Tabla de contenidos para October 2024 en MOJO

IN JANUARY 1974, MELODY MAKER’S MICHAEL Watts found himself in Chicago witnessing the start of the first Bob Dylan tour in eight years – a lucrative jaunt with The Band around North America’s bigger arenas. After such a long absence from the stage, Dylan’s motives were widely perceived as cynical, mercenary, but David Geffen, his new label boss, claimed otherwise. “Bob Dylan is a multi-multi-millionaire,” Geffen told Watts. “He doesn’t need the money.” Fifty years on, Dylan has spent this past summer on tour with Willie Nelson and Plant & Krauss, clearly enjoying himself with a setlist capricious even by his own standards. At 83 – an age deemed unviable for US presidents – he will be back in the UK and Europe this autumn, just before a Dylan biopic…

BORN HOWARD Trafford in Scunthorpe in 1952, Howard Devoto was never one to linger. The original frontman of Buzzcocks, he quit after their pioneering ’76 EP Spiral Scratch to channel sublime post-punk alienation with Magazine, confiding penetrating unease on such essential 45s as Shot By Both Sides and a series of extraordinary LPs. After their 1981 split, he completed the decade with 1983’s solo album Jerky Versions Of The Dream and Luxuria’s electro-acoustic otherness. Thereafter, he re-collaborated with co-founder Buzzcock Pete Shelley for 2002’s Buzzkunst and presided over a 2009 Magazine re-formation. Now Buzzkunst has been “reconfigured” as Special Sauce, conjoined with archival Devoto set Designoid. “Designoid’s only a mini-album,” he warns MOJO, “I thought I wouldn’t push my luck…” Was Buzzkunst really almost titled ‘Buzzcunts’? That was my little…

IN THE late ’90s, guitarist Chris Forsyth was digging through the racks of famed St Mark’s Place record shop Kim’s Under-ground when he found Robert Quine and Fred Maher’s 1984 album Basic. A fan of Quine’s guitar work with The Voidoids and Matthew Sweet, he took the album home, only to discover it sounded like neither. “It has a lot in common with Eno’s stuff,” explains Forsyth, leader of Philadelphia’s Solar Motel Band. “It’s kind of an ambient record but it has the beats, and the guitar playing is just sublime. It’s also odd because it was largely rejected by the people who liked Quine’s guitar playing.” The only person Forsyth knew who shared his love of this “moody, mood-forward” album was his longtime collaborator Nick Millevoi, so when they…

WHENEVER BERRY GORDY was asked about Motown’s greatest fans, he would invariably single out those in Britain. “The ones that meant the most to us were in the UK,” he said a few years ago, “because they never forget anything. Once you’re a star there, you’re a star forever.” Gordy had good reason to feel that way. His company’s first global hit was My Guy by Mary Wells – which Britons began buying in quantity from its release in May 1964. Typically enthusiastic was the Coventry Evening Telegraph, where reviewer Arthur Reeves judged it his Record Of The Week: “Mary Wells… a favourite with The Beatles, I hear, singing a fine beat number with sweet voice and good lyrics.” My Guy peaked in the Top 5 during June, selling over…

Bob Dylan Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY June 29, 2024 BY THE TIME Bob Dylan and the Outlaw Music Festival truck into Jones Beach, the seabreezy amphitheatre on Long Island’s southern shore, the Dylanologists have settled down somewhat. After wrapping two-and-a-half years of Rough And Rowdy Ways touring with a nearly static setlist and a rotating slot for occasional surprise covers, Dylan rewrote the programme twice in the summer’s first two shows – a tantalising throwback to the Never Ending Tour’s wild surprises. But at Jones Beach a week later, the only variation is the hooded figure who appears behind the centre-stage piano as Beethoven’s 9th plays, shedding his sweatshirt as the band strikes up Highway 61 Revisited, a one-night-only entrance. Just because the setlist is relatively static, it doesn’t…

