Table of contents for May 2022 in MOJO (2024)

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MOJO|May 2022THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE…Simon McEwenMOJO Production Editor Simon’s first ever foreign trip was for sister mag MOJO Collections in 2002, interviewing Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in the reggae maverick’s Secret Laboratory near Zurich. It was the highlight of a life-long affair with Jamaican music. This month he reviews Horace Andy’s new album on page 84.Andy CowanLong before he became MOJO’s jazz columnist, Andy edited rap monthly Hip-Hop Connection, where he witnessed Cypress Hill’s rise from underground chancers to rap superstars at close quarters. He tells their tale on page 34. Away from music, his hands are full juggling super fluffy animals (see Klaus, pictured).Ben WardleBefore embarking on Mark Hollis’s biography (extracted from page 50), Ben had warmed up with books including The Art Of The LP and a novel based on Wire’s Pink Flag.…1 min

MOJO|May 2022HELLO OPERATOR!OVER 20 YEARS INTO AN EXTRAORDINARY CAREER, Jack White’s range of influences shows no sign of getting any narrower. In fact, studying the credits for his forthcoming Fear Of The Dawn, the guests and samples are more diverse than ever: Q-Tip and Cab Calloway; the Manhattan Transfer and The Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison. What might appear random eclecticism in the hands of many, however, seems infallibly coherent, a skill that makes White such a potent connector to the great music of the past. In his cover versions, too, you can see that same kind of scholarship, energy and invention – a way of honouring tradition without being deferential to it. Hence this latest MOJO CD, compiled with the help of White’s Third Man label, draws together the original versions of…6 min

MOJO|May 2022Theories, rants, etc.MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication.E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.ukTHERE’S A STRIKING MOMENT AT THE end of Jack White’s new album, Fear Of The Dawn. “This is the real me,” he sings plaintively in Shedding My Velvet. “I’m not as bad as I was/But I’m not as good as I can be.” For those of us who may have been unhealthily fixated on White’s long juggle between honesty and artifice, it marks the start of a new era. “Everything I’m doing right now,” he tells us this month, “is all rebirth.”A great time, then, to catch up with this most compelling of modern artists. For this issue of MOJO, White gave us unparalleled access to his domain and processes. If you’ve seen the video for Fear Of The Dawn, it was even worked…7 min

MOJO|May 2022ALSO WORKING… Jeff Tweedy (right) announced last month, “I’ve been in the studio with WILCO making some new music, chipping away at a new record. It’s been very, very, very fun and exciting, and we’re having a great time… if I can get everybody in the Wilco braintrust on board, maybe I’ll share a snippet of a work in progress” …enigmatic studio images of P.J. HARVEY (right) with guitar, effects pedals and microphone have emerged, suggesting she s recording new music …session bass trouper Guy Pratt shared an image of himself with PETE TOWNSHEND in a recording studio with the words, “To say the last couple of days recording has been beyond magical would be an understatement.” Whether it’s a solo Townshend project, new Who or something else, was not revealed……1 min

MOJO|May 2022ALICE COOPERFREED FROM Covid restrictions, self-confessed “road rat” Alice Cooper is back touring the US. Four shows in, he has a day off in Louisville, Kentucky, and is entertaining MOJO at (his) 8am, after his daily round of golf. Back in 1970, Detroit’s Alice Cooper band were a ragged, pioneeringly gender-neutral tour de force touting such lean, mean anthems as I’m Eighteen and School’s Out, plus on-stage mock executions and shameless python action. The momentum continued when Alice went solo in 1975 with Welcome To My Nightmare, and after a relatively fallow ’90s and ’00s, 2011’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare sequel triggered a renaissance; 2021’s back-to-basics Detroit Stories went UK Top 5 and was his first Billboard Album topper. And the stories he can divulge, even at 8am: Alice Cooper, super-trooper.What…4 min

MOJO|May 2022JAPAN’S UNKNOWABLE AVANT-ROCK ENIGMAS LES RALLIZES DÉNUDÉS BREAK COVER!IN 2019, Tokyo musician/producer Makoto Kubota received a call from Takashi Mizutani, Les Rallizes Dénudés’ mysterioso-in-black, a man whose extraordinary guitar-playing took up from where Hendrix’s demolition of Wild Thing left off. During the band’s spasmodic lifetime, roughly 1967 to 1996, the ‘Rallies’, as he calls them, had appeared just once on record – an anachronistic, side-long howl of acid rock on a 1973 various artists album. In 1991, three Mizutani-authorised retro CDs, issued as grunge was breaking, spread the word. But by 2019, says Kubota, the band’s bassist between 1969 and 1973, the Rallies had become “famous in a strange way”. Some 100 LRD recordings, mostly live, were in circulation. “Some words were very direct: ‘We’ll make love on the street!’”MAKOTO KUBOTA Mizutani was miffed. But after several conversations,…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Keith RichardsLOOK, f*ckING favourites – it depends how you wake up in the morning. It could be Muddy Waters or f*cking Mozart, hahaha! Let me throw this one out there – Little Walter Jacobs. If you look him up, you cannot go wrong, but I would suggest this album on Chess Records – available nowhere! It’s got Blues With A Feeling on, and all the rest. I had that same album in the early ‘60s, black-and-white on the front, and he looks really bad. The Chess guys were all individuals, and I would say that, as far as harp-playing goes, Walter was the Louis Armstrong of that damn thing. Mick [Jagger] is still in awe of him. We’re both in agreement on that, and Mick is a damn good harp player…2 min

MOJO|May 2022THE ROCK’N’ROLL GOSPEL OF SARAH BROWN, VIA STEVIE WONDER, ROXY MUSIC, PINK FLOYD AND SIMPLE MINDSSINGING HAS been Sarah Brown’s day job since she was spotted in the late ’80s as part of London’s Inspirational Gospel Choir. Then a teenager from Aylesbury, Bucks, Brown found herself on a career trajectory to match her skywards voice. To the disapproval of the choir master, she answered a call from producer Richard Niles to sing backing vocals for Stevie Wonder. “I thought I was going to meet him,” she remembers, laughing. “But I did some ‘bah-bah, oo-ahs’ and that was it!”Since that auspicious start, Brown has lent her voice to musicians including Simply Red, Roxy Music, Pink Floyd and, for the last 16 years, as part of Simple Minds’ line-up. As her career took off, a long-term solo project, an album entitled Sarah Brown Sings Mahalia Jackson, would…3 min

MOJO|May 2022THE ROCK’N’ROLL GOSPEL OF SARAH BROWN, VIA STEVIE WONDER, ROXY MUSIC, PINK FLOYD AND SIMPLE MINDSSINGING HAS been Sarah Brown’s day job since she was spotted in the late ’80s as part of London’s Inspirational Gospel Choir. Then a teenager from Aylesbury, Bucks, Brown found herself on a career trajectory to match her skywards voice. To the disapproval of the choir master, she answered a call from producer Richard Niles to sing backing vocals for Stevie Wonder. “I thought I was going to meet him,” she remembers, laughing. “But I did some ‘bah-bah, oo-ahs’ and that was it!” Since that auspicious start, Brown has lent her voice to musicians including Simply Red, Roxy Music, Pink Floyd and, for the last 16 years, as part of Simple Minds’ line-up. As her career took off, a long-term solo project, an album entitled Sarah BrownSings Mahalia Jackson, would…3 min

MOJO|May 2022A LIFE IN PICTURES1 Eight-year-old Bonnie Raitt with brothers David and Steven, and father John at the helm, April 26, 1958.2 Raitt in 1972, circa second album Give It Up.3 Blues buddies: Raitt and Keith Richards in Toronto during The Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour, 1994.4 The slider: Bonnie giving it some middle finger, London Hammersmith Odeon, August 6, 1977.5 In the mood: Raitt with John Lee Hooker, 1990.7 Endless flight: Raitt with John Prine, author of her signature song Angel From Montgomery, on-stage in Los Angeles, 1993.8 Kindred spirits: Raitt with her childhood idol (and fellow Quaker of Scots ancestry) Joan Baez, at the We The Planet Festival in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, April 20, 2003.9 “I’m proud to be a role model”: Bonnie Raitt, ‘badass blues mama’, at the Greek…1 min

