Longhaired hippy dreamer, proto-punk rocker, experimental synth-explorer, godfather of grunge, still raging anti-war polemicist... Since he first emerged as part of Buffalo Springfield in 1966, Young has taken on every one of these guises, sometimes several at once. But one constant remains – as soon as the world has begun digesting the latest Neil Young creation, the man himself will have moved on.

• READ MORE: Neil Young's Best Albums Ranked!

The passage of time is a recurring theme in Young’s music. He’s a master at capturing a moment, his references to the past and questions about the future placing the listener directly in the song. Past and present, the end and the beginning, young and old, the artist and the audience, the electric and the acoustic; conflicts like these lie at heart of his best records. Whether he renders them using the upper registers of a blazing Les Paul or an acoustic guitar, a piano and that vulnerable/defiant voice, or even a vocoder and a keytar, Young has always made music that comes from the very centre of his being.

It's why his songs have resonated not only with his fans over the decades, but with other musicians who remain in awe of his continued creative chase. A chase that, as his latest album, Second Song, shows, continues to turn up fresh treasure long after the gold rush was supposed to have passed. Neil and The Chrome Hearts recent shows – including spellbinding sets at Glastonbury and Hyde Park - proved that whether written in the 60s, 70s, or the 21st century, Young's songs have a magic to them that will neither burn out, nor fade away any time soon.

Below, a selection of stars - many of whom have played on those very same tracks - pick their own personal favourites for MOJO's rundown of Neil Young’s 50 greatest songs…

50.

Music Arcade

(Broken Arrow, 1996)

Neil’s lowest-fi slice-of-life: “Have you ever been lost?”. As selected by Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb.

“Just weeks before flood waters [in Pennsylvania] would come and spill six feet over our roof, I had just drawn a mural on my bedroom wall of my favourite bands at the time. Neil was there amongst the Stones and Zeppelin. Funny thing was, when we re-entered our devastated home, those walls had been protected by the mattresses that washed up against them. There I stood in my destroyed world, stanky river mud clotting the walls and ceiling and ankle-deep ooze all over the floor hiding the water snakes still lurking. I yanked down the mattresses and the images of Neil and all my favourite bands were untouched and looked glorious in that surrounding muck. It felt like some kind of omen, something bigger than losing our home.

“The song of his I most embrace is something that sounds so hidden and tucked away. Music Arcade is as intimate as it gets. Like Neil couldn’t sleep, like it was a hell of a day… so he walked over to his home studio recorder and whispered this pup like he was writing it just as it was being harvested. Quiet enough to wonder at his own meaning and place in the world at that very moment. Quiet so as not to wake anyone else in the house. And that sensibility is housed in all his songs. Powerful enough to be that quiet and while under the pondered impossibility of our troubled world, still show us a way out, an endgame spin. His songs show us a way to make it through the day, but at the very same time, have enough care in them to not wake anyone else in the house who managed to find some sleep.”

49.

I Am A Child

(Live Rust, 1979)

Raw version of Young ache from the Springfield’s contractual Last Time Around. As selected by Dylan LeBlanc.

“I was asleep at night and I had Live Rust playing continuously. I had always skipped that song but on that occasion it played and I woke up as it was playing. It was a dark and dreary day but at that point that song seemed like the perfect song to wake up to. There is an innocence and youthfulness in it combined with a feeling of desperation. It’s like Neil trying to tell us something that we really can’t understand. That’s why it appeals to me, because I have felt that same sense of hopelessness so many times. (Sings) ‘I am a child/I’ll last a while/You can’t conceive/Of the pleasure in my smile.’ Neil’s telling us that people take children for granted, and the song is also a reminder that you are going to get hurt. Musically, the six chords in that song are beautiful. It moves so well. The music actually paints a picture even without the words. It feels like you’re being taken back to an older time rather than the time that you are in. I think Neil Young always wrote that way. That’s what makes him so timeless.”

48.

Ambulance Blues

(On The Beach, 1974)

Through the past, darkly, with burnouts, critics, Presidents and worse. As selected by Phosphorescent’s Matt Houck.

“It’s a monster, a really long and hypnotic and all-encompassing nine-minute mood piece that smoulders along. Loose, resigned and weary, but still full of piss and strength. It can change the entire mood of what’s going on around you, which is really impressive. And these little fragments of lyrics appear each time you hear it. I once wrote a song called Not A Heel that was directly inspired by the line, ‘I’m such a heel for making her feel so bad.’ That really struck me then as I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t a heel, for the exact same reasons. The references – Richard Nixon, Charles Manson, Patty Hearst, CSN&Y – are quite specific but like all great art, it rises above whatever the artist is specifically talking about and becomes universal. Just listen for those nine minutes and then put the needle on it again. And listen for nine more. Listen to that wandering fiddle. Listen to that voice. And the ragged way it’s recorded. It’s all right there. You can just feel it.”

47.

Old King

(Harvest Moon, 1992)

Twanging C&W hymns man’s best friend: “I told the dog about everything.” As selected by Swans’ Michael Gira.

“When I think of Neil Young, this is the song that pops into my head: (sings) ‘My dog King wasn’t afraid to jump off the truck in high gear’ (laughs) and then it’s got the banjos. I think it’s wonderful coming from the same artist that wrote The Needle And The Damage Done. Harvest Moon has some beautiful love songs on it, but it takes a lot of talent to be able to write a song about a dog. It could be in a Disney movie. From the first couple of lines – Willie Nelson has this ability, too – you’ve got this picture of the whole world. To be able to do that – despite how comical the subject matter is – I think is a true talent.”

46.

Winterlong

(Decade, 1977)

Rock as melancholy and monumental as any in the canon. As selected by Pixies’ Black Francis.

“Beginning with the title, it is creative. It’s a new word. And we all know what it means, but it has more weight than ‘winter long’. The song begins in a sleepy but totally solid tempo on a one-bar ascending riff that announces the chord progression that follows it: C, Am, F, G. A perfect 1950s chord progression. The 1950s chord progression. The amps are just loud enough to break up a bit. The sound is warm and the guitars gurgle like liquid coming out of the ground. That’s how it sounds to me. Like liquid from inner earth. And my heart is breaking and I don’t even know why yet. The band plays one time through and resolves in an F and a C and the riff again before the spotlight blinks on Neil at the mike. ‘I waited for you Winterlong/You seem to be where I belong/It’s all illusion anyway…’ He longed all winter, but he also knows in the end it’s the trickery of the human perspective. Love is but it also isn’t.

“Second verse: ‘If things should ever turn out wrong/And all the love we have is gone/It won’t be easy on that day.’ I’m sorry. But that is heartbreaking. He knows it’s coming. And then we build toward that final chorus. ‘I waited for you Winterlong/You seem to be where I belong.’ Over and over. The pathos of the minor chord feeling is gone, and a knowledge and a resignation has replaced the sadness, almost triumphant. The singer has been formed by the experience. A mutation has occurred. He is stronger and more lonely, but he isn’t waiting any more. He will never have that feeling ever again. Ever. Forever.”

45.

Thrasher

(Rust Never Sleeps, 1979)

Or “Why I Quit CSN&Y”, charged with slippery symbolism. As selected by art critic and Neil nut Matthew Collings.

“I like the narrative. I like all that stuff about ‘crystal canyons’, about the drugs being taken by Crosby and Stills. And I like, ‘Brings back the time when I was eight or nine/I was watching my momma’s TV/It was that great Grand Canyon rescue episode.’ It’s a lovely leap, flashing up those images. But the song is also a warning: the thrasher is death. You will be cut down. That gives the song its epic feel, that and the structure: no chorus, just great long verses like Dylan’s Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, heroic in a way that very few people have managed to pull off. If he were a visual artist I think he would have to be someone expressive. Sometimes when he’s playing the lead on the guitar, you feel like he just sort of leant on the guitar, just groaned the noise out. It’s the most sublime sound, like great buildings crashing, a big historical sweep. I think he’d be Mark Rothko – with those big banks of tone and colour.”

• READ MORE: Bob Dylan’s 60 Greatest Songs: As picked by Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, Nick Cave, Bono and more!

44.

Here We Are In The Years

(Neil Young, 1968)

The hidden gem of Young’s fussy debut. Dig the horn-emulating synth! As selected by Midlake’s Eric Pulido.

“I somehow overlooked Neil Young’s debut album at first. But once I spent some time with it I found the ever-present beauty, most especially in this song. I was hooked by the concertoesque piano intro that then settles right into a simple yet perfect rhythm section. It just feels so good. And if that wasn’t enough, the delicately beautiful side of Neil’s voice over this bed of continued musical gold, with great acoustic and electric guitar flourishes throughout, makes it that much more impactful. The lyrics of a world divided into a ‘city vs country’ type mindset and the impending repercussions, is also something that I can relate to and is even present in some Midlake tunes. Thanks Neil, for another amazing tune.”

43.

It’s A Dream

(Prairie Wind, 2005)

Everyday country life transformed into exquisite reverie. As selected by Doug Paisley.

“I first heard It’s A Dream in Heart Of Gold, the concert film by Jonathan Demme. Initially, there was a part of me that resisted its plaintive tone: it just seemed too simple. By the time I heard the song again later in the film, I mostly knew how to sing it. When I was in a rough patch I cued up the song every morning to start my day. We played It’s A Dream on-stage at the Cameron House in Toronto a while ago and a number of people came up to me afterwards just to say that the song had made them cry. That had never happened to me before, but I knew it wasn’t my performance that had touched them so deeply. I grew up a few blocks from where Young had lived and gone to high school in uptown Toronto. His songs were often playing at neighbourhood parties as we drifted about in a teenage haze. There were other bands, Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, that people seemed to build up their whole identities around. With Neil Young’s songs there were no requisites for listening or identifying, it was pure music. That must be why they’ve gone so deeply into my consciousness and how they are living there still.”

42.

Sleeps With Angels

(Sleeps With Angels, 1994)

Burning out versus fading away. As selected by MOJO writer David Fricke.

As eulogies go, Sleeps With Angels, Neil Young’s instant memorial to Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, was short, brutal and ambiguous – much like the life of the man he mourned. On April 8, 1994, Cobain was found dead from a self-inflicted shotgun wound at his Seattle home. In his rambling anguished suicide note, Cobain quoted Young, from Rust Never Sleeps’ My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue): “It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” Two weeks later, on April 25, Young convened his loyal garage band Crazy Horse at Complex Studios in Los Angeles and recorded a 20-minute instrumental that sounded like Nirvana in leg irons, a funeral shuffle coated in ugly throbbing fuzz, with a stuttering riff and pie-plate-like cymbal clangs. Young cut that beast down to a three-minute splinter, adding barely whispered vocals – Young singing with himself via slightly skewed overdub – dotted with falsetto cries (“Too late! Too soon!”) that sound like rattled seraphim at the pearly gates, frantically double-checking the guest list.

Unlike Ohio, Young’s fast, outraged response to the 1970 Kent State University massacre, and Tonight’s The Night, his sayonara to roadie and OD victim Bruce Berry, Sleeps With Angels is all allusion, a reflection on the most desperate kind of comfort and the empty space left behind. But it is also painfully acute writing. The opening lines – “She wasn’t perfect/She had some trips of her own” – is a plain reference to Cobain’s widow, Courtney Love. What follows – “He wasn’t worried/At least he wasn’t alone” – is a revealing compassion. Even from a distance, Young could tell: Husband and wife had been perfectly, if fatally, suited to each other.

'We just wanted to hear all these Neil Young stories...'

Krist Novoselic

Young and Cobain never met. They came eerily close. In the spring of 1991, when Nirvana were hunting for a producer for Nevermind, the band approached Young’s producer David Briggs. Nothing came of it, although there was a memorable meeting over coffee at a Denny’s restaurant. “We just wanted to hear all these Neil Young stories,” bassist Krist Novoselic recalled. Nirvana nearly opened for Young on the ’91 Weld tour – Cobain’s buddies Sonic Youth, already on the bill, tried to get them the opening slot. And Young biographer Jimmy McDonough noted in Shakey that he saw Cobain and Love hanging around backstage at Young’s 1993 Harvest Moon show in Los Angeles.

Finally, in the first week of April, 1994, Young – troubled by the news of Cobain’s near-suicide in March, from a drug overdose in Rome – attempted through management channels to reach the younger man. Cobain never got the message. Sleeps With Angels, added at the last minute to Young’s next studio album, would be his penance. “It’s just too bad I didn’t get a shot,” Young lamented years later. “I might’ve been able to make things a little lighter for him.”

41.

Broken Arrow

(Buffalo Springfield Again, 1967)

Suite inspiration from Buffalo Springfield. As selected by MOJO writer Richie Unterberger.

Out-and-out psychedelia is not Neil Young’s stock in trade. Yet for a golden moment on Buffalo Springfield’s second album he married lyrical obscurity to arrangements as magically orchestral as any psychedelic rock this side of Sgt. Pepper. The six-minute Broken Arrow shifts mood and perspective like a movie of three discrete vignettes interrupted by haunting, sometimes surreally disturbing flashbacks. Its dedication to old friend (and, briefly, Springfield bassist) Ken Koblun notwithstanding, it defies easy interpretation and keeps listeners perpetually off-balance, the instrumental interludes quaking and shimmering as they dissolve into the three verses.

Those verses – the core of Broken Arrow – are impressive enough on their own, driven by one of Young’s grandest, most melancholic melodies and progressively lusher, soaring backdrops. The words deal with disillusionment – already a worn theme in rock, but here outlined with delicious dreaminess, whether Neil is alluding to the emptiness of pop stardom or JFK’s assassination, or both, or more, blurring that day in Dallas with imagery from a medieval parade. It’s all united by the yearning chorus, tying failed dreams to the broken arrow, used by Native Americans as a symbol of peace at the end of war.

An ideal prelude to the opening miasma of post-gig alienation...

Broken Arrow works beautifully enough as an unadorned folk song, as the November 1968 solo acoustic performance on Sugar Mountain: Live At Canterbury House would ultimately reveal. But it needs its wildly disparate instrumental sections to push it to the masterpiece level. The opening snippet of Mr. Soul – recorded in the studio and sung by Springfield drummer Dewey Martin, though overdubbed screams pass it off as a live concert snippet – is an ideal prelude to the opening miasma of post-gig alienation: where fans linger for a glimpse of their idols through the windows of a black limousine.

A merry-go-round turning into a nightmarish swirl of dissonance sets up the far more bizarre second verse, linked to the final, exponentially more ominous section with martial drums conjuring JFK’s funeral march. Odder still is the instrumental tag, a loungeish jazzy jam featuring session pianist Don Randi and clarinettist Jim Horn, ending with the spooky pulses of a beating heart.

At the time, some found Broken Arrow’s production too over-the-top, including, perhaps, other members of Buffalo Springfield. Martin and Stephen Stills later recalled learning the song on the hoof and Young confirmed in his notes to Decade that it took more than 100 takes to get right. Part of the song was airlifted from a Springfield outtake, Down Down Down, Neil admitting in Hit Parader soon afterward that, 
“I had a two-minute song with no repetition, so I figured the only way to make it work would be to turn it into a six-minute song, repeat the refrain three different times and take it into three different movements.”

Forty-odd years on it continues to transcend its cut-and-paste origins, staking its claim as Young’s most glorious suite: a hypnotic, roller-coaster rush, a better movie than any of the actual movies he’s made.

40.

See The Sky About To Rain

(On The Beach, 1974)

Lyrical, self-healing bimble on wobbly Wurly piano. Probable “slow-drug” input. As selected by MGMT’s Andrew Van Wyngarden.

“This is the song I can listen to over and over the most. It’s the simplicity – the steel guitar and the soft drums – real loose but sparse. There’re two sides of the song, a kind of environmental issue, but it’s also Neil struggling to cope after the Tonight’s The Night tour, the ultimate ‘fuck you’ tour, hated by everyone. There’s that final verse: ‘I was down in Dixie Land / Played a silver fiddle / Played it loud and then the man / Broke it down the middle.’ The Neil albums I first got obsessed with were Harvest, After The Gold Rush and then Tonight’s The Night, the tequila one – but there’s something uniquely ominous about this.”

39.

Will To Love

(American Stars ’N Bars, 1977)

Haunting field recording unveils Neil at his most epically desolate. As selected by

Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis.

“I’ve got an older brother, and he had a lot of records, and that’s how I started listening to Neil’s stuff. I don’t remember anybody at the time not liking Neil Young, except for people who thought that he was a terrible guitar player and were into Eddie Van Halen or something. I was attracted to the sound of Neil’s guitar, the feelings he evokes. It can touch you somehow. It’s like Neil’s speaking to you through his guitar.

“Will To Love’s always been my favourite song. It’s really intimate, intense; you’re sitting by a campfire, you can hear the fire crackle… It’s really spacey; he sounds so depressed, like he’s detached, floating down the stream, just kind of floating away from reality and problems. The Dinosaur Jr song Not The Same [from 1993’s Where You Been?] was definitely inspired by trying to capture that feeling. It’s as close to a rip-off as I’ve come, I suppose.”

38.

Goin’ Back

(Comes A Time, 1978)

Shimmering strums usher in misty visions of Eden. As chosen by Rumer.

“I heard it for the first time recently, and it made me cry. The idea of wanting to go back to a place of innocence, but in that place ‘there’s nowhere to stay’ – that’s so powerful. The lyrics are strange, bleak, and they speak to me at exactly the point I’m at in my life. I’ve been such a hobo, all my life, like a stray dog, wandering about. I’ve been free, but I’m not free any more. The way Neil Young is, the way he writes, is just so intuitive, he just seems to follow his subconscious. Then there’s his voice – it’s so feminine, with that bit of sweetness to it, but he’s very much a masculine man, raggedy and almost punky. Among all those early ’70s singer-songwriters, he was the dark one, the dark star. At the same time, he’s like a little boy, forever yearning and searching, in the moment, a rolling stone, someone who is going to follow the muse no matter what. It’s what makes something like, say, A Man Needs A Maid so tragic. That feeling of desolation and loneliness, because he can’t reconcile a relationship with this overwhelming mission, his ministry. Neil’s way is bold and brave, but it’s lonely.”

37.

Transformer Man

(Trans, 1982)

Synth Neil’s underrated enigma. As selected by Devo’s Gerald Casale.

“Dean Stockwell and Toni Basil turned Neil onto Devo in ’77, and we ended up doing a scene in [Young’s panned movie] Human Highway. He was much more of an iconoclast than we ever could’ve imagined. I think he was genuinely turned on by synthesizer music. He was kind of a Dada joker, and we liked that aspect of him. But this song is very Devo. He’s talking about some new version of The Man. Like, the man who pulls the strings, the man who’s not on TV – not the song and dance man for marketing hope or something like that, but the guy that really makes things happen or not happen. [NB: the song is often said to be about Young’s problems in communicating with his younger son Ben, the second of his boys born with cerebral palsy]. As you get older, you get to know human nature, and how deals are really cut, how it isn’t like the good of the many that drives anybody to do anything. It’s pure brute exercise of power. Then at a certain point, it’s so much chaos, and such a big mess, that the system doesn’t work anymore. That’s the point that Western culture is at. It’s Devo!”

• READ MORE: “We took it too far, but Neil got it…” Get the latest issue of MJO for the inside story on the mischief and madness of Human Highway.

36.

F*!#in’ Up

(Ragged Glory, 1990)

Molten pain and guilt meets riff like Vulcan beating his anvil. As selected by Endless Boogie’s Top Dollar.

 “Why do I keep fuckin’ up?!” Yeah, I can relate to that, those semi-conscious dynamics that lock me into patterns of self-sabotage are toxic for relationships. Lots of people say Neil’s songs speak to them in a personal way. F*!#in’ Up spoke to me. I was already jazzed that Neil was back in Crazy Horse hard-rocking action at the time, and then… BULLSEYE! F*!#in’ Up? Fuckin’ A! That revolving, heavy-hitter holding pattern riff explodes and implodes simultaneously, the perfect sonic version of fuckin’ up over and over again. You know you’re gonna do it, here’s the anthem. “Sorry, sorry!” he wails at the end of one live version. It hits me close, the price for intimacy is way high, fuckin’ up is an easier load, must have a heart of steel, and whoa… those ‘broken leashes on the floor’! Sometimes the song sounds celebratory to me in a twisted way, but that’s the guitars: lyrical fragments swirling in a maelstrom of stormy aggression. Try to find a live clip on YouTube where he isn’t tearing the notes out of Old Black at the same velocity and intensity that’s in his mind. When you can do that you can get away with fuckin’ up, forever.”

• READ MORE: Neil Young And Crazy Horse Fu##in’ Up Review: Young and co. breathe new life into past glories

35.

Don’t Let It Bring You Down

(After The Gold Rush, 1970)

Death and doom abound but “you will come around”. Hmm, if you say so… As selected by John Grant.

“This always reminds me of my brother Dan and his love for Neil Young. The ‘dead man lying by the side of the road with the daylight in his eyes’ is an amazing, horrific, image, and for me this is one of those songs that provides such vivid snapshots of moments that the overall melancholy of the song serves not to bring you down but to lift you up. I always find myself thinking that I better stop taking things for granted – like my relationship with my brother, for example. I always think it’s about lack of perspective and that, even though we have no control over the goings-on in the world, we still have to think about today and carry on regardless. I have to say that I was never a big fan of Neil Young’s voice to begin with. But now it’s like a security blanket, and that blanket is handmade of the finest and sturdiest and softest material money can buy.”

34.

Don’t Be Denied

(Time Fades Away, 1973)

Anthem for the left-out and left-behind. Ye shall overcome! As selected by Wooden Shjips’ Ripley Johnson.

“As a kid I didn’t know anything about Neil’s biography, so I would glean as much as I could from the songs and the album photos. Don’t Be Denied seemed to be one of his most literal and autobiographical songs, and that’s part of its appeal to me. It’s a mini-biography of his early, pre-stardom life – ‘The punches came fast and hard / Lying on my back / In the school yard’ – and lays out many of the themes and values of his work. After hearing this one song you feel like you really know where he’s coming from. I had a chance to see a secret Crazy Horse show in San Francisco in the ’90s and they played Don’t Be Denied with the lost ‘Oh Canada’ verse. Since the album had been so neglected up to then, it was really special to experience that. Everyone in the audience could feel that the guy on-stage was still the same guy in the song, the guy who started a band and played all night, and that defined his life.”

33.

Revolution Blues

(On The Beach, 1974)

Like a feral Dylan drunk on hate surfing a superbadass groove. As selected by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck.

“Revolution Blues was such a totally ballsy move. To write that in the mid-’70s, when Charles Manson’s still the pariah of the scene, and here’s Neil taking this song that relates what Manson did to the movie and music business, conveying a lot of Neil’s ambivalent feelings about showbiz. I don’t think I could have done that. And it’s a great performance by the band, whoever that band is – I think it’s almost certainly Rick Danko on bass. I bought both Time Fades Away and On The Beach at the time they came out because they got really bad reviews. There was a local hippy paper in Atlanta, and the Time Fades Away record review was just the quintessential bullshit hippy review: ‘Neil’s the type of guy you used to be able to smoke a doob with your old lady, and then he makes this record which is all noisy. You need to get all mellow again, man.’ And I thought, I hate mellow, so this must be great, and I was right. R.E.M. played with Neil in 1998 at a Bridge School Benefit. He called up to ask what songs we were thinking of doing. And I said, Weelll, y’know, Motion Pictures, On The Beach, Revolution Blues, Ambulance Blues… He said, ‘Man, you’re going all the way down with that…’ We played Ambulance Blues with him in the end. He’s very precise. The tempo can’t vary. You know, it’s natural in rock’n’roll if you get excited about playing something you speed it up a little bit. But not Neil Young. He’ll stop you and go, ‘No – here’s the tempo. It doesn’t go any faster.’”

32.

Words (Between The Lines Of Age)

(Harvest, 1972)

Harvest’s closer. Scraggy but profound. As selected by Chip Taylor.

“When I was a kid I used to listen to country radio because I loved the pain you could hear in those songs. Neil Young has that same beautiful sadness in his music. When I did my version of Words I really wanted to feel that. I needed to learn the song properly before I could really sink into it. Lyrically, the first section makes me think of Neil Young looking out of his cabin window contemplating all the things that have happened down the years on the land he looks out on. The second part of the song deals with the issue of class from the point of view of a servant or a junkman. The question is really: How would you feel if you were me? In terms of the music, the time signature jolts in the instrumental sections, musically representing the transition between generations. The fact that they rub against each other so quickly reminds me that life is short, real short – you’ve got one chance so don’t fuck it up!”

31.

Rockin’ In The Free World

(Freedom, 1989)

Catchy, conflicted: Neil’s Born In The USA.

As selected by Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn.

“I think it was the one-two punch of Landing On Water and Life that finally put me over the edge. I mean, enough was enough. And then someone gave me a [bootleg] cassette of the songs from [unreleased album] Times Square and I remember hearing Eldorado and thinking, Hmmm… maybe it’s not all over. And then just a few months later I saw Neil on Saturday Night Live. He was playing Rockin’ In The Free World and it was like hearing Cinnamon Girl for the first time. Maybe it’s like when you’re really hungry and get the first taste of something that resembles food. Sometimes the degree of hunger outweighs the quality of the meal. But it came at the right time, it felt like a bolt of lightning and it bought Neil and his fans another couple of decades together, so who knows? Maybe it’s his best song ever.”

30.

I Believe In You

(After The Gold Rush, 1970)

All emotion, no imagery, in one of Young’s most direct love – or not-love songs. As selected by Linda Ronstadt.

“It’s my favourite out of the Neil songs I’ve covered. It’s about the ambiguities in personal relationships. The conflict of you liking them better than they like you – or it’s the other way round and you want to cut your heart out. What’s that first line? (Sings) ‘Now that you found yourself losing your mind/Are you here again?’ You fall for somebody and it’s suddenly beyond your control, no safety net, your life isn’t your own any more. The ambiguity of romance was pretty new back then – the pill, people getting divorced – a new road map emotionally and culturally which Neil was exploring. On the road chicks were throwing themselves at the guys all the time. Such upheaval! With someone for a few hours, then you get on a plane, you arrive somewhere else – like a hammer shattered your reality. The passionate ambiguity, the howling need, it’s there in I Believe In You… that’s hard to capture in words. And maybe the title, the refrain, is a vote of confidence in a strong connection that might turn into a lifetime friendship. When I recorded it, it gave me the chance to really stretch out and bellow. It’s very operatic, a tenor might sing it. Neil has a very interesting voice in that context, really compelling, almost counter-tenor. Aaron Neville is the only American singer I’d compare him to, that beautiful, pure sound, a horn, an angel.”

29.