Lady Blackbird Slang Spirituals BMG. CD/DL/LP THERE ARE plenty of reasons why Lady Blackbird stands out. And not just for the billowing peroxide Afro or the shimmering gowns and capes. There’s the fabulous voice, of course (the passion of Tina Turner meets Amy Winehouse’s bluesy blur). There’s the fact that her muse inhabits an era predating Pro Tools and Auto-Tune. And then, perhaps, there’s her age; it’s rare for a singer of 39 to discover international fame suddenly hurtling towards them. Those years of living – the hard knocks, the career misfires – feed into the second album of the Lady Blackbird project with lyrics about rebirth and resilience. New Mexico-born Marley Munroe had plenty of false starts before she assumed her current persona and wowed critics in 2021 with…

BY THE early 1960s, modernists – followers of modern jazz distinct from trad jazz fans (attrib. Daily Sketch) – had developed a taste for authentically groovy music of all kinds, predominantly black and from the US, and called themselves Mods. Randy Cozens became dedicated to the music and the style in 1962, aged 14, and was critical of the next intake, circa ’64, who went around in parkas (so last year) following The Who, Kinks and Small Faces. When Mod fully revived in 1979 after a 12-year lull (no time at all, really), Cozens, still only 31, wrote fervently to the music press urging the latest crop of Mods to renounce The Jam and give themselves up to the real deal: “I was around in the early ’60s and I’m…

Art Brut And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice! EDSEL. CD/DL Confident debut Bang Bang Rock And Roll and catchy sequel It’s A Bit Complicated still sound fresh; Eddie Argos’s sprechgesang balanced out by punchy guitar riffs and sharp pop sensibilities. Three extra CDs – live takes, demos, alternative mixes – largely repeat the same material. AC Alan Clayson Ancient And Modern TLAK. DL/CD The renegade cult from “Rock’s Lunatic Fringe” presents a wilful 1973-2017 best-of. Within lurks inventive pop, bold experiment and the compulsion to go too far, sincerely, in a full-bodied cri de cœur (see Lord Sutch panegyric The Last Show On Earth). File beside impending auto-biog Nut Rocker. IH Dinosaur Jr. Farm JAGJAGUWAR. LP Fifteenth anniversary vinyl for 2009’s bumper crop of Dino-rock: loud, fervent and forlorn.…

Dreams: The Many Lives Of Fleetwood Mac Mark Blake NINE EIGHT. £22 DID FLEETWOOD Mac thank their cocaine dealer on the sleeve of Ru mours? Did Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie insist on having grand pianos in their hotel suites during the Tusk tour? Did the band steal the house cat from the Albuquerque Tingley Coliseum in November 1979? It’s testament to the lavish sprawl of the Fleetwood Mac story that MOJO writer Mark Blake can round up the most enduringly scurrilous myths about the band and squash them into a brief “true-or-false?” chapter without diminishing the ludicrous richness of their story. (Answers: no; yes; only the female members). From their first appearance at The Windsor National Jazz And Blues Festival in August 1967 (“You’ll never be a star if…

THE FOUR TOPS were built on love,” Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir told this writer in March 2022, as he prepared for his group’s final UK dates. “We loved what we were doing… we just wanted to be able to entertain and be loved and respected. And we got that.” One of the great Motown vocal groups, The Four Tops did indeed achieve their dream. Allied with the mighty Holland-Dozier-Holland writing/production team, they scored powerful, emotion-packed hits that have ascended to classic status: the pleading, heartsick I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) hit US Number 1 in 1964, with the sublime Reach Out I’ll Be There repeating the feat in America and Britain in 1966. Like all the best vocal groups, their harmony came from more than practice, rooted in…