MOJO|May 2022THE BONG SHOW+.HE STREET LOOKED LIKE COUNTLESS OTHER STREETS IN South Central Los Angeles – towering palm trees, picket fences, grids of wooden bungalows – but Louis Freese knew different. It was a dividing line: the border between safety and the opposite. The 17-year-old knew this because he’d crossed it before: as an apprentice with the Family Swan chapter of the Bloods, his initiation had been to spray-paint his crew’s names on a wall in Crips territory. And he knew the risks: “If you get caught, you’re f*cked.”Today his set were headed to a friend’s house to score weed, but their friend lived in the danger zone. “Normally we would take a gun on a walk like this because of the close borderline,” says Freese – now best known as Cypress Hill…16 min

MOJO|May 2022Diamond In The RoughIT WAS SPRING 1966 AND VASHTI Bunyan was in London’s Olympic Studios, recording Mann and Weil’s call-and-response love song The Coldest Night Of The Year with harmony duo Twice As Much. It was the 20-year-old’s next potential single for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records label and she was on a high. “Oh, I just loved it,” she tells MOJO today. “We’d been rehearsing and doing overlays. We wanted a Beach Boys kind of sound, and I think we got it. It was great.”In the two years since she’d been thrown out of Oxford’s Ruskin School Of Drawing And Fine Art, this West London-raised “wild child” had been introduced to Rolling Stones manager Loog Oldham and recorded a brace of singles, a defiantly introspective cover of Jagger/Richards’ Some Things Just Stick…15 min

MOJO|May 2022THE BONG SHOW+.HE STREET LOOKED LIKE COUNTLESS OTHER STREETS IN South Central Los Angeles – towering palm trees, picket fences, grids of wooden bungalows – but Louis Freese knew different. It was a dividing line: the border between safety and the opposite. The 17-year-old knew this because he’d crossed it before: as an apprentice with the Family Swan chapter of the Bloods, his initiation had been to spray-paint his crew’s names on a wall in Crips territory. And he knew the risks: “If you get caught, you’re f*cked.” Today his set were headed to a friend’s house to score weed, but their friend lived in the danger zone. “Normally we would take a gun on a walk like this because of the close borderline,” says Freese – now best known as Cypress…15 min

MOJO|May 2022Diamond In The RoughIT WAS SPRING 1966 AND VASHTI Bunyan was in London’s Olympic Studios, recording Mann and Weil’s call-and-response love song The Coldest Night Of The Year with harmony duo Twice As Much. It was the 20-year-old’s next potential single for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate Records label and she was on a high. “Oh, I just loved it,” she tells MOJO today. “We’d been rehearsing and doing overlays. We wanted a Beach Boys kind of sound, and I think we got it. It was great.” In the two years since she’d been thrown out of Oxford’s Ruskin School Of Drawing And Fine Art, this West London-raised “wild child” had been introduced to Rolling Stones manager Loog Oldham and recorded a brace of singles, a defiantly introspective cover of Jagger/Richards’ Some Things Just…15 min

MOJO|May 2022DARK ST★RIN THE SMALL HOURS OF JANUARY 16, 1972, Marc Bolan, still wearing the sparkling gold jacket he’d worn on-stage earlier that night, was returning home to London in a 1956 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud 1 driven by his wife June. He’d recently bought the car on the back of Number 1 hits Hot Love and Get It On, naming it ‘The White Swan’ in honour of the song that had turned his life around the previous winter.“I’m not into status stuff,” Bolan told journalist Michael Wale. He just had a weakness for cars and liked singing about them, from Ford Mustangs and Cadillacs to the girl with the “hubcap diamond star halo” in Get It On that had everyone talking about poetry in pop again. Besides, it was the shape of…22 min

MOJO|May 2022BOOGIE WONDERLAND!SUNKEN RAGS(B-side of Children Of The Revolution)The original acoustic demo of this dig at Ladbroke Grove’s freak fraternity – among them original Rex man Steve Took – invoked a Pink Fairies song (“ride on, fight on”) and, ironically, ended up on the Glastonbury Fayre LP. Backing vocalists Flo and Eddie fine-tune this band version.TELEGRAM SAM(Previously unreleased Top Of The Pops version)Telegram Sam did for the language of pop what Magritte did for pipes and apples: ultra-vivid sensory delirium. While a homage to Tony Secunda, “automatic shoes” and “corkscrew hair” place Bolan firmly at the song’s centre.MAIN MAN(Radio session, KDAY-FM Santa Monica)The studio Main Man resonates with fragility. But in a February 1972 version taped for US radio, Bolan lets the song take him to all sorts of places, namechecking main…2 min

MOJO|May 2022DARK ST★RIN THE SMALL HOURS OF JANUARY 16, 1972, Marc Bolan, still wearing the sparkling gold jacket he’d worn on-stage earlier that night, was returning home to London in a 1956 Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud 1 driven by his wife June. He’d recently bought the car on the back of Number 1 hits Hot Love and Get It On, naming it ‘The White Swan’ in honour of the song that had turned his life around the previous winter. “I’m not into status stuff,” Bolan told journalist Michael Wale. He just had a weakness for cars and liked singing about them, from Ford Mustangs and Cadillacs to the girl with the “hubcap diamond star halo” in Get It On that had everyone talking about poetry in pop again. Besides, it was the shape…21 min

MOJO|May 2022ALL MY COLOURSWHEN JACK WHITE GOT THE CALL SAYING HE WAS NEEDED on national television, he knew it was time to start fasting again.It was the first full week of October 2020, seven months since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. After video captured Morgan Wallen partying sans mask and making out with strangers, NBC’s Saturday Night Live – still the US’s marquee musical spotlight – scuttled the young country star’s scheduled appearance at the last minute. What’s more, Eddie Van Halen had died a day earlier. Saturday Night Live needed a guitar hero, and fast.On Wednesday morning, four days before the broadcast, the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, rang White’s Nashville landline. If the network’s private jet landed there on Friday, could White play on Saturday? He didn’t hesitate.“It’s like vaudeville…23 min

MOJO|May 2022“WE WORK THE SAME WAY – VIBING AND JAMMING”FOR A SPELL, Jack White felt like he’d slid a riddle into a song. During Into The Twilight, the demented rave-up at the centre of Fear Of The Dawn, two samples from acrobatic vocal jazz institution Manhattan Transfer crisscross as the song’s final minute begins. But none of White’s music-zealot friends spotted the snippets – that is, until he sent the song to A Tribe Called Quest mastermind Q-Tip. “’Is that a Manhattan Transfer you’ve got on there?’” White remembers Tip asking. “He knew instantly.”Q-Tip first heard The White Stripes around the start of the century, when De Stijl caught his ear. He introduced himself to White backstage in New York, ignoring any talk of how much his raps had meant to White to discuss other sounds instead.“We were both…2 min

MOJO|May 2022“I WOULD NEVER CALL MYSELF A SINGER STANDING NEXT TO BEYONCÉ”On his favourite Beatle: “Absolutely 1,000 per cent Paul McCartney. Get Back proves what I’ve been saying since I was 13 – without Paul, there’s no Beatles. Everybody else is out-of-this-world incredible. But you could theoretically take any other Beatle out of that band and still have The Beatles. You want to be on George’s side, for coolness. But it’s easy to be the guy in the room who doesn’t want to do anything. It’s really hard to be the one in the room who’s trying to motivate everybody. They don’t come off as cool. It’s a shame, because those are the people who make things happen. I’m not a fan of people who don’t want to do things. That’s demotivating.” On The Rolling Stones: “People want The Rolling Stones…2 min