Mellow My Mind

(Tonight’s The Night, 1975)

Rustic fantasies ease Neil’s rock star stress. As selected by Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall.

“I discovered the Tonight’s The Night album when I was in art school, I would have been 19. I loved the fact that it was so rough and ready, but I’m sure the label was completely fucking horrified… I was particularly drawn to Mellow My Mind because he couldn’t hit the high note – the vulnerability of that. I even considered emulating it on the cover version I did [on 1998’s Blue LP], but decided that was a cop too far. I love the melody, and the wonderful imagery. There’s something Huckleberry Finn about the lyric – the ‘schoolboy on good time/Jugglin’ nickels and dimes’ – only Neil Young can write things like that. On the tour bus, we always have debates about who’s the king, who’s the daddy – Bob Dylan or Neil – and the band’s unanimous that it’s Neil. He’s a teller of home truths. He gives you direct wisdom: ‘You’re all just pissing in the wind.’ He never dresses things up.”

28.

For The Turnstiles

(On The Beach, 1974)

Banjos, enigma and, perhaps, a prophecy? As selected by Fionn Regan.

“Neil Young is a sapphire in a deep well, a strange bird in a storm, a lantern in a black night. Picking just one song is a challenge, but For The Turnstiles weighs in both melodically and lyrically. When the first note kicks off it feels like a door has just swung open for you to stumble into a dingy tavern, sea salt hanging in the air, a foot thumping on a pallet, a banjo hammering. Like all great Neil Young lyrics, these are as emotionally direct as they are enigmatic. Listening now, when Neil sings, ‘All the great explorers/Are now in granite laid/Under sheets for the great unveiling/At the big parade,’ it could be a premonition of the musical climate which has since emerged.”

27.

Cowgirl In The Sand

(4 Way Street, 1971)

…Nowhere’s electric megajam becomes a slice of CSN&Y-serving acoustic serendipity. As selected by Smoke Fairies’ Katherine Blamire.

“When we were growing up Jessica [Davies]’s mum had a great collection of mostly ’70s vinyls and we used to listen to them constantly. One of those records was the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young live album 4 Way Street and that’s the first time we heard Cowgirl. When Neil Young takes the stage, the album really kicks off to another level, and the performance of this song is transporting, it makes you wish you were there. It’s lyrically pretty ambiguous – ‘Old enough now to change your name/When so many love you is it the same?’ It’s just the trace of a story you’re not allowed to entirely understand. Growing up in West Sussex, Cowgirl In The Sand inspired us to buy cowboy hats and wear them into town, where we used to go to shop and busk. We got massively heckled. I guess sometimes it’s best not to take the lyrics of a Neil Young song too literally.”

26.

Sugar Mountain

(single, 1968)

Childhood idyll remembered with regret. As selected by Ray Lamontagne.

“Every time I hear this song, everything gets painted in these autumn colours, and it takes me back to when I was seven. This guy named Red Randall had a ranch in Tennessee, and I lived in a bunk-house with my mom and my four sisters. My uncle lived in a Dodge Power Wagon nearby. My father was a musician in various bar bands, and at that time he was coming and going, mostly going, but I remember boxes of his old records around, and my uncle was always playing them. The beautiful melancholy of that melody, that other-worldly voice Neil had, really got to me, even then. Now, of course, listening to it, I can hear that it’s a song about losing innocence, that realisation that you have to leave the known and enter into the unknown. It’s a deep tune. And Neil was only 19 when he wrote it… Crazy.”

25.

Pocahontas

(Rust Never Sleeps, 1979)

Native America, and what we built on it. As selected by Kelley Stoltz.

“Neil is the gateway drug to anyone learning the guitar. Most songs of his are D to G and minor chords, simple progressions but they’re profound, beautiful songs. I love the acoustic songs on Rust Never Sleeps. I used to want Thrasher to be played at my funeral, but perhaps it’s a bit morose (laughs). Pocahontas’s opening line is so cool: ‘Aurora borealis, the icy sky at night/Paddles cut the water in a long and hurried flight,’ because you can really see those Indian dudes in their canoes. Neil often talks about how things were before every stone was turned, and how the more naïve, innocent way of life was disrupted. Pocahontos was written around the time of the oil crisis, and the emergence of global awareness of what man was doing. It’s one of the few of Neil’s songs I’ve done live, on piano, with a G Harmonica. That’s another thing; when you add harmonica, you can sound like Neil pretty quick. It’s the same way punk rock works; play a few chords up the neck, and you have the Ramones.”

24.

Harvest Moon

(Harvest Moon, 1992)

Neil reconvenes the Harvest team, 20 years on, makes sweet love to the missus. As selected by Stephanie Dosen.

 “It instantly evokes the moment. You’re in the back field, it’s getting dark, and immediately you’re dancing. It has that slow, molasses feel, you can feel the warmth of a summer night. Even after all these years, whenever I play Harvest Moon, it’s like the moment I’m playing it in becomes more important. That skippy guitar thing is so simple but totally alien. You’ve never heard anything like that on the radio with all that pop music trying so hard to impress; it’s so sweet and sad and slow and reflective. The lyrics are beautiful, too: (sings) ‘Because I’m still in love with you/I want to see you dance again.’ When the harvest moon appears, it means it’s time to pull in the crops, and that’s what Neil’s doing on that whole record. It’s like things have gone full circle from the Harvest album, when he sowed these seeds, and now it’s time to take stock of what he’s got before the freeze sets in.”

23.

Philadelphia

(Philadelphia OST, 1993)

A psalm to love and lost. As selected by MOJO writer Bill DeMain.

Call it a stealth power ballad. Philadelphia delivers its profound emotional wallop without any histrionics or obvious button-pushing pop devices. Shuffling a delicate haiku-like melody through alternating vocal and instrumental verses, it draws you into its still centre, where Young’s trembling voice pleads softly for love and acceptance. The accompaniment is sparse – piano and muted strings. The lyric is both vague and vast. Folded inside couplets such as “Sometimes I think that I know what love is all about/And when I see the light I know I’ll be all right” are invitations for us to add our own images and memories.

This open-ended quality made the song a perfect foil for the final scene in Jonathan Demme’s movie, Philadelphia, as family and friends gather to eulogise Tom Hanks’ character, who has died from AIDS. When Young heard that there wasn’t a dry eye in the house as the credits rolled at the film’s premiere, his sly comment was, “It must’ve been quite an emotional release. Probably the only thing I could’ve done to surpass that is Wayne’s World 2.” Demme was more straightforward: “It was the perfect way to send people home.”

'[Originally] I wanted the movie to start with a giant Neil Young guitar anthem to relax all the homophobic guys in the audience.'

Director Jonathan Demme

Originally, the director had requested a very different kind of tune. “I wanted the movie to start with a giant Neil Young guitar anthem to relax all the homophobic guys in the audience, who would go, ‘OK, Neil Young is on board, I’m open now.’ We cut the opening sequence to Southern Man. I was hoping to have Neil maybe compose the Southern Man of homophobia. So this tape arrived and my wife and I listened to it and it was this very unanthemic, exquisitely written song, and we were sitting there crying, and I thought, ‘We’re going to end this movie on this note.’”

Never one to recycle himself, Young had followed his muse towards a ghostly hymn. “I knew it wasn’t going to come easy,” he confessed. “To tell you the truth, the song’s actually quite a bit over my head in terms of playing. It’s hard to play, and it’s got to be played loose.”

Harmonically, it draws its Satie-meets-Bacharach richness from Major 6ths and 7ths, those split personality chords that straddle the line between happy and sad. Young stirs the emotional waters further by shifting the key of his instrumental verses up a step, which subtly insinuates that the “brotherly love” he sings of will forever remain out of reach. Difficult as it may have been for Young to play, he performed a stunning solo piano version at the 1994 Academy Awards, where it was up for Best Song. In an ironic twist, he lost the trophy to Bruce Springsteen’s Streets Of Philadelphia, the beatbox-driven anthem that opened the movie.

In the years since, Young has collaborated with Demme on two concert films, including 2006’s luminous Heart Of Gold, but has rarely reprised Philadelphia, content to leave it as both a hidden jewel in his catalogue (royalties going to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis Center), and maybe the most moving one-off film song ever.

22.

On The Beach

(On The Beach, 1974)

Fame sucks. I’m stoned. Fuck you anyway. As selected by The Cardigans’ Nina Persson.

“When I first heard this around 1997, I already loved Harvest, but I didn’t like the Crazy Horse stuff. This was something else: a third aspect of Neil that was bluesy and dark and insanely slow. Lots of songs deal with that ‘it’s lonely at the top’ thing, but most of them piss you off because someone successful is complaining. This one doesn’t. It’s bigger and more clever than that. I identified with it because I’ve always been mixed up about fame. In The Cardigans I wanted to be a team player, but I felt lonely, always having to do press by myself because that was what the press wanted. The whole lyric is so strong and so true, but the first time I heard Neil sing: ‘I went to the radio interview/But I ended up alone at the microphone,’ I just wept. He’s great at making you think without using complicated language. When you’re making a pop album you’re told every second is precious, but On The Beach just goes its own way at its own speed.”

21.

Tired Eyes

(Tonight’s The Night, 1975)

The true tale of a Topanga Canyon drug deal gone bad. As selected by The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn.

“It’s the idealism being fried out of someone, like rock’n’roll had reached this tipping point and gotten into violence and crime, something really scary. It’s really dark and really sad. And adult: it’s someone who’s lived and been hurt and is trying to deal with something that’s beyond him – the deaths of close friends to drugs. A really sad and confusing thing for anyone to go through. How amazing that he tried to get through it by playing music.”

20.

A Man Needs A Maid

(Live At Massey Hall 1971, 2007)

’Cos man cannot live on honey slides alone. As selected by Danny & The Champions Of The World’s Danny Wilson.

 “I remember very clearly the feeling I had when listening to Harvest the day after my exams were finished – one of the very few times I’ve felt completely free. But A Man Needs A Maid is so lonely and isolated and dark, something I would probably shy away from in my own work. I love the words – ‘the beggar goes from door to door’ – and though I’ve heard people discussing whether it’s a sexist song, I don’t see that. I see someone who’s lonely, someone who wants to shut themselves away entirely. We did our own cover in a night, me and Romeo [Stodart] from Magic Numbers and a guy called Rich Causon on keys. I’m very proud of it. It has some of the same loneliness but not the menace that’s in the Neil version on Harvest. Ultimately, though, I think the Massey Hall version is the version. That’s out there. Stripped of the orchestra the words are simply impossible to ignore.”

19.

Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)

(Rust Never Sleeps, 1979)

Neil takes up punk’s gauntlet: “Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?” As selected by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

“That song made my heart stop in a really big way. I first heard it walking down Canal St in NYC in 1979, coming out of a little radio speaker on the street, and the real molten, overamped guitar stopped me in my tracks. When I found that it was the new Neil Young record, I couldn’t believe it. I’d boxed a lot of pre-’76 music away. It was eradicated. But hearing Neil play Hey Hey My My for the first time reawakened for me the wonders of pre-punk music. That song inspired me to radicalise the guitar within songwriting. I saw him recently. He was playing Le Noise before it came out, sort of testing it. I went with a friend of mine named Bill Nace, an experimental guitarist who uses metal files and wooden sticks to create guitar music. I introduced him to Neil, said ‘This is Bill, he plays file guitar.’ And Neil’s like, ‘What’s that, file guitar?’ We explained, and Neil’s eyes just got real big, and then his people had to pull him away. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get a recording session with Neil where we just use files and sticks on our guitars, and just do experimental guitar stuff. That’s a dream of mine. He’s a busy man (laughs) but I have put word out.”

18.

Old Man

(Harvest, 1972)

The rock aristocracy’s favourite Neil Young song! As selected by David Crosby*.

 “Songs have to make you feel something in order to be good art and when I listen to that song, I think Neil still – when he sings it – feels the emotions that he felt about this old guy that was livin’ on his ranch and the similarity of their lives, the connection between ‘em. I liked it that he could see into the guy’s life and that he could see into his own life and he could see the similarities. He could put himself in his place. Neil’s a very good observer of other human beings. He’s not one for admitting that his age is passed or that he’s as old as he is. He wants to be out there on the front edge of creativity. He doesn’t like singing old songs or songs that show that a lot of time has passed for him. But I think Old Man is beautiful. Really beautiful and really insightful. One of the ones I loved singing with him the most.”

*Speaking to MOJO in 2011.

17.

Expecting To Fly

(Buffalo Springfield Again, 1967)

Or “Why I’m Leaving Buffalo Springfield,” wrapped in symphonic glory. As chosen by Dungen’s Reine Fiske.

“It’s a song that hits you straight away, because of the incredible Jack Nitzsche string arrangement that opens it up with this sun-drenched sound. It’s the ultimate bittersweet song, a song about him leaving the band, or a song for anyone who needs help letting go. The end of the song is beautifully cinematic. You can almost see someone, or yourself, going up into the sky. And, that’s the end of this amazing film. As a guitar player it’s pretty hard not to be struck by the guitar playing. You sense the actual condition he was in when he recorded things. The guitar can sound grumpy, or desperate. He is a very delicate player, but sometimes he just belts, and his sense of melody and timing is always amazing.”

16.

Tell Me Why

(After The Gold Rush, 1970)

“Is it hard to make arrangements with yourself?” We’ve all been there. As chosen by Neil’s six string sideman Nils Lofgren.

“To me, Tell Me Why is a metaphor for transition, between where you are and where you’re going. The tune’s wonderful, and Neil has this kind of stark, whimsical matter-of-fact voice. This was my first real session work, 18 and scared, so there’s a lot of uncertainty here, but hope too. Neil asked if I’d play acoustic guitar. He said, ‘We’ll sit across from each other, I might even have you sing live harmonies,’ so I did. But I didn’t have an acoustic guitar, so he handed me this beat-up D18 Martin, the one on the album sleeve. [Producer] David Briggs said Neil had been writing a lot on it, so it had a lot of mojo. I did a little finger-picking inside the licks, all pretty quickly, and we started tracking. The next day, Danny [Whitten], Ralphie [Molina] and Neil and I sang additional harmonies and that was it. There are no guarantees in life but I’m glad it went well. And Neil gave me his D18 Martin at the end of the session, which blew me away. I still use it today.”

17.

Southern Man

(After The Gold Rush, 1970)

Corrosive anti-Jim Crow blast. As selected by Villagers’ Conor O’Brien.

“Southern Man is the knife right in the middle of After The Gold Rush that cuts you really deeply. There’s something amazing about the production, the drum sound, the way his voice is, the way he uses the backing vocals – it’s like an army of men, and he’s in the middle, screaming. What makes Neil great is, he doesn’t seem to cross anything out. He just pukes onto a page, and that’s the song. And even if some of it is childish or sloppy, it’s all the more endearing for that. It’s not too studied or academic, it’s just getting right to the core. And Jesus Christ, the energy…”

14.

Cortez The Killer

(Zuma, 1975)

The Aztecs meet angel dust. As selected by MOJO writer Keith Cameron.

Stoned to its mainframe, Cortez The Killer is the ’70s hippy experience in toto: the rapture and the rot, the love and the loneliness. Neil Young in spring 1975 was stepping off a treadmill of trauma that began in 1972 with the death of Danny Whitten, then dived through the ‘Ditch’ album trilogy and a bitter CSN&Y reunion, culminating in the collapse of his relationship with Carrie Snodgress, mother of his son Zeke. He had much to reflect upon, and Cortez became its parent album’s totem, because for all its historical derivation, it feels deeply personal.

• READ MORE: Neil Young And Crazy Horse Live Reviewed: Rock’s greatest brotherhood make a blistering return.

We hear of a man who “came dancing across the water, with his galleons and guns/Looking for a new world, and that palace in the sun”, and obviously this is far more about Neil Young, the questing Canadian troubadour-turned-millionaire, than a 16th century Spanish conquistador and his Aztec counterpart (“with his coca leaves and pearls”). The Malibu home of producer David Briggs was a scene of depravity – drugs and girls were ever-present, dudes of varying depths of shadiness would wander by (one day Bob Dylan parked his car outside and just sat, listening) – with Young its epicentre, wielding power without responsibility (“And his subjects gathered ’round him…”).

A hallmark Young/Crazy Horse epic...

At seven and a half minutes, Cortez is a hallmark Young/Crazy Horse epic, configured around tension and release, and, of course, Young’s solos. The playing is ghostly and tentative, because this is the newly configured Horse, with the void left by Danny Whitten finally filled by Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, a proper hippy who carried a gun, did drugs for breakfast, and now found himself shadowing Neil Young, at that point entering a period of such luminosity on the electric guitar it would define him for ever more.

On Cortez, the ensemble’s sensitive performance is remarkable, because the participants were off their collective nut. According to his accounts in Jimmy McDonough’s Shakey, the bonkers Sampedro, whose drug du jour was heroin, had “conned” bassist Billy Talbot into smoking angel dust with him as they recorded Cortez. So that’s how they sound so relaxed. “I thought the second chord was the first chord,” said Sampedro, who was nodding out as they played. “It’s only three chords.” The finished cut was pieced together by Briggs, a considerable feat given that the power to the console failed during the take, and by the time it came back a whole verse had been lost. When told, Young stated: “I never liked that verse anyway.”

This, along with the lyric’s dubious historical accuracy – Young later claimed they were written as high school homework – and the fact of its vocal not arriving until 3’22”, confirms that Cortez is all about the journey… and what gets left behind. When Young switches from third- to first-person (“I still can’t remember when, or how I lost my way”), the penny finally drops. The Horse are bombed, Neil is flying; the rest of us follow, seduced. It’s brilliant, but barely there.

13.

Ohio

(Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young single, 1970, compiled on Decade, 1977)

Neil’s requiem for Kent State. As selected by Pretenders leader, and survivor, Chrissie Hynde.

“I don’t claim to cast light on why it happened. But I was there. I was 19, studying art. Jeff Miller, who was shot dead, was in my circle of friends. Obviously, we were in shock. Then Neil Young comes out with that song and there’s understanding and an acknowledgement. Kent State University is 10 miles from my hometown, Akron. It was straight left-wing. Vietnam had polarised the nation. Then [Thursday, April 30, 1970] Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. The next night everyone gathered in town. We drank beer and dropped acid and wheeled these garbage cans into the street and set them on fire. An impromptu demonstration.

“On the Saturday we all went up to the campus and we burnt down this ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] building. The National Guard had arrived and they threw tear gas at us. So we ran away. I was in the stampede and somebody near me yelled, ‘Walk!’ I did and, ever since, I’ve thought it’s a metaphor in life; when there’s trouble someone has to yell, ‘Walk!’

'I heard shots and people screaming...'

Chrissie Hyde

“Sunday was quiet. Monday was half-term and I was taking my portfolio to the art building – walking with Jeff’s girlfriend, in fact. You had to go through the Commons where the ROTC building had been. Another protest was going on and the National Guard had surrounded it – the four inches of charcoal that remained. Kids with rifles, some of them in the shooting position. Kids like us except their parents couldn’t afford to send them to university. A lot of students threw rocks at them.

“Then it got confusing. I heard shots, maybe 12 [official count: 67] and people screaming ‘They’ve killed them!’ I sat down right where I was and refused to move. I didn’t see anything more until some soldiers carried me away. By then, they had killed four students and wounded nine. The campus was closed down and there were crowds of us on the highway hitching, trying to get home.

“I knew Jeff was a big fan of CSN&Y, so the song meant a lot. It rocks, it’s melodic and it means something. It had a great hook: ‘Four dead in Ohio…’ That stands on its own. Expressed what we couldn’t express. Even now. We needed someone like Neil to give us a voice. Songs like this can instruct you, give you ideas… just make you feel you’re not alone, that more than anything. Ohio was a comfort for everyone caught up in the Kent State shootings.

“Music was my life. People like The Beatles, Hendrix, they gave you license to explore something else, more mystical maybe, that higher consciousness. Adults didn’t know what they were talking about because they weren’t on acid. But it worked for me, I never turned back. You were on a mission, you didn’t want to think it all meant nothing. Hippy ideology wasn’t just a fashion to me; I fucking believed it and I still do.

“I’d been falling in love with Neil Young from the genius solo albums and Helpless. Later I met him and I did say, “Thanks for writing Ohio.” He’s a really gracious, humorous person. And obviously one of the gods.”

12.

Powderfinger

(Rust Never Sleeps, 1979)

Ringing riff, sky-scraping solo, the Horse’s most fetching “ooh”s. What’s not to like? As selected by Band Of Horses’ Ben Bridwell.

“Powderfinger isn’t just one of my favourite Neil songs, it’s one of the best songs ever recorded. How did someone else not pick this before me? The story being told often catches me off guard like I’ve never heard it before, even though I’ve heard it countless times. The lyrics seem so personal and at the same time distant. Just when you think you know what the plot is, you can hear the words differently and re-imagine the story line. Like, “Red means run, son, numbers add up to nothing.” It’s funny to sing along with conviction and realise you have no idea what the meaning is. Hillbilly soap opera? Civil War drama? I don’t need to know.”

11.

Tonight’s The Night

(Tonight’s The Night, 1975)

Tears in your tequila, and spook in your heart as Neil seizes the day. As selected by Joe Henry.

“I knew who he was, of course: my older brother owned a copy of Déjà Vu. But the hippies-as-desperados stance failed to work on me, thus I never allowed myself to be seduced by Neil Young until he’d slipped the yoke of shimmering, smooth harmonies and left real blood on the tracks. Tonight’s The Night changed my mind, Neil crooning like a prison escapee calling on the glow of the moon for assistance while trying not to wake his cellmate: “Tonight’s the night… Tonight’s the ni-hi-hi-hi-ight…“ The night for what? To break free or die, that’s what. Neil is confronting what it means to live and create, to hold a small flickering flame in the fierce headwind of death’s inevitability.

“Neil was only 28 when he wrote and recorded this, his voice speaking with the craggy defiance of a man already grown old; but when he mourns his friend with the shaky voice – the spark in his eyes and his life in his hands – who does it sound like he’s describing? Whom is he really mourning? Well, you don’t need me to tell you. But therein lay his true liberation: because in embracing his own mortality, Neil Young is free of it. It’s a gift and a generous one, to shine a light back for the rest of us from up along such a dark and spooky road.”

10.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

(Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

Here comes the bummer. And yet, jauntily. As selected by Roy Harper.

“I first heard this track in a flat in Chelsea when one of The Who’s road crew brought in a copy of the album. He was raving about it and as soon as he put it on I thought, This is a great record. I knew that Buffalo Springfield were a good band but I didn’t really take Neil Young too seriously up until that point, but after hearing this I saw him as an individual. It didn’t matter whether he joined Crosby, Stills And Nash – which he did, of course – because this music marked him out as a genuine solo artist. The song itself is plaintive. It cries out in the way that Neil Young does, like a voice in the wilderness. It’s full of an emotion that was prevalent among all of us at the time: it’s a leaving song and we all wanted to leave behind the mess that faced us. We all wanted to clamber onto those wooden ships and escape, knowing that the state was coming and its power was getting bigger. It’s personal on one level, but more than that: it suggested that the things we were enjoying weren’t going to last. When I hear it now, it takes me back to that flat in Chelsea. It’s a dim and distant memory of a time when the world could be righted.”

9.

The Needle And The Damage Done

(Harvest, 1972)

Gorgeously picked elegy to Danny Whitten’s dissipating talent, and more. As selected by Gang Of Four’s Jon King.

“It’s the quintessential Neil Young. He’s the guy in the plaid shirt drinking in some anonymous bar, telling the story of a friend, maybe secretly himself, in that very honest and unironic way. There’s been so much cleverness, postmodernism in lyric writing, as if we’re all in an elaborate gag about culture. Neil Young is the antidote to that. Here he’s talking about the cost of hard drugs, the way it destroys your talent and worse, but in a way where you could be overhearing a conversation on the subway. He’s got that fragile sort of Smokey Robinson voice, like he’s still trying to grapple with the situation. You sense he’s very on the edge. And then it’s funny the way the song doesn’t really resolve itself. ‘But every junkie’s like a setting sun…’ And? It’s like he’s run out of things to say, because there are no more things to say. When people I know have died from overdoses – I think of [sometime Gang Of Four bassist] Buster Jones and Malcolm [Owen] of The Ruts – you get angry with them. It seems so aimless. It’s trite to say it’s a waste but it is a waste, and there is no full stop to the sentence.”

8.

Mr. Soul

(Buffalo Springfield Again, 1967)

Satisfaction fed through Neil’s mincer: “You’re strange, but don’t change.” As selected by Rush’s Geddy Lee.

“When we were growing up in Toronto, we were all big Buffalo Springfield fans, and Neil Young was one of our first heroes. We used to play Mr. Soul when we were a struggling bar band. We were trying to play our own material, but you couldn’t get work unless you played cover songs. So we tried to find cover songs that were not so obvious, not Top 40 songs. We were pretty crude and pretty loud, and so is Mr. Soul, so it would go over pretty well with our crowd. Neil Young is someone I really respect. We met in 1985 when a bunch of Canadian artists got together to record a single to raise money for African famine charities [under the name Northern Lights]. We did a song called Tears Are Not Enough that Bryan Adams wrote, and all these different singers each sang a line. David Foster was producing, and I remember watching another of my heroes, Joni Mitchell, sing her line. In my view, it was perfect the first time, but David made her sing it over and over. Then Neil Young sang his line, and Foster said, ‘Can you do it again? I think there’s a little bit out of pitch.’ But Neil said, ‘Hey man, that’s my style!’ And that was that. That really summed up Neil Young for me. The guy’s got big balls.”

7.

Down By The River

(Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

Creeping, loping, groping: Neil and Crazy Horse find their groove. As selected by Crazy Horseman Billy Talbot.

“I don’t know how Down By The River evolved in Neil’s mind, but as far as the band is concerned, we went up to his house and he started playin’ and we started playin’ this song. A couple days later we came back and played it some more and that was that – we had it. The Rockets – the band Crazy Horse came from – were a jamming band in our own rehearsal room. We would play these two- or three-chord jams for an hour with Bobby Notkoff playing violin and George or Leon Whitsell or Danny Whitten taking solos. That’s what we did. Then we went in with Neil, and we naturally elongated his songs just the same way. But I really don’t think of these songs as individual things. I think of the total work of the man and what it represents. Some of these songs affected me at times differently. In the overall, I think it’s all of his work together that really is something to contemplate. It’s a big picture of one man’s view of his life on the planet: colossal, for one man to have accomplished in our time. Not somebody from history, but somebody who no doubt will be noted and be a part of history. That’s why it’s hard for me to think of him in terms of one song. They’re all good!”

6.

