Tabla de contenidos para November 2023 en MOJO

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 WELCOME, EVERYONE, TO OUR 30TH anniversary issue of MOJO. It’s humbling, as we call up old friends and plan the festivities, to be reminded how much our magazine means to so many of you. Jack White remembers saying to Meg White, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could get on the cover of MOJO?” Kamasi Washington and John Grant tell us about the validation brought by winning MOJO’s Album Of The Year. Readers all over the world – hello, Alan Mannings and Chris Jackson in Australia! – sent pictures of their entire collections of MOJOs, from issue 1. Such love encouraged us to indulge ourselves a…

“We have the only album that has both Noel Gallagher and Alice Cooper on it.” AFTER SOMETHING of a transitional decade following the worldwide success of 2010’s Brothers and ’11’s El Camino, The Black Keys are on something of a roll at the moment, preparing to drop their third album in as many years, likely to be a 20-track double-LP – which the duo are variously calling “our Saturday-night party record”, and “our best”. In the wake of 2021’s tribute to hill country blues Delta Kream, and last year’s lockdown pressure release Dropout Boogie, singer/ guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney decided to keep recording. To freshen things up, they called Beck with a view to finessing a collaboration first discussed 20 years ago, when he took the duo…

We were living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. My dad, who was a writer and poet, was teaching at Louisiana State University, and he had a meeting with one of his students at our house. This student walks into the living room waving Highway 61 and saying, “You have to listen to this, it’s amazing!” I was 12, I had just started taking guitar lessons and was really into the whole folk scene, but I’d never really heard Bob Dylan – Imight have heard a song on the radio or a cover, but I’d never really studied him. They went into another room and left this record on the table. I very carefully put it on the stereo, and BOOM! The words were so mysterious and there was something about the…

1 AL GREEN PERFECT DAY Reverend Al makes sacred capital out of Lou’s heroin epiphany, with the Hi Rhythm Section in support. The “You’re gonna reap just what you sow” climax is magnificent. Find it: streaming services 2 JONI MITCHELL HELP ME (DEMO) The first revelation from Joni’s forthcoming Archives Vol. 3: a solo demo of Help Me that shows her leap from acoustic troubadour to jazz sophisticate wasn’t so great after all. Find it: YouTube 3 BLACK PUMAS MORE THAN A LOVE SONG From the Grammy winners’ second LP, fresh-but-classic soul moves and a cry for survival. And dig the chess/talking-to-dogs video. Find it: YouTube 4 THE MIRACULOUS LOVE KIDS FT BETH GIBBONS ATMOSPHERE/“HEROES” Young female musicians forced to leave the Taliban’s Afghanistan and the Portishead singer sweetly conjoin…

Sufjan Stevens ★★★★ Javelin ASTHMATIC KITTY. CD/DL/LP SONGS ABOUT serial killers and figure skaters (John Wayne Gacy Jr; Tonya Harding). An orchestral suite and wordless film hymning a road bridge in Brooklyn (2009’s The BQE). A mostly electronic LP inspired by outsider artist Royal Robertson (2010’s The Age Of Adz), and a lengthy ambient meditation dedicated to his late father, Rasjid (2021’s Convocations). Add Sufjan Stevens’ music for film and ballet to these random CV pin-drops, and it’s clear his pur view has grown prairie-wide. Stevens shapeshifts to rest or build certain muscles, it seems, yet this driven, inscrutable creative still shines brightest when primarily armed with acoustic guitar and voice. If you concur with that take, this record is wonderful news. Discounting A Beginner’s Mind, our host’s 2021 co-write…

Jamila Woods ★★★★ Water Made Us JAGJAGUWAR. CD/DL/LP JAMILA WOODS likes to sink her teeth into a concept. Her 2016 debut album HEAVN explored the reality of what it means to be a black woman in Chicago, celebrating her “black girl magic” while noting “we go missing by the hundreds/Ain’t nobody checking for us”. Her second album, 2019’s Legacy! Legacy!, paid tribute to her creative and cultural heroes but was also part self-portrait, Woods finding her own fierceness in her depiction of Miles Davis yelling “Shut up motherfucker I don’t take requests”, her own restlessness reflected in her chronicle of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s knotty relationship. The concept behind the Chicago-born poet, community organiser, educator and singer/ songwriter’s third album is, simply, love. Only, because this is Woods, it’s…

