“In every town there’s one screwball, a bit of an outcast who is ridiculed but also perhaps slightly revered because he may dare to think differently. He may like our music,” proclaimed Frank Zappa in 1966, on the eve of the release of the first Mothers Of Invention LP Freak Out! In the ensuing 26 years, until his death on December 4, 1993, Zappa revelled in his outsider status, channelling his anger through his work and using humour as much as his virtuoso talent to create some of the most challenging and provocative music of the Twentieth Century.

• READ MORE: When John Lennon Met Frank Zappa: “I expected a grubby maniac with naked women all over the place…”

His body of work ranges from psychedelia, hard rock, jazz-fusion, progressive rock, doo-wop, avant-garde to modern classical music. Such was his prolific nature that when your correspondent met him a few months before his death, he was unsure whether he’d released 52 or 54 albums. The labyrinthine complexity of his catalogue has since extended to over 75 albums - a world in which the listener can truly get lost. As a result Zappologists have long and often highly charged conversations over his most essential recordings. Ask 10 Zappa fans for his best albums and you’re likely to get 10 different lists, followed by a series of explanations and the odd revision. This selection should therefore act as a primer for the great man’s work. Those seeking a compilation by way of introduction should possibly ask their FZ-loving pal to compile a playlist. Failing that, the next best thing is possibly the Zappa’s Picks collection compiled by Primus guitarist Larry Lalonde, which outstrips the 16 track Best Of offering released on Rykodisc in 2004. The latter is unsatisfying, gathering Zappa’s most popular tunes but underlining the fact that a real introductory anthology is sorely missing. As our list suggests, however, Freak Out! is as good a place as any to begin your journey into Zappa-dom.

10.

Frank Zappa And Ensemble Modern

The Yellow Shark

ZAPPA RECORDS, 1993

Zappa enjoyed a love-hate relationship with classical music. While he admired modern day composers, he loathed the fact that classical performances were often such matters of ceremony. His own classical forays were at times disappointing (the exhumation of material by his baroque namesake, Francesco Zappa, for the material that made up 1984’s album of the same name being a case in point), but The Yellow Shark isn’t one of them. Introduced by FZ, conductor Peter Rundel leads the Frankfurt-based Modern Ensemble through 19 tracks culled from Zappa’s canon and proves just how well suited his material is to such orchestral treatment, G-Spot Tornado and all.

You say: “An essential stop, and I recommend to book a hotel.” Osgood, via mojo4music

9.

Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention

Uncle Meat

BIZARRE/REPRISE, 1969

Having courted controversy through his lyrics, Zappa’s sixth album was designed to place the focus firmly on his instrumental prowess by containing “music from The Mothers’ movie of the same name which we haven’t got enough money to finish yet”. The result is rich with Zappa’s arch and artful compositions typified by the dissonant guitar workout of Nine Types Of Industrial Pollution and recurring motifs of Dog Breath and King Kong. Housing a flimsy concept – Uncle Meat kidnaps a rock’n’roll band and drugs them in a bid to use them and music to secure world domination – the album itself remains a meditation on Nixon’s America.

You say: “Ridiculously inventive playing… general batshit insanity.” Conform to deform, via mojo4music

8.

Frank Zappa

Chunga’s Revenge

BIZARRE/REPRISE, 1970

Featuring the talents of comedic harmonists Flo & Eddie, Chunga’s Revenge upset a number of hardcore Mothers fans due to the incorporation of the vocal duo. Away from such petty prejudices, Chunga’s Revenge remains one of Zappa’s most consistent, not to mention heavy sets – the latter showcased by clattering opener Transylvanian Boogie and the righteous supplication of Tell Me You Love Me, both of which sit alongside jazzier moments like Road Ladies, Twenty Small Cigars and The Nancy And Mary Music. The title track sees sax player Ian Underwood using a wah-wah on his alto and also showcases Zappa’s dexterity as a guitar player.

You say: “An overlooked work… the title cut makes it all worthwhile.” Jedd Beaudoin, via mojo4music

7.

Frank Zappa

Joe’s Garage Acts I, II & III

ZAPPA RECORDS, 1979

Narrated by the spook-voiced Central Scrutinizer – a governmental agent whose job is to “enforce laws that haven’t been passed yet” – Joe’s Garage is a three-disc, 19-track anti-censorship opera. As if to inflame the politically correct, Zappa himself appears as a blacked-up janitor on the sleeve and packs in a sexist threesome of tracks - Catholic Girls, Crew Slut, Fembot In A Wet T-Shirt – for good measure (itself viewed from a “stupid-looking white sort of male person’s” point of view). For all of its caustic intent and outrage, the album’s finest moment is Watermelon In Easter Hay – a beautiful guitar instrumental and one of Zappa’s most celebrated pieces.

You say: “Simply Zappa's best concept album/social satire/manifesto.” Cowtools, via mojo4music

6.

Frank Zappa

Lumpy Gravy

VERVE/BIZARRE, 1968

Having quoted modern composer Edgard Varèse on his debut LP, with his fourth album Zappa turned his hand to a post-modern orchestral work in two movements – both over 15 minutes each and which provided the listener with an aural collage that remains both puzzling as well as utterly absorbing over 40 years later. A lesson in how to deconstruct rock music, Lumpy Gravy remained Frank’s favourite album and is the equivalent of spinning through your radio dial and enjoying snatches of unconnected dialogue, moments of static and random music ranging from surf rock to surrealist toy tunes and classical menace.

You say: “Makes the other LPs seem accessible.” Mark Hughes, via email

• READ MORE: See where Lumpy Gravy came in MOJO's rundown of The 50 Weirdest Albums Ever

5.

Frank Zappa

Läther

RYKODISC, 1996

Originally intended for release as a four-record box set, Warner Brothers refused to release Läther so Zappa re-formatted the music into four albums – namely Zappa In New York, Studio Tan, Sleep Dirt and Orchestral Favourites – fulfilling his contractual obligations in one fell swoop. When the label refused to pay him for his work, in December 1977 Zappa broadcast the album on the radio and invited fans to tape it. Läther finally emerged in its intended form as a posthumous three-CD set and remains the most complex of his widely available work, and a sprawling critique of the excesses of rock music.

You say: “The full Zappa gamut… get it.” Pete Garner, via email

4.

Zappa/Mothers

Roxy And Elsewhere

DISCREET, 1974

While there are a vast number of FZ live sets, this is his most satisfying capturing the band of Zappa, George Duke, Chester Thompson (drums), Tom Fowler (bass), Bruce Fowler (trombone), Ruth Underwood (percussion) and Napoleon Murphy Brock (vocals) at the height of their powers. The spoken preamble to Penguin In Bondage leads into a set of virtuoso performances that are quite staggering, the apex of which is Echidna’s Arf (Of You) and Don’t You Ever Wash That Thing? Existing video footage of the Roxy shows confirms that at that time Zappa’s band were one of the most fluid and exciting outfits out there.

You say: “Super-technique with real soul… awe-inspiring.” Salmacis, via mojo4music

3.

Frank Zappa And The Mothers Of Invention

One Size Fits All

DISCREET, 1975

While Zappa enjoyed bona fide commercial success with Overnight Sensation and Apostrophe (the latter ’74 set reaching Number 10 in the US), this nine-track affair is the most satisfying of his so-called funky ‘70s period, its title and content reflecting on capitalism’s endgame. Musically, the album revolves around the twin axis of soul - Inca Roads and the cod Germanics of Sofa No 2 (both with keyboard player George Duke on vocals), along with Po-Jama People - and hard rock (the recession-chiming Can’t Afford No Shoes, Florentine Pogen and Andy). The result is both lyrically socio-political and musically cohesive.

You say: “Tricky parts, not much potty humor, and if they can get through that…” pata, via mojo4music

2.

Frank Zappa

Hot Rats

BIZARRE/REPRISE, 1969

Hot Rats marks the first time Zappa used a 16-track studio and he employed a line-up of crack jazz and R&B musicians including violinists Jean Luc Ponty and Don ‘Sugarcane’ Harris (aka the ‘Don’ in Don & Dewey), and Wes Montgomery’s drummer Paul Humphreys. The result is a cogent six-track exercise in jazz-rock fusion with the added attraction of FZ’s typically serrated edge. Theme-like opener Peaches En Regalia (featuring Shuggie Otis on bass) sets the tone for a largely instrumental outing that, despite Captain Beefheart’s gnarled psychosexual vocals on Willie The Pimp, lets the music to the talking.

You say: “If you're only going to buy one… Beefheart has fun here.” spiderjohn, via mojo4music

1.

The Mothers Of Invention

Freak Out!

VERVE, 1966

Ardent Zappologists lost in the churning depths of the man’s catalogue will question The Mothers’ 1966 debut hogging this top slot. But for the uninitiated it is both his most accessible offering and the template for the rest of his career with many of FZ’s principal themes seeded on this riotous Tom Wilson-produced double. The notion of pop as insurrection (Hungry Freaks, Daddy, its sub-Satisfaction riff welded to an attack on “Mr America”), rock as improvisation (the 12-minute-plus avant work-out of The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet recorded at 1.00am with $500 of rented percussion) and music as satire (the doo-wop pastiche of Go Cry On Somebody Else’s Shoulder) all contribute to Freak Out!’s scabrous critique of its own time.

You say: “Elements of psych, doo-wop, blues, garage and graveyard shift alchemy… Get it for it’s first-ness.” Gregory Griffith, mojo4music

• READ MORE: Sceptics! Neophytes! Zappa obsessives! Check out MOJO's pick of Frank Zappa’s 15 Wildest Songs!

Picture: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

Beth Orton - The Ground Above

★★★★

PARTISAN

In the three decades after she was crowned the post-rave ‘comedown queen’ with the Andrew Weatherall-guided, beats-and-synths-assisted folk of 1996’s Trailer Park, Beth Orton veered between electronic and acoustic approaches on subsequent albums. In recent years, working with producers as diverse as Tucker Martine (My Morning Jacket, Rosanne Cash) and Andrew Hung (ex of psychedelic techno nutters Fuck Buttons), she pursued an increasingly wayward path, while yielding diminishing creative returns.

Then came 2022 and Weather Alive, her eighth album and an artistic breakthrough prompted by Orton’s purchase of a cheap old upright piano, resulting in a move to keyboards and self-production that opened up new sonic vistas. The Ground Above is effectively a sequel to that record, and similarly explores ECM dreaminess, the jazzier end of John Martyn, and late period Talk Talk. Amid the tom-tom pattering and meandering piano of the beautifully drowsy and starry-eyed Celestial Light there are distant echoes of The Blue Nile (as opposed to Friday Night, the virtual homage to the Scottish trio that was a Weather Alive standout).

Here as producer Orton marshalls a small platoon of crack musicians, ranging from The Smile drummer Tom Skinner, The Invisible bassist Tom Herbert, The Bees’ Paul Butler (horns, woodwind and string arrangements), along with guests such as Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Nick Hakim, the former’s fractured guitar solo in the coda of Cigarette Curls giving way to the latter’s haunting one-man choir. The passing of time has meanwhile turned Orton’s own voice vaporous and tremulous, weathered and cracked in places, yet into an instrument that is genuinely soulful.

Where Weather Alive thematically tackled grief and chronic illness (she is a longtime sufferer of Crohn’s disease, and has endured seizures), on its successor Orton is often to be found drowning in nostalgia, whether it be faraway memories of hitchhiking and “dancing in the full beam light”, or Cigarette Curls’ vivid visions of a friend with “a laugh that comes right out of the dirt” conjured up in the here and now. “Time caught up with me, eventually,” she reflects over the latter’s hypnotic downtempo soul groove.

The laidback Motown beats of Waiting gently drive a song (one of Orton’s catchiest) about snapping out of a doom-loop of fear, while closer Otherside emerges out of the darkness and into the light, building towards a hopeful finale – “Tell me you made it through alive” – that is halfway between Hey Jude and The Beta Band’s Dry The Rain. Ultimately, The Ground Above elegantly shores up Beth Orton’s creative resurgence. Altogether, it represents a more mature form of comedown – one that comes with midlife epiphanies and a strong sense of resilience.

The Ground Above is out June 26 on Partisan.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

Tracklisting:

The Ground Above
Before I Knew
Cigarette Curls
Waiting
Celestial Light
I'll Miss You
Love You Right
Otherside

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

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The Rolling Stones - Foreign Tongues

★★★

Polydor/ Capitol

Another new Rolling Stones album? Only three years since the last? And again with the Andrew Watt production? If you’ve grown comfortable with the band’s lengthy between-album hiatuses, or sceptical of the benefits that Watt brings to his charges – Paul McCartney, Elton John, Pearl Jam, all of them (you’d think) quite capable of producing themselves – your red flags will be fluttering.

• READ MORE: Every Rolling Stones Album Ranked!

If so, then rest easy – or mostly. Foreign Tongues turns out to be a rousing and varied experience with plenty of trademark Stones action and only a handful of caveats. Dig the inimitable duelling guitar gnarl of the visceral Rough And Twisted, Keith Richards mixed here on the left and Ronnie Wood over there on the right like a 2026 version of the Keith/Little Mick separation on Let It Bleed’s Live With Me. Or the echoes of Soul Survivor in Richards’ repeated riff to In The Stars, a phantom of Gimme Shelter’s apocalyptic vision, with Jagger noting “a sickness in the land” but concluding with an exhortatory “Do you wanna dance till the roof falls in?” – repentance be damned. Better still is Ringing Hollow: a post-Gram Parsons country swinger, on the edge between relaxed and reflective, Jagger road-tripping across the American landscape, with flashing images that weigh a lifetime in thrall to its culture. “The dreamers get the dream they want,” he concludes, almost wisely, as, nearly buried, Keith’s backing vocals growl and wheeze.

It’s the Stones doing Stones things – surely all we need. But apparently not, as Foreign Tongues piles on the guest appearances like cocaine on a 1972 rider. Steve Winwood – tantalisingly advertised on organ and piano – is everywhere but (kind of) nowhere. There’s a vague swirliness to one of the guitar tracks on Divine Intervention that may denote the presence of The Cure’s Robert Smith. But the conclusion that these names are here for a PR story rather than their distinctive musicality is inescapable. Bruno Mars is good on cowbell tonight, innee? Who can tell? Maybe in tribute to Brian Jones’s famous intention to “play the things you can’t hear”, he’s inaudible.