MOJO|May 2022“I’ve got through all the tribulations.”Why the nickname Sleepy?Horace Andy: “All my life they call me Sleepy because, honestly, I’ll be talking to you and after 10 minutes I’ll fall asleep. (Laughs) It’s true!”Better keep this brief, then. You’ve worked with many great Jamaican producers, such as Coxsone, Bunny Lee and Lloyd Barnes. Was it any different working with Adrian?HA: “It was really wonderful working with Adrian. He’s a very smart man, y’know? He knows the music and has very good ears. Adrian chose some of my old Studio One songs, and we did some new ones too for Midnight Rocker. I’m very proud of it. Adrian is a producer, not like some [I’ve worked with] who are more like investors and hustlers and don’t pay their artists properly.”How did your 1970 audition with Coxsone…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Dreadlocks in moonlightHorace Andy ★★★★ Midnight Rocker ON-U SOUND. CD/DL/LP PICTURE THE scene: 13 Brentford Road, Kingston, Jamaica, the home of producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s fabled recording and publishing facility Studio One. It’s 1970, and a nervous teenage singer by the name of Horace Hinds steps up to the mike to run through a reggae tune he’s written called Got To Be Sure. The stakes are high: Hinds has already unsuccessfully auditioned here a few days earlier as a duo with Frank Melody, and his first single, This Is A Black Man’s Country, cut with producer Phil Pratt four years earlier, was a flop. It’s now or never for the young Rastafarian vocalist, but something isn’t right. The musicians around him fidget and giggle, bemused and surprised by the singer’s distinctive, quavering…38 min

MOJO|May 2022Feel like going homeKurt Vile ★★★★ (Watch My Moves) VERVE. CD/DL/LP FOR ALL that he venerates blue-collar Philadelphia and his schooling in the city’s psychedelic underground, there’s big ambition lurking beneath Kurt Vile’s shaggy mane. Calling 2008’s debut album Constant Hitmaker wasn’t wholly unserious. His most recent release, the Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP saw him conjoined in arpeggiated twang and harmony with his hero John Prine; days after their recording session the pair performed together at the Grand Ole Opry. Vile has consistently aligned towards essentially traditional musical contexts. Work on (Watch My Moves), his first LP since the Prine collaboration, was divided between Rob Schnapf’s LA studio and ‘OKV Central’, Vile’s newly-built home recording space, named in tribute to Tompall Glaser’s Nashville outlaw country hub ‘Hillbilly Central’. It boasts a console…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Distance LearningFontaines D.C.★★★★Skinty FiaPARTISAN. CD/DL/LP“WHEN YOU speak/Speak sincere/And believe me friend, everyone will hear,” sang Grian Chatten on the wisdom-dispensing title track of Fontaines D.C.’s last album, 2020’s A Hero’s Death. There is always the danger that “sincerity” can be used as cover for a multitude of on-the-nose, salt-of-the-earth sins, but with Skinty Fia (an old Irish exclamation meaning “the damnation of the deer”), it’s clear just how acute this band’s understanding of the balance between art and heart has become.If A Hero’s Death was partly informed by the seismic upheaval caused by the saviours-of-guitar-music success of 2019 debut Dogrel, Skinty Fia emerges from less frenetic circ*mstances, a deep appraising breath, a chance to burrow deep into love, identity, the shifts and pressures of building new lives away from Ireland. The…2 min

MOJO|May 2022FILTER ALBUMS EXTRATom Caruana★★★★Strange PlanetTEA SEA. CD/DL/LP/MCProducer of 2010’s Wu-Tang/ Beatles mash-ups corrals rap talents (Mr Lif, Jehst, King Kashmere, Confucius MC, Prince Po) for a riveting set: interplanetary vibes (cavernous drums, jazzy keys, scratching) meet intergalactic musings at warp speed 9.The Hanging Stars★★★Hollow HeartLOOSE. CD/DL/LPMade at Edwyn Collins’ studio in NE Scotland yet on the same West Coast ley lines as Teenage Fanclub, shaggy Londoners channel classic ’60s cosmic fare. Beatific Hollow Eyes, Hollow Heart glows with pedal steel and vibrant guitar.Vicky Farewell★★★Sweet CompanyMAC’S RECORD LABEL. CD/DL/LPJazz and classical-schooled Californian applies her keyboard skills to dreamy, swing-beat pop. The Stevie Wonder-in-space production (clue: she’s on Mac DeMarco’s label) may be too sickly for some, but her concise pop instincts are undeniable.Jeremy Ivey★★★★Invisible PicturesANTI-. CD/DL/LPAlready Nashville A-Team – Ivey is Margo Price’s…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Remains of the dayPavement★★★★Terror Twilight: Farewell HorizontalMATADOR. CD/DL/LPTHAT TERROR Twilight: Farewell Horizontal arrives a full 14 years after the previous entry in Pavement’s supposedly biennial reissues series is notable. The group’s percussionist/Moog-wrangler/wildcard Bob Nastanovich tells MOJO the delay was principally due to a paucity of bonus material. But then he admits, “Terror Twilight was our most poorly received album.” Helmed by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the recording sessions took the group outside of their comfort zone. With an eye to making a Pavement album that might speak to a broader audience, Godrich expected these notoriously lackadaisical musicians to knuckle down and toil, as frontman Stephen Malkmus began to wonder if he’d outgrown his bandmates.You can forgive their reluctance to revisit the experience, then. But, following a winter spent poring over The Beatles: Get…12 min

MOJO|May 2022FILTER ALBUMS EXTRATom Caruana ★★★★ Strange Planet TEA SEA. CD/DL/LP/MC Producer of 2010’s Wu-Tang/ Beatles mash-ups corrals rap talents (Mr Lif, Jehst, King Kashmere, Confucius MC, Prince Po) for a riveting set: interplanetary vibes (cavernous drums, jazzy keys, scratching) meet intergalactic musings at warp speed 9. The Hanging Stars ★★★ Hollow Heart LOOSE. CD/DL/LP Made at Edwyn Collins’ studio in NE Scotland yet on the same West Coast ley lines as Teenage Fanclub, shaggy Londoners channel classic ’60s cosmic fare. Beatific Hollow Eyes, Hollow Heart glows with pedal steel and vibrant guitar. Vicky Farewell ★★★ Sweet Company MAC’S RECORD LABEL. CD/DL/LP Jazz and classical-schooled Californian applies her keyboard skills to dreamy, swing-beat pop. The Stevie Wonder-in-space production (clue: she’s on Mac DeMarco’s label) may be too sickly for some, but her concise…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Remains of the dayPavement ★★★★ Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal MATADOR. CD/DL/LP THAT TERROR Twilight: Farewell Horizontal arrives a full 14 years after the previous entry in Pavement’s supposedly biennial reissues series is notable. The group’s percussionist/Moog-wrangler/wildcard Bob Nastanovich tells MOJO the delay was principally due to a paucity of bonus material. But then he admits, “Terror Twilight was our most poorly received album.” Helmed by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, the recording sessions took the group outside of their comfort zone. With an eye to making a Pavement album that might speak to a broader audience, Godrich expected these notoriously lackadaisical musicians to knuckle down and toil, as frontman Stephen Malkmus began to wonder if he’d outgrown his bandmates. You can forgive their reluctance to revisit the experience, then. But, following a winter spent…12 min

MOJO|May 2022“Nigel didn’t know my name…”You said that Terror Twilight is Pavement’s most “poorly received” album… “We were extremely spoiled when it came to reviews – if anything, we’d always been overrated. Terror Twilight was the record where people decided, ‘It’s OK to dis Pavement now’. But part of the reason we’re doing this now is that fans have been clamouring for this reissue for the last decade. I really like these songs, they’ve stood the test of time.” Stephen Malkmus shouldered almost all of the song-writing responsibilities on the album – did that cause tension? “Terror Twilight was basically just Stephen. He was not aggressively critical about it, but he did say that it was hard being in a band with people who had stopped listening to music and new things. For us to…3 min

MOJO|May 2022THIS MONTH’S CONTRIBUTORS INCLUDE…Simon McEwen MOJO Production Editor Simon’s first ever foreign trip was for sister mag MOJO Collections in 2002, interviewing Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry in the reggae maverick’s Secret Laboratory near Zurich. It was the highlight of a life-long affair with Jamaican music. This month he reviews Horace Andy’s new album on page 84. Andy Cowan Long before he became MOJO’s jazz columnist, Andy edited rap monthly Hip-Hop Connection, where he witnessed Cypress Hill’s rise from underground chancers to rap superstars at close quarters. He tells their tale on page 34. Away from music, his hands are full juggling super fluffy animals (see Klaus, pictured). Ben Wardle Before embarking on Mark Hollis’s biography (extracted from page 50), Ben had warmed up with books including The Art Of The LP and a novel…1 min