Helpless

(Déjà Vu, 1971)

Nature’s wonders knock him flat with awe. Yes, it’s “helpless” in a good way. As selected by k.d. lang.

“That song, it’s connective tissue to my Canadian musical DNA. ‘There is a town in North Ontario…’ [Young grew up in tiny Omemee, lang in tinier Consort, Alberta]. To me, Helpless is about looking back at your beginnings: ‘I still need a place to go/All my changes were there.’ He’d got into an emotional block, it seems, and that place, the physical beauty, set him free somehow. I can relate to that. ‘Blue windows behind the stars’: I’ve had my moments out on the prairie contemplating the universe. ‘The chains are locked/And ties across the door’ gives me the image of a summer cabin being locked up for winter. But it’s an emotional winter he’s talking about. And the chorus, ‘Helpless, helpless, helpless’, that’s pure, innocent awe of physical and spiritual beauty — not vulnerability, but the polar opposite: openness. Singing Neil’s music helps me discover who I am, my primordial natural self. He is the standard of truth and… rawness. I never asked Neil what he meant by Helpless. But when he had the aneurysm and I stood in for him at the 2005 Junos [Canadian music awards], I sang it and he called and left a sweet message on my voicemail…”

5.

Like A Hurricane

(Weld, 1991)

Force 12 assault on American Stars ’N Bars’ epic. Young’s axe apotheosis. As selected by Richard Hawley.

 “I’d like to know more about him as a guitar player because that album, Weld, the guitar-playing on that is just immense. Forget the individual songs, his guitar playing has influenced me far more than his songwriting. When he plays guitar he doesn’t seem to have any formal time-limit. He goes beyond the form of the song and all of a sudden these wings appear out of his back and he just flies. It’s beautiful to watch. It seems to be a great release for him. I hear angels in it; all of a sudden a human being can fly, human flight is possible. There’s only him and Hendrix who you listen to and just go, ‘Fuckin’ ‘ell!’ My dad in the ’60s worked with Little Walter and he said that Walter would pick up any harmonica and any microphone and any amp and it didn’t matter. What got that sound was him. And I wonder how much of Neil Young’s sound as a guitarist is down to the equipment or down to him. He’s a force of nature.”

4.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

(After The Gold Rush, 1970)

Joni Mitchell dumps Graham Nash. Neil rubs salt in the wound. As selected by Galaxie 500’s Dean Wareham.

“It’s one of his most beautiful and simplest ballads, easily in his top five! I first heard it in Michael Almereyda’s film Another Girl, Another Planet. It’s a dreamlike meditation on a string of romances that don’t work out, and that dreamy feeling is enhanced by the fact he made it in blurry monochrome Pixelvision. It’s like nothing is real and everyone is lost and to me Only Love Can Break Your Heart carries that message. It was a perfect moment of film and song working together. It’s what they call a ‘connecting lyric’ in that most human beings can relate to it. It describes the saddest truths about the human condition: that you fall in love with someone and end up being destroyed, or destroying someone. There aren’t many lyrics that can sum that up. The other thing I love is that it’s in three-four time, which balances the depressing message and makes the lyric feel uplifting. There’s just something about that time signature: because it’s missing one beat, it pulls you through to the next part of the song.”

3.

Heart Of Gold

(Harvest, 1972)

The monster hit in the canon. Raw as sushi, catchy as a lullaby. As selected by Sheryl Crow.

 “I first heard the song in high school, when all the girls would embroider Neil Young’s or Bob Dylan’s names in their jeans. The first thing that struck me was the haunting, lonesome quality of Neil’s voice, and how it cuts right to your own emotions, especially when he’s singing his softer stuff. Lyrically, Neil has this cinematic simplicity that perfectly suits his vocal, and Heart Of Gold is super-poignant and articulate without wordiness or forced intellect – like, who else could get so much out of “And I’m getting old…”? Lyric and voice just flow as one musical emotion – he is like a tour de force of emotion. And that’s whether he’s being vulnerable and soft as on Heart Of Gold or Old Man, or sonic and menacingly intense like on Down By The River or Southern Man. Nobody has sounded remotely like him before or ever since.”

2.

Cinnamon Girl

(Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 1969)

What you hear when someone says “the Crazy Horse sound”. As selected by Metallica’s Kirk Hammett.

 “I can’t really remember the first time I heard Cinnamon Girl, but I imagine I was in my teens, riding in the back of a friend’s truck drinking Mickey’s Big Mouths. The second you hear it you’re drawn into the heavy rhythmic push and lean of the riff… kinda like hard rock but much more swampy and greasy. When the verse comes, Neil’s vocal with Danny Whitten has a lovely soft/heavy dynamic and when they go back into the main riff at 1:32 you can hear Neil turn his distortion pedal on – two seconds late! – to make the riff sound heavier. I love stuff like that.

“What’s cool about Neil is that he never hesitates to try whatever it takes to get his point across musically. Whether it’s just him on acoustic guitar, him solo on the piano, or with Crazy Horse, it seems that he will find the best way to play the song, whether it’s grungy or doo-wop… He always finds the best way to serve his music.”

1.

After The Gold Rush

(After The Gold Rush, 1970)

Alchemy, prophecy and ecology in one magical, timeless vision. As selected by MOJO writer Jim Irvin.

Neil Young’s enigmatic masterpiece is set in the past, present and future – the past: a medieval battlefield; the present: a basement where the narrator lies comatose; the future: a farewell gathering as refugees from a ruined Earth – The Chosen Ones – disappear into outer space. It is, according to Young himself, “an environmental song” declaring Mother Nature to be “on the run in the 1970s” and lyrically it’s unlike anything else he’s written. It is simultaneously broadbrushed and detailed, chilling and comforting, baffling and evocative, immediate and elusive.

It’s a work which raises many questions. For instance, Why that title, which isn’t referred to in the lyric? Does it concern Earth as an abandoned planet, its resources spent, like an exhausted mining town? Does it perhaps refer to the comedown from a particularly vivid trip? Or does it take a sly dig at Young’s recent sojourn as a suffix to Crosby, Stills And Nash for the disappointing, but lucrative, Déjà Vu album? Subconsciously, maybe; all those interpretations hold water. But the title originally belonged to a movie script written by actor Dean Stockwell. Young was so impressed by it he offered to direct and write the score, yet, even after the runaway success of Easy Rider, the hot young actor and his singing sidekick couldn’t convince any Hollywood squares to bankroll their peculiar vision and this song – which Stockwell thought perfectly captured the jump-cutting surrealism of his script – and one other, Cripple Creek Ferry, are all that remain of the project.

Young created it in a cramped studio he built at his Topanga Canyon home. Having tried recording the standard, company-approved way, he was keen to start cutting records using his own, more ad hoc methods. Eight of the album’s songs were recorded in this tiny space – with barely enough room for Young, his producer and one other musician, and no facilities for reverb or fancy effects. So it sounds small, dry and vulnerable.

Young plays the song on an upright piano in the key of D major, which, in the early months of 1970, when he was still only 24, put him in the register of a washed-up choirboy. After a 10-second intro, over the chords of D and G, the wavering voice enters with a slightly tentative delivery: “Well I dreamed I saw the knights in armour coming…” It’s all hopeful, major chords, D, G and A, until the words “fanfare blowing”, over a B minor introduce a shiver of unease.

It’s nothing short of miraculous for such a unique, complex and eternally resonant moment in pop music...

In verse two the narrator comes to in a burnt-out basement and lies there for some hours, from full moon to sun-up. He can hear music in his head (the B minor again) and he fancies getting high. When Dolly Parton covered the song with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt for their Trio II album, she called Young up to explain the song. He confided that each verse depended on what drug he’d taken at the time. Parton changed “and I felt like getting high” to “and I felt like I could cry.”

The only other colour on Young’s recording is a mournful horn solo after the second verse by Bill Peterson. It’s generally assumed that this uncredited performance is played on a French horn, but Peterson recalls it as the more trumpet-like flugelhorn.

For verse three we move into science fiction territory, the “chosen ones” are being readied to colonise space. Unlike the previous verses, where the final lines are repeated in full, “flying Mother Nature’s silver seed to a new home in the sun” is cut short the second time, the word “home” is held on an unresolving note while the piano fades. We are what’s left of mankind, watching our representatives, our own children maybe, sailing towards an unknown future. The hope and despair in that final “home” is almost unbearable.

Randy Newman has praised the song’s eloquent confusion: “I can’t stand that sort of ‘meadow rock’ thing – Neil’s doing it, and writing about a big issue in a simplistic way, but I still like it. I love it. There’s some kind of alchemy going on.” Strangely, contemporary reviews were rather snooty. Rolling Stone gave After The Gold Rush, the album, a resounding raspberry.

But it was huge seller. In 1975, the title song’s majesty was recognised more widely when a Dutch group, Prelude, had a major chart hit in the UK with a brief, haunting a cappella version. It has since been covered many times, by artists ranging from The King Singers to kd lang and its simple but supremely moving melody has inspired many instrumental versions from jazz piano to fretless bass and Irish fiddle.

Producer David Briggs claimed this glorious, time-travelling odyssey was conjured in about half-an-hour and recorded immediately. It seems unlikely, considering what initiated it (and Young’s conversation with Parton), but if that’s so, it’s nothing short of miraculous for such a unique, complex and eternally resonant moment in pop music.

MOJO's New Neil Young Special Is Out Now!

MOJO’s deluxe Neil Young special edition MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Neil Young Essentials is on sale and available to order now. Over 132 pages filled with rare and iconic photographs, our team of expert Neil-ologists guide you through the maze of Neil Young releases, including in-concert albums, film projects and books, as well as a full survey of his ongoing Archives series. Your definitive guide to Neil Young’s albums, songs, films and books, MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Neil Young Essentials is on sale now and available to order for delivery HERE!

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When Le Guess Who? (LGW?) began in 2007, it was primarily the musical wishlist of two men (Bob van Heur and Johan Gijsen). At the opening of its 20th edition, van Heur confesses it has become such a highly anticipated and prestigious event that he has a team of sonic fanatics dream up bills so esoteric even he doesn’t know everyone playing. Over the course of the past few years, the line-up has become increasingly focused on unheralded acts the organisers think you should hear for the first time, the only guarantee being that you will leave - to quote a panelist on one of the symposiums - “with your mind de-colonised”.

Perhaps only LGW could get away with booking Tortoise - arguably the most well-known band of the weekend - and scheduling them not as Saturday-night headliner but as Thursday’s amouse-bouche. It’s a stridently anti-pop groove but loosens us up for a session with Ethiopia’s Ibex Band, Swinging Addis Ababa’s equivalent of Booker T & The MGs 50-something years ago. “You might know these songs from online or AI,” notes veteran guitarist Selam Woldemariam after a glorious Tezeta, “but we played them first.”

In the city centre arts complex Tivoli Vredenberg, it’s just an escalator ride to Austin, Texas collective Water Damage. They demurred when asked to play a three-hour set, saying that would be “too intense”; instead, they deliver two hours of Static Ecstatic - “Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation”, or (to the more cynical) “two hours, one for each chord” - during which a revolving cast of more than 20 swap instruments and induce transcendence for those who stick it out for the duration. MOJO’s out-of-body experience kicked in just after the 85th-minute mark.

Friday afternoon begins in the medieval Jacobikerk, where Roy Montgomery and Martha Skye Murphy give the first and probably last performance of this year’s album Nebular. Via waves of azure surf-ambient guitar and ecstatic, wordless howling, the space reverberates, the mind ripples, and when someone breaks a glass just as one spiritually charged song ends, Murphy observes “musique concrète there” with perfect comic timing.

Never let it be said LGW? encourages complacency. At 5pm things start to get seriously unhinged with goat (JP), whose intensely disciplined skeletal minimalism - think industrial techno meets Osaka noir – reaches heights of eruptive intensity and deep quiet with equal sang-froid. The Japanese art rock rolls on with the all-female OOIOO, who again balance chops and mercilessness in extreme form, operating with no map but still arriving at dramatic destinations. And, when frontwoman YoshimiO (also of Boredoms) gets her trumpet out, it’s like the Teardrop Explodes have suddenly parachuted in from five miles up.

The latter two bands are the switchback antithesis of the joyous Tropicalia of Pra Gira Girar, whose sunlit cheer seems quite radical amongst the question marks and enigmas running riot elsewhere. There is similar uplift full-throttled Bnet El Houariyat, led by Khadija Warzazia, seven Moroccan women battering percussion at lightning speed (including a gong worn on the head and one performer playing a tin tray), then suggestively shaking every one of their curves as a prelude to onstage cartwheels. In contrast, a rather beautiful show from Shabaka Hutchings comes as some relief, his flute, sax and clarinet flowing seamlessly through an imagined day, from dawn to sun-up. It seems like a chilled reminder that preserving energy may be in order, as the weekend is only hotting up. Unless you went to see 20 Years Of GNOD, where super-heavy psych-rock sludge from Salford is released via four guitarists, two drummers and a bassist.

Saturday’s mood-setter is Bethlehem in the Jakobskirk, where symbolic white and red lights are reminders of peace and bloodshed and the fragility of life; the music, however, blends electronica with ancient Greek Orthodox hymns. How else could we follow that but with veteran Dutch punks The Ex, their riffs here augmented by a thumping backline of brass? Imagine, if you will, Status Quo in their imperial pomp, backed by The Memphis Horns. That good.

For the rest of the evening, MOJO goes Caribbean, firstly with the traditions of Colombia’s Martina Camargo, then the Venezuelan stew of Raúl Monsalve Y Los Forajidos. The ingredients are familiar - no-wave, new wave, jazz-funk-psychedelia - but they are mixed in such a way that the final dish is wholly unpredictable.

The main course, though, is the 24-hour Dub event happening at the shuddering, metal, out-of-town warehouse that is the Kabul A-Go Go. Hammering the chest, limbs and head, the local Krackfree Soundsystem does the bass honours. As his MC states twice, Channel One mixing legend Scientist (main picture) is here to play 1981’s Scientist Rids The World Of The Curse Of The Evil Vampires LP. Rhythms are re-rendered, elements re-imagined and we enjoy surprise inclusions of The Abyssinians’ Satta Massagana and I Love Marijuana by Scientist’s old colleague Linval Thompson – not exactly a note-perfect recreation, then, but no-one minds. After Greentea Peng DJs some choice reggae cuts, festival fave The Bug and the similarly black-clad Ghost Dubs play the undead techno of their 2025 collaboration Implosion. Filling the place with dry ice, strobes and grinding distortion, their indoor hailstorm of noise stays just on the right side of punishment. After a fabulous hour with veteran Hackney selector Aba-Shanti-I, The Bug comes back to hit the acid dancehall with long-term MC Warrior Queen. Over rupturing ragga rhythms and sonic dirt, she commands the crowd to feel the energy and, at one point, sagely points out that it’s not how big it is, it’s what you do with it that counts. Wise words. MOJO makes it out at 4.30am, but the dub goes on for another twelve hours.

Our heads suitably messed, Sunday kicks into gear slowly, a melancholy pall hanging over us as we realise it’s the closing day. For the bands, of course, no such regret is conceivable, and Etran De L’Air are a dose of pure adrenalin. Know anyone planning their nuptials and unable to find a DJ? This Saharan wedding band may be exactly what you are looking for - they are certainly a good excuse to ignore your limbs’ screams of exhaustion.

Unlikely star of the weekend, though, is Iranian percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, who uses a goblet-shaped drum and a frame drum to conjure up a mesmeric rolling thunderstorm of beats that would leave the most math-minded techno producer reeling. That’s the show: one man and his utter mastery of his art - but it’s a privilege to experience it.

The Dirty Three’s great showman, Warren Ellis, doesn’t appear to have mastered where exactly he is - “The name of the festival eludes me” - but the cataclysmic squall and messianic fervour the Australian trio bring to the stage as the clock winds down would raise the dead in the Ballater cemetery the young violinist once haunted. He has two pieces of advice to dispense: all retired over-65s should forms electronica bands; and we should all “live the best lives you possibly can.” To do the latter, be at Le Guess Who? next year, whoever is on the bill.

Le Guess Who? next takes place from November 11-14, 2027, in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

Exclusive! A full immersion in the alternative universe of the original Genesis frontman, solo one-off and thinking-person’s musical maverick. Our in-depth interview includes his latest album, the story of Sledgehammer, new plans for The Lamb…, and more. Also in this issue: the Best Albums Of 2026 in our bumper Review Of The Year; The Animals, uncaged; R.E.M.’s darkest, and finest hours; going dotty for Angine De Poitrine; Steve Diggle’s Buzzcocks odyssey; the Womacks’ soul dynasty. Plus: Love, Morphine; Shane MacGowan; 10cc; Judy Collins; Rezillos; Ryley Walker; Pretty Things; The Cramps; Gram Parsons’ loopy sci-fi flick; and more!

THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD is Peter Gabriel: Signal To Noise 1977-2026, an exclusive Peter Gabriel compilation curated by Peter Gabriel. Features classics, live tracks, mouthwatering rarities and fascinating collabs. Unmissable!

PLUS! Only available when you buy a copy of the new issue, a bespoke 2027 calendar featuring 12 iconic photographs of some of MOJO's best-loved artists*.

HAVE MOJO 398 SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

CONTENTS MOJO 398

PETER GABRIEL A new album prompts a deep dive into a true original’s take on music and the world. Genesis, solo dissidence, ’80s stardom and what he’s learned. “I like the idea of following your nose,” he tells Mark Blake.

THE BEST OF 2026 The 75 Best New Albums, 20 Best Reissues, best books, films and stories. Macca, Beck, Beatles, Rush, Elliott Smith, Angine De Poitrine and more. Nod sagely, disagree wildly, and plug the gaps in your listening year.

THE ANIMALS Rare performances and a lost documentary shine new light on the North East’s R&B rebels – and how ambition, exploitation, and LSD spelled their fate.

R.E.M. How, teetering on the brink of dissolution after Bill Berry’s flit and the challenges of Up, the “three-legged dog” got back to its feet on 2001’s Reveal.

THE WOMACK SISTERS The breakthrough trio carry with them the soul DNA, and troubled stories, of Sam Cooke, Cecil, Linda and Uncle Bobby Womack: “There was a lot of tragedy.”

STEVE DIGGLE Buzzcocks’ buzzsaw guitar and ceaseless dynamo on the positives of punk, ‘jousting’ with Pete Shelley and more. “It was heavy at times,” he tells Pat Gilbert.

MORPHINE Mark Sandman’s shocking death in 1999 robbed alt-rock of a hip, sardonic voice and a crepuscular sound. Now music from the archives revives his, and their, story.

REVIEWED Shane MacGowan / 10cc / Radie Peat / Julian Cope / Michael Kiwanuka / Jimmy Webb / Kelley Stoltz / The Church / The Mars Volta / Lee Ranaldo / La Roux / Bap Kennedy / Kim Deal / His Lordship / Nouvelle Vague / Paul Weller / Howlin Rain / Bob Dylan / Ween / The Clash / Don Cherry / The Doors / Sparks / Siouxsie & The Banshees / Sebadoh / Jelly Roll Morton

PLUS Rush check in, mid-tour / Gram Parsons’ loopy sci-fi flick / The Pretty Things, anthologised / Wendy Eisenberg and My New Band Believe have Risen / Ryley Walker gets glitchy / Johnny Echols keeps Love alive / The Rezillos get their due / Judy Collins takes a (final?) bow / Kid Congo’s Cramps stint / Lambchop’s Ink Spots obsession / How To Buy… Animal Collective and their sub-species / Sayonara, the Mighty Sparrow, Cronos from Venom… / Buy Elvis’s nunchuks! / more!

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*2027 calendar available on UK newsstands and with online orders only.

U2 - Carnaval De Luz

★★★★

UMC / ISLAND

“We need some carnival here, it can’t all be ashes,” Bono told U2’s official fanzine Propaganda earlier this year. “We’re going to try to make the light brighter real soon.” He wasn’t joking: as the title suggests, Carnaval De Luz, the band’s first album of new material since 2017’s Songs Of Experience, is a wind-tunnel rush of colour and sound, a concerted attempt to work against the enveloping misery engendered by the current state of the world. “Don't want to make a devil bigger / stop repeating his name,” asserts the singer on the defiant bunker singalong of Midnight Sunshine. These songs are the opposite of doom scrolling, focusing on the tiny pinpricks of light, the little flashes of hope.

• READ MORE: U2 Interviewed: “I just want to write great tunes, because that’s where U2 started, with big choruses, clear ideas...”

Carnaval De Luz is not, however, intolerably Pollyanna-ish, despite occasional platitudinous lapses. U2 have been operating according to their own slightly out-of-sync liturgical calendar this year, beginning with the Ash Wednesday release of the Days Of Ash EP. A bale of ripped-from-the-headlines protest songs addressing the Middle East, Ukraine, ICE. It was followed by the Easter Lily EP - a more meditative collection informed by the aftershocks that shake faith and friendships.

With Larry Mullen Jr back after his medical absence, this is U2 returned to full strength, cheerleading for a flawed humanity. Go (Carnaval De Luz) revs up into a jagged electronic call for community; Silencio, echoing a sweet-sour Buzzcocks call-and-response capers between sacred and profane. La Reina’s excitable Pop Musik, saluting a quasi-heavenly carnival queen, plays a similar game, theatrical sparkle replaced by spiritual glimmer: “nobody is alone,” sings Bono, “but nobody knows that.”

When it comes to the spiritual, it works on both micro and macro levels, the physical detail and the cosmic big picture. If The World Is At War We Better Not Be, mistily recalls distant pre-U2 days (“I was standing in the schoolyard / waiting for you to happen to me”), testament to the power of small-scale bonds: love, friendship, community, bands. The Greatest Show On Earth tugs at a With Or Without You thread, a Blakean search for God at the cellular level.

“Sing me a song like a boxing glove,” sings Bono on Midnight Sun and Carnaval De Luz can be on-the-nose. Street Of Dreams, betraying its Bon Iver-esque opening, is best treated as uplifting propaganda for the Street Child World Cup, while The Mirror Maker (Rosalia) is an uneasy salute to the Spanish pop star (“Mamaladyday!” yelps Bono excitably). There’s a more successful elevation of female energy with Torn. As Can’t Stop Us Now dissolves in chaos, a gentle electronic pulse clears the air and Dolly Parton materialises, duetting with Bono about “a house divided” – A family? A country? People at war? - her voice cracking with mother-of-the-world grief.

• READ MORE: Every U2 Album Ranked

“Break the glass in case of emergency,” whispers Bono on The Mirror Maker (Rosalia), and this record feels like U2’s attempt to hand on a little supply of hope, comfort and light. It’s hugely generous: bold, adventurous, refusing despair. Fifty years since they came together in the schoolyard, U2 still throw one hell of a parade.

Carnaval De Luz is out November 13 on UMC/Island.

Tracklisting:

Go (Carnaval De Luz)

La Reina

Street Of Dreams

The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)

Superficiality

If The World Is At War We Better Not Be

Silencio

The Greatest Show On Earth

Glorify

Midnight Sunshine

Can’t Stop Us Now

Torn (Feat. Dolly Parton)

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!

Steven Wilson - Requiem For A Village

★★★★

FICTION

The album’s title derives from David Gladwell’s 1976 film about rural lifestyle and traditions under threat, and opens with David Tennant’s recitation of Andy Partridge’s text describing a scene of “Fluffed and flattened farm gardens/Diced by dark hedge crosswords”. But attempts to re-connect with such an idyll become increasingly disquieting and on Now Departing: Hireath (“a longing for home” in Welsh) Wilson keeps warning, “The train will just bring you back here”. On the title track, monastic chorales introduce a dazzling band performance of twisting riffs and flamboyant lead guitar over speedy syncopated drumming.

By contrast, Murmuration delves into Folk Horror via sumptuous vocal harmonies, eerie mellotron and a nod to the traditional murder ballad, Cruel Sister. Throughout all this turmoil the “Giant white horse on the hill” stares down, presumably with some bafflement. Wilson envisaged the album as a challenge and it’s certainly one worth taking.

Requiem For A Village is out November 6 on Fiction.

Tracklisting:

1. Swirl In a Lark's Eye
2. Requiem for a Village
3. The Same River Twice
4. Now Departing
5. Hireath
6. On Chapel Slope
7. Murmuration
8. Cursus Fingerprint
9. A Basket of Bees
10. Great Green Map
11. Wheel
12. The Old God is Buried

Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure

★★★★★

UMR/ISLAND/EMI

October 1972: with Roxy Music’s first 45 Virginia Plain still airborne, Bryan Ferry, wearing gold-trimmed black silk pyjamas, was convalescing from a tonsillectomy. “I may never sing again,” he said, drily. “But I can’t promise anything.”

• READ MORE: Roxy Music Interviewed: “My singing was pretty odd…”

Ferry’s voice was musical Marmite, shivering and trembling like a lounge singer from Mars. Expressive to the point of caricature, it stretched the bounds of believability to such an extent that some questioned its sincerity. There were similar misgivings over Roxy’s trailblazing, wildly eclectic music. “Style over substance,” grumbled rock TV host Bob Harris earlier that year. Duane Eddy, ’60s girl groups and King Crimson were all part of the band’s mischievous raiding of pop’s various pasts, a practice so ostentatious and unprecedented that detractors dubbed them ‘Poxy Music’.

The naysayers got it wrong. Punk was raised on Roxy. So too the ‘designed’ acts of the MTV era. The mixing of styles that had enraged Roxy’s enemies has now been standard for decades – with one major difference. Roxy Music’s superpower was its eccentricities, rather than any adherence to orthodoxy or imitation. Multiple elements were juxtaposed in the manner of Ferry’s art tutor Richard Hamilton collaging the pop world on canvas. Artistry and eclecticism ran deep.

Having spent more than a year hatching the project, Roxy’s June 1972 debut album surprised many by breaking into the Top 10. Ferry, a virtual veteran approaching 27, hastily began making plans for a follow-up: it would be, he declared, “quicker, cheaper, wilder”. Thinking conceptually, he even suggested reprising the album in the same track order to demonstrate just how far they’d come. None of it happened.

Because touring and promotion left little time for writing new material, Roxy first revisited a couple of existing pieces: Grey Lagoons, initially recorded as The Bogus Man Part 2 in July 1971, now included on this 3CD+DVD Super Deluxe edition; and the roaming For Your Pleasure, started by Ferry during sessions for the first album. Early radio versions of Grey Lagoons (August 1972) and For Your Pleasure (November 1972), feature alongside four further BBC recordings.

