a couple by the Incredible String Band, and I went down an Incredible String Band rabbit hole for about five or six years. It just didn’t sound like any other kind of music I’d heard before. It’s just not like what you expect music to be. It’s like folk, but it isn’t. It’s just completely its own thing. I’m a big fan of all the stuff they did before they became Scientologists, but that song Maya…

Suede (Nude, 1993) Have you ever tried it that way? A superb act of world-building, Suede’s debut is a portal – or maybe peephole – into an existence that trembles between desperation, ugliness and ethereal beauty. Animal Nitrate, She’s Not Dead or Pantomime Horse drag the listener into places they shouldn’t be: a bedroom, a car, a troubled mind. Quite the introduction to the band. Dog Man Star (Nude, 1994) As omni-talented guitarist Bernard Butler’s last turbulent stand with Suede, Dog Man Star was almost drowned out by the unhappy story of its making. The drama of these songs (cf. The Wild Ones, New Generation) wouldn’t be overshadowed for long, though. A yearning for something bigger and better still shines through the tumble of film stars, thwarted romance and imminent…

Gush NETTWERK. CD/DL/LP Latest creative outpouring from Los Angeles-based electronic composer. THE VIDEO for Neptunes, one of the tracks on Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s collaborative 2024 EP with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, was awash in close-ups of glistening aquatic creatures, all suckers, tentacles and ambiguous mouths. Her latest album, Gush, might be rooted in human love and desire, but her synthesized pulses and colour-changing beats mean that even land-based relationships come with a squid-like sheen. Like Matmos, Smith has a gift for turning the physical world into an alien playground. Tracks that skim the surface of conventional song structure (Drip, for example) never quite behave as expected, vocals dissolving or trailing off to follow their own rhythmic path. There’s a playfulness here – In The Dressing Room demands its own Oliver…

Stephen Vitiello With Brendan Canty And Hahn Rowe Second BALMAT. DL/LP Dubstyle post-rock from unlikely supergroup. Weird configuration on paper, this one. Canty you may know from his days drumming with Fugazi, here aligned with Vitiello, an ambient electronic producer, and Rowe, a violinist whose CV includes being part of 1980s New York art-rockers Hugo Largo. But pleasingly, Second often feels like a logical sum of its parts: stressed, dubbed-out rhythms (Canty on bass as well as kit) and Hahn’s lead lines (on violin, viola and bowed guitar) subjected to Vitiello’s light-touch processing (he’s on keys and guitar, too). Like peak Tortoise, there’s a sense of endless jams being reconfigured and collaged, but with those hardcore roots and reggae aspirations more prominent, so that Rhythmic Rhodes in particular sounds like…

Reggae Magic SOUL JAZZ. CD/DL/LP Favourites and rarities from Jamaica’s Studio One Hammond specialist. AS THE resident organist and musical arranger at Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s Studio One, Jackie Mittoo played a pivotal role in the development of Jamaican popular music. Soul Jazz’s excellent The Keyboard King At Studio One (2000) signalled their commitment to quality reggae reissues and this long overdue follow-up maintains the standard, showcasing Mittoo’s ability to transform any given rhythm. Landmark hits such as The Wailing Souls’ Back Out, The Jamaicans’ Ba Ba Boom and The Gaylads’ There’s A Fire are given creative organ transpositions and, on cuts of The Maytals’ Monkey Man and Dawn Penn’s immortal No No No, Mittoo takes the material in another direction, through melodic meanderings unrelated to the vocal line. The rarities…

BABYSHAMBLES GUITARIST PATRICK WALDEN (below, b.1978) played with The White Sport before joining Pete Doherty’s post-Libertines band in 2004. He appeared on UK Top 10 singles Killamangiro and Fuck Forever (which he co-wrote) and Top 10 LP Down In Albion. Suffering from drug problems, he left the band in early 2006. KORA PLAYER/multi-instrumentalist FODAY MUSA SUSO (b.1950) was a Gambian griot. After moving to Chicago in 1977 he recorded albums with Herbie Hancock, Jack DeJohnette and Philip Glass. He also worked with Ginger Baker, Don Cherry, Pharoah Sanders, Material, Umar Bin Hassan and others, and recorded with his own Mandingo Griot Society. SONGWRITER ARTHUR HAMILTON (b.1926) worked in publishing before composing three songs for 1955 Jack Webb movie Pete Kelly’s Blues (which also starred Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald): these…