MOJO|May 2022ALL BACK TO MY PLACEJimmy WebbTHE SORCERER FROM WICHITAWhat music are you currently grooving to?I’ve been having fun with [Amazon virtual assistant] Alexa, asking her to play rare stuff like Duane Eddy’s wonderful Theme For Moon Children. You say, “Alexa, play Southern Man by Neil Young” and there it is, instantly. It’s a bit addictive, like a drug.What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album?Probably Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Sings Newman. It’s precious in the most positive sense of the word.What was the first record you ever bought, and where did you buy it?I borrowed a dollar bill from my father and drove about 20 miles from Laverne, Oklahoma to Beaver, Oklahoma to buy a single I’d heard on the radio by Glen Campbell called Turn Around, Look At Me.What musician, other…5 min

MOJO|May 2022Theories, rants, etc.MOJO welcomes correspondence for publication. E-mail to: mojoreaders@bauermedia.co.uk THERE’S A STRIKING MOMENT AT THE end of Jack White’s new album, Fear Of The Dawn. “This is the real me,” he sings plaintively in Shedding My Velvet. “I’m not as bad as I was/But I’m not as good as I can be.” For those of us who may have been unhealthily fixated on White’s long juggle between honesty and artifice, it marks the start of a new era. “Everything I’m doing right now,” he tells us this month, “is all rebirth.” A great time, then, to catch up with this most compelling of modern artists. For this issue of MOJO, White gave us unparalleled access to his domain and processes. If you’ve seen the video for Fear Of The Dawn, it…7 min

MOJO|May 2022AFTER NINE YEARS, SIGUR RÓS RETURN TO HIT THE GROUND RUNNING FOR LP EIGHTA HALF-HOUR drive from Reykjavík, in the converted swimming pool that was Sigur Rós’ studio for a decade before their former keyboard player Kjartan Sveinsson took it over, the Icelandic post-rock ensemble are buckling down to forge their first studio album since Kveikur in 2013.“It was normal for us to take a break before, for two or three years,” reports bassist Georg Hólm. “I guess it’s abnormal being nine, but things happened. And maybe we’d have been further along if it wasn’t for Covid.” “Things happened” is an understatement.It’s been a tumultuous time for a band whose majestic post-rock fission felt more suited to stargazing than matters on the ground. In 2016, Sigur Rós were charged with tax evasion: all charges and fines were repaid whilst citing their accountant’s “mishandling”…3 min

MOJO|May 2022JAPAN’S UNKNOWABLE AVANT-ROCK ENIGMAS LES RALLIZES DÉNUDÉS BREAK COVER!IN 2019, Tokyo musician/producer Makoto Kubota received a call from Takashi Mizutani, Les Rallizes Dénudés’ mysterioso-in-black, a man whose extraordinary guitar-playing took up from where Hendrix’s demolition of Wild Thing left off.During the band’s spasmodic lifetime, roughly 1967 to 1996, the ‘Rallies’, as he calls them, had appeared just once on record – an anachronistic, side-long howl of acid rock on a 1973 various artists album. In 1991, three Mizutani-authorised retro CDs, issued as grunge was breaking, spread the word. But by 2019, says Kubota, the band’s bassist between 1969 and 1973, the Rallies had become “famous in a strange way”. Some 100 LRD recordings, mostly live, were in circulation.“Some words were very direct: ‘We’ll make love on the street!’”MAKOTO KUBOTAMizutani was miffed. But after several conversations, including talk of…3 min

MOJO|May 2022KYOTO STORM WARNINGStudio Et Live ’67-’69(RIVISTA, 1991)No ‘Group Sounds’ here. The fledgling Rallies hailed the ‘rock revolution’ with bell-ringing dream-psych (Soap Bubbles) and driving, Frisco-style folk rock (My Conviction) bookended with howls of ego-shredding electric storms.Mizutani/Les Rallizes Denudes(RIVISTA, 1991)Recorded in one all-night session in early 1970, this was Mizutani’s attempt to turn a new leaf. ‘We played all the quiet songs,” says Kubota, ‘then he started The Last One, hit the fuzz pedal and we were the loud Rallies again.”Live ’77(RIVISTA, 1991)Includes the nearest thing to a Rallies anthem, Night Of The Assassins, built around the riff from Little Peggy March’s I Will Follow Him. Pick of the bunch in ’91 when Sonic Youth and MBV were flying.…1 min

MOJO|May 2022A STONE AGAIN ORI CAN GIVE you a little bit of Stones news, we’re hitting Europe sometime next year, sometime in the year – probably summer. That’s what we’re aiming at, as long as the good Lord, hahaha, smiles upon us!It’s a very hard thing to talk about, with Charlie [Watts, passing away last year], but Steve Jordan ending up with the Stones was like a full circle thing. Thank God it was Charlie’s recommendation. You know, we’ve got a band going, and we still feel that it’s got a continuity.The album, we’re still working on it. Mick and I are getting together in a couple of weeks, to figure it out. I don’t know if we can make a record and do a tour, or if we just do the [writing] work,…1 min

MOJO|May 2022FROM SILICON VALLEY TO THE NASHVILLE MESS AROUND – MEET MOLLY TUTTLE, ROOTS PRODIGY“Gillian Welch made the whole studio smell good!”MOLLY TUTTLEMOLLY TUTTLE, singer-songwriter, musical prodigy and a leading light of the newest wave of roots-Americana, is telling MOJO about a podcast she just recorded. “It’s with Tim Armstrong of Rancid. I do have a soft spot for punk rock.” She did a cover of Rancid’s Olympia, WA on her last album. “But I heard so much old-time music and bluegrass growing up, I always knew I wanted to play it.”Tuttle, who lives in Nashville, was born and raised in suburban Palo Alto, south of San Francisco and deep in Silicon Valley. “I miss the California dreaming,” she sings in San Francisco Blues on her new, third album, Crooked Tree. Hers was a musical home, “instruments everywhere”. Her siblings all played too; father…3 min

MOJO|May 2022THE MOJO INTERVIEWASK BONNIE RAITT ABOUT HER FIRST couple of albums – landmark records on many levels, not least for a white woman playing the blues – and she cringes.“It sounds like I’m so young! I hated my voice. That’s probably why I drank. I was trying to smoke and drink to get my voice lower.”At 72, looking back over a 50-year career, Raitt concedes that she grew into the role. On this afternoon, as late winter light streams through the windows of her northern California office, catching the corona of those famous red locks, she crackles with excitement as she reels off the current demands on her time: rehearsals for a first tour since 2019 and preparations for the release of her eighteenth album, Just Like That.“It’s been nonstop,” she says.…19 min

MOJO|May 2022THE MOJO INTERVIEWASK BONNIE RAITT ABOUT HER FIRST couple of albums – landmark records on many levels, not least for a white woman playing the blues – and she cringes. “It sounds like I’m so young! I hated my voice. That’s probably why I drank. I was trying to smoke and drink to get my voice lower.” At 72, looking back over a 50-year career, Raitt concedes that she grew into the role. On this afternoon, as late winter light streams through the windows of her northern California office, catching the corona of those famous red locks, she crackles with excitement as she reels off the current demands on her time: rehearsals for a first tour since 2019 and preparations for the release of her eighteenth album, Just Like That. “It’s been…19 min

MOJO|May 2022A LIFE IN PICTURES1 Eight-year-old Bonnie Raitt with brothers David and Steven, and father John at the helm, April 26, 1958. 2 Raitt in 1972, circa second album Give It Up. 3 Blues buddies: Raitt and Keith Richards in Toronto during The Rolling Stones’ Voodoo Lounge tour, 1994. 4 The slider: Bonnie giving it some middle finger, London Hammersmith Odeon, August 6, 1977. 5 In the mood: Raitt with John Lee Hooker, 1990. 7 Endless flight: Raitt with John Prine, author of her signature song Angel From Montgomery, on-stage in Los Angeles, 1993. 8 Kindred spirits: Raitt with her childhood idol (and fellow Quaker of Scots ancestry) Joan Baez, at the We The Planet Festival in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, April 20, 2003. 9 “I’m proud to be a role model”: Bonnie…1 min