With the labyrinthine, mostly instrumental The Bogus Man also earmarked for the new album, Roxy appeared to be moving towards more extended, album-oriented material. All that changed when Virginia Plain peaked at No. 4 in September. The one-time self-styled ‘avant-rock’ Roxy were now mixing it with the glam rock farceurs who were dominating the pop charts. Aflush with this new-found success, Ferry, now living in an apartment of his own, sat at a rented Steinway and began to craft a new set of songs. It was his first sustained period of writing since spring 1971.

Over several weeks, Ferry worked at his London home retreating briefly to Roxy art director Nick de Ville’s cottage in the Derbyshire Dales. The ten demos he emerged with formed the basis for side one of the forthcoming album. These recordings, which sit at the heart of this vast and thrilling ....Pleasure package, offer an intimate glimpse of Ferry at the Steinway, the Hohner Pianet and, occasionally, switching to guitar, conjuring up songs destined to develop into full band masterpieces.

Gripped by a sense of urgency, self-taught Ferry strikes the open-tuned guitar chords of Pyjamarama like a young Pete Townshend, pounds out rudimentary piano chords on Do The Strand and Editions Of You, then returns to more familiar territory, channelling his role model Jay Gatsby’s Long Island ennui on Beauty Queen (in three echo-laden takes) and Strictly Confidential. A Farfisa version of In Every Dream Home A Heartache evokes the doomy Pink Floyd of 1968; a second, played on tremolo guitar, comes closer to Space Ritual-era Hawkwind. Even his brisker take on For Your Pleasure suggests a full rock band ending. With several of these sketches featuring intros, outros and breaks, Ferry’s vision for the total architecture of a song is palpable.

But it would be wrong to let his fine art and auteurist inclinations detract from the other band members who were substantially more than ‘colours’ in Ferry’s exquisite palette. Further evidence, in the form of eight engrossing rehearsal room and AIR studio outtakes, attest to the collaborative nature of the February 1973 sessions.

In the accompanying 116-page book, saxist Andy Mackay describes this as “adding the Roxyness”. Bob Clearmountain’s new instrumental remix of the original album brings that ‘Roxyness’ into sharp focus – Mackay’s sax, alternately blowhard and experimental; Phil Manzanera’s blues-free guitar inventions; with both instruments ‘treated’ via Eno’s tape and synthesizer manipulations. The arrival of new bassist John Porter, whose vigorous style locks in perfectly with Paul Thompson's strong-arm drumming, doubles the band’s potency.

What surprises about the instrumental mix is just how much Ferry is missed. For all the musicians’ madcap firepower and invention, Roxy Music doesn’t quite make sense without him. The televised performances on the accompanying DVD - including a previously unseen Top Of The Pops clip of Pyjamarama – tell a similar story. Marvel at Manzanera’s fly’s-eye specs, Mackay’s sci-fi rockabilly outfits and Eno’s featherweight alien persona, but it’s Ferry’s compelling, ironic rictus grin that ultimately encapsulates the Roxy aesthetic: serious or not, here we come.

There was nothing like For Your Pleasure in 1973 (even David Bowie was quietly awed), and there’s nothing like it now: its dizzying blend of comic lounge balladry (Beauty Queen), consumer culture anxiety (Dream Home…), paranoia damaged Krautrock (The Bogus Man) and off-kilter rockers (Do The Strand) gift wrapped in camp and innovation. Plenty of instrumental grandeurs too, from nine minutes of hypnotic improv on The Bogus Man to Mackay’s guffawing sax and Eno’s synth hysterics on Editions Of You, as well as archaic homages: psychedelic phasing on Dream Home…, doo-wop harmonies on Grey Lagoons. And then there was the premonition.

Released in March 1973 and hitting No. 4 soon after, For Your Pleasure – here in Ferry’s favoured 1999 Bob Ludwig remaster – ends with the title track’s long, echoing electronica fade set against solemn voices bidding “Ta-ra”, northern slang for goodbye. Four months later, Eno – whose Terry Riley-inspired electronic treatments for the piece provide a fascinating short outtake here – was gone; Ferry had toned down his vibrato and Roxy Music soon gained acceptance as a ‘proper’ band. For Your Pleasure, the most exciting, inspirational album of its time, demonstrates perfectly why we must always look beyond ‘proper’ bands.

For Your Pleasure 2026 Reissue is out November 6 on UMR/Island/EMI.

2LP Tracklisting:
1. Do The Strand 
2. Beauty Queen 
3. Strictly Confidential 
4. Editions Of You 
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache 
6. The Bogus Man 
7. Grey Lagoons 
8. For Your Pleasure 
9. Pyjamarama - AIR Studios outtake 
10. Beauty Queen - AIR Studios outtake 
11. Strictly Confidential - AIR Studios outtakes 
12. Editions Of You - AIR Studios outtake 
13. The Bogus Man - AIR Studios outtake 
14. Grey Lagoons - AIR Studios outtake 
15. For Your Pleasure - Eno tapes 

2CD Tracklisting:
1. Do The Strand 
2. Beauty Queen 
3. Strictly Confidential 
4. Editions Of You 
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache 
6. The Bogus Man 
7. Grey Lagoons 
8. For Your Pleasure 
9. Pyjamarama - AIR studios outtake      
10. Beauty Queen - AIR studios outtake   
11. Strictly Confidential - AIR studios outtake      
12. Editions Of You - AIR studios outtake      
13. Bogus Man - AIR studios outtake      
14. Grey Lagoons - AIR studios outtake   
15. For Your Pleasure - Eno Tapes  
16. Pyjamarama - 2026 remaster
17. The Pride and the Pain
18. Grey Lagoons - BBC Paris Theatre, London, August 1972 
19. Pyjamarama - Peel Sessions March 1973    
20. Do The Strand - Peel Sessions March 1973  
21. Editions Of You - Peel Sessions March 1973      
22. For Your Pleasure - Peel Sessions Nov 1972 

**3CD/DVD Box Set Tracklisting:
**CD1 – For Your Pleasure:
1. Do The Strand 
2. Beauty Queen 
3. Strictly Confidential 
4. Editions Of You 
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache 
6. The Bogus Man 
7. Grey Lagoons 
8. For Your Pleasure 

CD2 – Demos, Rehearsals & Studio Outtakes:
1. Pyjamarama - guitar & vocal 
2. Do The Strand - piano & vocal 
3. Beauty Queen - tremolo piano 
4. Beauty Queen - electric piano 
5. Beauty Queen - piano & vocal 
6. Strictly Confidential (segue into) 
7. Editions Of You - electric piano 
8. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - farfisa & guitar 
9. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - tremolo guitar 
10. For Your Pleasure - electric piano 
11. Pyjamarama - Rehearsal 1973 
12. Bogus Man - Rehearsal 1973 
13. Grey Lagoons - 1971 Demo (Original title The Bogus Man Part 2) 
14. Pyjamarama - AIR Studios outtake 
15. Beauty Queen - AIR Studios outtake 
16. Strictly Confidential - AIR Studios outtakes 
17. Editions Of You - AIR Studios outtake 
18. The Bogus Man - AIR Studios outtake 
19. Grey Lagoons - AIR Studios outtake 
20. For Your Pleasure - Eno tapes

**CD3 – Live sessions, Singles & Instrumentals:
**1. Grey Lagoons – BBC Paris Theatre (London) August 1972 (first live performance) 
2. For Your Pleasure – Peel Sessions November 1972 
3. Do The Strand – Peel Sessions March 1973 
4. Editions Of You - Peel Sessions March 1973 
5. Pyjamarama - Peel Sessions March 1973 
6. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - Peel Sessions March 1973 
7. Pyjamarama A side single 
8. The Pride And The Pain B side single 
9. Do The Strand (instrumental) 
10. Beauty Queen (instrumental) 
11. Strictly Confidential (instrumental) 
12. Editions Of You (instrumental) 
13. In Every Dream Home A Heartache (instrumental) 
14. The Bogus Man (instrumental) 
15. Grey Lagoons (instrumental) 
16. For Your Pleasure (instrumental) 

**DVD – TV & Live Performances:
**1. Pyjamarama – Top of the Pops (lost tape)
2. For Your Pleasure – Full House November 1972
3. Grey Lagoons – Full House November 1972
4. Do The Strand – Old Grey Whistle Test April 1973
5. In Every Dream Home A Heartache - Old Grey Whistle Test April 1973
6. Do The Strand – Live at Montreux April 1973
7. Grey Lagoons - Live at Montreux April 1973
8. Beauty Queen - Live at Montreux April 1973
9. The Bogus Man- Live at Montreux April 1973
10. In Every Dream Home A Heartache- Live at Montreux April 1973
11. Editions Of You- Live at Montreux April 1973
12. Do The Strand – Musikladen 1973
13. Editions Of You – Musikladen 1973
14. In Every Dream Home A Heartache – Musikladen 1973

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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This month, Roxy Music’s 1973 album For Your Pleasure gets a deluxe multi-disc reissue featuring frontman Bryan Ferry’s early demos, studio outtakes, radio sessions and DVD of TV performances. Below, Ferry and saxophone player Andy MacKay discuss the making of their landmark second LP, taking art rock to the top of the pop charts, and why it wasn’t “a big surprise” when Brian Eno quit the band shortly after the record’s release...

• READ MORE: Roxy Music For Your Pleasure reviewed: "The most exciting, inspirational album of its time..."

People weren’t sure whether to take early Roxy Music seriously. Was that the idea?

Bryan Ferry: “Well, we certainly didn’t intend to be a comic band! We wanted to do something that hadn’t been heard before, do something that had a point to it even though we weren’t sure what that was. We had a battery of sounds to work with. Phil [Manzanera, guitarist] liked getting unusual sounds. Having [Andy Mackay’s] oboe in the band was beautiful. I loved that sound. Eno could conjure up a million different things. Paul was strong and powerful. We were like beat brothers. He was the deep heart and soul of the band.”

And you?

Bryan Ferry “My piano playing was quirky, and my singing was pretty odd. It got better with practice. On the first album, a lot of the keys were too high. On For Your Pleasure, I found my way as a singer. I was more confident and not overthinking.”

There’s melancholy on songs like Beauty Queen and Strictly Confidential. Is that state of mind unavoidable for someone with a deep appreciation of the past?

Bryan Ferry: “I guess I just like sad songs. That’s when you dig deepest and find the best way to communicate. I’ve always liked singers like Billie Holiday. Even on happy songs, she would add an element of tristesse.”

The album ends with you walking away singing “Ta-ra”. Afterwards, Eno left and you made a solo album. Was any of this coming?

Bryan Ferry: “We didn’t have any quarrels, sorry to disappoint you! I just remember that I’d put everything into the album and I felt totally drained. We’d finished the album on a high.”

Was it Roxy’s intention to bring something new to rock?

Andy Mackay: “We were surprised that people found the first album so avant-garde, but because none of us were rock’n’roll musicians we had no template to work from. And, yes, there was an expectation that we’d take more risks with the second album.”

How did the success of Virginia Plain change Roxy?

Andy Mackay: “From being an arty album band, we’d become a pop band. We realised we needed songs that would work well on stage, and that we had to work up our act. We enjoyed that, though maybe I overdid the rock'n'roll saxophone gestures! There was also an expectation that we’d come up with another hit single. Pyjamarama was a brisk little track, though if we’d taken a bit more time, we could have come up with something that should have been a No. 1, frankly.”

Was Bryan a natural pop star?

“During the early days, Bryan was quite reluctant to front the band. Though he always saw it as his band, he preferred the idea of singing while playing keyboards at the side of the stage. But we soon realised that in a venue with people shouting, and wanting a bit of rock’n’roll, you needed someone in the middle of the stage. For a while, it had been me and Phil, and to some extent Eno, though he was a bit tied to his keyboards too. So we pushed Bryan. We said, You’ve got to do something that doesn’t require the keyboard. Just stand and sing!”

Brian Eno left the band shortly after For Your Pleasure’s release, was it apparent during the sessions that him and Bryan weren’t getting along?

Andy Mackay: “They got on fine in the studio. The problem was that Eno was very flamboyant. His stage presence was a kind of artistic statement. And some people saw him as the band’s figurehead, which was not helpful. I don’t think it was a big surprise that he left. It’s fairly obvious that ego and ambition played some part.”

Roxy were originals. How do you see the legacy?

Andy Mackay: “Rock’n’roll has always veered between the contrived and the natural, the organic. It’s showbiz!”

For Your Pleasure 2026 Reissue is out November 6 on UMR/Island/EMI.

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Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers - Origins 1971-1978

★★★★

UNIVERSAL

“Welcome to one of the best origin stories in rock’n’roll: the long march from genesis to liftoff of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,” trumpets MOJO writer David Fricke’s essay in the beautifully illustrated and informative ‘zine-style guide that accompanies Origins’ 50-plus tracks and Blu-ray of the band’s BBC Old Grey Whistle Test performance. But the actual story is less a glory-bound forward march than a stop-start of slow-downs, double-backs and dead ends before a serendipitous reset.

Save for the first two TP&TH albums not just in toto but with several tracks re-edited to run precious seconds in extenso, this is all reflected in the box’s running order which is no linear chronicle of their prehistory and first flush but a package to get lost in: fun first, homework second.

An intriguing what-if subtexts the story. The first recording here is Up In Mississippi Tonight, the self-financed debut single by Florida’s upstate Gainesville band Mudcrutch cut in Criteria Studios, Miami in September 1971 with 20-year-old writer and bassist Tom Petty on lead vocals and fellow future Heartbreaker Mike Campbell, 21, on guitar. On the other guitar and still only 18 was Tom Leadon, whose older brother Bernie was in LA starting with another new group – The Eagles.

There’s no denying the twanging, country-rock likeness between the two bands at this formative stage, but The Eagles were more seasoned players in the right place at the right time with the extra uplift of nominative determinism favouring the all-American airborne over the backwoods earthbound.

It took nearly five years of falling short en route to LA’s promised land before all concerned – which crucially included the band’s expat British producer and label boss Denny Cordell of The Move, Procol Harum, Joe Cocker and Leon Russell fame – saw the light and ditched Mudcrutch murk for Heartbreakers flash, with Petty thrust, not altogether reluctantly, into the spotlight.

As chief songwriter he was the one irreplaceable element, over the years learning to craft material for a band which in turn stretched even to reggae thanks to Cordell’s enthusiasm for the 1973 Feeling High Vol. 1 compilation featuring Dennis Brown, Max Romeo and I-Roy which particularly influenced Benmont Tench’s keyboards.

American Girl, however, cleaves closely to Petty’s personal heartland where Dylan, rock’n’roll and West Coast sunshine converge in The Byrds, so much so that Roger McGuinn thought it was his song. In 2001 it was in turn lifted for Last Nite by The Strokes whose hip, flip, echt-New York pop-rock could have sprung fully formed from Anything That's Rock’N’Roll, another banger on the Heartbreakers’ 1976 self-titled debut whose half-century this box commemorates. Thus did the East Coast imitate a Southern imitation of the West Coast with zeitgeist rock anthems at every step.

All sounding splendid thanks to Ryan Ulyate’s remixes and refurbishments, Origins leaves the story with the Heartbreakers established mid-table in loose league with the likes of Springsteen and Costello straddling old wave and new with energy, commitment, songcraft and high principles. The breakthrough blockbuster Damn The Torpedoes would follow in 1979 with success supplying its own struggles.

Origins 1971-1978 is out November 6 on Universal.

Tracklist:

LP1: No Sleep Til L.A.
1. Parade of Loons
2. You're Gonna Learn
3. Another Lonely Night
4. I Can't Fight It†
5. Depot Street†
6. Sin City
7. Wild Eyes†
8. Unheard of Kind of Hero
9. Up in Mississippi Tonight†
10. Satisfy Yourself
11. Since You Said You Love Me†
12. Long Way

LP2: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (50th Anniversary Edition)
1. Rockin' Around With You
2. Breakdown*
3. Hometown Blues
4. The Wild One, Forever
5. Anything That's Rock 'N' Roll
6. Strangered in the Night
7. Fooled Again (I Don't Like It)*
8. Mystery Man
9. Luna
10. American Girl*

LP3: You're Gonna Get It! (50th Anniversary Edition)
1. When the Time Comes*†
2. You're Gonna Get It*†
3. Hurt
4. Magnolia
5. Too Much Ain't Enough*
6. I Need to Know
7. Listen to Her Heart
8. No Second Thoughts
9. Restless*
10. Baby's a Rock 'N' Roller*

LP4: Live From the Record Plant 1977
1. Pre-Show
2. Surrender
3. Jaguar and Thunderbird
4. Band Intros
5. American Girl
6. Al Kooper, Denny Cordell Intro
7. Fooled Again
8. Luna
9. How We Doin' on Tape?
10. Listen to Her Heart†
11. I Need to Know
12. Strangered in the Night
13. Dog on the Run
14. (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66

LP5: The Cut Out Bin
1. Save Me
2. Making Some Noise
3. The Ballad of Harry, Neil & Tillie
4. Cry to Me†
5. Lost in Your Eyes

DISC 6: Live on the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test 1978
9 performances in HD and restored audio • Running time: 41 minutes • 48kHz 24-bit PCM stereo Picture: 4:3 Pillarbox / 29.97 fps • NTSC All Region

*Extended version
†New mix of previously released version

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!

"Sometimes being a brother,” American children’s author Marc Brown famously wrote, “is even better than being a superhero.” Sibling rivalry has certainly driven the Gallagher brothers to extraordinary heights, both together within the uneasy alliance of Oasis, and thereafter in their solo capacities since the band split in 2009.

• READ MORE: Noel Gallagher Interviewed: "We always has unshakeable self-belief in Oasis..."

What they shared while growing up in suburban Burnage, south Manchester, was a passion for two rock idols, The Beatles and the Sex Pistols. After much in-studio huffing, puffing and pugilism, 1994’s Oasis debut, Definitely Maybe, delivered a confident amalgam of those two influences, and almost single-handedly reinstated home-grown rock in the British pop charts. For the next couple of albums, Noel Gallagher drew on a stockpile of anthems composed pre-fame, but the problems started thereafter, when he felt increasingly straitjacketed by the imperative to write for stadiums. Successive albums lacked creative movement and, increasingly, zip.

Oasis almost single-handedly reinstated home-grown rock in the British pop charts.

For fans, the bust-up in Paris which terminated Oasis in August ’09 has brought the benefit that each made progressively more livelier, interesting music alone. Initially, it appeared that Noel held all the cards, as the songwriter extraordinaire breezily cast off his shackles to embrace disco beats and Laurel Canyon vibes, while Liam’s neo-Oasis efforts with Beady Eye foundered. When Liam Gallagher began trading under his own name, with help from high-end co-writers, the tables turned.

Since then it was more of an even fight between Liam and Noel. Now, finally, after a 16 year absence, Oasis are back together. Whether another Oasis album will follow remains to be seen, but – for now – here's MOJO's full rundown of every Oasis, Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds and Beady Eye album ranked from worst to best..

18.

Beady Eye

BE

Columbia, 2013

Credit where credit is due. After 2011’s Different Gear, Still Speeding showed the remaining members of Oasis could hold their own after the departure of their chief creative force, Liam, Gem Archer, Andy Bell and drummer Chris Sharrock could have quite easily stuck out another album of Oasis-lite. Instead, they hooked up with TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek for what might be the most out-there sounding record any member of Oasis has been involved in. When it works – the Mexican standoff of opener Flick Of The Finger, Face In The Crowd’s cinematic psych rock - the gamble pays off, but largely, for all its inventive sonic atmospherics, BE highlighted that Beady Eye simply didn’t have the songs.

17.

Liam Gallagher

C’Mon You Know

Warner Bros, 2022

By the time of C’Mon You Know’s release, Liam Gallagher’s first two solo albums and willingness to deliver Oasis songs (and songs that sounded like Oasis songs) to new generations of fans sniffily dubbed “parka monkeys” by his older brother had placed him firmly on top in the post-Oasis pecking order. Quite why he decided to leave that behind for an album of groove-based songs that largely eschewed guitars remains to be seen. Even Liam himself grumbled about the change of direction in interviews. “It’s a bit odd this record,” he told Apple Music. “There’s not a lot of guitars on it, which is upsetting me.” Despite the calibre of a lot of the material, he sounds uncharacteristically unsure and at times simply disinterested in the new setting.

16.

Different Gear, Still Speeding

Beady Eye/Dangerbird, 2011

Following Oasis’s split, it spoke volumes that, within weeks, Liam had announced a new band alongside the other three members (guitarist Gem Archer, bassist Andy Bell and final-tour drummer Chris Sharrock), leaving Noel to go it alone. By the time Different Gear… emerged, its sense of ‘continuity Oasis’ felt mistimed – quite simply, the world wasn’t ready to welcome Oasis back yet, in any guise. Despite the large Noel-shaped hole in the songwriting, Beady Eye’s debut had plenty in its favour, delivering flagrant Lennonisms (The Roller), Who-esque thrills (titled Beatles And Stones, oddly), and piano-trashing rock’n’roll (Bring The Light) with a vitality that bespoke years of repression under the old regime.

15.

Oasis

Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants

Big Brother, 2000

When it arrived three years after the perceived folly of Be Here Now, Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants was meant to herald a new creative dawn for Oasis – now without Bonehead and Guigsy. Beta Band-cribbing lead single Go Let It Out certainly suggested as much, as did hammering psych rock instrumental opener Fuckin’ In The Bushes, which quite rightly became the band’s on-stage walk on music from there on in. After that though, Oasis’ fourth album quickly falls off a cliff. Liam’s first stab at songwriting, the mawkish Little James, was widely derided, but not much else here fares any better (Noel’s “I can see a liar, sitting by the fire” on I Can See A Liar isn’t exactly Smokey Robinson, either). Strangely, ELO-like closer Roll It Over was largely overlooked by the group on subsequent live outings despite being one of the best things here by some stretch.

14.

Oasis

Dig Out Your Soul

Big Brother, 2008

It would soon all end with a smashed guitar and a dashed plum, but with hindsight does Oasis’ last (for now?) album sound like a band at the end of their road? Yes and no. Hammering first single The Shock Of The Lightening, Liam’s Lennon-esque I’m Outta Time and Falling Down, later explored to mind-bending effect by Amorphous Androgynous, all suggest Oasis still had plenty of creative fire in their bellies, but elsewhere you can’t shake off the feeling of a group running out of both puff and ideas. Tellingly, by the time the band played their last show less than a year after the album’s release only three songs from Dig Out Your Soul were in the set list.

13.

Liam Gallagher

As You Were

Warner Bros, 2017

Even while Beady Eye was failing commercially, it was Noel who advised, with a winner’s smirking disinterest, that his younger brother should go solo, with “his name in lights” – an obvious reference to late-’60s Elvis. The parallel wouldn’t be irrelevant when Liam ultimately did so two years later. With the push of a major label behind him, a raft of elite-class songwriters helped sculpt material that essentially celebrated Liamness. Thus, while Noel’s solo records sought routes away from Oasis-style rabble-rousing, As You Were simply gloried in it (Wall Of Glass; Greedy Soul), while also, on For What It’s Worth, mining the singer’s troubled private life with winning vulnerability.

12.

Liam Gallagher

Why Me? Why Not

Warner Bros, 2019

After Beady Eye fizzled out, 2017’s As You Were put Liam back on first principles – snarling rock and roll with a side order Lennon-esque ballads – and was a resounding success. The tables now turned in his favour, for his next move the younger Gallagher wisely opted to double down on that record’s wellspring of all things Liam. Unlike its predecessor, every song on Why Me, Why Not? is a co-write, with Liam focusing his attention instead on what he does best: being the greatest rock and roll singer of his generation. True, nothing here matches the likes of Live Forever or Rock ‘N’ Roll Star, but it oozes the confidence and swagger that alchemised Oasis’ greatness.

11.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Chasing Yesterday

Sour Mash, 2015

On release of his second solo record, Noel recalled how he and Gem Archer would reflect on critiques of late-Oasis stodginess, wondering, “What do they expect – space-jazz?” This, clearly, was to prepare the troops for Chasing Yesterday’s expansion on solo Noel’s first freedoms, to include sax solos (hear blissful, West Coast-ish opener Riverman) and two revised outtakes from a shelved collaboration with cosmic ’90s dance troupe Amorphous Androgynous. Themes of middle-aged ravers regaining the old magic, and an appearance by Johnny Marr on wonderfully dreamy disco-pumping closer Ballad Of The Mighty I, sealed another chart-topping victory.

10.

Liam Gallagher John Squire

Liam Gallagher John Squire

Warner Bros, 2024

Two Manchester icons estranged from their creative partners, pairing the voice of Oasis with the guitar wizardry and tumbling melodies of The Stone Roses sounds like such a good idea on paper it seems strange no one thought of it sooner. Rumours persisted that the songs that made up Liam Gallagher and John Squire’s collaboration had been written for a third Stone Roses album that never was, but in truth Liam is a far better fit for the spangled psych pop on the likes of Mars To Liverpool and Just Another Rainbow than Ian Brown. Whether or not they ever make another one, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable diversion and probably more fun than a Brown/Noel Gallagher link up would be.

9.

Oasis

Be Here Now

Creation, 1997

Conventional wisdom has it that Oasis’ third album was the moment the Gallaghers irreparably George Bested it. An overblown, coke-addled folly that would prove to be Britpop’s Altamont. Yes, the album’s 72 minutes are frequently weighed down by lumpen bridges and middle eights, endless guitar overdubs and laboured arrangements (All Around The World couldn’t be any longer if it tried – and that’s before it reappears in ‘reprise’ form), but strip back the production bluster (something Noel Gallagher largely puts down to mixing the record while high on cocaine) and some of the band’s finest songs of the era are hiding underneath the noise and confusion.

8.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Sour Mash, 2011

Even on first listen, Noel’s solo debut felt like a liberation. Swapping Oasis’s stampede of multitracked guitars for a strummed acoustic, and his strained bark for a more natural, choirboy-esque vocal purity, …High Flying Birds birthed a sound that played to his own strengths (thoughtful, sophisticated), rather than Liam’s (headlong). Everybody’s On The Run and If I Had A Gun… saw him take his foot off the gas to wonder at the world, while proven pop smarts resurfaced in Kinksian whimsy (Dream On) and piano-house-like euphoria (AKA…What A Life!). Britpop’s songwriting master had got his edge back.

7.

Oasis

Heathen Chemistry

Big Brother, 2002

Having booted out all three of Liam’s original bandmates from The Rain and supplanted them with handpicked indie-rock pros, for Heathen Chemistry, Noel opened the door to others writing songs. Gem Archer’s Hung In A Bad Place and, particularly, Liam’s Songbird – a breezy love letter to his then-fiancée Nicole Appleton – brought fresh energy, while Noel’s perennial England-out-of-the-World Cup weepie Stop Crying Your Heart Out topped off a promising new blend. Oasis Mk2 might not ever match the era-defining glories of their earlier incarnations, but Heathen Chemistry has aged remarkably well.