Martin Simpson and Thomm Jutz ★★★★ Nothing But Green Willow: The Songs Of Mary Sands And Jane Gentry TOPIC. CD/DL/LP Wonder in the mountains: transatlantic celebration of Appalachian songs. On a WW1-era trip to America, collector Cecil Sharp gathered over 90 songs from North Carolina singers Mary Sands and Jane Gentry, part of a huge cache of Appalachian material he believed had survived intact for centuries after going West with English settlers. Subsequent scholars would disagree, and with Brit-folk magus Martin Simpson and German-born Americana expert Thomm Jutz providing sparkly acoustic backing for a raft of British and American singers, Nothing But Green Willow underlines elegantly that the songs have roots all over the UK, and took on significant flavours from black, native American, Celtic and other European traditions during…

★★★★ The Complete Liberty Recordings ESOTERIC. CD Shock waves: three-CD motherlode for UK acid-rock heavyweights. “THEY WERE all brilliant musicians, but a bit unstable,” newly hired Hawkwind violinist Simon House told Melody Maker in 1974 as he reflected on his time with the doomy High Tide, who made two albums for Liberty at the turn of the 1970s. The band led by Jim Morrison-voiced ex-Misunderstood guitarist Tony Hill spiced their Amon Düül II space racket with gigantic fuzz guitar and folky twists. 1969’s Sea Shanties is a cult classic, Death Warmed Up and Missing Out epitomising its fusion of West Coast guitars and W11 squat glower. Recorded after the band moved to Dorset, their self-titled follow-up is more eccentric still, The Joke approximating a Tudor Black Sabbath. A final disc…

★★★★ Woman Is Sweeter NOW-AGAIN. DL/LP Gorgeous reissue of 1969 soundtrack from the composer of Hair. WITH THE primacy afforded him from writing the music to Hair, Montreal composer and pianist Galt MacDermot set up Kilmarnock Records and assembled a crack house band including drummers Idris Muhammad and Bernard Purdie to put down this 1969 score to a documentar y on Yves Saint Laurent. Sought after primarily for sampling purposes – most lucratively for Busta Rhymes, who used the heavy funk bass line from Space on 1996’s Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check – it’s nevertheless worthy in its own right. The high point Tango is a rare groove, all snappy percussion, guitar flicks and piano clinks, which could be tailor-made for the blaxploitation market; MacDermot’s next LP would indeed…

FEW PROTEST singers get to see their songs make an actual, impactful, physical social difference. In the case of Rodriguez, however, it’s arguable that without his 1970 Cold Fact album, apartheid in South Africa might have lasted a generation longer than it did. Jesus Sixto Diaz-Rodriguez was born in Detroit to Mexican parents on July 10, 1942. Known as Sixto – he was their sixth child – his mother died when he was three, and the family lived a typically poor immigrant Motor City life. Rodriguez wasn’t like the others, however. His wife Konny later described him as “a really eccentric guy” who she first noticed at Wayne State University walking down the street with a guitar. That was 1972, and his music career had already flamed out after two…

MOJO at 30 1 THE PRISONERS Deceiving Eye This sinewy beat club beatdown opens In From The Cold, the last album by Medway garage Mods The Prisoners, selected as a Buried Treasure in MOJO 107, back in 2002. This month, though, Graham Day’s reassembled band return to our pages (see p26), with news of a fifth album – a mere 37 years after its predecessor. Written by Graham Day/James Patrick Taylor. 1986 Countdown Records under license from 2 ANIMALS THAT SWIM Kinó Beer “I understand the appeal of the band you like that no-one else does,” Animals That Swim frontman Hank Starrs told MOJO 280, decades after their debut album Workshy was released. A shabby-genteel indie masterpiece from the London pub circuit circa 1994. Written by Hank Starrs, Hugh Barker.…

IT’S THE HOTTEST day of 2023 so far and Pete Townshend is sat in the study of his Oxfordshire home, wearing a woolly stevedore’s hat. MOJO gets the sense that he’s decompressing after the recent The Who Hits Back! world tour. But Townshend is here to discuss Life House, the abandoned concept album/story/movie behind The Who’s 1971 LP, Who’s Next. Both are commemorated in a 50th anniversary box set, which, in contrary Who fashion, has arrived two years late to its own party. The thoughts of Chairman Pete will always have an outlet via Life House. “There’s a documentary being made about it,” he divulges, “and the researcher has found – wait for it, because I know I exaggerate – one thousand interviews I’ve done about Life House.” Life House…