Granted, there’s a little too much loud and busy – Mr Charm and Hit Me In The Head (with an archived Charlie Watts drum track) barrel along, aggressively in your face – plus some unnecessary reaching for a modern airplay hit, the most palatable option being Never Wanna Lose You’s catchy crypto-disco, with Jagger barking and snarling in a weirdly fun way. Yet also key moments when the Stones’ soul shines through. Reliably, Keith’s lead vocal on Some Of Us adds empathy, more poignant still now it’s so clearly an effort, while the Heartbreakers’ Benmont Tench on organ – either given or taking more bandwidth than Winwood – weaves a spell. It’s one of those rather-too-rare moments where an instrumental part has room to breathe, as it does on the rueful Back In Your Life, with Ronnie Wood exquisite throughout, and incandescent on his epic closing solo (“Come on Ronnie!” cheerleads Jagger). Proof that, on a modern rock recording, everything need not be louder than anything else.

Foreign Tongues is out July 10 on Polydor/ Capitol.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

Tracklisting:

Rough And Twisted

In The Stars

Jealous Love

Mr. Charm

Divine Intervention

Ringing Hollow

Never Wanna Lose You

Hit Me In The Head

You Know I’m No Good

Some Of Us

Covered In You

Side Effects

Back In Your Life

Beautiful Delilah

“Me and Mick are very different people – and that’s what makes the gravy.”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our exclusive interview with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in full, in which they reveal the secrets behind The Rolling Stones’ ongoing saga – from the loss of Brian Jones and Charlie Watts, to on-the-road excess, almost splitting up, and why The World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band aren’t done yet. “If you're not performing what are you going to do?” they tell MOJO. More information and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

Speaking in the new issue of MOJO – on sale now – Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have discussed the madness and excess that surrounded The Rolling Stones in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the drug-fuelled sessions for their 1972 masterpiece Exile On Main St., and the death of their founding guitarist Brian Jones.

• READ MORE: Mick Jagger: “America is not the same place as it was.”

“It wasn’t only Keith. It seemed like everyone was in a mess back then," Jagger tells MOJO’s Will Hodgkinson, looking back on the period that incorporated the police raid at Richards’ Redlands home in 1967, Jones’ death in 1969, Meredith Hunter's murder during their performance at Altamont, and the band’s tax exile in France as Richards’ heroin addiction took hold.

“Obviously, it affected me, and I was probably to blame for some of it, but the whole period was one drama after another and you ended up wondering: What’s going to happen next?”

Of course, the period also coincided with the unimpeachable run of albums from the Stones that started with 1968’s Beggars’ Banquet, through 1969’s Let It Bleed, 1971’s Sticky Fingers, and Exile On Main St. in 1972.

“You learn a lot from being famous because of all the crap you’ve got to deal with,” Richards says of the circumstances behind the band’s golden era. “One minute you’re playing guitar. The next you’re in a room with three high-powered lawyers, asking, ‘What did I do?’ I found out more about how corrupt authorities and governments are in one year than I would have done in a lifetime. Eventually they got fed up with planting drugs on us and moved on, but I’ve no doubt that we were fuelled by the feeling that we had to beat those mothers. It became a matter of pride, hence Exile On Main St. There’s nothing like being chased by Scotland Yard to get the juices flowing.”

The stories surrounding the recording of Exile On Main St. at Villa Nellcôte, Keith Richards’ seafront mansion in Villefranche-sur-Mer, are legion – John Lennon , William Burroughs and Gram Parsons dropping by, an endless supply of cocaine and heroin flooding in on speedboats from Marseilles drug dealers – yet somehow, a masterpiece emerged from the chaos.

“When we started Exile, we didn’t have any songs,” says Jagger. “But that was the vogue of the time: it will take you months, you will be there until five in the morning, and it was a lifestyle experience as much as work. It was also a result of being well off. Before then we were rushed into Regent Sound, the cheapest studio in London, and given three days to do an album. Then you sell millions of records and it becomes an extravagance, with a lot of drugs and drinking, and things slowed down massively. A lot of the time it was just fucking around, really, but wonderful things did come out of it.”

• READ MORE: Every Rolling Stones Album Ranked!

“Working under the influence is a part of the story because it’s the one job where you can get away with it. I’m not driving, you know,” says Richards. “But this idea of everyone being befogged by drugs… it wasn’t like that. We worked very meticulously, with a little hit here and there, and drugs were used either so we could stay awake to finish a song, or to go: ‘Gimme a break.’ And it was the era. The ’60s and ’70s were wide open for it.”

Next month, The Rolling Stones release their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues. Mick Jagger is an improbably-spritely 82 years old, while Keith Richards celebrates his 83rd birthday this December. Others surrounding the band have not been so fortunate. Most notably the Stones’ original band leader and multi-instrumentalist, Brian Jones, who died at his home at Cotchford Farm, East Sussex, in July 1969 at the age of 27, having been sacked from the band the previous month.

“Brian had all kinds of problems and one of them is that some people should be very careful about going into showbusiness,” says Jagger of his former bandmate, whose spiralling drug use and unreliability had effectively rendered him incapable of contributing to the group he formed in 1962.

“He might have been psychologically suited to being a session musician because he was playing dulcimer, marimba, xylophone, all that sort of thing, but to be in a band, in that era, as a young star… It puts a lot of pressure on you. There’s a lot of competitiveness, a lot of bitchiness, and your music-making takes second place to all the externals you were not ready for and weren’t even expecting. You’ve got to be really tough to survive.”

“Me and Mick are very different people – and that’s what makes the gravy.”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our exclusive interview with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in full, in which they reveal the secrets behind The Rolling Stones’ ongoing saga – from the loss of Brian Jones and Charlie Watts, to on-the-road excess, almost splitting up, and why The World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band aren’t done yet. “If you're not performing what are you going to do?” they tell MOJO. More information and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Bowie Essentials 2026, a new, updated edition of our bestselling guide to David Bowie’s albums, songs, films and books, is in UK shops and available to order for delivery wherever you are now. Get your copy HERE!

• READ MORE: David Bowie's 100 Greatest Songs

David Bowie’s impact on the world of music was – and continues to be – immeasurable. From glam messiah Ziggy Stardust and the experimental ‘Berlin Years’, to the blond megastar of the Let’s Dance era and beyond to his emotional final album, Blackstar, the singer rarely failed to inspire, challenge and entertain. But, as creator of nearly 30 studio albums, hundreds of amazing songs, and a raft of live recordings, soundtracks LPs and compilations, how best to navigate his vast legacy? And what of his myriad film appearances and the many Bowie-themed books?

Written by MOJO’s team of experts, Bowie Essentials tells you everything you need to know to piece together your ultimate Bowie collection. As well as reappraising each of his studio LPs, we profile the Mod and R&B singles he made in the mid-’60s, and make sense of the flood of live recordings, box sets and rarities compilations that have appeared since his untimely death in 2016.

There are also celebrations of Bowie’s most important songs – as collected on the posthumous ‘best of’ album, Legacy – and a survey of his movie appearances, from starring roles in The Man Who Fell To Earth, Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence and Labyrinth, to his fascinating 1970 promo reel Love Me Till Tuesday and role as Andy Warhol in Basquiat. Plus we recommend the best Bowie literature with which to line your book shelves.

Illustrated throughout with dozens of rare and iconic photographs, Bowie Essentials is an indispensable purchase for all Bowie connoisseurs and serious music fans.

Order Your Copy Now!

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From early, ground-breaking cuts with The Yardbirds, to The Jeff Beck Group, solo triumphs and dazzling collaborations with everyone from Kate Bush and Stevie Wonder to a real-life blackbird, MOJO salutes ‘the guitarist’s guitarist’ by selecting 20 of the best songs and performances from across Jeff Beck's career.

• READ MORE: Ronnie Wood remembers Jeff Beck: "I'm really gonna miss him..."

1.

The Jeff Beck Group

Beck’s Bolero (stereo)

From Truth, 1968

Initially recorded in 1966 with Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Keith Moon on drums, Beck’s Bolero not only displayed his peerlessly sublime tone and ability to absorb all manner of styles into his playing –classical, garage rock, baroque psychedelia, proto prog, nascent heavy metal and more are swept up in under three minutes – but also drew up an astonishingly ahead of its time blueprint for the journey music would take post-Sgt Pepper. Page, Pink Floyd et al were taking notes.

2.

I Ain’t Superstitious

The Jeff Beck Group

From Truth, 1968

Shortly after being booted out of The Yardbirds, Beck showed his old paymasters what you could *really* do with the blues. Forming The Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart on vocals and Ronnie Wood on bass, The Jeff Beck Group took Willie Dixon’s blues standard and transformed it into a molten colossus of a track. Beck’s opening four notes alone are enough to make the hairs on the back of the neck stand up.

3.

The Yardbirds

Heart Full Of Soul

Single, 1965

Within weeks of joining The Yardbirds, Beck had transformed them from blues purists to avant-pop outliers to rival The Beatles and The Stones. On this 1965 single Beck’s playing manages to mimic a sitar in the eastern drift of the main riff before nose diving into a blistering fuzz-toned solo, predating Norwegian Wood by six months and Paint it Black by almost a year.

4.

Jeff Beck

Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers

From Blow By Blow, 1975

Written by Stevie Wonder, this slow-burning, brooding number from 1975’s Blow By Blow shows the sheer depth of emotion Beck could wring from his instrument. There’s more feeling in these five-and-a-half instrumental minutes than most singers manage in a lifetime.

5.

The Jeff Beck Group

The Shape Of Things To Come

From Truth, 1968

If Beck were the type to be bothered about that sort of thing, he would have looked on at Led Zeppelin’s success through the ’70s and wondered why the private jets and mega sales hadn’t come The Jeff Beck Group’s way instead. The Shape Of Things To Come is a prime example of the sheer transcendent power the unit he assembled could summon. Rod Stewart’s blue-eyed rasp provided perhaps the best vocal counterpart Beck ever found. Stewart certainly thought as much, saying as recently as 2018 that the pair were “a match made in heaven”.

6.

The Yardbirds

Happenings Ten Years Time Ago

Single, 1966

There aren’t many better examples of how far out Beck pushed The Yardbirds in his short, 20-month stint as a member than the bad trip heebie-jeebies of Happenings Ten Years Time Ago. One of the few Yardbirds tracks to feature both Beck and his old mate and soon-to-be-successor, Jimmy Page.

7.

The Yardbirds

Beck’s Boogie

B-Side to Over Under Sideways Down 1966

Though it was based on Chuck Berry’s Guitar Boogie, what a young Beck did with his source material here is astonishing. Effortlessly flitting between styles at a rate that was breath-taking. Eric who?

8.

The Jeff Beck Group

Spanish Boots

From Beck-Ola, 1969

Here, once again, are The Jeff Beck Group out-Led Zepping Led Zeppelin. Micky Waller’s replacement on the drum stool Tony Newman provides a thunderous bedrock for Beck’s monster riff-a-rama and lightning solo runs. Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood departed soon after to form The Faces, taking some of this loose-limbed boogie with them, but Spanish Boots’ power is inimitable.

9.

Jeff Beck

Freeway Jam

From Blow By Blow, 1975

A fan favourite, the wandering yet always sweetly melodic playing on Freeway Jam rides past a funky, jazz-fusion backdrop that showed Beck was already moving in far more adventurous waters than his former blues boom alumni.

10.

Jeff Beck

Hi Ho Silver Lining

Single 1967

Beck was embarrassed by his accidental 1967 hit, referring to it as like having a pink toilet seat hung around his neck for the rest of his life. Yet there is a simple reason why to this day no wedding disco is complete without Hi Ho Silver Lining – it’s as wonderful a burst of joy and optimism as the ‘60s produced.

11.

Jeff Beck

Goodbye Porkpie Hat

From Wired, 1975

By 1975’s George Martin-produced Wired, Beck was moving more and more into jazz-fusion territory. This twinkling, subtle reinvention of Charles Mingus’ Goodbye Porkpie Hat was a highlight. Other players might have been tempted to fill in the gaps here just because they could, but Beck’s approach was both restrained and magical, with not a note wasted.

12.

Stevie Wonder

Lookin’ For Another Pure Love

From Talking Book, 1972

13.

Beck, Bogert & Appice

Superstition

From Beck, Bogart & Appice, 1972

Born out of a jam with Stevie Wonder for the Talking Book sessions (Beck came up with the distinctive drum opening heard in Wonder’s version). Wonder originally wanted Beck to release his version first, but Motown boss Berry Gordy had other ideas and denied Beck a hit. Still, this version recorded with his short-lived trio with Vanilla Fudge’s rhythm section, drummer Carmine Appice and bassist Tim Bogert, provides a dirty funk rock delight that feels like it’s been dug out of the mud on the banks of the Mississippi, with Beck deftly recreating Wonder’s clavinet part on the guitar.

14.

Jeff Beck

Angel (Footsteps)

From Who Else!, 1999

Showing that his antennae for changes in music was as sensitive as ever as he approached his sixties, Beck’s first regular studio album in ten years saw him embracing electronic, techno and ambient music. As on this gorgeous highlight, it was his playing that took centre stage, though, curling and spooling through dreamy clouds of sound that recalled both Eno/Jon Hassell and then producer du jour, William Orbit.

15.

Kate Bush

You’re The One

From The Red Shoes, 1993

Beck’s presence is initially almost inaudible on Kate Bush’s gorgeous tale of post-break up heartbreak (which also features Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker on Hammond) but it’s the subtle runs he spins underneath Bush’s vocal that help incrementally heighten the emotional intensity of You’re The One, eventually sending the song off with a searing solo as Bush wails in anguish.

16.

Jeff Beck

Blackbird

From You Had It Coming, 2001

Not a cover of the White Album’s bucolic ballad, but Beck instead placing his blues-informed call-and-response playing in an even more natural setting by duetting with an actual blackbird. Not the novelty track you might imagine, the resulting one-and-a-half minutes is quietly majestic.

17.

The Yardbirds

Stroll On

From Blow Up, 1966

Director Michelangelo Antonioni originally wanted The Velvet Underground for Blow Up’s iconic club scene, but the cost of flying them over to London from New York proved prohibitive. Necessity proved to be the mother of invention, however, as the short-lived Beck/Page two-guitar Yardbird line-up exploded with more feral power and menace than Lou Reed and co could have ever mustered.

18.

The Yardbirds

Over Under Sideways Down

Single 1966

Beck wasn’t only pushing the boundaries of what he could do as a player in The Yardbirds, but was revolutionising what the band did in the studio, manipulating his instrument beyond almost all recognition. The guitar sound on Over Under Sideways Down’s rave-up is still impossible to pin down: part snake charmers’ pungi, part kazoo – how *did* he do that?

19.

Roger Waters

What God Wants, Pt. I-III

From Amused to Death, 1993

The albums Roger Waters made after flouncing out of Pink Floyd had plenty of the grandeur and ambition that helped forge Dark Side… and The Wall, but they lacked a certain something: namely, David Gilmour. There was only one other guitarist in Waters’s rolodex (it *was* the early ’90s after all) who could provide the same musical transcendence that the bassist’s curmudgeonly concepts needed. On What God Wants, Beck delivers blistering mutant blues fireworks, chiming reveries and cosmos-touching solos that almost single-handedly elevated the three-part suite to the level of Floyd at their peak. Nick Mason confessed that Pink Floyd had initially wanted to ask Beck to replace Syd Barrett but were too afraid to ask him. Here’s a taste of what that alternative history might have sounded like.