MOJO|May 2022MUGGS GAMECypress Hill Hand On The Pump (from Cypress Hill, 1991) Muggs’s discrete sonic world in microcosm. An intricate chop-up of Gene Chandler’s Duke Of Earl vocal looped into a hypnotic bassline. A squeak of Albert King’s Cold Feet adds a phantasmal atmosphere as B-Real and Sen Dog hunt down foes. Beastie Boys So What’cha Want (Soul Assassin Remix) (Bonus track on maxi-single of So What’cha Want, 1992) Muggs does away with the industrial heaviness of the Check Your Head original for a summer block party groove predicated on Joe Tex’s laid-back drums from Papa Was Too. House Of Pain Jump Around (single, 1992) An indomitable riff on Chubby Checker’s Popeye (The Hitchhiker) made rapper Everlast – once of Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate – a star. His HOP bandmate Danny Boy labelled…2 min

MOJO|May 2022THE SPECTACULAR BIRTH OF MUDHONEY, 1988“THE sh*tTINESS OF THE GUITAR SOUNDS… WAS THE KEY THING.”Dan peters Bruce Pavitt: When Jonathan [Poneman] and I quit our jobs and opened the doors to Sub Pop – April 1, 1988 – our big new record was by a dead band, Green River’s Rehab Doll. Which was a little challenging. With Green River, there had been a split in sensibilities. Mark Arm: Stone [Gossard, Green River guitarist] and Jeff [Ament, GR bassist], I think they really wanted to make a career of music. And they rightly thought they weren’t going to get anywhere with me as a singer. We came back from this West Coast tour and they said, “The band’s broken up”. To me it was a relief. So then I decided to call [ex-GR guitarist] Steve [Turner]…10 min

MOJO|May 2022MOJO PRESENTSIT IS 1986 AND IN THE SATELLITE TOWN OF HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, 24 MILES NORTH-WEST of London, the 19-year-old Steven Wilson is a home-recording obsessive, creating a private sonic world in his bedroom, working on a 4-track made for him by his electronics engineer father. Inspired by Gong, Hawkwind, but mainly XTC’s psychedelic capers as their Dukes Of Stratosphear alter-egos on 1985 mini-LP, 25 O’Clock, Wilson starts to imagine himself as the leader of some fictitious progressive rock band.Giving them the suitably strange and mythical name Porcupine Tree, he conjures up a line-up in his mind (Timothy Tadpole-Jones, Sir Tarquin Underspoon, Mr Jelly), along with a backstory hinting that some of the members might have spent time in prison.Wilson now accepts that, as a teenager, he was out of step with…8 min

MOJO|May 2022“They Were Being Very GENEROUS”“FIRST OF ALL, Steven was in No-Man with Tim Bowness. I was approached as a session guitarist to play on their album [1994’s Flowermouth]. We recorded it in Steven’s parents’ front room, near Bourne End. They wanted me to sound like the guitar solo on Sailor’s Tale from King Crimson’s Islands. But it was a very good, very fun session. And I was very happy and very pleased to be working with a younger generation of players.I supported Porcupine Tree with [Fripp’s recurring instrumental project] Soundscapes on both an American tour and an English tour. I think they were being very generous and supportive of an older musician, because basically Soundscapes weren’t at all popular. With Porcupine Tree’s audiences, there was a little more latitude. Instead of active booing, most…2 min

MOJO|May 2022MOJO PRESENTSIT IS 1986 AND IN THE SATELLITE TOWN OF HEMEL HEMPSTEAD, 24 MILES NORTH-WEST of London, the 19-year-old Steven Wilson is a home-recording obsessive, creating a private sonic world in his bedroom, working on a 4-track made for him by his electronics engineer father. Inspired by Gong, Hawkwind, but mainly XTC’s psychedelic capers as their Dukes Of Stratosphear alter-egos on 1985 mini-LP, 25 O’Clock, Wilson starts to imagine himself as the leader of some fictitious progressive rock band. Giving them the suitably strange and mythical name Porcupine Tree, he conjures up a line-up in his mind (Timothy Tadpole-Jones, Sir Tarquin Underspoon, Mr Jelly), along with a backstory hinting that some of the members might have spent time in prison. Wilson now accepts that, as a teenager, he was out of…7 min

MOJO|May 2022“They Were Being Very GENEROUS”“FIRST OF ALL, Steven was in No-Man with Tim Bowness. I was approached as a session guitarist to play on their album [1994’s Flowermouth]. We recorded it in Steven’s parents’ front room, near Bourne End. They wanted me to sound like the guitar solo on Sailor’s Tale from King Crimson’s Islands. But it was a very good, very fun session. And I was very happy and very pleased to be working with a younger generation of players. I supported Porcupine Tree with [Fripp’s recurring instrumental project] Soundscapes on both an American tour and an English tour. I think they were being very generous and supportive of an older musician, because basically Soundscapes weren’t at all popular. With Porcupine Tree’s audiences, there was a little more latitude. Instead of active booing,…2 min

MOJO|May 2022Dreadlocks in moonlightHorace Andy★★★★Midnight RockerON-U SOUND. CD/DL/LPPICTURE THE scene: 13 Brentford Road, Kingston, Jamaica, the home of producer Clement ‘Coxsone’ Dodd’s fabled recording and publishing facility Studio One. It’s 1970, and a nervous teenage singer by the name of Horace Hinds steps up to the mike to run through a reggae tune he’s written called Got To Be Sure. The stakes are high: Hinds has already unsuccessfully auditioned here a few days earlier as a duo with Frank Melody, and his first single, This Is A Black Man’s Country, cut with producer Phil Pratt four years earlier, was a flop. It’s now or never for the young Rastafarian vocalist, but something isn’t right. The musicians around him fidget and giggle, bemused and surprised by the singer’s distinctive, quavering falsetto – the way…39 min

MOJO|May 2022Feel like going homeKurt Vile★★★★(Watch My Moves)VERVE. CD/DL/LPFOR ALL that he venerates blue-collar Philadelphia and his schooling in the city’s psychedelic underground, there’s big ambition lurking beneath Kurt Vile’s shaggy mane. Calling 2008’s debut album Constant Hitmaker wasn’t wholly unserious. His most recent release, the Speed, Sound, Lonely KV EP saw him conjoined in arpeggiated twang and harmony with his hero John Prine; days after their recording session the pair performed together at the Grand Ole Opry. Vile has consistently aligned towards essentially traditional musical contexts.Work on (Watch My Moves), his first LP since the Prine collaboration, was divided between Rob Schnapf’s LA studio and ‘OKV Central’, Vile’s newly-built home recording space, named in tribute to Tompall Glaser’s Nashville outlaw country hub ‘Hillbilly Central’. It boasts a console previously owned by Mitch Easter,…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Tillman SchmillmanFather John Misty★★★★Chloë And The Next 20th CenturyBELLA UNION. CD/DL/LPGIVEN HOW Josh Tillman’s nowdecade-long adventure as Father John Misty has pursued Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman more than any lasting traces of his former band Fleet Foxes, it was perhaps inevitable that his career would wend its way towards an orchestral or standards-style album. But while there are echoes of Sail Away and A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night in Misty’s fifth, the overall effect is of a Hollywood album moving from the ’30s through to the ’60s and melding those influences to create an imagined version of the past.For Tillman, topping 2017’s masterful, 75-minute long, end of days conceptual record Pure Comedy was always going to be a challenge. So, on 2018’s God’s Favorite Customer, he didn’t…2 min

MOJO|May 2022FOLKOysterband★★★★Read The SkyRUNNING MAN RECORDS. CD/DLFolk rock lives… and tells the tale.Hardy old veterans they may be, but Oysterband can still belt out a killer tune and a compelling lyric with the best of them. Indeed, better than most. Amid recurring themes of land and sea, they tackle their task with rare urgency and valour, John Jones’ voice still magnificent, and the tough arrangements and musical barrage around him delivered with blistering gusto. The album root is a series of urgent beats, while fiddle and guitars interact with the conviction and inventiveness that comes from a lifetime on the road – there’s even a rare Alan Prosser vocal lead on the retro Hungry For That Water, while Jones channels his inner Roy Orbison on Streams Of Innocence. They end in…2 min