6.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Who Built The Moon?

Sour Mash, 2017

Following his team-up with The Chemical Brothers on ’96’s Setting Sun, Noel had experimented with ‘going dance’ in Oasis circa ’03-04 via abortive sessions with Death In Vegas, then solo with Amorphous Androgynous. He doubtless felt pressure to modernise, and things eased in that direction with 2017’s team-up with Belfast producer/movie soundtracker David Holmes. WBTM upheld solo Noel’s sense of casting off shackles, echoing New Order, Phil Spector and The Prodigy, and, in Holy Mountain’s use of the glam-y horn riff from Bryan Ferry’s Let’s Stick Together, reconnecting with early Oasis’ ‘genius steals’ mentality.

5.

Oasis

Don’t Believe The Truth

Big Brother, 2005

After abandoning sessions with Death In Vegas’ Richard Fearless, Oasis turned to producer Dave Sardy for what might be their leanest, meanest and most chaff-free set of songs since (What’s The Story) Morning Glory. With Liam’s songwriting having progressed past the nursery rhyming of Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants’ Little James, Oasis now boasted four match-fit songwriters and a pool of 60 songs were whittled down to a punchy eleven, the likes of Lyla, The Importance Of Being Idle and Liam’s bolshy The Meaning Of Soul pivoting nimbly round around a mid-60s axis of The Beatles, Stones and The Kinks. Listening to the renewed lease of life here, it’s hard to conceive that Oasis only had one more album in them.

4.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Council Skies

Sour Mash, 2023

2017’s Who Built The Moon? and subsequent EPs occasionally felt like Noel Gallagher was trying to prove a point. That, now into his 50s, he could make music that was well outside of the indie rock comfort zone he’d spent the previous two decades building for himself. Last year’s Council Skies, however, found him back doing what he does best, and arguably doing it better than at any time since the mid-'90s. Even Liam conceded that Dead To The World was up there with his best (“how can such a mean-spirited little man write such a beautiful song?” he wrote on Twitter) and the likes of The Cure-indebted Pretty Boy and Open The Door, See What You Find’s psychedelic soul splurge showed he could still push his songwriting in front of new musical backdrops without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

3.

Oasis

The Masterplan

Creation, 1998

A central plank to Oasis’s mid-’90s dominance dictated that Noel’s songbook was so stuffed with classics, the extra tracks on singles packed more chart-topping potential than any other band’s A-sides. Here, as a stopgap after their 1996 Knebworth mega-gig and Be Here Now, they reinforced the point: The Masterplan trounces all later Oasis LPs, too. Three cuts – opening brotherly-solidarity duet Acquiesce, bittersweet soul-searcher Half The World Away, and the orchestral title track – really were Number 1s that slipped the net. Others, like acoustic tearjerker Talk Tonight, delivered a variety of mood and instrumentation that make a fine companion to the Oasis-in-overdrive ‘proper’ albums.

2.

Oasis

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory

Creation, 1995

It’s hard to overplay the breathless, pre-social media phenomenon of Oasis through 1994-95, and how their ascent was mirrored in their second LP’s expansion on the debut’s raw materials. Most importantly, in Wonderwall Morning Glory had the heartstring-tugging megahit to facilitate the band’s crossover worldwide. At every turn there was growth, from Noel’s primetime vocal debut on the anthemic Don’t Look Back In Anger, to Champagne Supernova’s Quadrophenia-on-steroids finale. Quite how much was ‘held back’ for LP2 by career mastermind Noel is still questionable, but these mighty choruses would soon resound around Earls Court, Maine Road and beyond.

1.

Oasis

Definitely Maybe

Creation, 1994

Their second album may have become the UK’s third biggest-selling studio long-player of all time, but with every passing year this debut becomes more established as an unassailable career zenith. Often plausibly compared with Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols, this album’s cultural impact was in some ways as far-reaching (if not politically), as it reignited British rock. It also took endless tinkering mix-wise to finesse Noel’s beefed-up guitars, but there was a purity and purpose to his songs on Definitely Maybe that can never be repeated. From Live Forever’s gutter-level stargazing and Slide Away’s desperation to Rock’N’Roll Star’s magical self-fulfilling prophecy, it simply cannot be bettered.

• READ MORE: Every Oasis B-Side Ranked!

Mad for more Oasis? Pick up MOJO's newly updated special bookazine, MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Oasis Essentials 2025 Special Edition, for the definitive guide to Oasis’s albums, songs, films and books. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE!

Picture: Getty Images

As the 70s drew to a close, The Rolling Stones were in New York mixing their next big-seller Emotional Rescue, with some partying with Stevie Wonder and, in Ron Wood’s case, sharing a stage with Bob Marley in California thrown in. Few were thinking of their old, infamous friend from the sixties Marianne Faithfull.

• READ MORE: Marianne Faithfull Remembered: “Much as I love The Rolling Stones, they’re not my life…”

Her first hits – how fresh As Tears Go By and Come And Stay With Me sounded – were more than fourteen years in the past. In the seventies her interest in music had largely given way to stage acting and roles in low-key films including Madhouse Mansion and Assault On Agathon. Enduring heroin addiction, she’d lived in a freezing squat in Chelsea, played in fans’ houses in exchange for food and even engineered a tour of Holland as improve her living standards. But this November, she would surprise them all with her comeback album Broken English.

In her 1994 memoir Faithfull: An Autobiography, she reflected on how her image as a “tarnished Pop Star Angel”, owed to her years with the Stones, was like an albatross around her neck. “I had reluctantly come to the conclusion,” she wrote, “that if I was ever to obliterate my past I’d have to create my own Frankenstein, and then become that creature as well.”

Her route back had begun, oddly, with a surprise Irish number one hit with March ‘76s country single Dreamin’ My Dreams. A touring band which included Faithfull’s soon-to-be-husband Ben Brierley on bass and guitarist Barry Reynolds turned into something different when they began co-writing with the singer.

As well as Faithfull’s now-weathered smoker’s rasp, the punk upsurge also informed her new direction. Producer Mark Miller Mundy was struck when he saw a Faithfull band gig at the Music Machine in 1978 (the same year she was set to play Sid Vicious’ mum Anne in the unrealised Russ Meyer-directed Sex Pistols movie Who Killed Bambi?). One of the songs the tightly drilled group played was a searing reggae interpretation of Heathcote Williams’ 1968 poem of sexual betrayal Why D’Ya Do It. They recorded the track and Cold War disco number Broken English – inspired by West German terrorists the Baader-Meinhof Gang – in the subterranean Matrix Studios in Bloomsbury. Mundy took the tapes to Island Records’ Chris Blackwell, who duly signed her up for an album.

The summer ’79 sessions were not exactly harmonious: Marianne remembered Mundy as “useless as a producer as well as being a flaming asshole,” also noting, “I was working on Broken English and Ben was off in LA having affairs. I was wild with jealous rage.”

An intensity was being captured, however, and it was deepened when Mundy’s previous client Steve Winwood came in to add New Wave-friendly synthesizer parts. While the singer has spoken up for the flintier rock mix (which was released on 2013’s Deluxe Edition), the electronic textures and frigid washes added striking gothic dimensions to songs including junkie boogie What’s The Hurry and the self-lacerating Guilt. Her brooding version of Working Class Hero, she said, was sung in tribute to Mick and Keith, Bowie and Iggy and Lennon himself – all self-realised creatures, as she was. The composer would be dead in a matter of weeks, but Yoko Ono confirmed he’d heard it and approved.

The expletive-heavy Why D’Ya Do It closed the album, prompting boycotts by UK pressing plants and EMI’s distribution arm (the Australian edition even replaced the song with a blank track entitled, oddly, ** ** **’* ***). Having commissioned Derek Jarman to make a three-song, twelve-minute film involving punk-paganism, Soho sleaze and Nazi imagery, Island pushed on, and were vindicated. The Sun and The Guardian were both fulsome in their praise of the record, while John Peel played its songs among Joy Division and Killing Joke. On November 24 Marianne’s bruised, vaporous version of Dr Hook’s The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan entered the UK top fifty, and soon went top five across Europe. The following week Broken English made it to 57 on the British album charts, reaching a respectable number 82 in the US and winning a Grammy nomination.

The singer still wasn’t above a little self-sabotage, though. On a high-profile appearance on Saturday Night Live! in February 1980, her voice was compromised when she unwittingly ingested the dental anaesthetic Procaine. Back home in her squat, she recalled spending her first big cheque from the record on clothes and more drugs. But she had proved something vital, and resurgent in the decades that followed, she’d prove a lot more, working with PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Blur's Damon Albarn and many others.

“The thing about Broken English,” she told MOJO’s Sylvie Simmons in 2005, “it’s this sense, this energy, that ‘Fucking hell, before I die I'm going to show you bastards who I am.’ … I can’t repeat (it). Because I actually realised, obviously I’m going to die, but not yet...”

Main photo: Marianne Faithfull, New York, February 11, 1980. (Credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns)

The last time this writer met up with Jeff Tweedy, at a 2019 show in Brussels, the imminent release of his band’s 11th album was giving Tweedy cause to ponder where Wilco fitted in. “One of the things I think is strange about my [current] antipathy towards rock music,” he considered, “is that it's happening at the same time as I'm becoming more confident Wilco is a rock band unlike any other still walking the earth. Does that make us a dinosaur? No, I think it's definitely valid.”

• READ MORE: Jeff Tweedy Interviewed: "My deepest fear is having a clear deck..."

It's a curious, self-reflexive way of praising your band, especially when that band have been routinely lauded as one of America’s best for the last 25 years. But perhaps Tweedy’s questioning of what it means to be a rock band, and what a rock band can be, has been crucial to Wilco’s brilliance for a quarter of a century.

Over 13 studio albums, multiple side projects, hefty boxsets and a busy live schedule, Wilco’s ubiquity has been rooted in their deft, subtle way of avoiding cliché and expectations. To some, they are a cornerstone of the Americana movement, however uncomfortable they’ve sometimes been with the tag. To others, they are the much-vaunted “American Radiohead”, worrying away at rock convention with a restless desire to stretch the form. A natural successor to R.E.M., or to The Grateful Dead? Wilco accommodate it all, taking their place in a great tradition of American rock bands while playfully subverting that tradition as they go.

Success has not always felt guaranteed, however. When Tweedy formed the band in 1994, it was his old partner in Son Volt, Jay Farrar, who was widely expected to have the more significant career. Wilco’s progress for a decade was one of incremental triumphs achieved in the face of daunting challenges, both personal and professional. Their second two decades have been less tempestuous, with a long-stabilised lineup, but no less creatively rewarding. Hence the challenges of selecting their ten best albums: a band notable for their consistent excellence, in perpetual musical flux. “[The Beatles] were pushing to express themselves in ways they'd never heard anybody express themselves,” said Tweedy in 2020. “That's basically art. That's what I want. I want to try and find that.”

10.

Kicking Television (Live In Chicago)

NONESUCH, 2005

If Wilco’s first ten years were marked by interpersonal volatility – Jay Bennett’s tenure being especially frictional – the ensuing 19 have been strikingly solid: the lineup that came together just before these 2005 Chicago live recordings a constant ever since. Those gigging years have only seen Wilco’s flexible virtuosity increase, alongside the Grateful Dead-like command of their whole catalogue. But Kicking Television presented a band also starting at the top of their game, with Nels Cline and his needlepoint guitar lines establishing a Verlaine/Lloyd-style rapport with Jeff Tweedy. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot songs beefed up impressively, and there was a plaintive version of soulman Charles Wright’s 1969 peace anthem, Comment: “If all men are truly brothers…”

9.

Cruel Country
DBPM, 2022

Tweedy’s longtime exasperation with the Americana tag has led him to some musically extreme places, and in 2005 he told me, “[Alt-country] has become a very conservative movement that’s not really a movement. It’s stagnant.” The 12th Wilco studio album, however, archly leaned in to concepts of American roots music – and into ideas about the state of their nation. An opportunity, then, to showcase the band’s casual mastery of classic folk songwriting, but also to be slyly subversive, as they slipped an understated avant-jam into Bird Without A Tail/Base Of My Skull (think: Sonic Youth, acoustic). Cruel Country was a strategic double bluff: a self-proclaimed “country” record that was often as far as ever from being a conventional one.

8.

Wilco (The Album)

NONESUCH, 2009

Another pet gripe of Tweedy – that his fans required him to be tormented as a default – was challenged head on by the bright, liberated, sometimes rather goofy seventh Wilco album: “A sonic shoulder for you to cry on,” he promised in the self-referential power pop of theme tune, Wilco (The Song). While a fraught motorik workout (Bull Black Nova) did make the cut, Cline afire, other songs on g were Tweedy’s most Beatles-adjacent efforts since Summerteeth. The twist this time being that the sentiments of, say, You Never Know (a vibrational All Things Must Pass stomper) were ruefully optimistic rather than spiked.

7.

Ode To Joy
DBPM, 2019

A political concept album of sorts, though way subtler and more artful than the norm, Ode To Joy initially sounded like groggier kin to 2016’s mostly acoustic Schmilco. But beneath Glenn Kotche’s martial drums, a lot more was going on. “The idea of making a rock record is distasteful to me at this moment,” Tweedy told me. “We wanted to make really, really small music gigantic.” Hence “monolithic folk” songs that were both sombre and humane, anthemic by stealth, and packed with micro-detail and invention deep in the mix. Moving, too: “Remember when wars would end?” Tweedy sings in Before Us. “Now when something's dead/We try to kill it again.”

6.

Star Wars
DBPM, 2015

A surprise release, given away online, and the band’s shortest album at only 33 minutes, Star Wars could easily be misconstrued as marginalia: even the sleeve art, a kitschy cat painting from the kitchen wall of their Chicago studio, signalled irreverence. But while the songs often veered towards sparky garage art-rock, they were terrific sparky garage art-rock. Cranked-up experimentation came compressed into three-minute gobbets and cut with nagging hooks; cf Random Name Generator, their catchiest tune since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s Heavy Metal Drummer. And alongside frenetic post-punk (Pickled Ginger) there were more conventional Wilco triumphs, notably the cumulative intensity of You Satellite.

5.

Being There

REPRISE, 1996

1995’s Wilco debut, A.M., had at least established Tweedy’s bona fides as a bandleader, away from Jay Farrar in Uncle Tupelo. But it was sprawling follow-up Being There that vigorously asserted he and his rapidly evolving band’s range and ambition. Alt-country still figured (Forget The Flowers was a pitch-perfect Gram Parsons homage), alongside ragged-assed Stones boogies and questing, less generic pieces like Misunderstood that would form the bedrock of the Wilco canon. Plus, an auspicious newcomer in the ranks alongside Tweedy and bass-playing lifer John Stirratt, in the shape of multi-instrumentalist and powerpop classicist Jay Bennett. His moment would come, soon enough.

4.

Sky Blue Sky

NONESUCH, 2007

The first studio effort by Wilco’s most enduring lineup – Tweedy, Stirratt, Cline, Kotche, Mikael Jorgensen (keys) and Pat Sansone (keys/guitars) – initially seemed surprisingly safe; mellow craftsmanship that could almost pass as AOR, where many expected radical fireworks. The songs, though, were some of Wilco’s most gorgeous, often co-compositions that gradually revealed themselves to be nuanced, collaborative gems. The fireworks were there, smuggled into the great tunes, Side With The Seeds and especially Impossible Germany opening up into showcases for elevated groupthink, with Nels Cline’s pointillist jazz-rock soloing to the fore.

3.

Summerteeth

REPRISE, 1999

While Wilco’s 21st century excellence has proved yet again how great art isn’t inextricably bound up with suffering, that myth fixed on to Tweedy circa Summerteeth. Wilco’s third was an elaborate chamber pop confection, bathed in the sunshine possibilities of The Beatles and The Beach Boys, but earthed in Tweedy’s personal problems: his relationship issues, drugs and, fundamentally, depression. Tweedy and Jay Bennett obsessively piled on the mellotrons to mask the trauma, but the record’s brilliance lies in its light and shade. “I was trying to figure out what the fuck I was feeling,” Tweedy told me in 2020. “But it was much easier for me to tolerate when I'd layered a disclaimer of ornamentation.”

2.

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

NONESUCH, 2001

Another drama on multiple fronts, with protracted record label grief and a power struggle between the traditionalist Bennett and the increasingly adventurous Tweedy that only ended with the former leaving Wilco. Now, though, especially with a mammoth 2022 boxset mapping its evolution and intricacies, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s brilliance seems ever more distinct from its backstory. New drummer Glenn Kotche brought unorthodox rhythms, while mixer/co-conspirator Jim O’Rourke facilitated Tweedy’s experiments with process, texture and noise, his desire to escape what he later described as the “pastiche” of Summerteeth. But the radio static and conceptual dislocation ultimately complemented rather than distracted from Tweedy and Bennett’s songs: poignant, sonically fragile; a lot more resilient than they first appeared.

1.

A Ghost Is Born

NONESUCH, 2004

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is often tagged Wilco’s masterpiece, the “American Kid A” of popular acclaim. Its follow-up, though, might be even better. Record label support, Bennett’s departure, and the consensual embedding of O’Rourke as producer ensured avant-garde principles were baked into A Ghost Is Born. The sound, more organic and less processed than YHF, could accommodate Band-like country soul (Theologians) and Krautrock supergrooves (Spiders (Kidsmoke)) as well as fractured guitar improv. But Tweedy had become addicted to painkillers to combat his migraines, adding high anxiety to the spectacularly good songs: Less Than You Think, 15 minutes of uncompromising minimalist drone, was designed to mirror a debilitating headache. A fully realised and moving document of pain and addiction, immeasurably improved by the knowledge Tweedy recovered. Plus, it’s his own great guitar album: those spraying solos, pitched halfway between Neil Young and Derek Bailey, were Tweedy, not the as-yet-unenlisted Nels Cline.

• READ MORE: “My illness had got to the point where it had overwhelmed the desire to create…” Jeff Tweedy on A Ghost Is Born and the battles that plagued its creation.

Starting life as R&B-playing Mods, The Who quickly transformed into rule-breaking pioneers, perverting, distorting or ignoring the accepted rock tenets. John Entwistle’s bass and Keith Moon’s drums became lead instruments, vying for attention with Pete Townshend’s guitar, which he’d bash and trash to create an unholy wall of noise, citing Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art as inspiration. While Roger Daltrey’s role as straight man kept the ship from capsizing.

• READ MORE: Pete Townshend Interviewed: The Who are not done yet!"

The only two members still surviving – and still performing as The Who –  the partnership between Townshend and Daltrey is central to their mercurial magic and the volatile chemistry of the band, typical of the contradictions that make them such a remarkable group. There’s “wimpy little Townshend” writing the songs, explained Pete Townshend, but “the guy singing them could beat your brains out.”

That hint of violence is ever-present in much of The ‘Orrible ‘Oo’s best songs, lurking behind corners and ready to explode at any moment. From Mod anthems to ballads for paranoid dictators, via the rummest cast-list in rock – transvestites, seaside idiots, invading armies – for almost 60 years Who songs have challenged the norms of every era and, by the by, rocked like thunder. Here, then, MOJO presents The Who’s 50 finest moments. Strap yourselves in though, it’s a white-knuckle ride.

The Who's 50 Greatest Songs...

50.

Zoot Suit

(High Numbers single, 1964)

Jerky, strutting and show-offy, Zoot Suit, written by the group’s then advisor Pete Meaden enunciated the Mod experience with an insider’s attention to detail – “I wear zoot suit jacket with side vents five inches long/I have two-tone brogues,” boasts Roger Daltrey over a swaggering rhythm based around a then-obscure R&B song, Misery, by the Detroit band, The Dynamics. The High Numbers’ only single sold just 500 of its 1,000-copy run; the group reverted to ‘The Who’ four months later; by then Meaden had left, and Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp had assumed their management. But Zoot Suit is pivotal in The Who’s evolution; they’re Meaden’s words but they acted as a creative spur for Townshend, ultimately unlocking his raison d’être – to provide an interior voice for the new youth experience.

49.

Jaguar

(Outtake from The Who Sell Out, 1967)

Townshend’s version of acid rock was sulphuric, not lysergic, and he answered the “psychedelic wetness” of the Summer of Love with warped visions of rampant consumerism. Though Jaguar ultimately missed the cut, it was the first song written in this vein – a woozy cod-paean to the flash ’arry car marque (“grace, space, pace,” hiss the backing vocals, seductively) addressed to a notional jaded hipster in Moon’s high frenzied register (“Everything they’ve seen you have seen!” etc). A sizzling, sardonic companion to Armenia City In The Sky.

48.

Going Mobile

(from Who’s Next, 1971)

There is something deliciously un-Who-like about a song praising the joys of motor caravaning; but the jubilant country-boogie of Going Mobile is no more about Airstream trailers than the Small Faces’ Song Of A Baker is about making bread. One of the first songs written for Lifehouse, it celebrates the thrill of escaping societal bonds, made all the more powerful by Townshend’s breezy vocal, squelchy synth outro – and the fact he’d taken his own motorhome on the road when touring in summer 1970.

47.

Eminence Front

(from It’s Hard, 1982)

Pinging off a pulsating keyboard riff that sounded like Baba O’Riley updated for the 1980s, Eminence Front found Townshend - fresh from a course of Dr Meg Patterson’s Neuro Electric therapy - railing against the rise of Thatcherite yuppies. What could have come across as a rich rock star whine lands due to his visceral disgust  - “come and join the party dressed to kill” - and the hypnotic, not particularly Who-like drive of the music. Townshend may have now been clean, but The Who’s creative engine was still far from serene.

46.

Amazing Journey

(from Tommy, 1969)

The title has become shorthand for The Who’s own topsy-turvy narrative (it’s shared with Murray Lerner and Paul Crowder’s film doc of 2007) but the trek alluded to in the Tommy opera’s spiritual centrepiece is decidedly inner, as our sensually challenged hero encounters a bearded, godlike figure: “He is your leader/And he is your guide”. The first song PT wrote for his baroque edifice epitomises how acoustic guitars denote Tommy’s core of humility, before the Moon-led psych bashment kicks in.

45.

Tea & Theatre

(from Endless Wire, 2006)

Almost a decade ago, the last Who studio album ended with this regretful, delicately picked acoustic track which read like an elegy to the band still reeling from the sudden death of a second member. Two men meet for tea and discuss “a great dream derailed”, one of their kind “gone”, another “mad”, the other “me”. Is the “stage” vacated by the men in the last verse life itself? A powerful and pointed Who live set closer.

44.

The Good’s Gone

(from My Generation, 1965)

One of Daltrey’s most convincing, and interesting, early performances, it’s almost ‘Method’ singing as, pissed off and sneery, he delivers a blank-sounding deconstruction of a love turned bad, ratcheted up by Townshend’s choppily chorded guitar solo. The track provides a strong contrast to the more excitably expressive, ‘up’ tracks that comprise most of their debut album. The vocal tone of ’65 Dylan and sound of the also-emerging Byrds in Townshend’s ringing guitar intro reveals a band on top form, and a songwriter with ears wide open.

43.

I’ve Known No War

(from It’s Hard, 1982)

Like many of their ’60s peers, The Who entered the ’80s in the grip of a mid-life crisis, their principal songwriter wrestling with addiction and struggling to reconcile his past with his present. If their tenth studio album was an uneven set, the opening track on side two nods to Who’s Next in terms of its brawny musical invective, while lyrically Townshend marries his post-War malaise to contemporary No Nukes sentiment. Despite their imminent ‘farewell’ tour, it whispered that all was not lost for The Who.

42.

Dogs

(single, 1968)

With pirate radio finished, The Who found it difficult to infiltrate the new Radio 1 monopoly. Informed by trips to White City dog-track, and the rough-edged charm of the Small Faces’ Lazy Sunday, Townshend’s bungled attempt at radio-friendly pop resulted in this strange gem. Daltrey dubbed it “wanking off”, but heard anew it plays like the sweetest love song Ronnie Lane never wrote, and in its blend of character, dialogue, and soaring romantic warmth it clearly predates the narrative ambition and exposed emotions of 1973’s Quadrophenia.

41.

Rael Pts 1 & 2

(from The Who Sell Out, 1967)

The Who debuted Rael on a tour of Scotland and the north in October ’67. “Everyone just looked at us with their mouths open,” Townshend reported. “The complication was too much.” Though not greatly suited to a Saturday night at the Beach Ballroom, Aberdeen, there’s plenty to admire in Townshend’s second mini-opera, not least a loony libretto about Red China invading the world (“The Red Chins in their millions will overflow their borders…” trills Pete, perkily) and the acoustic guitar brangggs and thunderous tymps that presage the musical themes of Tommy.

40.

Heaven & Hell

(from Live At Leeds, 1995 CD reissue)

John Entwistle’s Who compositions were quirky, bass-driven monsters whose eccentricities were at once in tune and at odds with Townshend’s personal meditations. Heaven & Hell, however, was something else: proof the bassist could write the perfect Townshend-style rock song, complete with stirring major chord progression. First played in 1968, it was deemed thrilling enough to open the now-legendary Leeds University show (although not to grace the original vinyl release), with an instrumental section whose wild bass, guitar and drum improvs seem (gloriously) tangential.

39.

You Better You Bet

(single, 1981)

Few would pick 1981’s Faces Dances as their favourite Who LP, but You Better You Bet is an absolute belter, its lyrics inspired by yet another Townshend life crisis, this time his affair with Jackie Vickers. The lyrics are brilliantly on the nose (“I’ve drunk myself blind to the sound of old T.Rex… and Who’s Next”) and Daltrey delivers one of his strongest vocal performances, stretching, growling and chewing the word “better” with glee.

38.

Run Run Run

(from A Quick One, 1966)

Underlining The Who’s patriarchal sway over nascent US snot-rock (Count Five would essay My Generation and Out In The Street on their debut album) A Quick One’s opener shelved the increasingly customary innovations in favour of a belligerent, bounding growler of a groove – injected with extra whoosh by the lift-off key change at 1.44. Typically of The Who when they’re trying to play nice, there’s a subtext of creepy and gauche: “Whenever you run, I’ll be following you…” Cue screams.

37.

Endless Wire (Extended)

(from Endless Wire, 2006)

The Who’s first album in 24 years was rich in beguiling fragments, short on fully-rounded songs – something Townshend acknowledged, surely, when he tacked an extra minute to the album’s keynote tune and added it as a bonus track. A nagging ditty becomes something more satisfying, with the stoic trudge of rhythm, lilting bluegrass shimmers and dash of added Roger combining in an autumnal version of The Who’s old defiance. The story? Answers on a postcard, please, to the usual address.

