In the new issue of MOJO – in UK shops and available to order for delivery wherever you are now! – we take an exclusive look inside the newly expanded edition of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and dig deep into the Fabs’ 1965 masterpiece.

• READ MORE: Inside the making of Rubber Soul: “People were getting high. It was the shift from drink to pot...”

There have been exhaustive Beatles vault excavations over the years, via the Anthology series and numerous reissue packages – not to mention the completion of the ‘final’ Beatles song, Now And Then, in 2023. But among the wealth of unreleased tracks featured on the new edition of Rubber Soul, undoubtedly the most remarkable discovery is something most fans didn’t think possible in 2026 – the release of a never-before-heard Beatles song.

Recorded in 1965, Little Girl is a John Lennon demo of a song that was never completed with his bandmates. A recording that was such a closely guarded secret that even the most ardent Fabs watchers weren’t aware it even existed.

Ahead of the new edition of Rubber Soul’s release on October 2, MOJO’s Danny Eccleston travelled to Abbey Road studios where Giles Martin – son of Beatles producer George – played him the song, and uncovered the origins of the recording.

“Little girl, I’ve come to say / That this has been a lovely day / I love you, I love you …” sings a disarmingly sweet-sounding Lennon over an idling acoustic guitar, before a more typically Lennon-like pay-off. “…If you’d have asked me yesterday / Then I’d have told you sweet FA…”

“It shows you where Lennon was at the time,” Giles Martin tells MOJO. “It is a pop song – maybe a song you could imagine going on Double Fantasy later, when he’d gone full circle. But the ‘sweet FA’ thing is interesting. It’s like he’s thinking, ‘Aren’t we getting away from this kind of song?’”

Little Girl is not the only revelation of 2026’s Rubber Soul reboot, but it is the most extraordinary. Out of four CDs’ worth of remixes from by Giles Martin and associate Sam Okell, outtakes, a mono version, the US version of the album, plus the contemporaneous single Day Tripper/We Can Work It Out, Little Girl stands out – a Beatles-era John Lennon song no one outside of the band’s closest circle has ever heard.

“It was Allan Rouse who discovered the tape, I believe,” Beatle expert Kevin Howlett tells MOJO, referring to Giles Martin’s predecessor as Abbey Road’s keeper of The Beatles’ sonic flame, “but nobody knew about it outside of a few people at Abbey Road. It was a very closely guarded secret.”

• READ MORE: The Beatles' Top Ten Most Groundbreaking Songs Ranked!

The tape consisted of four fragments of Lennon’s attempts at the song – subsequently edited into one performance by Giles Martin – dated by Rouse to 1965. Howlett, who writes the new Rubber Soul package’s liner notes, cites more evidence for the dating: a lyric Lennon scrawled on a postcard that Hunter Davies included in his 2012 collection, The John Lennon Letters. Amid crossings out, one of the “little girl…” choruses is verbatim, although a verse suggests a more troubled song than we hear from the tape: “When a girl begins to be a problem / Pretty soon the girl must go / When they’re gone you find at last you love them…”

Like much of Rubber Soul, the song captures a feeling of The Beatles on the cusp - looking back, towards pop, and forward, to what pop could, and would, become in their hands.

The Beatles’ Rubber Soul revolution: “The fear’s gone. The experimentation is beginning to happen….”

Get the latest issue of MOJO – in UK shops and available to order for delivery wherever you are now – to read the full story behind the wealth of material unearthed for the new edition of Rubber Soul and for a full immersion in The Beatles’ original pot’n’soul-fuelled, axis-shifting LP. More info and to order your copy HERE!

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The Cure’s 1985 video for Close To Me famously featured the group crammed into a wardrobe which plummets from Beachy Head. Four decades on, the clip’s director Tim Pope reveals shocking new details in his new book I Shoot Rock Stars. During production, unfortunate band whipping boy Lol Tolhurst passed gas – after a spicy curry-eating contest – in the confined, airless space. “It’s a deep and dark secret I’ve held for many years,” says Pope. Shortly after, he adds, Tolhurst’s hair caught fire.

They’re just two revelations to be found in I Shoot Rock Stars, which traces the Enfield-born Pope’s charmed life from music and film fan to video director and beyond. “My whole thing has been relationships with people,” he says of his MO. “I’ve described myself as like a bespoke tailor, creating stuff to embody someone else. I think just being myself and maybe making people laugh helped… I do say a lot of inappropriate things at the wrong time. I think I was like that with the work.”

In time for MTV’s ’80s/’90s glory years, Pope shot idiosyncratic promos for Soft Cell, Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Style Council and The The among others. Along the way he also kitted out Queen’s Freddie Mercury as a “giant prawn”, was propositioned by Scottish comedian Wee Jimmy Krankie on Saturday morning TV and, more grimly, encountered Harvey Weinstein while directing troubled 1996 movie The Crow: City Of Angels. Many intriguing encounters were had with collaborators including Neil Young (“those burning eyes!”), Iggy Pop (“he tried to seduce my mother”) and Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis (“loads of laughs”). Remarkably, on his very first meeting with David Bowie in the ’80s, Pope called him “a proper cunt” (Bowie responded with his “Marlboro laugh”). Later, as Pope prepared to film the singer’s 50th birthday show at Madison Square Garden in 1997, he was on hand to see Bowie reunite with Lou Reed after years of estrangement. The subject of discussion? Fruit bowls.

Robert Smith can be quite particular, let me put it that way.

- Tim Pope

Yet Pope’s most enduring meeting of minds was with The Cure, for whom he’s directed single promos and concert films since 1982. As Pope alerted his subjects to the book, he admits to nail-biting concern regarding Robert Smith. “Robert can be quite particular, let me put it that way,” says Pope. “I e-mailed him and said, I just want to make sure there’s nothing that particularly upsets you. He said, ‘I doubt if anything you misremember could upset me.’ He wrote back so enthusiastically, I was amazed.” So much so, Smith has written the foreword, in block capitals.

As Pope recalls the practicalities and minutiae of clips including Lullaby (what did Smith reckon to the vulva-like spider’s maw?) and In Between Days (what was with the DayGlo sock motif?), the book also includes the relevant QR codes so the curious can check out what he’s talking about. Pope stresses the book’s not a final word: new projects include a photo exhibition and a 50th anniversary Cure documentary in 2028, as well as a return to feature film directing. “I was so sure that putting The Cure in a wardrobe was going on my bloody gravestone,” he says cheerily. “But now Iggy’s given me this wonderful quote that’ll be on my headstone – ‘Tim is a strange person.’ It doesn’t get better than that, does it?”

Tim Pope’s I Shoot Rock Stars: The Wild Adventures Of A Music Video Director is published on August 13 by Wildfire.

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A pop superstar at the age of twenty, a prisoner in her own home at 28, in 2015 Ronnie Spector looks back on life with The Ronettes, The Beatles, The Stones, Springsteen and ex-husband Phil Spector...

“The moment I knew it was time to leave, to get out of there period, was when he asked me and my mother to take a look at the glass coffin he had for me in the basement, should I ever think of leaving him. That coffin scared me to death.”

The words come tumbling fast out of Ronnie Spector’s mouth. The “he” she is referring to is, of course, Phil Spector, her then husband, the producer-songwriter-creator of the famed ‘Wall of Sound’ production technique, who, in the mid 60s, telegraphed his stifling obsession with his wife through a dizzying series of emotionally intense 45s for her group, The Ronettes: Be My Baby, Baby I Love You, Do I Love You, Born To Be Together. The “there” is Spector’s LA mansion, where Ronnie had was held captive from 1968, the year of their marriage, to 1972, the year of her escape.

Today, sitting in her living room in New York State - where she’s lived for the past 20 years - dressed in black pencil thin jeans and a tailored pastel shirt, still sporting her trademark dishevelled bouffant hair and red painted lips, she recounts her escape. She remembers her mother, Beatrice Bennett, telling Spector that she and Ronnie were going for a walk. After leaving her shoes - to fool Phil she’d be returning - the barefooted singer, with heart racing, set off as calmly as she could, past the barred windows, guard dogs and barbed wire that secured the property’s grounds. Then once through the 10 foot metal gated entrance, they headed towards Sunset Strip. “I knew that if I didn’t leave then I would die there,” she says, “and when I got to the corner of Sunset and DohenyI never felt stronger. I didn’t have anything, not even my shoes, but I was out of that mansion and I cried, ‘Dear God, I’m free at last!’”

Ronnie Bennett first met Phil Spector in 1963, as a 20-year-old aspiring singer, raised in a world of music.  Every Sunday afternoon, the Bennett family gathered at Ronnie’s grandmother’s pre-war built apartment in Spanish Harlem. Aunts and uncles told jokes, danced and and Clyde McPhatter and McGuire Sisters songs, but it was five-year-old Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Bennett, born in 1943, who stole the show.

“My grandmother had 14 children,” she explains. “I had 23 first cousins, they’d all sit on the living room floor, and I’d stand on the coffee table using a wooden stirring spoon as a mic and sing Pearl Bailey and they would get excited and applaud. I knew from that point on that this was what I was going to do.”

Frankie Lymon was her childhood idol.

“I heard his voice and wanted to sing like him,” she says. “I’d come home from school and instead of doing my homework I’d study his records. I wrote down his lyrics, copied his diction. I listened to At The London Palladium until it wore out and my dad had to buy me another copy.”

The teenage Frankie ate at King’s Donuts, next to Harlem’s Apollo, where Ronnie’s mother worked as a waitress. Frankie was invited to Ronnie’s 13th birthday party; he turned up two weeks late, drunk and made a pass at her.

“It was awful,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know about things like that. He was my hero and he behaved like that!”

Despite the impropriety it was still Frankie’s Why Do Fools Fall In Love that Ronnie performed with her makeshift group of cousins at Harlem’s Apollo’s amateur night later that year. “My cousin Ira was too scared to sing,” she says, “but I knew if I didn’t impress, my parents would ban me from playing my records and make me concentrate on schoolwork, so I grabbed the mic and boom! The audience loved me.”

That performance led to the formation of The Ronettes with her sister Estelle Bennett and cousin Nedra Talley: “We played bar mitzvahs, sock hops, we danced in the window of the Hawaii Kai restaurant, sung in Greenwich Village coffee houses, anywhere we could.” They’d also sneak into the Peppermint Lounge, the tiny Manhattan nightclub that gave birth to The Twist dance craze and was frequented by Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift; one time, in a case of mistaken identity, The Ronettes were ushered on stage to dance with the house band Joey Dee And The Starlighters. Soon they were singing What’d I Say with the group on a nightly basis for $10 a time.

This was 1961, the same year, they signed to New York’s Colpix Records, the recording arm of Columbia Pictures-Screen Gems, which resulted in five singles that pinned Ronnie’s raw R&B vocal to stirring Brill Building orchestral pop. When none hit, a cold call to Phil Spector’s office led to an audition at New York’s Mira Sound Studios.

With Phil sat at the grand piano, they sang Why Do Fools Fall In Love. “The moment he heard it, he loved it,” recalls Ronnie. “He was, ‘That’s it, that’s the voice I’ve been looking for!’ It was obvious it was love at first sight for him.”

It was seeing Spector’s command of a recording studio and its personnel that reeled Ronnie in. “The way he could control 25 men his senior, who all had wives and kids at home, tell them what to do, be mean to them then have them laughing like crazy and eating out of his hand. That turned me on. And we fit like a hand in glove, his songs and music, my voice, they were a perfect match.”

Success was immediate. 1963’s Be My Baby, written by Ellie Greenwich, Jeff Barry and Phil Spector, and featuring Cher’s first appearance on record as a backing vocalist, was the first of eight perfect pop singles released on Philles, that matched Ronnie’s nasally vocal, a delicate balance of adolescent yearning and street suss, to Spector’s giddying rush of symphonic noise. It hit the US Cashbox Number 1, Billboard Number 2 and UK Top 5.

“It was everything I ever wanted,” she enthuses. “After we got our first royalty cheque, I went straight out to Lord & Taylor and bought this fabulous pant suit, it had a mink top and matching mink pants. I’d spent my childhood window shopping, we had food and clothes but we couldn’t afford luxuries. At Christmas we’d go to look at the skaters at Radio City, but we never went in, we’d look at the trees lit up at the Rockefella Centre, but couldn’t afford to go in. Now I could go where ever I wanted.”

On landing at Heathrow for their first UK tour in January ’64, Ronnie and her fellow Ronettes were welcomed by screaming fans with banners.

“It was like Beatlemania,” she says. “We’d been all over the States and never experienced this. That was when I knew we were stars. We went on TV shows and they made our dresses for us and did our faces and we got to keep the dresses. That didn’t happen in the States either.”

That first night in London, they partied with The Beatles; Ronnie and John Lennon became close friends; he took her shopping on Carnaby Street, for dinner; to night clubs; when The Beatles arrived in the US, she took them to Harlem.

“They knew everything about us,” she says. “I didn’t know how. I didn’t know we were a big deal in the UK then.”

The Rolling Stones, then just starting out, supported the three girls around the country. They wanted to know about James Brown. When they came to the States, Ronnie took them to see him at the Apollo. At the same time she was hanging out with a then unknown guitarist Jimi Hendrix, joining him on stage at Ondine’s, a hip NY club with regulars including Bob Dylan and the Warhol crowd. In 1970 she provided vocals on Hendrix’s Earth Blues.

But the good times were always overshadowed by Phil’s domineering presence and his romantic attentiveness quickly turned to possessiveness and encroachment. During recording sessions, he isolated Ronnie from her label mates, getting her to sit in the sound booth with him rather than letting her sing backing vocals out on the floor. When The Ronettes went on tour, he got Ronnie to stay behind to record songs while her cousin Elaine went off in her place. Then he stopped releasing The Ronettes’ records – 1964 saw The Dixie Cups score a US Number 1 with Chapel Of Love, its success aided by Phil’s nixing of The Ronettes’ earlier, superior version.

“That,” says Ronnie, “was devastating.”

The Ronettes only released two singles in 1965, then one, I Can Hear Music, their final single in ’66. “By then Phil’s attention was fixed on Tina Turner,” she explains. Spector would produce Ike and Tina’s River Deep Mountain High single and album that same year.

When Phil and Ronnie eventually got married in ’68 and moved in together, the crazy behaviour escalated; home became a prison with barred windows, electric fences and prowling dogs. Intercoms were placed in each room so Phil could check up on Ronnie at all times. On the rare occasions Ronnie was allowed out on her own – once a month for twenty minutes to buy “feminine items” – a life-sized inflatable doll modelled on Phil Spector accompanied her in the passenger seat of her car.

“We didn’t do what normal couples did,” she sighs. “We didn’t go to the movies, we didn’t have date nights. I was brainwashed, he wouldn’t let me out of his sight. All I wanted to do was perform and sing and he wouldn’t let me. All he wanted me to do was stay at home and sing Born To Be Together to him every night.”

It took a visit from her mother to make her daughter see what was going on. “Love really is blind,” she says. “I couldn’t see what he was doing to me. All I saw was this great guy who had produced my records.”

After Ronnie’s escape in 1972, the divorce took two years to complete and the emotional fallout was immeasurable. When MOJO asks her how she managed to pick herself back up again, she stops and takes a breath.

“I really was not prepared to deal with much,” she says. “ I was successful at a young age and was always protected, first by my mom and uncles, then Phil Spector. So when I was finally on my own, I didn't know how to deal with much.”

Drink became a problem. In her 1991 autobiography, Be My Baby, she writes, “I’d get up in the morning, brush my teeth and have a beer. And then at night I’d drink until I fell asleep.” One night ended in the UCLA Medical Cenre after she passed out, lit cigarette in hand and set fire to her bed. Midway through a show in Boston, she fell off the stage to a baying crowd. “I started drinking in my second year of marriage,” she says today. “I had very low self-esteem, I was constantly being yelled at by my ex-husband who was screaming that I was a loser, worthless and would be nothing without him. The alcohol helped numb me.”

Aid came through musical validation thanks to her old pal John Lennon. He set her up with his engineer Jimmy Iovine who was producing Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes at New York’s Record Plant with Stevie Van Zandt. By the session’s end, Bruce Springsteen had turned up, rewritten a song as a duet for Johnny and Ronnie to perform together and the result, 1976’s You Mean So Much To Me recaptured the Ronnie Spector of the 60s. Ronnie with the Asbury Jukes spent the rest of the year on tour.

“What Bruce and Steven did - along with Johnny - was give me an opportunity to get out and sing on the road with a rock band and that was important to me then. My ex-husband was trying to break me and working with those guys saved me. They looked out for me, they wanted me to know I meant something to them and to music.”

1977 single Say Goodbye To Hollywood written by Billy Joel, “moved me forward.” Billy and his group the Hassles had opened up for The Ronettes in Long Island in the ’60s and with Steve Van Zandt producing and the E Street Band behind her, she sang, “the story of my life and it made me feel great.”

Joey Ramone then introduced her to a younger indie audience with 1999’s poignant She Talks To Rainbows EP but it was Amy Winehouse’s Ronettes-indebted image and 2006 album Back To Black that pushed Ronnie back into the mainstream gaze.

“Amy Winehouse made me know that I mattered,” she says. “that my work in the ’60s mattered, when she had that hairstyle, the beehive, the eyeliner, she brought back my youth to me. It was like looking at me. I remember when I first heard her singing, it was like a young Ronnie singing… I could relate to her in every way. I was that little lost girl.”

Spring 2014. Ronnie Spector has brought her Beyond The Beehive multimedia show to London’s Queen Elizabeth’s Hall. She’s on good form, the songs still capturing the wonderment of falling in love despite being sung by a seventy year old a long time estranged from their author. Least we forget, Phil is currently serving a life sentence in California’s state prison for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. Unbelievably he is still wielding power over Ronnie, refusing to grant her permission to perform Be My Baby or Baby I Love You in her show – she gets around it by including them in her encore.

“You can only leave the awful things behind you when those awful things stop happening to you,” she snaps, when the subject is raised, her mood turning suddenly. “The day he gets on with his life and leaves me alone will be the happiest day of my life next to the birth of my children. Whatever he can do to cause trouble for me career wise he will. 40 years after I left him he still is at it.”

Phil’s treatment of Ronnie has left its emotional scars. While she’s able to reminisce fondly of their early days together in the studio making music, when the subject turns to the abuse she faced, she’s angry, defensive and has every right to be. But, she insists, telling her story is, “part of a process” she needs to go through.

“I get to explain to my audience what I went through and then sing to them,” she explains. “For me that’s the best therapy in the world. All I ever wanted to do was get on a stage and sing. Being able to still do that, to see my audience laugh, see them cry, that makes everything worthwhile. I’ll always sing, and I love my songs.”

This article originally appeared in MOJO 256.

A sneak peek at the exciting, expanded Rubber Soul – including its long-lost song – and an exploration of the timeless gems of The Beatles’ first masterpiece. Also in this issue: Johnny Marr speaks frankly; David Bowie – inside the Shel Talmy vault; the wonderful world of Kate & Anna McGarrigle; Joy Division – live, unleashed. Plus: Flamin’ Groovies; Mike D; Queen; The Mary Wallopers; Steven Wilson; The Afghan Whigs; Wishbone Ash; The Tubs; The Cure on film; Wuxtry Records; This Is Lorelei; Norma Winstone; Steve Reich; Generation X; and All Back To The God Of Hell Fire’s!

THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD is Spread The Word!: The Soul Of The Beatles. Fifteen R&B bangers the Beatles were digging in 1965. Little Richard, Otis Redding, Ray Charles, Patti Labelle, Wilson Pickett, Larry Williams and more!

HAVE MOJO 395 SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

CONTENTS MOJO 395

THE BEATLES An exclusive early look at a Special Edition of Rubber Soul – with remixes, outtakes and (intriguingly) more – prompts an indulgent immersion in the Fab Four’s first mature masterpiece.

JOHNNY MARR On the perils of nostalgia, the doors of perception, Macca’s gnomic advice, Billie Eilish’s studio chops and why there are Smiths songs he won’t sing.

KATE & ANNA McGARRIGLE Fifty years ago, the Canuck sisters’ debut album arrived, and its beyond-folk palette still beguiles. “The pictures they painted were so vivid.”

MIKE D The Beastie Boys’ chief cratedigger on tabloid infamy, grief negotiation, Bob Dylan’s “pro-smoking concert” and a surprising new solo album.

FLAMIN’ GROOVIES Shake Some Action should have made them stars. It didn’t, but their name and their song live on: “There’s even a guy in the Taliban doing a karaoke version.”

WISHBONE ASH “Tuning into the cosmos” delivered the harmony lead guitars and medieval concept prog of the pathfinding Argus. Then came the fist-fights and palace coups.

THE AFGHAN WHIGS Greg Dulli and band brought soul vibes and howling self-castigation to the post-grunge ’90s. Navigating drugs and danger, it’s a miracle they’re still with us.

THE MARY WALLOPERS Dundalk’s ‘new Pogues’ sink a few Aperol Spritzes and talk tradition, politics, the peers who do them down, and their new album: “It’s a bit of a fuck you.”

REVIEWED The Tubs / Joy Division / Julia Jacklin / Bob Marley / Arab Strap / Beck / Dexys Midnight Runners / Tom Tom Club / Phoebe Bridgers / Jim James / Martin Carthy / Dinosaur Jr / Carly Simon / Ty Segall / Liam Hayes / Alabama Shakes / Cluster / The Jayhawks / The Proclaimers / Interpol / Billy Strings / Getdown Services / Primal Scream / Peter Asher

PLUS David Bowie: The Shel Talmy Tapes / The Cure on film! / Steven Wilson does folk horror – with Dr Who and Andy Partridge / Wuxtry Records – 50 years young / Queen’s Roger Taylor – how he nearly joined Mott The Hoople / Roberta Bayley’s punk pix / Norma Winstone’s jazz odyssey / This Is Lorelei and Sulafa Elyas are rising / Steve Reich – the platters that matter / Generation X – from the birth to the backstabbing / Phil Manzanera’s stellar side project / Who were The Nobs? / All Back To Arthur Brown’s!

SUBSCRIBE TO MOJO MAGAZINE

Phoebe Bridgers - Lost Weekend

★★★★

DEAD OCEANS

Interviewed by MOJO around her 2020 album Punisher, Phoebe Bridgers admitted she nearly quit high school through sheer lack of motivation. “Then I found something that I would do forever,” she said, explaining how music changed her life. Six years after her last solo record, however, fans of her reflective, raw-nerved songwriting might have wondered if she was having second thoughts. Boygenius, her supergroup with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, explained a couple of years, but there was still a sense Bridgers was in retreat.

• READ MORE: Phoebe Bridgers Interviewed: “We’re tearing down confederate statues and trolling Trump rallies…”

Partly that seemed a result of the intrusions that come when an artist’s acute gift for articulating difficult emotions leads people to think they know them. There was also the unhealthy fascination with her personal life (she dated Paul Mescal and is currently linked with singer and comedian Bo Burnham, credited on Lost Weekend), and the reality-warping effects of suddenly becoming the kind of person asked to interview Paul McCartney.

It’s initially concerning, then, that her third album starts with the vocodered abstraction of The Outside, its Bon Iver gauziness suggesting Bridgers is using her music as cover, thinning out her presence, defending her limits. There are songs that take their cues from the revelatory coda of Punisher’s I Know The End and build from there – Elliott Smith throwback Lost Boys, for example – but Lost Weekend’s tone is set by the ambient mist that rolls through the cracks in these songs.

The title track’s splashy hyperpop coda samples experimental composer Paul Lansky’s 1994 track Notjustmoreidlechatter; Panorama evocatively collages together the distant buzz 
of a city viewed from a lonely hotel room; while The Governor’s Waltz’s avoidant love song is softened by a haunted ballroom dreaminess. Yet Bridgers, her high-end co-producers – among them Jack Antonoff and Alex G – and a cast of stellar musicians (Blake Mills, Meg Duffy, Jim Keltner) know when to loom from the atmosphere, when to sink back, when to ground things with mandolin or banjo.

Bridgers’ father, who died in 2022, is the inescapable figure here, the loss that defines Lost Weekend. A voice message from him is preserved on Never Going Back!, but even that immediacy is superseded by Still Standing, a disturbing flashback to violent family dysfunction. “I found her bleeding over the sink,” sings Bridgers, “But when you said sorry/You were looking at me.”

Alongside the complexities of this legacy, Lost Weekend’s love songs are almost light relief. Bobby, a knotty domestic sketch, has her referring to “the end of wanting” and “a thing in a box I don’t fuck any more”, which is quite the tone-shift. Yet throughout Lost Weekend, the big issues – grief, harm, love, guilt – are kept in focus by the details: the confusions of a late period or a cancelled wedding, a flash of trauma or reference to Shelley Duvall. For a record so defined by absence, Lost Weekend proves, thankfully, that Bridgers is still very much here.

Lost Weekend is out 14 August on Dead Oceans.

Get the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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We're now past 2026's halfway mark, and already it's shaping up to be a vintage year for new albums. Alongside returning veterans and bona fide legends, there's been some remarkable leaps forward and unexpected changes of direction by some of the newer artists we've already grown to cherish here at MOJO. While it's just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to the deluge of great music being released every month - you'll need to pick up the latest issue of MOJO for that, or even better, grab a subscription in our 3 issues for £3 summer deal - here is a selection of some of the albums we've really loved so far in 2026...

MOJO's Albums Of 2026... So Far:

Dry Cleaning - Secret Love

(4AD)

In a nutshell: Spotless third effort from Florence Shaw's post-punk seismographers.

What we said: "Dry Cleaning have lost none of their distinctive edge, their idiosyncratic set-up proving to be endlessly elastic, as big as they want, as small as they need, 
to capture the chaos of the world... ★★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Lucinda Williams - World’s Gone Wrong

(HIGHWAY 20/THIRTY TIGERS)

In a nutshell: As she turns 73, Williams smells the sulphur of the apocalypse on her 16th LP.

What we said: "She's frail, wounded, and angry but she’s ready to tell it like it is... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Tyler Ballgame – For The First Time, Again

(ROUGH TRADE)

In a nutshell: Joy and heartbreak, rendered in analogue, from towering New England talent.

What we said: "Tyler Ballgame absolutely deserves acclaim right here and now... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Bill Callahan - My Days Of 58

(DRAG CITY)

In a nutshell: The dream river keeps on flowing through metaphysical singer-songwriter’s ninth post-Smog album.

What we said: "As unaffectedly beautiful as anything in Callahan’s catalogue... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Gorillaz - The Mountain

(KONG)

In a nutshell: Amorphous troupe’s ninth album features cameos from departed collaborators Dennis Hopper, Mark E. Smith and Bobby Womack.

What we said: "Gorillaz' most ambitious, and moving, record to date... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Shabaka - Of The Earth

(SHABAKA RECORDS/WARP)

In a nutshell: The sax is back! But Hutchings’s third solo LP is light years from jazz.

What we said: "Another ‘new age’ in Shabaka’s story dawns... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Squeeze - Trixies

(BMG)

In a nutshell: Revived and newly recorded, Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook’s pre-fame project might be the best work of their career.

What we said: "Sits comfortably beside Squeeze’s finest works of the late ’70s. It might even be better... ★★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Johnny Blue Skies & The Dark Clouds - Mutiny After Midnight

(HIGH TOP MOUNTAIN/ATLANTIC)

In a nutshell: Sturgill Simpson supercharges his Johnny Blue Skies alias for disco-flecked call to arms.

What we said: "Simpson has landed one of the best ideas of his increasingly remarkable career... ★★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Sunn O))) - Sunn O)))

(SUB POP)

In a nutshell: Be-cloaked duo get back to nature on elemental tenth LP.

What we said: "Music you feel in your body, your gut, your skull, a sensation of constant sonic regeneration and psychoactive power - ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

The Lemon Twigs - Look For Your Mind!

(CAPTURED TRACKS)

In a nutshell: Retro-minded siblings resist the tyranny of modernity by building their own world of gently psychedelic rock’n’roll.

What we said: "They have the confidence to fully inhabit their colourful, analogue world of vintage guitars, bowl haircuts, toy town innocence while also allowing aspects of the wider one to come in here and there too... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Aldous Harding - Train On The Island

(4AD)

In a nutshell: New Zealand enigma still keeps you guessing on transporting fifth album.

What we said: "Harding remains a fascinating songwriting provocateur...★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

The Coral - 388

(RUN ON/MODERN SKY)

In a nutshell: Cosmic scousers make a dub-tactic return to their roots

What we said: "By reconnecting with their past, The Coral have found the essence of who they are now – and it's pretty magical - ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Boards Of Canada - Inferno

(WARP)

In a nutshell: Long-awaited fifth LP from the Scottish brothers who altered electronic music’s collective unconscious**.**

What we said: "The sense is of something undefined being invoked... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Paul McCartney - The Boys Of Dungeon Lane

(MPL/CAPITOL)

In a nutshell: Pop’s master craftsman looks back across his life with a remarkable openness.

What we said: "As he approaches his eighty-fourth birthday, Paul McCartney is smart enough to deploy his inevitable frailty in service of what he wishes to share... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Beth Orton - The Ground Above

(PARTISAN)

In a nutshell: '90s comedown queen continues current winning streak with expansive and elemental ninth album.

What we said: "Elegantly shores up Beth Orton’s creative resurgence... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Jack White - Frozen Charlotte

(THIRD MAN)

In a nutshell: Following the return to form of 2024's No Name, former White Stripe largely lets his guitar do the talking.

What we said: "If rock music is in danger of going into cardiac arrest, then Jack White has the keys to the defibrillator... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Madonna - Confessions II

(WARNERS)

In a nutshell: Madonna plugs back into her clubland roots with a record that finds its place in the world by looking back.

What we said: "For Madonna, the musical pull of the dance floor is not just about escape but catharsis, a way of releasing dark buried emotion... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Panda Bear And Sonic Boom - A ? Of When

(DOMINO)

In a nutshell: Animal Collective/Spacemen 3 cosmic seekers throw open their cabinet of musical curiosities on second collaborative LP.

What we said: "There’s a sense of the pair layering and padding their songs like they’re trying to insulate themselves from the dark world outside... ★★★★" Read MOJO's review in full

Elvis Costello has announced details of an upcoming boxset focused on his 1977 debut album My Aim Is True. Due out October 2 on Ume, the 5-disc set will reflect, Costello reveals to MOJO, “the curious nature and the compression of events between ’76 and the middle of ’78”. Alongside a remaster of the album nestle a bounty of unheard demos from 1975 that he stresses “nobody’s ever heard”.  The My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition) box set will feature 104 Tracks, 52 of which are previously unreleased songs, plus demos, outtakes and live performances. The 2026 remaster of the original album, meanwhile, has been taken from Pathway Studios master reels. You can listen to a version of Watching The Detectives taken from the masters reel below:

In addition, Costello has written a 72-page accompanying essay with contributions from Nick Lowe, Bill Flanagan, Warren Zanes, Rosanne Cash, Peter Wolf and Jim James, as well as recollections from The Attractions' Steve Nieve and Pete Thomas.

Disc 1 will be the said My Aim Is True remaster – recorded in North London with the US country rock band Clover 50 years ago and showcasing what Costello describes “that great Pathway Studio sound”. He also promises “US readers will find Watching The Detectives added to the end of Side One, just where they expect to find it.” That song – Costello’s fourth single – remains a tribute to its interim rhythm section: drummer Steve Golding and bassist Andrew Bodnar from The Rumour. “‘Bertie’ Bodnar sadly left us not so long ago,” notes Costello, “but I am glad that I got to tell him that his bassline is still in all versions of the song played today.”

Disc 2 is entitled The Blue Print: “a record of 17 acoustic songs recorded in 1975 and 1976,” Costello explains. “Ten of which have never been published or issued before.

 “You will find a version of Radio Soul here,” he adds, “which turned into [1978 single] Radio Radio – but there are eight or nine of these songs that contain themes, individual lines, lyric couplets or entire verses and choruses that are found on Armed Forces, Get Happy!! or Trust, set to entirely different music. It’s a kind of editing in reverse and why this record is called The Blue Print.”

Five of the songs are solo recordings taped in Costello’s bedroom. “These songs were my view from the outskirts of town in ’76, away from ‘where it was happening’,” says Costello. “I had to find an entirely different way of speaking about these feelings and so the songs sound as if I might have been writing them for ‘Whispering’ Jack Smith or Al Bowlly not some odd-looking eejit in hornrims.”

Disc 3, The Stranger In The House, comprises demos and outtakes that in Costello’s mind illuminate the parallel career path that might have opened up for him as a songsmith-for-hire, possibly in Nashville.

“This disc opens with Radio Sweetheart – the first song I recorded for Stiff Records,” he reveals. “As you will hear, it has little or nothing to do with the musical allegiances of 1976 or 1977. It has a pedal-steel guitar on it for heaven’s sake. By early 1976, I was completely convinced I was really a backroom songwriter for other singers and tried to get signed on that for assignments all over town. Only Stiff Records thought differently. They put me in the studio with Nick Lowe and members of Clover.

“This sounds like a boast but Bruce Springsteen once asked me, ‘How did you get that sound on My Aim Is True?’ I told him honestly: No money.”

Compiled in the style of a radio documentary, Becoming The Attractions is Disc 4 and focuses on the period between the summers of 1977 and 1978 when Costello, keyboard player Steve Nieve, drummer Pete Thomas and bassist Bruce Thomas got hold of the My Aim Is True songs and began to enthusiastically remodel them.

“Clover tried to play really sensibly, y’know, like in the right tempo and everything and sort of swung in,” Costello tells MOJO. “When it comes to tempo, there’s a certain kind of song, particularly anything with a bit of a swing to it, if you play it too fast, it loses that. So, it was very noticeable that the songs from My Aim Is True that disappeared from [The Attractions’] live set were Pay It Back, Sneaky Feelings and Blame It On Cain. They kind of went away because they were a different kind of music.”

Covered In Clover, the final disc, is a live performance with Clover from 2007 – the one and only time the Marin County group performed the songs they recorded for My Aim Is True.

“Mickey Shine, the drummer, had become a painter by then, so we had to enlist Pete Thomas,” says Costello. “If you want to hear a happy drummer, you want to listen to this record. You’ve never heard anybody having such a great time being in his favourite band. He knew Clover before Stiff, before we started. Pete was living in California, and he got to know them, and he was the one who introduced Clover to my manager [Jake Riviera], and hence they were brought to England… supposedly to make their fortunes.”

The 2007 show was a benefit for sufferers of a rare genetic disorder, Prader-Willi Syndrome, a condition that eventually requires residential care. Richard de Lone – the son of Eggs Over Easy pianist and co-founder Austin, a former bandmate of Costello’s – is a sufferer‚ and the inspirer of subsequent benefit events including Nick Sings Elvis – Costello Sings Lowe in which Nick Lowe and Costello performed one another’s songs, and most recently, in 2022, Costello Sings Hunter/Garcia with The All-American Beauties led by Larry Campbell.

Austin de Lone passed early in 2025. “This disc is dedicated to him,” says Costello, “and all the people, both family and friends, who have seen many of the objectives of what has now become The Prader-Willi Homes Of California fulfilled.” You can find out more HERE.

My Aim Is True (49th Anniversary Edition) it out October 2 via UMe.

Tracklisting:

(** Denotes previously unreleased)

CD1: My Aim Is True

1. Welcome To The Working Week - 2026 Remaster

2. Miracle Man - 2026 Remaster

3. No Dancing - 2026 Remaster

4. Blame It On Cain - 2026 Remaster

5. Alison - 2026 Remaster

6. Sneaky Feelings - 2026 Remaster

7. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes - 2026 Remaster

8. Less Than Zero - 2026 Remaster

9. Mystery Dance - 2026 Remaster

10. Pay It Back - 2026 Remaster

11. I'm Not Angry - 2026 Remaster

12. Waiting For The End Of The World - 2026 Remaster

13. Watching The Detectives - Single Version

CD2: The Blue Print

1. I Turn Around - Hope & Anchor Studio**

2. Losing You - Hope & Anchor Studio**

3. Leverman - Hope & Anchor Studio**

4. Citizen Junction - Hope & Anchor Studio**

5. I Hear A Melody - Pathway Studios

6. Poison Moon - Bedroom Recording

7. Wave A White Flag - Bedroom Recording

8. Mercury Wings - Ms. Dore’s Tape**

9. Jump Up - Hope & Anchor Studio**

10. No Star - Hope & Anchor Studio**

11. Walk On - Hope & Anchor Studio**

12. Radio Soul - Hope & Anchor Studio**

13. Clean Money - Hope & Anchor Studio**

14. Don’t Put A Levy On My Love - Hope & Anchor Studio**

15. Play It Safe - Hope & Anchor Studio**

16. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) - Hope & Anchor Studio**

17. I Can’t Turn It Off - Hope & Anchor Studio

CD3: The Stranger In The House

1. Radio Sweetheart - My Aim Is True Outtake

2. Cheap Reward - Bedroom Recording

3. Mystery Dance - Bedroom Recording

4. Stranger In The House - My Aim Is True Outtake

5. Running Out Of Angels - Hope & Anchor Studio**

6. Just Like A Jukebox - Hope & Anchor Studio**

7. I Don’t Want To Go Home - Pathway Studios

8. Blame It On Cain - Bedroom Recording

9. Blue Minute - Ms. Dore’s Tape**

10. Pay It Back - Bedroom Recording **

11. Exiles Road - Flip City - Hope & Anchor Studio**

12. Knockin' On Heaven’s Door - Flip City - Hope & Anchor Studio**

13. Sweet Revival - Flip City - Hope & Anchor Studio**

14. Pay It Back - Flip City - Hope & Anchor Studio**

15. Imagination (Is A Powerful Deceiver) - Flip City - Hope & Anchor Studio**

16. Living In Paradise - Hope & Anchor Studio**

17. Welcome To The Working Week - Pathway Studios

18. Miracle Man - Bedroom Recording**

19. Miracle Man - Pathway Studios

20. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes - Ms. Dore’s Tape**

21. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes - Pathway Studios

22. Waiting For The End Of The World - Pathway Studios

23. Living In Paradise - My Aim Is True Outtake

24. Call On Me - Pathway Studios

25. Watching The Detectives - Pathway Studios Trio Version**

26. No Action - Pathway Studios Trio Version

27. Poison Moon - Ms. Dore’s Tape**

28. Stranger In The House - Ms. Dore’s Tape**

CD4: Becoming The Attractions

1. Alison - What’s On Granada Reports

2. Introduction By Dave Robinson - Live, The Nashville Room

3. Mystery Dance - Live, The Nashville Room

4. Pay It Back - Soundcheck, The Nashville Room

5. Radio Sweetheart - Soundcheck, The Nashville Room

6. Sneaky Feelings - Soundcheck, The Nashville Room

7. Crawling To The U.S.A. - Soundcheck, The Nashville Room

8. Lip Service - Pathway Studios**

9. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes- with Introduction Top Of The Pops**

10. Interview No. 1 - Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson

11. Watching The Detectives - Good Afternoon Broadcast**

12. Interview No. 2 - Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson

13. Hoover Factory - Good Afternoon Rehearsal**

14. I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself - Live Stiffs, University of East Anglia, Norwich, U.K.

15. Whole Wide World - Live Stiffs, University Of Leicester, Leicester, U.K.**

16. KSAN Intro - Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA

17. Pump It Up - Old Waldorf, San Francisco, CA**

18. Lip Service - Unknown Field Recording**

19. Mystery Dance - Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**

20. Blame It On Cain - Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**

21. Less Than Zero (Dallas Version) - Warner Theater, Washington D.C.

22. Waiting For The End Of The World - The Agora Ballroom, Cleveland, OH**

23. Miracle Man - Warner Theater, Washington D.C.

24. Watching The Detectives - Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**

25. I’m Not Angry - Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, CA**

CD5: Covered In Clover

1. Welcome To The Working Week (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

2. Miracle Man (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

3. No Dancing (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

4. Intro To Blame It On Cain (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

5. Blame It On Cain (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

6. Alison (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

7. Intro To Sneaky Feelings (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

8. Sneaky Feelings (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

9. Intro To Red Shoes (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

10. (The Angels Wanna Wear My) Red Shoes (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

11. Less Than Zero (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

12. Mystery Dance (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

13. Pay It Back (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

14. I'm Not Angry (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

15. Waiting For The End Of The World / Gloria (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

16. Watching The Detectives (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

17. Mr. Moon (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

18. Intro To The Love Trilogy (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

19. Love Has No Pride (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

20. Love Is Gone (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

21. (What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding (Live - Great American Music Hall, San Francisco, CA - November 8, 2007)**

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Ween - 12 Golden Country Greats (30th Anniversary Edition)

★★★★

RHINO

“The players on this record are the best that I’ve ever played with,” Dean Ween wrote before the release of Ween’s fifth album, 12 Golden Country Greats, in 1996, “and they nailed every one of these songs on the first and second takes.” He was referring to an elite squadron of Nashville session aces who indeed helped pioneer the city’s golden country (and occasional rock crossover) sound – folks like pianist Pig Robbins, drummer Buddy Harman, and titanic vocal group The Jordanaires. In the prior five years, Dean and Gene Ween had emerged as apostles of post-adolescent chicanery, their dumbly brilliant and brilliantly dumb self-made records earning them a major-label deal and a reputation as dudes who would try most anything. But a proper country album made in the legendary Buddy’s Barn and produced by a boyhood friend? Ween rightly assumed Elektra would be so taken aback that they self-financed the recording and kept the sessions secret.

12 Golden County Greats proved confounding to fans of the band that had just released the wild and careening Chocolate And Cheese. Who had sabotaged the weirdos of Ween? But three decades on, as borderlines between genres have corroded and as country has infiltrated so many corners of indie rock, these 10 songs feel less like aberrations than a scenic bypass on Ween’s oddball ride, perhaps even a place where they saw some of the future. This generous reissue offers not only a bright remaster of the original but a trove of demos, B-sides, and salvaged errata (including an aching cover of The Rolling Stones’ Fool To Cry) that makes their country reverence and skill clear. Dean and Gene barely played on these songs, convinced by producer Ben Vaughn to let the pros handle the licks; their lo-fi demo for opener I’m Holding You shows that the lovestruck tune was sharp from the roughshod start and that they meant it.

These songs weren’t just divisive because of sound; puerile until the end, Ween were blatantly homophobic and misogynistic here, with at least a whiff of racism for bad measure. Those songs are still here, but the bonus material dampens the sting by letting them ravage themselves, too. The great Boston Chicken is a brutal self-deprecating response to Piss Up A Rope, with Gene taking responsibility for domestic slovenliness. And Scum Of This Town is a beautiful, broken acoustic transmission from the bottom of a depressive morass, a plea for forgiveness that seems impossible. I’ll Miss You holds the bag of blame for the end of a relationship, the harmonies above the crying steel guitar spotlighting real Ween vulnerability.

It’s not likely that these additions will convert those put off by Mister Richard Smoker, nor should they. But they should make it clear that country was a rich vein for Ween, and perhaps they could have stuck with this Southern sojourn a little longer.

12 Golden Country Greats (30th Anniversary Edition) is out now on Rhino.

TRACKLISTING:

**LP/CD1 - 12 Golden Country Greats Remastered:
**1. I’m Holding You
2. Japanese Cowboy
3. Piss Up A Rope
4. I Don’t Wanna Leave You On The Farm
5. Pretty Girl
6. Powder Blue
7. Mister Richard Smoker
8. Help Me Scrape The Mucus Off My Brain
9. You Were The Fool
10. Fluffy

**LP/CD2 - 12 Golden Demos:
**1. I Don’t Wanna Leave You On The Farm – Demo 
2. Piss Up A Rope – Demo 
3. Mister Richard Smoker – Demo 
4. Help Me Scrape The Mucus Off My Brain – Demo 
5. Pretty Girl – Demo 
6. Fluffy – Demo 
7. You Were The Fool – Demo 
8. Powder Blue – Demo 
9. I’ve Got No Darkside – Demo 
10. Maybelle – Demo 
11. I’m Holding You – Demo
12. So Long Jerry – Demo

**LP/CD3 - 14 Golden Outtakes and Demos:
**1. I’ve Got No Darkside
2. Boston Chicken
3. Bad Day In Brownsville
4. Good Timing Rhyming Song
5. Sweet Texas Fire
6. Twinkle
7. If You Can’t Look Me In The Eye
8. I’m Gonna Fix Your Ass
9. Fool To Cry
10. Spaghetti
11. I’ll Miss You
12. Maybelle” – Waste Version 
13. Scum Of This Town
14. So Long Jerry

Get the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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The Durutti Column - Renascent

★★★★

LONDON

Listening to the music of Vini Reilly is a process of divine adjustment, a blissful adaptation to a unique sonic environment that feels simultaneously of the past and future but never the present. Assembled over several years in Reilly’s kitchen, then finessed with long-standing percussionist Bruce Mitchell and producer Keir Stewart, Renascent combines luminescent indie pastoralism with ghostly flamenco shadows and vocal samples that summon dancefloor ghosts of the Haçienda, but also push forward into new realms with the juddering Afro-futurism of Your Shadow At Evening and the Beckettian unravelling of Scammer.

What with their involvement in Harry Styles’ Meltdown this year and their recent championing by Blood Orange and Frank Ocean, The Durutti Column are undergoing something of a renaissance. Renascent proves that it is wholly justified.

Renascent is out July 31 on London Records.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

Tracklisting:

1. Echoes In The Memory
2. Your Shadow At Morning
3. Time Present And Time Past
4. Agonistes
5. Liars
6. Vapour In A Matchbox
7. Your Shadow At Evening
8. Sargasso Sea
9. Scammer
10. For Friends Everywhere
11. All They See is Fire

“I haven’t got the faintest clue why anyone would want to listen to my music!”

Get the new issue of MOJO to read our interview with The Durutti Column’s guitar genius, Vini Reilly. On the agenda: teenage delinquency, Tony Wilson, his recent brush with mortality and the surprise endorsement of One Direction star Harry Styles for this year’s Meltdown Festival. “Can’t he think of anything more interesting?” hears Ian Harrison. “Honestly I can’t think of anything worse!” More info and to order copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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When Kate Bush was inducted – rather belatedly some might argue – into The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in November 2023, singer and super-fan St. Vincent posed a question: “How could someone be this genius and pure and completely free?” It’s a question that perhaps only Bush herself is equipped to answer – and one suspects she’d be far too self-effacing to do so. But listening back to her records goes some way at least to explaining her almost preternatural gifts as a singer, songwriter, producer and performer.