MOJO|May 2022“We took from Nine Inch Nails.”What was the mood like when you reunited to make Skinty Fia?“It was good for us to have space from each other, really being able to live our own lives and be our own people. We came back together with loads of different influences for the songs. So, for Jackie Down The Line, I’d been experimenting with all these different kind of pedals, I’d been trying to work out sounds like Nine Inch Nails. I think that was the kind of thing you could only come up with if you had a load of time on your hands. There’s a lot to be taken from Nine Inch Nails in terms of arrangements and instrumentation. That kind of fragile approach to beauty, even among the earlier brash stuff.”That “fragile approach to…2 min

MOJO|May 2022FOLKOysterband ★★★★ Read The Sky RUNNING MAN RECORDS. CD/DL Folk rock lives… and tells the tale. Hardy old veterans they may be, but Oysterband can still belt out a killer tune and a compelling lyric with the best of them. Indeed, better than most. Amid recurring themes of land and sea, they tackle their task with rare urgency and valour, John Jones’ voice still magnificent, and the tough arrangements and musical barrage around him delivered with blistering gusto. The album root is a series of urgent beats, while fiddle and guitars interact with the conviction and inventiveness that comes from a lifetime on the road – there’s even a rare Alan Prosser vocal lead on the retro Hungry For That Water, while Jones channels his inner Roy Orbison on Streams…2 min

MOJO|May 2022“We took from Nine Inch Nails.”What was the mood like when you reunited to make Skinty Fia? “It was good for us to have space from each other, really being able to live our own lives and be our own people. We came back together with loads of different influences for the songs. So, for Jackie Down The Line, I’d been experimenting with all these different kind of pedals, I’d been trying to work out sounds like Nine Inch Nails. I think that was the kind of thing you could only come up with if you had a load of time on your hands. There’s a lot to be taken from Nine Inch Nails in terms of arrangements and instrumentation. That kind of fragile approach to beauty, even among the earlier brash stuff.” That “fragile…2 min

MOJO|May 2022World Of EchoBranko Mataja★★★★Over Fields And MountainsNUMERO GROUP. DL/LPFROM THE opening track, an instrumental re-imagining of Serbian ballad Da Smo Se Ranije Sreli (Yes We Have Met Before) you know you’re in the presence of a unique and strange talent. The roots are Eastern European folk, certainly, but this is music that emerges rather than begins. Materialising from a mist of reverb, Mataja’s eerie guitar glistens with a melancholy delay, as a low rumble, possibly from a Leslie speaker, resembles the solemn humming of a distant choir. There are suggestions of Joe Meek’s New World and Pops Staples’ tremolo ghosts, but also Spacemen 3’s E-chord ecstasy and The Ventures’ electric country twang. It sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar yet unique. It’s a miracle that it is even here.Born in Dalmatia, now…2 min

MOJO|May 2022TortoiseSTERN VIZIERS of instrumental post-rock, it’s easy to see Tortoise as a rather cerebral band. Picture them in their shared Chicago loft in the late ’90s, giant portraits of John Coltrane overlooking a scene of intensive, relentless musical virtuosity. For one track on 1998’s TNT, they chose the title In Sarah, Mencken, Christ, And Beethoven There Were Women And Men, a small twist on the name of an epic poem by John Barton Wolgamot; try shouting out for that banger at a gig. A multiple-disc compilation album of rarities, 2006’s A Lazarus Taxon, derived its name from a paleontological term for organisms that disappear off the face of the earth, only to reappear much later down the line.Smart guys, then. But to classify Tortoise and their music as a somewhat…8 min

MOJO|May 2022NOW DIG THISChicagoan Joel Berk wrote to MOJO about how Tortoise’s core members were “the musical connective tissue of the city… If any of those dudes were on the gig, the other players had to be good.” Consequently, it’s hard to go wrong with Tortoise offshoots or their prehistory in Bastro, Slint, Gastr Del Sol (1993’s The Serpentine Similar) and Eleventh Dream Day (start with 1989’s Beet). John McEntire’s gargantuan discography involves many fine Sea & Cake albums, inventive productions and a nice soundtrack (1999’s Reach The Rock). Also recommended: John Herndon’s DJ-friendly beatscapes as A Grape Dope (especially 2020’s Backyard Bangers); Tortoise’s covers set with Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, The Brave And The Bold (2006); and the whole adjacent David Pajo universe (seek out Papa M’s incredible 2000 version of Turn! Turn!…1 min

MOJO|May 2022HELLO OPERATOR!OVER 20 YEARS INTO AN EXTRAORDINARY CAREER, Jack White’s range of influences shows no sign of getting any narrower. In fact, studying the credits for his forthcoming Fear Of The Dawn, the guests and samples are more diverse than ever: Q-Tip and Cab Calloway; the Manhattan Transfer and The Jesus Lizard’s Duane Denison. What might appear random eclecticism in the hands of many, however, seems infallibly coherent, a skill that makes White such a potent connector to the great music of the past.In his cover versions, too, you can see that same kind of scholarship, energy and invention – a way of honouring tradition without being deferential to it. Hence this latest MOJO CD, compiled with the help of White’s Third Man label, draws together the original versions of 14…6 min

MOJO|May 2022ALL BACK TO MY PLACEJimmy Webb THE SORCERER FROM WICHITA What music are you currently grooving to? I’ve been having fun with [Amazon virtual assistant] Alexa, asking her to play rare stuff like Duane Eddy’s wonderful Theme For Moon Children. You say, “Alexa, play Southern Man by Neil Young” and there it is, instantly. It’s a bit addictive, like a drug. What, if push comes to shove, is your all-time favourite album? Probably Harry Nilsson’s Nilsson Sings Newman. It’s precious in the most positive sense of the word. What was the first record you ever bought, and where did you buy it? I borrowed a dollar bill from my father and drove about 20 miles from Laverne, Oklahoma to Beaver, Oklahoma to buy a single I’d heard on the radio by Glen Campbell called…5 min

MOJO|May 2022Standing On The EdgeTHE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJOSO OFTEN HAD Mark Lanegan cheated death, it became easy to assume the man was indestructible. Unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Layne Staley, friends and musical peers, he survived years of brutal drug addiction, a horror show unflinchingly recounted in his 2020 memoir Sing Backwards And Weep – written at the behest of Anthony Bourdain, another friend lost to the demons.Lanegan had also survived Covid, which in March 2021 saw him hospitalised in his new domain of south-west Ireland. For three weeks he lay in a coma. Only the intervention of his wife Shelley prevented doctors performing an emergency tracheotomy; she feared he might lose the ability to sing, and thus also the will to live. Yet months later, Lanegan…4 min

MOJO|May 2022Standing On The EdgeTHE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO SO OFTEN HAD Mark Lanegan cheated death, it became easy to assume the man was indestructible. Unlike Kurt Cobain, Jeffrey Lee Pierce and Layne Staley, friends and musical peers, he survived years of brutal drug addiction, a horror show unflinchingly recounted in his 2020 memoir Sing Backwards And Weep – written at the behest of Anthony Bourdain, another friend lost to the demons. Lanegan had also survived Covid, which in March 2021 saw him hospitalised in his new domain of south-west Ireland. For three weeks he lay in a coma. Only the intervention of his wife Shelley prevented doctors performing an emergency tracheotomy; she feared he might lose the ability to sing, and thus also the will to live. Yet months…4 min