36.

Naked Eye

(from Odds & Sods. 1974)

A truly heroic song that fell between the cracks – it was destined for an aborted 1971 stop-gap EP, but was never satisfactorily recorded for Who’s Next – Naked Eye is The Who’s lost classic, describing a troubled marriage, seemingly healthy “to the naked eye”, that ends in attempted murder. The fundamental power of the song, a close cousin of The Seeker and Behind Blue Eyes, suggests Townshend’s own home life may have been suffering from The Who’s enormo post-Tommy commitments.

35.

Dreaming From The Waist

(from The Who By Numbers, 1976)

Unfairly dismissed by Pete Townshend as “a fresh turd”, this highlight from 1976’s Who By Numbers is a mid-life crisis Pictures Of Lily, its newsly-turned-30 author thrumming with sexual frustration. This being The Who, however, Townshend’s neurosis are voiced with the red blooded gusto Roger Daltrey, of a man who has never knowingly had trouble ‘in that department’.

34.

Disguises

(from Ready Steady Who EP, 1966)

Playful, conceptual and funny, Disguises was perhaps one of the best realisations of former Ealing School Of Art student Townshend’s desire to make “pop art music”. Sheet metal guitar clashes against an angular grind from Moon and Entwistle, as if Jean Tinguely where trying to sculpt an R&B group out of iron as Daltrey hurls the brilliantly surreal lyrics over like splashes of paint.

33.

Our Love Was

(from The Who Sell Out, 1967)

Summer ’67: Pete Townshend was glued to Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds. Previously in love songs suspicious, thwarted and defeatist, his togetherness with Karen Astley inspired euphoric celebration à la Beach Boys. Recorded in August/September at regular BB's haunt Columbia Studios on Sunset Boulevard and referencing You’re So Good To Me, Our Love Was pscreams into 1967’s psoundworld with a psuper psix-pstring psolo.

32.

Happy Jack

(single, 1966)

Pete was altered by the teachings of Meher Baba in 1968, but his cabbalistic self had already manifested. A Number 3 hit, this punked-up toytown sing-along of the Isle Of Man – where the songwriter holidayed as a kid – tells of a vagrant who sleeps on the beach and smiles, beatifically, even when plagued by local urchins. There’s vengefulness here (“they lied”) and notions of martyrdom (could the donkey, burdens and tortures obliquely refer to Christ’s passion?), but the lapping waters bring deliverance.

31.

A Quick One (While He’s Away)

(from A Quick One, 1966)

Townshend compiled A Quick One (While He’s Away) by gluing some sketched melodies to hastily written lyrics that, he now admits, bubbled up from his subconscious in a was that was revealing even to him. The apparently simple narrative – a girl whose man has been gone “for nigh on a year” is persuaded to hook up with a lusty engine driver named Ivor, before thinking better of it and reuniting with her partner – actually stemmed from Townshend’s own childhood feelings of desertion during an extended period staying with his eccentric grandmother, Denny, while his parents’ marriage was under duress.

30.

Heat Wave

(from A Quick One, 1966)

Blues, R&B, surf and soul were staples of The Who’s early live sets, but Martha & The Vandellas’ 1963 hit was one of the few of their covers to make it onto record. And Motown’s summer stormer is perfect for the three instrumentalists’ rumbly thunder. I came closest to this when briefly and unexpectedly depping for the tardy Moon at the Newbury Corn Exchange on May 20, 1966, Heat Wave being one of songs I helped on, if memory serves. What struck most: the angry drive of Townshend’s rhythm; the wonderfully LOUD response from Moon’s brilliantly tuned Premier kit.

29.

Magic Bus

(single, 1968)

Written circa My Generation in late 1965 but not recorded until one boozy afternoon in May 1968, a Bo Diddley beat, clacking claves and Pete’s equally percussive guitar drive Roger’s polite, upstanding passenger “to my baby each day”, but he soon gets designs on the driver’s seat. Live, the song stretched out to an epic duet-cum-skit in which Rog tries to buy said vehicle from driver Pete (“Nooo!”). “Just a lot of fun,” said Townshend, and almost uniquely for The Who, that’s true.

28.

Tattoo

(from The Who Sell Out, 1967)

A Ray Davies-like tale of two young brothers grappling with notions of masculinity and getting themselves inked to prove their manliness. In place of machismo, however, there’s a very English sense of melancholy (“I’ll expect I’ll regret you”), a dash of music hall knockabout and a surreal oddness that so often lurks beneath The Who’s surface.

27.

A Legal Matter

(from My Generation, 1965)

A blackly comic rock’n’roller with a tingling riff and more than a hint of The Rolling Stones’ The Last Time, A Legal Matter parts with the beat wave’s adolescent romance agenda to offer a jaundiced take on its conventional aftermath: marriage. In his first recorded lead vocal, Townshend bemoans this tedious state (“marryin’s no fun”) in a funny American accent and legs it up the road, chased by Nicky Hopkins’ rinky-dinky, Keystone Cops piano. Was Roger’s already-wobbling first marriage to Jackie Rickman in Pete’s mind?

26.

So Sad About Us

(from A Quick One, 1966)

First heard as the follow-up to The Merseys’ Top 5 hit Sorrow – a now forgotten version with a rather stiff Kit Lambert production – The Who’s superior rendition was therefore overlooked as a single, yet still sounds like a smash hit waiting to happen. Subsequently, it became one of Townshend’s most covered songs, perhaps because it’s one of his least self-conscious, sounding effortless and exuberant – all la-la-la’s and chiming guitars – with just enough melancholy to give it bite.

25.

Bargain

(from Who’s Next, 1971)

Rockers praising God was in the air in ’71. Meher Baba disciple Pete yearned to lose the ego and baggage standing between him and the divine spirit, yet good works counted too – funded by hits. Bargain is a tremendous trade-off: heartfelt lyric/street-level title; Pete’s gentle cameo/Roger bullishly everywhere else; the ARP synth and acoustic bits/Pete’s heavy-rockabilly aggression on his Gretsch Chet Atkins; the reflective melodic undertow/the Moon-Entwistle engine slamming through the gears. Deal!

24.

Circles

(Substitute B-side, 1966)

Round and round and round. Intended as an A-side, briefly a B-side, then another B-side under the title Instant Party, then issued on 1966’s Ready Steady Who EP, Circles fell foul of The Who’s quarrel with producer Shel Talmy but deserves its place in the sun. Bridging My Generation’s maximum R&B and The Who Sell Out’s warped pop art, its reverby vocals and wigged-out instrumental break catch the group about to turn on and tune in, but just stopping short. As ever they would.

23.

I’m Free

(from Tommy, 1969)

Scourge of Moonie, who couldn’t quite grasp those sections welded by an odd, teetering time signature, adapted, Townshend said, from the Stones’ Street Fighting Man. So Townshend and Entwistle played snare, hi-hat and tambourine; Moon took over for the fills. Celebrating his escape from physical and emotional entrapment, a spiritually awakened Daltrey/Tommy rejoices – “freedom tastes of reality” – and beckons on his fans/followers. In the film and 1970s setlists, I’m Free is sequenced right after Smash The Mirror, earlier than on the LP. Its fade revisits the Pinball Wizard intro.

22.

Boris The Spider

(from A Quick One, 1966)

John Entwistle dashed off this operatic, Lord Sutch-style gig favourite after a boozy night inventing comedy animal names with Bill Wyman. But just as Freud argued, “fear of spiders expresses dread of mother-incest and horror of the female genitals,” the song crosses the line from spooky novelty to psychopathy, with the transfixed narrator identifying with the scuttling, hairy house spider, who hangs by a thread and is “as scared as me”. Boris ends up the hapless victim, but what does this say about Entwistle’s mind? And where’s PETA when you need them?

21.

I’m One

(from Quadrophenia, 1973)

Townshend has claimed that what many love about The Who are its polar opposites. There’s “wimpy little Townshend” writing the songs, he explained, but “the guy singing them could beat your brains out.” Quadrophenia’s I’m One is all the more affecting because it’s the wimp doing the writing and the singing, Townshend both as the LP’s hero Jimmy and his younger self, trying to fit in with the cooler kids and prove himself.

20.

The Seeker

(single, 1970)

In 1971, Townshend appraised The Seeker harshly: “I like this the least of all.” More recently, Daltrey declared it the first Who song he thought “pretentious” – which suggests he wasn’t fully paying attention during Tommy. The song’s atypical modesty is key to its appeal, as Moon and Entwistle take the downhome chug as an affront to their dramatic capabilities. Meanwhile, the Meher Baba-dazzled author calls out rival gurus (“I asked Bobby Dylan… I asked The Beatles”), and naturally Roger sings like only he knows what it all means.

19.

Who Are You

(single, 1978)

The Who’s greatest ‘Christ! I’m hungover… what happened last night?’ song, Who Are You was written after Townshend literally woke up drunk in a Soho doorway after a particularly brutal drinking session. It’s also one of the best examples of The Who’s fidgety power and nervous dynamism, stumbling staggering through its differing sections as if it might combust at any moment.

18.

Armenia (City In The Sky)

(from The Who Sell Out, 1967)

The Who Sell Out’s intense opener is famously anomalous: the only Who ‘original’ written by someone outside of the group – specifically, Pete Townshend’s chauffeur and “aide-de-camp”, John ‘Speedy’ Keen (later of Thunderclap Newman and Something In The Air fame). Not that you’d know it: Armenia sounds authentically Townshend with its backwards-tracked guitars and atmospheric, woozy organ passages. Vocally, there are echoes of The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows – both melodically and lyrically – matching rare whimsy to The Who’s muscular power.

17.

Love, Reign O’er Me

(from Quadrophenia, 1973)

It’s illustrative. Bobby McFerrin wrote Don’t Worry, Be Happy with reference to the teachings of Meher Baba. Inspired by the same guru, Pete Townshend penned this storm-soaked, post-breakdown moment of personal realisation set on a rock in the English Channel (_Quadrophenia’_s Jimmy sets sail in a stolen boat at the end of Townshend’s original libretto). Although it’s “Pete’s Theme”, it’s the oomph provided by Daltrey’s vocal acrobatics – well outside his comfort range – that swells this swirling epic to a peak.

16.

Pictures Of Lily

(single, 1967)

Townshend’s tale of a lad who gets a vaudeville pin-up from his dad to help resolve adolescent frustration, starts as a rather charming male rite-of-passage. This being Pete, though, things get Oedipal when the lad falls in love with his ‘Lily’, only to be told “…don’t be silly/She’s been dead since 1929.” The resolution comes in his dreams, where they can be together, and a lovely minor chord chorus that chimes with the song’s relative innocence in an era of readily available internet porn. Eh, Pete?

15.

The Kids Are Alright

(from My Generation, 1965)

It seems so promising – ace faces dancing with each other’s girls in some Soho basement, knowing the ’60s have begun. But the title needs a question mark: the early Who roughness is plaintive, better to express a restless young narrator weighing up escaping his marriage, the titular “kids” referring to his offspring at home whom he hopes will be fine without him (“I know if I don’t I’ll go out of my mind”). To neck or not to neck the French Blues? Even Moonie’s crashing drums sound ruminative.

14.

See Me, Feel Me

(single, 1970)

Initially contained within _Tommy’_s closing track, We’re Not Going To Take It, before its iconic, sunrise moment at Woodstock upgraded it to single status, See Me, Feel Me ends the opera on a surprisingly upbeat note, despite the eponymous hero’s loss of his army of acolytes. A vaguely mystical positivism and plain old happy-ending vibes combine, with thunderous drums, stretched vocal cords and chiming guitars building to a moment of a sky-bursting magnificence.

13.

I’m A Boy

(single, 1966)

Mentor Pete Meaden envisaged The Who as a blokes’ band. Hip to the Mods’ love of display and – by 1966, the year of Twiggy – encroaching unisex styles, Townshend turned that on its head with one of the era’s more peculiar hits. Cherubic, conciliatory harmonies are undone by a lyric embroiled in gender angst, Townshend taunting, “head case” Daltrey exploding: a fascinating fragment of Pete’s first (thwarted) rock opera, Quads.

12.

Pinball Wizard

(single, 1969)

Townshend called it his “most clumsy piece of writing”, a Gustav Holst-influenced quick fix inspired by journalist Nik Cohn’s assertion that the rock opera conceit needed humanising. Never mind pinball king Tommy, it was Pete’s supple wrists that were all-important – his indelible acoustic intro sequence, electric power chords and the space that allowed Daltrey to reinvent himself as a haloed frontman.

11.

Young Man Blues

(from Live At Leeds, 1970)

While Tommy was being created for a new era where albums were overtaking singles and live sets were growing to keep pace with hair-length, Townshend was on a mission to educate America in rock’s R&B roots. “Rock’n’roll is their fucking music, and they know less about it than we do!” he said. “In the ’60s I went to America and I lectured them. I’d say, ‘Do you listen to fucking rhythm and blues? Do you know who John Lee Hooker is? Do you really think that rock’n’roll is Jefferson fucking Airplane…?’ The incendiary version of Young Man Blues by Mose Allison’s Young Man Blues which kicked off the original 37-minute Live At Leeds was surely all the education anyone needed.

10.

Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere

(single, 1965)

After the so-called “commercial number” I Can’t Explain, Townshend said in May 1965 that “we wanna show what we’re really trying to do.” And how. Sandwiched between teenbeat verses was a revolution in sound so shocking that the group’s US label assumed the master was faulty. Channelling Link Wray, Charlie Parker, Gustav Metzger and belligerent Modness, this was cultural warfare fronted by feedback. “Pop art,” claimed Kit Lambert. “Spiritual,” reckoned Pete T. When John Cale returned to New York with a copy, The Velvet Underground knew exactly what to do.

9.

5.15

(single, 1973)

Conceived in Oxford Street and Carnaby Street between appointments and written and recorded in the studio on the same day, 5.15 tracks Quadrophenia’s pill-popping protagonist Jimmy’s journey to Brighton. Over a barrage of rock bluster – blaring horns by Entwistle, romping piano played by Joe Cocker sessioneer Chris Stainton, clattering percussion, crash-bang-wallop guitar – Daltrey roars the hall of mirrors horror of Jimmy’s wrung-out mind. When issued as the album’s only single in the UK, it just scraped into the Top 20. What can possibly have scared the pop kids away?

8.

I Can See For Miles

(single, 1967)

The lyrics are simple enough: a young man knows his girlfriend’s been unfaithful because he’s seen her. The song-title/chorus might merely be grand hyperbole, born of rage. But from that seismic punch and rumble intro, into those pure electric waves of guitar, bass ‘n’ drums that continually crash over Daltrey’s heavenly vocals (tweaked with echo at Hollywood’s Gold Star Studios), the song is transformed into a pulsing beatific high of psychedelic exultation (“The Eiffel Tower and the Taj Mahal are mine to see on clear days!”) that, as it fades off into infinity, becomes the most euphoric “fuck you” in pop history.

7.

The Real Me

(from Quadrophenia, 1973)

Townshend’s original demo is a slinky affair, but in the hands of The Who it’s transformed into the essence of heroism, underpinned by Entwistle’s propulsive bassline (improvised on his newly acquired Gibson Thunderbird), Keith Moon’s atomic drum parts and Townshend’s own hooligan power chords, while Daltrey’s raucous vocal adds genuine mania to Jimmy’s suspicions of hereditary madness. It wasn’t the first time Townshend asked the song’s central question, and it wouldn’t be the last.

6.

I Can’t Explain

(single, 1965)

Arriving at Pye Studios to record his own song as his newly rechristened band’s first single, Pete Townshend is disgruntled to find producer Shel Talmy has hired Jimmy Page and vocal trio The Ivy League to guarantee viable product. But intrigue over its personnel evaporates within seconds, as Townshend’s six Rickenbacker slashes propel I Can’t Explain beyond R&B and into the realm of art. While The Beatles sang about love, The Who dealt in confusion – a quality that would define them permanently.

5.

Behind Blue Eyes

(from Who’s Next, 1971)

A portrait song for Jumbo, the autocratic head of Lifehouse’s fictional media conglomerate and director of enforced shared culture. Behind Blue Eyes is a beautifully sung ballad that breaks with Moonie crashing in as Pete snarls: “If my fist clenches, crack it open…” a line he wrote after being tempted – in vain – by a groupie in Denver, 1970. Pete’s battle to stay strong is the inverse of Jumbo’s; isolated and possibly misunderstood, he struggles to maintain the steely core necessary for a career in tyranny.

4.

Substitute

(single, 1966)

As with Seaton’s rebellious declaration, The Who’s March 1966 single confounds with contrariness. Driven by a bass riff copped from Robb Storme & The Whispers’ Where Is My Girl, Substitute is an impersonation about impersonation, a 19th Nervous Breakdown parody (“I see right through your plastic mac”) that skewers the Stones’ persona (“I look all white/But my dad was black”), strips it of Jagger misogyny, and, with every Moon drum fill, mushrooms into a sneering metaphor for the shallow artifice of every stage-managed ’60s pop band. Including The Who.

3.

Won’t Get Fooled Again

(from Who’s Next, 1971)

Hailed by the National Review as the apogee of conservative rock, but also cited in Time as an “anti-war anthem”, Won’t Get Fooled Again proves the ultimate gauge of a protest song’s efficacy – appropriation by both sides. Its conflicted emotions, conveyed by music perpetually on the brink of explosion, manifest the thrill of The Who’s ingrained intellectual/activist joust: Townshend’s ambivalence, never more pointedly expressed than “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss”, undercut by Daltrey’s screaming, street-fighting man.

2.

My Generation

(single, 1964)

A cyclone of anger, frustration and arrogance in which post-war Britain found its voice. Pete Townshend joked that when he wrote “old” in My Generation he meant “rich”, but 60 years later the song still hasn’t left The Who’s live set. Punk before punk, it helped empower a generation, and made possible many exciting things to come. However, perhaps its greatest achievement was to convince The Who that being ’orrible would be no impediment to success.

• READ MORE: Inside The Making Of My Generation

1.

Baba O’ Riley

(from Who’s Next, 1971)

Salvaged from wreckage of Lifehouse, Baba O’Riley was – so Pete Townshend told journalist John Swanson in 1971 – originally 30 minutes long, an epic sweep taking in a turnip farmer called Ray, ecological disaster, a nation imprisoned in sci-fi ‘experience’ suits, a proto internet called The Grid and much, much more. Truncated to a mere five minutes for Who’s Next, one doesn’t need to know or understand the guitarist’s lofty conceptual ambitions to feel the force of Baba O’Riley  (and lord knows his bandmates didn’t). From the twiddly intro inspired by composer Terry Riley (who along with Townshend’s spiritual guru Meher Baba gives the song its title) to the coda’s frenetic cosmic spin, it presented rock music as spiritual transcendence. The Who’s masterpiece, regardless of what they’re actually singing about.

Compiled by: Phil Alexander, Geoff Brown, Jenny Bulley, Keith Cameron, Chris Catchpole, Danny Eccleston, Pat Gilbert, Ian Harrison, Jim Irwin, Alan Light, Andrew Male, Mark Paytress, Mat Snow, Paul Stokes, Lois Wilson

Phil Lynott - The Story Of My Life

★★★★

UNIVERSAL MUSIC RECORDINGS

Phil Lynott’s innate musical curiosity - and Thin Lizzy’s mutable guitar personnel - prompted 1980’s Solo In Soho and attendant synth-pop hit Yellow Pearl while Lizzy was still extant. His later solo output and post-Lizzy band Grand Slam seemed a little rudderless, however, heroin addiction and disillusionment with the biz sometimes clouding Lynott’s judgement.

• READ MORE: Phil Lynott Remembered: “Phil was about Thin Lizzy, he wasn’t about Phil Lynott...”

Boasting 29 previously unreleased tracks, this box’s demos and rarities include coulda-been Lizzy hits (see title track), curios (see A Tribute To Sandy Denny, which Lynott sang and produced for trad act Clann Eadir), a version of Parisienne Walkways with Huey Lewis on harmonica, and The Lady Loves To Dance, a sparky duet with Junior ‘Mama Used To Say’ Giscombe. What might have been had Lynott been well and not spread himself so thinly is all too apparent.

• READ MORE: Every Thin Lizzy Album Ranked

The Story Of My Life is out October 30 on Universal.

TracklistIng:

DISC ONE: SOLO IN SOHO
1. Dear Miss Lonely Hearts
2. King's Call
3. A Child's Lullaby
4. Tattoo (Giving It All Up For Love)
5. Solo In Soho
6. Girls
7. Yellow Pearl - First Version
8. Ode To A Black Man
9. Jamaican Rum
10. Talk In '79

**DISC TWO: FATALISTIC ATTITUDE (ALTERNATE ALBUM)
**1. Somebody Else's Dream - Fatalistic Attitude Version
2. Little Bit Of Water - Fatalistic Attitude Version
3. Gino - Fatalistic Attitude Version
4. Don't Talk About Me Baby - Fatalistic Attitude Version
5. Hate - Fatalistic Attitude Version
6. Fatalistic Attitude - Fatalistic Attitude Version
7. The Man's A Fool - Fatalistic Attitude Version
8. Ode To Liberty (The Protest Song) - Fatalistic Attitude Version
9. Cathleen - Fatalistic Attitude Version
10. Growing Up - Fatalistic Attitude Version
11. Old Town - Fatalistic Attitude Version

**DISC THREE: THE PHILIP LYNOTT ALBUM
**1. Fatalistic Attitude
2. The Man's A Fool
3. Old Town
4. Cathleen
5. Growing Up
6. Together - Album Version
7. Little Bit Of Water
8. Ode To Liberty (The Protest Song)
9. Gino
10. Don't Talk About Me Baby

**DISC FOUR: NON-ALBUM MIXES, B-SIDES & OFFICIAL RARITIES
**1. Yellow Pearl - 7" Remix Edit
2. Yellow Pearl - 12" Remix
3. Yellow Pearl - 7" Remix 2
4. Yellow Pearl - TOTP Theme
5. Together - 7" Remix Edit
6. Together - 12" Dance Mix
7. Somebody Else's Dream
8. Beat Of The Drum
9. The Lady Loves To Dance - 7" Version
10. The Lady Loves To Dance - 12" Version
11. Nineteen - 7" Mix
12. Nineteen - Extended Version
13. Nineteen - Dub Mix
14. Nineteen - Extended Dub Mix

**DISC FIVE: NON-ALBUM MIXES, B-SIDES & OFFICIAL RARITIES
**1. Parisienne Walkways
2. Spanish Guitar
3. Don't Believe A Word
4. Tennessee Stud
5. Please Don't Leave Me - Original Version
6. A Tribute To Sandy Denny
7. Out In The Fields
8. Military Man
9. Still In Love With You
10. Stop Messin' Around - Live From The Ulster Hall, Belfast, UK / 18th December 1984
11. Parisienne Walkways - Live From The Ulster Hall, Belfast, UK / 18th December 1984
12. Out In The Fields - Live From The Manchester Apollo, UK / 23rd September 1985

**DISC SIX: DEMOS
**1. Reggae 2 - Demo
2. Tattoo - Ruff Mix
3. Ode To A Black Man - Diff Mix And Vocals
4. Jamaican Rum - Rough Mix
5. Something's Going On - Demo
6. Parisienne Walkways - Demo
7. Bad Is Bad - Demo
8. The Story Of My Life - Demo
9. Catholic Charm - Monitor Mix
10. Dirty Old Town - Monitor Mix
11. Sweet Samantha - Demo
12. The Man's A Fool - Monitor Mix
13. Don't Talk About Me Baby - Monitor Mix
14. For Always - Demo
15. Mystery Aka I Hear You Call - With Vocal / Rough Mix

**DISC SEVEN: DEMOS
**1. Together - Paul Brady Version
2. Together - New Bass And Synths
3. Beat Of The Drum - Extended
4. Someone's Out To Get Ya - Demo
5. I've Heard Lately - Demo
6. Blue Parris - Demo
7. I Don't Need This - Demo (Grand Slam)
8. Crazy - Demo (Grand Slam)
9. Hot And Spicy - Demo (Grand Slam)
10. Dedication - Demo (Grand Slam)
11. Harlem - Demo (Grand Slam)
12. Can't Get Away - Demo
13. I'm Still Alive - Demo
14. One Wish – Demo

**DISC EIGHT: SOLO BAND REHEARSALS 1982
**1. Yellow Pearl - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
2. Together - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
3. Kings Call - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
4. The Man's A Fool - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982 / Version 1
5. Dear Miss Lonely Hearts - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
6. Tattoo - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
7. Girls - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
8. Solo In Soho - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
9. Old Town - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
10. Growing Up - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982
11. The Man's A Fool - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982 / Version 2
12. Fatalistic Attitude - Solo Band Rehearsals / 1982

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!

Queens Of The Stone Age - Perfecth

★★★★

MATADOR

Built amid the rubble of Josh Homme’s marriage, 2023’s In New Times Roman had a faintly desperate consolidatory air, certain-age guys struggling into skinny jeans. Perfecth is braver and better for being mostly rueful and reflective. “I’m not like that any more,” sings Homme on the Nikki Lane-accompanied Easy Street, repudiating his outlaw self over cosmic Tex-Mex skiffle.

A haunted mood infuses everything, from the opening It’s Only Love’s mortal thoughts through to Phantom Limb’s darklands boogie (“I admit it, I need help”). Insignificant Other, meanwhile, is essentially Kiss’s I Was Made For Loving You beautifully repurposed by ’70s Fleetwood Mac, and there’s even room in the stripped-down scheme for QOTSA’s take on Sunday, the 2015 song Homme wrote for Iggy Pop. Perfecth is exactly the record a questing 30-year-old rock band ought to make.

• READ MORE: Josh Homme: “They don’t know what it takes for me to survive. They just know what it takes for me to die…”

Perfecth is out October 30th on Matador.

Tracklisting:

1. It's Only Love
2. Insignificant Other
3. Where The Goth Girls At?
4. Mono
5. From the Cliff
6. Sunday
7. Easy Street
8. Phantom Limb
9. Run Away From the Mob

“It became clear that I am old enough, or scared enough, to write a record about love…”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our exclusive interview with Queens Of The Stone Age in full. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

This week, Queens Of The Stone Age release their ninth album Perfecth. A defiant, yet vulnerable set, the album was born from a particularly difficult period for frontman Josh Homme. Like its predecessor, 2023’s In Times New Roman, several of the songs on Perfecth are informed by Homme’s messy split from his wife, Brody Dalle, Australian frontwoman of US punk band The Distillers, while in 2022 the singer underwent surgery for cancer.