• READ MORE: Kate Bush On David Bowie: “He was just the right amount of weird…”

For an artist of such towering stature, Bush has produced a surprisingly modest body of recorded work. Since blowing minds with her debut single Wuthering Heights in early 1978, she has released just 10 studio albums – and one of those, 2011’s Director’s Cut, featured re-workings of old material. Yet, as each of those albums rams home, her music is ever ripe for further exploration and rediscovery. Nearly 50 years on from the release of Wuthering Heights, and its still remarkable parent album The Kick Inside, MOJO retraces the full story of Bush’s magnificent music...

10.

Lionheart

(EMI, 1978)

Whirled around by the success of The Kick Inside and immediately pressed back into the studio, Bush struggled – self-critically re-recording vocals time after time. Lionheart came out comparatively slight but nicely funny in its camp showbiz tales (Wow) and assorted languorous immersions (In The Warm Room). But, despite any overthinking, her singing and piano lift every note: a flood of mood, melody and glorious extremity, rock squawk to English rose seductress to basso-contralto Marlene Dietrichery.

Key Track: In The Warm Room

9.

50 Words For Snow

(Fish People, 2011)

Re-energised by Director’s Cut, Bush worked furiously on her first LP of new songs since 2005’s Ariel, taking as its central motif the magic, beauty and danger of snow. But a Christmas album it was not, as lengthy, often sombre mediations spread out like black ice, with frost-bitten Elton John duet Snowed In At Wheeler Street a highlight. 15 years later, we’re still waiting for a follow-up.

Key Track: Snowed In At Wheeler Street

8.

Director’s Cut

(Fish People, 2011)

That Bush’s first album since the remarkable _Arie_l was a reworking of songs previously heard on 1989’s The Sensual World and 1993’s The Red Shoes might have felt like a kick in the teeth for fans were it not for the remarkable transformation she revealed, stripping back the digital production sheen of the originals to reveal their warm organic mass and approaching the work afresh from the perspective of an artist now in her 50s.

Key Track: Flower Of The Mountain

• READ MORE: Kate Bush's 50 Greatest Songs

7.

The Red Shoes

(EMI, 1993)

Its inner sleeve image of juicy fruit with seeds spilling out points to what came next (ie motherhood), but The Red Shoes is half future hope, half immediate pain (her mother and other bereavements, her break-up with bassist Del Palmer). Dry eyes are impossible while Moments Of Pleasure mourns the people, and You’re The One mourns the love. But Eat The Music and Rubberband Girl come bouncing back. Bush may have retrospectively voiced her unhappiness at how these songs turned out, returning to them on The Director’s Cut, but it’s easily up there with her greatest work.

Key Track: Moments Of Pleasure

6.

The Sensual World

(EMI, 1989)

While the title track’s Joycean delirium seems to promise two sides of ecstatic eroticism, Bush moves quickly into the mainstream of songs about relationships. Even so, she concentrates on uncertainty; plenty of tension, no clichés – Hitler going “do-do-do-do” at the palais in Heads We’re Dancing is provocateuse perfection. Musically, if she missed something she wanted, the clue may lie in those Irish and Bulgarian folkies she gathered, then underused.

Key Track: This Woman's Work

5.

Aerial

(EMI, 2005)

After a 12-year wait, Bush affirmed her past via old friends, including ever-present drummer Stuart Elliott, former partner Del Palmer, and her current husband, guitarist Dan McIntosh. Then she addresses middle age, glorying in her “sun” Bertie, remembering her mother anew (A Coral Room) and creating Mrs Bartolozzi, who recalls her late husband through the shirts on the washing line. Human detail on disc one marries disc two’s panoramic meditation on landscape and passing time.

Key Track: King Of The Mountain

4.

The Kick Inside

(EMI, 1978)

A debut to stop your heart, to stop the clocks. Who? How? Singing of innocence and experience as if they were one: the strangest rhapsody of period pains, incest, sensual fantasy and romance, the aching wonders of womanhood. While everyone surely knows Wuthering Heights (no, not that one) and the steamy string-driven The Man With The Child In His Eyes, the strange phenomena within The Kick Inside still bedazzles and beguiles.

Key Track: Wuthering Heights

• READ MORE: The Making Of Kate Bush's The Kick Inside

3.

Never For Ever

(EMI, 1980)

Given more time and more control (as co-producer), Bush started to conjoin sensuality with ideas and argument and threw it all in. Squally grotesque Babooshka and Violin, taboo-twisting lullaby The Infant Kiss, and miniature war requiem Army Dreamers tumble towards the orchestrally grand Breathing – a first-person imagining of a mother and unborn baby being poisoned by nuclear fall-out: physical horror felt to the bone, political considerations left to the listener.

Key Track: Babooshka

2.

The Dreaming

(EMI, 1982)

“My ‘She’s gone mad’ album,” Bush once joked. Really, she’d just got inside some emotions that ought to have been beyond her – the Vietcong fighter’s inner scream of “I love life”, the woman howling “Get out of my house” at an intruder (real or not). Inspired by Peter Gabriel to use a sampler/synthesiser and write from rhythm, she made sense within a bedlam of strange sounds and multiple vocal personalities.

Key Track: Get Out Of My House

1.

Hounds Of Love

(EMI, 1985)

On which Bush made that “deal with God” and gathered a whole suite of songs that contemplate death (by drowning under ice, no less). This is no-limits Bush becoming the artist she re-conceived in her late twenties, a conscious “woman in a man’s world” with “a lot more weight and power” to deliver. She sings out, body and soul, no more interludes with the adroit character actress and comedienne, just herself, right there.

Key Track: Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)

• READ MORE: The Making Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill: "Every step of the way, there’s a little twist and turn..."

Out October 2, a new Super Deluxe Edition of The Beatles’ 1965 album Rubber Soul will feature 20 previously unreleased takes and three unreleased home demos, including Little Girl, an unreleased a John Lennon song that’s remained a closely-guarded secret for decades. Listen to Michelle (Take 1) from the new release below:

Little Girl is a partially complete Lennon home recording from 1965 which, until now, fans weren’t aware had been recorded. Unlike 2023’s ‘final’ Beatles song Now And Then, a Lennon demo retrospectively finished by Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and using parts from George Harrison recorded for the original Anthology project, the song doesn’t feature any additional contributions from the surviving members of The Beatles.

Speaking to MOJO in 2023, McCartney and Ringo discussed returning to Now And Then after having initially attempted a version with Free As A Bird/Real Love producer Jeff Lynne in the ‘90s.

“It hung around for a while… years,” McCartney told MOJO, “and every so often I’d kind of go to the cupboard and think, There’s a new song in there, y’know. We should do it, we’ve got to do it. But it would go back in the cupboard. A couple of years ago, I said, ‘No, we’ve really got to do something.’”

Newly mixed by Giles Martin and Sam Okell, the new edition of Rubber Soul will feature a new stereo mix, original mono mix, the Capitol US album version, which featured a different track listing to the UK release, plus Dolby Atmos mixes.

• READ MORE: Inside the making of Rubber Soul: “People were getting high. It was the shift from drink to pot...”

The set includes over 20 never-before-released session recordings and demos, and also features Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out, which didn’t feature on the original album. The 4CD and 5LP Super Deluxe editions are accompanied by an 88-page hardbound book featuring a new written introduction by Paul McCartney, and a foreword compiled from John Lennon’s reflections on Rubber Soul from across his life.

Keep an eye on mojo4music for more information about the release, and to find out about the providence of some of the never-before-heard material unearthed as part of the project.

The release details and full track listing for the various editions are as follows:

Rubber Soul - Special Edition Super Deluxe (68 tracks)

5LP Box Set

5LP Box Set, pressed on 180-gram vinyl, with 7” Single, 88-page hardbound book in a 12” x 12” slipcase.

• LP1: Rubber Soul (New stereo mix) half-speed mastered: 14 tracks

• LP2 & 3: Sessions and Demos (Stereo) half-speed mastered: 26 tracks

• LP4: Rubber Soul (Original mono master): 14 tracks

• LP5: Rubber Soul (Original Capitol US album): 12 tracks

• 7”: ‘Day Tripper’ & ‘We Can Work It Out’ (Stereo)

4CD Box Set

4CD Box Set with 88-page hardbound book in a 12” x 12” slipcase:

• DISC 1: Rubber Soul (New stereo mix): 14 tracks

• DISC 2: Sessions, Demos and the Single (Stereo): 28 tracks

• DISC 3: Rubber Soul (Original mono master): 14 tracks

• DISC 4: Rubber Soul (Original Capitol US album): 12 tracks

D2C-exclusive editions of the 5LP and 4CD Super Deluxe Box Sets, featuring an exclusive poster and set of art cards, are also available from the official Beatles Store, alongside a limited-edition Zoetrope picture disc.

Rubber Soul - Special Edition Deluxe (30 tracks)

2LP

2LP on half-speed mastered 180-gram vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with 4-page insert abridged from the Super Deluxe book:

• LP1: Rubber Soul (New stereo mix): 14 tracks

• LP2: The Single, Demos and Sessions Highlights (Stereo): 16 tracks

2CD

2CD in digisleeve and slipcase, with a 40-page booklet abridged from the Super Deluxe book:

• DISC 1: Rubber Soul (New stereo mix): 14 tracks

• DISC 2: The Single, Demos and Sessions Highlights: 16 tracks

Rubber Soul - Special Edition Standard (14 tracks)

1LP (New stereo mix) on half-speed mastered 180-gram vinyl

1LP (New stereo mix) on half-speed mastered 180-gram orange colour vinyl

1CD in digisleeve + 20-page booklet (New stereo mix)

Rubber Soul - Blu-ray Edition (16 tracks + 4 videos)

1 Blu-ray disc

New stereo mix in hi-res 96kHz/24-bit audio, new Dolby Atmos mix, and four videos

Track Listing:

Rubber Soul - Special Edition Super Deluxe: 5LP + 7” Single Box Set

LP1 - New stereo mix

Side A

A1. Drive My Car

A2. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

A3. You Won't See Me

A4. Nowhere Man

A5. Think For Yourself

A6. The Word

A7. Michelle

Side B

B1. What Goes On

B2. Girl

B3. I'm Looking Through You

B4. In My Life

B5. Wait

B6. If I Needed Someone

B7. Run For Your Life

LP2 - Sessions, Demos and The Single (Disc 1)

Side A

A1. Wait (Take 3 – instrumental backing track)

A2. Run For Your Life (Takes 1-5 – instrumental backing track)

A3. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (First version –Take 1)

A4. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Second version –Take 2)

A5. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Third version – Take 3)

A6. Drive My Car (Takes 1 and 2 – instrumental backing track)

A7. Day Tripper (Songwriting work tape)

Side B

B1. Day Tripper (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

B2. Day Tripper (Takes 2 and 3 – instrumental backing track)

B3. If I Needed Someone (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

B4. In My Life (Take 1)

B5. In My Life (Extract with unused organ solo)

B6. We Can Work It Out (Paul’s demo)

B7. We Can Work It Out (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

LP3 – Sessions, Demos and The Single (Disc 2)

Side A

A1. Nowhere Man (First version – Take 2)

A2. Nowhere Man (Second version – Take 5 – instrumental backing track)

A3. I’m Looking Through You (First version – Take 1)

A4. I’m Looking Through You (Second version – Take 2)

A5. I’m Looking Through You (Second version – Take 3)

A6. Michelle (Guitar rehearsal)

A7. Michelle (Take 1)

Side B

B1. What Goes On (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

B2. The Word (Takes 1 and 2 – instrumental backing track)

B3. Girl (Take 2 – instrumental backing track)

B4. Beatle Talk (Think For Yourself vocal overdubs)

B5. Little Girl (John’s demo)

LP4 – Mono

Side A

A1. Drive My Car

A2. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

A3. You Won't See Me

A4. Nowhere Man

A5. Think For Yourself

A6. The Word

A7. Michelle

Side B

B1. What Goes On

B2. Girl

B3. I'm Looking Through You

B4. In My Life

B5. Wait

B6. If I Needed Someone

B7. Run For Your Life

LP5 - US Album

Side A

A1. I’ve Just Seen A Face

A2. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

A3. You Won't See Me

A4. Think For Yourself

A5. The Word

A6. Michelle

Side B

B1. It’s Only Love

B2. Girl

B3. I’m Looking Through You

B4. In My Life

B5. Wait

B6. Run For Your Life

7” Single

Side A:

A1. Day Tripper

Side AA:

AA1. We Can Work It Out

Rubber Soul - Special Edition Super Deluxe: 4CD Box Set

DISC 1: New Stereo Mix (14 tracks - identical sequence to LP1)

DISC 2: Sessions, Demos and the Single (28 tracks)

  1. Wait (Take 3 – instrumental backing track)

  2. Run For Your Life (Takes 1-5 – instrumental backing track)

  3. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (First version – Take 1)

  4. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Second version – Take 2)

  5. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Third version – Take 3)

  6. Drive My Car (Takes 1 and 2 – instrumental backing track)

  7. Day Tripper (Songwriting work tape)

  8. Day Tripper (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

  9. Day Tripper (Takes 2 and 3 – instrumental backing track)

  10. If I Needed Someone (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

  11. In My Life (Take 1)

  12. In My Life (Extract with unused organ solo)

  13. We Can Work It Out (Paul’s demo)

  14. We Can Work It Out (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

  15. Nowhere Man (First version – Take 2)

  16. Nowhere Man (Second version – Take 5 – instrumental backing track)

  17. I’m Looking Through You (First version – Take 1)

  18. I’m Looking Through You (Second version – Take 2)

  19. I’m Looking Through You (Second version – Take 3)

  20. Michelle (Guitar rehearsal)

  21. Michelle (Take 1)

  22. What Goes On (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

  23. The Word (Takes 1 and 2 – instrumental backing track)

  24. Girl (Take 2 – instrumental backing track)

  25. Beatle Talk (Think For Yourself vocal overdubs)

  26. Little Girl (John’s demo)

  27. Day Tripper (2023 mix)

  28. We Can Work It Out (2023 mix)

DISC 3: Original Mono Master (14 tracks - identical sequence to LP4)

DISC 4: Original Capitol US Album (12 tracks - identical sequence to LP5)

Rubber Soul - Special Edition Deluxe: 2LP / 2CD

(Disc 1 / LP1 features the 14-track New Stereo Mix)

Disc 2 / LP2: The Single, Demos and Sessions Highlights

 Side A:

    A1. Day Tripper (Songwriting work tape)

    A2. Day Tripper (2023 mix)

    A3. We Can Work It Out (Paul’s demo)

    A4. We Can Work It Out (2023 mix)

    A5. Wait (Take 3 – instrumental backing track)

    A6. Run For Your Life (Takes 1-5 – instrumental backing track)

    A7. Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown) (Second version – Take 2)

    A8. Drive My Car (Takes 1 and 2 – instrumental backing track)

    A9. If I Needed Someone (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

Side B:

    B1. In My Life (Take 1)

    B2. Nowhere Man (Second version – Take 5 – instrumental backing track)

    B3. Michelle (Take 1)

    B4. What Goes On (Take 1 – instrumental backing track)

    B5. I’m Looking Through You (Second version – Take 3)

    B6. The Word (Takes 1 and 2 – instrumental backing track)

    B7. Girl (Take 2 – instrumental backing track)

Rubber Soul - Blu-ray Edition

2026 Atmos Mix

Drive My Car

Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

You Won't See Me

Nowhere Man

Think For Yourself

The Word

Michelle

What Goes On

Girl

I'm Looking Through You

In My Life

Wait

If I Needed Someone

Run For Your Life

2023 Atmos Mix

15. Day Tripper

16. We Can Work It Out

2026 Stereo Mix

Drive My Car

Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)

You Won't See Me

Nowhere Man

Think For Yourself

The Word

Michelle

What Goes On

Girl

I'm Looking Through You

In My Life

Wait

If I Needed Someone

Run For Your Life

2023 Stereo Mix

Day Tripper

We Can Work It Out

Videos:

Day Tripper (2023 Mix)

Day Tripper (Alternate Version)

We Can Work It Out (2023 Mix)

We Can Work It Out (Alternate Version)

With the possible exception of David Bowie, no other artist has created as singular, rich and dazzling a creative world as Kate Bush. From songs about being inside her mother’s womb, 42-minute explorations of nature to taking Emily Brontë to the top of the charts, no other oeuvre in pop music has quite so many surprises, uniquely brilliant ideas and breathtakingly beautiful music. In was an immense pleasure for MOJO to delve deep into her body of work to select what we believe to be Kate Bush’s 50 greatest songs. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we did...

• READ MORE: Kate Bush on David Bowie: “He was just the right amount of weird…”

50.

The Dreaming

(from The Dreaming, 1982)

Yes, this was a single.

“Extraordinary” might turn out to be a prominent adjective over the next 18 pages, but it won’t be more aptly applied than here. The apex of the experimental, mind-voyaging approach of its parent album, The Dreaming combines didgeridoos, Aussie race politics and daringly daft theatricals in a flummoxing lead-off single (allegedly titled ‘The Abo Song’ on early promo vinyl – oops), where multi-Kates brew a bad-trip babble through which “See the light ram through the gaps in the land” ripples like a seam of gold. Its other meaning was clear: all bets are off.

49.

Strange Phenomena

(from The Kick Inside, 1978)

Fabulously florid exploration of chance, fate and female biology.

Tinged with the scent of head-shop esoterica – a Tibetan prayer here, references to the phases of the moon there – this song about “the hand a-moulding us” is more than a cosmic curio. The charming, disarming reference to menstruation (“every girl knows about the punctual blues”) does its bit for the Sisterhood, while the Twilight Zone piano motif and luscious tidal pull of the chorus enhance the moonstruck drama. A heady celebration of everyday mysteries, tarot cards not included.

48.

The Song Of Solomon

(from The Red Shoes, 1993)

Kate swears! In her most R&B song ever.

Marmite, this one. To some “Don’t want your bullshit/Just want your sexuality” is too much information; they prefer their Kate crouched behind prettier metaphors. To others, the startling thrill of Bush’s most direct and demanding love song brooks no contest. It’s startling, but that’s the point: Bush is shocking the guy “who walks the path of the solitary heart” out of his aloof self-importance. And if that doesn’t work, how about “I’ll come in a hurricane for you”? That got his attention.

47.

The Empty Bullring

(Breathing B-side, 1980)

How great would Kate Bush: The Piano Bar Album have been?

The brassy, jazzy refrain – something like a tipsy Nina Simone or Randy Newman – that repeats throughout this piano-and-voice curio makes it sound like no other Kate Bush song. Hence, perhaps, its exile to B-sidedom. But it’s one of her best, certainly one of her flightiest picaresques, as Bush (comparing herself, for some reason, with Walter Scott’s “Tamlane in her Tower”) observes her matador pine for the action, the “glory and gore” that once defined him, making it sound like an everyman’s elegy for his lost purpose and powers.

46.

Big Stripey Lie

(from The Red Shoes, 1993)

A multitude of moods and voices enchant and disturb.

That dislocated Sledgehammer beat invites you to groove, but wait, there’s also a faint narcotic string section in there, promising balmy sleep. Both suggest inherent pleasure but deep within the heart of Big Stripey Lie lurks something sinister and dislocated. Is the “big stripey lie” the snake in Eden, Shere Khan in The Jungle Book or the deceitful promises of romance (“I know I could be good for you”)? Or is the song itself the lie, a beguiling spell of seduction that should be approached with caution?

45.

Heads We're Dancing

(from The Sensual World, 1989)

At the height of her late ’80s pomp, Bush meets the Führer.

A bombastic collision of disorientating synth figures, dramatic percussive lunges and wildly expressive fretless bass courtesy of Japan’s Mick Karn. But it’s the lyrics that stop you in your tracks: Bush unfolds the fantasy of a 1939 party, where a dance with a dashing stranger rests on the spin of a coin; the next day the breathless narrator discovers the man in black coat-tails is Adolf Hitler. As a critique of romantic let down – and pre-war appeasement – its nuanced symbolic oomph is mindblowing.

44.

Hammer Horror

(from Lionheart, 1978)

Gothic first single from her second album unleashes another Bush spectre.

Despite the title’s reference to the legendary British horror movie studio, Bush cited Universal’s 1957 film Man Of A Thousand Faces – where James Cagney played silent star Lon ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ Chaney – as inspiration. Bush took the idea of an actor playing an actor further, offering a complex narrative wherein a leading man dies and is replaced in the role by his best friend – the former returning to haunt the latter. Despite the track’s lyrical melodrama and playful musical charm, it missed the Top 40 when released as a single in October ’78.

43.

Flower Of The Mountain

(From The Director’s Cut, 2011)

Re-Joyce! The Sensual World in full Bloom.

Refused permission by the notoriously protective estate of James Joyce to use Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy from Ulysses, Kate Bush created her own delirious analogue to act as lyrics to The Sensual World (see 22). When Joyce’s grandson Stephen relented 22 years later, however, Bush’s original plan finally came to fruition. What might have been an idle literary conceit is elevated by the seamless synthesis of words and music, Bush’s lower, huskier voice the icing on the (seed)cake. A resounding yes.

  
42.

Blow Away

(From Never For Ever, 1980)

KB fears the tug of that stupid club.

The jazz tow of the bass and crisp piano-guitar counterpoints suggest Steely Dan’s sophisto-rock. But it’s unlikely that Donald Fagen ever expressed the looming, tantalising proximity of non-being so viscerally, if he ever felt it. Where does music go when we die? wonders Bush. Is it part of our souls? With the recent loss of Tour Of Life lighting engineer Bill Duffield, these were live issues for the ever-sensitive singer, and fed this track’s haunting, dissociative feel.

• READ MORE: Inside Kate Bush’s Tour Of Life: “She created this whole massive world”

41.

Feel It

(from Kate Bush Live At Hammersmith Odeon, 1994)

Falling in lust and in public.

Only Kate Bush can do this: the nice, suburban, English girl, wafting away generations of social/cultural inhibitions – like diaphanous veils, rather than the brick walls many of us crash into as we grow up or try to. Horny sweetness, rampant joy, unbridled grace: song and performance are multifaceted oxymorons, dynamic self-contradictions, and that’s how she reaches so many of us. She asks the same questions we all ask time and again through life and, like Ulysses’ Molly Bloom, she answers: Yes. The live version from 1979’s Tour Of Life remains faithful to The Kick Inside’s simplicity – Kate at the piano, no phantasmagorical show going on around her – but it gains the different intimacy of performance in front of a couple of thousand people, the astonishing candour of sharing with so many, right there, absorbing every detail.

40.

How To Be Invisible

(from Aerial, 2005)

Haunted-sounding electro-pop from the  first ‘side’ of her surprise comeback album.

Guitars quiver and crackle as Bush concocts a spell to make herself invisible: “Take a pinch of keyhole and fold yourself up… hem of anorak, stem of wallflower, hair of doormat…” she utters as a ghostly wind blows up around her. Whether or not the track is a veiled commentary on the rejection of pop stardom is never quite revealed but it doesn’t detract from the strange beauty of Bush’s incantation.

39.

Lord Of The Reedy River

(B-side of Sat In Your Lap, 1981)

Bush turns to her childhood hero for her maiden cover version.

A children’s album unlike any other, Donovan’s otherworldly HMS Donovan (1971) enraptured the young Kate Bush to such a degree that some way into her recording career, she still cited it as her “all-time favourite album”. Over the haunting trill of a recorder, her empathy with the protagonist – who gives herself to the majestic swan of the song’s title under cover of night – is underscored by the decision to tackle the lyric in the first person. Donovan clearly approved. That’s him on echoing backing vocals.

38.

Mother Stands For Comfort

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

HOL’s Tale Of The Unexpected.

In one of the least adorned songs on Hounds Of Love, Bush gently slips into the persona of an ice cold killer whose mother will hide his wrong-doings, no questions asked. Lyrically there are no ambiguities in the relationship – mum forgives all; the friction comes with the gently jarring music: the rocking chair rhythm and the Babooshka-breaking glass with the crepuscular voices, which mirror the madman’s internal cry of “make me do this, make me do that”.

37.

Among Angels

(from 50 Words For Snow, 2011)

Who you gonna call? Kate's supernatural support service.

Concluding 50 Words…, this sparse, poignant torch song to a beleaguered loved one has nothing to do with snow but fits with the album’s atmosphere of glittering, supernatural reverie. Initially taking an unexpectedly grounded view of the problem (“Only you can do something about it”), the song soon thickens into a spiritual balm, Kate offering celestial comfort over tender broken chords: “I see angels standing around you/They shimmer like mirrors in summer/But you don’t know it”.

36.

King Of The Mountain

(from Aerial, 2005)

Is Elvis enjoying his afterlife at an all-star ski-resort? Discuss.

The first song written (and partially recorded) for Aerial, in 1997, and the song that announced its completion eight years later, is an atmospheric meditation on the possibility that Elvis lives on in some iconic hinterland, sledging on Kane’s Rosebud. The slinky marimba groove, tough drums and skanky guitars (by Bush’s husband Dan McIntosh), provided an early clue this album would be unlike anything she’d done before, albeit reassuringly compelling and eccentric.

35.

Deeper Understanding

(from The Sensual World, 1989)

The sci-fi tale that became reality.

Nestled beside a song about falling in love with Hitler, Bush interjected The Sensual World with a song of dystopic doom describing the internal circuitry of connection between man and computer as the real world shuts its doors. Revisiting the theme of technological obsession (Experiment IV, Cloudbusting), Bush was playing Cassandra here as The Trio Bulgarka provided the celestial robotic force. As a known studio rat herself she was also drawing from her own experience of communing with the ‘little black box’.

34.

Under Ice

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

Glacial horizons reveal  horrible things in the cold.

After the cooing And Dream Of Sheep, here we lay in the treacherous isolation of slumber time. Kate is a skater chipping away at the frozen river “cutting out little lines” and discovering more than she should. As the rhythmic hacking of a zombie string quartet propels us into discovery, the demonic water chorus chants: “there’s something moving under ice” and a little voice sings-screams “it’s me”. At which point the camera snaps into focus and the full Hitchcockian nightmare is revealed: you’ve just seen yourself buried alive.

33.

Top Of The City

(from Director’s Cut, 2011)

So good she cut it twice.

Director’s Cut was Bush’s way of atoning for the spotty Sensual World and Red Shoes albums, stripping away their dated sonics and letting the best songs breathe. Some argued that it wasn’t the good songs that needed the help. This one, however, a highlight of The Red Shoes, narrated by a woman who shares her lover with another, was noticeably improved by taking down a key, calming the vocals and losing the gated snares. “Put me up on the angel’s shoulders,” she suggests. The view is terrific.

32.

All Of The Love

(from The Dreaming, 1982)

A suicide fantasy that sounds like it was recorded in purgatory.

The Bushian prospect of earwigging on your life from beyond the grave is something that would be explored in depth on Hounds Of Love, but three years earlier this spirit- and trapdoor-filled song flirts with the spectre of deathbed regret, mourning “all the love we should have given”. The last minute of the song, with choirboy Richard Thornton’s solo and the goodbye chorus of answerphone messages is Bush at her most devastating and cinematic, as affecting as anything created by her beloved Kubrick.

31.

An Endless Sky Of Honey

(from Aerial, 2005)

Hello birds, hello trees, hello genius.

When veteran British songwriter Don Black met Kate Bush for the first time in 1996, he asked if she had a favourite singer. “The blackbird,” she replied. “And my second favourite is the thrush.” Birdsong was clearly an inspiration for the second half of her double masterpiece, Aerial, initially presented as a suite of distinct songs. When the album appeared on iTunes in 2010 it had become one giant 42-minute track named after its closing, euphoric instrumental passage: An Endless Sky Of Honey. And that is what we’re gazing at here. 24 hours of light, sound, love, song and landscape distilled into one heady draught. The jewel on the sundial’s gnomon is Kate herself, every aspect of her is caught during the day: lover, mother, visionary, artist, naturalist, poet. As the final instrumental section hits high noon, we’re flooded in all that refracted sunlight.

30.

Delius (Song Of Summer)

(from Never For Ever, 1980)

Wobbly pop grows out of love for a grouchy composer and his amanuensis.

Marvel at the breadth of Bush’s frame of reference – and her empathy – as she teleports into the decline of composer Frederick Delius, his mind scrambled by syphilis (“Delius amat,” she trills, getting busy with the schoolroom Latin. “Syphilus. Deus. Genius, ooh”), while he dictates music to secretary Eric Fenby (“In B, Fenby!”). Scrunching bells, Paddy Bush as a scarily gruff Delius, and some bees add to the distrait air. So deliciously strange you have to play it again and again just to make sure you heard it right. You did.

29.

Leave It Open

(from The Dreaming, 1982)

The internal voices spill out on La Bushka’s ’She’s gone mad!’ album.

You’re spoilt for choice on The Dreaming for startling vocal personae. Check this particularly strange song, which closes the original side one, and summons a woozy phased lead, a cat-like answering voice, a banshee yelp and, once the drums have kicked off, spooky multitracked, reversed Kates apparently saying “leave it open, thank you”, as if the song‘s narrator is the spirit who’ll later be disturbed on side two’s equally bizarre closer, Get Out Of My House.

28.

Lake Tahoe

(from 50 Words For Snow, 2011)

Eleven minutes of spectral legend and choral spook: spine-tingling.

Aided by the classically-trained voices of Stefan Roberts and Michael Wood, Bush returns to the supernatural preoccupations of Wuthering Heights, her voice deepened with time, in this slowly unfurling incantation. Here a Victorian female ghost surfaces from the waters of the titular lake “like a poor, porcelain doll”, before being reunited with her dog Snowflake in an apparition of her former home. Free of any electronic interference, Lake Tahoe spotlights Bush’s dizzying musicianship, while sounding like a more mature take on her first two albums.

27.

Them Heavy People

(from The Kick Inside, 1978)

Esoteric wisdom concealed within quirky pop demands: ‘Awake!’

Having read Armenian guru George Gurdjieff – whose disciplines of work, inquiry and exercise would, apparently, enable humankind to learn life’s true purpose – she wrote this nervy but defiant account of her own efforts to access the divine within (“We humans got it all,” she affirms, heretically. “We perform the miracles”). A Number 10 hit, the song was rudely parodied on BBC comedy Not The Nine O’Clock News in 1980, as “England, My Leotard”. Kate later sang with Not… team member Rowan Atkinson on a 1986 Comic Relief special. So, no hard feelings.

26.

Don’t Give Up

(from Peter Gabriel, So, 1986)

In which Kate tells us we’re not beaten yet, and we believe her.

Although informed by Peter Gabriel’s own crumbling marriage, Don’t Give Up appears to have originally been conceived as a dustbowl country duet with Dolly Parton. Dolly’s last-minute replacement had previously sung with Gabriel on the Kate Bush Christmas Special in 1979, reinterpreting Roy Harper’s Another Day as a modernist narrative of suburban heartbreak. That mix of romantic honesty and Ballardian unease continues here with Gabriel’s submerged synth chords and apocalyptic lyrics (scorched trees, changed identities) countered by the aching intimacy of Kate’s heartfelt choral refrains.

• READ MORE: Every Kate Bush Album Ranked!

25.

And Dream Of Sheep

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

Beatific opening strand of HOL’s  stranded-at-sea concept suite.

…Sheep is the calm before the storm. The reverb-coated voice and keyboard mirrors the big sky/deep water scenario, dotted with seagull cries, while folky bouzouki and whistle underline the Scottish provenance of the ghostly snippet of BBC shipping forecast (“Bell Rock, Tiree, Cromarty”). From hope in the opening ‘life-
jacket’ motif (“little light will guide them to me”) to dread in the closing narcotic analogy (“Like poppies heavy with seed/They take me deeper and deeper”), it’s an existential epic in just 166 seconds.

24.

Get Out Of My House

(from The Dreaming, 1982)

’80s horror and Disney texts repurposed to ponder fame’s assault on personal privacy.

Inspired by Ridley Scott’s Alien and King/Kubrick’s The Shining, this heteroglossic tribal chant stars ‘Kate’ as a shuttered building under assault from devilish intruders. The final shapeshifting battle (“I turn into a bird”) recalls Merlin and Arthur’s experiments in transmutation in The Sword In The Stone, while the bookend “Eeyore!” cries reference the Pleasure Island horrors in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, as if this invasion of the self is transforming memories of childhood into a cyclical nightmare of invasion and transfiguration.

23.

π

(from Aerial, 2005)

To the portmanteau of Kate esoterica, add numerology.

 The sounds of nature, the operations of household appliances: Kate Bush can make anything sound like a spell, with the aura of occult significance clinging to even the humblest elements. But the sense that she sees “beyond” is nowhere greater than in this paean to a mathematical constant; and the chords that accompany her recitation are some of her most exquisitely sequenced. Claim that one of her most sensual lyrics goes “50288419 716939937510 / 582319749 44 59230781” and the unconverted might roll their eyes, but the way she lingers on these digits – especially those swelling, repeating 6s and 8s – is transporting.

22.

This Sensual World

(from The Sensual World, 1989)

Kate Bush is James Joyce’s Molly Bloom.

“Like trains of thought continually tumbling” is how Kate Bush described Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of James Joyce’s 1922 novel, Ulysses. It isn’t hard to see why the rhapsodic conclusion of Joyce’s modernist masterpiece took root in the singer’s subconscious. With Wuthering Heights, 11 years previously, Bush had alchemised Catherine Earnshaw’s tormented pleas for Heathcliff’s forgiveness into a sexual fever dream and if anything, Molly’s speech was an even more suitable case for such a treatment. From the first “Mmh, yes” that emerges from the opening peals of wedding bells, Bush’s languorous performance astrally vaults the listener to the mother of all postcoitally sunny Sunday mornings. One ironic consequence of The Sensual World’s success was that, by the time Bush set about re-recording it for 2011’s Director’s Cut, Joyce’s estate had clearly been won over by the purity of her intentions. With permission now granted, the new version – retitled Flower Of The Mountain – duly reverted to the original words, and saw Bush confer a breathier, worldlier ambience on Bloom, as if channeling the woman enjoying the memory of first love, rather than the woman in the memory. For all of that, it’s the first version that remains the definitive one.

21.

Pull Out The Pin

(from The Dreaming, 1982)

Kate Bush joins the Viet Kong. At The Movies

The cinematically-minded music that Kate Bush began striving to make on Never For Ever found its first full realisation as the centrepiece of The Dreaming’s wildly ambitious first side: the furiously inventive five-and-a-half minutes of Pull Out The Pin. Airlifting the listener directly into the south-east Asian jungle during The Vietnam war, the scene is set by Preston Heyman’s staccato stick-played bongo pattern, Danny Thompson’s snaking double bass and Brian Bath’s choppy guitar, shrunk to a fizzy noise emanating from a transistor radio amid the bamboo. Vocally, Pull Out The Pin is deftly complex – Bush’s electronically double-tracked delivery at first calm and composed before turning sinister, then desperate, in her repeated cry of “I love life!” By inhabiting the thoughts of this tenacious soldier, she performs an impressive act of ventriloquism. “It’s that thing of trying to imagine being there,” she said in 2005. “Being in this place that you’re singing about, trying to create what it looks like and who’s there. I think music is very visual.”

20.

Breathing

(from Never For Ever, 1980)

Nuclear apocalypse fear becomes terminal lullaby for clairvoyant unborn.

A foetus looks outwards from the womb as the nuclear bomb drops, and pleads to be allowed to live: it probably perplexed the Radio 1 playlist, but this dramatic piano and voice-led ballad – inspired by side three of The Wall – was a startling addition to the canon of songs inspired by Cold War terror. The act of breathing becomes somehow uncomfortable when listening (“chips of plutonium are shining in every lung,” she sings), but the emotional impact cannot be denied.

19.

Hello Earth

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

Back to the horror genre for multilingual thrills and chills.

On paper, The Ninth Wave’s penultimate gambit is 5th Form boilerplate: Kate’s in space, contemplating our planet’s insignificance. But the glorious switchback of perspectives – in a car, on the swell, from the stars – spins the head, and the elemental Richard Hickox Singers recreate the rumbling Georgian chant Bush heard in Werner Herzog’s 1979 film update of Nosferatu, bathing the whole thing in deep, thrilling unease. It’s a murder mystery, but who’s the “murderer”? Pet theory: it’s our baleful moon (“I was there at the birth”), wreaking tidal mayhem on its planetary twin.

18.

Babooshka

(from Never For Ever, 1980)

Russian folk traditionalism inspires modern studio mastery.

Inseparable from the promo of double bass-love and warrior-princess-shape-throwing, Babooshka is a tale of paranoid relationship collapse wrapped in a buoyant pop waltz replete with glass-breaking sound effects. Compared to the rest of the often bleak and meditative Never For Ever, Babooshka’s minor-chord intrigue offers three-and-a-half minutes of relatively light relief. Not that it was an easy song to record – even Del Palmer’s bass was deemed an incorrect fit for what would become one of Bush’s biggest singles.

17.

Under The Ivy

(B-side of Running Up That Hill, 1985)

A tantalising invite to a secret place.

Bafflingly given away as the flipside of the first single from Hounds Of Love, Under The Ivy is literally a hidden pleasure. The lyric of this alluring piano ballad finds the childhood-pining narrator sneaking away from a party, beckoning a partner into the foliage. Bush has dismissed the notion that the song is a metaphor for suicide. Instead, there is a clear sense of adults sloping off for furtive fumblings that might have begun, as Bush revealed, “when they were innocent and when they were children”.

16.

Waking The Witch

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

The third track of Hounds Of Love’s Ninth Wave suite throws the listener into a discombobulation chop-up of voices (Bush’s brothers, her father and actor Robbie Coltrane) in a startling dramatisation of a witch trial. “I think it's very interesting the whole concept of witch-hunting and the fear of women's power,” said Bush of the track. ”In a way it's very sexist behavior, and I feel that female intuition and instincts are very strong, and are still put down, really. And in this song, this women is being persecuted by the witch-hunter and the whole jury, although she's committed no crime, and they're trying to push her under the water to see if she'll sink or float.”

15.

Night Of The Swallow

(from The Dreaming, 1982)

Fairlight meets bouzoukis on electro-folk Ireland-only single.

Bush’s raw, pained vocal at the outset of this tale of a pilot resisting his wife’s attempts to stop him trafficking human cargo captures the female narrator’s fear and frustration, suggesting that the whole story is also a metaphor for the emotional push-and-pull of human relationships. One of the first songs recorded for The Dreaming, Bush enlisted members of Irish folk veterans The Chieftains and Planxty to add uilleann pipes and penny whistles.

14.

The Big Sky

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

Ecstatic, free-spirited anthem acts as precursor to rave.

The final single from Hounds Of Love is a pristine, pastoral rock transmission from the doe-eyed innocence of childhood. Bush’s chuckled delivery of “That cloud, that cloud/It looks like Ireland!” is a moment of pure joy infused with the melancholic knowledge that these flashes can’t last. Here, her epic Edenic visions and wide-eyed sense of wonder collide and ignite a wash of synths, before ending with a gospel-esque refrain that ranks among her most carefree arrangements.

13.

A Coral Room

(from Aerial, 2005)

Into the depths: Bush casts her net through memory and time.

Like the little brown jug that Bush remembers her late mother holding in her hands, A Coral Room is simple yet beautiful, a perfect match of form and function. Starting with mythical descriptions of a lost Atlantis-style city and planes crashing into the sea, when Bush dips her hands into this murky water, she pulls out the small but sacred image of her mother. A profoundly moving encapsulation of the workings of human memory, its complexity distilled into piano and voice.

12.

Suspended In Gaffa

(from The Dreaming, 1982)

Heavenly visions and electrician’s tape conjoin in a song about yearning.

Bush once suggested Suspended In Gaffa was a hangover from her Roman Catholic upbringing. The wonky time signature, oom-pah-pah piano intro and breathlessly delivered lyrics (“Can I have it all?”) complement the idea that it’s about briefly glimpsing the divine. Yet it also evokes that dreamlike state where you can only move in infuriating slow motion and everything is tantalisingly out of reach.

11.

Army Dreamers

(from Never For Ever, 1980)

The third and final single to be lifted from Never For Ever delivered a sucker-punch in a gossamer glove. A haunting waltz, built around double bass, gentle stabs of cello, sampled pistol-cocks and a spectral mandolin figure, its message was an unsettling mix of the motherly and political: that working-class boy soldiers join up, and die, because other more glamorous occupations aren’t open to them. Delivered in Bush’s best wide-eyed whisper, it matches Elvis Costello’s Shipbuilding for its profoundly humanist reading of the everyman’s tug of war and pride.

10.

Cloudbusting

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

Hypnagogic childhood of Wilhelm Reich’s son as sumptuous Purcellian lament.

A literal retelling of Peter Reich’s A Book Of Dreams (purchased by Kate in Watkins’ Esoteric Bookstore in 1976, before her Lindsay Kemp dance class), Cloudbusting exists in the liminal interspace between sleep and wakefulness, Reich Jr’s troubled sleep-memories of his Austrian psychoanalyst father represented as Edenic phantasy. Conceived as a short film, Cloudbusting is arguably the only Bush composition enhanced by its video, with Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm and Kate as Peter adding further meshing layers of Oedipal interpretation to the song’s melancholy Restoration march.

9.

Wow

(from Lionheart, 1978)

TOTP dimmed the lights when she sang “Vaseline” and patted her bum.

 Whether or not the period’s pisstaking about her hippy-throwback exclamations of “Wow!” and “Amazing!” provoked the song, she made the most of it with a grotesque Guignol demolition of showbiz bullshit flattery and backstabbing (“We’d give you a part, my love/But…”). The staying power comes from the emotional distance between those squealing to grande-dame-contralto chorus “Wows” and the melancholy strings when she hesitantly begins and then fades to vanishing at the end with the fear-ridden, “We’re all alone on the stage tonight”.

8.

Moments Of Pleasure

(from The Red Shoes, 1993)

Heart-shredding elegy to the fallen.

The cast of recently departed spans the known (Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Bush’s mother), the Googleable (Teddy is Abbey Road engineer John Barrett) and the unknown (Bubba, George The Wipe). Musically and thematically, Moments… echoes life-and-death opus This Woman’s Work, down to the line “give these moments back”, but adds deluxe orchestral icing that Bush replaced on the Director’s Cut take with a hushed choir: a longer (by one minute), more solemn and shivery pleasure.

7.

Mrs Bartolozzi

(from Aerial, 2005)

Washing machine! Washing machine!

A poignant piano ballad-cum-remarkable portrait song, its subject lost in the moving meditation of her family’s clothes going “round and round… slooshy sloshy…” in the Hotpoint. Long, contemplative pauses suggest either profound loneliness or perhaps a more sinister backstory (what has happened to this absent family?). Or is Mrs B Kate herself, reporting from 12 years spent at home before Aerial? Or perhaps she’s all our mothers and grandmothers, a female domestic perspective so rare in art. Either way, bring a hanky.

6.

Sat In Your Lap

(single, 1981)

Out-there outrider for The Dreaming.

Organised chaos: the African drum-charging thunder, the rigid piano lurch, the synthesized trumpet section’s blare – and then Bush sings some kind of six-characters-on-the-run-from-their-author wildness and overrides all that big pushy noise. Breathy Bush and squawky Bush alternate before transubstantiating into the dominatrix dictator – Thatcher pastiche? – declaiming “just when I think I’m king…” Meanwhile, her subject is knowledge, work, idleness, frustration, “’tis I that moan and groaneth”. You’re gobsmacked, but you’ve gotta laugh too.

5.

The Man With The Child In His Eyes

(from The Kick Inside, 1978)

JM Barrie, Jung and Freud subdued in non-corporeal love song.

 The contemplative but still visionary preamble to Wuthering Heights, which it preceded on The Kick Inside. The soundtrack is assured orchestral pop – imagine an autumnal daytime analogue to Scott Walker’s Sleepwalkers Woman – and within she cross-fades the archetypes bewilderingly. Simultaneously a daughter/mother/lover, her reverie concerns an understanding father figure who’s also a child – and who, it appears, exists only in her imagination. Still wholly bewitching, though, and incredibly she wrote it when she was just 13.

• READ MORE: Inside The Making Of Kate Bush's The Kick Inside

4.

This Woman’s Work

(from The Sensual World, 1989)

Her greatest ballad, written to order for John Hughes’ film She’s Having A Baby.

The emotions seeping from this ‘childbirth crisis’ are almost unbearable as Bush abandons symbolism for a direct hit of primal fear. Her own pregnancy was nine years away but given her mother Hannah’s fresh cancer diagnosis, the words double as a child’s own desperate lament, and her vocal is suitably anguished and ecstatic. The Synclavier parts – excised from the Director’s Cut revision to leave just voice/piano – are hardly obtrusive, leaving acres of space for this most tender, yet brutal, of Bush ballads.

3.

Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

Mood-pop gender-swapping and a contract with the Godhead.

Running Up That Hill’s appearance in Stranger Things’s series finale beamed Bush into the consciousness of thousands of minds previously unaware of her singular genius. And what an introduction. Returning to the question of genuine understanding between the sexes, here she imagines the Almighty enabling a woman and a man to actually become each other. This could have been risible – think the various ‘body swap’ storylines in film and books – but here, with its pummelling rhythms, animalistic Fairlight sample and a stark vocal that heads dauntlessly into her lower register, the impression is one of significance and limits crossed. Its parenthetical subtitle was not to be found on the 45 version – reportedly to spare religious ire.

2.

Wuthering Heights

(from The Kick Inside, 1978)

Taking Brontë onto TOTPs and launching an oeuvre.

A hit song that bypassed the prevailing genre staples – disco, MOR, punk/new wave, pap pop – for the singular realm of peculiarity and particularity.  Yet Wuthering Heights was not just peculiar but freakish: untamed, daring, a hallucination verging on hysteria and yet perfectly controlled. Bush was 18 when she caught the end of a BBC adaption of Wuthering Heights. Only then did she read Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel to ensure she didn’t misquote Cathy Earnshaw’s utterances, unreservedly embracing the story’s brutal vicissitudes to scale the charts. Bush used the song’s unique energy to fire her self-belief, to trust to her muse. And she never betrayed it, not even once.

1.

Hounds Of Love

(from Hounds Of Love, 1985)

Kate runs headlong from love and right into its clutches.