20.

ZZ Top

Rough Boy – Live From London

From Live! Greatest Hits From Around The World, 2016

Beck and ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons had been close friends for decades (see the clip below of Beck presenting Gibbons – “the guy who made beards famous” – with his MOJO award in 2009). On this live version, Gibbons invites his “ buddy Jeff Beck” onstage to deliver a series of scorching, dazzling solos on their mid-’80s hit, Rough Boy. Each one is a short tour-de-force in its own right, showing precisely why the world’s best guitarists considered Beck to be the undisputed master.

And here's a playlist of our top 20...

It’s August 29, 1966, in the locker room of the San Francisco Giants baseball team at Candlestick Park. Captured by the unerring Leica of the late great Jim Marshall, four of the world’s most famous men are eating, smoking and doodling on a tablecloth. Soon, they will be performing, separated from the insanity of their fans by the empty expanse of the Giants’ baseball pitch and a wire fence surrounding their stage, erected ostensibly for their protection but making them appear something like creatures in a zoo.

“We were aware this was the last concert,” says Susan Kirk, one of the show’s promoters, “and the crowd didn’t know. So ‘the lads’ were having a bit of euphoria with this awareness. It would soon be over, no more Beatles.”

Quoted in The Beatles By Jim Marshall: Live At Candlestick Park, Kirk (née Cox)’s words resonate in every one of the book’s extraordinary photographs. Onstage, the band seem ever so slightly hysterical – perhaps demob happy. ‘Backstage’, joined by a motley crew of select invitees – Joan Baez, with sisters Mimi and Pauline; Radio London DJ Kenny Everett; photographer Barry Feinstein; San Francisco Chronicle music critic Ralph J Gleason – they seem strangely detached. Lennon, particularly, appears etiolated and inanimate, a far cry from the ‘Fat Elvis’ John of the previous year’s Cow Palace show, also shot by Marshall and included in the book.

Marshall remembered The Beatles as “burnt out” and no wonder. In July, they had faced intimidation in the Philippines. On August 11 in a press conference in Chicago, Lennon had felt obliged to apologise for his “more popular than Jesus” comment, published in London’s Evening Standard in March and referenced by hipper fans at Candlestick Park with a knowing “Lennon Saves” banner. At LA’s Dodger Stadium on August 28, several thousand fans broke through the barriers and The Beatles were forced to wait in a secure room before they could leave the stadium.

Other omens were sub-optimal. Manager Brian Epstein had declined to accompany the band. Possibly he could not bring himself to witness his boys’ final show, which he’d insisted be moved from the Cow Palace to Candlestick Park. In the end, only a half of the stadium’s 39,000 seat were sold.

Another of the show’s producers, Raechel Donahue, recalls her mixed feelings in the book. “The Beatles hated America. They made that pretty clear. We had to threaten to sue them to get them to play the Candlestick Park concert. It was either that or give back the ten thousand dollars we had paid them.”

After playing 11 songs in just over 30 minutes, buffeted by a stiff cool breeze, George Harrison alighted from an armoured car at SFO and told press officer Tony Barrow, “I’m not a Beatle anymore.”

As the book’s Joel Selvin essay relates, the tablecloth doodled on by The Beatles hung in the front window of the show’s catering provider until, after only six days, a thief broke the window and stole it.

“Fifty-six years later,” writes Selvin, “the caterer’s grandson was astonished to receive a phone call from someone in Texas who had been in possession of the tablecloth for many years and wanted to return it. Covered in colourful sketches and signed by all four Beatles, the memento was sold by the auction house Bonhams for $88,000 in October 2022.”

The Beatles by Jim Marshall: Live at Candlestick Park 1966 is available now from Chronicle Books, RRP £30.

ORDER: Amazon | Waterstones

Next month, The Rolling Stones release their 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues. Ahead of the album’s release, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood have spoken exclusively to MOJO about the making of the record, the Stones’ rich history, recent jeopardy, and why The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band In The World are not done yet. “You’ve got to be really tough to survive…” they tell MOJO’s Will Hodgkinson.

• READ MORE: Every Rolling Stones Album Ranked!

The new issue of MOJO is in UK shops from Tuesday, June 16 and available to order for delivery wherever you are now. More information and to get your copy HERE. In the meantime, we’ve run down the band’s 50 greatest songs to date. A wild, culture-shifting trip that takes in post-adolescent frustrations, curb-side insurrections, satanic invocations, later life reflections, and more.

The Rolling Stones' 50 Greatest Songs Ranked...

50.

Memo From Turner

(On: Metamorphosis, ABKO, 1989)

Keith Richards stalled on finishing The Rolling Stones’ contribution to the soundtrack to Mick Jagger’s cinematic debut Performance after rumours circulated that the sex scenes between Jagger and Keith’s then partner Anita Pallenberg in Donald Cammell’s cult classic might not have been faked. Cammell and slide guitar ace Ry Cooder stepped in to finish it for the film, but the Stones’ version is imbued with its own malevolent allure.

49.

We Love You

(On: The London Years, ABKO, 2002)

The fact that Mick Jagger wrote the lyrics to We Love You while banged up in Brixton prison following the Redlands drug bust suggested there was a little more sarcasm to the message than some of the other peace and love missives of the era. John Lennon and Paul McCartney added backing vocals, but it’s the hammering, almost proto-house piano riff and Brian Jones mellotron bass that drive it.

48.

Star Star

(On: Goats Head Soup, Rolling Stones Records, 1973)

Musically, the final track on 1973’s Goats Head Soup is fairly unremarkable. It’s Jagger’s graphic retelling of the antics of a New York “star fucker” that lends its Chuck Berry-like boogie some frisson and infamy. Atlantic Records were reportedly terrified actor Steve McQueen would sue for being mentioned as one of the recipients of the ‘band aid’ in question’s services. He gave them the all-clear.

47.

Laugh, I Nearly Died

(On: A Bigger Bang, Rolling Stones Records/Virgin, 2005)

The omens for The Rolling Stones’ 22nd studio album weren’t great. It had been a full eight years since the underwhelming hodgepodge of 1997’s Bridges To Babylon, and even the most optimistic of fans weren’t expecting the band, now old enough to claim free bus passes, to produce anything that could hold a candle to their ‘60s, ‘70s, or even ‘80s output. A Bigger Bang delivered precisely that though. Among many classic Stones-styled highlights, the slow-burning Laugh, I Nearly Died presented some age-appropriate anguish, Jagger looking back, jaded and disillusioned, at where all those years of jet-setting high-living had left him.

46.

Heart Of Stone

(On: Out Of Our Heads, Decca, 1965)

The first Jagger/Richards composition to break into the US showed a remarkable step up in their songwriting. A simmering, queasy stalk with a blistering guitar break, it was a remove from their previous stock in trade of blues and R&B covers. Jagger’s lyrics, meanwhile, revealed vulnerability underneath his sneering, macho spite.

45.

Sway

(On: Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stones Records, 1971)

Perhaps blame the lack of a central riff, but few Stones songs are as undervalued as Sticky Fingers’ second track. Coming off the back of Brown Sugar, it might sound languid in comparison, but listen to the sheer force of both Watts’s drumming and Jagger’s voice, relaying existential inertia and dread as he tells a tale of rock’n’roll casualities burnt out by “that mean old life”. Plus, you get not one, but two, tour-de-force solos from Mick Taylor.

44.

2000 Light Years From Home

(On: Their Satanic Majesties Request, Decca, 1967)

Psychedelia and the summer of love were not a good fit for the bad boys of British pop. 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request – their uneven response to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – had its moments, though, including this bad trip voyage into the unknown, which landed somewhere between Pink Floyd and the 13th Floor Elevators.

43.

Mother’s Little Helper

(On: Aftermath, Decca, 1966)

“What a drag it is getting old”, sneered Jagger on Aftermath’s opening track. A rattling, shredded-nerve take on the observational pop of Ray Davies and The Kinks, Mother’s Little Helper took a vicious swipe at the older generation, both their humdrum consumerism of “instant cakes” and “frozen steaks”, and the hypocrisy behind their pearl clutching over recreational drug use in the '60s, the little yellow pills being prescribed to the bored housewife in the song presumably being Valium.

42.

No Expectations

(On: Beggars Banquet, Decca, 1968)

An often-overlooked gem from 1968’s Beggars Banquet, No Expectations’ languid porch blues is elevated by a show-stopping slide guitar turn from the soon-to-be-fired Brian Jones. Tragically, Mick Jagger remembers the song, recorded as the band sat in a circle on the floor of Olympic Studios, as “the last time Brian was totally involved in something that was really worth doing”. Jones would be found dead in his swimming pool in little over a year’s time, aged just 27.

41.

Let It Bleed

(On: Let It Bleed, Decca, 1969)

One of the group’s earliest forays into country rock, Let It Bleed’s title track was also the only song on the album to feature long-standing Stones stalwart Ian Stewart on piano, his role as the band’s chief keysman increasingly being taken by ace session player Nicky Hopkins. ‘Stu’ delivers a fantastic, and deeply apposite, honky-tonk boogie, however, as Jagger lays out some overtly sexual wordplay (“they’ll always be space in my parking lot…”). Ooh err.

• READ MORE: Ian Stewart, Pete Best... Wally Nightingale? The musicians who missed out on fame and fortune just as their bands broke big

40.

It’s Only Rock’n’Roll

(On: It’s Only Rock’n’Roll, Rolling Stones Records, 1974)

A riposte to journalists who had accused the band of treading water, It’s Only Rock’n’Roll would essentially become the Stones’ MO for the next five decades. Written and demoed by Mick Jagger and soon-to-be-Stone Ronnie Wood during an informal jam at the latter’s home in 1973, it featured David Bowie on backing vocals and Faces’ Kenney Jones on drums. Giving him a taste of future power dynamics, Wood was only cited as an “inspiration”, however, and the song was credited to Jagger/Richards, as per.

• READ MORE: “He was too pretty to be a Rolling Stone…” The guitarists who nearly joined The Stones

39.

Love In Vain

(On: Let It Bleed, Rolling Stones Records 1969)

Given the difficult task on Let It Bleed of clearing the air after the narcotic storm of Gimme Shelter, Love In Vain takes a trip up the Appalachian Mountains, Ry Cooder’s mandolin trills helping the Stones relocate Robert Johnson’s delta blues original to the heart of hillbilly country. No mean feat for a bunch of skinny Englishmen, and reflective of their deep understanding and love for traditional American music which would be the group’s constant elixir over the years.

38.

It’s All Over Now

(On: Big Hits (High Tide And Green Grass), Decca, 1966)

The Stones took a break from their first US tour in 1964 to visit Chess Records’ studios in Chicago where they cut this cover of a recent 45 by Ohio R&B outfit The Valentinos. After it gave the band their first number one single, the song’s author Bobby Womack was furious that some white boys from London had a hit with his tune. Until the first cheque arrived, that is.

37.

Sweet Virginia

(On: Exile On Main Street, Rolling Stones Records, 1972)

Gram Parsons had been a key member of the Stones’s extended musical family since 1968 and was instrumental in tutoring Keith Richards in country music. Although Jagger had thrown the perma-wasted Flying Burrito Brother out of the sessions for Exile On Main Street, partly due to increased interest from the French police, partly, some say, out of jealousy, his presence was still felt, particularly on Sweet Virginia’s sleepy, sun-kissed singalong.

36.

Ruby Tuesday

(On: Decca single, 1967, 2012)

The closest Brian Jones ever came to receiving a songwriting credit (“it was really Brian and Keith’s song,” Marianne Faithfull later insisted), Ruby Tuesday started life as a fragment of Elizabethan-style music worked up at Jones’ Courtfield Road flat, with Jones on recorder and Richards on acoustic. Jones then added piano, and Wyman bowed an upright bass. It is, however, Jagger’s mannered vocals and hastily penned lyric about the enigmatic girl who “comes and goes” that gave the most English of Stones songs its upper-class crust.

35.

Start Me Up

(On: Tattoo You, Rolling Stones Records, 1981)

As far as instantly recognisable Stones riffs go, Start Me Up is second only to (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Not bad going for a track taken from an album cobbled together at the start of the ‘80s from a load of offcuts. In 1978 the band had recorded numerous unsuccessful takes of the song in a reggae style. However, when engineer Chris Kimsey dug up an earlier rock-orientated take a couple of years later, it became Tattoo You’s lead single, reaching Number 2 in the US and 7 in the UK, and became a habitual set-opener for years to come.

34.

Midnight Rambler

(On: Let It Bleed, Rolling Stones Records 1969)

Jagger and Richards wrote Midnight Rambler while on holiday in the hillside town of Positano, near Amalfi in Italy. “I’m playing the harmonica in these little cafés, and there’s Keith with the guitar,” Jagger later recalled. “Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I don’t know.”  A gleeful murder fantasy alluding to the Boston Strangler, the early 1960s serial killer recently depicted in a 1968 biopic by Tony Curtis, it found the Stones fully embracing their role as the malevolent satanic majesties of repute. A highlight of pretty much every Stones live show since, it’s a showcase for Jagger’s mean harmonica skills, too.

33.

The Last Time

(On: Out Of Our Heads, Decca, 1965)

The first Rolling Stones single to be credited to Jagger-Richards (then still Richard), The Last Time chalked out much of what would define the pair’s work for the next fifty years: A heartless lyric; an insistent, nagging riff; an air of menace; and a clear debt to African American music, in this case, The Staple Singers’ 1961 gospel blues track This May Be The Last Time.

32.

As Tears Go By

(On: December’s Children (And Everybody’s), London, 1965)

Jagger and Richards’ first major songwriting success was initially a hit for Marianne Faithfull in 1964. While Faithfull wasn’t particularly impressed herself – “a bit drippy and languid” was her verdict  – As Tears Go By’s rainy day romanticism showed a sophistication that would last them well past the R&B boom of the day. Pop fact: the song’s baroque string quartet was arranged by future Glitter Band producer Mike Leander.

• READ MORE: Marianne Faithfull: “I got out very quickly. Much as I love The Rolling Stones, they’re not my life…”

31.

Coming Down Again

(On: Goats Head Soup, Rolling Stones Records, 1973)

Keith Richards’ third lead vocal following Exile On Main Street’s Happy and You Got The Silver on Let It Bleed, Coming Down Again presented a very different side to the bulletproof drug dustbin of legend. This ‘Keef’ was wounded, vulnerable and lost in an unhappy cycle of dependency, infidelity and loneliness - “Where are all my friends?” he asks, confused and childlike in the chorus. Jagger’s almost whispered backing vocal and Bobby Keys’ yearning saxophone add beautifully to the air of sadness.