• READ MORE: Queens Of The Stone Age Perfecth Reviewed: "Exactly the record a questing 30-year-old rock band ought to make..."

While he won’t be drawn on the specific details – “I don’t want to be known for being injured,” Homme says in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now – halfway through the band’s Catacombs Tour in 2024, he was rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, forcing the band to cancel their remaining European dates.

Listening to Perfecth, if anything, Homme appears to have been renewed by his health crises. In one of the album’s more typically rocky moments, Where The Goth Girls At, he passionately declares, “Never felt so alive as the day I almost died”.

“That’s something that’s been recurring in my life at times,” Homme tells MOJO’s Tom Doyle. “I almost drowned when I was 12, and I remember this incredible burst of life post-that. And so I’ve taken this as a near-life experience. It feels very much like being in the sun afterwards.”

Following his surgery in 2024, Homme’s doctors advised him that it would likely take him 18 months to two years to recover. Ignoring medical advice, he only waited eight months to go back on the road with Queens Of the Stone Age and start recording of Perfecth.

 “I was told many times to stop,” he says. “But that’s just someone’s opinion, y’know. They don’t know what it takes for me to survive. They just know what it takes for me to die, and I’m not interested in that second half.”

“I think he bounced back a little too soon,” bassist Michael Shuman admits. “Because there were some more complications. But it’s really hard to tell him to sit down and shut the fuck up and just take a break.”

“Man, he’s like a Terminator,” adds drummer Jon Theodore. “It’s like you can’t kill that guy. He’s had 150 lives already, and I’m just so impressed by his resilience.”

Elsewhere in the interview, in UK shops and available to order for delivery wherever you are now, Homme discusses establishing The Desert Sessions, the series of jam-based recordings at Rancho De La Luna studio in the Mojave Desert that over the years have produced a series of improvised albums featuring a diverse cast of participants including Mark Lanegan, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons and PJ Harvey.

One of the acts transformed at Homme’s desert hideaway were Arctic Monkeys, who emerged from Rancho De La Luna and the Homme-produced sessions for their 2009 album Humbug as a quartet of long-haired desert rockers.

“The truth is, they were looking to change,” he says. “They were looking to shed their skin, and they needed a safe place to do it with someone that wasn’t going to tell on ’em. What they needed was protection and someone to know when to shut the fuck up. A lot of that is just tuning the outside world out.”

Homme says he learned a lot from the Monkeys in return. “When we went to the desert, Alex [Turner] never had a lyric book and he would change words [at the microphone]. I just found that fascinating. It was fun to show them things, because I’d see them do it in a way I never would have. So it was a bit like looking at a different side of a Rubik’s cube.”

It was once again to the desert that Homme retreated when he assembled the crack band – comprising himself, QOTSA’s Dean Fertita and Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders – for the recording of Iggy Pop’s late career high, Post Pop Depression, released in 2016.

“There’s so many things I learned from Iggy,” Homme enthuses. “He’s just the greatest poet and collaborator. And no matter who Iggy collaborates with, he gives all he’s got to give. He was singing at the time from a 69-year-old’s perspective, and it was as vital as anything I’d ever been around. I just felt like, Oh my God, there’s a light way down the road.” Iggy’s attitude and third act energy galvanised Homme and pointed a way to his own future: “If I can do this, maybe I could save myself one day.”

“I’m not really interested in being nice…”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our interview with Queens Of The Stone Age in full. More info and to order a copy for delivery HERE!

Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO – on sale now – Elton John’s songwriting partner and lyricist Bernie Taupin has spoken about the original inspiration behind one of the pair’s most well-known collaborations, Candle In The Wind.

• READ MORE: Elton John Interviewed: “Nothing I’ve played before comes close to Glastonbury…”

First featured on John’s 1973 album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the song was an elegy to Marilyn Monroe, who had died eleven years earlier, aged 36. However, speaking to MOJO’s Sylvie Simmons as he releases his new solo album The Sea Has No Mercy, Taupin has revealed the track was initially written with another tragic Hollywood star in mind.

“I was never a fan of Marilyn Monroe. I’d originally written the story of Montgomery Clift,” Taupin tells Simmons. “The idea was how people are memorialised in probably the best sense when they die young, but mostly it was a fiction in my own mind. When that song came out, people started sending me so much Marilyn memorabilia. Sharon Osbourne, then Arden, gave me Marilyn’s shoes from some movie. Elton gave me the dress form that her dresses were made on, in a huge purple Perspex case with flashing light bulbs.”

Candle In The Wind wasn’t released as a single at the time, in addition to appearing on Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, it was chosen as the B-side to Benny And The Jets. However, the song would achieve a hitherto inconceivable level of popularity when John performed a version with new lyrics, written by Taupin, at Princess Diana’s funeral in 1997. Released shortly afterwards, Candle In The Wind 1997 became the best-selling single in UK chart history, and remains the second best-selling physical single release of all time after Bing Crosby’s White Christmas.

“I don’t want to sound cold or cruel, but it’s not something I intended to do,” says Taupin of re-working his original lyrics for Diana’s funeral. “Elton called and said they were asking him to sing at the memorial or funeral. I said, Do you want me to write a new song? I can’t remember who said it, but it became, what about rewriting the lyrics to Candle In The Wind. All I remember is I did it really quickly. To this day, if you ask me to recite one of the lyrics, I’d not be able to if you held a gun to my head.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Taupin looks back to the period in the late ’60s when, after being introduced by Liberty Records A&R  executive Ray Williams, he and John, then still calling himself Reg Dwight, lived together in Elton’s mum’s home in Pinner as they tried to break into the music industry as songwriters.

“When Elton and I realised that we had something going on with the songwriting, it just made sense to move in together. Thankfully his mother acquiesced to it,” says Taupin. “We put this back room together with the bunk beds and our record collections and our books and, as he has often said, I became the brother that he never had. I don’t know if he became the brother I never had because I already had one. But my brother and I really had nothing in common. With Elton, we had everything in common.”

The Sea Has No Mercy is out now on Vertigo/MCA Nashville.

“I adore Elton. We’re always in each other’s heads, no matter where we are…”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our interview with Bernie Taupin in full. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE.

“A year and a half ago, maybe, I said to my manager, I don’t think we’ll be doing any more albums,” Simple Minds frontman Jim Kerr tells MOJO. “We’ve kind of said about all we have to say, and I don’t need to be sitting indoors looking at a screen. Pro Tools – fucking hell! Death by a thousand cuts, you drive yourself nuts.”

• READ MORE: Simple Minds Live Review: Jim Kerr and co. bring the Big Music to LA

However, manager Ian Grenfell suggested he reconsider after reviewing new song ideas the band had accumulated. “He said, ‘Why not just go at it like you did in the old days?’” says Kerr. “He was very persuasive.”

Aware that a new track or two wouldn’t hurt, Kerr and guitarist Charlie Burchill convened for a three-day session at Eastcote studios in west London in spring 2025, immediately before going on tour in South America. They were joined by bassist Oscar Golding and drummer Geoff Holroyde, who were suggested by regular production team Andy Wright and Gavin Goldberg. “We started working fast, very much bass and drums and three backing tracks in an afternoon,” says Kerr. “And suddenly it was like, Maybe we can do this. It was very kind of guerrilla, and so against the odds I found it all invigorating.”

“New wave, post-punk, whatever you call it… that’s where we should be.”

- Jim Kerr

Over the next year and a half, they periodically repeated the process: with three days of finessing at Wright’s space in Acton, and mixing by Andrew Scheps, Kerr estimates that making the LP now titled Sacrosanct took around a month in total. Big US dates in summer 2025 further influenced the album’s direction, says Kerr. “We were playing the big songs, but I never thought I’d see American audiences jumping up and down to the fourth track on the second side of Sons And Fascination [1981], or so-called deep cuts from Empires And Dance [1980]. New wave, post-punk, whatever you want to call it… I thought, That’s where we should be, in that vein again.”

As well as Kerr and Burchill, there are songwriting contributions from Iain Cook of Chvrches and Paul Statham of ’80s contenders B-Movie. Some songs date as far back as 2013, but the singer stresses, “I wouldn’t want anyone thinking they were things that had been discarded – sometimes a song needs to find its time.”

He admits a debt to key early inspiration Magazine on attitudinal opener Elysium (“Magazine, in our dreams,” he says), calls second song King Of The Underworld unapologetically “epic” and lead single Beginner Boys “wistful, romantic, but with a bit of a new wave thrash.” William Blake manifests on Jerusalem (State Of Mind), while Our Secrets Are The Same reflects on the long association of Kerr and Burchill.

Aptly, the track Songs reflects on the miraculous power of music to redeem when all else fails. Does he still feel like they won’t make any more albums, then? “I’ve already started the next one. We feel rejuvenated,” Kerr says, and then addresses why it’s called Sacrosanct: “we’ve found the faith again.”

Sacrosanct is out January 29 on BMG

Tracklisting:

Elysium

King Of The Underworld

Beginner Boys

Jerusalem (State Of Mind)

Our Secrets Are The Same

Songs

Alive In This Moment

The Next Right Thing

The Who as we know them could have been two-hit wonders. Months before December ’65’s debut album My Generation, singer Roger Daltrey was dismissed for beating up drummer Keith Moon. He was soon reinstated, promising pacifism, but violence, resentment and intra-band rivalry would remain at The Who’s heart. And thankfully so, since music as powerful as theirs was unlikely ever to be created in an atmosphere of calm.

• READ MORE: The Who's 50 Greatest Songs Ranked!

Starting life as R&B-playing Mods, they quickly transformed into rule-breaking pioneers, perverting, distorting or ignoring the accepted rock tenets. John Entwistle’s bass and Moon’s drums became lead instruments, vying for attention with Pete Townshend’s guitar, which he’d bash and trash to create an unholy wall of noise, citing Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art as inspiration. Daltrey’s role as straight man kept the ship from capsizing – handy considering the group’s early management team of flamboyant visionary Kit Lambert and East End tough-nut Chris Stamp was often as out of control as the group.

“Violence, resentment and intra-band rivalry remained at their heart.”

Contractual and financial problems dogged them throughout their early days, and two years after their debut 45 I Can’t Explain charted, hit singles were drying up. But this was really the start: wowing America at the Monterey Pop festival in June 1967, the group elected to refine and elevate the album as an artform, a path which reached an apotheosis in 1969 with the ‘rock opera’ Tommy. Success as a stadium rock act followed, but Townshend’s impulse to eclipse Tommy led the group into another troubled phase, which saw concept album Lifehouse aborted (it was trimmed into the majestic Who’s Next) and the appearance of their final magnum opus Quadrophenia. The wheels came off in 1978 with Moon’s death, and fallow periods meant virtually no new material until 2006’s Endless Wire, released four years after Entwistle’s death, followed 13 years later by Who, their last studio LP to date. But their recorded legacy remains vast, deep, and ripe for exploration. We've this list of the band's studio albums and included a compilation, an outtakes LP and the group legendary first live album – simply because they’re key milestones in the Who story and no self-respecting music fan should be without them…

15.

Face Dances

(Polydor, 1981)

Its lead-off single You Better You Bet promised that a reconstituted Who with new drummer Kenney Jones could be a great thing; it also suggested that Townshend had figured out how to successfully incorporate modern keyboard sounds into the group’s beefy rock sound. But despite other good songs such as Don’t Let Go The Coat, Another Tricky Day and Entwistle’s The Quiet One, Face Dances overall felt like Who-lite, lacking clarity and confidence (it gets self-consciously ‘new wave’ in places), though Townshend’s complex arrangements must be admired.

14.

It’s Hard

(Polydor, 1982)

In the late ’70s you could wait three years for a new Who album, but It’s Hard arrived just 18 months after Face Dances. There was a reason for this: Polydor in Britain and Warner Brothers in the States demanded an album to capitalise on the new momentum Kenney Jones’ recruitment and Face Dances’ chart success had brought. At the time, Townshend didn’t think the band had another album left in them, while Daltrey later confessed he thought It’s Hard should never have been released. But that would have robbed the world of the then contemporary cold-funk majesty of Eminence Front, the wordy, Quadrophenia-sounding Cry If You Want, the reassuringly heartfelt Cooks County and blustering I’ve Known No War. Sensing the tank was now all but dry, The Who then went on an extended hiatus: there wouldn’t be another new Who album until Endless Wire, 24 years later.

13.

Who Are You

(Polydor, 1978)

After a year spent touring By Numbers, The Who drifted apart, with a booze-sodden Moon for a time residing in LA as actor Steve McQueen’s annoying neighbour. When the group reconvened for sessions in summer 1977 at their Ramport studios in Battersea, the going was slow but, after Daltrey underwent throat surgery, sessions at RAK the following year yielded the dense, synthesizer-heavy content of Who Are You. It wasn’t an easy album to love but the bombastic title track, snappy Sister Disco and Entwistle’s bolshy Had Enough were sufficient to save it from dying a turgid AOR death. It was Moon’s last record – he fatally overdosed a month after the album was released.

12.

Who

(Polydor, 2019)

Thirteen years after Endless Wire, The Who – or now ‘The Two’ – felt ready to make another studio album, albeit with Pete and Roger recording their contributions separately. The result, much to the world’s relief, was an album that recaptured their essential Who-ness, a fact they themselves acknowledged with the record’s stark title. There was, too, a degree of autobiography about the whole affair, with Detour clearly referencing their pre-Who name The Detours, while Got Nothing To Prove on the deluxe edition was an unreleased Townshend song dating from 1966. Guitars slash and twang, backing vocals “whooo”, strings skitter and Daltrey gives Pete’s reflective, grumpy-old-man lyrics his gutsy best. A Peter Blake cover completes a classy package. Will they ever make another? Who knows?

11.

By Numbers

(Polydor, 1975)

On May 19, 1975, Pete Townshend turned 30, prompting a crisis of confidence about his relevance as a rock star. What could you write about as a boozy, lusty, filthy rich father of two with thinning hair? After beating a severe bout of writer’s block, he answered his predicament by penning some dark songs about it, chief among them the self-explanatory However Much I Booze and the libidinous Dreaming From The Waist. Opening Side 1, the Lifehouse outtake Slip Kid set the tone with its warning to young artists about the evils of the record industry and rather joyless, honky-tonkin’ mid-’70s rock. There were two lights shining in the murk, though: the saucy romp Squeeze Box and Townshend-sung ukulele ballad Blue, Red And Grey.

10.

Endless Wire

(Polydor, 2006)

Two bandmates gone, Townshend and Daltrey courageously essayed another album as The Who – 24 years after the band’s previous album It’s Hard. The incarnation they revisited was the mid-’70s rock behemoth of Quadrophenia, with tracks such as Black Widow’s Eyes and Mike Post Theme showing Daltrey’s lungs to be intact and that Townshend could still turn his hand to bombast and mighty crash chords. The real surprises were Townshend’s cracked, burnished voice on the Dylan-esque title track, and the mini-concept piece Wire & Glass, a new Lifehouse tributary which saw Townshend’s best songs in decades in We Got A Hit and the elegiac Tea & Theatre.

9.

Odds & Sods

(Track, 1974)

During the second half of 1974 The Who were on sabbatical, albeit taking time out to appear in Ken Russell’s Tommy film. Entwistle used some downtime in the summer to compile Odds & Sods, an album of outtakes and rarities that he hoped would provide a “parallel history” of the group. But such was the quality of material he gathered that many fans welcomed it as a brand-new studio album. It kicked off with a new, horn-propelled Ox composition called Postcard, but its oomph lay with gems like the pre-Tommy experiments Glow Girl and Little Billy, plus early ’70s leftovers Pure And Easy, Naked Eye and Long Live Rock – the latter all to become Who classics.

8.

A Quick One

(Track, 1966)

The Who’s early years were dominated by the legal wrangling to oust Shel Talmy as producer following My Generation. In late 1966, the group raised much-needed cash by negotiating song publishing deals for Daltrey, Entwistle and Moon, on the understanding that the entire group would come up with material for the subsequent album. Consequently A Quick One took something of a turn for the weird, as three untested songwriters expressed themselves via the creepy and surreal Boris The Spider (Entwistle), Cobwebs And Strange (Moon) and See My Way (Daltrey). But it was inevitably Townshend who stole the show with the baleful So Sad About Us and the magnificent title track’s groundbreaking ‘mini-opera’ of adultery.

• READ MORE: "Don't fuck with me, you little shit..." The Who vs Jimi Hendrix, backstage at Monterey.

7.

Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy

(Track, 1971)

Though they struggled with the LP format until Tommy, few could deny The Who’s ability to fashion extraordinary, rule-breaking singles. Released in 1971, Meaty… compiled their key 45s so far, and moreover created instant nostalgia for their Pop Art-Mod beginnings, from the ridiculously brilliant bass solo on My Generation to I Can See For Miles’ fierce harmonic intelligence to Magic Bus’s hypnotic hippy shuffle. Unintentionally, it seems as much a concept album as Quadrophenia, charting Townshend’s personal journey from misunderstood teenage outsider (I Can’t Explain, The Kids Are Alright) to twentysomething spiritual adventurer (The Seeker). Perfect in every way.

6.

Live At Leeds

(Track, 1970)

By the time they broke the US market in 1967, The Who were a powerful live act, capable of transcendental performances often capped with gear-smashing finales. The problem was that few of their studio recordings suggested as much. Consequently, after several US tours showcasing Tommy, The Who contrived to capture their thunderous, improv-enhanced live set by taping a February 1970 Leeds University show on the Pye Mobile. Live At Leeds immediately set a lofty benchmark for in-concert rock records – check out the clanging versions of Summertime Blues and Young Man Blues – with subsequent editions adding renditions of Tommy and a spot-the-difference sister date in Hull. Utterly joyful.

5.

My Generation

(Brunswick 1965)

When did rock music begin? Arguably with The Who’s epochal debut, which while indelibly inked with mid-’60s Mod-pop smarts – La-La-La-Lies, The Kids Are Alright, A Legal Matter Baby – introduced a nasty, noisy, disruptive and dark element to the classic British guitar-band sound. The runaway title track, basically telling finger-wagging elders who’d probably fought in the war to fuck off, was a speeded-up blues with a mad bass solo and a finale sounding like a bus crashing; but it was the heavy instrumental improv jam of The Ox (Entwistle’s nickname) which dragged music into the future, Moon’s lunatic drumming and Townshend’s evil dog-fight guitar playing announcing a band who clearly didn’t actually care if you liked them or not. Which only made you love The ’Oribble ’Oo even more. The Beatles must have crapped themselves.

4.

Quadrophenia

(Polydor, 1973)

Unbowed by the disintegration of Lifehouse, in 1973 Townshend set out to write another, more earthly concept piece. Set in the Mod era, Quadrophenia probed the fractured psyche of troubled pill-popping teenager Jimmy; more, its notion of double schizophrenia enabled a playful examination of The Who’s four-way dynamic, each personality represented by a quasi-operatic leitmotif. Here, music and ideas meshed with breathtaking skill, with every track – from bullish rockers The Real Me and 5:15, through reflective, semi-theatrical fare such as Cut My Hair and the hymnal closer, Love Reign O’er Me – essential to the mood and storyline of the whole. Clever, powerful, overblown, it proved to be The Who’s greatest concept LP.

3.

The Who Sell Out

(Track 1967)

The Summer of Love wrong-footed many acts, and The Who, steeped in street-fightin’ Shepherd’s Bush, found the hippy world difficult to embrace. Stylistically, in 1967 the group were still in an explorative phase, caught in a no-man’s-land between the past (the straight pop of I Can’t Reach You), the present (the quaint folk-psych of Mary Anne With The Shaky Hand) and the future (the powerful, kaleidoscopic I Can See For Miles; the Tommy-predicting story-song Tattoo). Strangely, the overall effect was The Who’s most accessible and undemanding album, melodically rich and full of unexpected twist and turns, all glued together with made-up advertising jingles.

2.

Tommy

(Track, 1969)

With the assistance of Kit Lambert, throughout 1968 Townshend began sketching what would become the ‘rock opera’ of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who is cured by pinball and becomes a spiritual leader. The concept was rooted in Townshend’s fascination with the teachings of guru Meher Baba, and themes of universal love, all of which crucially chimed with the counterculture generation. The peerless Pinball Wizard, The Acid Queen, I’m Free and See Me Feel Me injected a new vector into rock music, exploring psychic elevation and personal redemption; rock grew-up in one fell swoop, and Pete Townshend obsessively strove for years to come to find another concept as powerful. And with Ken Russell’s film of the LP, rock movies moved into a new era.

1.

Who’s Next

(Track, 1971)

It was originally conceived as Lifehouse, a project that came to baffle Townshend’s bandmates with its sci-fi and quasi-religious elements including “experience suits”, a proto-internet set-up called The Grid, a single note binding all beings. Abandoned amid larger worries about Lambert and Stamp’s growing drug problems, producer Glyn Johns was drafted in to rescue the project, taking the strongest songs and shaping them into one of the roughest, meanest rock albums ever made, from the synth-skittering Baba O’Riley and politico sledgehammer Won’t Get Fooled Again, to the sunny Going Mobile and haunting Behind Blue Eyes. Townshend’s dented price was rock’s gain.

• READ MORE: Pete Townshend interviewed: Lifehouse, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, neotericism, ‘telematics’ and more!

The Best Summer

★★★★

Dir: Tamra Davis

VISIT FILMS/LONDON DOCK ‘N ROLL FESTIVAL

“There are no cute boys on tour,” laments Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna at 1995’s Summersault Festival in Melbourne. “What about Pavement?” her friend Tamra Davis suggests. Hanna looks doubtful. “I don’t know about them… they’re preppy!” Made from recently discovered camcorder footage shot for fun by director Davis while accompanying husband Mike D across Australia, 30 years later this travelling circus of backstage fun and on-stage action captures a charmed moment, when alt-rock’s best and brightest navigated the encroachments of fame. Hanna’s presence is pivotal: tasked with interviewing her tourmates, she draws telling insights from Kim Gordon, while Dave Grohl admits “I hate having to talk to the audience”. Then she gets to Adam Horowitz and falls in love on camera. Warm and bittersweet, like all the best summers.

The Best Summer screens at London Doc ‘N Roll Festival October-November. More info HERE.

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!

Manic Street Preachers - The Holy Bible Live

★★★★★

SONY

Twenty years after Richey Edwards’ final bow as a Manic Street Preacher, his bandmates honoured their departed friend by playing The Holy Bible in entirety for three nights at London’s Roundhouse. The trio summoned every shred of experience to re-engage with the cerebral causticity of a record defined by Edwards’ genius, their blistering performances laced with gallows humour. “It’s the feel-good singalong anthem of winter – take it a-fucking-way!” says Nicky Wire, introducing Mausoleum.

• READ MORE: Every Manic Street Preachers Album Ranked

Whether booing Thatcher or chanting Of Walking Abortion’s chorus, the audience contributions are key, vividly so in Kieran Evans’ accompanying concert film – Wire: “Less a movie, more a migraine” – where a fan’s “God Bless Richey 4 The Holy Bible” placard is complemented by James Dean Bradfield smiling amid P.C.P.’s lyrical tripwires. The Blu-Ray has Steven Wilson’s Atmos mix of the original LP. Heroic work all round.

The Holy Bible Live is out October 23 on Sony.

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!

In recent years Black Sabbath’s affable riff-god has embraced celebrity fragrances. Promoting his aftershave Tony Iommi Deified alongside Italian perfumers Xerjoff, the black-clad, crucifix-bedecked master of the devil’s tritone penned the instrumental Deified in 2024. So began From The Dark, his first studio set since Black Sabbath's 13 in 2013, and his first solo record since 2005’s Fused. An undead thriller penned with Norwegian singer Jørn Lande, previously of operatic supergroup Avantasia, it also sees “dear old friend” Brian May play a solo on Death Watch. There’s still something darkly monolithic about Iommi’s pioneering sound. It’s the Brummie brick heavy metal was built with; enduring testament to late bandmate Ozzy Osbourne and all Black Sabbath achieved.

• READ MORE: Every Black Sabbath Album Ranked

From The Dark****’s subject-matter includes nuclear Armageddon. Are we still dealing with the war pigs?

Well, the world’s not in great shape, is it? It’s so sad that we keep spending millions on weapons.

Django Reinhardt overcoming fire damage to his fretting-hand was inspirational when you lost the tops of two fingers in an accident aged 17. Were you a fan of Django’s music too?

Very much so. Especially his stuff with Stéphane Grappelli. I suppose there’s a bit of a Django influence on stuff like Planet Caravan [from 1970’s Paranoid].

Ozzy: what images endure?

Oh god. So many. When I picked him up for our first European tour he came out of his house with one shirt on a coat hanger. I said, “Oz, we’re going away for six weeks!” He said, “I know.” (Laughs). I remember playing the piano part for Changes [from 1972’s Vol. 4] and Ozzy coming up with that fantastic melody. He was brilliant with melodies. It’s quite Beatles-ish, that one.

You have a huge store of unused guitar riffs. What will happen to them after you’ve gone?

Where do you think I’m going? (Laughs). I should sift through them, but every time I go into the studio I come up with something new. Brian May was over and he said, “Got any riffs?” I found some old cassettes and must have played him about 150 ideas. He was like “You’ve got to use these!”

You once befriended horror-film icon Christopher Lee…

We interviewed each other at a London hotel and his son-in-law filmed it. I have a copy and Sir Christopher had a copy, but the film was never released. I told him I loved The Curse Of Frankenstein and The Mummy. He said “Really? They were rubbish!”

A little bird tells MOJO you’ve seen the ABBA Voyage avatar show.

Yes, my wife’s Swedish, and we took along [tennis player] Sue Barker and her husband. It was very good, but it left me with a strange feeling. Nobody there - just these images.

John Bonham was best man when you first married in 1973.

Strange old day, that was. We went out to the club in Birmingham for my stag the night before. John said, “Open all the champagne you have.” He wanted me to down 12 glasses for starters. I refused, so he polished them off - and the rest. I had to get him home, but he was pissed as a parrot and he’d lost his keys. When I pressed the buzzer Pat [Bonham’s wife] said, “Is he drunk?” I said, “He is a bit, yeah.” She said, "I’ll open the door, but he’s not coming up. Leave him in the hallway.” Next morning he was right as rain.

Legend holds you played bagpipes on 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.

Not true! I did send out one of the crew to get a set. I thought it might be quite haunting. But when he brought them back I couldn’t get a tune out of them.

Prior to Sabbath’s last stand at Villa Park last year, Andrew Watt’s wanted to produce a final album with the original line-up. You declined. Why?

Working with Rick Rubin [on 2013’s 13] had already been awkward, and Bill [Ward] had pulled out. Andrew’s good but I couldn’t imagine Bill or the rest of us being okay with him telling us what to do. And then Ozzy died, sadly. We would never have had enough time.