No matter how refined the circumstances of its creation – built at leisure in Bush’s new 48-track studio – or how newfangled its production – still tangible in the hi-tech stabs and pads of Fairlight, and the crispness of Jonathan Williams’ cello – Hounds Of Love is red in tooth and claw, its breathless, atavistic fear of capture mixed with almost supernatural rapture. Love is thundering through the psychosexual woods, hunting down somebody terrified of what it means to surrender to another person. The song opens with a quote from British horror film Night Of The Demon but that’s the only moment it feels like theatre. From then on, Hounds Of Love maintains a dizzying emotional velocity, the relentless double drumming of Charlie Morgan and Stuart Elliott stamping down on the accelerator. Bush’s voice might dip and soften, but those drums are merciless, while the strident backing vocals, like a hunting horn call, goad her on if introspection threatens to slow her down. It never lets up, every line heightening the pitch, closing the distance between song and listener. It ends with a suddenness that makes it seem like she’s hit the ground and you’ve hit it with her, breathlessly waiting for an answer to the question: “Do you know what I really need?” The uncertainty, however, is not reflected in the confidence – the perfect, dazzling completeness – of the song’s execution. On Hounds Of Love, Kate Bush is going at full pelt, chasing the horizon, running her vision to ground. Not really the hunted, but the hunter all along.

How did a middle class, prospective medical student rise from playing traditional highlife music to becoming Nigeria’s public enemy number one? David Hutcheon speaks to those who knew him best and chronicles the radicalisation of Fela Kuti – Africa’s greatest and most revolutionary star…

“Fela was a great father. If you got past his eccentricities and his peculiarities, you know… Once you got past them, he was a great guy. Even a lot of my siblings couldn’t cope with that.” Sitting in the lounge of a Dublin hotel, a chirpy Seun Kuti looks every bit his father’s son, and is happy to let anybody know what a sweet chap he was. This, of course, is not the man the world ever heard about.

• READ MORE: The 50 Greatest Protest Songs Ever!

By legend, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the progenitor of Afrobeat, whose name meant “He who carries death in his pouch”, was a philosopher-warrior – a mythical mix of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leonidas of Sparta and Che Guevara – who took every beating dictators could hand out and came back for more; who single-handedly smoked more dope than the entire Rasta nation; whose simultaneous marriage to 26 (or was it 27?) women only boosted his outrageous sexual appetite; whose gigs lasted not hours but days. Was he really just a misunderstood family man?

Born in the Nigerian town of Abeokuta, 60 miles north of the then-capital, Lagos, in 1938, Kuti had a comfortably middle-class childhood: his father, Daudu, was an Anglican minister and teacher; his mother, Funmilayo, a progressive community leader, reputedly the first Nigerian woman to drive a car. Had Fela never been born, she would still be a chapter in West African history, but musicians who played with Kuti in his early days insist she was also among his most significant mentors.

“She was the number one activist in Nigeria,” says drummer Tony Allen, who joined Fela’s jazz quintet in 1964. “No other woman had reached her level in the culture. He took like his mother; she was very outspoken and never hid anything. Fela was like that.” Sax player Lekan Animashaun, who signed on in January 1965, credits Funmilayo with pointing Fela in the right direction musically: “She said, ‘If you want people to listen to your music you have to play something they can relate to easily.’ So when he wanted to become successful, he started composing songs that could appeal to the people, using a language they could readily recognise.”

Allen remembers Fela hanging around Lagos clubs in the late 1950s, when highlife was king. Among the important band-leaders playing this music, which owed a debt to both Cuba and the legacy of colonial brass bands, were ET Mensah, Cardinal Rex Lawson and Victor Olaiya. “I was working in the clubs then. I wasn’t playing drums but I was friends with Olaiya and his musicians, so I’d always be around. Fela would come and sing with them. Then one day he was gone.”

Like his brothers Koyu and Beko, and sister Dolupe, Fela had been sent to Britain to study medicine. Unlike them, he was set on doing something else. In August 1958, he enrolled at Trinity College of Music in London. By night, he was an aspiring professional trumpeter, hanging out in Soho’s modern jazz venues, a vibrant scene for immigrant jazzmen in the early ’60s. He befriended Joe Harriott, a Jamaican and the UK’s top alto player playing at the Metro Club on Tottenham Court Road. After leaving Britain, Fela would add sax to his weaponry.

The Africa Kuti returned to in 1963 was a very different continent to the one he had left: in those five years more than 20 countries, including Nigeria, had become independent. Fired by optimism for the future, and with a new band, the Koola Lobitos, Fela spent five years playing a unique fusion of highlife and jazz, recording over a dozen singles – including flag-wavers Nigerian Independence and Viva Nigeria – and a handful of albums. Yet, for the last time in his life, he couldn’t get arrested.

“We would never play highlife the normal way,” says Allen. “Those that did had an audience. It was tough for people to accommodate what we did, it sounded crazy to them. It took them a long time to catch up.”

The African crowds were instead turning to American soul, and the first to cash in was Geraldo Pino. Today seen as more Arthur Conley than Otis Redding, Pino is still a crucial influence on Afrobeat. Quoted in Carlos Moore’s biography Fela: This Bitch Of A Life, Kuti made his awe clear after witnessing the Sierra Leonean live in 1966: “What worried me was that he was going to come back again to Nigeria. I’d seen the impact this motherfucker had in Lagos. He had everyone in his pocket… there wasn’t shit I could do.” For a married man with young children to feed, the situation was desperate. Whatever American lightning Pino harnessed, Kuti wanted a part of it. When the opportunity to tour the States came up, he didn’t think twice.

The trip was a financial disaster, but witnessing the civil rights struggle awakened something in Fela. Based in Sunset Boulevard’s Citadel d’Haiti club, run by Bernie Hamilton (future Captain Dobey in Starsky And Hutch, brother of Chico), the band were renamed first Nigeria 70, then Africa 70, as Kuti’s interest in his continent’s cultural heritage grew, thanks to the guidance of Black Panther friends such as Sandra Isidore. The irony of a Nigerian having to go to the new world to learn about African history impressed him deeply.

“In those nine months, Fela and some of us were exposed to things that were being kept from us in Africa,” says Animashaun. “I’m talking about history books not available in Nigeria. When we got back home from that tour, Fela said he couldn’t be a great man when people in his country were poor.”

The decision to Africanise his music, turning to tribal beats and call-and-response chants, meant an increased prominence for Allen, who had a wealth of knowledge of African rhythms. “In America, we were advised to keep it simple to make money. When the music became simple and trancey, with a good groove, that’s when people became fans, that’s when everything became like an explosion.”

The drummer bristles at any suggestion that Kuti was copying the funk template developed by James Brown, who had already made two trips to West Africa, in 1966 and 1968. “Have you ever heard anybody play like me? James Brown’s drummer? James Brown’s two drummers? No.”

And Fred Wesley, Brown’s trombonist at the time, adds: “Fela got a lot from James, but what’s not as obvious is what James got from Africa – the hard drive. He’d heard music there that undoubtedly influenced him. It was the same beat, sure, the same chords, but the drive was African. There Was A Time was influenced by Africa, and that became a big hit for us in Africa.”

The Africa 70 fled America before immigration officials could ask them about their long-expired visas and non-existent work permits. “We were happy to go home,” says Animashaun. “In America, we saw the great difference between the black and the white. I realised things there were a fantasy, the black people had little or no rights, they were bullied. In many aspects of life, you saw black people wanting. From then, the changes started coming. Fela was getting revolutionary in his music and his lyrics.”

Over the next few years a series of singles and albums were released combining sex talk (Na Poi, Lady), the pan-Africanism brought back from the US (My Lady Frustration) and social observation (Monday Morning In Lagos, Gentleman). Finally, Fela was a star and the seven-hour Africa 70 shows at his Shrine nightclub were the hottest tickets in town. As word grew, there were collaborations with Ginger Baker (Stratavarious) and run-ins with Paul McCartney. Yet not even his unpopularity among Nigeria’s polite society suggested Kuti was about to become public enemy number one.

• READ MORE: Ginger Baker: “I’ve never feared death. I laugh at it…”

 Everything changed in 1974. In April, the band’s compound in Surulere, then known simply as Fela’s House or the Africa 70 Organisation, was raided for drugs. “I had nothing to fear,” he told Carlos Moore. “I wasn’t even thinking they could have something against me. I was just preaching revolution for Africa, you know. I didn’t know they were planning against me, man.”

Fifty policeman arrived, found marijuana and took the male residents to the Nigerian police station Alagbon Close. Kuti spent more than a week in prison before returning home, only to be promptly busted again. This time, he was stuck in a cell until he could give a stool sample for analysis. The result was negative. On release, Kuti erected a 10ft, electrified, barbed-wire fence around his home, as if expecting further trouble. He also wrote the satirical Expensive Shit, the first in a sequence of songs that recorded his dealings with the agencies of oppression. The tension increased with what became known as the Kalakuta Show, in November, which began when a man came looking for his sister.

“It started as a joke,” says alto sax player Adedimeji ‘Showboy’ Fagbemi, who had recently joined Fela’s crew. “He was just passing and saw somebody who looked like his kid sister, who had been missing for two months. He came in, found out it was her and started beating her up.” It was a rule that women were not hit in Fela’s house. The brother was attacked and thrown out.

The girl’s mother visited next, but when her daughter refused to leave Kuti said there was nothing he could do. “Fela told her he didn’t write ‘Vacancy’ in front of his house, that his gate was open to everybody,” Showboy continues. “She left and we thought that was it.”

Before we knew it, 500 cops with cutlasses, hammers and other weapons were at the fence.

- Adedimeji ‘Showboy’ Fagbemi

Nobody knew, however, that the girl’s father was a police commissioner. “On Friday night we went to the Shrine to play. By the time we finished on Saturday morning, the police had surrounded the compound, but they didn’t hassle us, didn’t make any arrests. They were waiting for reinforcements. Around 1pm, we heard some sirens coming towards us. Before we knew it, 500 cops with cutlasses, hammers and other weapons were at the fence. They started chopping the wire, then they shot about 300 canisters of tear gas and attacked.  I was standing next to Fela, watching them. They took all of us to the police office, but the man in charge said he couldn’t hold us because we were too many. So they took us to Alagbon Close and put us all in Kalakuta [ruffian] cell.”

“They threw tear-gas and beat the shit outta us,” Kuti told Moore. “I was cut, bleeding profusely. Couldn’t even stand up or walk.”

“Fela was beaten,” continues Showboy, “They broke his head, broke his arm. His mother followed the police and insisted he was taken to hospital and not locked up. She went to a judge and got him bail on Monday morning. We stayed in jail for two weeks. When we got home, Fela had renamed the compound Kalakuta Republic.”

The first half of 1975 saw the persecution continue, with Fela’s men regularly harassed. The bandleader, however, seemed to absorb the attacks, transforming himself into the Kuti of myth, unbowed, righteous and cocksure, berating his audience and mocking his enemies, revelling in his notoriety and status. His mischievous creativity came in inverse proportion to his popularity among the Establishment, and in 1974-76, he was on a roll.

After the Expensive Shit LP came Alagbon Close, Everything Scatter, Kalakuta Show, with its sleeve featuring a battered Kuti, and, at the end of 1976, his 13th album in two years and his most successful to date, Zombie. If the sleeve, which crudely imposed a tiny Fela in front of a wall of helmets, wasn’t explicit enough, the lyrics – “Zombie no go go, unless you tell him to go/Zombie no go stop unless you tell him to stop” – would prove too much for his enemies.

In January 1977, as Nigeria celebrated the FESTAC festival of black and African culture, Fela fumed about corruption from the sidelines. The Shrine did a roaring trade, however, with Stevie Wonder, Sun Ra and Archie Shepp all making the trek to Fela’s to meet and play with the self-proclaimed ‘Black President’.

On February 18, in excess of 1,000 soldiers attacked Kalakuta. In This Bitch Of A Life, Moore interviews a number of Kuti’s queens, and their harrowing recollections of the attack make grim reading. Beko was left in a wheelchair; Funmilayo, then 78, was thrown from a window and would later die of her injuries; Fela only escaped death through the intervention of an army officer who told his charges to stop beating him. The compound was burnt to the ground, along with a clinic and recording studio. Two months later, a government inquiry found that Kalakuta had been destroyed by “an unknown soldier”.

If the human toll of the attack was awful, the financial implications left Kuti in dire straits. His followers had no homes, his band had nowhere to play, no instruments and no studio, his queens were traumatised and treated worse than prostitutes, and he was in self-imposed exile in Ghana for his own safety. Dates in Germany in 1978 saw many of the Africa 70 quit, including Allen. “He treated me like a child and I ran out of patience,” says the drummer. Kuti’s best years were behind him.

The next decade saw Kuti’s fame grow, yet success came at a price. The outside world caught up with Afrobeat, but didn’t always like what it saw or heard. The new band, Egypt 80, led by Animashaun, still produced fine albums, but their shows could mesmerise – his late-night set at Glastonbury 1984, captured by the BBC – or disappoint – Brixton Academy, 1983 – thanks to Kuti’s refusal to play anything crowds already knew. If you want to hear Zombie again, buy the LP.

Then there was his polygamy, even misogyny. Seun, the son of one of the wives he married in 1978, points the finger at western attitudes: “In Kalakuta, after Fela the most important people in the house, the most powerful, were the women. So he actually thought of them as very strong politically. Now look at Bill Clinton: he was married and sneaking into the Oval Office to get a blow job. If Clinton was an African, he would have been getting a blow job in his house, he could have been chilling with the kids and his wife, his second wife.”

Meanwhile, the Nigerian government kept on Kuti’s back, keeping him in court throughout the first half of the 1980s. A 1984 tour of America proved to be eldest son Femi’s big break when he had to stand in for his father, imprisoned on trumped-up smuggling charges. Yet even he would soon depart.

Fela had discovered an Egypt-centric African spirituality, which left him out of step with even the most sympathetic ears in the western world. In 1984, he told the NME’s Len Brown that Queen Elizabeth had come to Egypt in 1470 to steal power from the Yoruba people, then the explorer Mungo Park brought back a witchpot to Buckingham Palace, thus stealing African technology for Europe.

“I’m giving you fact whether people like to know it or not. Science uses words like theory to debase spiritual happenings.” Fatally, that was an attitude he took towards the arrival of a new disease in Africa.

His death in August 1997, of complications brought on by Aids, encouraged more than a million people onto the streets of Lagos. “My father was cool,” says Femi in a manner that brooks no disagreement. “He was hip, he stood by his beliefs and confronted the government. People pretend they are Fela’s guys, but when the problems come, they chicken out. He never ran, he was the only one standing.”

This article originally appeared in MOJO 210

Feeling redundant at the age of 27, post-Beatles Paul McCartney would compare his predicament to that of the astronauts who’d returned from the moon: “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?” he mused. His was to be a bumpy re-entry, characterised by a nagging doubt that was at odds with the apparently super-confident figure the public had seen on screen in Get Back.

• READ MORE: Paul McCartney Interviewed: "Imagine starting another band after The Beatles..."

From the low-key beginning of his first solo album McCartney, via a procession of variously slick or odd records throughout the 1970s, Paul built a band, Wings, as an extension of his travelling family, before they crashed following his still-bizarre weed bust/imprisonment in Japan in 1980. Like most of his ’60s contemporaries, Macca then seemed a bit lost during that glossy decade, before fully relocating his muse in 1997 with Flaming Pie.

Looking back, McCartney’s wonky solo path should not have been so much of a surprise, really. He’d always viewed the difference between The Beatles and their peers as being that the Fabs were inherently art-minded outsiders. He may have been the kid who’d lain on the carpet at 20 Forthlin Road listening to his former bandleader dad Jim playing piano and thus begun to learn the intricacies of harmony, but he was also the teen who’d sat on Liverpool buses smoking a pipe in an effort to look like a beatnik weirdo. In truth, Paul was never as “straight” as he appeared.

For someone often regarded as commercially minded, McCartney is at heart a pop experimentalist, as proven by his Wings and solo catalogue: a trail of records that highlight his eccentricity as much as his magical gift for melody.

Moreover, McCartney has pretty much always operated from instinct rather than a shark-eyed hunger for hits. “My career is certainly not carefully considered,” he told this writer 13 years ago. “And I think that’s probably quite obvious.”

In the July issue of MOJO, on sale now, McCartney discusses the emotional, 70-year journey behind his latest album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane. Following the record's release, Macca biographer Tom Doyle has dived into that career and ranked and rated every album from the former Beatle to date.

Every Paul McCartney Album Ranked...

31.

Paul McCartney

Give My Regards To Broad Street

(Parlophone, 1984)

McCartney’s grandest solo gesture – a major Hollywood studio feature film, with a Beatley plot involving the theft of his master tapes – turned out to be his greatest folly. Ringo agreed to get involved, but not to re-recording any of the old classics (leaving Fairport Convention’s Dave Mattacks to take over on drums on a too-smooth version of The Long And Winding Road). Highlights were few, but _Tug Of Wa_r’s seafaring pot bust ballad Wanderlust was given a brassy makeover, while the up-tempo new songs were probably Broad Street’s best: the chugging rocker Not Such A Bad Boy and the post-punk power pop of No Values.

30.

Percy “Thrills” Thrillington

Thrillington

(Regal Zonophone, 1977)

The strangest album in McCartney’s solo canon was made in the summer of 1971 but not released until six years later. An easy listening reworking of Ram, produced by the pseudonymous McCartney, it was arranged by Richard Hewson (who’d clearly been forgiven for aiding Phil Spector in his sugary orchestration of The Long And Winding Road for Let It Be.) While highlighting the melodic nuances of Ram’s songs, it was clearly destined to remain a curio. “Substances were involved,” Macca admitted of Thrillington’s conception. “He would’ve been better to put it out as a Paul McCartney-produced instrumental album,” Hewson reckoned to MOJO in 2021.

29.

Paul McCartney

Press To Play

Parlophone, 1986

Most 1960s artists got lost in clouds of 1980s reverb and Paul McCartney was no exception. If Press To Play suffered from a bit of an identity crisis – Pretty Little Head cribbed Peter Gabriel, the wan synth pop of Talk More Talk opened with a Floyd-like spoken word collage – there was a digital synth updating of the mid-‘60s Macca Beatles ballad in Footprints. In the video to promote perky single Press, Macca rode the London Underground, goofing around with surprised fellow commuters. Yet, it was all somehow less than the sum of its parts. “I don’t think it was that good of an album,” McCartney confessed to this writer in 2006.

28.

Paul McCartney

Off The Ground

(Parlophone, 1993)

Ahead of McCartney’s New World Tour, Off The Ground was recorded with his live band and attempted, with co-producer Julian Mendelsohn (Pet Shop Boys, Level 42), to capture the studio performances in as few takes as possible. Even when the songs were a bit thin, the messaging was heartfelt – see the animal rights rocker Looking For Changes – yet the results remained strangely over-polished. Strummy acoustic single Hope Of Deliverance was one standout, along with Flowers In The Dirt offcut Elvis Costello co-writes Mistress And Maid and (the brilliant, Bacharachesque) The Lovers That Never Were.

27.

The Fireman

Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest

(Parlophone, 1993)

Commissioned to remix tracks from Off The Ground, producer/Killing Joke bassist Youth decided to go much further, using samples from it (and Back To The Egg) to create long, elaborate ambient dance tracks in the style of his work with The Orb. McCartney often joined Youth for these nocturnal cut-and-paste sessions at his Hogg Hill Mill studio, adding fresh parts and gradually losing most of the samples. The results were released under a mysterious Penny Lane-referencing alias, until speculation forced Parlophone to cop to Macca’s involvement. A commercial pressures-free journey into sound, it was to be the first of three such collaborations.

26.

Wings

Wings At The Speed Of Sound

(Capitol, 1976)

An attempt to prove the validity of Wings as a ‘real’ band, …At The Speed Of Sound saw McCartney open up the songwriting and lead vocal performances. The decision seemed to personally spur him into action, with his contributions including the Beatle-quality soft rocker Let ‘Em In and the critics-baiting US Number 1 Silly Love Songs. Denny Laine turned in the dreamy ballad The Note You Never Wrote, guitarist Jimmy McCulloch (who succumbed to morphine poisoning in 1979) the deceptively breezy, if grimly prophetic Wino Junko. Elsewhere, there was room for drummer Joe English’s gentle Must Do Something About It and Linda’s ‘50s lark around Cook Of The House.

25.

Paul McCartney

Kisses On The Bottom

(Hear Music, 2012)

Forty-two years after Ringo released his first solo LP, 1970’s Sentimental Journey, Paul decided to make his own standards album, recorded in Hollywood and New York and produced by Tommy LiPuma (whose resume fittingly featured Barbra Streisand and Diana Krall). Like Starr, Macca tackled Bye Bye Blackbird, although wrung it for poignancy in a slow-paced arrangement, and elsewhere lent real intimacy to Irving Berlin’s song of eternal devotion, Always. McCartney’s two self-penned contributions adhered to the overall style, with My Valentine, written for his new wife Nancy Shevell, becoming a regular inclusion in his live sets from 2016 to today.

24.

Paul McCartney

Liverpool Sound Collage

(Hydra, 2000)

Inspired by Sgt. Pepper cover artist Peter Blake’s request for him to create a sonic backdrop for his About Collage exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Macca returned to his tape-snipping habits of the mid ‘60s, roping in Youth and Super Furry Animals to aid his efforts. The result was this far-out sampledelic five-tracker in which Macca very much let his freak flag fly. Plastic Beetle featured spoken word extracts of himself, Lennon, Harrison and Starr, and the vocal hook of Free Now was built around a sample of McCartney ad-libbing at the end of the ninth take of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band back in 1967. All in all, quite a trip.

23.

Paul McCartney

Run Devil Run

(Parlophone, 1999)

Returning to activity after the shock of Linda’s death from breast cancer in April 1998, Paul went back to first principles with this rock ‘n’ roll covers set, with three added originals. Assembling a crack band involving Floyd’s David Gilmour, Deep Purple drummer Ian Paice and The Pirates’ guitarist Mick Green, and with Beatles studio alumni Chris Thomas at the controls, Macca tore through old faves by Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent and Elvis Presley. Of his own new songs, the title track was the throat-shredding highpoint. Clearly a cathartic experience, it fair made the heart sing to hear him back rocking out with his pals.

22.

Paul McCartney

Egypt Station

(Capitol, 2018)

Very loosely a concept album in the sense that each of its 16 tracks was imagined as a ‘station’ on a near-hour-long journey, Egypt Station was clearly intended to be an expansive, creatively freeing affair. Largely co-produced by McCartney and Greg Kurstin (Adele, Foo Fighters), it was slightly off-putting to hear the septuagenarian singer getting fruity on Come On To Me and (the Ryan Tedder co-helmed) Fuh You. In Happy With You, Macca (only half-convincingly) renounced his pothead ways, while the six-minute Despite Repeated Warnings was an episodic epic and the timeworn and beautiful I Don’t Know offered a rare confession of doubt and pain.

21.

Paul McCartney And Wings

Red Rose Speedway

(Apple, 1973)

The leisurely, ‘hey man’ recording vibe of Wings’ second album pushed engineer Glyn Johns to the point of distraction, and he quit less than a month into the sessions. But it was to prove a key album for McCartney in helping him to stretch out stylistically after The Beatles. The tender Little Lamb Dragonfly helped to sketch the Wings blueprint, My Love (with its improvised solo from guitarist Henry McCullough) was gold standard Macca and, even if it meandered in places (the closing 11-minute song cycle was a bit aimless), there were gems among the doodles and noodles. Aldous Harding has named the quirky Single Pigeon as the one song she wishes she’d written.

20.

Paul McCartney

Driving Rain

(Parlophone, 2001)

Driving Rain carried some of the energy of the Run Devil Run sessions into an album of new material mostly recorded in LA in a fortnight and featuring the debut studio appearances of drummer Abe Laboriel Jr. and guitarist Rusty Anderson, set to become key players in McCartney’s touring band for the next two-plus decades. The gently tortured From A Lover To A Friend shared some of the heavily emotional air of The Blue Nile, while the dark, looping folk of She’s Given Up Talking even had something of The Beta Band about it. At 16 tracks, like Egypt Station, it was another effective double, and one that deserved a deep dive.

19.

Paul McCartney

McCartney III

(Capitol, 2020)

More in the style of 1970’s McCartney than the electronically-enhanced McCartney II – yet not quite like either – the third instalment in Paul’s series of self-recorded albums was born of necessity, being made amid the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. Long Tailed Winter Bird was a gently eccentric number with vocoder vocal interjections that seemed to speak of the isolation: “Do you miss me?”. The withering, if empathic Pretty Boys spoke of male models who were “bicycles for hire”. Elsewhere, Lavatory Lil sounded like it had dropped off Side Two of Abbey Road and the delicate, acoustic The Kiss Of Venus could have slotted somewhere onto The Beatles.

18.

The Fireman

Rushes

(Hydra, 1998)

Whether the title was a reference to the dailies on a film shoot, the sensation of coming up on ecstasy or – most likely – Penny Lane once again (i.e. The Fireman “rushes in…”), there was an air of mystery to the music contained within Rushes, even though everyone by now knew that Youth and McCartney were the members of this formerly anonymous band. Its eight tracks found Paul whirling around from guitar to harmonium to Mellotron, along the way picking up a flute and sitar and tapping on tablas, in a set of slowly unfolding soundscapes such as the reverie-inducing Palo Verde and the Tangerine Dream-go-Beatles 7 a.m.

17.

Wings

London Town

(Parlophone, 1978)

The sixth Wings album was originally working-titled Water Wings having been largely recorded on a studio set up aboard a charter yacht, the Fair Carol, floating around the Virgin Islands. At odds with this idyllic arrangement was the fact that by the time London Town was released, Wings had once again been reduced to a trio (Joe English returning to the US, Jimmy McCulloch quitting after a rift with the McCartneys). The grey UK capital depicted on its cover was far from the sunny vibes of the music – the hushed soft rock tones of the title track were compelling, along with the synth pop wonder of With A Little Luck.

16.

Wings

Wild Life

(Apple, 1971)

For his new band’s debut LP, McCartney was inspired to follow the lead of Bob Dylan and his swift recording methods when making 1970’s New Morning, recording Wild Life within a week. Get past the daft and jammy openers Mumbo and Bip Bop and the album opened up into a vista featuring an inspired cover (a skanking Love Is Strange) and too-easily-forgotten jewels such as Paul-and-Linda duets Some People Never Know and You Are My Singer. Meanwhile, Dear Friend was a conciliatory response to Lennon’s coruscating How Do You Sleep?, released earlier that year on Imagine. “Is this really the borderline?” he gently implores of his old pal.

15.

Paul McCartney

The Boys Of Dungeon Lane

(MPL/Capitol)

Having naturally grown more nostalgic in parts of his more recent albums, McCartney here delved fully into his own backstory, specifically his pre-Beatles past. The timeworn quality of his voice only made Days We Left Behind all the more poignant, while cryptically referring to a “secret code” shared with Lennon since their teenage days. Down South zapped him back to hitchhiking with George Harrison in the late fifties, while in the here and now there was Paul and Ringo’s first duet, the Getting Better-groovy Home To Us. As You Lie There meanwhile addressed a girl he’d once fancied, Janice Dobbs, who until the song’s release had “absolutely no idea” of the strength of Macca’s feelings.

14.

Paul McCartney

New

(MPL/Hear/Universal, 2013)

Keen to shake up his studio routines, New was assembled by Paul using four producers – Giles Martin, Ethan (son of his old mucker Glyn) Johns, Paul Epworth and Mark Ronson. For all of the stylistic division that might result from such as an exercise, New was a surprisingly cohesive set. The bouncy, catchy Queenie Eye co-opted rhymes from a street game he’d played as a child and lent them a Magical Mystery Tour musical treatment. Other key tracks involved similarly nostalgic ruminations: On My Way To Work depicted him on the upper deck of a bus, having a smoke and daydreaming; Early Days as a secretly traumatised, motherless youth hanging out with his new buddy John Lennon.

13.

Paul McCartney

Pipes Of Peace

(Parlophone, 1983)

McCartney already had more than half a potential album left over from the productive Tug Of War sessions. Of the new additions, the anthemic title track provided him with a UK Number 1 (helped by its memorable video depicting the Christmas 1914 truce between football-playing British and German soldiers), while The Man and Say Say Say captured Macca and Michael Jackson together in happier times (before their friendship turned frosty due to the latter’s purchase of The Beatles’ publishing catalogue in 1985). In slowie So Bad, Paul played the falsetto-singing soul man and the connection to its predecessor was made explicit in its penultimate, jazz funky remake Tug Of Peace.

12.

Paul McCartney

Memory Almost Full

(Hear, 2007)

Released two weeks before he turned 65 and titled after a warning that flashed up on his phone, McCartney was taken aback when it was pointed out to him that its title could be spookily reshuffled into an anagram: ‘For My Soulmate LLM’ (the initials standing for Linda Louise McCartney). Some of Memory Almost Full was achingly sad, not least You Tell Me (a Paul Weller favourite), filled with misty watercolour memories that were trippily unreliable and matched to a beautiful chord sequence that had McCartney’s fingerprints all over it. That Was Me offered snapshots of his past, pre- and post-fame and the affectingly happy/sad The End Of The End even pictured his own demise and spoke of a belief in an afterlife.

11.

Paul McCartney

Tug Of War

(Parlophone, 1982)

Made in the aftermath of Lennon’s death and the breakup of Wings, Tug Of War caught McCartney in reflective, yet galvanised form. The lovely title track concerned both international conflicts and the trivial tussles of human relationships, while Here Today – still a showstopping staple of his live sets – paid tribute to Lennon by movingly pointing out that he lived on in McCartney’s head. Poignancy aside, there was electro funk and racial unity balladry with Stevie Wonder in What’s That You’re Doing? and the transatlantic Number 1 Ebony And Ivory. Even Ringo was back in the fold, double-drumming alongside Steve Gadd in Take It Away.

10.

Wings

Back To The Egg

Parlophone, 1979

The final band-sized line-up of Wings (featuring normally jobbing sessioneers, drummer Steve Holley and guitarist Laurence Juber) saw off the ’70s with this 14-track splurge. Part-recorded in the supposedly haunted medieval Lympne Castle in Kent, Back To The Egg may have been dismissed at the time as messy stabs at new wave and synthy soul, but time has revealed its charms. Getting Closer and Arrow Through Me respectively play Squeeze and Hall & Oates at their own games, and the spoken word bits featuring plummy-toned castle owners Mr Harold Margary and Mrs Deirdre Margary lend artful strangeness.

9.

Paul McCartney

Flowers In The Dirt

Parlophone, 1989

Designed to be played on McCartney’s first tour in almost a decade, and recorded over an unusually pernickety 18 months, Flowers In The Dirt ended up very differently from how it began. As the expanded 2017 reissue revealed, preliminary sessions with Paul and Elvis Costello writing together “knee-to-knee” in the old Lennon & McCartney tradition yielded many great songs left on the cutting room floor. Nonetheless, the polished result, buffed up by the likes of Mitchell Froom and Trevor Horn, offered the early Beatles of opener My Brave Face (rawer and better on the Costello/McCartney duet demos) and the lovely, snaking melody of Distractions.

8.

The Fireman

Electric Arguments

One Little Indian, 2008

The product of a smash-and-grab/autowriting approach where Macca would arrive at his Fireman partner Youth’s home studio, and riff over the latter’s prepared loops, in a breathless rush of spontaneity. It was a modus operandi that both thrilled and terrified McCartney but forced him to write from the gut rather than the head. In contrast to their previous two abstract and ambient Fireman albums together, _Electric Arguments_was vocal-based and followed more trad song structures, but remained playful, dreamy and audibly liberating. See particularly the lightly trippy reverie Sun Is Shining and the yearning folk rock of Sing The Changes.

7.

Paul McCartney

McCartney II

Parlophone, 1980

Hearing McCartney II opener Coming Up on the radio made John Lennon declare, “Fuck a pig! It’s Paul,” and feel a sneaking admiration for the bouncy track. Its parent album, home-recorded alone (as with its 1970. predecessor) was a synth-inspired, octopus-limbed solo album that boldly and often brilliantly wore its peculiarities with pride. The effervescent electro of Temporary Secretary would be reclaimed as a hipster dancefloor curio in the 21st century (it was finally played live in 2015); elsewhere, minimalist ballad Waterfalls revealed Paul as quietly vulnerable and anxious, while One Of These Days was a stripped-back acoustic beauty echoing The White Album.

6.

Paul McCartney

McCartney

Apple, 1970

As The Beatles slowly decayed, McCartney had a tape machine from Abbey Road delivered to his nearby St John’s Wood home and began his solo journey. McCartney was regarded as an oddity: low-key – and proto lo-fi – songs and experiments (one used the thwacking sounds of arrows hitting a target as percussion). Beatles offcuts such as the gently mesmeric Junk and the cooing Teddy Boy sat side-by-side with admissions about McCartney’s troubled state of mind (Every Night). Where on December 1970’s Plastic Ono Band, John was primal screaming his pain, Paul cloaked his own in artfully twisty melodies.

5.

Wings

Venus And Mars

Capitol, 1975

Walking tall after Band On The Run and having established what would be the best Wings line-up – featuring American drummer Joe English and wild card Glaswegian guitarist Jimmy McCulloch – Venus And Mars was an album brimming with rediscovered confidence. The minute-long acoustic psychedelia of the title track (although later reprised) was all the more tantalising given its brevity, before it slammed into the Jimmy Page-referencing, designed-for-stage belter Rock Show. Glam loper Magneto And Titanium Man was appealingly catchy/daft, Letting Go dug into a deep Steely Dan-like groove and only the bizarre inclusion of a rocked-up version of the theme from teatime ITV soap Crossroads broke the spell.

4.

Paul McCartney

Flaming Pie

Parophone, 1997

Call it the post-Anthology effect, but a revived Britpop fascination with the Fabs – after a 1980s where they often seemed like a relic from a distant age – acted as a jump-start to McCartney’s motor. The quality control was back, following 1993’s brittle and patchy Off The Ground, and Flaming Pie fittingly put him back in touch with late-era Beatles, in the aching Somedays, the quietly empathic Little Willow and the bright-eyed Calico Skies. Steve Miller turned up on loose rocker Used To Be Bad, but the more atmospheric moments, such as the penultimate Beautiful Night, marked Flaming Pie out as top-drawer Macca.

3.

Paul McCartney

Chaos And Creation In The Backyard

Parlophone, 2005

Although Nigel Godrich’s star was in the ascendant due to his growing catalogue with Radiohead, his production work with Beck on Mutations and Sea Change largely informed his collaboration with Macca. It was a point underlined by Beck’s father David Campbell scoring the brooding strings on Riding To Vanity Fair, itself a rare glimpse into McCartney’s quietly seething side as he coolly lambasted a former, unnamed, friend. Throughout, a decluttered, if precise sound allowed air back into a McCartney record and the gorgeous, whispered Jenny Wren was one of his most haunting and affecting songs.

2.

Wings

Band On The Run

Apple, 1973

The slickness of Band On The Run belied its troubled creation – drummer Denny Seiwell and guitarist Henry McCullough quit ahead of the sessions; misadventures in Lagos in a dilapidated EMI studio; Paul and Linda getting mugged at knifepoint and having the only cassettes of their demos stolen. Working from memory, the McCartneys and Denny Laine were forced to record the songs on the hoof in Nigeria. The title track was a multi-movement classic and the sunny climes soaked into Bluebird. Jet propelled his pop nous into the heart of the 1970s, and Let Me Roll It successfully copped the fuzzy moves of the Plastic Ono Band.

1.

Paul And Linda McCartney

Ram

Apple, 1971

Recorded in New York and mixed in Los Angeles, Ram was far from the super-smooth album that the public possibly expected in the wake of the handmade McCartney. Instead, Paul carried over some of that initial experiment’s looseness, while developing a more episodic songwriting style. There were overt Beach Boys influences on show (the slow-building structure of Dear Boy, the orchestrated young love swoon of The Back Seat Of My Car) and cartoonish pop in the Liverpool docks-redolent Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey. Yes, opening track Too Many People may have rumbled along while spitting out (admittedly tame) put-downs of the “preaching practises” of John and Yoko. But the overall, colourful effect was that of an artist at play in a cloud of childlike wonder.

We've done that before. Let's do something different..."

Get the July issue of MOJO to read the full story behind Paul McCartney's new album, The Boys Of Dungeon Lane. In a world-exclusive interview, Paul retraces the key moments in his musical and emotional past: Growing up in Liverpool, The Beatles, Wings, and more. More information and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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David Byrne - American Utopia

★★★★

Director: Spike Lee

DOGWOOF

Where once the Great American Novel was a thing, today – hello Hamilton, hi Bruce – it’s the Great American Broadway Show. Thus, pop culture elder statesman David Byrne opens his nominatively ambitious 2019 show – captured by director Spike Lee, and showing in UK cinemas next week –  addressing a prop brain like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull in his trademark gee-whiz idiot savant style, a Martian Forrest Gump still musing, “Well, how did I get here?”

Barefoot and soothingly suited in dove grey, as is his 11-strong singing, dancing and playing troupe, in greatest hits linked by micro-TED talks Byrne opens up his cerebral-lite preoccupations to a national vision thrillingly light on its feet, the percussion-rich funk that first elasticated his knock-kneed nerdiness in 1978 a feature rather than quirk. A vanilla-born alignment with tutti frutti America, Byrne’s no longer innocent optimism inspires as it entertains, a welcome encore.

American Utopia screens at selected cinemas on August 5, more info and to book tickets HERE.

Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films. More information and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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Manager Simon Napier-Bell remembers wooing China’s apparatchiks, dealing with George Michael’s ego and dodging CIA intrigue.

“Jazz Summers [co-manager] and I had dinner with George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley at the Bombay Brasserie [in mid-1983], and George said, ‘If you want to manage us, your job is make us the biggest group in the world within a year.’ Jazz said, ‘Why don’t Wham! become the first group to play in Communist China?’ I got on a plane to Beijing the same week.

The challenge was to persuade the Chinese that letting a group play there would open up the country to huge investment. It was immaterial if they knew who the band were or not. But the problem was you couldn’t even travel to China as a Westerner unless you were part of an official delegation – then on a flight to Japan I met a mysterious man called Professor Rolf, who said he had contacts within the Chinese government and could help me.

The whole thing was filled with intrigue and danger.

- Simon Napier-Bell

I spent the next 18 months having lunch with a succession of ministers in China. The whole thing was filled with intrigue and danger, you never knew who, if anyone, to trust. In the end I was in an official’s office and [Chinese premier] Zhao Ziyang was on the other end of the phone and said, ‘yes’. The practical difficulties were immense: the Chinese had absolutely nothing in the way of infrastructure to stage a large rock concert: we took a crew of around 50 people and had to hire a jumbo jet for the equipment alone. We had two experienced tour managers to coordinate the whole thing – Benny Collins, who worked with Michael Jackson, and Wham!’s own guy Jake Duncan.

The Chinese were very good at extracting money from us. They charged us for everything, including a 100-strong local crew who did nothing. We were asked if we needed – for a fee – 1,000 ‘fans’ to greet us at the airport. I called up the head of CBS, Paul Russell, and said, We need a cheque for £500,000, and he called back and said we needed to make a film of the trip. I said, We’ll need another half a million. It was all against Wham!’s future royalties, of course – and it was like, ‘No problem.’

The tour was nuts! The day before we got there George had a meltdown in Hong Kong, he suddenly wasn’t sure about it all. We took 10 or 15 journalists with us, and they were ordered not to write about it if they wanted to cross with us into China. Beijing was a great show, but I foolishly asked the support act, a breakdancer called Trevor, to go down into the audience and get them all going, which unsettled the secret police. They made an announcement that everyone should stay in their seats. Then Lindsay Anderson, who was directing the film [1986’s Foreign Skies], wanted the house lights on to show the audience – but every time the Chinese thought the secret police were watching them and became subdued.

On an internal flight to a show in Canton the trumpeter went mad and cut himself with a penknife. The pilot went into a sudden 75 degree dive to upend him, and he was handcuffed and sedated. He was Portuguese, so it was really difficult to get the paperwork to get him into a mental hospital, but we did.

Because we were dealing with this insular regime, the CIA were on my back; they wanted to pay me to work for them, but not tell anyone, not even the tax man. I said, So you want me to break the law? No thanks. I got to know a lot of Chinese secret police, they were a lot more clever.

We succeeded in getting the attention of the world and so did the Chinese. We got the front page of Time, Newsweek, and within a month of coming home we were booking Wham! on a US stadium tour, when previously they were playing small theatres.

We were six months or so behind schedule when it came to George’s demand to make Wham! the biggest band in the world. But we did manage it and it was the start of China becoming the modern country it is today.”

• READ MORE: Wham!, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Elvis Costello And More Unite Against Heroin!

“A breakdancer called Trevor unsettled the secret police… ”

- Jake Duncan, Tour Manager

Tour manager Jake Duncan recalls the strange experience of getting a PA to Beijing in one piece, canine cutlets and over-zealous local crew.

“The only person who had played in China before was Jean Michel Jarre [in 1981]. But if anyone could make it happen, Simon could. Beforehand, Simon took [the production heads] to dinner and said, ‘This isn’t going to be like any tour you’ve ever worked on. You’ll need patience, politeness and understanding – we can’t offend anybody.’

We took most of the equipment with us, and hired the lighting rig in Hong Kong. It was all flown out on a special 747. We trucked a lot of stuff [from Hong Kong to Beijing] or flew with the Chinese airline CAC, or ‘kak’ as we called it, which pretty much summed up the service. When we got there, we couldn’t move around on our own. One day, we were taken to a food market, and Shirlie Holliman [of backing singers Pepsi & Shirlie] freaked out and said, ‘I think that’s a dog hanging up there.’ The translator, keen not to offend us, said, ‘If you don’t like dog, we also have cat.’

There’s an etiquette in China where you have to be painstakingly polite. You can’t be direct with people and call them a tosser. The Chinese didn’t want us to do any manual work; there were hundreds of local crew waiting to help us. It was difficult: electric equipment was being loaded onto open flatbed trucks in a country where it rains a fair bit. There’s also certain ways to safely unload, say, a Marshall amplifier; if anything was broken, there was nowhere to get replacements. So when we finally set up the gear in Beijing, we breathed a huge sigh of relief when we heard the first ‘one-two, one-two’ coming over the PA.

Things were helped by George and Andrew, who were very professional – George had his eye on the ball all the time; Andrew liked a laugh but didn’t miss a trick, either. If George dug his heels in about something, you could rely on Andrew to help him see it from another angle. But even the slightest change to the timetable disrupted everything. It was strange: we didn’t know what to expect, and they didn’t know what to expect either. No one had ever done anything like it before.

In the back of our minds we all knew if this doesn’t go well, how will other groups ever do it? And we didn’t want the people in China that helped us to lose their jobs. We pulled it off, but I can’t say it wasn’t stressful.

Two years later, I was involved in trying to get the Marlboro Country Music Festival to China. [Our delegation] spent a week being shunted from government office to office, waiting for two hours on wooden benches for nothing to happen. In the end we gave up, which showed just how good Simon was at setting the whole Wham! thing up. I’ve been back to China in more recent times with Westlife. Beijing is all steel and glass now. It couldn’t be more different than it was.”

This article originally appeared in MOJO 262

They were the hip hop marauders who’d sprayed the world with beer with 1986’s game-changing debut Licensed To Ill. Then Ad-Rock, MCA and Mike D left the Def Jam label and New York for California and new creative collaborators. There they found extraordinary rebirth via Paul’s Boutique, one of sampling’s greatest achievements. “It was fun,” they say. “And when something’s fun, it just transcends...”

Mike D (Michael Diamond, Beastie Boy, rapper/drums): We had probably some of our best times making our first album – going out to clubs and then back into the studio at two in the morning, hanging out with Rick Rubin. There is no great, grand plan in hip-hop – it’s about just making the statement of the moment.

MCA (Adam Yauch, Beastie Boy, rapper, passed away 2014): You’ve got to look at Licensed To Ill as a piece of fiction, like a movie. The same way that you see a bunch of people shooting each other, burning down villages and taking heroin – it’s just some ill shit. Parts of it were pretty radically exaggerated. Most of that tour was fun. But in England, towards the end, it got insane (on May 30 1987, their gig at the Liverpool Royal Court ended with a riot and tear gas: Ad-Rock later appeared in court there charged with throwing beer cans into the audience and injuring a fan). The press had a different perception – we were beating up cripples and all this shit… It was completely wild. The Sun was on a crazy 48-hour mission to destroy the Beastie Boys.

Bill Adler (Def Jam Director of Publicity, author): It’s not like that attention hurt them. I think Russell saw it as exactly the sort of ruckus you want to raise – to be attacked by the Fleet Street newspapers was perfect. You want them to hate you because they’re so hateful themselves. (But) wasn’t much fun for Ad-Rock to be put in jail and have punk rockers throwing beer bottles at him, but otherwise the Beastie Boys were world beaters. They owned rock’n’roll and pop music. They were The Beatles in 1987.

Ad-Rock (Adam Horovitz, Beastie Boy, rapper/guitarist): We were burnt out from being on tour and, like, how hung over can you be? I mean, I’d been to jail and all of that other stuff. It was a fucking crazy year.

BA: They had grown close to Lyor Cohen, who had travelled the world with them as manager, and had distanced themselves from Rick, who stayed in New York to make records with other artists. They wanted to make a movie and wanted complete control. Rick was saying ‘Wait a minute, I had a huge hand in making this album. I want a say.’

A: MCA and (Beasties associate) Tom Cushman wrote a script called Scared Shitless on the tour bus. We took some weird meetings on the roof of the Le Parc Hotel in Hollywood. Then I had a weird discussion with Rick at Blanche’s, that bar on Avenue A, where he started talking to me about ‘points’. I said, ‘Points? What do you mean, points?’ And he’s like, ‘Well, this is how much we’re gonna make, and this is how much you’re gonna make’. I forget exactly what the numbers were – but he said, like, the Beasties got three and he and Russell got 35… I remember going back to Adam and Mike and that’s when it all started going south.