SEPTEMBER 1996 …DJ Shadow intros Endtroducing SEPTEMBER 22 The UK album charts were having a late Britpop moment. Kula Shaker were at Number 1 with K, Oasis’s (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was at 7, and from 15 to 18 Pulp’s Different Class, Oasis’s Definitely Maybe and Suede’s Coming Up congregated headily in a former Number 1s club. Yet, nestled between them was a very different record: DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…, a cerebral hip-hop opus of depth, mystery and infinite nuance, had debuted and peaked at Number 17. DJ Shadow, AKA Josh Davis of Davis, California, had his hip-hop epiphany as a pre-teen hearing Grandmaster Flash’s The Message. Fast forward to the early 1990s and, inspired by such fearless rap collage-ists as The Bomb Squad, Prince Paul and Double Dee &…

HELLO AUTUMN 1969 I’d been in The Empty Vessels, a fairly successful band in the West Country with Steve Upton and my brother Glenn. After a car accident, basically, I realised I had to have a crack at being a professional musician or forget about it. So I went off to London and the other two guys came with me. My brother didn’t last long. We’d met Miles Copeland, who effectively became our manager, and we put an ad in Melody Maker for guitar players. After failing to approve anyone, we reevaluated. I really liked two guitars playing together in harmony, because I’m quite good at coming up with what I call pseudo-classical melodies. We got Ted Turner and Andy Powell back, and it was so obvious that it was…

PLUS! TWO UNHEARD DYLAN TRACKS! THE HISTORY BOOKS DO NOT, AS A RULE, COMMEMORATE 1974 as a major inflection point in popular music. There isn’t quite the glut of classics that arrived in a keynote year like 1971; the revolutions of punk are still a little further down the line. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take much digging to find a wealth of incredible music that was made 50 years ago. Forever Young is our celebration of 1974, and its eclectic, sometimes uncategorisable music. What the year lacked in epochal change, it made up for with individual masterpieces, and we’ve gathered a bunch of them here. Forever Young runs the gamut from Americana to spacerock, from funk explosions to Krautrock meditations, from folk to Afrobeat, and on into stranger, more esoteric zones.…

HE LEFT us aged just 61 in Memphis in August 2006, but Arthur Lee’s legacy as leader of the legendary Love remains immense: 1967’s Forever Changes in particular is one of rock’s true masterpieces. In 2025, that canon will be augmented with JustTo Remind You. Billed as the first new Arthur Lee/Love studio album since 1992, it collects material recorded from 1990 to 2005, curated and polished by trusted collaborators. Suffering from leukaemia and knowing the end was near, Lee gave his wife Diane two CDs of 17 songs, annotated with a red Sharpie and marked with a hand-drawn Love logo and the date, ‘10-22-04’. “Around 2014, Diane had mentioned this project,” says George Wallace of High Moon Records, whose reissues include Love’s lost 1973 LP Black Beauty. “In 2016,…

“WE’D FINISHED touring, we had some free time, and the studio was open. So we thought, Why don’t we just go and record something?” says Pixies drummer David Lovering, down the line from California. He’s talking about new Pixies LP The Night The Zombies Came, which will appear just 23 months after 2022’s previous album Doggerel. The group recorded it in three weeks last October with producer Tom Dalgety, who’s worked on the group’s last three records. They worked at Guilford Sound in Vermont, a facility billed as “New England’s premier eco-friendly recording studio and music retreat space.” “The power is really, really clean over there, you can hear it,” says Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago, also speaking from the West Coast. “Tom’s brutally honest – we’re done with the honeymoon…

I WAS on the dole and living on Grafton Street in Hull when I got Spotlight On Al Green. I’d just formed The Housemartins with Stan [Cullimore] as a two-piece, it would have been about 1984. It wasn’t immediate, because there are 24 songs on a double album. It took me a while to get into it. Like many soul records, it took an incident close to heartbreak. I was hoping for a relationship, and when I realised that might not be happening, all the songs dropped into place, like it did with the Buzzcocks when I was about 15. It was, There’s no way you’ve not written that about me. Suddenly his voice fitted every moment… he’s got me, he knows what I feel. And because he had, or…