THERE’S A MOMENT IN THIS MONTH’S SUEDE feature where their keyboardist/guitarist Neil Codling is considering the band’s unlikely longevity. “The fact that we’re still here, despite being outsiders in whatever sphere you care to look at, must be a motivating factor,” he tells Keith Cameron. “Stubbornness is in our DNA.” Suede’s trajectory over the past 35 years has been an odd, compelling one – a band who triggered a seismic cultural upheaval, but were too imaginative and unclubbable to be truly part of the Britpop scene they helped create. This month’s very special MOJO CD, fittingly named Outsiders, makes clear Suede’s significance, as it maps their journey from the gaudy new-glam progenitors of the early ’90s, to the post-punkish elder statesmen of the 2020s. Along the way there are artful…

NOSEDIVING PLANES, withered trees, alien landscapes: these have been some of the visually arresting images of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke’s album art for Radiohead, The Smile and Yorke’s own solo records. Now an exhibition of the pair’s work, titled This Is What You Get (and spanning 1995’s The Bends to 2024’s Cutouts) is being staged at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, featuring the original works and illustrating their evolution via unseen sketches and notebooks. Yorke and Donwood first met as art students at the University of Exeter in the late ’80s. Interviewed for the exhibition’s image-rich catalogue, Yorke reckons that the parameters of his and Donwood’s creative partnership were set in place back then. “I’m extremely restless,” he says. “I’ve never been really confident as a visual artist. I…

FOGERTY NOTIONS Five John jokers in the pack. 1 Booker T & The M.G.’s Green Onions (STAX, 1962) 2 Elvis Presley My Baby Left Me (RCA VICTOR, 1956) 3 Duane Eddy Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel (JAMIE, 1958) 4 The Beatles Revolver (PARLOPHONE, 1966) 5 Miranda Lambert More Like Her (COLUMBIA NASHVILLE, 2007) JOHN FOGERTY turned 80 a few days before MOJO calls him at home in LA. The erstwhile Creedence Clearwater Revival leader has more reasons to celebrate; after regaining his CCR publishing in 2023 after a 50-year legal stand-off, he’s now released Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years, a faithful re-recording of classics including Proud Mary, Bad Moon Rising and others. These songs may be the most potent and successful swamp rock on record, but CCR’s ’72 split remains…

STEPHENSON’S ROCKETS Martin, shaking’n’stirring. Martin Stephenson & The Daintees Boat To Bolivia (KITCHENWARE, 1986) The first of three wonderful Kitchenware LPs set out the stall, alighting on jazz, folk, reggae and melodious guitar pop, delivered with such confidence that the title track’s 12-inch featured universal love call Wholly Humble Heart – possible Stephenson’s greatest song – as an extra track. Should’ve been huge. Martin Stephenson The Incredible Shrinking Band (BARBARAVILLE, 2001) Accompanying himself on a Stefan Sobell guitar with a single-figure budget in his Highlands cottage at a “truly happy period in my life living with [album dedicatee] Karen Birrell”, a warmly lo-fi immersion in the Doc Watson tradition. Martin Stephenson & The Daintees California Star (BARBARAVILLE, 2012) With The Daintees and then-partner/backing singer Helen McCookerybook, who here wrote I’m…

“WHEN’S PAUL JONES GOING to join The Pretty Things, then?” It’s Monday afternoon, July 1, 1963, and Mick Jagger, second choice singer with The Rolling Stones, is bantering with the first choice – who’d turned down the opportunity the year before. He and Paul Jones are both alumni of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, British devotees of American R&B whose scuffling on a scene until recently more a cult than a career is suddenly bearing fruit. The Stones will make their first TV appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars the following Sunday, and Paul’s band, Manfred Mann, have graciously ceded their Monday afternoon rehearsal time at Soho’s Marquee Club so the Stones can prepare their performance. Paul has turned up out of interest to hear them rehearse. “They were doing covers,…

KITTY WELLS For Thompson, part of country music’s appeal is “the feminist thing” – women performing songs that say “let me stick up for myself for once”. A favourite: Kitty Wells’s 1952 hit It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. “It’s saying, ‘When you see women that are alcoholics or mentally ill, it’s not their fault. It’s usually men that did that to them.’” PHILIP LARKIN “Why do I love Philip Larkin?” laments CMAT on 2022’s Communion, “He would have hated me.” Her interest in the poet extends to how “the most sensitive people in the world often become the most unlikeable”. Also listen to her describing “the saddest cunts of plants” on Lord, Let That Tesla Crash and think of Larkin’s 1968 poem The Trees. CATE LE BON…