MOJO|May 2022AFTER NINE YEARS, SIGUR RÓS RETURN TO HIT THE GROUND RUNNING FOR LP EIGHTA HALF-HOUR drive from Reykjavík, in the converted swimming pool that was Sigur Rós’ studio for a decade before their former keyboard player Kjartan Sveinsson took it over, the Icelandic post-rock ensemble are buckling down to forge their first studio album since Kveikur in 2013. “It was normal for us to take a break before, for two or three years,” reports bassist Georg Hólm. “I guess it’s abnormal being nine, but things happened. And maybe we’d have been further along if it wasn’t for Covid.” “Things happened” is an understatement. It’s been a tumultuous time for a band whose majestic post-rock fission felt more suited to stargazing than matters on the ground. In 2016, Sigur Rós were charged with tax evasion: all charges and fines were repaid whilst citing their…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Keith RichardsLOOK, f*ckING favourites – it depends how you wake up in the morning. It could be Muddy Waters or f*cking Mozart, hahaha! Let me throw this one out there – Little Walter Jacobs. If you look him up, you cannot go wrong, but I would suggest this album on Chess Records – available nowhere! It’s got Blues With A Feeling on, and all the rest. I had that same album in the early ‘60s, black-and-white on the front, and he looks really bad.The Chess guys were all individuals, and I would say that, as far as harp-playing goes, Walter was the Louis Armstrong of that damn thing. Mick [Jagger] is still in awe of him. We’re both in agreement on that, and Mick is a damn good harp player himself!…2 min

MOJO|May 2022KYOTO STORM WARNINGStudio Et Live ’67-’69 (RIVISTA, 1991) No ‘Group Sounds’ here. The fledgling Rallies hailed the ‘rock revolution’ with bell-ringing dream-psych (Soap Bubbles) and driving, Frisco-style folk rock (My Conviction) bookended with howls of ego-shredding electric storms. Mizutani/Les Rallizes Denudes (RIVISTA, 1991) Recorded in one all-night session in early 1970, this was Mizutani’s attempt to turn a new leaf. ‘We played all the quiet songs,” says Kubota, ‘then he started The Last One, hit the fuzz pedal and we were the loud Rallies again.” Live ’77 (RIVISTA, 1991) Includes the nearest thing to a Rallies anthem, Night Of The Assassins, built around the riff from Little Peggy March’s I Will Follow Him. Pick of the bunch in ’91 when Sonic Youth and MBV were flying.…1 min

MOJO|May 2022A STONE AGAIN ORI CAN GIVE you a little bit of Stones news, we’re hitting Europe sometime next year, sometime in the year – probably summer. That’s what we’re aiming at, as long as the good Lord, hahaha, smiles upon us! It’s a very hard thing to talk about, with Charlie [Watts, passing away last year], but Steve Jordan ending up with the Stones was like a full circle thing. Thank God it was Charlie’s recommendation. You know, we’ve got a band going, and we still feel that it’s got a continuity. The album, we’re still working on it. Mick and I are getting together in a couple of weeks, to figure it out. I don’t know if we can make a record and do a tour, or if we just do the…1 min

MOJO|May 2022FROM SILICON VALLEY TO THE NASHVILLE MESS AROUND – MEET MOLLY TUTTLE, ROOTS PRODIGY“Gillian Welch made the whole studio smell good!”MOLLY TUTTLE MOLLY TUTTLE, singer-songwriter, musical prodigy and a leading light of the newest wave of roots-Americana, is telling MOJO about a podcast she just recorded. “It’s with Tim Armstrong of Rancid. I do have a soft spot for punk rock.” She did a cover of Rancid’s Olympia, WA on her last album. “But I heard so much old-time music and bluegrass growing up, I always knew I wanted to play it.” Tuttle, who lives in Nashville, was born and raised in suburban Palo Alto, south of San Francisco and deep in Silicon Valley. “I miss the California dreaming,” she sings in San Francisco Blues on her new, third album, Crooked Tree. Hers was a musical home, “instruments everywhere”. Her siblings all played…3 min

MOJO|May 2022MUGGS GAMECypress HillHand On The Pump(from Cypress Hill, 1991)Muggs’s discrete sonic world in microcosm. An intricate chop-up of Gene Chandler’s Duke Of Earl vocal looped into a hypnotic bassline. A squeak of Albert King’s Cold Feet adds a phantasmal atmosphere as B-Real and Sen Dog hunt down foes.Beastie BoysSo What’cha Want (Soul Assassin Remix)(Bonus track on maxi-single of So What’cha Want, 1992)Muggs does away with the industrial heaviness of the Check Your Head original for a summer block party groove predicated on Joe Tex’s laid-back drums from Papa Was Too.House Of PainJump Around(single, 1992)An indomitable riff on Chubby Checker’s Popeye (The Hitchhiker) made rapper Everlast – once of Ice-T’s Rhyme Syndicate – a star. His HOP bandmate Danny Boy labelled it “our generation’s Louie Louie”.Ice CubeWe Had To Tear This Mothaf*cka…2 min

MOJO|May 2022Pilgrim’s ProgressSOME THINGS JUST STICK IN YOUR MIND★★★★(FatCat/DiCristina, 2007) All of Bunyan’s surviving pop singles and demos from 1964 to 1967, now best viewed as the remains of a bold experiment to reposition the ’60s female pop song as a wintry place of melancholy, heartbreak and disillusionment. The influence of carols, nursery rhymes and hymns is strong but so is a love of Dylan’s acerbity and wit and Everlys harmonies.JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY★★★★★(Philips, 1970)When released in December 1970, this “document of a pilgrimage” already seemed part of a bygone romantic age. Then again, it was never intended as a reflection of reality but a picture of a dream, the wistful songs intended to lift the spirits of its songwriter. These days it has exactly that effect on the listener, a collection…1 min

MOJO|May 2022THE SPECTACULAR BIRTH OF MUDHONEY, 1988“THE sh*tTINESS OF THE GUITAR SOUNDS… WAS THE KEY THING.”Dan petersBruce Pavitt: When Jonathan [Poneman] and I quit our jobs and opened the doors to Sub Pop – April 1, 1988 – our big new record was by a dead band, Green River’s Rehab Doll. Which was a little challenging. With Green River, there had been a split in sensibilities.Mark Arm: Stone [Gossard, Green River guitarist] and Jeff [Ament, GR bassist], I think they really wanted to make a career of music. And they rightly thought they weren’t going to get anywhere with me as a singer. We came back from this West Coast tour and they said, “The band’s broken up”. To me it was a relief. So then I decided to call [ex-GR guitarist] Steve [Turner] and see…10 min

MOJO|May 2022Pilgrim’s ProgressSOME THINGS JUST STICK IN YOUR MIND ★★★★ (FatCat/DiCristina, 2007) All of Bunyan’s surviving pop singles and demos from 1964 to 1967, now best viewed as the remains of a bold experiment to reposition the ’60s female pop song as a wintry place of melancholy, heartbreak and disillusionment. The influence of carols, nursery rhymes and hymns is strong but so is a love of Dylan’s acerbity and wit and Everlys harmonies. JUST ANOTHER DIAMOND DAY ★★★★★ (Philips, 1970) When released in December 1970, this “document of a pilgrimage” already seemed part of a bygone romantic age. Then again, it was never intended as a reflection of reality but a picture of a dream, the wistful songs intended to lift the spirits of its songwriter. These days it has exactly that…1 min

MOJO|May 2022DRAMATIS PERSONAE• Bruce Pavitt (Sub Pop, co-founder) • Mark Arm (Mudhoney, guitar/vocals) • Dan Peters (Mudhoney, drums) • Matt Lukin (Mudhoney, bass) • Steve Turner (Mudhoney, guitar) • Jack Endino (producer) • Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth, guitar/vocals) • Nils Bernstein (fan; later Sub Pop publicist) • Jonathan Poneman (Sub Pop, co-founder) • Charles Peterson (photographer) • Ed Fotheringham (Thrown Ups, vocals; artist) • Garrett Shavlik (The Fluid, drummer) • Kim Thayil (Soundgarden, guitar)…1 min