1 JACK WHITE NO NAME 1 In July, shoppers at Third Man stores got an exclusive free Jack White solo album on white label, packed with explosive electric blues. Listen to it thanks to kindly online rippers. Find it: YouTube 2 LAURA MARLING NO ONE’S GONNA LOVE YOU LIKE I CAN A piano and voice miniature from her new album, beauteously vowing to make life meaningful against all odds. Find it: Instagram 3 BILL CALLAHAN KEEP SOME STEADY FRIENDS AROUND The Resuscitate! live set mostly jazzily expands Callahan’s recent songs. But also this Smog-era nugget: a lugubrious precursor of latterday Zen Bill. Find it: streaming services 4 HARD QUARTET EARTH HATER Stephen Malkmus’s superband with Jim White (Dirty Three), Emmett Kelly (Cairo Gang) and Matt Sweeney (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, etc) goes hard with arch…

JUNE 1993. EX-GALAXIE 500 SINGER/GUITARIST Dean Wareham is on tour with the re-formed Velvet Underground, fronting his group Luna at Edinburgh Playhouse. “We sat jet-lagged in our dressing room,” recalls Wareham today, “hearing them play Venus In Furs through this little monitor speaker. It sounded amazing. For all the bands that are told they ‘sound like The Velvet Underground,’ nobody else actually sounds like that.” His old band had always been compared with the Velvets – and spectral traces of Reed and co do chime through Galaxie 500’s three storied studio albums, released from 1988 to 1990. But Galaxie 500 vocals don’t sound like Lou Reed. Their bass and drums don’t sound like The Velvet Underground. However, Galaxie 500 could conjure similarly transportive melody from a couple of chords, and…

THE HARMONIUM BEGINS, WHEEZING A FEW aimless notes into the air. Then the tabla player joins in and we have a tune. It’s the WOMAD festival in Reading, July 1993. MOJO is sitting crosslegged on the ground, second or third row. Another harmonium joins in, then Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, sitting left of centre as we watch, his hair matted with sweat, starts tapping a rhythm. The second line of seated performers behind him start clapping in unison. He sings a long, keening note, they pick up and run with it. Raising both arms, Khan serves notice that he’s about to take command. The chorus of Mustt Mustt begins – many here will recognise it from the Massive Attack remix that has recently become Britain’s first chart entry in Urdu.…

BOB DYLAN TOLD ROB FRABONI to call his boss: the singer needed to borrow the sound engineer for six weeks, to help orchestrate one of rock’n’roll’s most daring feats. Days after Christmas in 1973, and just days before Dylan would return to the road for the first time in eight years for a tour of untested and enormous sports venues, he and The Band rendezvoused at The Forum in Los Angeles. They had rehearsed a little at a nearby studio, the Village Recorder, where a month earlier they’d cut a dozen songs for a new album with Fraboni in just three days. But the question now was how the massive sound system belonging to Bill Graham – the iconoclastic promoter who had helped manifest this miracle – actually worked. Robbie…

Katy J Pearson Someday, Now HEAVENLY. CD/DL/LP THERE’S A moment on Sky, the closing track of Someday, Now, where Katy J Pearson looks at the space around her and realises she’s out on her own. “I get why people make a home here,” the Bristol-based singer-songwriter admits. “I know there’s a need to settle down.” From Someday, Now, it would appear that’s not a need that Pearson shares. Instead, she says, she is “an eagle” – not the first modern singer-songwriter to use that metaphor as they embark on the quest for freedom. Recorded with a band that includes Huw Evans (H Hawkline) and Davey Newington (Boy Azooga) and produced by electronic maven Nathan ‘Bullion’ Jenkins, Someday, Now doesn’t quite have that sense of wild heraldic nobility. It’s more vulnerable,…

Make It Right FIRE. CD/DL/LP A longtime master of versatility staggers anew with his range. THE SONG supply of Steve Wynn has long seemed inexhaustible. The Dream Syndicate, The Baseball Project, a half-dozen other acts: no matter what group Wynn has powered for 40 years, his wildly branching pop-rock has always rushed from some deep vein. Though his first solo album in more than a dozen years is rich with friends like Mike Mills, Linda Pitmon, and Dennis Duck, its linchpin remains the way his technical reach rarely exceeds his stylistic grasp. Wynn steps from the beaten country beauty of Make It Right to the Suicide tremors of Vegas missive What Were You Expecting, from the Blonde On Blonde haze of Simpler Than The Rain to the Lou Reed psychedelic…