I didn’t know what a royalty was but I know I should’ve gotten it

- Ad-Rock

The next thing I know, we’re not getting our cheques. We’ve got a number one record and our lawyer is calling us, like, ‘Hey, they’re not giving you your royalties’. I didn’t know what a royalty was, but I know I should’ve gotten it. And then for Russell to tell our lawyer that we needed to go right back into the studio or we were in breach of contract!

Chuck D (Public Enemy): When the Beastie Boys were protesting, myself and Hank [Shocklee, producer] were approached by Def Jam to go and see if there was anything we could do with their old tapes. We couldn’t salvage anything

Mike Simpson (Dust Brother, producer): The Beastie Boys were in contract dispute with Def Jam and had no intention of making another record. Ad-Rock was in LA making the film Lost Angels (with co-star Donald Sutherland) and he’d gotten the production company to fly Mike D and MCA out, just to keep him company. They started hanging out with us at Matt Dike’s house – he promoted the tour they did with Madonna, back in the day, and was one of the owners of (L.A. indie label) Delicious Vinyl – where we were creating backing tracks for Young MC and Tone Loc. Several had too much going on and didn’t seem to work, so we set them aside for a Dust Brothers instrumental album.

One day Mike D came by Matt’s apartment. He was just trying to find out where the party was, but his ears perked up and he and asked what we were working on. Soon all three of them were like, ‘We really want to rap on this’. Our tracks inspired the Beasties to figure out their legal situation.

Ricky Powell (Photographer, ‘fourth Beastie Boy’): Soon afterwards they got signed to Capitol. In 1988 they moved out to Los Angeles, which was quite a transition. They rented a house in the Hollywood Hills called The G-Spot and were embraced by the community out there, all these celebrities’ children – Mick Fleetwood’s daughter, Stewart Copeland’s daughter and so on. Everyone was on their dick.

MS: We recorded songs and then put them aside, then came back and worked on them again and again. They really wanted to be born again. They weren’t crazy about (breakthrough 1987 rap-rock single) Fight For Your Right and the popularity that ensued, because it wasn’t really what they were about. They really wanted to be a rap group. The great thing is, there was still no record label guy telling us what to do. We just got to play and have fun, and I think that’s sort of the key.

RP: They started flying me over to just hang out. The Beasties and Dust Brothers had a great chemistry – good vibes, high-spirited, a lot of laughs. I felt privileged to witness it. The set up at Matt’s was nothing fancy – very humble, very much like a home studio. But it was fun. And when something’s fun, it just transcends.

MS: A lot of the ideas came in visions. We’ll be listening to something and have a few tracks made, then all of a sudden someone will remember a Tito Puento record or a Sammy Davis Jr record, so we’d just add that in. Fourteen months later… we had a finished album.

DJ Food (Sample connoisseur, fan): It was one of the more dense records, sample-wise, I’d ever heard. They ran samples together in time over each other, finished rhymes with vocal lines from other records, put Jaws with Psycho, had a country wig-out and the B-Boy Bouillabaisse cut-up at the end of side two seemed to reference the end of Abbey Road – that had never been done before on a hip-hop record. Sampling The Beatles was an absolute no-no [The Fabs apparently filed preliminary papers].

The Beasties were also the first group to start sampling disco and old school hip-hop back into their music. Cutting up two copies of Chic’s Good Times to close out the album almost felt like sign-posting the decade in rap, with a throwback to Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash. They were on to jazz ahead of Gang Starr and A Tribe Called Quest, with Idris Muhammad bookending the album.

MS: All those different pieces of music in B-Boy Bouillabaisse are to be taken as one work. We had the concept at the beginning, but no idea how it would turn out. We like using samples that people recognise, but don’t know who or what it is. The Beatles show up purely because they have incredible breaks. Now there are whole websites dedicated to the samples we used. Some of them are correct and some are incorrect, but sometime even I don’t remember what was what. People say, ‘I love how you used this song at this point,’ and I say, ‘Oh yeah, I guess we did’.

It took the world of sampling to the next level.

- Chuck D

MD: We listened to everything. We’d been getting further and further out in terms of our jazz listening. We went from Miles Davis’ funky jazz stuff to Ornette Coleman and Archie Shepp – the real noise.

RP: I couldn’t believe it when they played me Car Thief. They were like ‘Yo, check this out!’ When I heard the rhyme ‘Homeboy throw in the towel/ Your girl got dicked by Ricky Powell’ I was like ‘Oh my god!’ I fell out of my chair.

CD: I remember first hearing Paul’s Boutique on cassette and thinking ‘Wow, they sure as hell did come back. This album is dope.’ It took the world of sampling to the next level. The best thing about it was that it was non-stop – there were no pauses in-between, it moved like a mixtape moved. It wasn’t so much the actual samples they used as the way they aligned them together into a seamless flow. It was the epitome of a masterpiece.

RP: They had a release party on the roof of Capitol Records, a big to-do, but then some bad shit happened – the head guy at Capitol [David Berman] was fired and it had a trickling down effect. They had a manager that told them not to tour so the album – as genius as it was – didn’t reach its maximum potential.

MS: One of their mandates for Capitol was that there was no promotion. They wouldn’t do any interviews. There was no marketing department. They really wanted to make a record that people would hear about from word of mouth. They wanted to surprise people that they were more than this one hit wonder pop rap band. I was disappointed. I was so proud of the record and felt like it should have met a bigger audience.

MD: When people say, ‘Were you disappointed that Paul’s Boutique did this or did that’, I’m not. To me it was all really necessary. There was no way the Beastie Boys could have survived otherwise.

A: We needed to be a band again, our band, without them [Def Jam]. Rick needed to be this Rick Rubin guy and Russell didn’t need a record label to do anything. He’s bigger than a record label.

BA: Licensed To Ill is a masterpiece. But there’s a question mark in the Beastie Boys’ mind, even to this day, whether it’s their masterpiece, Rick’s masterpiece or a combination of the two. So Paul’s Boutique was a complete turning point. They sounded pleased to be able to stretch out and relax and try and figure out who they were, as artists and people. They grew as human beings and the music reflected that.

CD: I thought they were in a good situation with Capitol, who allowed them to grow. The album bought them some time and totally diversified their perception – it was great to do something totally different from what they were known for. It’s one of those records that could never be repeated, one of the all-time greats.

MD: The nature of hip-hop is to evolve. Someone’s always gonna come along and drop a bomb on everybody with some sound that’s never been heard before. The cool thing is that it always evolves around innovation.

With thanks to Malu Halasa, Kid Acne and John Richards at KEXP. Ad-Rock quotes from Def Jam: The First 25 Years Of The Last Great Record Label by Bill Adler and Dan Charnas.

This article originally appeared in MOJO 316

When Depeche Mode’s principal songwriter Vince Clarke left the band shortly after debut album Speak & Spell, the omens didn’t look good for the fresh-faced synth pop outfit from Basildon. However, with keyboard player Martin Gore taking the creative reins, Depeche Mode became something else entirely. Something darker, richer, and more subversive.

• READ MORE: Everything counts... Depeche Mode - All The Albums Ranked!

In the new issue of MOJO – on sale now – Dorian Lynskey traces one of the most remarkable metamorphoses in modern music, uncovering how Gore, Dave Gahan, Andy Fletcher and new recruit Alan Wilder emerged - via West Berlin’s notoriously decadent techno and S&M club scene – with a new kind of electronic music - one which would soon see them become global superstars. In this extract from our cover feature, MOJO discovers how Gore submerged himself in the nocturnal underbelly of Cold War-era Berlin, and injected a new transgressive element into British pop…

Dave Gahan once said that Depeche Mode worked so relentlessly during the 1980s that whenever he got home he didn’t know what to do with himself. The impact on Martin Gore was not dissimilar. “I don’t know how Martin did all that and wrote all those songs,” says Mute Records boss and Depeche producer Daniel Miller. “It was just tour, record, tour, record, and that did have its price of course. It was not the healthiest way of doing things, but it seemed right at the time.”

When Depeche Mode returned to Berlin’s Hansa studios to complete their fourth album, Some Great Reward, they fully immersed themselves in Berlin’s nightlife – none more so than the German-speaking Gore, who fell in love with a Berliner called Christina Friedrich and relocated there for two years. Gore had been a shy, quiet teenager who didn’t drink, rarely left Basildon and dated a devout Christian. “That pulls your reins back a little,” he drily told me in 2001, “but after we split up I moved to Berlin and got as far away from Basildon as I could – not geographically, but mentally. I think I discovered freedom in my life for the first time.”

Gore’s expeditions into Berlin’s demimonde took in gay clubs including David Bowie’s old haunt Dschungel as well as S&M clubs (“a fascinating scene”), which initiated a radical change of image. He took to appearing in black nail varnish and lipstick and outré ensembles of black leather, padlocks and chains, including a skirt that he would be asked about for years to come.

Gahan, who had been stealing cars and spraying walls while the teenage Gore was writing songs in his bedroom, was amused by the songwriter’s delayed adolescence. “He has totally changed,” the singer told the NME’s Danny Kelly. “But he’s just being the way he wanted to be anyway.” Four years into a relationship with Joanne Fox (they were married in 1985), Gahan craved stability but, as he told me, was in denial. “I’d already had these wild years, and I did have a longing to have some kind of normality in my life on a personal level. But to be honest I was fooling myself.”

Gore’s nocturnal excursions fed into the new album’s obsessions. Some Great Reward would essay boredom, hedonism, deceit, heresy, power and sex. To the dismay of the church-going Andy Fletcher, he suggested calling the album Perversions. Master And Servant used S&M as a broader metaphor for control and submission, while Blasphemous Rumours, in the dry assessment of Smash Hits’ reviewer Neil Tennant, gave God “a severe ticking off”. “We kind of subtly corrupt the world,” Gore told Record Mirror’s Andy Strickland. “Basically, if you call yourself a pop band you can get away with anything.”

“Suddenly we’d turned into a proper band!”

Get the new issue of MOJO – in UK shops and available to order for delivery wherever you are now! – to read the full story behind Depeche Mode’s daring mid-80s transformation. “Everybody was growing up…” discovers Dorian Lynskey. More info and to order your copy HERE!

February 2003 and in the offices of Island Records, a new female singer-songwriter, signed to the label just two months previously, is about to give an acoustic performance for the assembled employees. The 19-year-old Amy Winehouse sits on the lip of a sofa, unfussily dressed in black top, jeans and brown high-heeled boots. Chewing gum, she starts nervously fiddling with her black wavy shoulder-length hair.

“This is I Heard Love Is Blind,” she tentatively announces. “I’ll just clip my hair out the way because it gets in my mouth. I wrote this in Miami with a guy called Salaam and…I’m pretty proud of it.”

Accompanying herself on a cream-coloured guitar, she starts to sing the song – a jazzy, mischievous tale of drunken infidelity, which opens with the words, “I couldn’t resist him/His eyes were like yours/His hair was exactly your shade of brown”. As she carefully moves between barre chords and more tricksy inversions, her voice is a thing of wonder, an echo from another age. A smile begins to play on her lips with the lines, “He’s just not as tall/But I couldn’t tell/It was dark and I was lying down”.

She doesn’t flinch as she offers the blunt revelation, “I was thinking of you when I came”. Two minutes in, she lets rip, with the skewed declaration, “It’s not cheating/You were on my mind”, before closing with a deft and soulful trill as she delivers the knowing payoff line which gives the song its title. There follows enthusiastic applause from the record company onlookers, as Winehouse shakes her head almost dismissively. Then she smiles. She knows she’s got them.

This filmed scene appears early in Amy, the 2015 documentary by BAFTA-winning director Asif Kapadia. As a snatched camcorder reminder of Winehouse’s oft-overlooked musicianly skills and headgame-playing approach to confessional songwriting, it makes for riveting viewing.

“It was a genuine jaw-dropping moment,” says Winehouse’s then-manager, Nick Shymansky. “You could see people at the label thinking, What the fuck is this? We’d had quite a lot of rejections and finally we’d signed the deal. It was a really happy time for us.”

In an early signifier of what was to come, however, it was a happiness which wasn’t built to last. A year later, frustrated by the disappointing sales of her debut album, Frank, the characteristically bolshy singer gave an interview in which she derided the people at Island, calling them “idiots”.

“But they’re nice idiots,” she added. “So you can’t be like, ‘You’re an idiot.’ They know that they’re idiots.”

“It killed the buzz,” laughs Shymansky today, though a touch despairingly. “People were saying they’d never work with her again, who the fuck did she think she was? You couldn’t have hoped for a better vibe from a label for your artist and she just shot it out of the sky.”

Amy Winehouse was always trouble. Hugely talented, highly charismatic, but trouble nonetheless. Born in 1983 in north London to parents, Mitch and Janis Winehouse, both of Russian Jewish origin, she was a handful, even as a child. To go along with her inherent attitude, Juliette Ashby, her lifelong friend from the age of four, remembers that as a kid Winehouse always had her nose in a book.

“She was so intelligent for her age,” she recalls. “She was reading all the time…not children’s books, adult books. Always had her head down reading. Her intelligence astounded me as kids.”

At the same time, she was compelled by music. As precocious 10-year-olds, Winehouse and Ashby styled themselves as a Salt-N-Pepa-inspired hip hop duo, Sweet ‘N’ Sour (with Amy casting herself as the latter). Winehouse’s first studio experience came when, impressed, Ashby’s stepfather Alan Glass, a US producer and composer who’d written for Aretha Franklin and Al Green, offered to record the pair’s efforts.

 “To be honest, for two north London 10-year-old girls we had some serious skills,” says Ashby. “The American accent down and clever lyrics. We were just two hyperactive kids. We couldn’t wait to get on the mic. It was such a special time for us…definitely something that shaped us as kids.”

After hip hop, Winehouse was turned onto jazz by her part-time pub crooner father. “My dad liked Sarah Vaughan, a lot of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett,” she told this writer in 2007. “Then when I was about 13 or 14 my brother [Alex, three years older] was listening to a lot of jazz. I guess I learnt to sing with soloists. Sax solos and stuff like that.”

Naturally rebellious, she didn’t fare well at Ashmole secondary school in Southgate, leading to a fateful argument with the deputy head teacher. “I was just trying to wind him up,” Amy remembered. “I went [cartoon sneer], ‘I’m gonna go to stage school.’ And he goes, ‘Amy, stage school is a fantasy…it’s not what people really do.’”

But in her case, her talent already radiating, Winehouse managed to secure a scholarship to attend the Sylvia Young Theatre School from the age of 13. Although confrontationally mouthy, in truth Amy was always self-doubting. “What I learnt at Sylvia Young’s,” she confessed, “was how to put yourself forward for things and think, Yeah, I am good and I can do this.”

At 16, she enrolled on the musical theatre course at The BRIT School in Croydon, but quickly grew disenchanted. “I walked out,” she said. “I just thought, Fuck this. I admittedly did the wrong course. I should have done music.” Instead, she began attending Saturday morning National Youth Jazz Orchestra sessions at The Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone, where she was given the chance to sing with a big band.

“She was this moody, chubby, Jewish-looking teenager,” says Annabel Williams, her singing coach with the NYJO. “She seemed fairly quiet and uninterested. Amy first stood out to me when she was in the centre of all the musicians and started singing. I was just like, Woah, she’s amazing. She absolutely nailed it and I was so impressed.”

From here, Winehouse began performing back room pub sets, facing a crowd with just her voice and acoustic guitar. At the same time, she began guesting with a loose north London collective called The Bolsha Band, through which she met her long-term live keyboard-player Sam Beste.

“She said to me, ‘Do you like Thelonius Monk?’” Beste recalls. “People like Dinah Washington and Ray Charles and Donny Hathaway, she really connected with those musicians on a very deep, emotional, raw level. There was a strange awkwardness about Amy. Even in those early days when we were playing the small clubs, she wasn’t really engaging with an audience in the way that an entertainer would. She was a bit in her own world.”

Through a singer friend, Tyler James, 16-year-old Amy came to the attention of Nick Shymansky, then a teenage scout at Simon Fuller’s 19 management company, who had designs on matching James with a female singer to create a Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell-styled soul duo. Shymansky chased and chased a reluctant Winehouse and finally managed to pin her down. “She wasn’t very nice on the phone,” he remembers, though warmly. “She was kinda like, ‘Who the fuck are you? Why would I wanna meet up with you?’ I think her initial reaction was fear.”

In time, Amy sent Shymansky a jiffy bag adorned with “probably five hundred childish stickers of hearts” and containing a cassette, which the aspiring manager first played while driving. “It was a cover of Night And Day,” he says. “I had to pull over. I remember just thinking, Holy shit. I knew I’d found something really special.”

Winehouse was coy about her own songwriting, but showed Shymansky some poems she’d penned, which yielded still-unheard early compositions such as Estrogenius and the impishly-titled Monkey Not A Boy. Still, Amy seemed deeply unsure when it came to her gifts.

“She was very complex,” Shymansky reasons. “A lot of the things that the average person would think were brilliant about her were second nature and therefore unimpressive to her. She didn’t rate herself. Her songs were really dark, really sad, really self-critical.”

Everything about Amy was like one big diary...

Nick Shymansky

In early 2002, the 18-year-old Amy Winehouse, accompanied by Nick Shymansky, flew to the States for the first time, landing in Miami. Though it had proved tough for the manager to stir up record company interest in the singer, EMI Music Publishing had funded this trip to Florida for Winehouse to write and record with Fugees/Nas producer Salaam Remi. It was a thrilling time for the pair: riding around in a rented convertible, staying at the art deco Raleigh Hotel on the city’s South Beach.

“Salaam just got it from the off,” says Shymansky. “He and Amy were jazz and hip hop nuts. One minute they’d jump on the keys, next minute guitar, next minute double bass. Salaam was always a much better player than Amy but he’s not a player and Amy wasn’t a player. It dropped Amy’s insecurity that you have to be the most accomplished musician to be respected by other musicians.”

Moreover, without attempting to lighten the darkness in Winehouse’s songs, Remi encouraged the young singer to enhance the twisted humour in her writing. “What I allowed her to do was really just put wit into her songs,” he says in Amy.

In this environment, Winehouse flourished as an unflinchingly candid and luridly caustic songwriter. “Everything about Amy was like one big diary,” says Shymansky. “She would be spilling out her views. Sometimes her views were really raw and emotional and sometimes they’d be really funny and piss-taking.”

Aside from humour or personal confession, Winehouse pointed the finger at others in the songs which would feature on Frank. On Stronger Than Me, she taunted her then-boyfriend Chris Taylor, seven years her senior, for what she perceived as his lack of emotional strength (“Are you gay?” she baitingly wondered). In What Is It About Men, she publicly opened a can of worms, by addressing her parents’ separation when she was nine; Mitch leaving Janis after a long-term affair with a work colleague.

“I tend to write songs about things that I can’t quite get past,” Amy told me. “I wasn’t messed up about it. But it was something I was trying to make sense of. He’s been asked about it and he’s a bit like, ‘Well Amy’s Amy.’”

“I met my current wife and that was it,” Mitch Winehouse stressed when I asked him about the song in 2007. “I didn’t have a harem or anything. A lot of my friends find it difficult because we came from the moon in June and isn’t love lovely type of songs. She’s someone who sees it slightly differently.”

In the end, Amy wasn’t entirely satisfied with Frank. She moaned about how Island had forced her to include one song she hated, the Erykah Badu-lite of Amy Amy Amy, and claimed the label had “fake strings” overdubbed against her will on the downtempo soul reverie of Take The Box.

“She felt that spoiled the aesthetic of the record,” says then A&R manager, now president of Island, Darcus Beese. “No one should be happy with their first album. I always say, ‘How can you be happy with your first album when you’re still learning your trade?’”

“There was an element of tough love that had to happen to make the record,” Nick Shymansky points out. “I’m sure she would’ve made a record, ‘cause she was brilliant. But there was no structure. It may have taken 10 years.”

Where Winehouse maintained absolute control was on stage. Dale Davis played bass live with Amy from her second professional gig to her last and remembers being taken aback by their third together in Powis Square at the Notting Hill Carnival in August 2003. “Carnival crowds are never the easiest,” he states. “But her performance was so powerful. She didn’t need a band onstage, all she needed was herself and the guitar. Her singing was devastating.”

Davis remembers that Winehouse, truly soulful as a performer, never sang a song exactly the same twice, teasing fresh nuances from the material night after night.

“After four or five shows of doing one song, she’d changed the song completely,” he says. “You could hear her working the changes every night. I think ultimately that cost her, because she gave so much in performance and in her personal life that she just left herself short. You get a lot of artists who sing the same every night and they preserve themselves as a result. But with someone like Amy, who gave her all every single night, that leads to a bit of burnout.”

Touring for Frank completed, in January 2005, Amy moved to Camden, at the time a post-Libertines hive of indie hedonism. Seemingly utterly uninterested in writing songs for her second album, she dossed around, smoked weed, got drunk and played pool for hours each day.

“She’d been busy for five years,” says Nick Shymansky, “All of a sudden she wasn’t busy. Expectations hadn’t been met. Money was tight because we took a loss on the touring. And she’d upset a lot of people.”

“I started playing pool all day because I could,” Amy remembered with a shrug. “The record company would come and see me playing pool in the pub and they’d be like, ‘Do you still want to make a record?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, it’s coming, I’m just gonna play pool for three months, yeah?’”

On the Camden scene, in the summer of 2005, Winehouse first encountered the controversial figure of Blake Fielder-Civil, whose name she impulsively had tattooed onto her left breast. When Fielder-Civil ended their affair to return to his girlfriend at the end of that summer, Amy fell apart, drinking Jack Daniels from the moment she woke up, slumped in a sobbing heap on her kitchen floor. Though in a worrying state, the breakup was the grit which began to produce the songwriting pearls for Back To Black.

Winehouse’s friend and then-flatmate Juliette Ashby is in no doubt as to why that album was such a creative success. “Pain,” she says. “Pain can make you write like you’ve never written before. Being happy is wonderful but doesn’t get you the music that hits you in the stomach when you hear it.”

After 18 months of troubled downtime, according to Salaam Remi, Island were considering dropping Winehouse. “The label were considering letting her go,” the producer claims in Amy. “She ends up coming back to Miami. Guy Moot [EMI Music Publishing] calls me up. ‘Hey, you sure you wanna do this?’ I was like, ‘Listen, even if you dropped her, I will pay her to come to my house and sing, ‘cause this shit fucking moves me.’”

“If someone takes three years to write a follow-up,” says Darcus Beese from the perspective of the record company, “things are gonna be said and people are gonna have opinions. But I can’t ever remembering someone sitting me down and saying, ‘We’re gonna drop your act.’”

“She totally didn’t drink the whole time she was here,” Remi says of the Miami sessions for Back To Black. “She sat out in my back garden for four days. She’d take a little notebook and just keep writing.”

At the same time, Island also hooked Winehouse up with Mark Ronson in Manhattan. He remembers being warned by people in the industry that the collaboration would likely turn out to be an unproductive nightmare. “They were just like, [sarcastically] ‘Oh good luck’,” he says today. “‘I heard she’s been working on that record for three years.’”

When she wrote, there was no editing. It came out, like, this is the truth and this is how it’s gonna stay.

Mark Ronson

But, in Miami and New York, Amy was suddenly energised and, working quickly and intensively, bottled lightning. “I was really inspired,” says Ronson, remembering their first day together in the studio. “Both by her and the kind of music she was talking about wanting to make, playing The Shangri-Las and stuff. When she left that night I wrote the music for [the song] Back To Black and played it for her the next morning. She was like, ‘That’s what I want my album to sound like.’ So she wrote Back To Black in, like, three hours.”

Meanwhile Rehab, set to become her comeback single, was written after a conversation with Ronson about her recent problems. It was transformed overnight by the producer from what he describes as “a sort of Johnny Cash Folsom Prison Blues kind of thing. She showed me the chords and went home. So I sped it up and did that ‘60s picking, strumming thing. She came back in the next day and said, ‘Yeah it’s cool, it sounds like The Libertines.’”

Ronson still marvels at the memory of watching Winehouse in the moments when she lost herself in songwriting. “The thunderbolt strikes the head, the pen scribbles furiously and that’s the song,” he says. “When she wrote, there was no editing. It came out, like, this is the truth and this is how it’s gonna stay. She never second-guessed that and that’s why those lyrics are from another place.”

Talking to Amy four months after the release of Back To Black, it was clear she knew the album was a triumph. “I made an album of 11 songs that I’m so proud of,” she beamed. “I was listening to a very narrow spectrum of music, so all of the stuff kind of sounds the same. Whereas the first album was a bit of a melting pot, really. When I gave it to the record company, I said, ‘Do whatever you want…first single, second single, third single.’”

Still, Winehouse was unprepared and ill-equipped for the almost inevitable success of Back To Black, which by the end of 2007 had gone six times platinum in the UK alone. With the return of Blake Fielder-Civil, and their marriage in May 2007, Amy’s life for the next year-and-a-half became a drug-disorientated, paparazzi-trolled horror show.

Even in February 2008, when briefly clean of illegal substances, but forced to perform her live segment for the Grammys from the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith after failing a drug test for her US visa, Winehouse seemed unable to enjoy the fact that she’d astonishingly bagged five awards.

“I’m looking at her, trying to get some sort of reaction,” remembers Juliette Ashby of that night in Amy. “She went ‘Jules, this is so boring without drugs.’ And I felt really, really, really sad for her.”

She was really struggling. Physically and mentally...

Sam Beste

In the midst of the chaos, Amy Winehouse struggled to come up with anything substantial for a third album. “She was writing in amongst all the madness that was going on,” says Island’s Darcus Beese. “You’re in a dilemma. You’re conflicted between do you get in a place where she’s creative and keeping her mind busy? Or do you let her just go away and disappear? I was of the mind that you needed to keep her busy.”

As a result, during 2009, Sam Beste was charged with the task of visiting Winehouse once a fortnight at her new home near Enfield, in an effort to just play together and hopefully inspire her musically. “She was sort of perpetually in this state of distraction,” Beste says of these failed sessions. “One time we did actually talk properly and she sort of broke down and started crying and saying that she knew that everything was falling apart and she wanted to sort herself out.”

In Winehouse’s attic studio, the pair would try to work through soul songs or selections from jazz sheet music bible The Real Book. Alarmingly quickly though, Amy’s mind would start to wander. “We’d get three bars into a Donny Hathaway song or something,” Beste recalls, “and she would say, ‘I’m bored.’ Then we’d move onto another song and do that three or four more times and then she’d leave the room. She was just really struggling. Physically and mentally really unwell. It was very hard to know what to do.”

The same year, Salaam Remi was flown over to work with Amy in the attic, resulting in sketches for two new songs, Between The Cheats and Like Smoke. In October 2010, when I was interviewing her at the Q Awards, Winehouse was tipsy but bright-eyed and claimed that the album was in fact progressing, naming two new songs, Gutter and Our Souls Ain’t Sold. “It’s going really well, thank you,” she insisted. “What’s the style like? I couldn’t tell you yet...”

One key moment in Amy reveals where her thoughts lay when it came to stylistically imagining her next record. In a voicemail to Salaam Remi, Winehouse is heard buzzing about her recent periods of properly absorbed writing. “I keep coming out with battle raps and they’re just pouring out of me,” she tells the producer. “Like Wu-Tang stuff, but really neat, very beautifully alliterated little battle raps. I’m fucked up in the head, but I keep coming out with all this stuff all the time, all these lyrics and…I don’t know why. But I realise it’s for the next album.”

If nothing else, this is evidence that Winehouse’s fighting spirit seemed to be returning to her. In tandem, she was also planning a jazz project with Mos Def, Raphael Saadiq and Questlove and would send the latter countless MP3s as reference points. “I thought I had my doctorate in jazz, but no, she taught me a lot,” Questlove stresses in Amy. “She, like, assigned homework. ‘Study this record, study this record, study this record.’”

While admitting that Winehouse’s vocal power had diminished as a result of her indulgences, Dale Davis can picture another direction in which Amy might have headed. “I could’ve seen her moving towards ‘70s soul,” he says. “She was a massive Minnie Riperton fan and I could’ve seen her going down that route. But the thing with Amy, ‘cause she had that talent, she could’ve gone anywhere really.”

At the very end, out of character, even Amy Winehouse herself seemed to have finally recognised and accepted her rare and precious talent. On Friday July 22 2011, the night before Winehouse’s heart finally stopped beating, her bodyguard Andrew Morris remembers discovering her watching old footage of herself on YouTube. “She was showing me some clips on her laptop,” he painfully remembers in the final moments of Amy. “She said, ‘Boy, I can sing.’”

Soul Mining: Amy Winehouse’s Lost Gems

Four hidden gems from the small, yet powerful, body of work Amy left behind.

What It Is (Demo)

On: Frank Deluxe Edition

Acoustic guitar demo of song which picks through the wreckage of a destroyed relationship. A nape-tingling performance sees Winehouse take part of the blame (“I’ll tell you what you want to hear/It depends on what I’ve been drinking”), before turning punchy (“I could cut you down again/If you was like all other men.”)

Someone To Watch Over Me

On: Frank Deluxe Edition

Amy eerily channels Billie Holiday in this piano and vocal demo which sounds like it was recorded in the 1940s. The line “Tell me where is the shepherd for this lost lamb,” is delivered with real poignancy, particularly with the knowledge that it was Winehouse’s wish in old age to purely sing jazz standards.

Love Is A Losing Game (Demo)

On: Back To Black Deluxe Edition

The sound of a modern classic being created, almost in real time. This scrappy, but deeply soulful demo of Winehouse’s best song is felt out on a barely-in-tune acoustic guitar, with raw vocal emotion. Recorded evidence of her masterful songwriting in its purest form.

I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know

On: YouTube

Winehouse dedicates this stirring live rendition of Al Kooper’s soul-stripping ballad (recorded by Donny Hathaway on 1973’s Extension Of A Man) to “my husband”. Recorded in the turbulent air which followed Back To Black, there’s a gutsiness evident here, particularly in the uplift of the middle eight, which recalls Janis or Aretha.

This article originally appeared in MOJO 260

Picture: Alamy

Presenting a brand-new magazine devoted to one of the post-punk era’s most iconic bands, MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Siouxsie And The Banshees is a 132-page deluxe special packed with in-depth features and exclusive interviews, plus a guide to all the Banshees’ albums and side projects. MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Siouxsie And The Banshees is UK shops and available to order for delivery wherever you are now - ORDER YOUR COPY HERE!

• READ MORE: Siouxsie And The Banshees' Best Albums Ranked!

It’s nearly 50 years ago that Siouxsie And The Banshees first performed live, at the fabled 100 Club punk festival in September 1976. The group had formed just days before, purely to get on the bill, and featured Sid Vicious on drums and future Adam And The Ants star Marco Pirroni on guitar. But it was, of course, iconic vocalist Siouxsie Sioux and bassist Steve Severin who would go on to helm the Banshees through a further 20 drama-filled years, which produced eleven extraordinary studio LPs, a thrilling live album and numerous hit singles. Along the way they pioneered post-punk in 1978 with their debut album The Scream, invented ‘goth’ with their 1981 masterpiece Juju and showed that, even at the end of their career, they could create a record as masterful as 1995’s The Rapture.

Over 132 pages, we profile those albums, together with all the Banshees’ other releases, side projects and solo ventures, while also delving deep into MOJO’s archive to unearth a wealth of classic features and interviews – including exclusive encounters with Siouxsie, Severin and mainstay drummer Budgie – as well as a vintage Jon Savage piece from way back in 1978.

Illustrated throughout with dozens of rare and iconic photographs, this sumptuous special edition is an indispensable purchase for all Siouxsie fans, punk lovers, backcombed goths and music connoisseurs.

ORDER YOUR COPY NOW!

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In the ’80s, at the height of his showbiz-page fame, Eric Clapton became The Man In The Pastel Armani Suit. The Surrey kid who’d drenched himself in Mississippi Delta blues turned smooth, sleek (and unbelievably rich). But if he ever felt he’d found his place, it didn’t last. After his toddler son Conor’s accidental death in 1991 he was back where he’d really been most of his life: “Lost again,” as he once told MOJO. Not knowing where he was, who he was, even whether he was – with The Yardbirds, with Cream, with drugs and alcohol, when his grandfather died… Even amid the belated glow of happy marriage and three children, he could still wonder: “Every now and then, I put myself outside the door and take little, furtive glances to see if I still exist.”

• READ MORE: Cream Wheels Of Fire Reviewed: Expanded edition of the moment ’60s supergroup went supernova

Painful experience and inner uncertainty probably explain how Eric Clapton can reach so many different people. Stick around and he’ll give you everything he’s got. He’s always been capable of being erratic – compare the songwriting diversities of Layla, Wonderful Tonight, Tears In Heaven, Old Love, Lonely Stranger and many more. Singing he came to gradually, though it’s been good for years now. Back in the ’70s, even his most reliable gift, guitar playing, could be reduced by booze to noisy gibbering.

Although the guitarist formerly (and to many fans, still) known as God is now invariably a treat on-stage, his capacious recorded works add up to a warehouseful of curate’s eggs to sort through. Good-in-parts albums abound. But when he nails it, you stay nailed. A musician before anything else – as his vast list of collaborators implies, Howlin’ Wolf and Frank Zappa, Viv Stanshall and Aretha Franklin, The Beatles and Mary J. Blige – he can make every person understand sound and feel it - and still have no idea how to describe what just happened. Enjoy MOJO’s pick of Clapton’s finest albums…

10.

Eric Clapton

Slowhand

(RSO, 1977)

The confluence of Duane Allman Southern boogie and laid-back J.J. Cale inspiration alternates here with an unusual departure into sweet romance to coherent effect (although Slowhand’s brevity provoked the addition of an unrelated live CD to the 2012 ‘deluxe’ remaster). Three chart singles stake out the territory: Wonderful Tonight – much mocked, but too good to be bad – Cale’s furtive groover Cocaine and the gambolling Lay Down Sally. Thereafter it skims along, covering gentle songs by John Martyn and Don Williams along with a hard slug of Arthur Crudup’s Mean Old Frisco. Clapton adrift – hard luck and trouble, alcohol and love – but such a craftsman you hardly notice.

 9.

Eric Clapton

24 Nights

(REPRISE, 1991)

Live from his Royal Albert Hall residencies in 1990 and 1991 – the concerts completed 
a couple of weeks before his son’s death drew a line under the middle period of his life. Coincidental, then, that his disciplined, manly yet heartfelt playing and pungent vocals gathered the best of himself (post-multiple ‘recoveries’, post-divorce from first wife Pattie). The rock band/blues band/nine-piece/orchestra format-switching shows him off without him showing off, from dirty, scuffling R&B (Ray Charles’s Hard Times) to Cream (Sunshine Of Your Love), and onwards to Running On Faith and Old Love from Journeyman, the best album of his up-and-down ‘80s. An intriguing compare-and-contrast to the more widely known Unplugged.

8.

Wynton Marsalis And Eric Clapton

Play The Blues: Live From Jazz At Lincoln Centre

(REPRISE, 2011)

Never thought you’d hear the one hailed as ‘God’ sound like Acker Bilk? Well, he does, singing Satchmo favourite Ice Cream. This is no novelty, though, but a grizzled great going anywhere there’s hot music playing. Rowdy, though besuited, he transports the rather formal Marsalis band to the New Orleans levee, circa 1925. Clapton sings coarse and plays spring-loaded. Special treats: a super skifflesome Joliet Bound, Kidman Blues’ glorious horn/old rocker interaction, the crafty counterpoints Clapton adds to Joe Turner’s Blues and the roar he brings to Howlin’ Wolf’s Forty-Four.

7.

John Mayall With Eric Clapton

Blues Breakers

(DECCA, 1966)

Within the guitar hero cult, this period marked Clapton’s ascent from novitiate to deification. He attracted that reverence largely because of the discipline learned from his black American inspirations and professorially reinforced by Mayall – who, like the best teachers, then set him free. Student Clapton grasped the songs – blues standards and his bandleader’s own. He sculpted sharp lines with rich tone whether vocal call-and-responding on Double Crossing Time and Have You Heard, or punching measured, tough solos on Steppin’ Out. Also: Clapton’s first recorded vocal, on Robert Johnson’s Ramblin’ On My Mind.

6.

Eric Clapton

Sessions For Robert J

(REPRISE, 2004)

A companion to his 15th solo album, Me And Mr Johnson, Sessions For Robert J inches it because of the excellent accompanying DVD documentary. Engaging and often goosebump-inducing, the film captures those moments when Clapton – who, soloing on the limit, never knows what the next note is until he’s played it – connects his psycho-synapses with his fingertips and the resultant picking reaches right on through to the listener’s brain-heart-soul, unfathomed but felt. Here he concentrates on dirty Chicago electric growl (Traveling Riverside Blues) with the odd reminder (like Ramblin’ On My Mind) that Johnson could be acoustically wicked too: “Gonna hoist your hood mama/I’m bound to check your oil”.

5.

Cream

Fresh Cream

(REACTION, 1966)

The ‘60s supergroup’s debut found Clapton wondering whither he might go beyond the blues without getting lost. So, carefully complementing frlntman/bassist Jack Bruce’s sour-cream vocal harmonies, he plays heavy rock grunt in I Feel Free and rather formal R&B in I’m So Glad. But he’s at his ferocious best – drawing Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker to their own heights – when Spoonful and Rollin’ And Tumblin’ inspire him to unleash his soul, hard and howling. He sings only a mellow swing through Robert Johnson’s Four Until Late; odd in retrospect, because now it suggests: Aaah, this is how he’ll sound in 25 and 50 years’ time! Weird and often wonderful.

4.

Eric Clapton

From The Cradle

(REPRISE, 1994)

The blues always need recapturing from their history, it is true, and time and time again Clapton pulls off the feat, blood and sweat running down. Still mourning his son, for most of live-in-the-studio From The Cradle he followed the graceful Unplugged with a raging roar of grief (for himself, us, and the guys who wrote the songs, all barriers down). Tearing vocals and temple veil-ripping guitar weigh heavy and bleak throughout until, finally, the mighty Groaning The Blues holds a knife to your throat with Willie Dixon’s black joke against fate and stoic acceptance: “I’m so tired of moaning/ Try to groan away my blues”. If it wasn’t for bad luck…

3.

Eric Clapton

461 Ocean Boulevard

(RSO, 1974)

With his killer/filler balance difficulties yet to intrude, Clapton’s studio comeback after Layla (and his junkie interlude) felt substantial. Singable hit covers Willie And The Hand Jive and I Shot The Sheriff fit awkwardly, maybe. But Motherless Children’s rolling riff resurrection of Duane Allman’s Southern spirit could hardly be bettered. Give Me Strength’s plainly stated prayer, Get Ready’s taut, dry fighting talk (written and sung with Yvonne Elliman) and the slippery seduction and sentiment of Can’t Hold Out and Let It Grow all argue against suggestions he’d lost confidence in his guitar playing.

2.

Eric Clapton

Unplugged

(REPRISE, 1992)

After all the axeman decibel deity malarkey, Clapton’s biggest hit by a mile turned out to be this quiet, warm and acoustic set. Back then, everyone knew his son was gone, and that Tears In Heaven was his mourning song. But, with Unplugged, he carried that weight. Recording live, Clapton poured everything he’d learned into delicate, sweet-sway reimaginings of his bloodstream blues – Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy – and a few compositions of his own: from a new, honeyed Layla to the stoic intimacy of Old Love and Lonely Stranger (“I must be invisible/No one knows me”). Singer, songwriter, guitarist: behold the man – in full, and very 
different to Layla’s 25-year-old obsessive.

1.

Derek And The Dominos

Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs

(POLYDOR, 1970)

Clapton plunged into his Shakespearean time of tragic love and conscience wrestling, and got to the heart of his Pattie Harrison obsession with the emotional might and muscle of an R&B Othello. The title actually exaggerates Layla’s primacy over the ‘assortment’, from big, raw Bell Bottom Blues and Have You Ever Loved A Woman?, to gentle, passion-spent I Looked Away and I Am Yours. Clapton not only unleashed his mannish-boy anger, but had enough pure artist left to counterbalance ego by welcoming Duane Allman while stirring Bobby Whitlock to heights as co-writer/singer.

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1974 was the year George Clinton’s P-Funk philosophy went overground, taking the psychedelic black rock of Funkadelic and the horn-heavy dance grooves of Parliament into the charts, onto the stage, into the White House, up to outer space and beyond. MOJO's Lloyd Bradley shines his flashlight on a black music revolution...

Detroit, 1973. Motown Records, the city’s black music institution since 1959, has just moved its operation to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, another less prominent Detroit concern is facing its own career crossroads. In the space of fifteen years George Clinton had transformed his New Jersey barbershop quintet from slick doo wop harmonisers the Parliaments, into a Motor City troupe of guitar-fuelled black hippies called Funkadelic, a group so adept, yet so committed to psychedelic revolution, that their 1970 declaration of intent – Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow – somehow remained astonishingly cohesive, despite being recorded during a heavy group acid trip.

However, as relatively successful as Funkadelic had become, playing mid-sized venues within the hippified ‘Draft Dodgers Triangle’ of Detroit, Toronto and Boston and releasing five albums in three years on Westbound Records, the group had also become a black band without a significant black following. As soul music mutated into the far more self-determining funk, this was starting to look like an unworkable model.

“We were too black for white radio, too white for black radio,” is how George Clinton himself sums up Funkadelic’s commercial positioning today. During the first few of years of the 1970s, the group’s albums were minor R&B chart hits, barely troubling the mainstream Top 100. Their motivation had been pretty straightforward; to reintroduce a black take to the modernized blues upon which the rock world was built and put a contemporary Motor City spin on American black music as it shed the mohair suits and the afros got bigger. But the confusion resulting from the execution is just as understandable: theirs was a black rock, harking back to the blues, drenched in Timothy Leary-quality LSD, born in Motown but incubated in the Motor City’s fiercely working class, largely self-contained and genuinely alternative hippie scene. Gloriously unfiltered and ultimately unencumbered by major record label constraints, Funkadelic’s blues was furious, funny, wry, confrontational, existential, political, articulate, aching, oblique and off-the-charts in terms of the rush of images and ideas, some familiar, some wildly imaginative.

Funkadelic scared the shit out of black audiences.

- Tom Vickers, P-Funk press officer

Less circumspect as to the impact of albums with titles such as Maggot Brain, America Eats It Young and Cosmic Slop, is Tom Vickers, P-Funk’s former in-house press officer.

“The simple truth is Funkadelic scared the shit out of black audiences,” says Vickers. “They simply couldn’t get past the scary, dark, mysterious content of those albums … sleeve notes quoting the Process Church of the Final Judgment, stuff like that.”

The defining aspect was acid.

“It meant a connectivity with a hippie audience as it opened up their minds to an alternative reality far less inhibited by colour [race],” says Vickers. “[But] it was never a mainstream drug among black audiences. It wasn’t embraced the way it was in white youth culture, which put Funkadelic on a different plane to much of the audience they hoped to reach. And then, even if you had taken a pill you still had to be as far out there as the group themselves to get into what was going on.”

Something had to change.

Enter a Jewish former crooner from Brooklyn called Neil Bogart. General Manager at MGM Records at age 22, dubbed “the King of Bubblegum” a Buddah for successes with frothy pop acts such as Ohio Express and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, Bogart had been financed by Warner Bros to launch his own label. Casablanca Records would bring the world KISS, Donna Summer and the Village People, but for the time being he wanted to do business with George Clinton of Funkadelic.

“I’d known Neil for the longest time,” explains Clinton. “We were on Invictus [for Parliament’s first album, 1970’s Osmium], with Holland, Dozier and Holland, and their other label was Hot Wax, which Neil had distribution for at Buddah. But more than that, I grew up with his business partner at Buddah and at Casablanca, who was Cecil Holmes. I’d known him from the fifties back in New Jersey, when I knew Neil as Neil Scott, the singer.

We’d wanted to be with Neil for a while, and he’d always been interested in us, so we’d been flirting for some time, but he couldn’t do it until he had his own label. With Funkadelic signed to Westbound and me having got the Parliament name back from Invictus, that’s what he signed us to Casablanca as.”

Casablanca’s first Parliament album was 1974’s Up For The Down Stroke, George Clinton’s most consistently conventional set of recordings since The Parliaments’ harmonizing 7-inches ten years previously. Safe to say it didn’t tear up too many trees. Vitally, though, it shifted the group’s direction out of the underground. The man who had only recently been referring to himself as ‘the Maggot Overlord’ relished such an opportunity.

“They were promotion people, Neil and Cecil – they were good at it,” says Clinton. “They’d done all the bubble gum things at Buddah. You give them a character and they would know what to do with it – we gave them plenty to promote. We were a circus! I knew this was the shot I was going to get at taking it big – pop big, like super bubblegum, because we had spaceship ambition even back then, and we had some substance to go with it.”

Timing was everything. Bogart’s record label launched at exactly the point that acid rock had played itself out. Following the social and political upheavals of the previous decade, black America’s middle and professional classes had become far more visible to the country in general. It didn’t take long for mainstream advertisers to appreciate that here was a different dollar to be pursued. Black radio boomed and major record label executives, acknowledging this new spending power, started taking this new black music – music they might not listen to themselves - much more seriously.

Such developments offered a winning situation for musicians and consumers alike. Acts had bigger budgets and greater creative freedom, and as radio programming expanded, so did the myriad of genres and sub-genres within the catch-all of “black music”. Funk, the more robustly representative soul music that had emerged at the end of the previous decade, rose to the occasion with gusto. From 1973 to 1974 albums as stylistically varied as The Fatback Band’s Keep On Steppin’, Herbie Hancock’s Thrust, The Ohio Players’ Skin Tight, Kool & The Gang’s Light Of Worlds, Donald Byrd’s Steppin’ In To Tomorrow, Curtis Mayfield’s Sweet Exorcist, Gil Scott-Heron’s Winter In America, Earth Wind And Fire’s Open Our Eyes, The O’Jays’ Ship Ahoy, 24-Carat Black’s Ghetto: Misfortune’s Wealth, The JBs Damn Right I Am Somebody and The Payback and Black Caesar by James Brown. Here were deeply groove-y, musically adventurous albums. Politically pertinent and instinctively black, this widerspread marketplace had overtaken Funkadelic, evolving from what Clinton had called the “beating on a box records” of Soul Power-era James Brown, to a far more sophisticated and stimulating situation. It was the sharp end of an exciting, enpowering and largely self-regulated cultural revolution that encompassed black literature, film and TV. It was the ideal environment for the arrival of the reborn Parliament.