30.

19th Nervous Breakdown

(On: Decca single, 1966)

Its title coined during the madness of post-Satisfaction Stonesmania – “we’d done five weeks’ hectic work in the States and I said, Dunno about you blokes, but I feel about ready for my 19th nervous breakdown,” remembered Jagger, “we seized on it at once as a likely song title” – 19th Nervous Breakdown presented a decidedly English take on the acid put downs of Bob Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone and Positively 4th Street (as a slight, “your father’s still perfecting ways of making sealing wax” sound almost musical hall). The jumpy amphetamine shake of the music also features some excellent dive bombing on the bass from Bill Wyman at the end as the titular breakdown finally arrives.

29

Dead Flowers

(On: Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stone Records, 1971)

A country pastiche complete with honky-tonk piano from Ian Stewart and Jagger adopting his most over-the-top southern drawl, the influence of Richard’s new best friend Gram Parsons is clear on Sticky Fingers’ penultimate track. However, the lyrics to Dead Flowers place the Stones closer to Kensington than Kentucky, and it’s not hard to see the recently separated Jagger and Marianne Faithfull in the junkie in his “basement room, with a needle and a spoon” railing against “the queen of the underground” in her “silk upholstered chair”.

28.

Waiting On A Friend

(On: Tattoo You, Rolling Stones Records, 1981)

Waiting On A Friend’s lilting backing track had been hanging around since the 1972 Jamaican sessions for Goats Head Soup. It wasn’t until autumn 1980 that it was finished, however, with a wonderful freewheeling saxophone solo from Sonny Rollins and lyrics from Jagger the singer said were “very gentle and loving, about friendships in the band”. It’s a touching moment in the Stones’ canon, made even more so knowing of the growing rancour between Mick and Keith that would almost derail the band in the following decade.

27.

Bitch

(On: Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stones Records, 1971)

Punk rock five years before punk rock was even a thing, the B-side to Brown Sugar presented the Stones and their leanest and meanest. In a role reversal of sorts, Keith handled the soloing, while Mick Taylor played the ferocious, tightly-wound riff. Strip off Bobby Keys and Jim Price’s horns and Bitch genuinely wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Never Mind The Bollocks...

26.

Shine A Light

(On: Exile On Main Street, Rolling Stones Records, 1972)

The devil may have the best tunes, but the Stones also found plenty of inspiration in the secular pleasures of gospel. Perhaps never more so than on Exile On Main Street’s penultimate track. Of course, this being the Stones, salvation was being offered to someone strung out in a hotel room and left “drunk in the alley”, their “clothes all torn”. Written by Jagger as early as 1968, Stones watchers have speculated the subject was Brian Jones, although by 1972, the sentiment could have also applied to Marianne Faithfull, another casualty of the Stones whose life was spiralling out of control.

25.

Fool To Cry

(On: Black And Blue, Rolling Stones Records, 1976)

In the eyes of former Stones fans like The Clash’s Mick Jones or Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, Fool To Cry was precisely the sort of schmaltzy soft boy slop that meant the old rock dinosaurs needed to be put out of their misery. It is, in fact, brilliant: a fragrant bouquet of supper-club piano, gloopy Fender Rhodes and Jagger’s super-sweet falsetto. Keith Richards was never a fan, though, and literally fell asleep on-stage while playing the song at a show in Germany during the band’s 1976 European tour. Although that may have had something to do with what was ingested before the show.

24.

She’s A Rainbow

(On: Their Satanic Majesties Request, Decca 1967)

The summer of love wrongfooted The Rolling Stones, and 1967’s Their Satanic Majesties Request is largely a distracted mess. She’s A Rainbow, however, is as fine an example of the era’s baroque psychedelic pop as anything by The Beatles, The Kinks or Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, thanks in no small part to Nicky Hopkins’ music box piano and inventive string arrangements from future Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. Meanwhile, sped-up, munchkin-like backing vocals lurk uneasily in the corner like an impending bad trip. Very Stones.

23.

Happy

(On: Exile On Main Street 1972)

Recorded at his home in Nellcôte, France, Happy saw Keith Richards taking on all the guitars, bass, and a rare lead vocal. In fact, if it wasn’t for the presence of producer Jimmy Miller on drums and Bobby Keys on sax, this most quintessentially ‘Keef’ of songs would be an entirely solo Richards effort. Gleefully self-mythologising (“always took candy from strangers, didn’t want to get me no trade, never wanna be like papa working for the boss every night and day”), the opening track on side three of Exile On Main Street wraps up both Richards’s origin story and raison d’être in three joyous minutes.

• READ MORE: Keith Richards Interviewed: “We’re born to have fun. If you take it too seriously, you’re fucked…”

22.

Time Is On My Side

(On: The Rolling Stones No.2, Decca, 1965)

In the hands of New Orleans soul belter Irma Thomas, Time Is On My Side was a defiant burst of gospel-powered, uptown R&B. For their debut US Top 10 hit, the Stones stripped the song down to its raw essentials. With Richards supplying his spikiest licks to date and Jagger sneering in a way that suggested he really didn’t want his ex to come running back to him at all, it showed how the Stones could transform an already great song, even if they didn’t yet know how to write one themselves.

21.

Get Off Of My Cloud

(On: December’s Children (And Everybody’s), London, 1965)

Keith Richards would later dismiss the rush-recorded follow-up to Satisfaction as “one of Andrew [Loog Oldham]’s worst productions”. But Get Off Of My Cloud’s fuzzy murk, in which Charlie Watts’ machine gun snare fills were mixed above everything else, including Jagger’s vocals, is what makes the singer’s “stop-bugging-me, post-teenage-alienation song” so appealing. Particularly to the legions of garage rock bands forming across the United States for which it would provide a petulant, snot-nosed template.

20.

Rocks Off

(On: Exile On Main Street, Rolling Stones Records, 1972)

Opening the door, passing you a joint and thrusting a drink in your hand, Rocks Off invites you into Exile On Main Street's extended party with a suitably debauched sense of occasion. However, behind the relentless chug of Richards’ riff and Bobby Keys’ excitable fanfare, if you listen beneath the murk of the mix, Jagger is expressing a weary, over-stimulated ennui in which sex, drugs, and even sunlight “bore the daylights outta me”.

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones - Lost, Rare And Unseen Pictures!

19.

Beast Of Burden

(On: Some Girls, Rolling Stones Records, 1978)

Recorded at Pathé-Marconi, Paris, Beast Of Burden was originally much faster, though perhaps considering how pacy most of the material for 1978’s Some Girls was shaping up to be, the band decided to drop the tempo. “Everyone settled down and enjoyed the slow one,” recalls Richards. It was a wise move. A US number 8 hit, the track’s elastic riffing and sleepy-eyed swing make for one of the Stones’ most effective slowies.

18.

Let’s Spend The Night Together

(On: Decca single, 1967)

Marianne Faithfull claims it was inspired by the first time she and Jagger slept together following a Stones gig in Bristol in 1966. Producer Andrew Loog Oldham, meanwhile, spun a yarn that he’d persuaded two passing policemen to bang their truncheons together for added percussion on the track. Myth and speculation aside, The Stones’ most lascivious single (certainly up to that point), Let’s Spend The Night Together managed more than enough controversy on its own - US radio stations bleeped the chorus, and Jagger was forced into singing “let’s spend some time together” when they performed it on the Ed Sullivan Show. Even as recently as 2003, the band were banned from playing it during their first-ever show in China due to its “suggestive lyrics”.

17.

Monkey Man

(On: Let It Bleed, Decca, 1969)

With Jagger and Richards reconciled after Mick’s on-set fling with Anita Pallenberg during the filming of Performance, the sessions for Let It Bleed hit their stride with this snake-hipped groover. Jagger reels off absurdist braggadocio (“I’m a sack of broken eggs, I always have an unmade bed”) in tribute to Italian pop artist Mario Schifano, while Richards slots together an impossible jigsaw of slip-sliding riffs so lopsided it would leave lesser rhythm sections scratching their heads in bewilderment.

16.

Under My Thumb

(On: Aftermath, Decca, 1966)

Under My Thumb’s scathing, misogynistic lyric, which anticipated Mick Jagger’s break-up with model Chrissie Shrimpton, has lost none of its unpleasantness over the years. Despite the singer trying to claim in a 1984 interview that it was about him being the victim. “The whole idea was that I was under her. She was kicking me around,” he pleaded. “All I did was turn the tables around. So, women took that to be against femininity, where in reality, it was trying to get back against being a repressed male.” Nice try. The music, however, has aged like a fine wine. Wyman, Richards and Watts deliver a note-perfect soul groove, but the star is Brian Jones’ lilting, baleful marimbas.

15.

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking

(On: Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stones Records, 1971)

Keith Richards would dismiss the extended jams of US bands like the Grateful Dead as “poodling around for hours – boring shit, man.” On Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, however, (or at least its second half) you can hear the Stones tear up the map and fly off into the unknown to embark on precisely the sort of improv Richards would later pooh-pooh. Inspired by the Latin-flavoured workouts of Santana and led by Mick Taylor’s serpentine lines, you could happily listen to them go on like this for days.

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones: Why Mick Taylor had to go...

14.

Angie

(On: Goats Head Soup, Rolling Stones Records,1973)

Although widely accepted at the time as a love letter from Mick Jagger to David Bowie’s then wife, the title and basic melody for Angie in fact came from Keith Richards. Basic being the key word, according to Jagger.  “He said, ‘It goes, Angieeee!’ And I said, Is that all? He said, ‘Yeah,’” recalled the singer. Even when completed by Mick, Angie remains a yearning, broken lament for Richards’ doomed relationship with Anita Pallenberg, and as recently as 1998 Keith admitted playing the song live  “can still get to ya”.

13.

Moonlight Mile

(On: Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stones Records, 1971)

With Keith Richards incapacitated, Mick Jagger developed Moonlight Mile in one all-night session with guitarist Mick Taylor instead. Perhaps feeling less self-conscious away from his usual songwriting partner, the singer turned in one of his most vulnerable and heartfelt lyrics and performances, dropping the rock star façade and expressing his road-weary loneliness and longing for home. Richards still took the co-write, though.

12.

Miss You

(On: Some Girls, Rolling Stones Records,1978)

Written for Jagger’s new squeeze Jerry Hall with keyboard player Billy Preston while Richards was facing trial for his Toronto drugs bust, Some Girls’s glitter ball centrepiece triumphed where so many of the Stones’ ‘60s contemporaries failed by embracing, rather than rejecting disco, and borrowing its louche groove to create one of the defining tracks of the era. A shot in the arm both creatively and commercially, it gave them their first US number one in five years.

11.

Street Fighting Man

(On: Beggars Banquet, Decca 1968)

In 1968, student uprisings in Paris, riots in Chicago, and anti-war protests in London suggested the ‘60s youth revolution might tip over into actual insurgency. Unlike The Beatles’ Revolution, which ultimately found John Lennon sitting on the fence, Street Fighting Man positioned Mick Jagger firmly on the barricades. Although how likely the former LSE student would have been to throw a paving stone at a policeman is unclear, “my name is called disturbance” is a fantastic lyric, and the Stones certainly sound like they’re up for a scrap, Brian Jones adding some disorientating, eastern-inspired drones beneath the clash and clatter of Richards and Charlie Watts.

10.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

(On: Let It Bleed, Decca, 1969)

Keith’s then-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg claimed that the title refers to her playing off the two latter-day rivals for her affection during a trip to South America. “It was about my romance with drugs,” countered Marianne Faithfull, with Stones producer Jimmy Miller also fingered as the user – “Mr Jimmy” – who was losing it as the decade’s party got wilder and wilder. Regardless, You Can’t Always Get What You Want’s tale of swinging jadedness became one of the Stones’ most transcendent moments, thanks largely to arranger Jack Nitzsche’s inspired idea to bring in the London Bach Choir to both open, and then send the song heavenwards at its close.

9.

Tumbling Dice

(On: Exile On Main Street, Rolling Stones Records 1972)

Tumbling Dice first took shape at Mick Jagger’s country house, Stargroves, in 1970, but it wasn’t until the sessions for Exile On Main Street at Richards’ home in Nellcôte, France, a year later that the band struck gold. So loose that even Charlie Watts manages to misplace the beat at one point and with Jagger’s vocals slurred to the point of being completely undecipherable, it’s also the most joyful moment on the Stones’ most joyful album. “They were the worst band in the world,” Exile engineer Andy Johns reflected. “Could be for days. Then they became The Rolling Stones. It was magical.”

8.

Wild Horses

(On: Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stones Records, 1971)

“If there’s a classic way of Mick and me working together,” opined Keith Richards of Wild Horses, “then this is it.” Playing around with open tuning on a twelve-string acoustic, Richards came up with the song’s chorus and melody line as a lullaby for his newborn son, Marlon. Jagger then delivered the verses, his heart-wrenching wretchedness widely interpreted – though Jagger can be elusive on the facts – as a farewell to Marianne Faithfull. Whether addressing an absent lover or a child on the other side of the world, Wild Horses’ aching poignancy makes for the Stones’s most tender moment. “Wild Horses was about the usual thing of not wanting to be on the road,” reckoned Richards, “being a million miles from where you want to be.”

7.

Paint It Black

(On: Decca single, 1966)

The Beatles and The Kinks had already introduced Indian music into UK pop by 1966. However, the Stones, and Brian Jones in particular, fully embraced its flavours, using them to conjure up their own malevolent juju. Billed as “a different kind of single”, Paint It Black’s flamenco rhythms, sitar and melodrama illuminated the Stones’ predilection for exoticism and the dark stuff. Less Marrakesh Express, more Highway To Hell.

6.

Brown Sugar

(On: Sticky Fingers, Rolling Stones Records, 1971)

Although some chose to regard it as a self-mocking dig at the Stones’s boastful sexual image, or more likely a double entendre about heroin, Brown Sugar’s references to the exploitation of a slave girl are beyond the pale by any standard, and Jagger now says he wishes he could rewrite the lyrics. If it’s possible to look past them, however, it presents the Stones as a band at their absolute peak. Nothing here is sloppy, extraneous or misplaced. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts stay tight and low as Keith Richards and Mick Taylor trade licks with the lean economy of two sparring prize-fighters and Bobby Keys blows lustily beside them. Like (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, a song that is instantly recognisable with the first two notes.

5.

Sympathy For The Devil

(On: Beggars Banquet, Decca, 1968)

Inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s magic realist novel The Master And Margarita, which tells of Satan wreaking havoc in 1930s Moscow, Sympathy For The Devil finds Mick Jagger taking his bad boy posturing to its extreme by taking on the persona of the actual devil. As the song works itself up into a conga-driven frenzy, Keith Richards slashes with razorblade guitar fills, and also plays the bass, driving an almost Can-like rhythmic intensity. With Bill Wyman and on maracas and superb piano work from Nicky Hopkins, Brian Jones was relegated to joining Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg on backing vocals.