Søren Skov Orbit Adrift FREDERIKSBERG. DL/LP Danish saxophonist’s new band’s otherworldly debut. Every player gets a chance to shine on Søren Skov Orbit’s restless first full-length. Less psychedelic than Skov’s fusion past in Mythic Sunship, his full-toned tenor and soprano melodies nonetheless traverse inner and outer space on lengthy, evocative standouts Reflections Of Rif and Notifications Of Nothingness, with subtle nods to Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp and Hans Dulfer along the way. Much of the scene setting comes via Peder Vind’s heavily reverbed and hypnotising piano motifs (at his most ghostly and ethereal on Orbiting), while bassist Casper Nyvang Rask steals the show on The Valley and drummer Rune Lohse and percussionist Ayi Solomon unleash an unstoppable rhythmic tour-de-force on Naration. Otherworldly modal jazz with Sun Ra spaciousness, a propulsive,…

Eno Dir: Gary Hustwit FILM FIRST/TIGERLILY PRODUCTIONS. C/S FRENCH DIRECTOR Jean-Luc Godard once declared that films should have a beginning, a middle and an end, “but not necessarily in that order”. Gary Hustwit’s documentary is that idea squared: its interview footage and archive clips, the latter culled from 500 hours of film and video in Eno’s personal collection, ‘randomly’ sequenced courtesy of proprietary generative software created by the director and digital artist Brendan Dawes, meaning that each viewing offers a unique filmic experience. The approach echoes Brian Eno’s career-long interest in art and music that effectively builds itself, and as a means of enlivening the documentary format it undoubtedly works, each major editing cut accompanied by on-screen coding, so you know something new, and perhaps delightfully incongruous, is coming.…

KINKY FRIEDMAN was an enigma. On one hand he upset countless prigs, and yet his fans ranged from Trump voters to Marxists. A combination of Hank Williams, Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce, he was a great American humorist, adept at locating his nation’s absurdities and turning them into country songs, mystery novels and political campaigns. He was born in Chicago on November 1, 1944, and moved to Texas with his Jewish family as a child where they ran a summer camp for kids. His first musical foray was in surf-rock band King Arthur & The Carrots, a novel aggregation in that they were nowhere near a wave. Fame came with Kinky Friedman & The Texas Jewboys, the satirical country-rockers formed in 1973 with whom he sang classics like They Ain’t…

Nubya Garcia LONDON JAZZ MOVER What music are you currently grooving to? Taylor McFerrin’s Early Riser, the new Hiatus Kaiyote album Love Heart Cheat Code, and Ludwig Göransson, who did the score for Oppenheimer. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? That’s tough, but right now, my two favourites are Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer – he was a genius, with such a command of human emotion, making you experience like, galactic forces! – and Love Tape: With Voices by Marquis Hill, a trumpeter from Chicago. What was the first record you ever bought? And where did you buy it? Jaco Pastorius’s self-titled album, when I was about 11, at a flea market type thing. Which musician, other than yourself, have you ever wanted to be? I…

…RUFUS WAINWRIGHT’s (below) orchestral work Dream Requiem made its live premiere in France in June with Meryl Streep as narrator. Said Rufus, “Dream Requiem will be released in the early winter” …PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING’s The Last Flight arrives in October. It concerns the final days of pioneering female aviator Amelia Earhart: notably, no original source material was used: “We’ve recreated archive,” says mainman J. Willgoose, Esq., “almost like writing a script” …images of ex-Hole bandmates COURTNEY LOVE and MELISSA AUF DER MAUR in London appeared online in June, with the description, “having a blast – first time in studio together in 24 years” …including an Americana cover of the Velvets’ Femme Fatale, SID GRIFFIN’s The Journey From Grape To Raisin arrives on October 4 …having reunited with old group The…