“Right then was the right time for us,” Clinton agrees. “Not just with Neil [Bogart] coming along, but black audiences had evolved, just as they would do if they were exposed to something constantly which itself is allowed to change. The best example of that is The Beatles: they would hit you with all kinds of shit, all kind of good music – rock, funky, classical, pop, witty, folky … – and their audience would go with them because once they put it up there and it was good, people wanted to get into it, they wanted The Beatles to take them with them. Wherever they were going. It was the same with funk too, once it had the commercial power to take care of its own business and could move forward on its own terms, the audience wanted to evolve right along with it. In fact they expected it to take them somewhere else, funk weren’t no different from any other type of music.

”By that time, black was going pop, and it had evolved to the point at which it knew that and groups could make the most of that and there really was no limit to where it could go. Up until then the music itself didn’t even realise how popular it was, and it was still defending itself and it even didn’t realise that it was the shit at the time. It took us a long time to catch up with where we actually were, because we were up in there so busy trying to fight for the right to be what we already were! When I signed us with Neil, there was no reason we couldn’t shoot as high as we wanted. We knew it, the industry knew it, the audience knew it.”

While at Buddah Records Neil Bogart had played a considerable part in that evolution, striking distribution deals with a myriad of embryonic independent black labels - Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom, the Isley Brothers’ T-Neck and Sussex, home to Bill Withers and Dennis Coffey  - affording them the necessary promotion and racking clout while maintaining their creative autonomy.

With a new label and a new name for, essentially, the same bunch of players, George Clinton needed a new sound. Something beyond contemporary, further developing existing funk and, ultimately, providing greater opportunity for it. He arrived at what became Parliament’s dense, complex and bottom-heavy calling by not discounting anything, but having the nous to make it all work together.

“I knew there was a lot of elements to the funk as it was, so I came in and said ‘OK, gimme all of that shit and Motown, because Motown was at the centre of everything, and The Beatles and the English rock groups. So we had Funkadelic with the guitars, the James Brown horn players, the Motown rhythm sections, the Sly Stone mentality – which is a lot of music to play with – and because I worked at Motown, [Clinton was a staff writer and producer at the label in the 1960s] I knew how to stack the different elements together, then move things out of the way when something else is coming through,  so you can have any weird combination, but everything will be heard. We had Bernie [Worrell] who was a conservatory-trained classical pianist, but we also had Bootsy…”

It was Bootsy Collins’ extraordinary musicianship upon which the Parliament vibe was built. A bass player in the JBs, who quit to join Funkadelic for America Eats It Young in 1972, Collins’ technique brought the discipline of the James Brown band and the ambition of a former lead guitarist to the freedom of Funkadelic, elevating the bass to a featured instrument.

“Funkadelic had been established as a black funk rock band,” explains Collins, “so each act [Parliament and Funkadelic] had to have their differences. We were very aware of that. George, being the overseer, wanted Parliament to be more James Brown danceable. That was really easy, and challenging at the same time. I knew the James Brown grooves and band hits, the breakdowns and dynamics, but I always wanted to be a part of a big band sound. I loved how those big bands sounded back in the day  – Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, John Williams – they had that tension, drama, they could be emotionally charged, or innocence and silence, then… Jaws breaks out of the water! That was the challenging part, because it plays with every emotion you have and a few others you don't know you have.”

The main thing Collins brought brought to Parliament, was something he’d learned from his time with James Brown, funk’s big beat and metronomic timing, otherwise known as ‘The One’.

“I brought the mighty One,” avers Collins, “and I had band arrangements that were playing in my head, which George Clinton gave me the opportunity to let out. I was always wild, so the band and I fit right in, as if we had been together from the beginning.”

Collins, who had just turned 21, had a youthful rawness to his playing, the perfect foil for more considered and delicate P-Funkers such as former Juilliard School graduate Bernie Worrell and jazz-oriented trombonist Fred Wesley. However, the bass player also brought order to proceedings, a by-product of growing up under the Godfather of Soul’s command.

“I loved to rehearse,” says Collins, “so I brought a certain discipline to a very chaotic situation. It worked out really well as a balance. George needed someone like me and I needed someone like him.”

Collins brought discipline to Clinton. Discipline and how to keep it on the One.  In return, Clinton opened up a new world of freedom and experiment for Collins.

George knew how to mix chemicals. I mean musicians and songs. Well, drugs too.

- Bootsy Collins

“I could not sleep with chicks with James Brown,” says Collins, “because he was more of a Father figure. George, however, was my older brother or like an uncle. I could do anything I wanted to in front of him. In fact he endorsed it. George looked like the craziest mother on the planet but he was actually complete opposite. He was very Funkentelechy [aware] he knew how to mix chemicals – meaning the musicians and the songs. Well drugs too, but at this time we were all pretty focused on the newness of playing together, riding in cars together, writing together. I’d love seeing George’s face light up when I hit the studio because he knew that I knew something, but I never knew what it was neither did he, but we both knew and it was magical. It was not a job, it was an adventure.”

It was an adventure that captured the audience’s imagination. Whereas Up For The Down Stroke consolidated the sound, the following album, 1975’s Chocolate City, established an attitude: smart, articulate, constantly surprising and as funny as hell, building an alternative reality that was both recognisable and cartoon-crazy in its depiction of a black US Presidency (this was nearly forty years ago). It struck a chord and gave the group their biggest selling album (selling 150,000 copies in Washington D.C. alone) and became and the basis of a committed fan following.

“We wanted to say something because that was our background as Funkadelic,” says Clinton, explaining the Chocolate City concept. “It wasn’t just about putting ourselves in an unusual situation. We had to do it so it was something we could be proud of, something we could look up to. We thought where would we most want to be in America, and that was in the White House, with Richard Pryor, Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin forming the government. And that was what the whole Chocolate City thing was: where would we like to be but haven’t been allowed? Since that worked so well, we figured we had to find another place that ain’t used to seeing blacks, somewhere else we would like to be but haven’t been allowed, and that was in outer space.”

 The result was 1975’s Mothership Connection.

“We got us a space ship and started making out like black folks would do if they had a space ship,” says Clinton. “A low ridin’ space ship! Then there was The Motor Booty Affair, when we thought ‘Where else can we take black people where they never been before? Under the sea!’ So that took the whole story down to Atlantis for that underwater vibe.

Thankfully, Neil Bogart totally got behind Parliament’s potential as something bigger than just another funk band.

 “Neil totally understood it,” says Clinton. “The succession of the Mothership, then the Clones [Of Dr Funkenstein, 1976], then Motor Booty. He knew how to market it like one big book – a comic book. He worked it as one chapter at a time, leaving people always looking forward to the next one as they get taken along with the story, they feel part of it.”

Bogart also knew how to sell Parliament to the mainstream pop market. He broke the first single from Mothership Connection, P-Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up), on black radio, but when he heard some pop stations playing its B Side, Give Up the Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker), he reissued the record for mainstream stations and stores with the labels reprinted, thus giving birth to the double A side concept. On another occasion, he sent his teams out to bribe security guards at rock and pop stations to let them in to super glue the current Parliament single to every turntable in the buildings.

But where Bogart really surpassed himself in terms of promotion was in October 1976 with the P-Funk Earth Tour, a massive $250,000 touring stage show complete with a full-scale model space ship that landed and took off to facilitate George Clinton’s entrance as the funk overlord, Dr Funkenstein.

“When we got Chocolate City we knew we had it,” Clinton exclaims, grinning at the memory, “but when we got Tear The Roof Off The Sucker, I knew I had to take it out live. I told [Casablanca] to get me a space ship.  I wasn’t even going to chase them down for the royalties on the albums, because you gonna catch hell trying to get paid on the back end anyway, but I wanted them to do that for us.

“He did it too, because the one thing Neil would do would invest in something that would help the record sales – and he wasn’t scared of doing it on a big scale, because he’s already done it with KISS. He spent all that money on their stage show when they couldn’t sell records worth a damn and it turned them into the biggest group in the country. That’s what broke us across all audiences, because it was so big. Even if you didn’t go to the shows you were aware of us and that was something you to get into. Even Neil Bogart had the spaceship would help him that much!”

The tour captured the music, mayhem and excitement of P-Funk in full flow, lives on in a DVD, Mothership Connection, 1976, and brought together both of Clinton’s vast band projects.

After the 1974’s Standing On The Verge, Funkadelic had been moving closer to Parliament with a series of almost normal (by their standards) albums for Warner Bros and on stage the two concepts blended seamlessly, as their audience pulled together for them as a single entity. The unification was best illustrated by the collective’s biggest hit, One Nation Under A Groove. Originally intended as a Parliament song, Clinton knew Groove was going to be massive and wanted to give it to Funkadelic as they were, for him, where it all started. The track charted all over the world at the end of 1978 and became the P-Funk stage show’s rallying closing number.

Yet, just as P-Funk came to dominate and define the 1970s it struggled to gain traction in the 1980s, after the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight had so drastically moved American black music’s goal posts. By that time, George Clinton’s empire had expanded to include two girl groups, Parlet and the Brides of Funkenstein, Bootsy’s very successful and superfunky Rubber Band, Fred Wesley & Maceo Parker’s Horny Horns and the Bootsy-produced disco-flavoured Sweat Band. He’d also launched his own label, Uncle Jam Records. Understandably the P-Funk empire began to crack and crumble under a weight of administration difficulties, financial disputes, internal jealousies, and Clinton spreading himself too thin. It was a demise hastened by changing tastes and what Clinton called “the built-in obsolescence of the music business. Nobody expects you to be on top more than five years.”

The irony was, even he didn’t expect it to last that long. The Parliament album Gloryhallastoopid, was so titled to mark the ridiculousness of the fact they were still around in 1979.

Another significant contributor to Parliament and P-Funk’s shift in fortunes was Neil Bogart’s absence. He and Cecil Holmes had personally shepherded the group to the heights of success, but by 1978 Bogart was making arrangements to sell to Polygram and start again. It made a difference, one that Clinton is now stoical about.

“He wanted to take us with him,” he says, “but all the time he was fixing to sell I was too out of my head on drugs to be paying attention so wasn’t aware of what was going on. Once the company was sold, we definitely didn’t get the attention we’d been getting before.”

The spaceship is in the Smithsonian Institute. We could ride the Mothership forever.

- George Clinton

Although Clinton recorded a few very good albums with Parliament personnel in the early 1980s it was essentially all over ten years after the Mothership first took off in 1976. However, Clinton, a naturally life-affirming soul, has few regrets. He’s back on tour with a band that mixes a few veterans with a number of original members’ children and grandchildren, he is still recording, is about to star in his own TV reality series and will have his memoirs published later this year.

“I know where I stand,” he says, in conclusion. “Those records are still around today in one way or another, either out in their own right or on somebody’s record, and the spaceship itself is in the Smithsonian Institute. That was such an incredible thing at the moment we did it, that it’s still doing what I thought it would do. Forever. We could ride the Mothership forever.”

This article originally appeared in MOJO 250.

From a rubbish burglar and pub-room blues singer to the godfather of heavy metal and (inter)national treasure, Ozzy Osbourne’s journey was sometimes a rocky one. But beyond the bat-biting antics and hair-raising war stories, Ozzy leaves behind a body of work that completely redefined rock and spawned an entire genre of music that continues to enthral generations the world over. Outside of heavy rock, Ozzy and Black Sabbath’s heavy boot imprints can still be heard all over the contemporary musical landscape. The worlds of hip hop, industrial, stoner and psych rock, and doom-laden modern-day folk acts like Dublin’s Lankum all owe a debt to the almighty sounds he and Sabbath first cooked up in Aston, Birmingham at the dawn of the ‘70s. On the one year anniversary of Ozzy's death, MOJO's Mark Blake hitches a ride aboard Ozzy’s train and charts his musical journey via his ten greatest songs...

• READ MORE: Every Black Sabbath Album Ranked!

Black Sabbath

(from Black Sabbath, Vertigo, 1970)

Osbourne’s lyrics on track one, side one of Black Sabbath’s debut album were inspired by bassist Geezer Butler spotting a shadowy apparition in his Aston bedroom. “Oh no, no please God help me!” implores Ozzy, sounding like the distraught victim in a Hammer Horror movie. Osbourne’s musical life started here.

War Pigs

(from Paranoid, Vertigo, 1970)

On first listen, this strident anti-war anthem is defined by his bandmates’ great lumbering rhythm and Tony Iommi’s staccato riff, but Osbourne’s beseeching wail – “Generals gathered in their masses” etc. – is the glue holding it together. His repeated “Oh Lord yeah” is pure Oz: daft and simple but wholly believable.

Paranoid

(from Paranoid, Vertigo, 1970)

Geezer Butler wrote the song about his own parlous mental condition, but Ozzy’s narration captured his friend’s anguish. Osbourne saw himself in the song, too, and Top Of The Pops viewers had their first glimpse of him shaking his curtains and clinging to the mike stand like a drunk to a lamppost.

Planet Caravan

(from Paranoid, Vertigo, 1970)

Like a stoned astronaut, Osbourne croons about “sailing through endless skies” and “the crimson eye of great god Mars”. With its pattering bongos, jazzy guitar and Ozzy’s hushed vocals fed through a Leslie speaker, it’s crying out for an Ibiza comedown compilation remix. Think: Ozzy goes trip-hop.

Changes

(from Vol 4, Vertigo, 1972)

Sabbath’s first power ballad avoids the genre’s usual bombast, partly because of its subtle arrangement, but mainly because of Ozzy’s guileless vocal. There’s no posturing: he sings it like someone who's lost the love of his life, but by ’72 the changes were metaphorical too, with the band, not least their singer, staring down the narcotic abyss.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

(from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Vertigo, 1973)

There’s no heavy metal vocalist on the planet who could deliver Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’s foreboding lines with such utter conviction. But Osbourne showed his versatility too: switching from sounding hurt and defeated (“Fill your head all full of lies”) to furious in the draw of a breath. His ‘You bastard!’ is one of the song’s highlights.

• READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne Bites The Head Off A Dove: "You should have seen their faces!"

Symptom Of The Universe

(from Sabotage, Vertigo, 1975)

One of Sabbath’s most underrated albums was recorded amid legal and chemical warfare, with Osbourne vocalising their collective woes on its defining song. “Swim the magic ocean I’ve been crying all these years,” he urges before managing a little optimism at the end. But really, it sounds like one long howl of pain (see also: Sabotage’s Hole In The Sky and The Writ).

Crazy Train

(from Blizzard Of Ozz, Jet 1980)

Away from Sabbath, Osbourne’s comic-book wildman persona quickly took shape. The first single from his debut solo album blueprinted a new look and sound: Ozzy fessing up to his supposed mental instability over Randy Rhoads’ nimble solos, but with everything anchored by a shiny, singalong pop-metal chorus. America was soon his for the taking.

• READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne: “I’m clean and sober but I’m far from f***ing sane!”

No More Tears

(from No More Tears, Epic, 1991)

The title track to Osbourne’s sixth solo album was a canny reboot for the 1990s. Doomy pop-rock toughing it out against Nirvana, Pearl Jam, etc, it had Ozzy inhabiting the guise of a serial killer, dragging out his syllables and wailing along to the riff the way he’d done on Sabbath’s Iron Man and other vintage gems.

Mama, I’m Coming Home

(from No More Tears, Epic, 1991)

Heavy rock is littered with hollow songs about weary road warriors missing home. Ozzy’s contribution to the genre was superior because he only ever had one gear: honest and unaffected. As heard during his final performance at Villa Park, he sang it like he meant every word of it.

Photo: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

Over seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Ozzy Osbourne dragged himself to the pinnacle of rock’n’roll. Haunted by rejection, raddled with substances, but also full of love, fun and a talent he couldn’t describe or always understand, his victory was one for every underdog, everywhere. MOJO's Sylvie Simmons watched it all unfold…

It was September 1978, in a nondescript hotel bar in Central Valley, California, when I first met Ozzy Osbourne. Black Sabbath were touring their Never Say Die! album and Sounds sent me on the road with them to review two of the shows and talk to Ozzy and guitarist Tony Iommi.

• READ MORE: Every Black Sabbath Album Ranked

The shows were good and the audience loved them. As far as they were concerned this was Black fucking Sabbath, metal gods, the heaviest band in heavy rock, in an era when most arena rock bands were of the MOR/Foreigner kind. Ozzy, the ultimate rock showman – stomping the boards like he was quashing a mountain of ants, pumping V signs like every song was a glorious finale – told them to “go fucking crazy” and they did. He did too.

The stage, I came to learn, was his safe place. The place where he was most confident. The place he came alive. But you could sense a pall over the band. The opening act, a brand-new young rock band called Van Halen, came close to blowing them offstage both nights.

When Ozzy walked into the bar that night like, he looked so much older than he did onstage. Grey-faced and bloated, shuffling into a banquette and resting his head against the mirrored wall, he told me in a surprisingly quiet voice that he rattled when he walked, from all the pills he took, washed down by an enormous amount of drink. While the piano player in the bar played what sounded like the best of Barry Manilow, Ozzy told me how much he loved his life with Black Sabbath, the band he’d fronted for the past ten years and helped become an institution. What he did not know then was that when the tour was over, Tony Iommi would throw him out of Black Sabbath and replace him with Ronnie James Dio.

Ozzy told me wanted to be a Beatle. Simple as that. He’d tried and failed at just about every other job available in the ’60s to a piss-poor kid in Aston, Birmingham who’d left school at age 15 with no qualifications –slaughterhouse, labourer, a factory job tuning car horns – so joining a pop band might actually have been the more realistic option.

His father, a tool maker at Lucas, urged him to learn a trade, and for a short while Ozzy was an apprentice plumber. But it didn’t take. He tried joining the army, thinking his dad would like that, but the recruiting officer, he said, took one look at him and said, “We want subjects, not objects.” Admittedly he was shoeless and wore a bath tap around his neck.

An attempt at burglary went no better, and led to six weeks in prison. When he was released, his father took out a loan so Ozzy could buy a PA. Ozzy put a postcard in the window of the local music shop looking for a band.

Ozzy was 13 when The Beatles released She Loves You. “I remember as if it was fucking yesterday,” he told MOJO’s Keith Cameron. “I had a light blue transistor radio, walking down Witton Road in Aston and this song came on... It fucking turned my head.” Music unlocked something in Ozzy. The only thing he’d liked about school had been appearing in – of all things – a pair of Gilbert & Sullivan productions. Aside from this it was a hell of then-undiagnosed dyslexia, ADHD and bullying. Singing in an operetta wouldn’t have helped. Among the bullies was someone from the year above named Tony Iommi. “Kicked me in the bollocks a few times,” Ozzy admitted.

He was a sensitive kid. Sensitive adult too. He attempted suicide more than once. He was fragile, frightened, even if he couldn’t always say of what, but knew to put a clown face on it. Although one of six kids, raised in a two-bedroom house, there seemed a loneliness that singing in an operetta or in The Beatles or any band would help cure. When he was tossed out of Sabbath he lost a lot more than a job in a band.

Ozzy was broken. It didn’t occur to him to find another band. He told me he figured he’d be back in Birmingham on the dole queue. Living in LA, musicians would tell me he’d locked himself in a room in the Le Parc hotel in West Hollywood, going insane, refusing to let anyone inside, the maid included. The place was a sty. He lived on pizzas left outside the door and drugs and vats of liquor.

• READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne: “I woke up with Sharon stabbing me in the chest with a dinner fork!”

It was true. “I was living in a total Steptoe nightmare,” is how he’d later describe it. Black Sabbath’s manager Don Arden, not the tenderest man in the music business, sent his daughter Sharon to take care of him – which she did, stunningly well, as manager, then wife and mother of his children, his biggest support and fierce defender right up until the end of his extraordinary and extraordinarily challenging life.

One day Ozzy called me and said he’d signed a record deal as a solo artist. He gave me his first post-Sabbath interview.

“It’s like a fucking divorce, that’s what it is,” he said when I asked how things were going. A messy divorce. Following the split, Sabbath drummer Bill Ward had told Ozzy that the new line-up with Dio would go out under a new name. “But I heard from a good source that they’ve already started booking a tour as Black Sabbath. I own a quarter of that name. When I found out last night I went nuts.” Evidence: one wrecked hotel room.

“It’s funny, but to me Sabbath is dead and I don’t want no part of it,” he said, swigging a glass of wine – a new habit since he’d bought a wine bar in England “as a sort of retreat, something to fall back on if it all came crashing down”.

• READ MORE: Inside Ozzy Osbourne’s First-Ever Solo Show...

When he talked about his former colleagues his voice swung from anger to bewilderment, and desolation to amusement at having heard that Iommi and his new lineup were having difficulties in the studio. What struck me was how much younger Ozzy now looked in his blue Black Sabbath T-shirt than he did when we’d met on tour. With Sharon Arden’s encouragement he started a new young band from scratch: Blizzard of Ozz. In another of the seeming acts of God that litter his story, he’d stumbled across a generational talent in Quiet Riot guitarist Randy Rhoads – a classical scholar who metabolised hard rock and gave it elegant new shapes. Sounds editor Geoff Barton’s review described their debut album as “Sabs-like to be sure, but faster, more furious and updated for the 1980s... Ozzy, whose vocals seemed limited with Sabbath, sang with conviction and personality, from headbanging scorchers Crazy Train to spooky Mr Crowley.”

Though Iommi swapped it for Dio’s powerful, more technically skilled yodel, Ozzy’s voice on those classic Sabbath songs was a tool that cut right through Iommi’s loud, sludgy, tuned-down guitar, a wail that was part blues, part wild animal, anguished and plaintive, or deep and doomy, that seemed to come straight from his soul. It was a unique voice in rock at that time. It both started and defined heavy metal, but reaches out beyond sub-culture or genre to fans of all kinds of music in all kinds of places – like Washington state and the nascent Nirvana.

“Kurt really liked Ozzy,” Dave Grohl told MOJO in 2016. “Growing up in a town like Aberdeen and hearing a band like Black Sabbath – it’s a sweet release. Suddenly there’s something outside your small-town world you can relate to – when you can hear that alienation in someone else’s music.”

Pulling back from Ozzy’s story in the wake of his death, much of the mayhem, goonery and excess – once grist to music magazines providing weekly bulletins from the increasingly wild edges of showbiz: a different kind of release from a small-town world – starts to look a lot like PTSD.

The first two solo albums made with Rhoads, bassist Bob Daisley and drummer Lee Kerslake – Blizzard Of Ozz (1980) and Diary Of A Madman (1981) – were miraculous successes, multi-platinum in the States. But that phase ended in more, and still greater trauma, with Rhoads’ death, along with that of pilot Andrew Aycock and hairdresser Rachel Youngblood, in a light aircraft accident while on tour in 1982. Buzzing the Ozzy band’s tour bus as a prank on the morning of March 19, the plane’s wing clipped the bus’s left side, whereupon it crashed into a house and burst into flames. Ozzy and Sharon, asleep at the back of the bus, were woken by the jolt.

“I looked down the bus and the windscreen was all of a twist,” Ozzy told MOJO’s Phil Alexander in 2010. “There was glass everywhere, and there was this smell. I said to Sharon, We’ve had a crash on the freeway. So I get off the bus and I’m thinking, Where the fuck are we? And nobody could speak. Sharon gets off the bus and starts going crazy so I go to the fridge and get a bottle of beer, like every alcoholic does. I was still loaded from last night but everything seemed weird. Sharon says to [tour manager] Jack Duncan, ‘Where is Randy and where is Rachel?’ And she gets her shoe off and hits him over the fucking head with the fucking shoe. He points to the house and I thought, Oh fuck, ’cos it looked like a fucking inferno.”

In full repression mode, replacement guitarists were recruited and the tour continued, but the effect on Ozzy, though buried, was profound. He shaved his head, almost in penance. “I thought that it was all over again,” he would admit. “It was as if someone really didn’t want me doing this any more.”

As Sharon (Sharon Osbourne after their July 4, 1982 wedding in Maui) helmed his career, negotiating crises including the 1984 case that saw Ozzy in court after the 1984 suicide of fan John McCollum, unsuccessfully blamed by his parents on the Blizzard... song Suicide Solution, Ozzy’s lifestyle continued to careen. All those stories – the coke-snorting contest with Mötley Crüe that ended with Ozzy snorting a line of ants; or the time he demanded a rubber duck for his hotel bathtub and, when one didn’t materialise, kidnapped a real live duck from a nearby park – are true. I witnessed some of them. Strip the most famous – the dove whose head he bit off at a CBS function in March 1981 – of its layers of subsequent lore, and it’s actually horrifying. The other was the bat tossed onstage at a Des Moines show in January 1982, which also made its way between Ozzy’s teeth. He thought it was a toy. It wasn’t. After the concert he needed rabies shots that, he said, felt “like someone injecting a golf ball in your arse”.

• READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne Bites The Head Off A Dove: “You should have seen their faces!”

 Some of this was dumb stuff to get over the boredom of touring and its never-ending line of freeways and lookalike hotels. Mostly it was fuelled by alcohol and drugs. Even Sharon couldn’t stop that. During blackouts, his behaviour was uncontrolled, increasingly dangerous. September 1989 was the nadir. “I remember waking up in Amersham nick in this single cell with shit smeared over the walls, and scratches on my face where Sharon tried to defend herself,” he told Mick Wall in a 2004 MOJO Interview. “They told me I’d tried to strangle her.”

There were periods of rehab and sobriety that lasted for various amounts of time. I recall visiting Ozzy and Sharon’s house in London in the mid-’80s and seeing Ozzy, sitting at the kitchen island, glumly pushing the button a blender, making smoothie after healthy smoothie. He was trying.

Another time when I interviewed him at the house, Ozzy and Sharon’s first daughter Aimee, still a toddler, was crawling around the floor playing with the Osbourne’s dogs. Midway through answering one of my questions he quietly and calmly addressed his daughter: “Aimee, take that pencil out of the dog’s arse, it’s a dog’s arse, not a pencil sharpener.” It was the Osbornes years before The Osbournes.

Amid the madness, Ozzy’s music career seemed solid. A run of albums in the ’80s and ’90s – fuelled by successive, game-changing hard rock guitarists including Jake E. Lee and, until the end, the super-loyal Zakk Wylde – were guaranteed platinum-sellers Stateside, and Sharon ran the shop ruthlessly. After the sacked Daisley and Kerslake sued for writing royalties on Diary Of A Madman, she retaliated by reissuing the CD in 2002 with re-recorded bass and drum parts. More imaginatively, in 1996 the pair launched Ozzfest, a rock and metal festival tour that kept Ozzy’s name at the centre of the genre until its last gasp in 2018. Typically, it was originally conceived to give the finger to the Lollapalooza organisers who’d dared to turn Ozzy down.

Talking to Ozzy during the ’90s, there was still a voice inside who thought it would collapse like a house of cards, that he was never more than days away from a Birmingham building site or dole queue. Sharon had her sharper eyes on broader horizons, but what next transpired must have amazed even her. Between 2002-2005 The Osbournes TV show – MTV’s hybrid reality show-cum-soap – took Ozzy’s fame to a new level. He was suddenly TV-famous, a bumbling but big-hearted British dad and his loving, long-suffering British wife dealing with the vagaries of family life and pets that need therapists – an enclave of celebrity Hollywood that would be forever partly Aston. Old ladies who’d never heard War Pigs or Mr Crowley but were drawn to him for his likeability would spot him walking on Doheney Drive near the Osbournes’ L.A home, and call his name.

• READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne: “I’m clean and sober but I’m far from f***ing sane!”

But while the show encouraged Ozzy to stay soberer than he’d ever been, it dramatized what was already intense in the Osbournes’ lives. Amid the foolishness, it documented Sharon’s battle with colon cancer: “I’d come home from a show and find this grey little thing in bed,” said Ozzy. “She had several seizures, and every time I’d go to the hospital I’d think, This is it.”

The Osbournes was a phenomenon. Ozzy asked the producers, If the show had been an album, how many records would they have sold? “This guy goes, ‘You know Thriller? Well this is like 18 Thrillers.’” But the aftershock of the scrutiny was something his children Jack and Kelly struggled to process. “Suddenly my kids are going off the rails,” Ozzy told Mick Wall. “Jack, at the age of 16, he’s doing smack! Then Kelly comes stumbling home one night, trips over and a shit-load of pills come spilling out of her bag. I find out she’s been getting them off the internet.”

Despite every solo success, Black Sabbath remained unfinished business. Ozzy had rejoined them for gigs and tours – a misfiring Live Aid set, a 1997-’99 tour; a 1998 album entitled Reunion – but none of it felt satisfying until Ozzy, Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler convened in December 2012 in Shangri-La, Bob Dylan’s old studio in Malibu, which now belonged to Rick Rubin.

Minus Bill Ward – at contractual loggerheads – a new Black Sabbath album was underway. Iommi, who had cancer, would fly back to the UK every six weeks for chemotherapy. Ozzy, after Sharon’s travails, couldn’t have been more sympathetic. The first thing Rubin did when the three original Sabs were in the studio was make them sit and listen to their first album.

“They went, ‘Oh, we know how it goes,’” recalled Rubin, “but I said, No, let’s really listen to it and analyse why it is what it is. And I think they were surprised by what they heard in terms of how eclectic it was. Because it’s not heavy metal; it’s _pre-_heavy metal, almost pre-prog rock, with its complex structures, jazz and blues. There’s almost something Beatlesque about it too.”

When that was done, the band just jammed. Said Rubin. “Ozzy thinks Tony is the best guitar player in the world and is so excited every time he brings in new riffs, it’s like, he can’t believe it. And Tony loves the way Ozzy sings and how passionate he is about the project.”

For years, Ozzy had heard younger bands tell him of their debt to Black Sabbath. He was generally bemused: “We were just four local guys,” he’d say. “There was no secret, nothing conscious about it. We just played.” But he was re-learning what was special about the band

13, released in June 2013, topped the US and UK chart. In support, the trio toured the world, and again on a jaunt entitled The End in 2016 and 2017. Despite longterm health issues deriving from a lifetime of substance abuse, a near-fatal quad bike accident in 2003 and symptoms of Parkinsons disease first diagnosed around the same time, Ozzy was forging on with his original bandmates, eventually to be rejoined by Ward, for what would prove to be his, and their, final show at Villa Park on July 5 2025.

“My career started with Bill,” Ozzy told MOJO in his last interview with the magazine, “and I’d really like to finish with Bill by my side.”

• READ MORE: Ozzy On Black Sabbath’s Final Show: “I wanted to say a proper thank you to my fans for the life they have given me”

The end. Always the hardest part to write. There’s so much to say. Like that Sabbath was the sound of the factory floor, but Ozzy thought of himself as a Beatle. He told me that his life seemed to be in black and white until the Beatles turned on the light. He told me he was approached by some kind of Satanist cabal to play a show at Stonehenge: “I told them to fuck off.”

That he was a showman, a rock frontman of the highest order, as big a fan of the band he played in as the audience was. From the outset he put everything he had into it, and when it came to the end who knew how much of it there was after so much had been taken by ill-health. Ozzy had been talking about The End since the ’90s: the No More Tours I and II; multiple announcements of his retirement for health reasons, including a life-threatening infection in 2019, exacerbated by steroids he used in order to sing.

But no-one wanted to him to end. By now he was more than a singer, he was a National Treasure. He’d met the Queen (she said “I hear you’re quite the wild one”). He’d become one of those people who by sheer longevity, courage in the face of adversity and character were loved by all. The so-called Prince of Darkness was in the end the People’s Prince.

At the Back To The Beginning show, steps away from where he and Sabbath grew up, Ozzy came onstage in royal splendour, seated on a black leather bat throne. He didn’t have the strength to walk. The concert, with an audience of 40,000, raised more than two million dollars for charity. As Ozzy sang Mama, I’m Coming Home he seemed on the brink of crying, but a triumphant, let’s-go-crazy Crazy Train more than evened the score.

Ozzy Osbourne 1; The Universe 0.

This article originally appeared in MOJO 383.

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He bit the head off a dove, and then a bat, before desecrating an American monument. Next came the lost of his guitarist in a freak plane accident. But behind these lurid headlines lurked a more sombre truth. In 2010 Ozzy Osbourne revisited the turbulent times that shaped him and his music. In remembrance of Ozzy, who passed away one year ago, we revisit the feature in full. “I was living in a total nightmare,” he told MOJO's Phil Alexander...

Le Parc Hotel in West Hollywood is an oasis of pastel colours and understated wealth that promises its clientele “the best of Los Angeles”. For one resident in the balmy summer of 1979 it provided a bolt-hole into which he could retreat and lose his mind.

• READ MORE: Ozzy bites the head off a dove: “You should have seen their faces…”

Thirty-one-year-old Ozzy Osbourne had just been ejected from Black Sabbath, the band he’d fronted for a decade and the only proper group he’d ever been in. Guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler had left drummer Bill Ward with the unenviable task of telling their singer that his increasing drug consumption had become an unacceptable liability.

“It was utterly heartbreaking,” remembers Bill. “Oz was my best friend in the band and what made it worse was that we were all as bad as each other, sitting in our hotel rooms with vases of cocaine and blaming everyone else. But telling Oz he had to go was too much for me. It took me years to recover from it.”

For Ozzy being fired unleashed a sense of injustice that soon turned into a daily routine of self-destruction that involved waking up any time after noon and phoning out for the day’s supplies – booze (gin, beer, brandy, Mateus Rosé), a “big bag of Womble dust” (cocaine) and, finally, food (pizza, most days). His suite remained devoid of daylight, the curtains tightly drawn, fast food containers and empty bottles sticking to the increasingly matted shag-pile carpet. The maid had long stopped coming, petrified of the wild-eyed stare of the long-haired guest who spent hours staring vacantly at the gas fire, and horrified by the sheer stench of the room. Ozzy’s aim was simple: to get catatonic by 4pm at the very latest.

“I was living in a total Steptoe nightmare,” he admits. “I genuinely thought it was all over. My father had died a couple of years earlier, I hadn’t saved any dough, and I thought, That’s it, time get the fuck back on the building site, so I just got utterly out of my tree every single day for three months.”

 “I ran into Iggy Pop the other day. I hadn’t seen him since the MOJO awards a few years ago, but he’s fucking weird,” says Ozzy Osbourne in his trademark Brummie brogue. “He told me my hair smelled nice. I told him that it’s because I fucking wash it!”

In contrast to the “full-blown alcoholic drug-addict” of 1979, Ozzy today is a well-groomed picture of health. Having pressed flesh during his visit to MOJO HQ this May morning, he has repaired to the brasserie at London’s Covent Garden Hotel. Previously, an interview would have provided an excuse to kick off the day’s drinking – one particular occasion at an Irish country club ending with Ozzy insisting that we enjoy “a nightcap” of a bottle of Bushmills whiskey. Each. Today, however, Ozzy orders nothing stronger than a mug of English Breakfast tea.

“I’m clean and sober, but I’m far from fucking sane,” he points out. “I’ve got a head full of devils. When technology has the means of doing it, come and spend an hour in my head. You’ll come sliding back down my nose faster than a gram of bad coke.”

Colourful analogies are, alongside explosions of expletives, always part of any conversation with Ozzy. So too is a large dose of unflinching self-analysis.  “People have preconceptions about me,” he continues. “But a lot of those preconceptions have nothing to do with the real me. Maybe The Osbournes changed some of that.”

The all-conquering TV series that ran for three years from 2002 transformed Ozzy from notorious hellraiser to cuddly ‘rock dad’, its success at times obscuring a musical career that has seen him sell upwards of 60 million albums. Ozzy likens the show’s success to “Beatlemania on LSD”, admitting that he took up to 42 different pills per day to cope with the anxiety and stress it caused. Those days, he says, are now over. Dealing with the promotion of his new album is comparatively easy. The album, Scream, is the 10th studio set of his solo career – a career founded on the bedrock of his 1980 debut album, Blizzard Of Ozz, and its successor, ’81’s Diary Of A Madman. Recorded in the wake of his scarified tenure at Le Parc, both albums define Ozzy’s music, the stories that surround them cementing his reputation.

“They’re such important albums to me,” he admits, “Without them I wouldn’t be here. I genuinely was living like the fucking Prince of Darkness when we made them, and then I met Randy Rhoads…”

Blond, petit and wiry, the stack-heeled, Randy Rhoads was born in Santa Monica on December 6, 1956, one of three siblings. His mother Delores – who had split from her husband William when Randy was 17 months old – ran the Musonia School Of Music in which her son grew up, graduating from classical acoustic guitar to electric via a battered semi-acoustic Harmony Rocket.

A prodigious talent, by 15 he had outpaced his music teacher and joined the school’s staff prior to forming his first band, Violet Fox, with his friend Kelly Garni. A year later, they formed Quiet Riot with singer Kevin Dubrow as Rhoads – armed with a distinctive neo-classic style – began to forge a reputation as one of Hollywood’s hottest guitar players along with Eddie Van Halen.

Quiet Riot secured a record deal with CBS Sony in Japan, for whom they recorded two patchy albums which remained unreleased in the US. While in ’83 a later line-up of Quiet Riot would enjoy a chart-topping album in the US with Metal Health, as the ’70s drew to an end the band had reached an impasse. When word got out that Ozzy was holed up at Le Parc and looking to recruit a new band, such was Randy’s status that his name was in the frame – introduced by fellow hopeful/bassist Dana Strum.

“I was terrified of auditioning people ’cos I’d only been in one band up until then and we were all mates,” admits Ozzy. “I was only a singer and I couldn’t even play triangle! I remember listening to five drummers banging away one after another and thinking, I’m fucked if I know whether any of these guys are any good. Then Dana said to me, ‘I know this guitar player that you should see.’ I said to him, I can’t, I’m too out of it.”

But Strum was insistent and, since Ozzy refused to leave his room, brought the softly-spoken, 23-year-old Rhoads to the hotel. “Dana turned up with a guy who looked like a little doll,” says Ozzy. “I went, He’s fucking gay! Randy was like, (affects camp voice) ‘You’re sooo weird!’ But he promised to come back the next day.”

“They turned up again and I wasn’t really paying attention to what they were doing so Randy said, ‘I feel a bit goofy just standing here, what do you want me to play?’ I didn’t really care so I just said, Any-fucking-thing you want. I’m not sure what he played exactly but I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘But I haven’t really played anything properly yet,’ said Randy. I said, Come back tomorrow, and I passed out on the couch.”

Despite their contrasting personalities, in November 1979, Rhoads agreed to follow Ozzy to England. Osbourne didn’t have a deal but along with his manager, Sharon Arden, he’d agreed to invest what cash he had left to record the new material he was hatching with Rhoads. Alternating between a flat in Chelsea and Bullrush Cottage, the house Ozzy shared with his wife Thelma and their kids in Staffordshire, Osbourne found his new guitar foil to be an encouraging presence.

“The difference between Randy and Tony Iommi was that when we were writing I had to fit the gap that Tony gave me. There was no tuning down for me. But Randy was a teacher so he’d say, ‘You know, you’re better off singing in this key.’ He was really patient with me and he taught me a lot.”

The next addition to Ozzy’s line-up emerged when the singer ran into bassist Bob Daisley at the Music Machine, Camden Town, at a gig by glam-metal outfit Girl (then signed to Jet, the label owned by Sharon’s father, Don Arden, who was also Black Sabbath’s manager). A veteran of Chicken Shack, Widowmaker and Rainbow, Daisley was intrigued by Ozzy’s gushing praise for his new guitar player.

Agreeing to meet at Osbourne’s house a few days later, Daisley was impressed with what he heard. Osbourne’s band was complete when German booking agent Ossy Hoppe recommended Uriah Heep drummer Lee Kerslake (key influences: John Bonham and Buddy Rich) as a suitable candidate.

“I said to the guys, OK only the best ideas will get through, and that’s how we worked,” says Ozzy of the band’s modus operandi, as the quartet repaired to Rockfield, the residential studio in Monmouthshire, to begin pre-production work.

“When we got there, there was a lot of drinking, a lot of drugging, although Randy wasn’t into that,” recalls Ozzy. “Rockfield’s an old farmhouse so we used to tell each other bullshit scary stories and have fake séances. There was this one guy called Spencer who was a roadie-cum-stand-in-drummer. I put a speaker under his bed and plugged it into a mike. I waited for him to fall asleep, then I’d go (adopts spooky voice) ‘Spencer! Spencerrrrr!’ He was terrified. Then there was a time when we went crazy and threw all these snooker balls through the window. He came running out. We just said, ‘Poltergeist!’”

On March 22, 1980, the four-piece moved from Rockfield to Ridge Farm Studios, Surrey – ostensibly to begin work with producer Chris Tsangarides before electing to use in-house engineer Max Norman. “I always judge how good things are by whether the hairs on my arms stand up,” says Ozzy. “And Randy’s playing in the studio had that effect on me.”

Musically, the LP showcased Rhoads’ innovative playing, his baroque flurries punctuating Goodbye To Romance (Ozzy’s open letter to his former Sabbath bandmates), the eco-worrying Revelation (Mother Earth) and acoustic instrumental interlude Dee (a tribute to his mother Delores). Lyrically, the songs amplified Ozzy’s larger-than-life personality. The maniacal laugh that kick-starts Crazy Train suggested over-the-top mischief, juxtaposing the personal (“Mental wounds/Not healing”) with the political (a post-War Pigs view of Cold War détente), while the melodramatic Mr Crowley, about famed British occultist Aleister, further reinforced the singer’s reputation for devilry.

“To be honest, everybody was into Crowley in those days. Apart from me,” shrugs Ozzy. “I just wrote a song along the lines of, ‘Who the fuck were you? What the fuck were you about?’ Because I didn’t really understand half of it.”

The most misunderstood of all nine tracks was Suicide Solution. The tune would come back to haunt Ozzy when, after the suicide of John McCollum from a .22 calibre gunshot wound in October 1984, McCollum’s parents brought a case against Osbourne and CBS records, claiming that the instrumental breakdown two minutes into the track includes lyrics not listed on the album’s sleeve which state, “Get the gun and try it! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot! Shoot!” The initial case was dismissed and a second appeal at the Californian Court Of Appeal upheld the verdict of the first, the court stating: “Musical lyrics and poetry cannot be construed to contain the requisite ‘call to action’ for the elementary reason they simply are not intended to be and should not be read literally.”

Ozzy’s view was equally pragmatic. “Listen, it’d be a pretty bad career move for me to write a song saying ‘Grab a gun and kill yourself.’ I wouldn’t have many fans left,” he winces. “Anyhow, that track was about me drinking myself to death. Look at the lyrics. ‘Wine is fine but whiskey’s quicker/Suicide is slow with liquor/Take a bottle drown your sorrows.’ I knew even then I had an alcohol problem.”

While Ozzy had managed to assemble a new band, his former colleagues in Black Sabbath had already re-grouped with singer Ronnie James Dio and released Heaven And Hell on April 25, 1980, six days after Ozzy finished recording at Ridge Farm. The album had hit the UK Top 10, proving Sabbath were still a viable force without their ex-frontman, leading to bouts of points scoring in the press by both parties.

“There was definitely a rivalry there and we all said a lot of stupid things,” admits Ozzy today. “But it was like a divorce. It’s always like that with your ex-wife-to-be. There’s always that period where you go, You have the cat, I’ll have the dog, but then you end up calling each other fucking assholes. I was shit scared. I’d slipped off my pedestal big time.”

Ozzy’s insecurity was worsened by the prospect of a first tour under his own name. “We weren’t going to get played on the radio, so we had to do it by playing live. That’s what we did in Sabbath, and that’s what we decided to do this time but I was terrified,” he admits.

• READ MORE: Black Sabbath’s Best Albums Ranked

Initially, Ozzy had wanted to name his new band Blizzard Of Ozz, harking back to his time in Sabbath when he’d planned to release a solo album in ’76 under that name with members of Cumbrian outfit Necromandus as his backing band. Sharon Arden made him think differently. “Sharon just said, ‘Do you really want people to say, “Who the fuck are that band?” Or do you want them to say, “We’re going to see Ozzy”?’ She was right. It was a case of using my name because my name meant something.”

As a result, Blizzard Of Ozz became the album’s title just as Ozzy signed a deal with Jet Records, following Don Arden’s decision to stop managing Sabbath. An appearance at the Reading Festival on August 24, 1980, was duly announced, and then swiftly cancelled. After final rehearsals at Shepperton Studios, the band finally hit the road to coincide with the album’s September release.

“Sharon had talked to me about going out and headlining straight away. She thought it would be some kind of statement. The very first official gig that I did as a solo artist was at the Glasgow Apollo and, fucking hell, I realised I didn’t have enough material so I had to do Sabbath songs!” says Ozzy. “But it was a first step and in the end it felt like a monumental step to be back out there and playing.”

Osbourne’s optimism was confirmed by a string of 34 sold-out shows, Ozzy and Randy’s stage antics recalling David Bowie and Mick Ronson’s fret-biting double act. The tour’s success saw record sales of Blizzard Of Ozz boom, the album hit the UK charts at Number 7, two places higher than Sabbath’s previous effort.

1981 proved a pivotal year for Ozzy. On a personal level, he was in the throes of splitting up with Thelma, his long-suffering wife of 10 years whom he would divorce that year, as he and his manager Sharon began a tempestuous relationship. February saw him feverishly trying to complete his second album, Diary Of A Madman – a more melodic affair, again recorded at Ridge Farm with Max Norman – before flying to the States for the launch of his first album on March 27, which was due out via his recently inked deal with CBS.

Believing that the label were more interested in Adam Ant, Sharon had a simple plan to garner attention: Ozzy would attend a label function in LA and make a grand entrance by freeing two doves from his jacket pocket and flashing peace signs. Arriving at the CBS meeting at 11am, Ozzy found himself “pissed and bored” and went a step further, freeing one dove but biting the head off the second.

“I don’t really know what happened,” he admits today. “I didn’t really realise what I’d done or why I’d done it. I suppose I thought it would be funny but no one else seemed to find it funny at all.”

The resulting photos show Osbourne glassy-eyed and spitting feathers from his mouth as a label employee looks on with disgust. A spread of the shots ran in British weekly magazine Sounds, dubbing the singer “The Vilest Man In HM”. In the wake of this controversy, Ozzy began his first solo US tour at the Towson Centre in Maryland on April 22. Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake were gone – the result of contractual and personal disputes – replaced by bassist Rudy Sarzo (formerly of Quiet Riot) and Tommy Aldridge (ex-Black Oak Arkansas). The recording of Diary Of A Madman, meanwhile, was complete. The mixing, however, was not.