All Mod cons: The Prisoners (from left) Allan Crockford, Johnny Symons, James Taylor and Graham Day in 1983; (inset) the band today on the steps of Abbey Road Studios. Eugene Doyen “PRETTY MUCH ever ything we did was destr uctive.” Graham Day of Medway Scene heroes The Prisoners is reflecting on the first half of the 1980s, years that flickered tantalisingly for his band, then routinely kicked them in the teeth. “It would have been better if we hadn’t been battling people who thought we should sound like Duran Duran.” Formed in Rochester, Kent in 1980 as the Mod revival foundered, they were as influenced by psychedelia, garage rock and punk as the Small Faces. Until their ’86 split, the band released four albums, but were hampered by poor promotion,…

AFTER YEARS OF flying below the radar, Billy Woods is enjoying a moment in the sun. Beloved by Thom Yorke, who featured him on a recent Radio 6 Music Mix, the cultured New York rapper’s recent collaborations with Future Islands frontman Sam Herring, British jazz lion Shabaka Hutchings and spoken-word poet Moor Mother have helped highlight a talent Woods himself has sometimes sought to obscure. Woods has rejected hip-hop’s cult of personality, using balaclavas, pixilation and creative angles to obscure his face in photos and videos. “It started out as a necessity,” says Woods, not his real name, “and came to represent me accurately. I enjoy my privacy. I don’t care to be recognised.” The sheer quality of Woods’ recent album output has made his image seem irrelevant. Prolific, but…

Who Do You Love? (Roulette single, 1963) Robertson was three years into his lead guitar tenure with Ronnie Hawkins – and still just 19 – when he ran riot across this Bo Diddley cover, spearing The Hawks’ frantic gallop with thrilling precision-slalom runs and stiletto-treble sustain. And this was nearly a twoguitar shootout: Roy Buchanan, who played with Ronnie’s cousin Dale, was on the session – alas, on bass. DF The Stones I Throw (Will Free All Men) (ATCO single, 1965) Recorded as Levon And The Hawks, this spiritual Robertson melody and Civil Rights-boostering lyric create a bridge between The Hawks’ Ronnie Hawkins days and The Band, already digging backwards to re-imagine the Great American Songbook. Even the thrown away B-side, He Don’t Love You (And He’ll Break Your Heart)…

Wilco ★★★★ Cousin DBPM. CD/DL/LP THERE WERE not, by current standards, many album reviews in the first issue of MOJO. Our late colleague David Cavanagh tackled Come On Feel The Lemonheads, Teenage Fanclub’s Thirteen and Nir vana’s In Utero, and called the latter’s Scentless Apprentice, with unusual hyperbole, “arguably the most exciting shot of rock music of all time”. Fourteen of the 24 reviews were reissues. “There are few advantages to being 54,” wrote a guesting John Peel in a personal homage to rock’n’roll. “Perhaps the only one is that you are old enough to have had your life transformed by Elvis Presley.” Uncle Tupelo’s Anodyne, released the same day in October 1993 as the Teenage Fanclub album, didn’t make the cut. Elsewhere, reviews of the record often focused on…

Modern Nature ★★★★ No Fixed Point In Space BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP PARTLY A REACTION to the grid-like predictability of contemporar y digital recording, No Fixed Point In Space, true to its Einstein (via Merce Cunningham)-derived title, is predicated on the eschewing of strict rhythms, time signatures, traditional song structures and even syntactically orthodox lyrics. In their place, Blackpoolborn, Cambridgeshire-based Cooper, alongside some estimable confrères, has sought to maximise the textural and dimensional possibilities of part-scored, part-spontaneous ensemble playing alloyed to spare, allusive vocals – an approach influenced by contemplation of the natural world. “I wanted the music and the words to feel like roots, branches, mycelium, the intricacies of a dawn chorus, neurons firing, the unknown,” he says in the accompanying notes. The seeds for this approach were sewn on…

★★★★ ACE. LP Fifth volume in Ace’s superlative series of vinyl comps celebrating the US girl group sound. ONE OF the strongest cuts, also the earliest here, is The Del-Phis’ My Heart Tells Me So (AKA I Know It’s You) from 1961. Raw soul straight out of the Motor City, written by a pre-Motown Martha Reeves, and built around her infectious vocal, all raspy and agitated, it ranks alongside anything coming out of Hitsville USA that year. Equally lively is Bonnie Jean’s Street Dance, an explosive R&B blast from 1964 featuring the Wrecking Crew, Darlene Love & The Blossoms and a screaming, honking sax not unlike Jr Walker’s. The pace slows with album cover stars The Lovettes’ Lonely Girl from 1966, a late-night tear y ballad perfect for a noir…