ON A SUMMER evening several years ago, when the pandemic was still curtailing social lives, Gillian Welch went for a solo walk in East Nashville, the landscape a riot of seasonal green. She watched a train cross a trestle, framed by the blue horizon. “An empty trainload of sky,” she thought. Back at home, sun still shining, she sat with partner David Rawlings in their living room and told him about the phrase, so evocative of that moment’s tangle of promise, tragedy, and beauty. It was the whole world within a line. For a spell, it was also the title of the pair’s first album of original songs since Welch’s The Harrow & The Harvest in 2011 and Rawlings’ Poor David’s Almanack in 2017. “That somehow was at the core…

“When we started it was easy, we just had one acoustic guitar.”MOUSSA ‘ABINDI’ IBRAHIM “THIS CITY is very special for many reasons,” says Moussa ‘Abindi’ Ibrahim. He’s trying to explain what it is that makes Agadez, the Niger town that has spawned some of Africa’s most innovative guitarists, so musically fertile. “We are famous throughout the desert for our hospitality, for respecting our traditions and for living in harmony. But, mostly, we are famous for our way of playing.” Offering a mix of traditional desert blues and original compositions, Etran De L’Aïr are a family band and veterans of Agadez’s demanding wedding circuit, where every gig lasts four or five hours. In their earliest days – they started out in 1995 – they would regularly walk 25 kilometres to put…

ON APRIL 22, 1964, THE WORLD’S Fair opened in New York City, featuring exhibitions, performances and food from 80 nations, a symbol of international cooperation at the height of the Cold War. One of the highlights of the exposition was the Ford Motor Company’s introduction of the sleek Mustang, a sexy symbol of the Detroit-based corporation’s percolating production line. Industrial progress in the United States was matched by advancements in civic life. President Lyndon B. Johnson, on his way to a landslide election victory, signed a voting rights bill that provided for direct federal intervention to register black voters in the segregated South and elsewhere. It was a move that reversed over a century of voter disenfranchisement in America. Meanwhile, a British musical invasion was in full force. In 1964,…

MY SEAT was up where the air was rare, in the high tier at the back of the oval-shaped arena. But the distance and hockey-rink echo couldn’t dull the shock of Bob Dylan’s entrance with The Band at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, shortly after 2pm on Sunday, January 6, 1974. For the opening number of his first local gig in a decade and my first-ever Dylan concert, the singer pulled a topical broadside, Ballad Of Hollis Brown, from his last fully acoustic album, 1964’s The Times They Are-Changin’, and whipped it with electric-blues venom: the enraged-preacher cadence of his vocal, Robbie Robertson’s barbed tendrils of guitar and the rock-slide charge of Levon Helm’s drumming. The song was no idle choice. Dylan last performed Hollis Brown live in October, 1964, at…

Mercury Rev Born Horses BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP IT’S BEEN NEARLY 26 years since Jonathan Donahue sang “Holes/Dug by little moles,” on Deserter’s Songs, the record that reanimated Mercury Rev’s ailing career with the force of a lightning bolt. It remains a strikingly tender line on a song that strives to capture the implacable march of passing time, the way in which life can be slowly destabilised, its certainties gradually scratched away by invisible forces that might as well be – why not? – tiny burrowing mammals. The animals on Born Horses, Mercury Rev’s first LP of original material since 2015’s excellent The Light In You, are of a quite different order, however; horses that are about to take flight, birds that live inside you, extended family of the odd apocalyptic…

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Wild God BAD SEED/PIAS. CD/DL/LP DURING THE last five years, Nick Cave often seemed like a lionhearted shepherd in a time of global upheaval, guarding a flock with psalms and sermons of his own experience and hand. Four years after the 2015 death of his teenage son, Arthur, Cave wrestled with and stood in his grief on Ghosteen, a masterclass of surreal visions and spiritual tests. Just months later, when the world shared a new extended nightmare of collective loss and suffering, Ghosteen suggested a survival guide that was candid about the madness involved in moving on. So, too, with Carnage, a 2021 pairing with Warren Ellis that expanded the palette of Ghosteen and grappled directly with the world’s tandems of despair and death.…