IT WAS, ALL WHO KNEW HIM AGREE, the very essence of Mickey Newbury. In 1969, recording his mellow heartbreak masterpiece Looks Like Rain in a converted garage studio on the outskirts of Nashville called Cinderella Sound, the Houston, Texas-born songwriter decided his album would benefit from the sound of crickets. Newbury had found other incidental sounds, including pouring rain and passing trains, on an album by the Mystic Moods Orchestra, but crickets were proving elusive. So he bought a jar of them from a nearby fishing bait store, held them up to the microphone, and waited for the orthopteran insects to do their thing. Unfortunately the crickets suffered a bad case of red light fever, the terror that can hit any musician the moment the producer presses the record button.…

GO TO YOUR RECORD collection, or open up Spotify, and have a look for the Beach Boys’ 1965 single, The Little Girl I Once Knew. Like many songs Brian Wilson wrote or co-wrote between 1963 and 1966, The Little Girl I Once Knew is about the dislocation and trauma of leaving innocence behind, but it’s not – compared to, say, Please Let Me Wonder – one that graphically maps out Wilson’s anxieties in the lyrics. Instead, hesitancy is baked into the very structure of the song. It begins cautiously, Carol Kaye’s bass line arriving by stealth, before suddenly opening up into one of Wilson’s most radiant miniature symphonies. After 32 seconds, though, a compositional rupture appears and the song stops. For the best part of three seconds there’s a vacuum,…

THE BEACH BOYS I Get Around (Single, 1964) “Brian’s still a couple of years away from Pet Sounds,” Lindsey Buckingham tells MOJO, “but the richness and sophistication is already there in I Get Around. It’s probably a Mike Love lyric, but the construction is off the charts – the twists and turns, the key shifts, the acrobatic dynamic.” Yep – nailed it. DE GLEN CAMPBELL Guess I’m Dumb (Single, 1965) The great Beach Boys single that never was. Binned from 1965’s Beach Boys Today! sessions because none of the band wanted to sing a lyric (penned by Russ Titelman) of such extreme vulnerability, Wilson gifted the lavishly emotive backing track to touring Beach Boy Campbell. The melodic stumble out of the chorus, via Hal Blaine’s timbales, is a classic Wilson…

The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives PIAS. CD/DL/LP The hyper-energised Swedes’ seventh LP. “CHEWIN’ ON a plastic pen/It’s trying to kill my brain again,” yelps Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist amid O.C.D.O.D.’s blistering 1:45 duration. Such chinks in The Hives’ armour of invincibility are rare, their playful braggadocio otherwise amped to 11 as per. Billed as an “arena album” comprised of 12 potential singles, The Hives Forever… rails against nanny states (Legalize Living) and less specific ills (Enough Is Enough). It also packs not wholly unfamiliar configurations of deeply felt and furious riffage, but with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D adding “magic touches” alongside trusted-hand Pelle Gunnerfeldt (Viagra Boys etc), new ground is breached too. The title track, inspired by the band’s current motto, is a powerful evocation of The Strokes going…

Talking Heads More Songs About Buildings And Food RHINO. CD/DL/LP “CUT BACK the weakness/Reinforce what is strong,” sings David Byrne on The Good Thing, the third track on More Songs About Buildings And Food. “Watch me work!” Backed by a Chinese-style workers’ choir (actually bassist Tina Weymouth and two studio secretaries, AKA The Typing Pool), there was, as the singer would say in a 1978 interview, nothing about this track from Talking Heads’ second album that the late Chairman Mao would have found “disagreeable”. In fact, deadpanned Byrne, “it would be the song that could get us a tour of Red China – but of course with the Gang Of Four.” By the time More Songs About Buildings And Food was released in July 1978, Talking Heads had made their…

Crown Jewels ALLIGATOR. DL/LP Spotlight on the Queen Of The Blues at Alligator. TAYLOR LAUNCHED her career at Chess with her 1965 hit Wang Dang Doodle. When the label went bust a decade later, she moved to Alligator where she remained until her death in 2009. This best-of cherry-picks from her nine albums for that label and begins with a 1978 remake of the aforesaid song. Her voice is deeper than on the original with ringing guitar, honking horns and emphatic bass and drums providing extra ballast. From the same year, covers of Hey Bartender and Let The Good Times Roll swing’n’shuffle and bring the party with that gravel road roar of a voice unruly and delivered at volume. When she sings I’d Rather Go Blind at Fitzgerald’s in Berwyn,…