“I was on the road in America and I was in a fucking phone box mixing the album. I had a tape of Diary Of A Madman and I was saying, Less bass on this, more vocal on that track, and so on,” says Ozzy. “It wasn’t the best mix in the end because of that.”

Touring commitments saw Ozzy play over 90 shows between April and September in the US, Stateside sales of Blizzard… hitting half a million by June. Back in the UK, in August the band played the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival at Port Vale Football Club as special guests to Motörhead, confirming Ozzy’s popularity back home. The release of Diary Of A Madman on November 7, 1981, gave little pause for breath as the band toured Germany before Ozzy collapsed from nervous exhaustion.

By the time he returned to the US to play San Francisco’s Cow Palace on December 30, the band’s live show had also grown, reflecting Madman’s epic qualities (the set now resembled a fortified castle, Ozzy’s fringed jacket replaced by red chain-mail armour) and boasting a host of outlandish elements including a giant mechanical claw, a hanging midget and Osbourne’s take on a slapstick favourite.

“I’d always liked custard pie fights so I decided to do that on-stage… with meat!” he cackles. “Then it got out of control pretty quickly. It got put on one of the posters: ‘Bring your own offal’. It started off with a few sausages and bacon, and then we got snakes, giant marsh frogs and even a sheep’s head.”

His plan backfired spectacularly on January 20, 1982, when, while on-stage at the Veterans Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, he bit into what he thought was a plastic toy. “I thought it was a rubber bat so I picked it up and just bit into it. Then I began to feel my mouth filling up with this fucking liquid that tasted fucking terrible…” he winces.

Unclear as to whether the bat had actually bitten Ozzy before he’d killed it, the doctor’s advice involved guarding against rabies with a daily series of injections. “Having rabies shots feels like someone injecting a golf ball in your arse,” muses Ozzy. “Then you feel it melting and trickling down inside your leg. It’s like when you get a dead leg at school and you can’t stand on it. I had a shot in each hip, one in each butt cheek and one in each arm. It was fucking terrible. I ended up crying it was so bad.”

Less than a month after his Iowa experience, the Diary Of A Madman tour snaked through Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia and into Texas. The dove and bat headlines attracted further pressure, this time from religious groups.

“We were somewhere in Texas and I called the receptionist at this hotel to get a doctor to look at my vocal chords,” Ozzy remembers. “I went downstairs into the coffee shop which was full of people and sat right in the middle of it. Fifteen minutes go by, a guy in a suit comes in with his briefcase, sits right opposite me and says, ‘Are you Mr Osbourne?’ I said, Yeah I am, thinking he was the doctor, and he started going, (adopts fire-and-brimstone voice) ‘Put Jesus in your life! Put Jesus in front of you!’ All of a sudden all the other fuckers in the coffee shop started shouting, ‘Repent!’ I had this security guard who was an ex-Vietnam vet, so he wades in and starts punching the shit out of everybody. Meanwhile, I was on my hands and knees crawling out the fucking door!”

Ozzy’s notoriety would reach even greater heights on February 19, 1982, when, in the eyes of Middle America, he would surpass himself by desecrating a national monument

“I’d finished a bottle of Courvoisier at around seven in the morning…”  he begins, recalling the events that led to the singer being arrested for relieving himself on The Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, on February 19, 1982. Having drunk himself awake, Ozzy met up in the hotel bar with photographer Tom Sheehan and journalist Alan Jones, there to cover the Diary Of A Madman US tour for Melody Maker.

“Ozzy was ordering an orange juice and a double brandy every time,” remembers Sheehan. “He’d place the brandy near me as if he wasn’t drinking it, but he got quite pissed. When we decided to go out to do photos he went to get changed.”

Returning to the bar, Ozzy was now dressed in his female wardrobe assistant’s outfit. “Then he stopped off at the hotel shop to buy a straw hat and a handbag and we left,” laughs Sheehan. Minutes later the party arrived at The Alamo, famed fortress defended by Texans against the Mexican army, and began taking photos.

“Ozzy seemed to be having quite a good time,” recalls Sheehan. “Then, after a few frames, he says, ‘I need a piss!’ I told him we’d finish and be back in the hotel in a few minutes, but he couldn’t wait.”

“I need to have a piss, I saw this wall and I pissed on it. I didn’t know what it was,” counters the singer. A passer-by, however, had seen Ozzy’s gratuitous act and alerted a nearby Texan ranger.

“This big Texan cop comes round the corner and sees me and starts shouting. Then he said, ‘How you feel if I pissed on Buckingham Palace?’ I said, I wouldn’t give a fuck, mate, because I don’t live there. That was it. Off to the police station I went in this cop car. I got thrown in a cell with a load of murdering fuckers.”

Ozzy did indeed share a cell with a man who was still covered in the blood of his recently murdered wife but was allowed to play that night’s show before being banned from San Antonio. The ban was lifted 10 years later.

• READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne On Black Sabbath’s Final Show: “I wanted to say a proper thank you to my fans for the life they have given me…”

Ozzy Osbourne can still feel the numbness of realisation. He can still smell the burning fuel. And, when you talk to him, it is almost as if he can still feel the shattered glass under his feet as he awoke on that tour bus on the morning of March 19, 1982. The day Randy Rhoads died.

The night before, the band had played the Civic Coliseum in Knoxville, Tennessee, and set off for Orlando, Florida, immediately after the gig where Ozzy was due to play the Rock Super Bowl XIV with Foreigner and UFO. Having consumed two bottles of gin, Osbourne passed out at “around six or seven” in the morning.

At approximately 8am the bus arrived at Flying Baron Estates, a privately owned airstrip a mile west of Leesburg, Florida, framed by three colonial-styled mansions. The airstrip was also headquarters for the bus company and spares were required. Their driver, Andrew Aycock, a qualified pilot, parked 15 yards in front of one of the houses, then borrowed a red-and-white Beechcraft Bonanza F-15 from one of the hangars.

On his first trip he took keyboard player Don Airey and tour manager Jack Duncan for a joyride. The second trip saw Randy Rhoads and the band’s hairdresser, Rachel Youngblood, on board. Eye-witnesses saw the plane swoop over the bus three times. On the fourth pass its left wing struck the bus’s left side, catapulting the plane into a tree and on into the garage on the west side of the house where it burst into flames. Ozzy and Sharon, asleep at the back of the bus, were roused by the jolt.

“I looked down the bus and the windscreen was all of a twist. There was glass everywhere, and there was this smell. I said to Sharon, We’ve had a crash on the freeway,” recalls Ozzy. “So I get off the bus and I’m thinking, Where the fuck are we? And nobody could speak. Sharon gets off the bus and starts going crazy so I go to the fridge and get a bottle of beer, like every alcoholic does. I was still loaded from last night but everything seemed weird. Sharon says to Jack Duncan, ‘Where is Randy and where is Rachel?’ And she gets her shoe off and hits him over the fucking head with the fucking shoe. He points to the house and I thought, Oh fuck, ’cos it looked like a fucking inferno.”

Despite the state of shock that appeared to paralyse the travelling party, Ozzy was one of the first to realise what was happening. “I thought, I’m going to have to fucking go in the house, there might be kids in there,” he recalls. “By this point the garage was ablaze. So I run over to the house and there’s this old guy in there. It turned out he was deaf, and he reaches for a shotgun. I’m screaming at him through the door, Come out! But he’s just looking at me with his gun in his hand and he shouts back, Get out! Get out of my house! Eventually he opens the door and he sees the fucking flames and he runs out.”

Remarkably, Randy, Rachel and Aycock were the only fatalities. As the police sealed off the crash site the travelling party headed to the nearby Hilco Inn, incapable of absorbing what had happened. Rhoads’ death plunged Ozzy back into the state he’d been in after his sacking by Sabbath. “I thought that it was all over again,” he admits. “It was as if someone really didn’t want me doing this any more.”

His sombre state in the days after also led him to reflect on the impact Randy had had on him. “On that last journey he said to me, ‘I want to go to UCLA to get a degree in classical music.’ I said, All right, if that’s what you want to do. He said, ‘To be honest I don’t want to do the rock’n’roll thing.’ I said, Are you fucking joking? We’re just beginning to crack the ice! In a few years you can buy your own university. But that was Randy. It was all about the music for him.”

An inquest would later find that Aycock’s pilot’s licence had expired. He was also found to have cocaine in his blood stream. Randy’s blood contained nothing stronger than nicotine.

Randy’s funeral service was held at the First Lutheran Church in Burbank, California, on March 24, 1982 with Ozzy acting as a pallbearer. While the singer began to retreat into himself once again, Sharon adhered to the old adage that the show must go on. “Sharon took it really badly,” nods Ozzy. “She couldn’t look at a picture of Randy, or listen to the records or talk about him. But she said to me at the time, ‘Randy wouldn’t want you to stop now.’ That gave me a lot of strength.”

After a two-day audition in LA involving four guitarists, 30-year-old Gillan guitarist Bernie Tormé got the job. After a few days of rehearsals, Ozzy returned to the stage on April 1 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Tormé lasted eight shows before quitting on April 11, stating that “the emotional pressure” of the tour made it impossible for him to continue. Ozzy was fulsome in his praise of the guitarist’s attitude and remains so today. “To be honest, I owe him my life,” he says. “Although everything sounded like Purple Haze because he was Jimi Hendrix mad, he got me back on the bus. I don’t know if I could have done that without him.”

Tormé’s position had always been temporary, and a second guitarist, Brad Gillis of Night Ranger, had been travelling with the band, watching the show every night and learning the set. When Tormé left Gillis stepped into the breach, playing his first show at Broome County Arena, Binghamton, New York, on April 13, 1982.

A brief moment of respite came on July 4 when, en route to Japan, the Osbourne party stopped off in Maui and Ozzy and Sharon got married. Too incapacitated to enjoy his own stag night, the groom spent his wedding night sleeping in a hotel corridor.

Now that they were married, Sharon wasted no time in securing her husband’s future by buying him out of the restrictive contract which he’d signed with Jet and her father. As a contractual obligation, Ozzy delivered Talk Of The Devil, aka Speak Of The Devil, a live album of Sabbath covers recorded at The Ritz in New York that September 26 and 27.

“Randy had barely been buried and the label wanted to release these live tapes of him,” he smarts. “I refused. I told them I’d deliver a live album but it would have nothing to do with Randy. So I recorded two nights, a bunch of bullshit Sabbath covers. I don’t recognise that album. I wasn’t there for the mix. I just delivered the tapes and that was it. I don’t give a fuck about that album.”

Ozzy’s state of mind was reflected in his appearance – he shaved his head in protest. “Even though we stayed on the road, I just didn’t think I could do it any more,” he says. Yet somehow, he did.

 In effect, Talk Of The Devil marks the end of the first chapter of Ozzy’s solo career, providing the coda to the most turbulent period in his life. Since then he has continued to achieve phenomenal success but he is the first to admit that nothing quite measures up to his work with Randy Rhoads.

“I still think of Randy all the time. You can measure how good he was by the fact that we were together for such a short space of time but people still talk about him and listen to those records,” he says, reflecting on the success of Blizzard Of Ozz and Diary Of A Madman – global sales of which are now seven and five million respectively.

“When I look back, that period told me it was worth carrying on, that I could still do things,” concludes Ozzy. “It was an emotional rollercoaster ride and I’d hate to go back there. But it was also the best of times because, like Dylan said, when you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose. And he was right about that.”

This article originally appeared in MOJO 201.

Photo: Scott Weiner/MediaPunch/Alamy

Robyn Hitchcock - The Confuser

★★★★

TINY GHOST

“When I decompose I will be part of everything,” announces Robyn Hitchcock on I Am This Thing, marvelling at the fragile wonder of existence. Once desperate to be anything other than himself (hear The Soft Boys’ (I Want To Be An) Anglepoise Lamp for proof), Hitchcock seems increasingly comfortable on the physical plane as he enters his seventies, and if The Confuser’s Fab-Macca-goes-pub-rock thing will irk some, true believers will delight at its resolutely sunny take on death and decline.

Breathless dances on the edge of the abyss, The Vanishing Kind melds a homage to Bryan Ferry with thoughts of mortality, while Monday For Me is a Bob Dylan-esque reckoning with Hitchcock finding love and a sense of place in Nashville. Conclusion: life is precious, be glad while you still can.

The Confuser is out July 24 on Tiny Ghost.

ORDER: AMAZON | ROUGH TRADE | HMV

Track Listing:

I Am This Thing

My Dead Astronaut

Yesterday's Rain

Breathless

Ghost in Sunlight

Building from the Ruins

The Vanishing Kind

How to Feel Alright

Monday for Me

Wasted

“I hardly took any acid at all! I don’t think I need hallucinations. Sometimes I just feel I am one…”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our career-spanning interview with ex-Soft Boy, perma-outré songsmith and international treasure, Robyn Hitchcock. “I was never ging to be a sting-type figure,” he tells Victoria Segal. More info, and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are, HERE!

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Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now, R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck has explained why a full reunion with his former bandmates will never happen. R.E.M. officially called it a day it on September 21, 2011, having released their 15th, and final, album Collapse Into Now earlier that year. Despite the original lineup of the band – Buck, Michael Stipe, Mike Mills and drummer Bill Berry - appearing on stage together following their induction into the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 2024, and more recently, performing with actor Michael Shannon and guitarist Jason Narducy’s R.E.M. tribute act, Buck tells MOJO’s Keith Cameron why they won’t be following the likes of Oasis and get back together for a reunion tour…

• READ MORE: R.E.M.'s Best Albums Ranked

Peter Buck: “When we decided it was the end, I felt fine with it. That was the story – it had a beginning and an end. I was happy with the whole arc, and we were all young enough to go off and do other things, and we all have been. I’m really busy. We reached the end of that road. And it was a great road and I’m really proud to have done that with everybody, but it just seemed like a really good time to walk away. And unlike every other band in the world other than The Smiths, we’re not going to be doing the famous album reunion tour or any of that crap. It’s just not going to happen.

Everyone has their memories and they’re sacrosanct. We did those shows, we did those records, we performed to the best of our abilities, and now that story’s over. I think that’s pretty great. I don’t want to do a tour so we can make more money or be famous. That’s not why you do it. We were, ’til the very end of our career, focused on the new record, pushing it into the next place. Once that’s over, it’s gone.

I just don’t want to be the legacy act at Glastonbury playing our 40-year-old hits. It’s great that we did all that stuff when we did it, and I’m really proud of the performances. I don’t want to cheapen it by going out there just for ego and money. I don’t need the money, and my ego? Well, I’ve had enough applause to last 10 lifetimes.”

As told to Keith Cameron.

“I’m not trying to fool people into thinking I’m Michael Stipe…”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our interview with actor Michael Shannon and guitarist Jason Narducy about their ongoing live tribute to R.E.M.. “No one can sound like R.E.M.,” they tell Keith Cameron, “but we try to capture the spirit.” Also in the issue: Depeche Mode, 13th Floor Elevators, The Damned, Paul Simon's Graceland revisited, the return of Rush and more! More information and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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Picking a list of Bob Dylan's best songs is in many ways an impossible task. This being Dylan, an artist who five decades in is still producing some of his finest work, a list of just 60 tracks means that some of the greatest songs ever composed might not be present (whaddayamean there’s no Dear Landlord/I Want You/Mississippi?!?). But by handing the choices over to Dylan’s fellow musicians and songwriters we feel we’ve given a different perspective (another side of, if you will) on Dylan’s craft and enduring genius. And these aren’t just any musicians, either.

• READ MORE: Joan Baez On Bob Dylan: “I put his music on and any remaining resentment evaporated…”

Some of the names below played on and helped record many of the songs featured, while modern-day acolytes including Beck, Bono , Coldplay's Chris Martin and Lucinda Williams have lined up to pick their favourite Dylan numbers. The closest we have to the heirs to his crown, Nick Cave and Patti Smith, meanwhile, reveal a fresh perspective on his work, while Dylan’s one-time mentor Pete Seeger reveals the true story behind Dylan’s decision to go electric.

Elsewhere, East Coast rapper Nas recalls his teenage conversion to Bob, while contemporaries like the late David Crosby, Jimmy Webb and Paul McCartney (arguably the only serious challenger to Dylan’s status as the world’s greatest living songwriter) recall first-hand the seismic changes brought on by Dylan’s songs.

2023’s Shadow Kingdom showed that Dylan’s mercurial magic is as potent as ever, so no doubt we’ll be back here again soon with more revered artists waxing lyrical about their favourite song off his next masterpiece. Until then…

Bob Dylan's 60 greatest songs...

60.

Lonesome Day Blues

(Love And Theft, 2001)

As selected by The Waterboys’ Mike Scott

“If Dylan had recorded this in the mid ‘70s when I longed above all things for his return to electric rock’n’roll, I’d have been thrilled.  But good things come to them what waits.  I was just as thrilled when I heard it the day it came out in 2001, a teasingly mid-paced barnstormer with a killer blues riff both humorous and sombre that runs like a monolith through every line, and graced by the master’s wittiest, dryest lyrics since Blonde On Blonde. I’ve sung it live myself and it’s a supreme joy the way the lines want to tumble off the tongue, so well-constructed, full of rhythm, sass and cunning.”

59.

Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

(The Bootleg Series 1-3, 1991)

As selected by Badly Drawn Boy

“It’s Bob Dylan’s funniest song all about how he buys tickets to a picnic but ends up corralled into this ship, which sinks. He wakes up on the shore: ‘My arms and legs were broken, my feet were splintered, my head was cracked, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t talk, smell, feel, couldn’t see, didn’t know where I was. I was bald.’ He was bald!  Dylan’s great at going that one step further than anyone else. Like rhyming the same rhyme. – in The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll, when he rhymes ‘table’ with ‘table’ twice in a row!”

58.

Po’ Boy

(Love And Theft, 2001)

As selected by This Is The Kit’s Katie Stables

“Po’ Boy is one of my favourite songs to listen to with my family, everyone waiting for the next punchline and then loving it when he delivers. It’s always great to hear Bob Dylan letting himself have fun with lyrics and rhyming and wit. It’s what he does best. This song feels like an excellent exercise in storytelling, where you choose a word and then build the story up and around it to finish on the rhyme you want to get. The punchline. I of course have no idea how he really went about writing this song, but I really love imagining it. It feels quite cosmic. A stream of narrative consciousness and two-liner dad jokes. There’s such pleasure in the list-like nature of the way he rolls out all the anecdotes in the song. The line about Othello and the poison wine has become something of a family catchphrase in our household. It rolls along musically in such and easy going and amicable way that just goes so well with the irony of the lyrics. The twinkle in his eye. The ever-present twinkle in his excellent eye.”

57.

This Wheel’s On Fire

(The Basement Tapes, 1975)

As selected by Siouxsie Sioux

“I chose this for our covers album [1987’s Through The Looking Glass] because I thought Julie Driscoll had written it. I’d seen her perform it on Top Of Pops as a kid and I loved her Joan Of Arc look. Then I found out it was by fucking Bob Dylan! I liked the song, so it stayed anyway.”

56.

Sign On The Window

(New Morning, 1970)

As selected by Black Crowes’ Rich Robinson

“It’s just Bob on piano at first, then his band are trying to catch up. It comes off in such a great way. Lyrically there’s a lot of reflection on city life. He’s trying to figure out the world and ends up looking for he simple, things. “Build me a cabin in Utah / Marry me a wife, catch a rainbow trout’. That’s beautiful and concise, but it has meaning on a greater level. Musically, it’s textured to the point where it sounds like it had earth in it. I covered this song live when I did some solo touring and it made me thing that whatever artists you’re talking about it’s all about the subtleties. And Bob’s music is full of subtlety.”

55.

Song To Woody

(Bob Dylan, 1962)

As selected by Donovan

“I particularly like this song because I was so influenced by Woody Guthrie before I heard Bob’s first record. I was 16 and living rough on the road with my best friend Gypsy Dave. I went home for a bit and Gyp wrote to me and said he’d found a record of a new American folk singer who was doing what I was doing, singing Woody Guthrie songs and wearing a cap and a harmonica harness. I was already kind of committed to the mission before I heard Bob, but Song To Woody confirmed to me that I was not alone in wanting to bring true poetry and new, meaningful, social lyrics back to popular culture. Joan Baez introduced me to Bob. The famous scene in Don’t Look Back where we’re both playing our songs, you’ve got to look closely. There’s a drunk in the room who’s berating Bob about him stealing the tune for With God On Our Side from Dominic Behan. Then Bob turns to me and I sing To Sing For You. Notice he takes not one drag of his cigarette all the way through... he’s listening. Then I ask him to sing a song for me and he does [It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue]. What people miss is that he listens all the way through to my song, acknowledges that it’s good, but not with too many words. He was a bit curious and a little amazed that there was another Guthrie disciple arising out of Europe. But we were no threat to each other. When they used to say I was the British Bob Dylan, I used to quip, ‘No, I’m the Scottish Woody Guthrie.'”

• READ MORE: DA Pennebaker On Dont Look Back: “There was a story there, I could feel it in my bones…”

54.

Lily Rosemary And the Jack Of Hearts

(Blood On The Tracks, 1975)

As selected by Ronnie Wood

“I first heard this when I was making my first solo album [1974’s I’ve Got My Own Album To Do] and it strikes me now as it did then – strong mini-novel with twists and dark turns like something Ray Bradbury would have written. I love that it gathers momentum and the lyric makes you picture mysterious mining town incidents, bank robbers and hookers. Dylan’s very impressionistic as a painter as well as a songwriter, and fun to play with live. You never quite know where you are – which suits me fine! His band rocks and before going on stage, he always says to the MD, ‘Just give Woody the keys to the songs and once he’s on stage he stays ‘til we finish’. He gave me a cowboy hat, thrown on stage when we played Kilkenny, and he said to me, ‘Every time you play with me you get a free hat.’”

53.

Most Of The Time

(Oh Mercy, 1989)

As selected by David Gray

“I got into Dylan when I was 13, and I loved the early, simple stuff best. By the time of Oh Mercy in 1989, I’d stopped buying Dylan albums and I only got it on a friend’s recommendation but, as soon as I heard Everything Is Broken, I knew he was back. Most Of The Time is a beautifully simple song. You get this central idea that most of the time he’s on the case, stronger than all that bullshit he has to deal with, but then it becomes a love song and you get this sense of a man with deep sense of longing, thinking of someone he lost long ago. I’s not a pop song, but it’s getting that way. I talked to Daniel Lanois about making that album and he said Dylan spooked him, he felt Dylan was inhabiting him like some ghost.”

52.

With God On Our Side

(The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964)

As selected by Linton Kwesi Johnson

“It speaks of the wicked ness of the strong against the weak, of powerful nations and what they do – what the American settlers did to the Indians, the Spanish-American war, the American Civil War and First World War. It goes to the heart of how little we value human life, how we kill for power, for greed, and invoke the name of God while doing so. In a way the song explores a kind of helplessness in the face of evil. It’s the voice of the weak. He’s obviously faced with a conundrum at the end and that’s part of the song’s power, that paradox – ‘If God’s on our side / he’ll stop the next war’. You have to see. It against the backdrop of a world in turmoil – the proliferation of nuclear weapons, anti-colonial struggles going on in Africa and elsewhere, and the Cold War at its height – but the strength of the song is that it’s relevant and still speaks to the conflicts of our time. For me, that’s why Dylan is the greatest protest lyricist ever.”

51.

Simple Twist Of Fate

(Blood On The Tracks, 1975)

As selected by Neko Case

“There are some moments here – like where the guy is sitting on the park bench having these weird realisations – that you can actually feel them as he’s having them. The way he sings the lines – ‘She looked at him and he felt a spark tingle to his bones / ‘Twas then he felt alone and wished that he’d gone straight’ – it’s just devastating. There’s so many moments like that which are so painful, but they’re really honest and they’re said in a way that I don’t think anyone had said before… or since. I don’t think Dylan even knows where songs like that come from. A lot of his songs seem born of that spirit.”

50.

Pretty Saro

(Another Self Portrait: The Bootleg Series Vol. 10, 2013)

As selected by The Coral’s James Skelly

“It’s my favourite Dylan vocal. Anyone who says he can’t sing, listen to Pretty Saro. It’s like Percy Sledge crossed with Hank Williams. It’s got all the mystery that you want from Dylan, you can’t quite figure about what it’s about. Either the girl is from a higher social class or aspires to be, and he knows that he can never give her the security that she wants. And then at the end he says if I was the dream version of myself, the poet, I’d be eloquent enough to explain it to you, but the fact that he got close enough to touch the dream was enough and that’s what he’ll take away with him. I don’t know how much of the lyrics are his and how much are from the traditional version, but it’s got that romantic and mysterious thing from Dylan which is what I like, it means you get to project your own version onto it. Self Portrait was slated at the time, but it’s all part of it. Real greats can see 30, 40 years ahead. You throw this curveball, but then that’s what gets you to Blood On The Tracks or whatever. Sometimes you’ve got to write and you’ve got to move three moves to get to where you want to.”

49.

Only A Pawn In Their Game

(The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964)

As selected by Pete Seeger

“Back in 1963 I got together with Bob and Theodore Bikel for a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. A friend of mine was making a little documentary film there and the mayor told him, We never had a nigger problem here, it’s outside agitators cause the trouble. Well, we had a little song festival in a cotton field and Bob sang Only A Pawn In Their Game which he’d just written about Medgar Evers, the Mississippi Civil Rights activist who was murdered three weeks earlier. The song says just putting the murderers in jail wasn’t enough, it was about ending the whole game of segregation. It was the first song I heard that connected the position of the black field hands with that of the poor whites in the South: ‘He’s taught in his school /From the start by the rule /That the laws are with him /To protect his white skin /To keep up his hate /So he never thinks straight / ‘bout the shape that he’s in.

• READ MORE: Who Are The Other Musicians In A Complete Unknown And What Happened To Them?

"Generally, Bob wanted to make a record that would make people think. He was very curious and quick to learn. He told me he’d seen me singing when he was at university [University Of Minnesota, 1959-1960]. I remember that was a night when we were picketed by the American Legion - which got us a lot of free publicity. But I must have first met him in New York up in the Broadside magazine’s office [Dylan’s Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues appeared in the first edition, Feb, 1962]. I remember sitting there and Bob and Phil Ochs played their songs and I was thinking, I’m in the same room as two of the greatest songwriters in the world! Two weeks later I had Bob on at a Carnegie Hall Hootenanny and there were so many artists on I had to tell everyone they were limited to 10 minutes and he smiled and said, I’ve got one song that lasts 10 minutes’- and he did A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.

Bob got up and said: I don’t belong to anyone.

Pete Seeger

"I was always impressed by his independence. He wasn’t going to be any child of the lefties. One night someone introduced him saying, ‘He’s one of ours, and Bob got up and said, ‘I don’t belong to anyone.’ I realised he was a genius turning out one great song after another. Blowin’ In The Wind is still one of the greatest songs of the 20th century. I used to sing Masters Of War occasionally myself and Hard Rain. Bob had drawn lessons from Woody, he knew a good song tells a story or paints a picture and, like Woody, he could combine tragedy and humour. And he didn’t try to be too specific or too clear. I have a little skating rink in my yard and when John Wesley Harding came out I remember skating around listening to it over and over on the outdoor speakers thinking, What does this mean? A good song is like a basketball backboard, you bounce your life against it and you catch new ideas rebounding back at you.

"There are a lot of reports of me being against him going electric at the ‘65 Newport Folk festival, but that’s wrong. I was the MC that night. He was singing Maggie’s Farm and you couldn’t understand a single word because the mike was distorting his voice. I ran over to the mixing desk and said, Fix the sound, it’s terrible! The guy said, ‘No, that’s how they want it.’ And I did say, If I had an axe I’d cut the cable! But they didn’t understand me. I wanted to hear the words. I didn’t mind him going electric.”

48.

I’ll Be Here Staying Here With You

(Nashville Skyline, 1969)

As selected by Beck

“I didn’t get too deep into his music until I got into the Nashville records. Those are the ones that really got to me, because I was so into country music when I was younger and hearing those records for the first time... I always liked his kind of throwaway love songs. For somebody who’s a giant like him, who writes those great cinematic songs like Visions Of Johanna that draw you into a strange world, to just toss out a good little tune...that’s an aspect of Dylan I always really appreciated.”

• READ MORE: The Making Of Time Out Of Mind: "What do you think of this kid called Beck? I want to make a record the way he makes records."

47.

Jokerman

(Infidels, 1983)

As selected by legendary reggae drummer Sly Dunbar

“Bob Dylan always does songs in different keys, like he’ll change three, four different keys in a song, and he will change the lyrics on the fly, so when we cut Jokerman, we recorded it and then we had a break overnight. He came in the morning and said, ‘Oh, gentlemen, could you just run Jokerman for me again?’ Nobody knew the tape was spinning; we were just running down the music and he said, ‘OK, that’s it’ - it was the take we didn’t know we were taking that he used. It was a surprise; I think we were playing the run-down a bit looser, ‘cos it was just a run-through, but he probably liked something about it.”

46.

Changing Of The Guards

(Street-Legal, 1978)

As selected by Patti Smith

“I’ve always cherished this song. The first time I heard it was when I’d just moved to Detroit and was living in a hotel room with Fred [‘Sonic’ Smith]. I put on Bob’s new record, and Changing Of The Guards was the first song... it just moved me to tears. I would never presume to know what his songs are about, but it has such a mix of tarot card and Joan of Arc imagery. The song starts, ‘Sixteen years...,’ and Joan of Arc was 16 when they shaved her head and burned her at the stake. No matter how bitter or melancholy his songs are, there’s always so much resilience, a sense of him striking back. Like the line that goes, ‘Gentlemen, he said, I don’t need your organisation, I’ve shined your shoes.’... The downtrodden hero always manages to have the last word. I don’t really analyse his songs, but I’ve been following him since I was 16-years-old and I don’t question what he does. He can do what he wants as far as I’m concerned.”

45.

Lay Down Your Weary Tune

(Biograph, 1985)

As selected by The Byrds/The Flying Burrito Brothers’ Chris Hillman

“This has always, always been a favourite Dylan song of mine. The Byrds got an acetate because our manager Jim Dickson knew Bob. At the time I didn’t like it, but Roger, then known as Jim McGuinn and always an insightful guy, picked it to record on Turn! Turn! Turn!. Such a great opening verse, really a beautiful lyric all around. It is kinda like Dylan Thomas poetry, as if he wrote lyrics for popular music.”

44.

Million Dollar Bash

(The Basement Tapes, 1975)

As selected by Green On Red’s Chuck Prophet

“Whenever I hear that song, I always picture Dylan on the balcony of some high-rise Manhattan penthouse, kicking it with Marlon Brando and Lenny Bruce and a gaggle of long-legged socialites, taking it all in and just dreaming of fishing by a stream somewhere. Now here he is in Woodstock with his friends - look at The Basement Tapes cover: what a joker Bob is, how are you gonna play a mandolin with a bow? And they look like the kind of guys you’d want to invite over to your parents’ for a barbecue and a softball game. This was one of the times, I think, when Dylan knew he was going to have to take an interest in his own music, and seized the moment to just play with his friends. Perhaps he’s looking back on all those interchangeable people at the million dollar bash and nursing the motherlode of all hangovers - the ‘60s.”

43.

You’re A Big Girl Now

(Blood On The Tracks, 1975)

As selected by Richard Hell*

“Talking about Dylan is too complicated for just a few words. You can see why everybody writes books about him. It seems that anyone who likes him at all has a relationship with him, whether they admit it or not. He’s been that useful, meaningful and exasperating all your life long. No wonder he resents his fans. And this song is the one for me that’s the most revealing of his bewildering powers because it’s the one that has the greatest distance between its emotional impact and its actual words. How does he make those silly words so affecting? ‘Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast.’ Where is the poetry in that? The metaphor is obvious and the observation commonplace. But in the song it breaks your heart. I think maybe it’s something about both his openness and the way his mind skips around in his condition, somehow indicating the shape of everything, and I mean everything. It’s how the lines turn into each other. For instance, the whole beginning of that stanza goes, ‘Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast/Oh, but what a shame if all we’ve shared can’t last/I can change, I swear.’ No one line is much more than banal, but it’s how they follow from each other that makes that ‘I can change, I swear’ choke me up every time. Or is it his delivery? Or the melody? Or the weird way saying ‘You’re a big girl now’ is inherently sarcastic, when obviously what’s going on is he wants her more than anything? It’s all the currents, in something apparently so simple and ordinary. There’s no explaining it.”

42.

Isis

(Desire, 1976)

As selected by Johnny Marr

"I could choose almost anything off Desire, an amazing album with an atmosphere that was unique at the time; classic and offhand at the same time. My favourite track from it is Isis. Brilliant imagery as always and evidence of Bob Dylan as an ace vocalist. The live versions of Isis from this time are great too, as can be seen on the Rolling Thunder Revue documentary. Who writes songs like these ? So many tried but just couldn’t do it.”

• READ MORE: Bob Dylan’s Desire At 50: “It was a chaotic, crazy scene…”

41.

Talkin’ World War III Blues

(The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

As selected by Robert Plant

“‘Some time ago a crazy dream came to me /dreamt I was walkin’ into World War Three.’ I love where he goes - ‘And I drove 42nd Street in my Cadillac / Good car to drive after a war’. For a guy who wanted to be in The Teddy Bears with Phil Spector, he’s certainly moved some minds and mountains, hasn’t he? I’ve got his autobiography [Chronicles Vol.1], but I don’t want to read it. I read something about him being a piece of work who lied and danced with Mimi Farina a bit too often. I thought, I don’t need to know this; I just need to know A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

40.

I’ll Keep It With Mine

(Rare And Unreleased: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3, 1991)

As selected by Devendra Banhart

“To me, the folk scene immediately after Bob Dylan was a lot of Bob Dylan impersonators, impersonating someone who was already impersonating someone else. Then, immediately after that, Bob became Bob and did something so completely Bob that no-one could imitate him. I got The Witmark Demos bootleg from Currituck Co.’s Kevin Barker and I love the sound of that version [from June, 1964] too. It sounds like it was recorded on a Radio Shack hand-held tape recorder. They were recorded for Witmark Publishing, not for Dylan to release but for other people to listen to and hopefully record. I’ll Keep It With Mine was written for Nico and like all of Dylan’s tunes it’s perfect. To go with the song, Kevin, a musicologist extraordinaire, also showed me some footage of a party where The Byrds are doing keg stands and, over there in the corner, you can see Dylan and Nico making out.”

39.

Not Dark Yet

(Time Out Of Mind, 1997)

As selected by Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill*

“I first heard Not Dark Yet on holiday in Sri Lanka at Christmas. Somebody had the album and I just got obsessed with that track. In some respects, it’s not as brilliant lyrically as some earlier songs, but those have an air of pretentiousness to them. Like on Blonde On Blonde, you think, is that exactly what Dylan wanted to say? I don’t think he needs allusions to intellectual content to convince us he’s clever. But the lyrics to Not Dark Yet are really simple. It’s exactly what he is: an old man and he’s tired. It’s Dylan speaking authentically from where he is now, in this time of life, looking at what he’s been and seeing where he is at, and expressing it in terms which resonate with many people: ‘Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day / It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away’. I don’t think I’ve ever heard music quite as languorous. It feels very big-old-river, moving very slowly, like the Mississippi when it gets very close to the sea, edging along. It’s very Louisiana, hot and sweaty. It’s the most incredible atmosphere that you get drawn into. You absolutely sense that the sun is just beyond the horizon, it’s not quite dark, but it’s just going down and he’s sitting there, hot as fuck, and it’s the end of his life.”

38.

Knockin On Heaven’s Door

(Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, 1973)

As selected by Dylan’s then drummer Jim Keltner

“When we did Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, that was such a moment. We were in the dark, looking at a big screen with the film showing, and Bob’s playing this song, with these changes, and those words. My God! Then, the fact that Katy Jurado, the Mexican actress, she’s got these big ole eyes like my mom, and her husband is this white guy, this sheriff, and he’s dying at the edge of the river. And Bob’s singing... and, man, I just started crying. I’m playing, but I’m crying hard. And I’m thinking, Don’t blow it, don’t blow the take! A few years later, I did Short People with Randy Newman. And I was in the same situation, but I was laughing instead of crying. I was hearing Randy say these words that had me cracking up, and I’m thinking, Don’t ruin it, this is a good take!”

37.

Tombstone Blues

(Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

As selected by Teenage Fanclub’s Norman Blake

“It’s just relentless, as a six-minute torrent of surrealistic images. You can tell it was written at the height of Pop Art, with these incredible iconic characters: Galileo, Cecil B. DeMille, Beethoven all thrown together. And there’s a lot of humour in it – all that stuff about knitting a bald wig for Jack The Ripper. There’s a real punk quality to it too – Dylan had youthful energy pouring out of him and the band are missing cues. I was listening to it and it struck me how much Dylan influenced the early Velvet Underground. There’s a really similar sound and intensity.”

36.

Brownsville Girl

(Knocked Out Loaded, 1986)

As selected by Bono

“Brownsville Girl, I would suggest, is a song that altered songwriting. It’s a completely new kind of song and also has this spectacular line, because he can always make you burst out laughing: ‘If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now.’ Brownsville Girl is a beautiful rhapsody about this Hispanic woman with her teeth like pearls, and then, in the middle of the song he says, ‘She ain’t you, but she’s here and she’s got that dark rhythm in her soul.’ So this song is not really about the Brownsville Girl, but rather it’s addressed to this other woman who seems to be his muse. And his muse, of course, he refers to obliquely in Tangled Up In Blue, where he talks about the Italian poet whose every word came off the pages like burning coals. And at some point you realise that – of course!- this Italian poet is Dante. Every word that Dante wrote was for his muse, Beatrice, and there’s a Beatrice there in most Bob Dylan songs. Whether she’s real or imagined isn’t important to me, but it’s extraordinary. In your twenties you’re not so much interested in ideas like that: you’re more interested in The Times They Are A-Changin’. But Bob Dylan is there for you at every stage of your life.”

35.

Romance in Durango

(Desire, 1976)

As selected by John Cooper Clarke

“It’s a movie isn’t it? The mariachi accompaniment and even the way he pitches his voice, a bit like Alfonso Bedoya, the leader of the bandits in Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, conjures the Mexican desert - ‘Hot chilli peppers in the blistering sun’ - you’re straight there! The picture of him and that girl on the one horse makes me think of Marlon Brando and Pina Pellicer in One Eyed Jacks. I wonder if the whole Spanish milieu that he likes could be a device by which Dylan can leave the patrician world of North America with its Judeo-Protestant values and enter the more elemental Catholic-Latin world where he’s the impulsive doomed hero, in trouble by his own actions. He’s obviously shot her husband or something and although he’s made it across the desert he’s clearly about to die but he’s blinded by love and optimism, and shit frightened underneath it all and the present tense is shot through with both this beautiful regret and projections into the future. He’s dying not only of a fatal gunshot wound but with the mortal sin of murder on his soul, the face of God with his serpent eyes of obsidian. In Romance In Durango, like all the best westerns, the people are complex, but the morality of the Old World they inhabit is clearly defined.”

• READ MORE: Dylan Plays Letterman With Unknown Punk Band: “Bob told us to tell the cops we were playing with Waylon Jennings.”

34.

Blowin' In The Wind

(The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

As selected by Mavis Staples

“Blowin’ In The Wind was the first song I heard from Bobby. I fell in love with it because of the message. We could really relate to that, especially my father [Pops Staples]. Pops couldn’t understand how someone like Bobby could write such heavy songs as such a young man. He’d say, ‘Where did this little guy come from writing a message like that?’ But that song had an effect on a lot of people. When Sam Cooke heard Blowin’ In The Wind he said, ‘Now if a young white guy can write a song like that then I got to get my pen in hand.’ And that’s when he wrote A Change Is Gonna Come.”

33.

You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

(Blood On The Tracks, 1975)

As selected by Madeleine Peyroux

“Bob Dylan is someone I grew up with. I used to sing his songs when busking on the Metro in Paris and I always had a huge aspiration to record something of his one day. I chose You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome… because it’s a love song and Dylan’s love songs are special because there’s ofren a twist of bitterness. On this one he admits that things are not going to be perfect either now or any time. It’s amazing the way Dylan can take something very simple and turn it into something very important. I love the melody too. I think Dylan doesn’t often get enough credit for his melodic strength.”

32.

Stuck Inside The Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again

(Blonde On Blonde, 1966)

As selected by Frank Black

“There’s a lot of beauty in this song. I don’t know what it’s about, and I’ve never bothered to work it out, but even though it’s about being stuck somewhere with the blues, it’s a triumphant song, with a really powerful chord progression. So when you’ve got that going for you, with the killer lyrics and the band going for it, it’s defiant blues, very exhilarating. At the moment, I’m so in love with the drummer: Kenny Buttrey. Sometimes get choked up, literally, just listening to the drummer, the way he does a little snare roll, or something. I know it sounds silly, but I love that song and how it pulls me in, but once I’m in there I always focus on the drummer. It’s a song with so much soul, but the more I listen, I always go back to those killer drums.”

31.

Man In The Long Black Coat

(Oh Mercy, 1989)

As selected by Oh Mercy/Time Out Of Mind producer Daniel Lanois

“We spent a lot of time getting the ambience right, recording the neighbourhood crickets - the genuine sound of the New Orleans night. It’s a song that was directly inspired by the environment and mood of the city. Bob came to the recording of Oh Mercy with a number of songs fully written but Man In The Long Black Coat was composed entirely in the studio. It was a hot steamy time down there - and that’s exactly how the song sounds. On Oh Mercy Bob is generally standing inside the songs, but on this one he’s standing outside, observing. It’s a fascinating subject for a song, the idea that someone might escape the confines of the ordinary world by a sudden impulsive act. It’s a song about a turning point, one moment that might change a life forever- like running away to join the circus.”

30.

She Belongs To Me

(Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

As selected by The Beach Boys’ Bruce Johnston

“I heard about Dylan from Jack Nitzsche’s wife Grazia who made me listen to Freewheelin’. It wasn’t his voice, which was difficult to get comfortable with, it was his songs. What we were hearing on the radio at that time was great, highly-polished pop, like Goffin-King kind of songs, but Dylan was 180 degrees in the other direction. Then, when I heard She Belongs To Me, I was struck by the fact that it has such a natural groove. To me, a natural groove record would be something like Little Richard, R&B stuff, but here’s this Greenwich Village folkie, who has turned the lyric-writing thought process upside down, and suddenly he’s making songs with a natural groove. You could finger-pop to this track. Dylan’s melodies can be difficult to digest sometimes, because he’s not a singer who writes, he’s a writer who sings, but this is a great tne. Carl Wilson and I really loved Belong To Me. I remember in the Hilton Hawaiian Village hotel when we were playing Hawaii, and we had a record player in our suite and just played it and over and over.”

29.

Girl From The North Country

(The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

As selected by The Blue Nile’s Paul Buchanan

“I must have heard it at a time when I dressed like he does on the cover of the Freewheelin’ album. I wanted my life to be like that cover. There is something of the same romance about the song; a straightforward enough reminiscence of a lost love, without any cynicism or defeatism. I like the mentions of the girl’s hair and coat and, I guess, the third person thing works nicely because it’s all kept so simple and defenceless.”

28.

I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)

(Another Side Of Bob Dylan, 1964)

As selected by The Lovin' Spoonful's John Sebastian

“I’d already had my world as a songwriter completely rearranged by Masters Of War and Chimes Of Freedom. But with I Don’t Believe You, Dylan established an unprecedented relationship between man and woman in song. Before Bob, things had been pretty benign, often one-dimensional, between the sexes. It was absolute love or utter heartbreak. What little shading there was usually came from the woman’s point of view, laying out the case against her man. Dylan turned the tables in this sense, offering romantic critiques of women, and he did it with a degree of emotional awareness and insight. He made it more real, and opened up vast new territories for songs to explore.”

• READ MORE: Bob Dylan In The '60s: Every Album Ranked

27.

All Along The Watchtower

(John Wesley Harding, 1967)

As selected by Terry Callier*

"To write songs about things that are close or painful, you have to be at a level where you can say something about it that everybody will be able to identify with. You can’t always take your most personal experiences and do that, but Bob Dylan was good at it. As a matter of fact, he was the one that showed us that your personal ruminations and experiences, if put in a vibrant enough context, were valuable. Because people hadn’t been doing that before: people had been saying ‘Yes, I love you, you love me, we will be together, 1, 2, 3.’ But you start talking about: There must be some kind of way out of here, said the joker to the thief... Well! Now we’re getting down! We’re talking about neuroses, psychoses, and other ‘oses! He showed us that if you put these things in the right context, in the right emotional patterns and the right combinations of words, this is as valuable as anything else on this earth.”

26.

Every Grain Of Sand

(Shot Of Love, 1981)

As selected by Sheryl Crowe

Every Grain Of Sand was the first religious song I’d heard which transcended all religions. It asks the universal questions that lead all people into exploring God, eternity, mortality. I first heard it when Shot Of Love came out and I loved it right away, but then I sang it at Johnny Cash’s funeral so it has a special meaning for me. It was my choise, but his family wrote to me to tell me how important that song was to Johnny. It’s always been interesting to me to think of Dylan’s Christian phase. I’d done the born-again thing when I was 17. There was a youth movement I got wound up in until it started to really bug me that some of my friends were going to heaven and some weren’t. I became what they call a backslider pretty quick. The music on every Grain of Sand ebbs back and fourth – it’s almost a waltz – but the song’s great strength is the text: ‘Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer’ – it’s almost Dickensian. I’ve called him on a couple of occasion to talk about songwriting and he’s been amazing. It’s like playing tennis with someone who’s better than you, it brings your game up.”

25.

To Ramona

(Another Side Of Bob Dylan, 1964)

As selected by Lucinda Williams

“The first time I heard Bob Dylan - it was 1965, and a young poet, a student of my dad’s, came over to the house with a Dylan record - it changed my life. Here was someone who had taken both of the worlds I was from - the traditional folk music world and the creative writing world - and put them together and made it work. From that moment on, I decided I wanted to write songs like that. I’m still working at it. To Ramona is just a love song, not one of those intensely heavy, metaphorical songs, but it’s the ultimate love song. And there’s just something about it – the rhyming, the imagery, everything is wonderful. That was Dylan at his inimitable, quintessential best, right there. Awesome and beautiful."