4.

Honky Tonk Women

(On: Decca single, 1969)

For all the genius of Mick Jagger’s lyrics here (as an opening gambit, “I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis” takes some beating), Honky Tonk Women showed that as the Stones hit their imperial phase, the most important creative partnership in the band wasn’t Mick’n’Keef – it was Keith and Charlie Watts. Producer Jimmy Miller added cowbell and the sessions doubled as an audition for Brian Jones’ replacement, Mick Taylor, but such was the pair’s self-sufficiency that there wasn’t even any need for bass on the verses.

3.

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction

(On: Decca single, 1965)

Not only did Keith Richards claim to have written (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’s guitar riff in his sleep, but that he intended it only as a placeholder for a horn section (he even prefers Otis Redding’s version, which he said was closer to what he had in mind). Regardless of how it came into being, it’s arguably the most well-known guitar riff in the history of recorded music. What perhaps gets less credit, though, is Jagger’s lyrics. Outwardly, the world’s horniest pop star moaning about not being able to get his leg over, dig deeper, and he’s expressing a wider existential frustration about looking for meaning within the hollow commercialism of mainstream culture. Or maybe he is just wanting to get laid.

2.

Jumpin’ Jack Flash

(On: Decca single, 1968)

With the summer of love over, The Rolling Stones could get back to playing the sort of rock and rollers you wouldn’t let your daughter marry. Jagger self-mythologises and cooks up a litany of made-up villainy (being born in “a crossfire hurricane” certainly sounds tougher than being born in Dartford) as Richards’ twin guitars attack like a swarm of hornets, and at a stroke, the Stones rediscovered their essence. Perhaps not so devilish, the “Jumping Jack” of the song’s title was inspired by Keith Richards’ gardener, Jack Dyer, who woke Jagger up one morning clomping past the singer’s window in his wellies.

1.

Gimme Shelter

(On: Let It Bleed, Decca, 1969)

By 1969, the ‘60s dream was over. Brian Jones was dead, Nixon was in the White House, and Woodstock had been eclipsed by the Manson murders. The previous summer had been a bad time for Keith Richards, too. With Decca refusing to release the Stones’s long-completed seventh album Beggar’s Banquet because of its controversial sleeve and Mick Jagger away cavorting with Keith’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg on the set of Performance, he threw himself into writing and recording Gimme Shelter, fuelled by heroin and cocaine. What resulted was a darkly magnificent eulogy for the decade and rock and roll’s greatest song of fear and loathing. Richards’ opening guitar droplets precede the coming thunderstorm that blows in, while New Orleans singer Merry Clayton’s anguished cries of rape and murder further evoke a coming apocalypse. The Stones never quite suited the peace and love era; now they were going to watch it burn.

"Me and Mick are very different people - and that's what makes the gravy."

Get the new MOJO to read our world-exclusive, career-spanning interview with The Rolling Stones in full! Also in the issue: Janis Joplin, The Waterboys, Deep Purple, The Fall, Lenny Kaye, Dexys Midnight Runners, Frank Zappa, The Cramps, and more! The latest issue of MOJO Magazine is in UK shops from Tuesday June 16 and available to order for delivery wherever you are now. More info and to get your copy HERE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Paul McCartney Album Ranked...

31.

Paul McCartney

Give My Regards To Broad Street

(Parlophone, 1984)

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

30.

Percy “Thrills” Thrillington

Thrillington

(Regal Zonophone, 1977)

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

29.

Paul McCartney

Press To Play

Parlophone, 1986

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

28.

Paul McCartney

Off The Ground

(Parlophone, 1993)

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

27.

The Fireman

Strawberries Oceans Ships Forest

(Parlophone, 1993)

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

26.

Wings

Wings At The Speed Of Sound

(Capitol, 1976)

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

25.

Paul McCartney

Kisses On The Bottom

(Hear Music, 2012)

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

24.

Paul McCartney

Liverpool Sound Collage

(Hydra, 2000)

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

23.

Paul McCartney

Run Devil Run

(Parlophone, 1999)

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

22.

Paul McCartney

Egypt Station

(Capitol, 2018)

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

21.

Paul McCartney And Wings

Red Rose Speedway

(Apple, 1973)

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

20.

Paul McCartney

Driving Rain

(Parlophone, 2001)

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

19.

Paul McCartney

McCartney III

(Capitol, 2020)

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

18.

The Fireman

Rushes

(Hydra, 1998)

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

17.

Wings

London Town

(Parlophone, 1978)

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

16.

Wings

Wild Life

(Apple, 1971)

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

15.

Paul McCartney

The Boys Of Dungeon Lane

(MPL/Capitol)

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

14.

Paul McCartney

New

(MPL/Hear/Universal, 2013)

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

13.

Paul McCartney

Pipes Of Peace

(Parlophone, 1983)

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

12.

Paul McCartney

Memory Almost Full

(Hear, 2007)

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

11.

Paul McCartney

Tug Of War

(Parlophone, 1982)

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

10.

Wings

Back To The Egg

Parlophone, 1979

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

9.

Paul McCartney

Flowers In The Dirt

Parlophone, 1989

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

8.

The Fireman

Electric Arguments

One Little Indian, 2008

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

7.

Paul McCartney

McCartney II

Parlophone, 1980

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

6.

Paul McCartney

McCartney

Apple, 1970

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

5.

Wings

Venus And Mars

Capitol, 1975

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

4.

Paul McCartney

Flaming Pie

Parophone, 1997

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

3.

Paul McCartney

Chaos And Creation In The Backyard

Parlophone, 2005

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

2.

Wings

Band On The Run

Apple, 1973

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

1.

Paul And Linda McCartney

Ram

Apple, 1971

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

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

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

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Few would regard the albums The Rolling Stones made between 1964 to 1972 – that is, from their debut LP to Exile On Main St. – as anything other than vital documents from rock’s formative era. But, of course, that was only the first phase of their 64-year journey, which would deliver many more musical pearls, whether it was 1978’s Some Girls with its mix of disco and punk influences, or the unfeasibly good collection of studio outtakes Tattoo You in 1981, or Steel Wheels, their punchy ‘comeback’ statement after a midlife lull in the ’80s.

• READ MORE The Rolling Stones Interviewed: "Working under the influence is a part of the story because it’s the one job where you can get away with it!"

The Stones’ recorded output may have slowed down in the 21st century – 2005’s A Bigger Bang was their first album in almost a decade, while 2016’s Blue & Lonesome was made up entirely of blues covers – yet 2023’s Andrew Watt-assisted reboot Hackney Diamonds is soon to be followed by a brand-new Stones record, Foreign Tongues, due July 10. Speaking in the new issue of MOJO, on sale now, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood discuss the making of the album, the madness and excess surrounding the band during the 60s and 70s, the loss of Brian Jones and Charlie Watts, and why The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band In The World are not done yet - "If you're not performing," they tell MOJO's Will Hodgkinson, "what are you going to do?"

While we await the new Stones record, MOJO's Mark Blake has rundown every studio album to date from the band. From their earliest days as blues and R&B-loving youngsters, through their late '60s and early '70s imperial phase, their more chequered '80s and '90s output, and their recent revival in the 21st century.

Every Rolling Stones Album Ranked...

24.

Dirty Work

(Rolling Stones Records, 1986)

Cobbled together by a group in freefall (Jagger and Richards weren’t speaking), Dirty Work is briefly redeemed by a cover of the Miracles’ Going To A Go-Go and One Hit (To The Body)’s scrappy hard rock. But most of it suggests the Stones sleepwalking – and some. Poor old Charlie Watts is so disengaged, he can’t even look at the camera in the cover pic, and he’s grown a beard.

Key track: One Hit (To The Body)

23.

Undercover

(Rolling Stones Records, 1983)

Marginally better than Dirty Work, the single, Undercover Of The Night is worth the price of admission (and, as an aside, the 12-inch mix is worth investigating). While there is an awful lot of over-processed hard rock and camp S&M imagery here, Too Much Blood, where Jagger semi-raps about a murder (“Ever see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre? ‘orrible isn’t it”) is both bizarre and brilliant.

Key track: Undercover Of The Night

22.

Bridges To Babylon

(Virgin, 1997)

This late-‘90s makeover was engendered by Jagger hiring several hip co-producers, including Beastie Boys collaborators the Dust Brothers, while Richards glowered on the sidelines. However, Keith’s Thief In The Night and How Can I Stop? are more intriguing than by-rote rockers such as Flip Of The Switch. The single Anybody Seen My Baby? (with rapper Biz Markle) is a melancholy highpoint, but an accidental partial re-write of k.d. lang’s Constant Craving, hence some last-minute credit changes.

Key track: Anybody Seen My Baby?

21.

Voodoo Lounge

(Virgin, 1994)

Apparently, Jagger wanted more grooves and strangeness on the Stones’ first album without Bill Wyman (and their first of the 1990s), while co-producer Don Was steered them towards familiar Stones terrain. You Got Me Rockin’ is less prosaic than it sounds, and became a mainstay of the live set, while New Faces has Jagger unusually playing the role of a lover cuckolded by a younger man. But overall it’s a bit safe.

Key track: You Got Me Rockin’

20.

Their Satanic Majesties Request

(Decca, 1967)

The Stones’ riposte to The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper… was pieced together in between Jagger and Richards serving jail time – and sounds like it. Sing This All Together proves the Stones didn’t really ‘do’ love and peace, and The Gomper suggests Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd slipping into a Mandrax stupor. Better to stick with 2000 Light Years From Home and the slightly creepy flower-power pop of She’s A Rainbow.

Key track: 2000 Light Years From Home

19.

Steel Wheels

(Rolling Stones Records, 1989)

“Let’s bury the hatchet/wipe out the past,” declares Jagger on Mixed Emotions, the lead single from the Stones’ 1989 comeback. Steel Wheels benefits from Mick and Keith’s truce, whether on the daft Terrifying (“I’m h-o-r-n-y as a hog” indeed), grubby rockers such as Hearts For Sale or the mournful ballad, Almost Hear You Sigh. Also tips a hat to Brian Jones on Continental Drift featuring Jones’ old collaborators, The Master Musicians Of Joujouka.

Key track: Hearts For Sale

18.

Hackney Diamonds

(Polydor, 2023)

Re-energised by co-producer Andrew Watt, the Stones’ first album of all original material since Bridges To Babylon and the last to include contributions from Charlie Watts, bested their ‘90s output. Cameos from Elton John, Lady Gaga and Paul McCartney are all well and good, but it’s the sheer Stonesy-ness of Get Close and Mess It Up that impress, with Depending On You a textbook example of the band’s flair for vulnerable ballads.

Key track: Get Close

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones On Working With Paul McCartney And Lady Gaga: “Macca wanted to put the dirt on it...”

17.

A Bigger Bang

(Virgin, 2005)

Feted as – that old chestnut – “their best since Exile On Main Street”, A Bigger Bang is their finest this century so far and exudes more vim and fire than its immediate predecessors. Exhibits A and B: the lascivious Rough Justice (“Am ah justa one of ya cocks?”) and Look What The Cat Dragged In, a wiry funk-rocker in which Jagger moans about his dirty stop-out girlfriend staggering in while he’s reading the morning papers.

Key track: Look What The Cat Dragged In

16.

It’s Only Rock’N’Roll

(Rolling Stones Records, 1974)

Mick Taylor’s swansong LP is a curate’s egg. The title track remains a cornerstone of any Stones hits collection (and featured Taylor’s replacement Ronnie Wood). The real juice, though, lies in Time Waits For No One, which demonstrates the departing Stone’s gorgeous guitar playing, and Fingerprint File, where Jagger runs through his gamut of regional US accents on a funky tale of covert surveillance and what sounds like cocaine paranoia.

Key track: It's Only Rock'N'Roll

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones: Why Mick Taylor had to go...

15.

Blue & Lonesome

(Polydor, 2016)

Arriving 11 years after A Bigger Bang, Blue & Lonesome comprised of 12 covers cranked out during three studio sessions. Its sparky versions of Howlin’ Wolf’s Commit A Crime and Little Walter’s Hate To See You Go suggested the band weren’t experiencing collective writer’s block but wanted to revisit the source of so many of their own songs. A fine showcase, too, for Jagger’s peerless harmonica playing.

Key track: Commit A Crime

14.

Between The Buttons

(Decca, 1967)

Jagger and Richards’ songwriting had bedded in by now, as had Brian Jones’ desire to broaden the group’s sound with dulcimers and harpsichords. Between The Buttons is a band in transition, then: flitting between bratty R&B (Let’s Spend The Night Together) and the newfangled baroque pop songs, Yesterday’s Papers and Ruby Tuesday; music for lounging around on cushions in some hip art dealer’s Mayfair pad, while his Moroccan manservant pours the Darjeeling.

Key track: Let’s Spend The Night Together

13.

Black And Blue

(Rolling Stones Records, 1976)

Recorded while the Stones were seeking a replacement for Mick Taylor, Black And Blue is more cohesive than its transient personnel (Wayne Perkins, Harvey Mandel and Taylor’s eventual replacement, Ronnie Wood, all feature) suggests. The teary Fool To Cry had legs beyond the album’s natural lifespan, but the pared-down jams Hot Stuff and Hey Negrita impress as much – and few rock bands looked as disreputable as the Stones did on the LP cover.

Key track: Fool To Cry

• READ MORE: “He was too pretty to be a Rolling Stone…” The guitarists who nearly joined The Stones

12.

Out Of Our Heads

(Decca, 1965)

The US version of Out Of Heads squeezed in some early hits alongside a bunch of covers. Instead, Britain got the Stones tearing up Don Covay’s Mercy Mercy and Marvin Gaye’s Hitch Hike, alongside the Jagger/Richards originals, Heart Of Stone, I’m Free and The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man (credited to the group’s shared pseudonym, Nanker Phelge), in which the pair poked fun at a record company stooge: “I’m a necessary talent behind every rock and roll band.”

Key track: Heart Of Stone

11.

Emotional Rescue

(Rolling Stones Records, 1980)

The Stones’ first album of the ‘80s followed its predecessor Some Girls by meshing rock, reggae and disco, and, on Indian Girl, political commentary with mariachi horns: “My father he ain’t no Che Guevera,” claims Jagger in a questionable accent. Mick’s lilting falsetto is a thing of wonder on the fabulous title track, as is his over-enunciated rap at 4:01 minutes: “I will be your knight in shining armour…” indeed. An often-underrated curveball in the catalogue.

Key track: All About You

10.