As a proud citizen of the county of Somerset I have been a life-long fan of The Wurzels. It has always interested me that the late, great Adge Cutler never recorded a studio album – all of his releases being live recordings at pubs and clubs around Somerset (Royal Oak, Nailsea, The Webbington Country Club, etc). Are there any other artists that only ever recorded live, and never in a studio? Kevin Rawlings, Clevedon, North Somerset MOJO says: Great question, Kevin! It’s not common but it has happened. One big name example was The New Barbarians, the Ron Wood/Keith Richards-and-friends superband that toured North America and supported Led Zeppelin at Knebworth in 1979: their one official LP was Buried Alive: Live In Maryland in 2006. Similarly, Deep End, a group…

Stephen Malkmus HARD QUARTET, JICKS, PAVEMENT What music are you currently grooving to? Dragged Up, this band we’ve been playing with. They’re unbelievable. Also C.I.A. Débutante, which is like free noise with some Suicide. And I love The New Dawn, a psychedelic band from Oregon. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Jesus, that’s hard. I’ll say Silver Jews’ Starlite Walker, because I’m on it and I love myself. I just like the freeness of it, the way it feels like it was made out of the very air that you hear on it. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Boogie Fever by The Sylvers, at Tower Records in Stockton – the second one ever was in my…

FACT SHEET Title: Twilight Override Due: Late September 2025 Production: Jeff Tweedy Songs: Better Song, Throwaway Lines, Betrayed, Feel Free. The Buzz: “It’s a big, open-hearted outpouring, the defining statement of my solo career so far.” Jeff Tweedy JEFF TWEEDY HAS a mantra for these testing times: “Creativity eats darkness.” Chatting from Dortmund, Germany while touring with Wilco, the group’s frontman confirms his first solo record since 2020’s Love Is The King is in part a salve against debilitating outside forces. “As small groups of humans it’s hard to have much impact on the shape of things globally,” he tells MOJO. “You control what you can and double-down on beauty so you’re not just being pounded by existential crisis.” A triple LP, no less, Twilight Override’s 30 songs variously explore the…

DUBBED “THE personification of the counterculture movement” by Publishers Weekly, Ed Sanders has been a writer and poet, as well as musician and musical instrument inventor, activist, bookstore proprietor, newspaper and literary magazine editor: his most infamous, early-’60s publication was Fuck You/A Magazine Of The Arts, whose contributors included Burroughs, Ginsberg, Warhol and W.H. Auden. But Sanders is best known as co-founder and leader of the rock band The Fugs. The Fugs have gone through various incarnations since 1965, making this year the 60th anniversary of their first gig. “I’ve kept the mission going,” Sanders tells MOJO. “I ran every recording session and wrote every setlist, so I guess I’m more or less in charge.” The Missouri-born boy moved to NYC in 1958 to study Greek, and became immersed in…

THE WEEKEND STARTS HERE Manfred Mann Mann Made Hits (HIS MASTER’S VOICE, 1966) When pin-up Paul Jones went solo, Manfred Mann’s record label cashed in with this punchy hits and highlights compilation, erroneously believing the group were finished without him. A great collection, though, venting the ’63-66 band’s full range from Pretty Flamingo’s poppermost to The One In The Middle’s self-mockery, from the R&B/jazz vamp Groovin’ to Dylan’s With God On Our Side and If You Gotta Go, Go Now. THE GODLESS LAST GASP Paul Jones Crucifix In A Horseshoe (VERTIGO, 1971) Previously 1969’s mish-mash Come Into My Music Box seemed to signpost Jones’s exit from rock stage-wards, so Crucifix In A Horseshoe came out of nowhere – and quickly returned. From the same louche, cynical, musically eclectic and theatrical…

THE MANY fans who despaired of ever hearing more Sly Stone music after his misfiring 1982 album, Ain’t But The One Way, will be delighted – or at least intrigued – to learn of a five-track hoard of unheard songs that have been surfacing online since September 2023, and are now available on all streaming services. The five singles – Destiny, Without A One, Role Model, One More Hit and Big City (the latter featuring a guest appearance from rapper Del The Funky Homosapien) – represent Stone’s most fully realised batch of new music since 1982; there’s even an elaborate music video for One More Hit on YouTube, with a starring role for Stone himself, his final onscreen appearance. The tracks are the result of a collaboration with LA musician/producer…