24.

Buckets Of Rain

(Blood On The Tracks, 1975)

As selected by Coldplay's Chris Martin

“It was the moment I fell in love with Bob Dylan’s music. I was on a tour bus leaving Reading Festival, the first time we played it in 1999, and I woke up suddenly with that song playing in my ears. And I was suddenly there. Completely in it. Dylan keeps on writing, keeps on playing, because ultimately, that’s all there is… That’s the truth. That’s what you are. Doing this is not a ladder to anything else, if you love it. Often I’m asked, 'What are you going to do next, what else do you have going on?' I have friends who do a lot of things, and sometimes I think to myself, 'Oh man, should I, like, open a… hat shop as well?' But I need to write music, and sometimes I feel like a loser ’cos that’s all I want to do. But you know, there’s no Bob Dylan hat shop…"

23.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

(The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

As selected by Tom Paxton

“[In Greenwich Village] me and Bob were friendly but I don’t think anyone’s close to Bob. One night I went to the Gaslight and he pulled paper out of the typewriter and gave me five typed pages and asked what I thought. I said, ‘This is fabulous – it’s like you have written [Anglo-Scottish ballad] Lord Randall for 1962’ and he had. He asked what he should do with it and I said, ‘Put a tune to it.’ Two nights later he got up at the Gaslight at one in the morning and sang it for the first time – A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall. It was clear where he was heading.”

• READ MORE: Bob Dylan’s First Ever Recording: “Rock’n’roll made you oblivious to the fear…

22.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

(The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964)

As selected by Nas

“I first heard The Times They Are A-Changin’ in a movie called The Wanderers, which I saw when I was about 14-years-old. The song came at a very important point of the movie, where the characters had been running the streets forever, and had gotten old. It had come full circle with their lives, so they had to make a change. The verse that blew me away was: ‘Come senators, congressmen/Please heed the call/Don’t stand in the doorway/Don’t block up the hall/For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled.” The words he’s saying are words of awakening, but when you add that to the conviction in his voice, you can hear that this is a man fighting to get the truth out. To make a record like that, you have to genuinely have it in your heart to not just love your music and your cause, but to be a part of it, and that’s what he does. You can’t fake that record.”

21.

Visions Of Johanna

(Blonde On Blonde, 1966)

As selected by Steve Harley*

“This sparkles with that dreadful mystery that’s Dylan’s own. Hearing it for the first time has never left my mind. Suddenly I wasn’t a 15-year-old listening to music anymore: I was hearing poetry. ‘Lights flicker from the opposite loft/in this room the heat pipes just cough/The country music station plays soft.’ And there’s a pay-off line with Dylan. He says: ‘But there’s nothing, really noting to turn off.’ You listen and think, What the fuck was that? All the time, this young man of 24 was thinking of a lost love. Maybe apocryphal, maybe genuine - but he’s a poet and he has licence to create. Every pay-off at the end of every verse just says there’s nothing here. Nothing exists. It’s all fantasy. Am I awake? Am I asleep? All I’ve got is visions of Johanna, which keep me up past dawn. The man can’t sleep! He’s lovesick. But is he really? Or is this poetry? This isn’t Wordsworth or Keats. Dylan is beyond them.”

20.

Ballad Of A Thin Man

(Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

As selected by Al Stewart

“You walk into the room/With your pencil in your hand/You see somebody naked/And you say Who is that man?/You try so hard/But you just don’t understand/Just what you’ll say/When you get home...” I haven’t played it in years but I can still remember the words. At the time, all us London hipsters assumed it was about the Melody Makers’ Max Jones. It’s an unspoken rule that the trade-off for fame and fortune in the music business is that you have to be able to accept criticism, but not every artist subscribes to that, and Dylan obviously didn’t. With Positively 4th Street around the same time, it was clear Dylan was pissed off about a lot of things- and he was writing like a maniac. Musically it’s beautiful. I love the skinny sound of the record - it suits the title. When I saw Dylan the Albert Hall in 1966 he played it, and I think it was the only song that he played on piano. There’s this old-fashioned barrelhouse feel, which works really well with the words. And when the organ comes in on top... that’s wonderful.”

19.

Idiot Wind

(Blood On The Tracks, 1975)

As selected by Blood On The Tracks engineer Glenn Berger

“Dylan was recording Idiot Wind and I thought this is so powerful. When has Dylan ever been this raw? The amount of rage coming out of him was so powerful. And when you hear something being cut in the studio where it’s directly from his mouth into that beautiful microphone and coming out of those huge speakers – you never hear it like that again. The power was overwhelming. And he gets to the end of the song and waits a few seconds and then turns to us in the control room and sarcastically says: ‘Was that since-e-e-re enough?’” Maybe it had been so powerful for him emotionally that he had to take away some of that intensity.”

18.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

(Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

As selected by The Doors’ Robby Krieger

“Bringing It All Back Home just might be my favourite album of all time. I discovered him whilst at private school as a teenager. A lot of people hated it when he went electric, but I liked it. I saw him at Long Beach with his electric band whilst on acid, and I really dug it. I know he must’ve been on acid when he wrote Subterranean Homesick Blues.”

17.

Masters Of War

(The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963)

As selected by Loudon Wainwright III

“Writing protest songs is difficult because they often have a very limited life-span. But when Dylan sings ‘you can hide behind walls, you can hide behind desks, I just want you to know, I can se through your masks’, you instantly think of The White House and Downing Street today. He attacks the biggest targets going, and there’s nothing polite about it. It’s a young man’s rage - outrage really - not Where Have All The Flowers Gone? There’s no choruses, and the guitar playing is unrelenting. His guitar playing swings and rocks really hard. The writing itself is great. He’ll take a word like ‘word’ which from the perspective of someone who writes songs is a very hard word to rhyme, but he rhymes it with ‘hurled’, and that’s a way around the problem, and its not just a way around the problem, but is a great couplet too. I remember seeing him for the first time at the Newport Folk festival at about the time this song came out. He was just this young guy stood on stage with a guitar, but he had balls, and any young person will admire someone who has balls. Let’s hope so anyway.”

16.

I Threw It All Away

(Nashville Skyline, 1969)

As selected by Nick Cave

“This is my favourite Dylan song. The production is so clean, fluid and uncluttered, and there is an ease and innocence to Dylan’s voice in its phrasing, in its tone that is in no Dylan recording before or after. There is a perfectly measured emotional pull to the singing. This is a guy doing the job God put him on Earth to do, and doing it well. This song is about craft; Dylan removes himself, the burden of his history, his myth, from the process of songwriting to craft a song unparalleled in its gorgeousness. It’s mathematics, music by numbers, and all the more affecting for it. It’s Mozart man up against the wracked Beethoven of his other work. Nashville Skyline was an audacious record, lyrically and musically, flying in the face of those who thought it was Dylan’s moral duty to be the drum major of his generation. I can put this song on first thing in the morning or the middle of a dark night and it will make me feel better, make me want to carry on. The song serves the listener as it should and that’s its genius.”

15.

Tangled Up In Blue

(More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol.14, 2018)

As selected by Gaz Coombes

“I have to say, I prefer the demo versions that are out there to the one on Blood On The Tracks. They’re quite slow, down-beat versions of the song and that’s what I love about them. They’re just acoustic guitar, bass and vocals, and they’re just beautiful. They Sound more emotional, more contemplative whereas the version on Blood On The Tracks is quite bouncy. He changed a lot of the lyrics after this version. The demos are written in the third person, like he’s telling a story about someone else, then when you hear it on Blood On the Tracks he uses ‘I’, which makes you wonder whether it was actually about him all along.”

14.

Love Sick

(Time Out Of Mind, 1997)

As selected by Marianne Faithfu*

“I heard Time Out Of Mind pretty much as soon as it came out; I’m a ‘rush out and buy Bob’ kind of person. I love the whole record, but Love Sick is my favourite. Beautiful. Everything. The words, the melody, the passion in the singing. I loved it immediately. For the longest time I thought it was called I’m Sick Of Love, because that’s what he sings. But being love sick and being sick of love are two entirely different things. And yet obviously the same to an old romantic like Mr D. And that is such a brilliant writer’s thing to do. Love is hard for all of us but it’s very, very hard for an artist. He talks about being tired and hearing the clock tick - this is someone with lots to do, lots of work, he’s got no time for anything and on top of that there’s this love, and he can’t do a thing about it. The lyrics are actually very straightforward. Someone else singing it might make them sound sappy, but the way Dylan sings - very intense and strong and not at all detached - it’s a statement, and a great one, about love.”

13.

Highway 61 Revisited

(Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

As selected by Gang Of Four’s Jon King

“When I was 11, at Sevenoaks school, the A level boys in the art classes were allowed to play whatever music they liked, which was Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde. We didn’t have a record player at home, and I’d never heard anything like it. It led me to being absolutely focused on art and music. What got me was the sound of his voice: suddenly you had someone who put songs together that played with words-I wasn’t sure what he was saying, but I knew he was being brilliantly sarcastic and clever, and sneering at the people who were boring, and I loved it. Highway 61 Revisited itself was just so funny. Highway 61 bisects the American North and South, and represents an escape, particularly from where Dylan lived, the tedium of living a constrained, pre-defined life. But in that context, I saw so much. Like the way he plays with the story, and the whole issue of race. And how he was embracing rock’n’roll, when he was being accused of being a Judas - what was that all about? It was almost segregationism in the folk scene. With my Gang Of Four lyrics, I’d always try and make something internally contradictory, constructing narratives out of words that seem to be logically inconsistent, which is what Dylan so cleverly did. He wasn’t trying to be obvious, which is easy. He was being complicated without being necessarily vague. There was this sense that you were involved in a cultural conversation. Dylan created the conversations to beat all conversations.”

12.

Just Like A Woman

(Blonde On Blonde, 1966)

As selected by Jimmy Webb

“This was when I understood how deep Dylan’s well really was. It wasn’t a folk song, it wasn’t protest, it was just a great love song, which of course had an immediate impact on me. I had just dropped out of college to commit to what I hoped would be the life of a songwriter. I was very much in love with a girl who was inspiring a lot of the music I was writing, and this song seemed to cut right to the heart of what I was feeling emotionally at the time. All these years later I still marvel at what an absolutely stunning piece of writing it is. What a fortuitous nexus of rhyme and purpose is the chorus: She takes just like a woman/She makes love just like a woman /Then she aches just like a woman / But she breaks just like a little girl.’ As songwriters we live for the moment when words to fall together like that, as if they’ve been waiting for just that arrangement. The way everything leads toward that last line is masterful. That would be enough for most writers, but the third verse reveals Dylan’s strategy to be much larger. When he says ‘Please don’t let on that you knew me when /l was hungry and it was your wold,’ he steps on-camera and addresses this person directly to deliver one final twist. There’s a lifetime of listening in these details and layered subtleties. Any serious student of songwriting will find a complete education in this one composition.”

11.

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

(The Times They Are A-Changin’, 1964)

As selected by Bill Fay*

“Just before I started writing, in 1964, I started playing the guitar to myself by practising The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll.I heard it purely by chance up in Bangor as a student, we played him all the time, listening to early Dylan before he’s really filtered into the mainstream. He was so powerful melodically. His voice was amazingly mature for such a young man but with tracks like like Hattie Carroll he was trying to say something with lovely tunes and a great vocal sound. Before the protest they were actual songs that you could get lost in. Take away Dylan’s persona and they still stood out. Over the years I’ve come to realise that his music is about access. Hattie Carroll? It’s five chords. Even in 1964 I knew four of them. When you first start out, you can play Dylan. His songs are about the people and for the people so it makes sense that they’re accessible, that they’re easy to play. Even a more recent track like Mississippi [from 2001’s Love And Theft] you can climb inside. There are gems scattered throughout.”

10.

Murder Most Foul

(Rough And Rowdy Ways, 2020)

As selected by Villagers’ Conor O’Brien

“It’s almost like a sister song to songs like It’s Alright Ma and Desolation Row, those patchwork quilt songs where it’s about trying to find meaning in a fragmented world. For me he’s continuing that journey that he started so long ago and he gets better and better at it the older he gets. He’s clearly someone who is very moved by things, despite his exterior, and it kind of feels like a prayer - it’s redemptive. Like with his best songs, it’s about how we all share these scars. I feel like the assassination of JFK in this is more like a symbol, a shared trauma, in a way he could have chosen any collective shared trauma. I like the way he takes about the things that loomed large in his own life in terms of pop culture and mixes it with the politics. Right after the assassination he goes straight into Bealtemania. It’s the thing that Dylan does so well, where high art and low are all one thing. He might reference Greek mythology right after The Beatles – he’s saying it’s all part of the same thing, the human spirit transcending this crazy fragmented world we live in.”

9.

Mr. Tambourine Man

(Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

As selected by Paul McCartney

“I know it’s corny, but I heard him do it at the Albert Hall [May 9, 1965], and I was aching for him to do it and knowing Dylan I thought he might not do it. Just to be awkward, just to be perverse. It was the infamous show where all the folkies thought he’d sold out. How crap is that? It was fantastic. First half is folky, and then the second half was electric with The Band - it was the all-time concert. But then of course, somebody starts going, 'He’s deserted the folk world!' Yeah, no wonder, look at you mate. So he did it there, the first time I’d ever heard it live. A really good song, very much of the period. Totally nailed that year. I was lucky to be there.”

8.

It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

(Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

As selected by David Crosby*

“When I first heard Dylan in New York didn’t like his singing. I thought, Why doesn’t everybody like me more? But then I went to see him perform and I got it... his songs! They were so good and there was one after another after another. Asking for a favourite is like asking a parent, Hey, which is your favourite child? Bob Dylan a good three dozen flat-out sterling pieces of material that we can safely refer to as classics. But when I first heard It’s Alright, Ma it really was such a knockout. ‘Darkness at the break of noon /Shadows even the silver spoon’- hey, that’s the apocalypse coming, nothing less.”

7.

It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

(Bringing It All Back Home, 1965)

As selected by Richard Thompson

“Sounds like it’s curtains for Baby Blue, which has led some to speculate that this is an updating of the story of Mary, Queen Of Scots; Bob may have heard ‘Mary Queen Of Scots’ Lament’ on his visit to England in the winter of 1962, or perhaps he’s just a history buff. She was fond of blue stockings – indeed, she was wearing sky-blue hose with an inter-woven silver thread when she was beheaded in 1587. The orphan (or soon to be) ‘crying like a fire in the sun’ might be her son, and the ‘empty-handed painter’ her secretary-lover David Rizzio, also a fine musician, and composer of outstanding ballad tunes. One might also speculate about the presence of the Earl of Bothwell and her husband, Lord Darnley. The action, we imagine, is shifted to Greenwich Village, and is beautifully and skilfully updated and made immediate by imagery and street language. A great song by someone who knows the tradition, innovates in it, and builds on it.”

6.

It Ain’t Me Babe

(Another Side Of Bob Dylan, 1964)

As selected by Dylan sideman Charlie Sexton.

“In the past when I’ve seen Dylan do a show or when I played with him, at times it seems as if there was a circle of light surrounding him regardless of what the lights in the show are doing. Everything just goes away and you just sit there, taking in everything he says. Certain songs really bring out that kind of focus and this is one of those songs. I played it a lot when I was out with him, and while some songs would go through changes and various arrangements, this one changed very little. Except there was always something new from Bob vocally, in phrasing, phrasing that could dazzle Miles Davis... But all in all, It Ain’t Me, Babe stayed pretty much the same, and I was always happy to listen. Often when it was played there would be the same reaction from some of the fans, a sort of celebration - which is interesting when you listen to the words. It’s shadow and light.”

5.

Blind Willie McTell

(Rare And Unreleased The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, 1991)

As selected by Martin Carthy

“It blows this massive hole through the romantic notion of the South. It’s about corruptibility. And it has an amazing emotional impact, which counts for everything. When he sang Hard Rain in The Troubadour in London in 1962 the audience was fucking thunderstruck. They’d never heard anything like that in their lives. To take a songwriting idea like you find in Nottamun Town -a ‘song of life’ in the folk lingo - and to develop it like he did in Hard Rain was absolutely awe inspiring. I was absolutely stunned. And Blind Wille McTell had the same effect on me. It’s everything a song should be. It’s concise, it’s eloquent and it also happens to be a beautiful piece of music. I love the position of the narrator in the song - sitting in a New Orleans hotel room contemplating the whole history of the south, the murder amid the magnolias, but not with anger for a change. It’s a... rumination. A great word for a great song.”

4.

Desolation Row

(Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

As selected by Roy Harper

“Desolation Row, I thought when I first got hold of the record, That’s exactly where we’re at. It contained all the elements of where we’d felt civilisation had been for years. But it wasn’t delivered with the overt sense of humour of his more accessible earlier songs. Times had changed for Dylan. He was no longer the carefree young vibe thief of the freewheelin’ age. He was now expected by everyone under 20 to become the next messiah, just as he was becoming more human. There were rumours of hard drugs and self-examination. Like a lot of us, he was on the verge of floundering. There were no easy solutions anymore. The more I thought about it, the more Desolation Row appeared as a collection of impressions thrown at a page. It was riveting, it was desperate. I could very readily identify with that. It called the world to account, but it wasn’t bold, the humour was almost hidden. The song was a delineation. Like a final notice of departure. We all know the characters the song describes. The Millais painting of the drowned Ophelia lingers in my mind, dead in the head at 22, living vicariously, peeping into Desolation Row for moments of delicious embarrassment, only to resume her role in some Salvation Army equivalent. Robin Hood, Cinderella, Bette Davis etc, they’re all there along with a million inferences about the humdrum of seedy human life, usually set at mid-night and beyond, while daytime insurance men check that no one escapes to Desolation Row. And then there’s the last verse written by someone on the outside. A token note from someone who’s no longer part of the scene, who misses the freedom, but who perhaps couldn’t handle the hand-to-mouth abandonment, or perhaps the grime. We never get to find out. And it doesn’t matter. It never did and it never will.”

3.

Sad Eyed Lady Of the Lowlands

(Blonde On Blonde, 1966)

As selected by Robert Wyatt

“One of the things I like about jazz is that jazz goes on and on and on. This song has got that kind of momentum. It builds and grows, builds and grows, and it’s a simple structure. Another thing that’s so great about it is the band playing on it, Al Kooper’s on Hammond, and they roll along beautifully. I read somewhere that he didn’t tell them how long the song was going to be, so they keep thinking they’re coming to the ending, surging towards an end, which is brilliant, Miles Davis-like in its wickedness. And then he’ll drone away another verse! So they’re playing as if they keep building towards the climax, all the time! I suppose it’s like very clever sex, really.”

2.

Positively 4th Street

(Greatest Hits Vol.1, 1967)

As selected by Love guitarist Johnny Echols

“It deals with the duplicity of human beings and the nebulous nature of friendship. It’s an incredibly important thing to cling on to in life, if you can. I knew that even back in 1965 when this came out. I immediately connected with Dylan’s take on humanity and the nature of hypocrisy. He spoke to me. It’s a very New York song but it made perfect sense out on the West Coast. After Dylan went over big you could feel the style of music changing everywhere. Previously, songs sort of went from C to A minor to F to G in a prescribed patter but with Bob coming from folk music, the songs started to follow wherever the vocal melody went. That had a huge effect on everybody.”

1.

Like A Rolling Stone

(Highway 61 Revisited, 1965)

Al Kooper on how he hustled his way into the making of Dylan’s cryptic fairy tale and all-time greatest song.

“I began my professional music career as a member of The Royal Teens in 1959, becoming a professional songwriter shortly thereafter and teaming up with lyricists Bob Brass & Irwin Levine. By 1965 I’d befriended producer Tom Wilson at Columbia Records at 799 7th Avenue in New York City. Tom was riding high as the producer of Bob Dylan, of whom I was a big fan. After a while, the others that worked on his floor got used to me coming and going whether Tom was there or not. Occasionally I’d “borrow” unreleased acetates of Dylan’s albums in progress and take them home overnight and make a tape copy for my own enjoyment. Tom would also invite me on occasion to the New York Giants football team’s Sunday games, where he had excellent seats. I was about 21-years-old but I knew when to speak and when not to.

Then one day, out of the freakin’ blue, Tom invites me to an afternoon Dylan session. It’s Wednesday June 16 and they’ve already done a day’s work on a handful of songs – one they’ve been calling Phantom Engineer but will turn into It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry; another they’ve started and have all of today to get right. I’m carefully instructed to sit in the control room and be as invisible as possible.

The session is to begin at 2pm. So I get there at 12.30pm with my electric guitar and amp and begin to warm up like I truly belong there. After about ten minutes, Dylan comes blasting in the door along with a guitarist who has his guitar on his shoulder like a rifle. Only it’s raining outside and the caseless guitar is as wet as can be.

The guitarist is Mike Bloomfield. I’ve read about him in Sing Out! magazine – he is in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, whatever that is. The other musicians are mostly a crew of dependable guys that do this for a living: among them, drummer Bobby Gregg, pianist Paul Griffin and bassist Joe Macho Jr. The only one I know by sight is Griffin. I had hired him a few times for songwriting demos. An excellent player and a really nice guy.

Bloomfield comes over to where I’m sitting with my guitar and says hello – he wipes the rain off his guitar with a rag and plugs into a Fender amp and starts warming up. This shocks me as I have never heard someone my age play with the skill and tone he has. I quickly put my guitar in its case, slide it under a bench, and get my ass into the control room where I actually belong (and just in time as Tom Wilson enters five minutes later).

The band begins to rehearse the song Dylan wants to start off with. Wilson begins getting sounds on each instrument. Paul Griffin is playing organ and Dylan is playing an electric Fender Stratocaster! This blows my mind - acoustic Bob goes electric! The song is over six minutes long and Bloomfield is instantly mesmerizing. After three takes Wilson moves Paul Griffin from organ to piano.

Tom says, 'You know that guy’s not an organ player, right?' Bob says, 'I don’t care – just turn it up in the mix!'

Al Cooper

While they are moving the piano around and miking it. Everyone takes a break. I go out to the studio and sit at the organ which is fortunately still plugged in and turned on. It’s very complicated to turn an organ on and I haven’t acquired that knowledge yet. The piano is tuned. Wilson starts over the talkback: 'This is Like A Rolling Stone Take 4.' He pauses and sees me behind the organ. 'What are you doing out there?' he says and the other musicians laugh and, thank God, so does Wilson. He appears to relent and says, 'OK, this is Take 4.'

After the intro, I wait until everyone else plays a chord and then I come in. Pretty quickly I memorize the chords - there’s only five! - and then I begin to play parts. This is the first complete take of the session, so they play back all six minutes of it. Now I go in the booth and sit at the end of a bench. After the first chorus Bob says to Tom Wilson, 'Make the organ louder.' Tom says, 'You know that guy’s not an organ player, right?' Bob says, 'I don’t care – just turn it up in the mix!'

And that my friends, was the beginning of my soon-to-be real career.”

*Speaking to MOJO in 2004

Picture: Getty

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Echo & The Bunnymen have spoken exclusively to MOJO about their new album, Apples For Isaac. Back in late 2021, Mersey vocal eminence Ian McCulloch told the Irish Newsthat a new Echo & The Bunnymen album was nearly finished. In December 2022, readers online were told that the group’s first all-new collection since 2014’s Meteorites would be released in 2023. Come late 2024 there was still no record, but guitarist Will Sergeant did reveal that he’d played on as-yet unreleased music by veteran Liverpool scenester Courtney Love.

• READ MORE: Echo And The Bunnymen Live Review: McCulloch and Sergeant still produce the magic – and mercurialness – of old

“What kept us?” says singer Ian McCulloch. “I think Covid had something to do with it. But also I just wanted, lyrically, for everything to make sense - or to be cryptically important. Which is a hell of a sentence.”

Lyrical importance is assured on the album’s lead song Brussels Is Haunted. “That started years ago,” says Mac. “It was a magical place, the first place the band played abroad in 1980. We got invited over by the hip set of Brussels. A friend of ours, Bert Bertrand, he’s in the opening line. He used to follow us around, him and Annik Honoré. He ended up committing suicide in New York. That still haunts me, and obviously Annik Honoré and the Ian Curtis thing… there’s a sense of, like, total beauty, an ancient kind of sadness, and impending doom, maybe… and Brussels as the centre of European politics. All of this stuff is packed into that one song, and it’s weird the way it all tied together.”

The new album was begun soon after 2018’s re-recordings set The Stars, The Oceans & The Moon. Mac recalls working in Liverpool’s Parr Street Studios, which closed in 2020, but adds that the real work happened post Covid, mainly at residential setup The Doghouse Studio outside Henley. “It’s a wooden hut with some beds in,” says Mac. “Fantastic!” Regular collaborator Andrea White was engineer and assistant producer. McCulloch says that Sergeant – who has declared himself “sidelined” from the songwriting process for some years - plays sounds that are “really good and maybe more brittle than for a while, like (1983’s) Porcupine. Very Bunnymen – there’s nothing where you’d go, who the fuck’s this?” He notes that Erica Nockalls provided strings, and that extra vibes came courtesy of playing Transformer and Hunky Dory.

That’s probably the best lyric I’ve ever written, or anyone’s ever written.

Ian McCulloch

“More than any other record I can remember, it’s actually sounding how I heard it in my head. I’ve just gone, sing it how you want to hear it,” says Mac. “I think it’s maybe one of the most complete Bunnymen things. We’re the most relevant, most glorious and noble of bands on the planet!”

Other songs include closer We Prayed In The Dark (“This is no Shangri La, no paradise or Eden,” intones Mac, “This is where tarot cards show Jesus Christ the heathen”) and The Unstoppable Force (“One of these days, I know I’ll lose the will for the thrill of the chase”). “That’s probably the best lyric I’ve ever written, or anyone’s ever written,” Mac affirms. “A catchy pop song with layers, that’s what I always like to do. That sometimes takes time. It’s been a real labour of love. Mountains are there to be climbed. I’m halfway up and I’m scared of ice, so I’m not going down…”

Sade Adu was a stylist when she met London Latin ensemble Pride. Soon after she was a fronting a new, streamlined group playing soul, jazz and sophisticated pop. After Sade’s classic Diamond Life hit in the second half of 1984, West End clubland and squats with frozen pipes made way for international success. Four decades on from their moment-defining debut’s release, players and friends recall the moment of fusion. “It was all positivity and action stations,” they say, though “Sade took the full brunt of the fame...”

Robert Elms (journalist): Sade had studied fashion design at St Martins and was working with Spandau Ballet when (in 1981) my mate Lee Barrett asked her if she could sing. She said yes, ‘How hard can it be?’ Lee was managing the group Pride and he wanted her to sing backing vocals and bring some glamour, because she had the look already. She joined and at some point they shrunk down to Sade, Stuart Matthewman (guitar, sax) and Paul Denman (bass), and they brought in Andrew Hale (keyboards) and they became Sade.

Simon Booth (Working Week guitarist): I had seen Pride perform. They had a Latin feel and Sade was singing lead on a couple of tracks. Her father was Nigerian, her mother English, and she had grown up in Essex and had star quality. She was also incredibly nice and down to earth. I had been working with the producer Robin Millar on the first Working Week single, Venceremos (We Will Win). Stuart played on it and I mentioned the group to Robin.

Robin Millar (producer): The day after we did it, Lee Barrett called. He had two tracks, Your Love Is King and Hang On To Your Love. They were good. Sade’s voice, even with just a mike in a rehearsal room, had that tone that you knew, if people heard it, it would affect them. But there was no structure really, her singing was like riffing. It was almost like hip hop over a repetitive funk groove, a solid bass and drums with keys and sax playing around it.

RE: Sade was a soul girl. The first song I heard her sing in the shower was Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You. But she also knew about Fela Kuti before anyone else, and she knew about jazz. She also knew exactly what she wanted her records to sound like, look like, how they should be presented.

Andrew Hale (keyboards): We bonded over US soul and jazz music but coming out of that time period of new romantic and post-punk, there was still this idea of the punk DIY aesthetic, and that was really important because we weren’t virtuosos. We were young, curious and played to our limitations. We didn’t try to emulate our heroes, we couldn’t have even if we’d tried. There’s a homemade feel to what we were doing.

RM: I was nuts about classic soul arrangements, the horns and the strings and the percussion and the vocals. I had a meeting in the studio with Sade, Stuart, Paul and Andrew and I thought I was Quincy Jones. They had a singles deal with RCA but had never been in a recording studio and I said, ‘Here’s what we do.’

Martin Ditcham (percussion): The vibe in the studio was very creative but also very relaxed. They were incredibly tight, all working together, all listening to one another.

RM: There was no money so we worked on the demos for a week in downtime, and we started working on Smooth Operator and another song they had in their live set, Your Love Is King. By the end of it we had six songs.

AH: We were new to the studio environment, but Robin and Mike Pela, the engineer, were very good at guiding us. Basically we believed in the music we were making and it was exciting to translate that on to tape in the best way we could.

RM: When we finished we played the songs to the 20 or so people in the studio. Everyone was beaming, nodding their heads. Then Lee took it to RCA, and remember this is 1983, you’ve got Depeche Mode and Duran Duran, and they were like, ‘Where are the drum machines and the synths? Why has it got sax on it?’ Lee then took it round all the other labels and they all rejected it.

RE: I was working at The Face and I put Sade on the (April, 1984) cover of the magazine. It worked but it wouldn’t have worked if they weren’t good.

RM: Robert said, ‘Have you got enough songs for a gig?’ Well we had six songs, so Sade and Lee secured a gig at Heaven (on February 27, 1984) and Robert got the word out to all his mates and pop journalists, and suddenly it was the hot gig of the week.

Gary Crowley (Capital radio presenter): There was a real buzz and queues outside. She had this amazing poise and cool about her and carried herself like a film star. The band were serious, there was a real mood to it, a sense of drama and you knew these songs, Your Love Is King, Smooth Operator, their cover of Timmy Thomas’ Why Can’t We Live Together, were the business. She reminded me of George Michael, this new breed of pop star.

RM: She was suddenly being hailed as the new Aretha. The deals came flooding in. I said, ‘Don’t take the deal with the most money but the deal that offers you the most support artistically.’ They went with CBS on that basis.

PB: We did the album. We did 15 tracks and nine went on the album. It was an organic process, putting the guitar, drums, keys down together live first then solos and overdubs. Sade was learning on the job, some of the songs had only just been written and she was rewriting and rewriting and there was a lot of, ‘Let’s try this.’

SA: We didn’t go in for lots of effects and gimmicks. It’s more honest that way. And we can write proper songs, really simple songs.

RM: She had a strategic wisdom. She listened to the tracks and she said, ‘We have built something with a mood here,’ which then made it easier to whittle down the tracks. We got rid of a dance track called Spirit and a Sam Cooke number called Mr. Wrong which she said was too jolly. (A&R) Muff Winwood knew once Sade did videos and the public saw her she’d be a superstar. Sade worked really hard on the presentation, met with the promotion and press teams, she spent hours on getting everything just right. We all knew it was going to be a hit.

AH: Straight after recording we’d go to The Wag (Wardour St club). Just being there, it fed into the experience and sound of the record.

Pete Brown (studio assistant): Sade was very hip, she was a girl about town, and I was 17 - what 17-year-old wouldn’t go out when asked? We’d get a cab from Willesden to the West End, go to the Wag club, we’d have a few beers to say the least. But it never distracted from the work. When we mixed the album, they’d be four of us, we’d be on the desk with little notepads and marks on the faders. Robin would listen back and then we’d make more changes. Lots of meticulous work went into getting that super clean sound.

RE: Your Love Is King was the first single [in January 1984]. Sade and I were squatting in a disused fire station for the whole time this had been going on, and it was freezing. We only had one two bar electric fire to keep us warm and the bath was in the kitchen. The day she went to do Your Love Is King on Top Of The Pops, the toilet had frozen over. CBS sent a big black limousine to pick her up and by the time she came home that night, everything had changed. They had made it.

AH: We were super nervous and super excited. It was a big deal. We’d all watched it growing up, we all remembered seeing Bowie doing Starman.

PB: Your Love Is King was a hit [Number 6, March ‘84] then they put out When Am I Gonna Make A Living? [in May].

SA: I can remember in the Pride days walking from Turnpike Lane tube. It was pouring and I was soaking wet… I got my pen out and started to write When Am I Gonna Make A Living on a soggy envelope. I got halfway through and the pen stopped working.

MD: The album came out in July and hit Number 2. We did the Diamond Life tour. It was all positivity and action stations. We’d rehearsed on Holloway Road and were really tight. When we did the Montreux Festival we missed the flight and had to get a helicopter, and arrived just as we were due to go on stage. It was one of the best shows we did at that time. We did Paris, this really old theatre. We soundchecked then Sade went to iron her blouse and the fuses blew and we were in darkness. There was also the Hammersmith Odeon which they broadcast on Radio 1 [In Concert]. That was a good one. But they all were.

Dan Beck (US product manager): Breaking Sade in the States took time. English R&B and soul acts were not credible. We decided on Hold On To Your Love for the first single, and we aimed at the Urban chart. The thinking was that once it was a hit on Urban, we’d go to Adult Contemporary, then the Top 40. Sade were not happy at first. They thought it was a racial slight - Why weren’t we going straight to the Top 40? But if we hadn’t done it that way they might have had a pop hit but they wouldn’t have had the momentum for a second. They needed that credibility first. Then (in February 1986, second LP) Promise hit Number 1 on the US Billboard chart. She was soul royalty, and she made it on her own terms.

SA: My priority isn’t to carry on getting richer. It’s to carry on getting better. That’s the enjoyment. Writing new songs, performing…

RE: You’ve got to remember she was having huge success but the press were putting her through the ringer [there were untrue rumours of drug addiction and a nervous breakdown]. At some point she just said, ‘I’m not doing any more interviews.’ And she didn’t need to.

AH: Sade took the full brunt of the fame and attention and recognition. Us three guys could still jump on a bus and no one would recognise us, so we were just enjoying the moment. We didn’t have to deal with the downside.

RM: Diamond Life started Sade’s journey. It’s a one-of-a-kind record. It captured the time it was made in but in another sense it could have been made at any time. It launched her career, and is one of the best soul albums to ever come out of the UK.

AH: There was a period where we were seen as an eighties band in the UK, but during the last five years we’ve seen a new generation discovering Diamond Life through TikTok, which has been lovely to see.

DB: When I first met Sade, I thought, ‘this is an artist who could have a hit album at any age.’ I often liken her to (singer and Civil Rights activist) Lena Horne. She has a dignity that defies trends.

This article originally appeared in MOJO 372.

Sade quotes: Bill Holdship [Pulse!, December 1992]; Lesley White [The Face, April 1984]; Peter Martin [Smash Hits, May 23, 1984]; Number One, Oct 26, 1985. Simon Booth was speaking in 2012. Thanks to Jim Irvin.

Yard Act - You’re Gonna Need A Little Music

★★★★

ISLAND

The sleeve of Yard Act’s new LP shows a pedestrian about to be flattened by a falling piano, and a sense of impending doom – or an imminent backlash – hangs over these songs. “Do you feel like an impostor for every new level you ascend to, too?” asks James Smith on opener Empty Pledges.

But if it’s a record that grapples à la Pulp’s This Is Hardcore with the downside of success, You’re Gonna Need A Little Music is further testament to Smith’s lending library smarts and the band’s Happy Mondays-via-Franz Ferdinand knack for indie-disco bangers, with Over The Barrel and mournful Streets shuffle Janey Said worthy additions to the canon. “I could kill your mood with all this wisdom,” Smith reflects on the elegantly crumpled Talky Talky People, but Yard Act wear their learning wisely. The Yeah Yeah Noh of their age, and that’s a compliment.

You’re Gonna Need A Little Music is out July 17 on Island.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

Track listing:

Empty Pledges
New Beginnings
Tall Tales
Fiction
You're Gonna Need A Little Music
Cherophobe Rock
Thrill Of The Chase
Janey Said
Redeemer
Talky Talky People
Over The Barrel

Get the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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Street hustler, heartbreaker – Johnny Thunders remains an icon wherever rock’n’roll is revered, but he was never a bigger star than he was in London, for 18 months at the acme of punk.  On what would have been Thunders' 74th birthday, friends and bandmates sift the man and his music from the junkie mythos, and mourn his fate anew. “You always got the feeling that Johnny was hurtling towards something,” hears Andrew Perry...

No-one ever looked more like a rock star than Johnny Thunders. Dressed like a hooker in stack heels, with hair teased into something indescribable, he first manifested before British eyes on November 26  1973, as lead guitarist in Big Apple glam-rockers The New York Dolls on BBC TV’s The Old Grey Whistle Test. Presenter ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris called them ‘mock-rock’, but a younger generation were transfixed.

“We’d seen the Dolls at Wembley, when they supported the Faces [in November ’72],” remembers future Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook. “They were so throbbing and relentless. Steve Jones [the Pistols guitarist] was in awe of Thunders.”

But under the make-up, the scowl and the violence with which he attacked his six strings, lurked a character of complexities impenetrable to all but those who knew him best. “Johnny could be a monster,” says lifelong friend and collaborator Patti Palladin, “but he was a sweetheart underneath all that.”

Born John Anthony Genzale Jr on July 15, 1952, Thunders was raised by his mother and sister in the Italian-American heartland of Queens. Palladin, a Brooklynite who’s rarely spoken about Thunders since his untimely passing in 1991, first encountered him in the crowd at the Fillmore East, watching Jimi Hendrix. “Johnny’s mother used to say, ‘If he was a girl, he’d be you,” she recalls, her dark eyes affectionately twinkling, “‘and if you were a boy, you’d be him.’”

At 18, Genzale joined a bedroom band called Actress, which duly morphed into The New York Dolls. His musical role model was obvious and also ominous: Keith Richards.

• READ MORE: David Johansen: “We inspired a lot of people. Not just musically, but to get involved and have fun with it…”

“You always got the feeling that Johnny was hurtling towards something which wasn’t gonna end with him being able to do music,” says Peter Perrett, formerly of The Only Ones, who befriended him in London in the late ’70s. “He didn’t seem to take care about his personal wellbeing, and maybe that was part of the appeal. But there were other, deeper sides to Johnny – his love and knowledge of rock’n’roll, his sweeter nature – that nobody ever really saw or understood.”

After The Dolls imploded on tour in Florida in summer 1975, Thunders and drummer Jerry Nolan formed The Heartbreakers, initially as a trio with bassist Richard Hell, who arrived from a fractious stint in Television with status as the emerging NYC punk scene’s poster boy, and – crucially, for Thunders and Nolan – a heroin habit.

Thunders himself had reputedly been turned onto the drug by Iggy Pop circa July ’73, after Thunders started a full-time relationship with LA groupie Sabel Starr, while Iggy was dating Starr’s sister Corel. Junkie lore would soon enshroud the Heartbreakers – but in the short term, his band made headway at Warholian NYC hipster dive Max’s Kansas City after poaching second guitarist Walter Lure from debutants The Demons.

“They needed another guitar player,” explains Lure, “because at that point Johnny could only carry it if he wasn’t singing.” When the headstrong Hell quit to pursue his own band, the Voidoids, Thunders’ combo recruited mild-mannered Billy Rath, who, says Lure, was “a speed freak at that point, but he steadily became a junkie like the rest of us.” He adds: “Back then, it was cool to be one. People didn’t think you were slobbering or collapsing onstage. Everyone was taking drugs.”

By Autumn ’76, unable to land a record deal in New York, the newly rechristened Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers had plateaued. Their unlikely saviour: Malcolm McLaren, the English fashion entrepreneur whose first dabble in music had been to guide the Dolls through their second, terminal phase. McLaren’s new charges the Sex Pistols were about to unleash Anarchy In The UK, and he was calling to invite the Heartbreakers onto the Pistols’ first British tour.

“We had no idea that the Pistols looked up to Johnny so much,” recalls Lure. “When we arrived, Malcolm took us out to a restaurant, and [the Pistols] were all kind of in the corner, not saying anything, and we later found it was because they were in awe – they were afraid to sound like idiots.”

A couple of hours later, the Pistols were whisked off to Thames TV Studios for a last-minute appearance on The Bill Grundy Show.

“Next day,” says Lure, in a still-disbelieving Queens brogue, “we wake up and read the papers – ‘What the fuck is all this? Somebody’s cursed on television, and the whole country’s in an uproar? People are kicking their TV’s in?’”

The Anarchy tour’s faltering progress from that moment on has been amply documented, but for Thunders and co it was doubly mind-warping. “We were turning up in Derby and Worcester, not able to play,” says Cook, “and The Heartbreakers were all withdrawing from heroin, feeling shit. They’d be sitting up all night, acting strange, drinking loads of cough medicine, going, ‘Urgh, I can’t sleep!’”

At the few gigs that took place, Steve Jones, The Clash’s Mick Jones and The Damned’s Brian James watched open-mouthed side-of-stage as Thunders summoned a sound from his Les Paul Junior and Fender Twin that was both primitive and volatile, lyrical and inimitable. Come the final cancelled show in Paignton, on 23 December, Thunders and co, in Lure’s words, suddenly found themselves to be “in the aristocracy of punk bands in the UK”. So, instead of flying off to resume a fruitless struggle back home, they decided to remain in London, with a view to hustling for a British record deal.

On December 25, they joined their touring companions round at Melody Maker writer Caroline Coon’s house for Christmas turkey, and, on January 11, played the fourth show at UK punk’s first dedicated nitespot, the Roxy in Covent Garden. While the four Heartbreakers returned to New York to collect their possessions, their manager Leee Black Childers brokered a deal with Track Records, home of The Who in the ’60s. Thunders – a Pete Townshend-style powerhouse guitar hero for the punk era – was finally on course for stardom.

In a sticky-floored private dining room on London’s Abbey Road, the mercurial spirit of Johnny Thunders seems to waft through the air, as Patti Palladin and Peter Perrett share their reminiscences.

“Johnny was above the whole punk movement,” says Perrett, who first met Thunders at the second Only Ones gig at the Speakeasy in March ’77. “He was someone who had charisma in any setting, but it gave him an audience. One time, he was on the phone to someone back in New York, and he was going, ‘You gotta come over here – they think we’re professional!’”

“Johnny and Jerry were completely bemused by the whole scene,” adds Palladin, who’d moved to London in ’74. “There they were in their ’50s threads – Mr Fuckin’ Suave – and there’s all these kids running around in binliners.”

Newly signed to Track, and installed first in a tiny shared flat in Pimlico, then in a more palatial affair in Oakley Street, Chelsea, the Heartbreakers were living hand to mouth, and pulling together material for a debut album. Eventually dubbed L.A.M.F., it would boast the fast and furious Born To Lose, I Wanna Be Loved and Pirate Love, plus Chinese Rocks, a solid-gold anthem donated by Dee Dee Ramone, but internal divisions were already starting appear when Nolan – on some level, a stabilizing, elder-brother figure in Thunders’ life – got himself onto a methadone programme and moved into a girlfriend’s place out in Harrow.

“Jerry used to lose his temper with Johnny quite a lot,” says Perrett. “One time in Pimlico, Johnny asked me if The Only Ones would support the Heartbreakers. He goes next door to talk to Jerry and Jerry goes, ‘But you promised the Banshees they could do it.’ Then you heard shouting, and things being thrown and smashed. It was very much a love-hate relationship.”

The band’s album should ideally have been punched out quickly, tight and bright, but sessions dragged on through summer ’77 at several studios across town, with a producer, ‘Speedy’ Keen, formerly of The Who's protégés Thunderclap Newman. With time running out to make its October release date, there were post-production issues with L.A.M.F. which would diminish its potency. Nolan fumed at the muddy mix and initial pressing of 5000 albums.

It soon transpired that Track’s motives in signing the Heartbreakers had been somewhat shady: in order to continue to receive royalties on The Who’s back catalogue, its bosses Chris Stamp and Kit Lambert had had to prove it was still a functioning label. When they lost a court case to secure those monies, they simply liquidated the company, with huge debts, casting L.A.M.F. and its creators to the void.

“Johnny joked about it all,” says Perrett, no stranger to hard drugs himself. “He told me he was gonna change their name to The Junkies. They’d been on Track Records, and the publishing was now gonna be Hepatitis Publishing. Maybe it was just his funny way of flagging up that it was about to fall apart.”

Before the year was out, The Heartbreakers were no more.

“Johnny was above the whole punk movement. He was someone who had charisma in any setting.”

Peter Perrett

On January 14 1978, The Sex Pistols replicated the Heartbreakers’ demise, flaming out in comparable disarray on the opposite side of the Atlantic. With The Damned also no longer operational, Thunders was still handily placed, if he could just get his act together.

He was an icon of the new order, right up there with Iggy. His reverb-overloaded guitar style – which Nolan once evocatively described as “like dinosaurs screaming in the forest” – was referenced by every wretched punk band on earth. Still, the foul-mouthed street-tough façade he saved for the stage. In private, he was very different. “He was that kind of vulnerable, lovely guy,” says Paul Cook, “who attracted people to come and look after him. There’d always be a lady around to take him in, and mother him.”

Indeed, on a fleeting trip back to Queens, he’d married his long-standing girlfriend, Julie Jourden. Says Perrett, “Part of him craved a stability, which he knew he could never adhere to.” Their relationship was fractious: Jourden, says Lure, was “a hard-ass, and they were always having these knock-down-drag-outs, where the police got called.”

When she duly came over to London with her two sons, John Jr and Vito, the latter fathered by Thunders, they moved into a flat above a sauna in D’Arblay Street, in the heart of sleazy Soho. Thus perilously ensconced, Thunders had his next move mapped out.

Recalls Perrett, “Johnny always used to say to me, ‘Chuck out [lead guitarist] John Perry, and let me join The Only Ones. He’d say it half-jokingly, and I’d sort of laugh it off. I think he was looking for someone to bounce off – a Jagger-Richards type thing. Then when the Heartbreakers split up, he asked me to get a band together for him, to start doing gigs.”

For the first night of a residency at the Speakeasy in February ’78, Perrett drafted in The Only Ones’ rhythm section – bassist Alan Mair and drummer Mike Kellie – and Palladin came in on vocals. Billed as The Living Dead, this loosely-arranged revue went on for some weeks, playing songs, old, new and borrowed, with line-ups featuring such admirers as the Pistols’ Cook and Jones, and Steve Nicol and Paul Gray from Eddie & The Hot Rods.