Astrid Williamson Shetland Suite INCARNATION. DL/LP Slaying in the Isles: musical polymath’s poignant voyage home. Drawn back to the music of her native Shetland when her mother died after suffering from dementia, Astrid Williamson recorded a version of Da Selkie Wife’s Song, one of the local dialect pieces that her mum continued to remember after she had lost the ability to speak. Digging deeper, the one-time Goya Dress frontwoman has stitched together a patchwork of Shetland material for her tenth studio album, crofters’ chants melting into misty electronics and Music For A New Society art noise to forge a powerful but understated reckoning with the eternal. Williamson’s stately versions of Baloo Balilli, King Orfeo and Da Narrowa Wheel retain their otherworldly allure as she underlines folk music’s unstated core message:…

Faces Faces At The BBC RHINO. CD/DL/LP FOR A group renowned for their boozy, boisterous live performances, the Faces have been woefully represented by in-concert releases. Their only official live album, 1974’s Coast To Coast, was an underwhelming beast that didn’t even feature original bassist Ronnie Lane (he’d departed a year earlier) and is now perhaps best known for providing the crowd noise sample at the start of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. There has been a smattering of live tracks on retrospective compilations, plus some TV performances and the inevitable bootlegs, but that’s about it. Until now. Overseen by Rob Caiger, who did such a splendid job in the mid-2010s resurrecting the Small Faces’ catalogue from previously lost tapes, Faces At The BBC includes no fewer than 85 tracks broadcast…

DEMYSTIFYING Jethro Tull’s magic formula in a 1978 interview, frontman Ian Anderson said: “Stylistically, I’ve always said that we can’t be a heavy riff group because Led Zeppelin are the best in the world. We can’t be a blues-influenced R&B rock’n’roll group because the Stones are the best in the world. We can’t be a slightly sort of airy-fairy mystical sci-fi synthesizing abstract freak-out group because Pink Floyd are the best in the world. And so what’s left? And that’s what we’ve always done. We’ve filled the gap.” Thin-skinned and curmudgeonly, Anderson rarely made being in one of the most successful bands of the 1970s seem like much of a joy, while his antagonistic relationship with the music press has not perhaps helped secure Tull the kind of kudos legacy…

CHICAGO VOCALIST EVELYN THOMAS (below, b.1953) worked in musical theatre before having a UK Top 30 disco hit in 1976 with Weak Spot, produced by Ian Levine. Levine oversaw her debut album and EP, and in 1984, with Fiachra Trench, co-created Thomas’s biggest UK hit, the pumping 1984 Number 5 High Energy. She continued to record into her sixties. SONGWRITER/PRODUCER JERRY FULLER (b.1938) sang with his brother in Fort Worth, Texas, before going solo as a rockabilly singer. From 1961 he wrote hits for Ricky Nelson, while as a writer/producer at Columbia he oversaw success with Gary Puckett & The Union Gap, The Peanut Butter Conspiracy and O.C. Smith, and, as an independent operator, Al Wilson. In his seventies he recorded his own versions of the hit songs he’d created.…

AS THE vinyl revival continues to prosper, the Third Man label is a mark of particular quality. Record gourmands who enjoy their annual Vault subscription receive, each quarter, a package of limited edition, exclusive vinyl delivered to their door. Other contents of the package vary, but can range from pins and posters to patches and photo books, frequently housed in a collector’s box set. Vault members can also access exclusive media, exclusive merchandise and limited-edition records, access to pre-sales, $50 off first year on nugs.net, 10 per cent off their tab at The Blue Room Bar, and 10 per cent off site-wide and in TMR storefronts. In July, Vault Package #61 was Bob Dylan’s The 1974 Live Recordings: The Missing Songs From Before The Flood, on triple green LP with…