TOM WAITS may be our greatest method singer. Raised in a nice middleclass San Diego home, almost all he hung onto of his background was his name, as he rose to prominence by living the life of his protagonists, troubled edge-dwellers subsisting on hard liquor in LA. He’d seemingly ruined his voice with booze by 26, all the better to resemble the grizzled souls he conjured on 1975’s live-in-the-studio Nighthawks At The Diner. Even the live recording was a put-on, you’ll notice. Adopting a persona in popular music is not unusual (“Paging Mr Zimmerman!”), indeed it’s almost essential for survival, but Waits went for it to such a degree that sur vival didn’t appear to be his motive. When he met his wife Kathleen Brennan, at the end of the…

WANT FANTASTIC sound in a simple package that is easy to set up and use? No complicated app, no speaker cables – just high-resolution, low-latency wireless audio? That’s DALI EQUI. Established 40 years ago this month, DALI is a renowned global speaker brand and has even run its own record label DALI MUSIC from Denmark since 2000 (recent releases include Uncover by Bjørn Fjæstad and Circles by Nicolai Kornerup). The DALI EQUI system features award-winning OBERON C speakers and a neat Sound Hub Compact which allows you to wirelessly stream your music from your phone, tablet or laptop. Other inputs allow you to connect your TV, CD player or turntable. It’s worth a cool £999, and we have one to give away! Get in the game by completing the crossword, sending…

ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1991, Nirvana began their Nevermind North American tour at Toronto Opera House. The venue capacity was 980 and the band had a road crew of three. Two years and many million album sales later, the In Utero North American tour opened at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, to an audience of 15,000 and with the off-stage team now numbering 17. Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic had on-stage company too: Pat Smear, formerly of LA punk legends the Germs, was now full-time touring guitarist, plus cellist Lori Goldston. Meanwhile, amid fake trees and the state-of-the-art lightshow stood two life-size anatomical models with angel wings, like a pair of dream sentinels. “We were trying to be professional,” Novoselic recalls. “So we put on a show for people:…

ADAM AND JOE 6 Music tag-team DJs Adam Buxton and Joe Cornish’s regular feature Song Wars involved making up witty satirical tunes in the style of Bowie, Dylan and others. In 2008 it alighted on MOJO, with Buxton brewing up two short numbers respectively in the style of late-period Fall (“Other magazines don’t cater to my specific tastes,” delivered in a full-commitment Mark E Smith gurgle) and Loser-era, sample-scratching Beck (“So eclectic we use eclecticity”). Of course, it remains a choice career high for contributors Sylvie Simmons, Andrew Male and Ian Harrison to get namechecks in the latter tune. SAXONDALE Steve Coogan’s TV character Tommy Saxondale – apest controller with anger-management issues – was a loyal reader of MOJO: in the first episode of series two, he’s seen reading the…

“Europeans have always struggled with our words.” AMONG THE outfits Jeremy Dutcher has chosen to complement his brooding, rousing piano ballads, the one he wears in the video for his latest single, Take My Hand, is the most revealing: not just a white cape, lace dress and sparkly earrings, but a medicine pouch necklace gifted by his Grand Chief from the Wolastoq community of indigenous Canada. There is footage, too, of the trans elder Dancing Bear, a jingledress dancer who, like Dutcher, identifies as Two-Spirit: “The intersection of feminine and masculine,” Dutcher explains. “I want to put these images out there, indigenous and queer, because I didn’t see anything like them when I was young, not from TV or YouTube,” Dutcher adds. “I’m excited to give them to the world,…

Roger Waters ★★★★ The Dark Side Of The Moon Redux SGB MUSIC. CD/DL/LP WHY RE-PAINT your masterpiece? Why violate the sacrosanct, inviting comparisons between original and remake? Roger Waters’ reasoning has at least two strands. Firstly, Dark Side addresses madness, so why not embrace folly? Secondly, he argues that the LP’s ever-pertinent messages have gone unheeded, and thus warrant repeating. The aim, Dark Side’s conceptual architect has said, is not to “supersede or replace” the original version he loves, but rather “to remember it and provide an adjunct.” Fifty years on, after cover versions of the entire album by The Flaming Lips and other devotees, Waters has more right than most to meddle. But what a bomb to lob at the Floyd estate HQ. Dark Side Redux, then, but also…

★★★★ IMPULSE! CD/DL/LP East Coast “free jazz quintet with an experimental punk mentality” make the best of their big move to Impulse! after three LPs for International Anthem. THREE DAYS IN the Van Gelder studio have produced a healing effusion of light and shade as well as the sound and fury with which the name of Irreversible Entanglements is often associated. Heady opener Free Love channels the immortal bass line of Arthur Blythe’s Down San Diego Way with the same infectious insouciance that the title track of 2021’s Open The Gates doffed its revolutionar y cap to Art Ensemble Of Chicago’s Theme De Yoyo. Meanwhile the thrillingly stentorian vocal inter ventions of Camae Ayewa (AKA Moor Mother) have never been better integrated into the fluid virtuosity of rhythm section Luke…