The Rolling Stones No.2

(Decca, 1965)

The young Stones radiate hooligan vibes from the LP’s cover, setting the tone for this grab-bag of chippy R&B covers (even Solomon Burke’s Everybody Needs Somebody To Love sounds a bit sullen) and three equally sneery originals. What A Shame and Off The Hook hardly break the mold, but Grown Up All Wrong is typical Stones fare: complaining about a girl who isn’t falling for their bullshit anymore: “You were easy to fool when you were in school.”

Key track: Grown Up All Wrong

9.

Tattoo You

(Rolling Stones Records, 1981)

A clever hotch-potch of mostly outtakes, Tattoo You still included the hits Waiting On A Friend and Start Me Up; the last a setlist mainstay as recently as 2024. The provenance of Slave, Hang Fire and Neighbours (in which Jagger hilariously berates the noisy folks next door) barely matters as the whole thing flows beautifully, while Heaven – a dreamy, psychedelic groove cooked up by Jagger, Wyman and Watts especially for this album – is a lost gem.

Key track: Start Me Up

8.

The Rolling Stones

(Decca, 1964)

Where it all began: 12 covers of songs by the Stones’ heroes, including Willie Dixon and Muddy Waters, plus one Jagger/Richards original, Tell Me (You’re Coming Back). You can already hear the future, though, in these ferocious takes on Dixon’s I Just Wanna Make Love To You and Chuck Berry’s Carol; songs to inspire mass hysteria among teenagers and mass condemnation from a generation who’d fought two world wars only to be subjected to this bloody racket.

Key track: Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)

• READ MORE: Controversy, R&B and a passing Phil Spector shaking a brandy bottle... Inside the making of The Rolling Stones’ first LP.

7.

Goats Head Soup

(Rolling Stones Records, 1973)

Dwarfed by its predecessor, Exile On Main Street, Goats Head Soup is also partly let down by its cover image (Mick as the world’s campest bank robber, anyone?). The groupie anthem Star Star is the most explicit example, but most of the album, from the gnarly Dancing With Mr D to the wounded-sounding Angie, seem to reflect the Stones’ itinerant lifestyle; all tax-exile globe-trotting and nasty drug habits. Goat’s Head… deserves more love.

Key track: Angie

6.

Some Girls

(Rolling Stones Records, 1978)

On their late-’70s comeback, the Stones faced down the twin threats of punk and disco by reminding the world of their garage band origins on Lies and Shattered, and their black music roots on the dancefloor filler Miss You. Elsewhere, flipping between almost parodic country (Far Away Eyes) and soulful balladry (Beast Of Burden) compounded their flair for always sounding like the Stones no matter what genre they laid their grubby mitts on.

Key track: Miss You

5.

Aftermath

(Decca, 1966)

Mother’s Little Helper’s opening lyric, “What a d-r-a-g it is getting o-l-d”, sets the tone for the rest of the Stones’ fourth LP: essentially, snarky beat-pop decorated with Brian Jones’ exotic instrumentation (dulcimers, kotos, etc). Just as the Stones did on later albums, Aftermath’s glib putdowns (Stupid Girl) and quest for sexual dominance (Under My Thumb) held up a mirror to their insular world – and woe betide anyone on the outside.

Key track: Under My Thumb

4.

Beggars Banquet

(Decca, 1968)

In many ways, the Stones’ first ‘American’ album (despite being recorded in West London), Aftermath trailered the tough-as-nails blues-rock with knowingly British wordplay that became their calling card from hereon in. It’s all here: in Richards’ riff-driven Street Fighting Man, Sympathy For The Devil’s satanic majesty, and Parachute Woman’s sexual braggadocio: “I’ll break big in New Orleans and I’ll overspill in Carolina,” promises Jagger. Steady on Mick…

Key track: Sympathy For The Devil

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones: Rare And Unseen Pictures!

3.

Let It Bleed

(Decca, 1969)

A soon-to-be-fired Brian Jones was barely present, with Mick Taylor taking his place here. But Let It Bleed is the Mick and Keith show, from Gimme Shelter’s doomy overture to You Can’t Always Get What You Want’s grand finale, but also in the Appalachian hoedown Country Honk and Monkey Man’s ode to Italian painter Mario Shifano. Having embraced their collective public enemy number one persona, the Stones sound poised to conquer the world here.

Key track: Gimme Shelter

2.

Exile On Main Street

(Rolling Stones Records, 1972)

Apparently, Jagger dislikes the mix and some songs on Exile…, but for non-Stones members, its noisy sprawl of rock, soul and gospel is part of its charm. All Stones life is present on this joyous double LP: on Rip This Joint’s redux Chuck Berry grooves and Tumblin’ Dice’s exultant blues-rock shuffle to those songs (think: I Just Want To See His Face’s voodoo ceremony-meets-revivalist church hymn) that too often slip between the cracks on sides three and four.

Key track: Rocks Off

1.

Sticky Fingers

(Rolling Stones Records, 1971)

Partly recorded at Alabama’s Muscle Shoals studio, the Stones fully consummated their love affair with American music here. However, nothing, from the now partially cancelled Brown Sugar’s tale of “scarred old slavers” to Dead Flowers’ hillbilly lament ever lapses into pastiche. Instead, the Stones bring their droll British perspective to it all and, on the closing Moonlight Mile, even sound a little homesick for the Thames Delta. There are no bad songs on Sticky Fingers.

Key track: Can’t You Hear Me Knocking

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“Me and Mick are very different people – and that’s what makes the gravy.”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our exclusive interview with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in full, in which they reveal the secrets behind The Rolling Stones’ ongoing saga – from the loss of Brian Jones and Charlie Watts, to on-the-road excess, almost splitting up, and why The World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band aren’t done yet. “If you're not performing what are you going to do?” they tell MOJO. More information and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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Speaking exclusively in the new issue of MOJO, on sale now, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have discussed the political message behind one of the songs on their forthcoming new album, Foreign Tongues, the band’s longstanding relationship with America, and how the pair first started writing songs together in the 1960s.

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones' 50 Greatest Songs Ranked!

Featured on the Stones’ 25th album, out July 10, Ringing Hollow is a classic Stones-styled country ballad that serves as both a love letter to America and a lament for what it has become. “Lady Liberty don’t look so good when there’s a tear in her gown,” sings Jagger on the track, which, like the rest of Foreign Tongues, was recorded with Hackney Diamonds producer Andrew Watt.

“It’s about America as an idea,” Jagger tells MOJO’s Will Hodgkinson. “The American Dream is intact for some people, and I’m sure we can find some wonderful immigrant stories that happened in the last 12 months, but we read about the decline of the American Empire. Is the Iran war America’s Suez moment? Well, it’s not the same at all, but there are a lot of questions about imperial overreach, and the lobbying system. The money spent on an election is absurd – it’s not corruption per se but unnecessary. Is it indicative of this administration, or is it something has been happening a long time? In any case, it’s not the same place as it was.”

In a career-spanning interview, Jagger and Richards reflect on how America and its culture have shaped The Rolling Stones, from their earliest days as blues and R&B-obsessed teenagers, to the making of their latest LP. The Stones launched their recording career in 1963 with a cover of Chuck Berry’s Come On, while Foreign Tongues ends with a recording of Berry’s 1958 song Beautiful Delilah. But, as Jagger reflects, the group have also seen a different side to the American dream than the one presented to them by rock’n’roll when they were growing up amid the dreariness of post-war Britain.

“I lived in New York for 19 years,” the singer confirms “I’ve seen lots of America that no Americans have seen because people on the coast never go to the clapped-out towns, the middle and the south. Every English band had a love affair with America. The Beatles retained their northern thing, and then John fell in love with New York.”

Jagger’s bandmate Richards is certainly one of those for whom America, and in particular, its music, has been a lifelong love and source of inspiration.

“I take Ringing Hollow to be about America when we were growing up in the ’50s,” says the guitarist. “The romance of it all: have a cocktail, smoke your cigarettes, play your jukeboxes. We were 14, 15 years old, dying for more black music from America, and slowly you go through the rock’n’rollers and realise that these cats all learned from Muddy Waters. Even now, if I’m stuck for an idea I’ll go back to the blues because the musical form is limited and that makes it all the more intriguing. You’re telling me you can get more out of this thing? Ringing Hollow is our way of saying: we love you.”

• READ MORE: Keith Richards Interviewed: We're born to have fun, if you take it too seriously, you're f***ed..."

While The Rolling Stones’ first album, released in April 1964, was made up entirely of cover versions of American blues and R&B numbers,  by their 1965 follow-up, The Rolling Stones No.2, Jagger and Richards’ songwriting partnership shifted the dynamic both within the group, who had been formed by doomed guitarist and blues purist Brian Jones, and that of British pop, which until then had been dominated by the more clean-cut image of The Beatles.

Although they only wrote their first song, so legend has it, when their first manager Andrew Loog Oldham locked them in a kitchen and refused to let them out until they came up with an original.

“I was never expecting to be a songwriter,” reflects Richards. “It only happened because of the sheer force of the business, to put it crudely.”

Jagger and Richards’ first original composition As Tears Go By, became a hit for Jagger’s soon-to-be girlfriend Marianne Faithfull in 1964 and set in motion a remarkable run of tracks which captured the tone of Britain as it dealt uneasily with the freedoms emerging from the rubble of World War II, from Mother’s Little Helper to Let’s Spend The Night Together: dispatches from an exciting but dangerous new world.

“I thought writing songs was on another plane, another level,” continues Richards. “Then I found out that if you worked at it, you hear melodies, you catch a phrase, and maybe songwriting is simply about being really quick. You find a rhythm or something in the street, like the honk of a horn, so thank you, Andrew Oldham, for that, even though he was doing it for himself… because we all needed the money.”

“There’s nothing like being chased by Scotland Yard to get the juices flowing!

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our exclusive interview with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood in full, in which they reveal the secrets behind The Rolling Stones’ ongoing saga – from dodging the law, chemical excess, and the loss of Brian Jones and Charlie Watts, to why The World’s Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band aren’t done yet. “You’ve got to be really tough to survive…” they tell MOJO. More information and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

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Graham Coxon - Castle Park

★★★★

TRANSGRESSIVE

During the sessions for his 2012 album A&E, Graham Coxon started hiving off songs that he didn’t think quite fitted on the record, assuming he would store them up for his next solo project. Distracted by Blur and his soundtrack work, however, Coxon left those songs on the shelf, only now releasing them from the archive.

• READ MORE: Graham Coxon Interviewed: “We tried to kill any stink of Britpop from our clothes”

Named after a theatre of adolescent drama in his hometown Colchester, Castle Park strikes a perfect note of callow romance, all Merseybeat lunchbreak gossip on the spiky Alright and Billy Says, tipping into Zombies intrigue on When You Find Out. Yet there’s a depth of melancholy to the vibraphone haunting of Isn’t It Funny or Dripping Soul’s flamboyant Love flamenco that sees Coxon straying from the main paths and into the dark corners.

Castle Park is out June 19 on Transgressive.

ORDER: Amazon | Rough Trade | HMV

Tracklisting:

1. Billy Says
2. Alright
3. When You Find Out
4. Isn't It Funny
5. There's a Little House
6. Easy
7. Dripping Soul
8. Forget Today 
9. Melodie Pour Christine
10. All The Rage

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

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Cream - Wheels Of Fire (Super Deluxe Edition)

★★★★★

POLYDOR

Speaking to MOJO in 2013, Jack Bruce flashed back to the summer of ’66: “In the beginning of Cream I had long discussions with Eric of what we wanted to do and what was the concept, because we didn’t really know.” What they did know was that in London’s fast-moving scene where rhythm, blues, jazz and pop came out to play, bassist Bruce, guitarist Eric Clapton and drummer Peter ‘Ginger’ Baker were their instruments’ crème de la crème, hence the name. The songs would surely come.

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

“I admired The Beatles’ ability to say a lot in three minutes and I was ambitious about writing songs for the band,” Bruce continued. “I wish we’d continued in the direction of one of the first I wrote, NSU, like a punk song 10 years ahead: minimalist, unconventional, almost like Bartok though it was inspired by a bit of syncopated scat singing in between the beats Otis Redding did on Respect.” In those heady days eclecticism and experimentation were in the air, and Cream’s creative milieu included artists and poets eager to collaborate. Anything was possible.

A year on, the concept had both broadened and solidified. Cream had befriended The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band who blended jollity, parody and dada, and Clapton had also fallen for Pink Floyd’s extended improvisation and half-sinister English whimsy, which likewise intrigued Bruce’s regular songwriting partner, the poet Peter Brown.

Secondly, in August ’67’s debut US tour Cream discovered in San Francisco a deeply stoned hippy audience that levitated in delight when the band stretched out in instrumental improvisation. As if handed the baton by John Coltrane who’d died that July, jazzers Bruce and Baker stepped up, driving Clapton onwards and upwards too. “I thought of Cream as sort of a jazz band, only we never told Eric he was really Ornette Coleman,” Bruce would chuckle years later. “Kept quiet about that...”

By then Cream’s second album, Disraeli Gears, was in the can so didn’t reflect this more expansive vision. Back at work in the studio on the follow-up, Cream and their producer Felix Pappalardi planned a double album split between studio and live LPs.

Recorded over seven months in London and New York, the studio disc took just a small step from Disraeli Gears’ blend of riff-rock and psych whimsy with one ear cocked to hit single potential. But the live disc made a giant leap into the head space of band and fans as one in the energy feedback zone of boldly going for transcendence.

Making a dramatic entrance with White Room, Jack Bruce and lyricist Pete Brown would dominate the new album’s studio disc. Though reprising Clapton’s Disraeli Gears track Tales Of Brave Ulysses’ chord progression, White Room packed its own punch in Bruce’s salute to The Jimi Hendrix Experience, the two original power trios basking in mutual admiration. Intensifying Brown’s verses as “an alcoholic speed freak” going clean in a minimalist new flat, White Room bursts with creativity, from Baker’s 5/4 bolero time to Bruce’s part-falsetto vocal to Clapton’s signature ‘woman tone’ (guitar controls set to max vol and min tone) and further breaking into a sardonic wah-wah. The classically-trained Pappalardi doubled key lines on viola, and he’d also combine with Bruce’s cello in the latter’s Deserted Cities Of The Heart, a hard-driving but lesser expression of angst. Inspired by Richie Havens’ acoustic guitar open tuning, Bruce’s sketchy As You Said intriguingly foreshadowed Led Zeppelin’s Friends.

The 1963 Profumo Affair had scandalised the nation about its ruling class, and Politician was among the Brown poems Bruce had up his sleeve when he needed lyrics to fit a tune. Its sleazy proto-Peaches riff came quickly in cahoots with Clapton when Cream had time for one more song in a January 1968 BBC Radio Top Gear session. Later in the studio Pappalardi panned Clapton’s brace of overdubbed solos from speaker to speaker, stereo itself a psychedelic effect in that moment when music fans were upgrading from Dansettes to hi-fi, from AM chart singles radio to FM rock album radio.