• READ MORE: Ozzy Osbourne On Black Sabbath’s Final Show: “I wanted to say a proper thank you to my fans...”

Tell us something you’ve never told an interviewer before.

I’ve got a great Yacht Rock playlist I put on when people come for dinner.

From The Dark is released on October 23 on BMG.

Angine De Poitrine

The Troxy, London, Monday, October 19, 2026

If someone had told you a year ago that the most talked-about band in London in the autumn of 2026 would be a funky math/prog-rock duo from Quebec with a microtonal double-neck and polka-dot papier mâché heads, claiming to be aliens called Khn and Klek, well, they’d have been laughed out of wherever it was they said it.

But who’s laughing now? Certainly not Khn (guitar) or Klek (drums) since they ‘speak’ only guttural gargles amongst themselves and sometimes to the audience. We’re meant to sort of know what they mean, and guess what, we sort of do.

ADP’s biggest UK headline show to date (one of two consecutive nights at the 3,600 capacity Troxy) is also MOJO’s third ADP show of the year. That means we’ve got through the phase of pure wonder at their costumes and baffling instrumental mastery and are in a position to judge the nuances. Firstly, this is Angine taking a more ‘rock’ line through their set list than usual, possibly in tribute to the straightahead heavy psych of their (also Québécois) support act, Gros Mené (translation: Big Minnow). Khn’s guitar tone has a tad more gnarl and their attack overall – but especially during a sizzling Sarniezz – is a little more frenzied and less fastidious. MOJO writer Jim Wirth’s insistence that he can hear some Allman Brothers in them suddenly makes perfect sense.

Angine start hard, with the fractured Zep riffing of Angor, and spend the whole night going harder, while you sense the audience slowly acclimatise to the shock of seeing these crazies in the flesh and begin to respond physically (there’s a tiny mosh enclave – a mosh Andorra – which grows slowly but steadily into a mosh Catalonia). One can empathise – only once you finish speculating how difficult it must be to play this ludicrously complex yet irresistibly danceable music with a two-foot rubber proboscis between you and your fretboard (Khn) or peering through a slit in a towering Count Binface-style helmet thing (Klek), it’s possible to deep dive into the music itself. Once you do, it’s dizzying: Khn’s swirling microtonal eddies lift you up; Klek’s precision beats nail you down. You’re assaulted by the King Gizzard psych-punk of Mata Zyklek, taken on a kaleidoscopic journey through the ever-changing Fabienk. It ends, as all nights on their UK tour have, with the Anatolian Hawkwind freakout of Sherpa, where the borders of reality appear to move in and out at a frightening rate.

Bands with strong visual or performance elements always face a dilemma at some point. How do you change it up while keeping the schtick in balance with the music? The Hives broke through with black shirts and white ties; upgraded to white jackets; returned recently with Nudie-ish suits (still black and white, though). They’re more than the sum of their sartorial choices but it’s what they’re known for. How will Angine sustain their mythology, long-term? Will there be an ill-advised unmasking, à la Kiss? For a minute or two tonight, your correspondent closes his eyes and makes Angine De Poitrine an entirely audio experience. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it rocks.

Angine De Poitrine, The Troxy, October 19, 2026, Setlist:

Angor
Yor Zarad
Tamebsz
Mata Zyklek
Ababa Hotel
Sarniezz
Fabienk
Sherpa

Michael Kiwanuka - Fudge

★★★★

POLYDOR

“[Create] the kinds of things that you think are beautiful… not what you think sounds good to someone else” – Chick Corea.

On June 18, 2025, MOJO interviewed Michael Kiwanuka about his then-unannounced fifth album, Fudge, a surprise addition to his catalogue given that he was still promoting Small Changes, released the previous November. To these ears, the 2024 LP was a good yet disappointing effort – as if he and producers Danger Mouse and Inflo had tried 
to create a classic soul album using a template rather than any emotions Kiwanuka felt at that moment. “Now I know you’ve listened,” was his response.

A month later, everything had changed: Kiwanuka had a haemorrhagic stroke that put him in intensive care: at the time of writing, he has not been home for more than 14 months. Though MOJO ran a small review upfront of its originally planned release, Fudge remained largely unacknowledged until September 2026, when the singer went public with the extent of his health issues and announced it as his next LP.

Recorded at the same time as Small Changes yet approached as a reaction to those sessions, Fudge has the feel of a man wrestling with the direction a successful career had taken him. By his own admission, Kiwanuka had only recently begun reaching the audience he sought; now he was eschewing the trappings of fame, recording alone in a shed with equipment he’d bought himself. In intent, at least, Fudge can be filed alongside Stevie Wonder taking artistic control or Marvin Gaye going on strike until Berry Gordy relented on issuing What’s Going On.

The first track, Summer Clothes, opens with that Chick Corea quote as a statement of intent, but as it closes you hear Kiwanuka in the studio: “I don’t know what I’m doing… I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.” The implication is clear: this is his break-up album – not in a romantic sense, but from the musical relationships that brought him here. It’s no less emotional for that. “I know who I want to be,” he sings on Love In My Heart; later cautioning on Move In My Direction: “I don’t know how to get there.”

Kiwanuka is pointing the finger of blame at himself; as a consequence, Fudge is a raw, emotive listen, with light relief hard to come by. Summer Clothes puts it bluntly: “You made me sad so I had to go.” Sing drives the feeling home: “I need miracles to wash away the pain.” For many, many reasons, you hope there will be another chapter to follow, shining light into these dark corners.

To quote Corea again: “You have to learn your own heart… that’s what’s beautiful, so you have to pursue that.” And this, as Michael Kiwanuka has demonstrated here, is where soul lies.

Fudge is out October 23 on Polydor.

Tracklisting:

Summer Clothes
California
Just Another Moment
Drowning In Your Heart
Love In My Heart
Across The Sky
Stars
Move In My Direction
You Sent Me Flying
Steve's Paradise
Sing
Swings And Roundabouts
Etching On The Fourth Side

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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Richard Thompson -  Hippies, Thugs and Heroes

★★★★★

NEW WEST

The hypnotic closing jangle on the first Richard Thompson album since 2024’s Ship To Shore, Siren captures another poor sap heading on to the emotional rocks. “It’s only love that stops my breath and makes me sigh and stare in wonder,” sings the ever-mournful Thompson, that desperate desire to love and be loved overriding all the flashing danger signs. “Only you and you alone can sing the spell that I fall under.”

• READ MORE: Richard Thompson Interviewed: “I come from a folk background, where songs about mining disasters and incest are normal…”

At 77, the musical spell cast by the bumbling former Fairport Convention man with the magic talking guitar is largely unbroken. Not a man given to wild flights of fancy, he has been making intense, gloomy and largely brilliant solo records for well over 55 years, with the chorus of Roll Over Vaughan Williams – the opening track on his 1972 debut, Henry The Human Fly – setting a Henny Penny precedent: “Live in fear, live in fear.”

The sky has not fallen on his head just yet, but his latest outing is one of his darkest and bleakest regardless. A kind of short story collection, Hippies, Thugs And Heroes finds a selection of innocents lining up to meet their fate, Gashlycrumb Tinies-style. Bashed together briskly by his American band, with the assistance of his wife Zara Phillips and long-serving accordion maestro John Kirkpatrick, it offers precious little in terms of light relief; nothing about vintage motorbikes, Jimmy Shand records, or teenage sex from the early ’60s. Instead, it is a Leviathan-worthy vision of a world governed by man’s basest instincts, where life tends to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and (if you are lucky) short. Depending on your outlook, it may be his best since 1999’s Mock Tudor, his best since 1975’s Pour Down Like Silver, or his best full-stop.

Byrds of ill omen flutter ominously over opening track Sorcerer’s Apprentice as Thompson stares into the face of evil and finds a disturbing lack of reason. “It dawns on me that you’re not quite well, you’re not quite compos mentis,” he sings, addressing the malevolent force in the room. If that Phil Ochs line is true – “half the world is crazy, the other half is scared” – it doesn’t take a genius to work out which side of the line Thompson thinks he stands on.

Crazy people are running all over town on Hippies, Thugs And Heroes, though. The strutting Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking tracks a chemically assisted dalliance between a “Kings Road hippie” and a “Saucihall thug”, with a shuddering Jethro Tull-sized riff helping to drown out the sound of loveless debauch.

She Burns It All, meanwhile, is another unhappy trip to the psychiatric ward (Thompson previously visited on Grey Walls from 1991’s Rumor And Sigh). One of his most unusual songs, this otherworldly duet with Phillips has echoes of early ’70s Nico/Kevin Ayers, and reaches the worrying conclusion that neither “Mandrake root or holy water” can soothe a sick soul.

Some people are ill, then, but others are just bad. The lopsided Stringer imagines the truth that underpins the heroic outlaw ballads as it portrays a toxic thug who “murders for pleasure” but somehow wins the public’s affection. “The poor and the needy they sing of his exploits; they feed him and hide him like one of their own,” sneers Thompson, every inch the policeman’s son. “But Stringer is a scoundrel, a taker a user; he cares about Stringer and Stringer alone.”

However, the Stringers of the world may be a symptom of a greater malaise. Muggers and thieves are rampant on the Ayn Rand-via-Joe Brown knees-up of Everybody’s Stealing – a grinning, Cajun-spiced reminder that, 50-plus years on from the release of Thompson’s Larkin-esque End Of The Rainbow, tycoons and barrow boys continue to rob with impunity.

The poor, the gentle and the wounded, meanwhile, continue to suffer. A sort of funky Brother, Can You Spare A Dime, Unsung Hero laments how working people tend to get overlooked in a society that only really has time for big names, while the ominous jangle of Pauper’s Grave is a sombre rumination on a dead drunk, decorated with a suitably mournful strathspey guitar solo. Thompson notes that his luckless John Doe was found with “nothing in his pocket but a letter nearly fallen apart; he read the thing so many times he must have learned it by heart”, and it may be that love – the painful, unresolved, unrequited kind – carves a deeper gouge through Hippies, Thugs And Heroes than any other human foible.

A wronged partner feels the sting of humiliation on The Soul In Me, while Make Believe You Don’t Know Me tiptoes around the frozen wreckage of an impossible affair, apparently with a gloomy brass band for company. The wistful Pipe Dream (a grandson of Don Gibson’s mournful 1955 country smash Sweet Dreams) offers a brief moment of wistful prettiness, but even then it is a song about watching the twinkling fragments of a broken heart tumbling down to earth.

The Big Smoke, meanwhile, echoes The Smiths’ London, unsettled chords and mournful strings a reminder that – in Thompson’s universe – a new career in a new town offers no escape from old-world misery. “I’ve made up my mind this is my time the big smoke is calling,” he sings, the sombre musical accompaniment making it clear that this joyful decision represents the opening of a new portal into Hell.

Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is, then, a bit of a downer, but those who have found their way to Thompson’s songs – via Fairport, or fellow travellers like Robyn Hitchcock, Tom Verlaine, Bob Mould, Pere Ubu, R.E.M. and now The Tubs – will know how intoxicating his kind of gloom can be. Like fellow Muswell Hillbilly Ray Davies, Thompson also knows how to place the tiniest corona of hope around the big black sun of this material, a clumsy little half joke or a sudden luminous flash of guitar enlivening the darkness. Thompson’s central message remains stark, though. Bad things happen to good people; bad things happen to bad people; bad things happen all the time. However – as the poor sap on Siren knows – only one person can sing this kind of spell quite so bewitchingly. To the rocks. Full speed ahead.

Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is out October 16 on New West Records.

Tracklisting:

Sorcerer's Apprentice

Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking

Pauper's Grave

Unsung Hero

Make Believe You Don't Know Me

She Burns It All

Everybody's Stealing

The Soul in Me

Pipe Dreams

The Big Smoke

Stringer

Siren

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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This Friday, former Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson releases his 20th solo album Hippies, Thugs And Heroes. Even by Thompson’s famously gloomy standards, it’s one of his bleakest records: a selection of short tableaus populated by murderers, drunks and the downtrodden. “It is a Leviathan-worthy vision of a world governed by man’s basest instincts,” writes Jim Wirth in MOJO’s five-star review, “where life tends to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and (if you are lucky) short.” Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is also, however, one of the best albums of Thompson’s storied career, on a par with previous high watermarks Mock Tudor in 1999, and 1975’s Pour Down Like Silver.

Below, Thompson speaks to Jim Wirth about the inspiration behind some of the nefarious characters portrayed on the album, what music he listens to for fun, and why he’s actually far more cheerful in real life than his songs might suggest. “I think I’m a happy, upbeat person,” he says. “If the music turns out not to be that way, I don’t know what’s gone wrong…”

Should we think of Hippies, Thugs And Heroes as a short story collection?

“It’s a short song collection. All songs tell a kind of a story. I suppose on this record some are more narrative than others. Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking: I was just trying to capture a certain kind of 1960s character; characters who get altered by the drug experience. Stringer is really more based on fantasy and conversations between my father, who was from the Metropolitan Police, and my uncle Frank, who was on the railways, talking about the gangs in Brighton. I kind of invented Stringer as a kind of a typical Brighton gangster.”

It feels like a bleak record, even by your standards.

“I come from a folk background, where songs about mining disasters and people having incest with their sisters are normal. If things are slightly more contemplative or introverted or sad [on this record], that’s not really the intention. I intend to be serious sometimes. I think there’s a place post Highway 61 Revisited to be serious in popular music. So, serious? Yes. Intending to be depressing? No. Some people do depressing much better than I do – far more naturally gifted at it. I think I’m a happy, upbeat person and if the music turns out not to be that way, I don’t know what’s gone wrong.”

You made it fairly briskly; is that how you like to work?

“I planned for five days recording and we made it in three. Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s uphill. You’re pushing and there’s tracks that never quite settle. This one 
just went really quickly. We just ripped through stuff. It was great. That’s ideal on a record. You don’t want to sound like you’re on take 35; you want to sound like you’re on take one all the time.”

She Burns It All is about as strange a song as you have recorded.

“It’s unusual in its structure, and I’ve got my wife Zara singing almost like counterpoint in some places to the vocal. It’s just a different way of constructing a song, really, for me. It’s about how your suburban life, your attitude to other people, all these things can get blown away by love. You can see it as a spiritual song or just a straight-ahead love song.”

What do you listen to for fun?

“I listen to classical music, jazz. I listen to vintage rock’n’roll, and I listen to popular music from the ’20s and ’30s. I just think sometimes you have to go back to go forwards and to be inspired.”

You like baroque pop records like Love’s Forever Changes and the first Left Banke album; have you never been tempted to make something like that?

“I think if I did, it wouldn’t quite come out right. I’m happy to use more folk elements, if you like. I’m happy to throw in hurdy-gurdies and Salvation Army bands and fiddles, accordions etcetera onto a record. To me, that’s a kind of authenticity that’s reflecting my soul a bit more.”

Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is out October 16 on New West Records. Read MOJO's five-star review HERE!

Fontaines D.C. - Dopamine Chamber

★★★★

XL Recordings

The sound of a band expanding their universe – growing bigger and bolder with each record – never loses its thrill. Upon their arrival in 2017, in an era when guitar music was regularly declared to be in terminal decline, Fontaines D.C. powered on through, painting in primary colours and frontman Grian Chatten’s vivid poetry. If their first three albums, culminating in 2022’s Skínty Fía, seemed intent on rebooting indie rock, it made 2024’s Romance and their abrupt pivot into electronics all the more surprising – not least because the band also underwent a sudden 1990s visual makeover of floppy hairdos and rave colours.

• READ MORE: Grian Chatten on the making of Dopamine Chamber: "It was really, really, intense.."

It’s worth remembering that, for the members of Fontaines D.C., that decade is as distant as the 1960s were to Oasis and Blur. And so, in effect, with Romance the group beamed themselves into a version of the 1990s that never quite existed: one built from the progressive promise of The Stone Roses jamming along to breakbeat records, Happy Mondays retooling their songs with remix electronics, and The Young Gods chopping up their grinding performances in samplers. It was a brief window before bands turned guitar-centric and traditional again with Britpop – and it’s this unrealised, future-facing 1990s that Fontaines D.C. continue to explore on Dopamine Chamber.

In fact, they ditch the guitars altogether – save for Conor Deegan’s rumbling bass – in brooding opener Six Shot Morning, morphing into a synth band whose sixth member is producer James Ford (returning from Romance) adding icy chords on a vintage, telephone exchange-proportioned ARP 2600. At other points, they disappear as a band altogether, as in the first two minutes of One Man, leaving strings and keyboard effects to carry the song until acoustic guitars and a rolling drum tattoo enter the picture. It makes the unexpected blasts into rock – everyone hitting the grunge pedals at once in Happy For You, and the metallic two-note solo in Tongue – all the more surprising and effective.

Meanwhile, Chatten’s depiction of “the darkest room, on the brightest day” in Where Is Gone? encapsulates a record that veers between the shadows and the light. In Mimesis, a super-catchy New Order-styled pop song about burnout, he notes, “Well everybody’s depressed/We’re running on a wheel”, before offering support: “I’m here to fight your corner/My heart is open”. The fact that this is a band operating in an age of absolute sensory overload is made explicit throughout Dopamine Chamber: a term from One Man describing the empty, addictive rewards available at the touch of a button in our hyperconnected world.

The effect on Grian Chatten’s lyric writing often appears to be a kind of dissociation that, with its frequent moviemaking references – the “cinematic feeling” in Marianne, the “melancholy hearts in a motion film” of Six Shot Morning – makes parts of the record feel as if they’re unfolding on a screen. There’s also a sense of others furtively capturing images, in the singer’s deadpan suspicion, voiced in the latter song, that “Silicon Valley took a photograph”.

Along with sonic expansion, Fontaines D.C. have set the bar even higher in terms of their songwriting. Chatten is a great melody writer in the sense that he sticks to the hooks without much variation, reducing the tunes to their essence without giving the sense that he’s preparing to spoon-feed them to the growing crowds who’ve come to sing along to Starburster, I Love You or Boys In The Better Land. Here, Japan, tucked away as the penultimate of the 11 tracks, features a naïve melody that recalls early-years Noel Gallagher in its smart simplicity, even if Chatten uses it to describe a mutually cold partnership – the kind of romance in which both parties are using one another.

Often, in the songs that focus on relationships, the lines are intriguingly blurred. In Happy For You, a slow-burning mid-pacer that builds and builds from its chorus-effected Cure guitar intro, Chatten – ever the short story writer, so we shouldn’t necessarily confuse the singer with the song – details an argument with a partner that results in a breakup, sweetened with a conciliatory gift of flowers. “On leaving I key your car,” he adds, revealing a sly act of revenge-motivated criminal damage.

Elsewhere, Chatten is a wholly unreliable narrator. In the baggy synth pop of Marianne, he appears to be reaching out to someone in trouble, but is he saving her from danger or inviting her into his own hazardous world? “I can help you disappear,” he promises or, possibly, warns. “This could be your fatal match.” Amid the ’80s goth contours of You Miss Me, he turns even more menacing. “You’re messing with something you don’t know,” he croons in a sinister tone, hinting that this dodgy character might even be doping his partner (“Your smile comes out of my pocket”), before the sky brightens with a deceptively uplifting chorus that features a Stone Roses stomp and stabbing, ’60s strings.

The latter era is exquisitely evoked in Where Is Gone?, the most surprising cut on Dopamine Chamber, being a duet with Rosalía that comes across like some imagined Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra duet arranged by Ennio Morricone. Gently driven by forever-changing orchestral fills from drummer Tom Coll and adorned with lovely, unobtrusive strings, it’s a cryptic love song dealing with nothing less than the mystery of death. Featuring lines that sound as if they’ve been written in another language, with something lost in their English translation – “The picture frame is surely wrong”, “There’s no way I’m going back to how I feel” – it’s a baroque pop beauty that further demonstrates Fontaines pushing at their stylistic boundaries.

Grian Chatten says that ultimately, he wanted Dopamine Chamber to “feel a little bit like the human race’s life flashing before its eyes”. In the end, with closer Intimate, he’s viewing “the ruins of the human dream”, while returning to his cinematic motif: “Colourful ending, so pretty in the final scene”. It’s a bleak vision, yet one that’s elegantly rendered by the group throughout the album, both sonically and lyrically, by mixing the past, present and possible future. As dark chroniclers of their age, Fontaines D.C. are here to illuminate the gloom.

Dopamine Chamber is out October 16 on XL Recordings.

Tracklisting:

1. Six Shot Morning
2. Marianne
3. Mimesis
4. Happy For You
5. Demolition
6. Tongue
7. One Man
8. Where Is Gone? (with ROSALÍA)
9. You Miss Me
10. Japan
11. Intimate

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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This Friday, Fontaines D.C. release their fifth album Dopamine Chamber. Recorded in the Suffolk countryside and Palmero, Sicily, with producer James Ford, it sees the Dublin five-piece further explore the dystopian world they mapped out on 2024’s Romance.

• READ MORE: Fontaines D.C. Interviewed: “Embracing the risk… that’s f**in’ exhilarating.”

Much like its predecessor, Dopamine Chamber veers away from the punk- and post-punk-inspired sound of the band’s first three albums in favour of a more electronic-influenced palette. Songs such as brooding opener Six Shot Morning, the New Order-like Mimesis, and Happy For You’s goth/grunge/greebo hybrid imagining an alternative reality 1990s where the dance-rock crossovers that characterised the start of the decade set the direction of travel for the next ten-plus years.

Frontman Grian Chatten, meanwhile, uses the album’s neon-lit backdrop to explore the confusion, numbness and sensory overload of modern times. “It’s a bleak vision, yet one that’s elegantly rendered by the group throughout the album, both sonically and lyrically, by mixing the past, present and possible future,” writes Tom Doyle in MOJO’s four-star review. “As dark chroniclers of their age, Fontaines D.C. are here to illuminate the gloom.” You can read MOJO’s full review of Dopamine Chamber HERE!

Below, Grian Chatten speaks to Tom Doyle about recording the album, the “terrifying level of talent” of Dopamine Chamber guest vocalist Rosalía, stepping up to the stadium rock big leagues, what Fontaines D.C.’s next move might be, and a potential second solo album…

How did the preparation for this album differ from Romance?

“Well, before we wrote this album, one of the fundamental questions I felt like asking myself was, Do we want to forget about Romance and kind of reinvent ourselves a little bit? Do like a rootsy album, take another left turn, or do we want to continue to pursue whatever this was with Romance. It felt like we had more to say in that area musically. More and more as we make albums, we’ve allowed the music to speak for itself. I suppose our music is getting a bit more cinematic. The lyrics were written after all the music.”

The band recorded Dopamine Chamber with producer James Ford at Decoy Studios in rural Suffolk. Did the isolation help the process?

“Well, the original idea was to go to La Frette [Studios], just outside of Paris, but we had to change it at the last minute because James had gone through treatment for his cancer [acute myeloid leukaemia], which fortunately I think is in the all-clear now. It just allowed us to get really deep into it and not get distracted. We only went into the local village about twice, I think maybe over three weeks, and it was really, really intense. We didn’t really leave that 30 square metres for a while.”

What did your lyric-writing process involve?

“I wrote all the lyrics abroad. I went away to Vienna and then to Venice and did a very short, compressed writing trip, which was fun. Not all of it is the same in terms of how it responds to the state of the world. But generally speaking, I try to write from kind of an emotional response to things that are happening in the world, and just hint at those things, as opposed to being explicit. I’d rather be implicit like that and be more explicit from the standpoint of the stage.”

You travelled to a house in Palermo, Sicily to record your vocals. Apparently building an ad hoc vocal booth out of mattresses and cushions?

“Me and James were laughing because it was like two young lads having a sleepover and building a fort. And of course that is what it is, really. We’re still just at play, y’know. It was a lot of fun, making all the music surrounded by equipment and then doing all the vocals with kind of nothing. Palermo is such a lively place. You’re surrounded by a sense of oldness that commands a certain reverence.”

What made you want to work with Rosalía on Where Is Gone?

“Because I think her voice, there’s a classical nature to it, but there’s also something kind of eerily sort of dystopian in it. She was on tour in America, so we sent her over the track, and within 48 hours she’d sent back this vocal. I just think she’s a bit of an auteur. She reminds me of Bowie and Björk. She has a terrifying level of talent. So it’s an honour.”

Could she be tempted onto the stage to perform the song live with you guys?

“I think she could. Nothing’s set in stone as of yet, honestly. But I think she’s up for it.”

While you were making the album, you were listening to the ‘60s records of Italian singer Mina. We can hear her influence in Where Is Gone? What was the appeal?

“Just the kind of analogue sense of humanity and the luscious strings and the liveliness of Mina’s vocals is something that kind of informed the nostalgia and sense of humanity that I wanted to put in the record… as something that we’re leaving behind, potentially. I wanted the album to feel a little bit like the human race’s life flashing before its eyes, and [have] a kind of spectrum of time. I think the Mina stuff informed how the old days would feel. The rose-tinted feeling of that. It was interesting to pair that with the slightly more dystopian, dark wavey-influenced stuff and have those two interact together on the album.”

Fontaines D.C. have reached arena and stadium level. How are you adjusting to that?

“It hasn’t really sunk in yet. When I think about it, it definitely makes me feel a bit overwhelmed and a bit knackered sometimes. I keep trying to contextualise it by thinking about The Cure and Robert Smith and how intact he seems as an individual. So I feel like you can do it and remain true to yourself.”

How do you feel when you look out at these enormous crowds and see fans singing every syllable of your songs? It must be strange?

“It is, yeah. The first time we had that was when we were on tour with Arctic Monkeys across America [in 2023], and once or twice in the more Irish parts of America, we started to get a bit of a big reception. I remember we were playing Jackie Down The Line, and all these phones went up, in the kind of lighter style, and people were singing. I just heard everyone in the band starting to make loads of mistakes (laughs). We just fucking collapsed.”

Where do Fontaines D.C. go from here?

“The best place we can go from here is away for a while. Take a bit of stock, and give people a break from us, maybe for a little while, after this one. I say that to you, but at the same time, I’m still writing a lot of music. I feel like when you do a fair bit of writing, and it doesn’t go anywhere, and it starts to stack up, you want it to go somewhere. So I can get a bit of oxygen or something. I’ll probably end up just writing and writing.”

For another solo record, maybe?

“Yeah, I think so. I’ve been thinking about it recently. I’ve got a few tunes, and I have a bit of an idea of how I want it to be. I would say it’d be a lot more lively and a bit more kind of festival-ready.”

Dopamine Chamber is out October 16 on XL Recordings.

An abridged version of this interview appears in the latest issue of MOJO Magazine, on sale now. For more info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are CLICK HERE.