★★★★ We Buy Diabetic Test Strips FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP Alt-rap man of the moment Billy Woods reboots his duo project. FOR THOSE of us with a less committed relationship to new hip-hop than we had of old, underground artists can still remind us of rap’s enduringly rich possibilities. A case in point: New York wordsmith Billy Woods, the son of a Zimbabwean political activist and a Jamaican literature professor, whose 20-year stealth career has latterly erupted in a glut of superb albums (cf, this year’s Maps). That run continues on We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, the sixth outing for his Armand Hammer duo with fellow rapper Elucid. JPEGMAFIA and Run The Jewels’ El-P are among the producers, while Moor Mother, on poetry, and Shabaka Hutchings, on flute, contribute to the…

The Who ★★★★★ Who’s Next/Life House UMC/POLYDOR. BR/CD/DL/LP “It’s like an episode of On The Buses dropped into the middle of Tomorrow’s World. But such is The Who’s contrary brilliance.” THE HOTEL Navarro, overlooking Central Park, was one of the few New York establishments that would host the ‘’Orrible ’Oo’ in the 1970s. That situation might have changed, though, had Pete Townshend jumped from one of their upstairs windows in April 1971. Like many Who stories, this one is probably embellished, but illustrates Townshend’s creative turmoil. The group were in New York recording what became Who’s Next, with their rumpled aristocratic co-manager, Kit Lambert, producing. One morning, the guitarist strolled into Lambert’s hotel suite and overheard him talking to his secretar y, Anya Butler: “If Townshend thinks he can swan…

★★★★★ Tim: Let It Bleed Edition RHINO. CD/DL/LP Just shy of its 40th birthday, Tim has never seemed so beautiful. IS THIS THE most purely likeable The ’Mats have ever been? After the band’s spate of anthologies, reissues and reunion runs, the classically built but sonically scarred major label debut of Minneapolis’s romantic miscreants gets its due not only with bonus material but with a remix that reinvents it. Ed Stasium dug deeply into multi-track tapes, stunned to discover the crisp sounds his old pal Tommy Ramone had gotten during the sessions despite his infamously muddy mix. Stasium’s work puts a spotlight beneath these 11 songs, brightening hidden corners until Bastards Of Young, Left Of The Dial and Kiss On The Bus sparkle like unworn jewels. There’s an unrehearsed but…

1 Instant Garage MOJO 115, JUNE 2003 You say: “An emblem of what MOJO does best – exalt the canon (MC5, NY Dolls, Ramones) and point to the holes in it (The Artesians, Mouse And The Traps). Here’s to another 30!” James Paasche, via Twitter The idea with Instant Garage and the three other CDs in the MOJO Music Guide series was to mix the familiar with the obscure, for an immediate overview of a genre, in this case ’60s garage rock. Compiled largely with the assistance of the ever-helpful Ace Records and the wonderful Miriam Linna and Billy Miller of Norton Records, these 28 tracks might be considered too much but it was a CD underscored by excess: too loud, too raw, too fast, too many. Personal highlights would…

Joan Baez: I Am A Noise ★★★★ Dir: Miri Navasky, Maeve O’Boyle, Karen O’Connor MAGNOLIA PICTURES. C/ST IT BEGINS with a close-up on Joan Baez’s young face, singing an African-American spiritual, Oh Freedom. Her expression is grave and earnest, her voice the spell-binding soprano that Dylan described not long ago – on his website; he’s not in the film in person – as “like a siren from off some Greek Island.” It’s a clever start, encompassing most of what the average person knows about Baez: folk music legend; civil rights and peace activist with the voice of an angel. But the second Baez documentary this century (following 2009’s Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound) adds some new strands to the story. Almost all belong in the third part of…

HELLO JANUARY 1993 I was editing Q magazine, which was so successful that you really couldn’t take too many chances with it. The idea was nagging at me to start something that would be more extreme in its amount of detail, and the level of obscurity it was willing to embrace. In its early stages, it was just me and [editorial mentor] Dave Hepworth having lunches, over which time the idea took more of a solid form. I left Q at the very end of ’92, so from the beginning of ’93, Andy Cowles [designer] and I were free to start on this ‘spook’ project, in an empty floor of an office in Great Titchfield Street. It was so vast we used to actually play football in there. The early…