Clapton was on fire, but not as a songwriter, taking centre stage on two covers: The Mississippi Sheiks’ 1930 country blues Sitting On Top Of The World and, at the behest of Atlantic Records boss Ahmet Ertegun eager to boost the song on the Stax label which he distributed, Albert King’s recent blues-soul crossover hit Born Under A Bad Sign. Each out-heavies the original but not to the point of crassness.

Utterly of their day, Ginger Baker’s three vocal and lyrical contributions scored by the tragic acid casualty Mike Taylor exemplify British psychedelia’s old curiosity shop of exotica, bucolica, whimsy and in-jokery. Pressed Rat And Warthog? Ask the Bonzos’ ‘Legs’ Larry Smith.

Recorded in Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium and even bigger San Francisco venue Winterland in March ’68, the live disc is no less of its day, to its detractors (who would come to include the compulsively self-sabotaging Clapton) bombastic rather than quaint yet to this day setting the bar for gutsy, muscular going-for-broke live rock intensity.

The road of excess may indeed lead to the palace of wisdom but it’s hard to say what wisdom is arrived at via the drum solo of which the 16-minute Toad mostly consists aside from now would be a really good time to take a leak. And for all its energy, Jack Bruce’s skiffling harmonica showcase Traintime huffs interminably. Preceding these self-indulgences, though, the marathon version of Willie Dixon’s Spoonful crunches, riffs, wails, builds and accelerates to the seventh heaven of bliss-out. As for Cream’s legendarily blistering reinvention of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads, though Clapton has since disowned it for his untidy timing (demonstrating that musicians can be their own most cloth-eared critics), it still slays.

Nor is that all: this handsomely packaged and annotated edition of fresh remasters and completist discoveries has raided those well-recorded shows for further tracks, including two renderings of NSU, neither minimalist nor punk but epic and thrilling. A big fat box of Cream in San Francisco, March ’68? Just putting it out there…

Cream - Wheels Of Fire (Super Deluxe Edition) is out now on Polydor.

Tracklisting:

CD1 - Wheels Of Fire: In The Studio (2026 Remaster)
1968 Originally Released Csg Encoded Version:
1. White Room 
2. Sitting On Top Of The World 
3. Passing The Time 
4. As You Said 
5. Pressed Rat And Warthog 
6. Politician 
7. Those Were The Days 
8. Born Under A Bad Sign 
9. Deserted Cities Of The Heart

Wheels Of Fire: In The Studio (Phase Corrected 2026 Remaster)
Previously Unreleased Phase Corrected (De-Csg'd) Version
10. White Room 
11. Sitting On Top Of The World 
12. Passing The Time 
13. As You Said 
14. Pressed Rat And Warthog 
15. Politician 
16. Those Were The Days 
17. Born Under A Bad Sign 
18. Deserted Cities Of The Heart 

CD2 - Wheels Of Fire: In The Studio (Stereo Reference Reels)
Previously Unreleased Stereo Tapes:
1. White Room 
2. Sitting On Top Of The World 
3. Passing The Time (Long Version) 
4. As You Said 
5. Pressed Rat And Warthog (With Spoken Intro) 
6. Politician 
7. Those Were The Days 
8. Born Under A Bad Sign 
9. Deserted Cities Of The Heart

Wheels Of Fire: In The Studio (Mono Reference Reels)
Previously Unreleased Mono Tapes
10. White Room 
11. Sitting On Top Of The World 
12. Passing The Time (Long Version) 
13. As You Said 
14. Pressed Rat And Warthog (With Spoken Intro) 
15. Politician 
16. Those Were The Days 
17. Born Under A Bad Sign 
18. Deserted Cities Of The Heart 

CD3 - Wheels Of Fire: Live At The Fillmore Auditorium & Winterland Ballroom (2026 Remaster):
1. Crossroads 
2. Spoonful 
3. Traintime 
4. Toad 

CD4 - Wheels Of Fire: More Live At The Fillmore Auditorium & Winterland Ballroom (2026 Remaster):
1. N.S.U. 
2. Sleepy Time Time 
3. Rollin' And Tumblin'
4. Sweet Wine 
5. Tales Of Brave Ulysses 
6. We’re Going Wrong 
7. Sunshine Of Your Love 
8. Steppin' Out 

CD5 - Wheels Of Fire: Rarities (2026 Remaster)
Early Versions, Alternate Mixes, Single Versions And Live Recordings + Previously Unreleased:
1. White Room (Stereo Us Single Edit) 
2. Sitting On Top Of The World (Alternate Stereo Mix) 
3. Passing The Time (Alternate Long Stereo Mix) 
4. As You Said (Alternate Stereo Mix) 
5. Pressed Rat And Warthog (Alternate Stereo Mix) 
6. Politician (Alternate Stereo Mix) 
7. Anyone For Tennis (Stereo Single Mix) 
8. White Room (Early Version Mono Mix) 
9. Deserted Cities Of The Heart (Rough Mono Mix / No Strings) 
10. Pressed Rat And Warthog (Alternate Mono Mix) 
11. As You Said (Alternate Mono Mix) 
12. Anyone For Tennis (Mono Single Mix) 
13. Crossroads (Mono Single Version) 
14. N.S.U. (Recorded 9 March 1968 At Winterland Ballroom) 
15. Sunshine Of Your Love (Recorded 7 March 1968 At The Fillmore Auditorium)

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

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On Saturday at New Jersey’s Monmouth University, the Bruce Springsteen Center For American Music opened to significant fanfare and much rocking: a week before, two sell-out nights entitled Music America: The Songs That Shaped Us saw Springsteen sharing the stage in proud celebration with Dion, Mavis Staples, Public Enemy, Rosanne Cash, Dropkick Murphys and more.

With a new 32,000-square foot headquarters, the Center will offer exhibition galleries, interactive user experiences galore, thematic performances, and deep archives of historic Springsteen objects. And as founding executive director Robert Santelli — who notes he “rode Bruce Springsteen’s coattails as a journalist” from his earliest beginnings - no site could be more appropriate for the Center than the Monmouth campus.

“Bruce wrote Born To Run four blocks from here, in a little cottage that’s now recognized as an important New Jersey Music landmark,” says Santelli, himself a graduate of Monmouth College (now University). “Also, his original base of fans were Monmouth College students - yours truly as well.”

He adds that the Center is not just about Bruce Springsteen, but all of American music - which means the programming, concerts and exhibits concern the richness and diversity of American music, not just one man. “People will say, there’s a Bob Dylan Center, a Woody Guthrie Center, even a Buddy Holly Center. Why is it the Bruce Springsteen Center ‘and American Music?’” says Santelli. “There are a couple of reasons - number one is because Bruce is a relatively humble guy. When I went to him with this idea I was calling it simply the Bruce Springsteen Center. He said, ‘I’m honoured that you would do this. I’m humbled. But the way I look at things, I’m just a chapter in the ongoing story of rock of American usage - and if you broadened it and made it bigger, so that’s not just about me, then I’d be interested.’ And that’s exactly what we did.”

Future plans include temporary exhibits that will travel — the first is Chimes Of Freedom: Patriotism, Protest And The Power Of Song, in which, Santelli says, “We take you from Yankee Doodle Dandy and the Revolutionary War all the way to the streets of Minneapolis.” There will also be a continuation of the American Music Honors which were launched in April (“It’s similar to the Kennedy Center Honors, except it’s not,” notes Santelli), and an upcoming book of the 50th anniversary of Born To Run, drawn from a four-day symposium held in September 2025.

The big question remains: what exactly does Springsteen think of it all?

“Believe it or not, he had nothing to do with this,” says Santelli, whose previous gigs included the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, Seattle’s Experience Music Project, the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. “I would tell him what we were doing on occasion, but he never imposed himself to say, ‘Hey, do this, don’t do this,‘ not at all. That’s a blessing and a curse, right? It’s a blessing because I’m honored that he trusts me with his legacy, but it’s also… you hope that what we did is right, and he likes it. And we won’t know that until he actually walks through.”

For more information visit springsteencener.org

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Main Pic: Bruce Springsteen at The Rainforest Fund 30th Anniversary Benefit Concert Presents 'We'll Be Together Again', December 9, 2019 New York. (Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Rainforest Fund)

Exclusive interviews with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood and more, delving deep into The Rolling Stones’ new album, rich history and recent jeopardy… and how they’re not finished yet. Also in the issue: Janis Joplin – her whirlwind rise; 50 years of The Fall; The Waterboys revisit Fisherman’s Blues; the Beatles unseen in ’66; the dub reggae revolution; Lenny Kaye – we salute you! Plus: Deep Purple; Deaf School; Dexys Midnight Runners; The Cramps; Ron Carter; Wednesday; Echo & The Bunnymen; Japan; Springsteen; Yoko Ono; Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy; Sonny Rollins; Panda Bear & Sonic Boom; Frank Zappa; and all back to Barry Manilow’s!

THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD is The Waterboys: Abandonment And Love – Lost. Rare. Live. 1986-1989. Amazing unreleased music from the Fisherman’s Blues sessions, plus revelatory live versions of And A Bang On The Ear and Dylan’s New Morning.

HAVE MOJO 393 SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME

CONTENTS MOJO 393

THE ROLLING STONES Jagger, Richards, Wood and pals (now including The Cure!) are turning back the clock on record while shadows gather over the stage. Who’d bet against yet another final act? “You’ve got to be really tough to survive.”

JANIS JOPLIN In June 1966, a shy young folk and blues singer joined a psychedelic SF R&B band, for good and ill. “It was the beginning – but it was also the end.”

THE FALL It crawled from the North, blending post-industrial grot and supernatural agency over atavistic clatter. Mark E. Smith’s original bandmates tell us how.

LENNY KAYE Patti Smith’s man for all seasons is also one of rock’n’roll’s great curators and cheerleaders, and now a solo songsmith. “I’m in my bonus era,” he insists.

THE WATERBOYS As they refit their roots-rock masterpiece Fisherman’s Blues for the road, Mike Scott and co revisit its creation: “It was a mystery train of discovery.”

DUB REGGAE Fifty years since its Lee Perry-powered annus mirabilis, the impact of dub is everywhere. David Katz tracks a sonic revolution back to its source.

WEDNESDAY Indie rock or country? Why not both, say Asheville’s rising force, built on Karly Hartzman’s bittersweet, beautifully observed, passionately belted songs.

DEAF SCHOOL Liverpool’s most-heralded band since the Beatles were championed by the Beatles’ PR guru, influenced Madness and Dexys, but remain in a category of one.

REVIEWED Panda Bear & Sonic Boom / Yoko Ono / Boards Of Canada / Frank Zappa / Tift Merritt / Punch Brothers / Neil Young / Graham Coxon / Yes / Kris Drever / Deep Purple / Tricky / Modest Mouse / Ali Farka Touré / David Torn / Beth Orton / Old Crow Medicine Show / The Shires / Joe Bonamassa / Beau Brummels / Joan As Police Woman / Deer Tick / Mike Campbell & The Dirty Knobs / Swamp Dogg / Tucker Zimmerman / Jon Spencer / Luke Haines

PLUS The Cramps rave from the grave / Bruce Springsteen gets his own ‘Center’ / Ron Carter – bass ace / The Beatles bow out – unseen! / Echo & The Bunnymen album imminent! / Ellie O’Neill and Fancy Weapon arise! / How To Buy Will Oldham / Richard Barbieri and Japan / Farewell, Sonny Rollins, Beverley Martin, Nedra Ross… / All Back To Barry Manilow’s / and more!

SUBSCRIBE TO MOJO MAGAZINE

As Fall fans gathered at august Manchester venue Band On The Wall, a “new” song by the group appeared online. With late conducator Mark E Smith in hectoring, bilious form, 30 Degrees is the first enticing excerpt from an impending album of unreleased material entitled Post Script.

READ MORE: Mark E Smith Interviewed: “I was too soft with the band. I spoiled them to death…”

There were further thoughts, addendums and reflections this weekend at the event dubbed Futures And Pasts: 1976-2026. Devised to mark 50 years since Smith and group started their singular work at the psychotropic outlands of rock and roll, it presented live music, talks, film, art, walking tours, a quiz and even an onstage revisiting of 1986’s experimental murder-in-the-Vatican stage caper Hey! Luciani. Accordingly, thrill-hungry Fall-watchers from as far afield as New Zealand, Alabama and Denmark have descended, as have ten ex-members.

After a launch event for Das Gruppe On The Wall, a monogram by Fall ex-drummer Paul Hanley (“if Mark was alive this wouldn’t be happening,” he notes, reasonably), Friday night’s fun includes one-off superband Lost In Music, where old band lags back American-in-Manchester BC Camplight to play cover versions favoured by MES. Cheerily declaring he doesn’t know why he was asked to deputise, BC works his way through a bottle of JD and strews his lyric sheets across the stage – one wag shouts “Call yourselves bloody professionals?”, quoting the back cover of 1980 Fall disc Totale’s Turns – but the versions of White Lightning, Lost In Music, Mr Pharmacist and Victoria are righteous, with BC’s manly rockisms and stalwart bassist Steve Hanley in particular bulldozing all before them. Studious yet dynamic two-frontman covers outfit The Look Back Bores close out the night: coming onto a tape of MES refuting the notion that there could ever be a Fall tribute band, their agreeably broad and wildly enjoyable setlist includes Wings, Blindness, Theme From Sparta F.C. and Big New Prinz (Fall drummer ‘Funky Si’ Wolstencroft sits in on this for extra oomph) and they even bring out a kazoo for New Face In Hell.

This is, of course, a specialist event, and on Saturday morning the venue is packed for the video-shot film The Fall US 93 94: The Dave Bush Tapes. Capturing the group touring America before the in-band turmoil of the late nineties, there is tension, tedium, in-band wrestling and aloof Ahab figure MES in moods both grave and hilarious (at one point he makes the entire band get up at 2.30 am to look on while he visits the grave of HP Lovecraft in New England). Further grist comes with the first ever solo live show by Fall soundman and beyond Grant Showbiz, wherein cosmic drift music meets Barber’s Adagio For Strings and Eno’s Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks. Thereafter there are DJ sets by old Fall hands Craig Scanlon and Marc Riley (PiL, The Birthday Party and PJ Harvey all get an airing), a performance by Fall founder member Una Baines’ group Poppycock (their spectral Lizard Man is dedicated to MES) and an agreeably tangential conversation between Jim ‘Vic Reeves’ Moir and weekend MC Daryl Easlea about his love of The Fall. What’s it all about, Jim?

It’s a love of the unusual...