MOJO|May 2022BOOGIE WONDERLAND!SUNKEN RAGS (B-side of Children Of The Revolution) The original acoustic demo of this dig at Ladbroke Grove’s freak fraternity – among them original Rex man Steve Took – invoked a Pink Fairies song (“ride on, fight on”) and, ironically, ended up on the Glastonbury Fayre LP. Backing vocalists Flo and Eddie fine-tune this band version. TELEGRAM SAM (Previously unreleased Top Of The Pops version) Telegram Sam did for the language of pop what Magritte did for pipes and apples: ultra-vivid sensory delirium. While a homage to Tony Secunda, “automatic shoes” and “corkscrew hair” place Bolan firmly at the song’s centre. MAIN MAN (Radio session, KDAY-FM Santa Monica) The studio Main Man resonates with fragility. But in a February 1972 version taped for US radio, Bolan lets the song take…2 min

MOJO|May 2022“I WOULD NEVER CALL MYSELF A SINGER STANDING NEXT TO BEYONCÉ”On his favourite Beatle: “Absolutely 1,000 per cent Paul McCartney. Get Back proves what I’ve been saying since I was 13 – without Paul, there’s no Beatles. Everybody else is out-of-this-world incredible. But you could theoretically take any other Beatle out of that band and still have The Beatles. You want to be on George’s side, for coolness. But it’s easy to be the guy in the room who doesn’t want to do anything. It’s really hard to be the one in the room who’s trying to motivate everybody. They don’t come off as cool. It’s a shame, because those are the people who make things happen. I’m not a fan of people who don’t want to do things. That’s demotivating.”On The Rolling Stones: “People want The Rolling Stones to…3 min

MOJO|May 2022ALL MY COLOURSWHEN JACK WHITE GOT THE CALL SAYING HE WAS NEEDED on national television, he knew it was time to start fasting again. It was the first full week of October 2020, seven months since the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. After video captured Morgan Wallen partying sans mask and making out with strangers, NBC’s Saturday Night Live – still the US’s marquee musical spotlight – scuttled the young country star’s scheduled appearance at the last minute. What’s more, Eddie Van Halen had died a day earlier. Saturday Night Live needed a guitar hero, and fast. On Wednesday morning, four days before the broadcast, the show’s creator, Lorne Michaels, rang White’s Nashville landline. If the network’s private jet landed there on Friday, could White play on Saturday? He didn’t hesitate.…22 min

MOJO|May 2022“WE WORK THE SAME WAY – VIBING AND JAMMING”FOR A SPELL, Jack White felt like he’d slid a riddle into a song. During Into The Twilight, the demented rave-up at the centre of Fear Of The Dawn, two samples from acrobatic vocal jazz institution Manhattan Transfer crisscross as the song’s final minute begins. But none of White’s music-zealot friends spotted the snippets – that is, until he sent the song to A Tribe Called Quest mastermind Q-Tip. “’Is that a Manhattan Transfer you’ve got on there?’” White remembers Tip asking. “He knew instantly.” Q-Tip first heard The White Stripes around the start of the century, when De Stijl caught his ear. He introduced himself to White backstage in New York, ignoring any talk of how much his raps had meant to White to discuss other sounds instead. “We…2 min

MOJO|May 2022Is This ItWet Leg★★★★Wet LegDOMINO. CD/DL/LPAS ALL one-hit wonders know, success can be as unforgiving as failure. There are songs that use all their energy in one brilliant efficient flash, making it almost impossible for their creators to relaunch or reignite, to catch the collective imagination so decisively ever again. It’s the pop equivalent of a limited-edition action figure, still in its original packaging – get it out of its box, see what it could do, and there was a danger it could lose its value, end up in bits.Chaise Longue, Wet Leg’s first release, initially bore the marks of such a track, a giddily profane spasm of insolent wit backed by indelible visuals. Yet Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers, Wet Leg’s core duo, subsequently released three more songs, each one the…2 min

MOJO|May 2022“I’ve got through all the tribulations.”Why the nickname Sleepy? Horace Andy: “All my life they call me Sleepy because, honestly, I’ll be talking to you and after 10 minutes I’ll fall asleep. (Laughs) It’s true!” Better keep this brief, then. You’ve worked with many great Jamaican producers, such as Coxsone, Bunny Lee and Lloyd Barnes. Was it any different working with Adrian? HA: “It was really wonderful working with Adrian. He’s a very smart man, y’know? He knows the music and has very good ears. Adrian chose some of my old Studio One songs, and we did some new ones too for Midnight Rocker. I’m very proud of it. Adrian is a producer, not like some [I’ve worked with] who are more like investors and hustlers and don’t pay their artists properly.” How did your…3 min

MOJO|May 2022Is This ItWet Leg ★★★★ Wet Leg DOMINO. CD/DL/LP AS ALL one-hit wonders know, success can be as unforgiving as failure. There are songs that use all their energy in one brilliant efficient flash, making it almost impossible for their creators to relaunch or reignite, to catch the collective imagination so decisively ever again. It’s the pop equivalent of a limited-edition action figure, still in its original packaging – get it out of its box, see what it could do, and there was a danger it could lose its value, end up in bits. Chaise Longue, Wet Leg’s first release, initially bore the marks of such a track, a giddily profane spasm of insolent wit backed by indelible visuals. Yet Rhian Teasdale and Hester Chambers, Wet Leg’s core duo, subsequently released three…2 min

MOJO|May 2022Tillman SchmillmanFather John Misty ★★★★ Chloë And The Next 20th Century BELLA UNION. CD/DL/LP GIVEN HOW Josh Tillman’s nowdecade-long adventure as Father John Misty has pursued Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman more than any lasting traces of his former band Fleet Foxes, it was perhaps inevitable that his career would wend its way towards an orchestral or standards-style album. But while there are echoes of Sail Away and A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night in Misty’s fifth, the overall effect is of a Hollywood album moving from the ’30s through to the ’60s and melding those influences to create an imagined version of the past. For Tillman, topping 2017’s masterful, 75-minute long, end of days conceptual record Pure Comedy was always going to be a challenge. So, on 2018’s…2 min

MOJO|May 2022Distance LearningFontaines D.C. ★★★★ Skinty Fia PARTISAN. CD/DL/LP “WHEN YOU speak/Speak sincere/And believe me friend, everyone will hear,” sang Grian Chatten on the wisdom-dispensing title track of Fontaines D.C.’s last album, 2020’s A Hero’s Death. There is always the danger that “sincerity” can be used as cover for a multitude of on-the-nose, salt-of-the-earth sins, but with Skinty Fia (an old Irish exclamation meaning “the damnation of the deer”), it’s clear just how acute this band’s understanding of the balance between art and heart has become. If A Hero’s Death was partly informed by the seismic upheaval caused by the saviours-of-guitar-music success of 2019 debut Dogrel, Skinty Fia emerges from less frenetic circ*mstances, a deep appraising breath, a chance to burrow deep into love, identity, the shifts and pressures of building new…2 min

MOJO|May 2022“Nigel didn’t know my name…”You said that Terror Twilight is Pavement’s most “poorly received” album…“We were extremely spoiled when it came to reviews – if anything, we’d always been overrated. Terror Twilight was the record where people decided, ‘It’s OK to dis Pavement now’. But part of the reason we’re doing this now is that fans have been clamouring for this reissue for the last decade. I really like these songs, they’ve stood the test of time.”Stephen Malkmus shouldered almost all of the song-writing responsibilities on the album – did that cause tension?“Terror Twilight was basically just Stephen. He was not aggressively critical about it, but he did say that it was hard being in a band with people who had stopped listening to music and new things. For us to expect him to…3 min

MOJO|May 2022World Of EchoBranko Mataja ★★★★ Over Fields And Mountains NUMERO GROUP. DL/LP FROM THE opening track, an instrumental re-imagining of Serbian ballad Da Smo Se Ranije Sreli (Yes We Have Met Before) you know you’re in the presence of a unique and strange talent. The roots are Eastern European folk, certainly, but this is music that emerges rather than begins. Materialising from a mist of reverb, Mataja’s eerie guitar glistens with a melancholy delay, as a low rumble, possibly from a Leslie speaker, resembles the solemn humming of a distant choir. There are suggestions of Joe Meek’s New World and Pops Staples’ tremolo ghosts, but also Spacemen 3’s E-chord ecstasy and The Ventures’ electric country twang. It sounds simultaneously ancient and futuristic, familiar yet unique. It’s a miracle that it is even…2 min

Table of contents for May 2022 in MOJO (2024)

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