Thunders revelled in this freedom, until one cringeworthy evening when his most wayward apostle turned up, begging to share a stage. Sid Vicious had bought hook, line and sinker into Thunders’ lifestyle and look. When New York groupie Nancy Spungen arrived in London in an ongoing quest to bed Jerry Nolan, Vicious famously embraced her – and her drug habits – with open arms. His fanaticism and choice of girlfriend were embarrassing enough, but to a guitarist for whom ‘chops’ were all-important in pulling off an ultra-cool stage act, Sid, newly freed of his duties in The Sex Pistols, belonged back in the moshpit whence he came.

“Sid was a nice guy, just a kid really,” smiles Palladin, “but he was in no way a musician. He came down to soundcheck, and he was going, ‘Oh, can I play now?’ and Johnny was turning to me, going, ‘What the fuck am I gonna do?’”

“I felt sorry for him,” says Perrett. “I persuaded Johnny to let him play, on condition that the roadies disconnected his amp from the speakers, so no actual sound came out.

“When we came on to do our set, Johnny had convinced Nancy to introduce us, topless. Sid was like a kid, upset that his girlfriend was up there being loud and topless, but for the first two or three songs, Sid was really jumping around enthusiastically. During the third song, he must’ve noticed there was nothing coming out. I was amazed it took him that long.”

Remembering those nights in early ’78, all concerned go a little misty-eyed. “They were magical because it was all so loose and spontaneous,” says Palladin, “which was very Johnny.” At one of the later shows, Dave Hill, young boss of Warners affiliated Real Records, who’d just signed Palladin’s emigrée pal Chrissie Hynde’s band, The Pretenders, approached Thunders with a view to replicating the Living Dead format on a star-studded solo album.

Perrett’s wife Xena brokered a deal for “a few thousand quid”. Again, Thunders entrusted Perrett with assembling the ensuing sessions, either side of an Only Ones tour supporting Television, with help from debutant producer Steve Lillywhite.

As well as firing off favourite covers from the Speakeasy, such as a Palladin-enhanced take on The Shangri Las’ Give Him A Great Big Kiss, Thunders unveiled some more sophisticated material he’d been working on, including You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory – a song destined to be acknowledged one of the best of any rock’n’roll era.

“For him,” states Palladin, “…Memory was about capturing more than the typical frontline rhetoric of youth. It defaults instead to his background, the whole Italian family thing, which came with a lot of compassion, pain and pathos in his case.”

Another anti-anthem, So Alone, found him in Perrett’s words, “almost pleading to be given a life that’s worth living”. At Island’s in-house studio in Chiswick, the track elicited an impassioned if somewhat unsteady performance from its author, who keeled over into Mike Kellie’s drum kit in the closing seconds, thus rendering the take unusable.

When Perrett disappeared on tour, Lillywhite corralled sessions with Cook and Jones. These yielded London Boys – Thunders’ swingeing riposte to the Pistols’ New York – but the Perrett-Kellie and Jones-Cook camps only came together for one late-night romp through Otis Blackwell’s Daddy Rollin’ Stone, where they were joined by Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott, a Speakeasy regular, and Steve Marriott, the erstwhile Small Faces frontman, with whom Thunders had first collided at a party during one of the Dolls’ early-’70s UK visits.

In July ’78, the rolling sessions had to wind up, as Thunders’ residence permit was up. Again, there was a rush to finish the album for October release, with a star-studded show booked to coincide at London’s Lyceum, and while the album was now titled So Alone, there apparently wasn’t time for the track it was named after to be fixed.

“My phone rings and it’s Johnny. He’s like, ‘You’ll never believe this – Sid killed Nancy.’”

Patti Palladin

Come October 12, the Johnny Thunders All Stars convened at the Lyceum, with bonus attractions like The Pretenders’ James Honeyman-Scott on keyboards, but without two of its biggest names. “Steve and I went to rehearsals,” says Paul Cook, “and Johnny was in a bad way, nodding out. It was starting to get pretty dark, and we’d had enough – neither of us was into drugs at that point. Malcolm was onto us, going, ‘You’ve gotta get away from him’.”

Unpredictable as ever, Thunders played a blinder, but there was a sense of the audience chafing at his more sensitive material. “It just didn’t fit with what people had come to expect of him,” shrugs Perrett, “and it must’ve felt to him like he was stuck with a punk audience.”

There was much, much worse to come.

“When I get home from the show,” says Palladin, “my phone rings and it’s Johnny. I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’ He’s like, ‘I just spoke to someone in New York, and you’ll never believe this – Sid killed Nancy at the Chelsea.’”

Punk’s days of innocence were over.

“His attitude became, ‘If you’re really paying this money, happy to see me play fucked up, hoping this is gonna be the gig where I actually die onstage, then fuck you!’”

Patti Palladin

As our three-hour conversation with Perrett and Palladin winds up, Pedro Mercedes, boss of Thunders’ reissue label Remarquable Records, arrives with artwork proofs for a forthcoming re-release of So Alone, including unused shots from the original album cover session. It transpires that, back in ’78, Johnny’s label chose to depict him as slit-eyed, wasted and backed into a corner, when they had some lovely close-ups of him looking bright-eyed and cheeky. Obviously, late-’70s marketing wisdom dictated that there was nothing to be gained by presenting Thunders at his best – it was the half-dead junkie that the public wanted.

“Drugs are like the evil grandmother hanging over Johnny’s legacy”, observes Walter Lure, who in the ’80s left-turned into a career on Wall Street and duly beat addiction. However, the fact remains that, in his lifetime, Thunders was totally unabashed about broadcasting his narcotic predilections.

“I sort of admired his brashness, in being so open about it,” argues Perrett, “but I also thought it was foolish, because it attracted a certain ghoulish interest, rather than people appreciating the art for what it was.”

After his frantic 18 months in London, Thunders’ initial plan was to relocate to New Orleans, and, says Palladin, “basically to play with a bunch of brilliant old blues musicians. In his head, he was hearing a horn section.” But none of that came to pass, as, for the next 13 years, he meandered between Detroit, Paris, Sweden and beyond, playing with pick-up bands, with the reformed Heartbreakers, with Wayne Kramer in the still-born Gang War, or sometimes, to secure a full cut of the door money, solo on acoustic guitar.

Says Palladin, “His attitude became, ‘If you’re really paying this money, happy to see me play fucked up, hoping this is gonna be the gig where I actually die onstage, then fuck you!’”

On April 22, 1991, a 38-year-old Thunders finally made it to a hotel in New Orleans’ French Quarter. “But he didn’t find what he was searching for,” says Palladin, “because within 24 hours he was dead.”

A somewhat inconclusive autopsy showed that he hadn’t died from an overdose, but was suffering from an advanced stage of lymphatic leukemia. It neglected to mention that his passport, guitar and suitcase, plus $20,000 in cash, had been taken from the room, raising an officially unacknowledged suspicion of murder.

Outside on Abbey Road, an early-evening darkness has descended, as Perrett, Palladin and Mercedes pile into MOJO’s VW Polo in order to hear a CD of unreleased out-takes from the So Alone sessions, including an alternate Give Him A Great Big Kiss, imminently to be released as a picture disc, and a newly discovered full version of the title track. When the CD ends, the car feels suddenly drained of an explosive presence, and both Perrett and Palladin gaze out at the passing streets in silence.

Palladin breaks it, finally. “I really miss him so much – it’s *so annoying…”

5 RUMBLES OF THUNDERS

MOJO's Andrew Perry picks some of Johnny's greats:

Subway Train

(on: New York Dolls, 1973)

The pick of his Dolls-era co-writes. David Johansen’s lyrics of romantic misery on Manhattan’s subway give Thunders carte blanche to blast off arguably the most electrifying railroad rock’n’roll guitar ever, its reverb hum and squealing notes mimicking the train hurtling down the tracks.

Pirate Love

(on: L.A.M.F., 1977)

This swaggering monster typifies how Thunders essentially vamped up ’50s rock’n’roll for the punk era. Initially, it’s like super-charged Chuck Berry – you could even duck-walk to it – but the final 75 seconds showcase the kind of pulse-racing, tempo-changing excitement that only Thunders could summon.

Chinese Rocks

(on: L.A.M.F., 1977)

Dee Dee Ramone bet Richard Hell he could write a junkie anthem to rival Lou Reed’s Heroin, and ultimately gifted this resultant classic to The Heartbreakers. Thunders made it his own with squalling amp noise and vocal howls that fully evoke an addict’s trauma.

You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory

(on: So Alone, 1978)

Drummer Jerry Nolan reputedly nixed Thunders’ more nuanced songs from the Heartbreakers’ set, but this one, reputedly written pre-Dolls, was his masterpiece – an effortlessly graceful tear-jerker about two outcasts who can’t live without each other. Cover artists include Ronnie Spector and Guns N’ Roses.

So Alone

(on: So Alone expanded reissue, 2017)

Themes of solitude and emptiness in Thunders’ writing – not to mention, his addictions – have often been attributed to his father’s absenteeism. This desolate number funereally reveals his inability to get truly close to a romantic partner, with an honesty that’s, well, heart-breaking.

This article originally appeared in MOJO 289.

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Behind their intense music and austere image, Joy Division remain a dark riddle wrapped inside the enigma of Ian Curtis and his tragic early death. MOJO's Pat Gilbert unravels the story of a frontman increasingly torn apart by love, epilepsy and duty, and the powerful effect of his harrowing illness on the group’s second album Closer, completed just days before Curtis’s tragic suicide in 1980 on the eve of a much anticipated first US tour...

• READ MORE: Peter Hook: “I would rather die than play with them three.”

On October 1979, Joy Division climbed into Steve Morris’s Olympic blue Ford Cortina and headed off on their first major UK tour. For the next six weeks they would be supporting the Buzzcocks at 2,500-seater venues across the country. Befitting a group on a small Manchester independent label, money was tight. Up north, they drove home after the gigs, feasting on the backstage booty of butties and crisps.

The damp autumn weather and lack of luxuries resulted in numerous muttered complaints. Yet, despite their austere public image, life on the road with Joy Division was never dull. In fact, it was pure Spinal Tap, with perhaps a dash of Coronation Street.

“We were like kids in a sweetshop,” grins Steve Morris. “They gave you a free crate of pale ale! It was our first encounter with The Rider.”

There were lots of hi-jinks. In Cardiff, the hotel bar shut at 2am, so the roadies prised off the metal grilles and handed out free beer, the night ending in a huge drunken cushion fight between main act and support. In Guildford, Joy Division surpassed themselves by removing the strip-lights from the gents’ toilets and smearing the taps and light switches with excrement.

During a mid-tour break, the group played a one-night stand at an arts complex in Brussels. After the gig – a significant landmark in the story for darker reasons – Ian Curtis got drunk and pissed into a free-standing metal ashtray.

The group were, by some accounts, a randy bunch. “There was suddenly this fantastic copping potential,” explains Morris. “I was somewhat young and naïve in that respect. It was like, ‘Steve, can I borrow the keys to the car?’ Why? ‘I need to get some badges.’ Why do you need badges? ‘Look, just give me the fuckin’ keys, you twat!’”

“Ian Curtis was actually loads of fun,” stressed Tony Wilson, Factory Records boss and music biz legend. “They all were. Their major pastime was japing – it was a central part of their lives.”

But you can hardly blame the outside world for buying into the noir Joy Division myth. Live footage from that time doesn’t exactly suggest four working-class, Northern lads out for a laugh. On-stage, they are intense, stern, apocalyptic. Ian Curtis, lost in his own world, marches back and forth like a demented Wehrmacht sentry, rhythmically clutching at imaginary ghosts. Peer closer, and his eyes are glazed and haunted. It’s as if he’s seeing something we can’t. Maybe he was. On that tour, he was suffering on-stage epileptic seizures virtually every night.

But talk about Ian as some kind of mystic and you will get very short shrift from his friends and former bandmates. Again and again they will stress “he was just a normal bloke” – married, a child, a mortgage, a dog, lived in an ordinary terraced house, loved music. Some of those closest to him will admit there were occasional glimpses of a mysterious, secretive, unknowable Ian, someone who, as Peter Hook explains, “was trying hard to hide part of his personality”.

But that didn’t mean that his sudden death in May 1980 made any more sense.

Ian was really clever. He was a fantastic writer and had plans for various works. It’s a loss in that way. Imagine if he wrote a novel…

Deborah Curtis

When Ian Curtis hanged himself at home in Macclesfield, Cheshire, he assured himself immortality. He was the second high-profile casualty of the punk era, following Sid Vicious’s overdose a year earlier. But the two couldn’t have been more different. Sid was a troubled rock’n’roll icon who fell victim to his own myth. Ian Curtis – beneath his unassuming Northern front – was a gifted poet and original thinker, clearly battling a debilitating illness and the stresses of a messy personal life.

Within weeks of his death, Love Will Tear Us Apart, one of Joy Division’s last recordings, reached Number 13 in the chart. Its sorrowful melody and haunting lyrics, seemingly about his disintegrating marriage, brought the group, somewhat late for Curtis, their first mainstream recognition. Ian was instantly transformed into an archetype: a dark visionary, who knew his life was fated to be a short one. On close inspection, some of Joy Division’s lyrics appeared to foretell of his tragic end. When he wrote about death, on tracks like Dead Souls, Shadowplay and New Dawn Fades, it was as if he was so close to it he could already feel what it was like and was presenting his own suicide as his final artistic statement.

His bandmates probably chuckle at such portentous analysis. But there is at least one person in this story who believes that Ian may have been secretly and knowingly living out the existence of a doomed prophet: his wife, Deborah. “He used to fantasise about taking his own life, that romantic idea of dying young,” she explains. “All the people he admired were ones who weren’t around anymore. That’s what he wanted – to be like them.”

It’s Christmas Eve 2004, and MOJO is discussing Joy Division’s enduring appeal with Tony Wilson (who will pass away aged 57 just three years later). In 2004, the group seem to be hipper than ever. They’re becoming to a new generation what The Velvet Underground were to theirs: a deliciously dark, cultish pleasure.

Then there’s the film. In January 2004, it was announced that an independent US production company is finally to bring Touching From A Distance, Deborah Curtis’s book about her life with Ian, to the big screen.

Tony Wilson is calling from his mobile. He’s in Salford, walking his dog, William – the pooch in New Order’s Blue Monday ’95 video. He is reassuringly as you’d expect. “Joy Division are immensely important,” he pants. “Bernard Sumner is… Hang on… William! Get off the road! Sorry about this… look you can’t shit there, you silly dog… William!!”

He rings off; he rings back. “Bernard Sumner is annoyingly clever,” he booms. “He once made the point that punk rock was vital because it rescued music from the crap and made it real again. But punk only had a limited vocabulary – it could only express simple things like ‘Fuck you!’ or ‘I’m bored’. Bernard said that sooner or later, someone was going to take the energy and inspiration from punk and make it express more complex emotions. And that’s what Joy Division did. Instead of saying ‘Fuck off’, they said: ‘I’m fucked.’ In doing so they invented post-punk and regenerated a great art form – rock’n’roll.”

Steve Morris still lives near Macclesfield, the Cheshire market town which used to spin silk for the world’s finest wardrobes. We’re sitting in the barn-cum-recording studio of his farm, where some of New Order’s forthcoming album, Waiting For The Sirens’ Call, was recorded. Pinned on the wall are instructions for making the group’s tea: Hooky “no milk”, Bernard “filtered water”, etc. In the corner is a full-size replica Dalek and piles of equipment, including some old Joy Division stuff – Bernard’s dusty Vox stack and Steve’s drum kit, stolen from outside New York’s Iroquois hotel in 1980 and later recovered during an FBI raid on a mafia warehouse.

Joy Division came together a few months after Curtis befriended Sumner and Hook at an early punk gig – no one can agree which one. Bernard and Peter were mates from Salford, the area of Manchester infamous for its cramped terrace houses and smelly textile factories. They’d been teenage skinheads and Mods, hanging out at North Salford Youth Club, listening to rock and soul. Hooky liked reading Richard Allen’s ’70s youth cult novels; Bernard was gifted at drawing but couldn’t afford to go to art school.

“Ian just seemed like one of us,” recalls Hook. “He had an Army & Navy flak jacket with ‘Hate’ written on the back. That was quite good. He was quiet and polite. Dead nice, really. He had a mate at college who painted doors on the floorboards. That’s Macclesfield for you! Then Steve joined. Did coming from Macclesfield make them outsiders? In a way. It was green hills and open spaces. They were both fuckin’ mad.”

Joy Division’s unusual sound developed during 1977 and 1978 at T.J. Davidson’s, a drab, ugly textile warehouse converted to a rehearsal space. Now demolished, it was situated on Little Peter Street, behind Deansgate Station on the fringes of Manchester city centre. In winter, it was so cold the group used to start fires with scavenged wood to keep themselves warm. The group – initially called Warsaw – practised for three hours every Saturday afternoon. All of them had day jobs.

Their originality stemmed from a punk naïveté. “None of us could play a note,” explains Bernard Sumner. “So instead we decided to use our brains and intelligence to do something original. We learned to play within our limits. What we did was simple and powerful.”

“There was none of this ‘four bars of that’ malarkey,” grins Morris. “It was like, ‘Play that riff twice and then do another riff.’ We had no musical language at all. None of us knew what a bar was. We used to argue about it, ‘Hang on, that’s your idea of a bar, not mine.’”

Tony Wilson describes Warsaw, who regularly played Manchester’s punk venues – Electric Circus, Rafters – as a “fucking cacophony with a great singer”. Famously, Hook played melodic riffs high up on the neck of his bass because his equipment was so poor it was the only way he could hear himself. Their music was edgy and intense. In From Joy Division To New Order, Mick Middles posits the theory that the group may have unwittingly been funnelling the vibrations of T.J. Davidson’s grim, industrial past.

Sumner and Hook take the psycho-architectural link even further.

“My background was working class,” says Bernard. “I lived in Alfred Road with my mother and my grandparents. It was a Coronation Street-style house. My niece and aunties lived in the same road. There was a chemical factory at the end of the street, which backed onto the River Irwell. It stank. When I was 11 we were moved into a tower block. We thought it was great. It had a bathroom and an airing cupboard. But it was also the breaking up of that community. I thought everyone in the street would move into the same tower block, but they didn’t.”

Hook: “Where Bernard and I lived it was dark, it was the ’50s and ’60s, there was still smog, rows and rows of terraced houses. It was black and claustrophobic.”

“There was something subconscious in my mind,” adds Bernard. “The displacement and sense of loss I had… Then my stepfather died. I was quite angry. Up until I was moved to a tower block, everything was really good. Afterwards it wasn’t. I think that may have affected the music in some way.”

“Joy Division were from the north side of Manchester,” the group’s producer, Martin Hannett, explained to Martin Aston in an unpublished interview from 1989. “It’s a science fiction city. Not like the south side at all. It’s all industrial archaeology, chemical plants, warehouses, canals, railways, roads that don’t take any notice of the areas they traverse. The incidence of serious diseases in north Manchester is 50 per cent higher than anywhere else in the country. Grim, eh?”

Ian was a working class bloke who had to go out and make a living. He had responsibilities and struggled hard to feed his family. I think that makes him more rock’n’roll.

Peter Hook

In April 1978, Ian Curtis handed Tony Wilson a note at a local battle-of-the-bands contest, the itinerant Stiff/Chiswick Challenge, informing him he was a “fucking cunt” for not booking the band on his Granada TV show, So It Goes. Within a year the group had recorded an album, Unknown Pleasures, for Wilson’s new independent label, Factory Records (no advances, no contracts). It was only when Martin Hannett – who based its sound on The Doors’ Strange Days – played them a test pressing that they properly heard what Curtis was singing about.

The lyrical content was blacker even than their music: death, religion, love, war. There were references to “the blood of Christ”, a girl’s uncontrollable seizures, childhood rooms filled with “bloodsport and pain”. His poetry was chilling, polished and original. Just as the group never analysed their music, no one ever asked Curtis to explain the words he sang in his rich, powerful tenor. It wasn’t as if Joy Division were consciously trying to preserve their own mystery. “Ian’s words sounded great,” says Hook. “That’s all that was important at the time.”

It’s a wet, drizzly night in December and Macclesfield isn’t in the mood to give up its secrets. MOJO is trying to find the “monstrous” grey council block behind the town station where Ian Curtis lived as a teenager. After 40 minutes trudging around the perimeter of Victoria Park, I give up. It later transpires that Park View flats were demolished 18 months ago.

Deborah, Ian’s widow – who now uses her maiden name Woodruff – has fond memories of them. “I remember Ian standing on the balcony, wearing his sister’s pink fluffy jacket and eyeliner,” she smiles. “He was tall and imposing, over six foot, a little bit frightening. This was 1973. Did he ever attract trouble? No. He could give people the stare.”

We are sitting in a pub, the Station Hotel, opposite the railway station, looking out on Macclesfield’s old industrial centre, warehouses and textile factories now converted to posh flats and heritage museums. When it was first published 10 years ago, Deborah’s memoir, Touching From A Distance, gave the first intimate and detailed picture of the singer’s life. It was an intensely moving book (and soon to be turned into the film Control).

Ian Curtis was 16 when Deborah first met him. A bright grammar school boy who’d passed seven O-Levels, he was also a pharmaceutical adventurer (solvents, Valium, barbiturates) and music nut (Lou Reed, Bowie, MC5, Iggy). His interest in drugs got him expelled from school – where Steve Morris was in the year below. Ian’s father worked as a detective in the Transport Police: it’s from him that Ian apparently inherited his love for literature and “silent moods”. Though living at 11 Park View when they began courting, Curtis had spent his early life in Hurdsfield, on the outskirts of Macclesfield.

“From what I can tell it was a fairly idyllic childhood,” says Deborah. “Wandering around fields, building dams in brooks, chasing pigs. It always puzzled me why he was so obsessed with writing about cityscapes. Maybe he felt guilty that he wasn’t trapped in one. Ian was angry,” adds Deborah. “But I was never sure why.”

Deborah found Ian charismatic and attractive. He was highly creative and original, and kept box files full of poems, lyrics and stories. He often stayed up late writing. He was desperate to make it as a rock star. Deborah recalls that he was smitten with tragic figures like James Dean and Jim Morrison; he also, she says, entertained romantic fantasies of his own early death.

He read Hesse, Sartre, Ballard, Dostoevsky, sought out cult films by Herzog and Fassbinder and, like most youths of his generation, was fascinated with Nazi Germany and military history. (Hence ‘Joy Division’, the corps of Jewish women forced to pleasure SS officers in the concentration camps.) Later, when Joy Division was taking off, Ian privately corresponded with Genesis P Orridge from Throbbing Gristle, punk’s foremost avant-garde thinker and outré performer.

“He was really clever,” she explains. “He could have done something very cerebral. He was a fantastic writer and had plans for various works. It’s a loss in that way. His lyrics are fantastic – imagine if he wrote a novel…”

Intelligent though he undoubtedly was, the man Deborah describes in her book isn’t always likeable; nor is he standard-issue rock’n’roll material. His politics were to the right. In 1975, he voted Conservative and insisted Deborah did the same. Though caring and tender, he could also be insecure, possessive and controlling. According to Deborah, she agreed to their marriage in 1975 under duress: Curtis made vague threats that he might do something to himself if she turned him down.

At their engagement party Ian violently threw his Bloody Mary over his fiancée, believing she was flirting with an uncle. Later that evening, she saw Curtis dance for the first time – the awkward, weaving shimmy the world now knows so well. She didn’t think it unusual at the time.

Once married, Deborah often found it hard to talk to her husband about his poetry and deeper thoughts. “He didn’t communicate very well,” she sighs. “You never knew what his agenda was.”

He got a job in a Manchester record store and was an early convert to punk. When he met Sumner and Hook he had the means to channel his literary ambitions and rock star dreams into something real.

• READ MORE: Joy Division And New Order's Best Albums Ranked

Throughout 1978 and ’79, when the group was taking off, he worked hard to keep his domestic and band life together. He took his new job, at the Manpower Services Commission, seriously. He and Deborah were so strapped for cash he even cleaned the group’s rehearsal room for a few extra quid. When Tony Wilson co-opted Joy Division to glue together the sandpaper sleeves for Durutti Column’s Return Of The… LP, the rest of the group paid Ian to do theirs for them. Meanwhile, they sat and watched a porn film.

In social situations Ian was witty and good company. He was also capable of being provocative, especially after a few drinks. In her book, Deborah mentions being upset when she heard that Ian had entertained the band with an offensive story about a Pakistani family defecating into sheets of newspaper and hurling the parcels into a neighbour’s garden.

There was, it seemed, a disturbing and unfathomable side to Curtis. It was only seen occasionally, but it was, says Morris, like “someone had flicked a switch”. His first encounter with “alter-Ian” came not long after he joined the group, and they all went to see The Stranglers at the Electric Circus. “We couldn’t get in, so we went to the pub,” Morris explains. “The Stranglers’ drummer, Jet Black, was in there smoking a pipe. So Ian said, ‘Look, I’ll go over and sort us out.’ He was drunk [and] the next thing was like, Where’s Ian gone? Then I saw him necking with some bird I’d never seen before in me life! It was like, What?! I said, Do you know her? He said, ‘No.’ So Ian is wearing a black star on his lapel and goes up to [journalist] Paul Morley, who says, ‘That’s a fascist symbol’, and Ian says, ‘No, it’s not, Paul, it’s anarchy, FUCKING ANARCHY!’ Then Ian said, ‘Shall we go into the ladies bogs?’ And I was like, Ladies’ bogs? Erm, why would we want to? It was frightening. He did like to carry on with the ladies.”

“Ian did have a bit of Jekyll and Hyde thing,” agrees Sumner. “I remember he tried kicking in the door of the dressing room at [the Stiff/Chiswick Challenge] gig, when Paul Morley and Kevin Cummins were taking ages to come on-stage. He [once] got so wound up arguing with Rob Gretton he ran around shouting with a bucket on his head. I thought it funny more than anything else.”

Outside the group, Ian and Deborah enjoyed a fairly ordinary domestic life. At weekends, they would take country walks with their dog. In April 1979, the Curtises became a trio when a daughter, Natalie, was born. His existence was, in many respects, the paradigm of normality. I put it to Hooky that Curtis – and Joy Division – weren’t very rock’n’roll in comparison with The Clash and Sex Pistols, who lived in squats, stole their food from street markets, and led a bohemian, art school life. He bristles. “Ian was a working-class bloke who had to go out and earn a living,” he says. “We all were. All those other bands you mention were middle-class and had money. We had nothing, it was totally derelict where we came from in Manchester. Ian had responsibilities, he struggled hard to feed his family, even though he’d rather have played music all day.

“I think that makes him more rock’n’roll. Don’t you?”

 In October 1979, with a new single, Transmission, out, the group set out on tour with the Buzzcocks. By now, Unknown Pleasures, was a permanent fixture on the indie album chart. In Sounds, Jon Savage proclaimed it to be “one of the best, white, English debut LPs of the year”.

The Buzzcocks’ Steve Diggle remembers the group as “very reserved. I don’t know if we frightened them off because we were pissed-up and full of drugs. We had a different verve and spark. It was rock’n’roll. They seemed reticent and timid.” Many claim that Joy Division’s deeply emotional, sheet-metal roar blew the ’Cocks off the stage. (Diggle, not surprisingly, dismisses such talk: “Another Factory myth. Most of the audience were still in the bar when they played. We were louder, heavier… No, quite impossible.”)

On October 16 the group journeyed on their own to Brussels Raffinerie du Plan K, an old sugar refinery converted into an arts centre. The evening culminated in a reading by beat legends Williams Burroughs and Brion Gysin from their collaboration The Third Mind. “To be honest, we all liked that kind of stuff, but we didn’t go on about it,” says Morris. “We didn’t go around in black or wearing sunglasses inside. But occasionally Ian would reveal that part of himself. I remember he went smooching over to Burroughs. We were like, ‘Great, we’ve got a crate of double-dead-strong beer, can we get another?’ He was off getting his book signed.”

Later, a drunken Ian reverted to type and pissed into the aforementioned metal ashtray. When a member of staff remonstrated with him, he sarcastically addressed her in slow, loud English, casting her in the role of stu-pid for-eign-er.

The constant touring and exhilaration of being the music press’s bright new promise was beginning to adversely affect Ian’s health. At the end of the previous year, in December 1978, he had suffered his first epileptic seizure, following Joy Division’s first ever London gig, at the Hope & Anchor in Islington. He had been prescribed medication, but the attacks were becoming ever more frequent, more violent. On a couple of occasions, Diggle recalls that the Buzzcocks were asked to extend their set, so fans wouldn’t interfere with ambulance crews trying to reach Ian backstage. The seizures usually occurred either on-stage or directly after performances.

Soon, however, there would be another stress that would send Ian’s epilepsy spiralling out of control. The last night of the tour, at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, Steve Diggle was chatting at the bar when Ian approached him. “We were talking generally about it being a good tour, how everything had gone really well, etc,” he recalls. “Then Curtis said, ‘I’ve got this problem. I met this girl in Europe and I’m married with a kid.’ He said it in a very sensitive and troubled way. That sort of thing was happening to a lot of people around us at that time. The temptations of the road. I just said, Don’t worry, mate. You’ll get over it! Other blokes would have laughed about it, but Curtis didn’t. It seemed to be a real problem. I didn’t realise how much of a problem.”

When Joy Division sped off down Ian’s street to start their European tour on January 10, 1980, Curtis looked directly ahead and didn’t wave goodbye to Deborah. Annik Honoré, the girl he’d met at Plan K in Brussels, would be secretly accompanying him throughout the tour. None of the other band members had a wife or girlfriend in tow. Annik worked at the Belgian Embassy in London. She was, by all accounts, “glamorous and exotic”.

On the road, the usual pranks and japes prevailed. “In Cologne, I did the stupidest thing that I’ve ever done,” says Morris. “We quite liked speed at the time. We sent someone to get some, and he came back and said, ‘I’ve got you this.’ It was like this red star.”

“It was called a Belgrade Star,” clarifies Peter Hook. “Steve swallowed it. This guy was like, ‘On no! Dat is five hits of acid!’ He took the lot in one go. Steve was out of his mind for two days. We were staying in a loft space, 12 feet up. Twinny, our roadie, thought it would be amusing to take the ladder away for the night.”

Morris: “I spent the rest of the tour tripping. I kept shouting, I’m going to chop off your head with an axe!”

Having Ian’s mistress travelling with them inevitably caused tensions. “I liked her,” says Hook. “But she was very bossy and domineering. The funny one was staying in a brothel. I can’t remember where. Speakers under the bed. You hired it by the half hour. After the gig we were in the van outside, waiting to go in. Annik said, ‘Hang on, ziz is a knock-ink shop!’ Yeah, so what? She said, ‘I am not staying in an ’ouse of ill-repute.’ So we said, Look, you’re shagging a married bloke, so what the fuck are you talking about, you silly cow!”

Outwardly, Curtis didn’t seem fazed by what was clearly an awkward situation. However, once the tour had finished and he was back home with a suspicious Deborah in Macclesfield, there was a sign that he was deeply troubled. One night, he drunkenly sought out a Bible. Having studied religion at school, he knew just where to look. He gouged out chapter two of The Revelation Of St John The Divine. It concerned the wanton Jezebel: “Behold, I will cast… them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation.”

Later, it transpired that same night he’d cut himself up, too. Unbeknown to anyone, Ian’s life was entering its final phase.

Between March 18 and 30, 1980, Joy Division worked on a second LP. As with Unknown Pleasures, the producer was Martin Hannett. As ‘Martin Zero’, Hannett had recorded the Buzzcocks’ pioneering Spiral Scratch EP, and it was this thick-set and dishevelled figure who had transformed Joy Division’s raw, edgy live sound into the glassy, stately, controlled force on Unknown Pleasures.

The sessions took place at Pink Floyd’s studio, Britannia Row, in Islington. Meanwhile, the group were billeted in a pair of adjoining flats in a modern residential block off Marylebone Road. New to London, each afternoon they’d go sight-seeing. Britannia Row had several superb ambient ‘live’ rooms. Hannett – a casual heroin user who regarded himself as an artiste – chose the location because, according to Steve Morris, he “liked to record in places that had a history of success”.

“Martin’s method was to turn everything upside down,” says Hook. “He talked to you like a mad professor. He’d say, ‘Make it softer but harder. Wider but not too wide.’ Jesus, it’s a only a fucking bass line, Martin! He had his head in the clouds. But he managed to bring a bit of the heavens down to earth. He managed to capture something special.”

“If Hooky has been able to communicate to me what exactly it was that he wanted, instead of saying it wasn’t what he wanted, it would have been easier,” said Hannett in 1989.

Steve Morris: “I thought Martin was great. The analogy was the Tom Baker Dr Who. It was a double act between him and Chris Nagle, his assistant. If we tried to interject, it was like, ‘Hmm, musicians…’ It was quite us-and-them. You sometimes felt you were on the outside of it all. The way you pushed the buttons on the console was all part of the recording magic, apparently. Right on, Martin!”

Sumner: “Martin had a vision, but it was difficult to see. He could hear things in the music that no one else could. Whether it was because he was stoned, I don’t know. We used to say, Tell him to turn up the ARP [synthesizer], and Hooky would say, ‘Martin, can you turn up the ARP?’ And he’d shout, ‘What?! What are you fucking talking about, you fucking cunt?!’ He’d get really angry. But it was 50/50, we got our way half the time.”

Closer, as the album would be titled, was carefully constructed from numerous performances and overdubs. Each drum was recorded separately. The music clearly foreshadows the beautiful, wintry, electronic dance music of New Order. Hannett insisted they used synthesizers and electronically triggered drum beats with which he’d become fascinated. (“Listen to The Eternal,” rails Morris, “there’s actually a beat missing because the equipment didn’t fucking work!’)

Ian’s voice was growing richer and more expressive – thanks, Tony Wilson believes, to a conversation he and Curtis had recently had about Frank Sinatra’s tone and phrasing. The most startling aspect of the record, however, was Ian’s lyrics. With hindsight, Closer clearly reveals his troubled inner life and anxieties about his physical deteroriation. Atrocity Exhibition, though ostensibly about the Nazi extermination camps, seems also to relate to his own experiences on-stage – an epileptic freakshow. Heart And Soul ruminates on the struggle between right and wrong and ultimately expresses an indifference to living. Love Will Tear Us Apart – taped at this session (but not on the album) – speaks of two lovers, reluctantly and painfully journeying on different paths.

Martin Hannett: “I’d rather still have Ian alive but it was just perfect. It was a document. He was crumbling. But it all came together in a magical way. There’s just a lot of pain in there as well as pleasure. Ian wasn’t taking his medication because he felt like it made him numb. He had to be looked after very closely all the time, because epileptics get prescribed fistfuls of phenobarbitone. These turned him off, it slowed him down. On the few occasions that we couldn’t look after him, we’d find him in a mess, because he’d had a fit. Sound-wise, I invented all these little tricks to do with generating sound images, like a holographic principle. Light and shade. Trying to make it independent of what you’d then listen to it on.”

Meanwhile, the japery continued. Ian was living with Annik in the bedroom of one of their Marylebone apartments. “It was trying to be a model of domestic bliss,” recalls Steve. “(Belgian accent) ‘Ian, are you do-ink your i-ron-ing?’ It was like, ‘Tell her to fuck off!’

“One day we found this kebab shop,” he continues. “It was like, Great! We said to Ian, ‘Come on, let’s go in!’, and Annik looked daggers at him. He said, ‘No, Annik’s a vegetarian.’ And she said, ‘And zo are you, Ian!’ So he’s like, ‘I don’t like kebabs.’ And we’re like, You what?! You don’t like kebabs?!… OK, have a salad, then. I’ll have a doner kebab – actually, I’ll fucking well have his.”

The group wound up the couple by folding their sheets into an “apple-pie” bed that you couldn’t get into and removing all their furniture bar the “i-ron-ing board”.

“It was a bit tense,” says Sumner. “Partly because of Annik’s presence. Rob and Hooky took the piss out of Ian. I thought it was a bit out of order, actually. But Ian was being a different person in front of Annik. You don’t fart in front of a new girlfriend, do you? So I think everyone had had enough of it. But… I don’t want to open old wounds.”

The last few months of Ian Curtis’s life is harrowing stuff. The most significant developments were his affair with Annik and worsening epilepsy. During the Buzzcocks tour, Ian had been suffering seizures virtually every night: they’d become almost a perverted validation of Joy Division’s Sturm und Drang. During the early months of 1980, the fits became more violent. At home with Deborah, he couldn’t fall asleep until he’d had an attack. The stress of his complicated private life clearly wasn’t helping. Nor was the primitive treatment for his epilepsy. The carbamazepine and phenobarbital prescribed to control his seizures resulted in unpredictable mood swings, “like a drunk, but without the high”, according to one leading epilepsy specialist. Ian was becoming extremely ill.

In April, Joy Division supported The Stranglers at the Rainbow. Curtis, lost in his dance/trance, had an epileptic seizure on-stage. Later that night, the band drove across London to headline a Factory Records show at the small Moonlight Club in West Hampstead. Ian had another fit while performing. Afterwards, he sat at the side of the stage, a complete wreck.

Ian stayed in London with Annik. On Easter Monday, he finally returned home to Deborah. That night he attempted to take his own life, with an overdose of phenobarbitone. He was rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped. When Ian was discharged, Tony Wilson suggested he should stay at Wilson’s cottage in Glossop.

Hooky phoned me and said, ‘It’s Ian, he’s only gone and done it.’ I thought it must be an accident! He’s not clever enough to kill himself. I felt angry with him. The ultimate cop out.

Stephen Morris

With hindsight, Joy Division should have taken a break. Despite the group’s reservations, Ian agreed to honour a gig the very next evening at Derby Hall, Bury. Knowing he was unwell, Rob Gretton arranged for Ian to perform just a handful of songs, then hand over to A Certain Ratio’s Simon Topping. The audience was outraged. The gig ended in a huge brawl. Ian was devastated. Wilson found him upstairs in tears.

“We were young, and the band was taking off,” says Hook. “We’d worked so hard to get that far. We didn’t know to deal with Ian’s illness. Imagine four 22-years-olds from Manchester – it was like, Hi, Ian. ‘Hi. Look, I’m really ill.’ Right. (Pause) You up for a pint then? It wasn’t like, OK, let’s sit down and talk about it. But let me make it clear, we did look after him. But the thing was he didn’t do much to help himself. He was fighting it.”

Steve Morris: “If we were more caring we could have dealt with it better. But we were like, He’ll be all right! He had to go to bed early, not get drunk, lead a regular lifestyle. No flashing lights! Don’t flash the lights! We were actually quite careful about that. But that was the antithesis of what he was. He wasn’t the kind of person who went to bed early. It was a head-fuck. Being in a band wasn’t conducive to making a recovery.”

A few days later there was a band meeting. Ian said he was leaving: he was going to Holland to open a bookshop. The group said fine. The next day Curtis met Sumner in the street in Manchester. He acted as if the conversation had never happened. The only talk was of rehearsals and gigs. Ian’s life was accelerating towards its grim conclusion. A tour of America was booked for late May. Estranged from Deborah, who wanted a divorce, Ian stayed with Bernard before returning to his parents’ house.

It was around this time that a bizarre and chilling event occurred: Bernard was interested in hypnotism and agreed to put Curtis under. “Ian brought the tapes home for me to listen to,” says Deborah Curtis. “[He] insisted he had regressed to a previous life.”

Todd Eckert, a producer of Control, has heard a cassette of the session. “You’d presume they were messing about, but they weren’t,” he says. “They were really serious. When Ian goes under he becomes this guy living in a hut in France in the 17th century. The intensity with which he tells this story is astonishing. It’s the single most scary thing I’ve ever heard in my life. Why? (Pause) Because Ian is alluding to already being dead.”

Joy Division’s last gig was at Birmingham University on May 2, 1980. During the next two weeks, Ian Curtis didn’t have any serious seizures and seemed quite content. “It was Friday night, we’d been to Manchester, and then Ian said, ‘Drop me off at Amigos’, a Mexican restaurant we used to go to,” recalls Morris. “He was probably meeting some birds! Seriously. It was like, See ya! We’re on our way to America! See ya!”

In Ian’s internal, heavily medicated world, however, things may not have seemed so cheery. On Saturday May 17, Curtis was meant to go water-skiing with Bernard, but didn’t. That evening, he spent the evening at home in Barton Street, Macclesfield. He wanted to watch the Werner Herzog film Stroszek, and didn’t think his parents would appreciate a movie about three low-life Berliners re-locating to the US for a better life. The American Dream turns out to be a bitter lie; Stroszek kills himself.

Deborah returned home from her bar job in the early hours of Sunday. She and Ian argued and Deborah spent the night at her parents’ house. The following morning she returned to find her husband’s lifeless body in their kitchen. He had hanged himself from their floor-to-ceiling clothes rack. Iggy Pop’s The Idiot was still spinning on the turntable.

Steve Morris: “Hooky phoned me on Sunday morning. He said, ‘It’s Ian. He’s only gone and done it.’ I said, Not tried to kill himself again? ‘No, he’s actually done it.’ I thought, It must have been an accident! He’s not clever enough to have killed himself. I felt angry with him. It’s the ultimate cop out.”

Inevitably, the feelings of those closest to him are coloured by their own attitudes towards suicide. Most are baffled by his actions, prompted as they were by his medication and unfathomable, hidden bouts of depression. “I didn’t understand it,” says Sumner. “We had no idea he was going to do it – if we had we wouldn’t have let him out of our sight. But… I’ve seen someone clawing to keep hold of life when they were dying of cancer. To throw something that special away…”

Hook (affectionately): “I thought, You silly bastard.”

Closer was released in July 1980 and reached Number 6. Its clattering, intense, funereal beauty took on extra resonance with Curtis’s death, the words of the single Love Will Tear Us Apart now seeming unbearably poignant. The phrase was chosen for Ian’s memorial stone in Macclesfield Cemetery and Crematorium.

Back in the Station Hotel, Deborah Curtis admits there are still many unanswered questions surrounding Ian’s death. “I know he fantasised about [dying young], but it’s still hard to believe that he actually went through with it. All kinds of things go through your mind: was he just messing about in the kitchen? Was it an accident, did he have a fit?”

I ask her what Ian would have thought of being a MOJO cover star and the subject of a film. “He’d love it!” she laughs. “Really. That’s what he really wanted and dreamt about. I can’t understand that he wanted something so badly that he had to die for it.”

“It doesn’t bother me that Ian’s become a rock martyr,” insists Bernard. “He was so good at what he did, a great performer, great lyricist, great singer. It’s fantastic that he’s remembered. That’s why we now play Joy Division songs.”

“We’ve had a great time,” concludes Hooky. “I just wish Ian had stayed around to enjoy it.”

Special thanks to Matthew Norman at Manchester District Music Archive.

Speaking in the new issue of MOJO, out now, Phil Collins has addressed the long-standing feud between him and Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher.

• READ MORE: Phil Collins: “I’m not hungry for it anymore…”

Later this year, Collins will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside artists including Joy Division/New Order, Wu-Tang Clan, Iron Maiden and Oasis.

While Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher previously said the awards were “for wankers”, he has since confirmed that he will be attending the ceremony, which takes place in Los Angeles on November 14. If Noel attends, it could spark an awkward situation given the long war of words between Oasis’ chief songwriter and the former Genesis drummer.

When Oasis were first breaking through with their debut album Definitely Maybe in 1994, Noel Gallagher described Collins as “the antichrist of music”.

“We’re gonna get rid of Phil Collins and Sting,” said Noel. “We’ve got to get in the charts and stamp them out. I want the severed head of Phil Collins in my fridge by the end of this decade. And if I haven’t, I’ll be a failure.”

Gallagher continued to take pops at Collins in interviews over the years, encouraging people to vote Labour in the 1997 general election to stop Collins, then living in Switzerland, from moving back to the UK.

“If the Conservatives get in, Phil Collins is threatening to come back and live here. And let's face it, none of us want that,” he told The Guardian. Collins eventually hit back, dismissing Oasis as “rude, horrible… and not as talented as they think” in an interview with the Irish Examiner in 2005.

• READ MORE: Noel Gallagher: "Back then, I'd hear Blur or Pulp or Suede on the radio and think – fuck these idiots..."

Speaking to MOJO’s Mark Blake, Collins has addressed the possibility of bumping into Oasis in November and speculated on the possible origins of Gallagher’s apparent beef with him.

“The [Hall Of Fame] inductees have all been invited to a lunch before the ceremony,” he divulges. “Which will be interesting, as I’m sure to bump into Oasis.”

In 2007, Collins’ daughter, Lily, now an actress and the star of Netflix series Emily In Paris, spotted Liam Gallagher backstage at the Live Earth charity concert, and decided to confront him over his brother’s comments. “She went up to him and said, ‘Why do you hate my dad?’” Collins tells MOJO. “And apparently Liam said, ‘I don’t hate anybody, love.’”

Collins discovered more about Noel’s ‘antichrist’ comment after Noel told a writer that Collins’ performance had scared him when he attended a Genesis gig “completely out of it” in the ’80s. “Now I’ve thought this through,” Collins tells MOJO, “and although Noel didn’t specify what song it was, I reckon it was Mama, where I go (recites the lyric) ‘Ha-ha-ha… Oww,’ with the light under my face.”

 “I think Mama is why Noel called me the antichrist. But I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt here, and assuming he doesn’t really think I’m the antichrist.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Collins speaks about the origins of his hugely successful solo career, which began with 1981’s Face Value, his relationship with his bandmates in Genesis, and discusses both his recent serious health problems and his battle with alcoholism, which began when he was in his 50s.

In the 2010’s, he reveals, Collins’ long-time friend Eric Clapton persuaded the singer to check into the Crossroads rehab centre, which the guitarist founded in Antigua. Collins was supposed to stay for six weeks, but left after a month because he had a tour booked. “The nurse who took me to the airport gave me a note and told me to read it on the plane,” he recalls. “It said, ‘If you have a drink, you will die – And it’s terrible to say, but I had a glass of wine.”

“Working with Brian Eno influenced me a lot, I wasn’t used to that kind of freedom in Genesis…”

Get the new issue of MOJO to read our exclusive interview with Phil Collins in full! More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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