I LIVED NEAR the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead. I was thinking of starting my own independent label, and I asked the doorman for any recommendations. He mentioned Suede, and a contact name, who I heard as “Bernard Butter”! A demo subsequently turned up, which included The Drowners and Metal Mickey; it was interesting but didn’t blow me away, though I kept the tape on top of my stereo, so I didn’t forget them. I was going to NME’s ‘On’ night of new bands in New Cross, January 1992, and Suede were on the bill. I couldn’t believe what I saw, it was pure goosebumps. They were so out of step with what was going on, like shoegaze and Teenage Fanclub. Suede referenced bands I loved growing up, like Roxy…

MICKEY NEWBURY’s patriotic medley from 1971, recorded for his album ’Frisco Mabel Joy and since taken up by everyone from Elvis Presley to the London Welsh Male Voice Choir, was not without controversy, given its Dixie component’s association with the Jim Crow South. But as Newbury’s biographer Joe Ziemer puts it, “Slowing down Dixie and turning it into a ballad drew out its beauty – and robbed the Ku Klux Klan of their marching song.” “The inspiration was Joan Baez,” says Susan Newbury, citing the folk icon with impeccable leftist credentials, who recorded a version of Newbury’s San Francisco Mabel Joy and performed it with him at Big Sur festival in 1971. “They got along famously, but they fought like cats and dogs when it came to politics. We were…

Paul Weller Find El Dorado PARLOPHONE. CD/DL/LP IN A TV title sequence, former pop heartthrob Adam Faith, in a faded denim jacket and a feathered barnet, grabs an unattended black briefcase off the back seat of a parked limo and scarpers. But what’s this? Faith trips, the briefcase falls open and its payload of lovely lolly is cast to the winds – a low-rent callback to the denouement of Stanley Kubrick’s classic track-heist noir, The Killing. The predicament of Faith’s character – Ronald ‘Budgie’ Bird – is made more wretched by the show’s theme song, a mournful dirge voiced by a none-more-enervated singer who may or may not be The Kinks’ Ray Davies (the theme was released under the act name Cold Turkey in 1972) – although if it’s not…

Africa Express Africa Express Presents… Bahidorá WORLD CIRCUIT. CD/DL/LP YOU CAN hold Covid partially responsible for the hiatus in Africa Express activities since a 2019 show in east London, but various governments’ decisions to make their countries less accessible has worked against artists whose goal is to spread understanding and empathy through music. Perhaps, then, we should read something into Damon Albarn and co’s decision to announce their rebirth at a five-hour performance at last year’s Bahidorá, a Mexican festival a day’s travel from the USA’s southern border. In the interim, the world has seen the seemingly unstoppable rise of young African artists who participate on a level playing field – the Afrobeats and amapiano stars, for example – without any need for BBC Radio 3 or broadsheet arts coverage…

Chapter 1: Where Does Happiness Come From? LEGACYPLUS. DL/LP The third generation keeps the Kuti family Afrobeat business running smoothly and evolving. HAVING SHARED a double album with his father, Femi, in 2022, Fela Kuti’s multi-instrumentalist grandson now stands alone in the spotlight, aware of the responsibility his family name brings yet capable of boosting the Afrobeat flame with youthful energy. Chapter 1 is not an album for the easily exhausted; instead, the 13 tracks gallop along, urging listeners and musicians to stand up for what’s right and take the fight to the forces of oppression. Opener Take It All In Before The Lights Go Out sets the scene, the young bandleader showing how to bring the Afrobeat template up to date without diluting the complexity of the polyrhythms or…

On Land And In The Sea ALPHABET BUSINESS CONCERN. LP Sheer heart attack: merry punk-progsters’ frenzied second from 1989. ELEVEN YEARS on from drawing the ire of Marillion fans when invited to support the band by singer Fish, the Cardiacs mystified Britpop kids when Blur put them on the bill at their 1995 Mile End mega-gig. Hear this deluxe vinyl reissue of the Kingston-upon-Thames oddballs’ second LP and it’s easy to understand why. The Leader Of The Starry Skys, Mare’s Nest and Two Bites Of Cherry have nods to War Childera Jethro Tull and the Mothers Of Invention, as well as occasional Van Der Graaf Generator’s Pawn Hearts’ horn parts, but the breakneck pace, and manic intensity of late frontman Tim Smith, mark out On Land And In The Sea…