Vic Reeves

“I think it’s a love of the unusual,” says Moir, who adds that his pal MES used to send him postcards that said things like, ‘Got really pissed last night. Thinking of you, MES’. “The words blew me away - a conundrum to decipher. Lyrics with an obvious story are a bit boring aren’t they? This was poetry, comedy… and a group that were equally as important. Like a Willem de Kooning abstract painting, they’ve got a force and a unity, but they’re abstract, and you don’t know where it’s going to go next!”

Unforeseen developments are writ large in the evening’s next phase, when the abundant enigmas contained within Smith stage play Hey! Luciani are revisited. Guardian writer Alexis Petridis discusses the madness with ’86 original cast members and director Graham Duff – Jackie O’Malley, who played Sister Bon Amico, returns to her teenage diaries to confirm that The Fall were all extremely nice – before a new ensemble gather onstage for a read-through of the play with The Look Back Bores on musical cues. Replete with peak Smith word-wrangling, it’s actually narratively fairly comprehensible, with a resonant, grave and suitably attired Malcolm Boyle giving good Pope Luciani. Will there be a fully staged revival, complete with ballet dancing, screen projections of maggots and Mossad commandos catching nazi-on-the-run Martin Bormann? We live in hope.

Onto Sunday, and highlights include the Fall knowledge quiz Middle Mass-termind, where two teams compete to identify song lyrics, number Peel session Fall tracks (96) and name tunes via short approximations played by Steve Hanley on a kazoo. Of any of the ‘how much would MES have hated this’ moments, this perhaps takes the can of Tennent’s Super. But as the among-friends, respectful ambience suggests – not synonymous with The Fall, in all honesty – there no room for negativity, and MC Frank Skinner effortlessly keeps the yucks flowing, even if he drifts into vintage knob-joke territory at times.

“Somebody sent me a bootleg of Mark E Smith slagging me off once! No one escapes,” Skinner tells MOJO. “The Fall have, without doubt, deeply, deeply enriched my life. I remember the thrill of witnessing something unique and special, and it makes me truly sad to know I’ll never do that again. You aren’t liking a band, you’re entering a world… but I’m very happy that I did. And it’s been great here, a really positive, warm vibe of love in the room.” He’s not wrong. Among the new pals MOJO makes are local man Mark Wood, who’s decorated his trousers with facsimiles of the text from the sleeve of 1982 Fall cornerstone Hex Enduction Hour (a veritable Keks Enduction Hour, no less).

Thereafter, Poet Laureate Simon Armitage DJs Fall tunes (1980 haulage-themed rockabilly number The Container Drivers gets yet another airing) and sits down for a Fall rumination with the Hanley brothers, wherein he recites his eulogy on MES’s death in 2018, Reddish Light Arches. “The Fall guy’s dead,” he intones. “There’s been a mistake.”

Thereafter, Imperial Wax, the group formed by The Fall’s last line up, are exhilarating to watch, and ace live karaoke gang The Fallen Women allow audience members to commune with their late leader one last time before reality kicks back in, with help from the Hanleys on Totally Wired. We leave reminded that there will never be another Mark E Smith and his spell is unbroken: or, as Jim Moir has it, “I’ll still be trying to decipher it to the end of me days.”

Paul Hanley’s Das Gruppe On The Wall is published by Route. Post Script is released by Cog Sinister in September.

Rush

Kia Forum, Los Angeles, California, June 7, 2026

“I consider my whole career to be a reflection of me at 16, what my values were and what I thought the idea of artistic integrity was and what you should be devoted to. I do refer to that kid pretty often, what would that kid say a rock band should do, or how a musician should behave and all that. And I do like to think that that 16-year-old would still be cool with me.”

• READ MORE: Every Rush Album Ranked!

These immortal recorded words, as uttered by the late Neil Peart, reverberate throughout Los Angeles’s Forum, as a highlight reel of the late Rush drummer’s finest moments plays across the arena’s video screens. Eleven years ago, on Aug 1, 2015, Peart appeared on this very stage, on the final date of Rush’s 40th anniversary tour, at what sadly ended up being his final public performance with bandmates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. Peart died four years and five months later, at age 67, after losing his secret three-year battle with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.

In 2022, Rush’s surviving members made a surprise return to the Forum to honour another beloved, gone-too-soon drummer, Taylor Hawkins (a lifelong fan who’d giddily attended Rush’s last show), at Hawkins’s L.A. memorial concert — with two rhythm-keeping greats, Dave Grohl and Red Hot Chili Peppers's Chad Smith, gamely attempting to fill Peart’s throne. And that night, backstage, none other than Paul McCartney encouraged Lee and Lifeson to “get back out there.”

One year later, Lee teased a Rush reunion during a MOJO interview promoting his autobiography, My Effin’ Life, saying: “After my book tour, Alex and I are going away on holiday together. I’m sure we’ll talk more about it then.” Lifeson had just experienced his own health issues with gastroparesis, and as it turned out, he and Lee decided during that holiday — at an Austrian health spa retreat, of all places — to heed Macca’s advice.

And now Lee and Lifeson are making history again at the Forum, as they officially kick off their Fifty Something tour, an event that Rush fans never thought they’d get to witness. (What Oasis’s hell-freezing-over Live ‘25 comeback tour was to Britpop fans last year, Fifty Something is to prog-rockers in 2026, basically.) And just like that emotional farewell night back in 2015, there’s barely a dry eye in the 17,000-capacity house.

But while tonight’s concert is billed as a Peart tribute — with Lee often sweetly citing Peart lyrics that “struck a chord” with him (notably Vital Signs and The Garden), and a touching Peart memorial slideshow playing during Bravado — it’s hardly some sombre, funeral affair. On the contrary, Rush’s absurdist humour (this is a band whose frontman once cracked the Billboard top 20 with a novelty song recorded with the SCTV sketch-comedy duo Bob and Doug McKenzie) is still very much intact. This is immediately evidenced by the show’s six-minute intro video, “Where’s Rush?,” a sort of Escape From Witch Mountain-style romp set in a medieval “Xanahaus” castle in the “Village of Strangiato.”

A choose-your-own-adventure mini-movie of sorts, the tone-setting Where’s Rush? stars Lee as a “slightly used sausages” salesman; the South Park kids as “Lil’ Rush”; and I Love You, Man actors Jason Segel and Paul Rudd as superfans trapped in a Xanahaus bedroom equipped with a magically witchy wardrobe filled with iconic kimonos (or “Absurdly Prophetic Robes”). Lil’ Rush reappear in the evening, with South Park’s Cartman, in mini-Geddy mode, accidentally misquoting Huckleberry Finn while introducing 1981’s Tom Sawyer, while Segel and Rudd later engage in a spirited debate about the proper pronunciation of Peart’s surname. It all makes very little sense, but it makes an excellent case for Lee and Lifeson getting their own Saturday morning kids’ TV/variety show someday.

More seriously, many of tonight’s eyes, dry or otherwise, are focused on Anika Nilles — the German virtuoso who first came to fame within the drumming community via YouTube, before touring with Jeff Beck and then landing the gig of a lifetime after Lee discovered her through Beck’s bass tech.

And as that above-mentioned kimono closet becomes a portal leading to the Forum’s Howard Ungerleider-designed steampunk stage, and Nilles, alongside Lifeson and Lee’s duelling double-necks, begin playing Xanadu — an 11-minute opus that has never been the first song on a Rush setlist until now — it is clear that Nilles is not joking around.

The drummer made her live public debut with Rush at March’s 2026 Juno Awards, playing Finding My Way, the first track off the band’s 1974 self-titled debut album. And despite Rush’s reputation for having a stereotypically bloke-heavy fanbase (the running joke ever since the band’s reunion announcement has been, “At least there will be one woman at the Rush concert”), her Junos appearance was met with almost unanimous online approval from even the nerdiest and judgiest Rush diehards. Now she’s fully in the limelight and exhibiting grace under pressure, so to speak — playing 24 songs across two sets, for more than two and a half hours.

Obviously, no drummer could ever replace Peart in Rush fans’ hearts, one of the most flamboyant and inventive drummers of the 70s, 80s and beyond, and to her credit, Nilles never tries to do so; she simply honours the songs, the feel, and Peart’s energetic, tonal approach. She clearly knows this is an important and near-impossible task, so she’s intensely focused and poker-faced at first, cracking only the tiniest and humblest of smiles when Lee introduces her just three songs into the night. But her grin grows wider, a display of both pride and seeming relief, during Rush’s second set, especially when she notices roaring concertgoers air-drumming along to her solo in Tom Sawyer (a  strobelit “fast skate” classic familiar to any SoCal Gen X-er who frequented a roller rink in the summer of ’81), or when she flawlessly handles the aggressive Morse-code drum fills of the daunting and demanding YYZ from 1981’s Moving Pictures.

• READ MORE: Geddy Lee on the making of 2112: “If we’re going to go out, we’ll go out doing our crazy shit…”

Also onstage tonight, and fitting right in, is former Chicago/Who keyboardist Loren Gold, making this the first time since 1972 that Rush have performed as a quartet. While Lee still toggles between bass and synthesiser throughout the night, having this additional utility player frees him up to work the stage, and he seems to be having the time of his life, his own wide grin rarely leaving his face. The 72-years-young frontman has pep in his step — at one point, he even breaks into a Chuck Berry-style duckwalk — and his sense of joy and playfulness is contagious, especially when he’s interacting with lifelong friend Lifeson, and the pair’s bantering buddy act is adorable.

Lee’s instantly identifiable bright and nasal voice is also still remarkably robust, navigating even the highest octaves on 1981’s Limelight with minimal strain. He took vocal lessons in preparation for this tour, telling the New York Times that this “brought back part of my range that I thought had left,” and it was undoubtedly money well spent. His glass-shattering twang is exquisitely complemented when former Til Tuesday singer-songwriter and L.A. resident Aimee Mann makes a surprise appearance to honour Peart by lending her ethereal vocals to Time Stand Still, in what is her first-ever live performance of their 1987 Hold Your Fire duet.

Rush’s marathon concert ends appropriately and full-circularly with 1974’s Working Man, the last song Rush played here with Peart in 2015 (accompanied by comic-book visuals that also pay homage to original Rush drummer John Rutsey, who died in 2008). To reference Peart’s aforementioned video voiceover, it’s fair to assume that the 16-year-old Peart, and the 67-year-old Peart, would be very, very cool with this.

Rush, Kia Forum, Los Angeles, California, June 7, 2026, Setlist:

ACT 1:

Xanadu

Limelight

Far Cry

Subdivisions

Freewill

Bravado

Caravan

La Villa Strangiato

Vital Signs

The Spirit of Radio

ACT 2:

2112 Part I: Overture

2112 Part II: The Temples of Syrinx

2112 Part VII: Grand Finale

Distant Early Warning

Red Barchetta

Dreamline

Natural Science

Time Stand Still

Red Sector A

YYZ

Tom Sawyer

By-Tor & The Snow Dog

Working Man

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As the bass, and high tenor, of Canadian prog rock gods Rush, Geddy Lee has navigated a life and career filled with both tragedy and comedy. In 2023, he talked to MOJO's James McNair about the controversy surrounding their iconic fourth album 2112, on the road excess, the tragic death of drummer Neil Peart in 2020, and the possibility of a Rush reunion. As Lee teased, he and guitarist Alex Lifeson are now getting ready to play their first show together since Peart's passing. While we await the show (come back to MOJO4MUSIC to read our review of the gig on Monday), we've republished the feature in full…

• READ MORE: Every Rush Album Ranked!

Sorry – one moment…” When the doorbell sounds at his Toronto home, Geddy Lee briefly disappears, leaving MOJO with his well-stocked library and a painting of his Norwich terriers. Our encounter has been sparked by Lee’s new memoir My Effin’ Life, a work whose zany title helps offset some sobering content. The book is funny, but also moving, occasionally harrowing. The dark sunglasses and low-visored baseball cap Lee wears today are not accoutrements of vanity, MOJO surmises; rather they offer protection during a free-ranging, sometimes emotionally raw conversation which sees Lee choke up more than once.

     Born Gershon Eliezer Weinrib, Rush’s singer and bassist was named after his maternal grandfather, a Polish jew murdered in the Holocaust. Having survived imprisonment at Auschwitz, Dachau and Bergen Belsen, his parents Moshe and Malka emigrated to Canada, where Lee was born in 1953, soon befriending another scion of Eastern European immigrants, Aleksandar Živojinović, aka future Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson. With bookish, lyric-writing drummer Neil Peart joining for Rush’s second LP, 1975’s Fly By Night, this close-knit, virtuosic power trio bonded around a love of goofball humour and Brit invaders Led Zeppelin, The Who and Cream.

     Active from 1968 to 2018, Rush have sold close to 50 million albums. They morphed from Zeppelin wannabes to kimono-wearing prog rock gods, and eventually channelled UK New Wave acts including The Police and Ultravox. Lee’s powerful, high-pitched voice alienated some listeners, and drew hurtful jibes. Much of the mainstream music press shunned Rush for decades, thinking them geeky (right), pompous (wrong), and dully abstemious (very wrong).

     The trio’s ever-expanding fan-base remained fiercely loyal, and from the noughties onwards, Rush enjoyed a cultural and critical renaissance. Banger Films’ intimate 2010 profile Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage captured the loveable, beating heart of Rush and their enduring, three-way bromance, while cameos in South Park and US comedy film I Love You, Man broadened their appeal. Soon Rush did the big US talk shows and found themselves inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by superfans Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins. The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada even named a star after Lee: Asteroid 12272 GeddyLee. The geeks had inherited the earth.

     Tragedy derailed them; nothing broke their bond. Rush were inactive and their future uncertain for four years when Peart lost his 19-year-old daughter Selena in a car crash, then wife Jackie to cancer. Courageously, they returned with 2002’s Vapor Trails, then 2008’s final, core values-reasserting Clockwork Angels, bowing out with their R40 North American Tour in 2015. Prior to Peart’s death from brain cancer in January 2020, Lee and Lifeson had kept his illness a secret for three years, as per his wishes. Lee’s memoir relives that dark chapter, and plenty more besides. “There were growing pains involved”, he says ruefully.

My Effin’ Life is a bit different from your last book, Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book Of Bass…

Just a tad. My publishers were leaning on me for a memoir, but the idea of wrapping up my life in print seemed odd and premature. Then the pandemic happened after some very difficult years of me dealing with Neil’s illness and ultimate passing, and I was sat in lockdown Toronto with the realisation that a huge part of my life was over. On top of that, my mum, who I was very close with, was suffering from dementia, and would die aged 95. Her struggles affected me deeply, and made me question how long my own grey cells would be in working order, so I got it all down.

Was that cathartic? You’d been in Rush for over 50 years…

Well, I was actually quite depressed because of Neil’s struggles and what they had represented. Back in 2014, when Neil first told us he wanted to retire, it was very difficult for me. I didn’t react like the friend I thought I was. I was frustrated, a little resentful. I understood all the reasons why he felt he had to say goodbye and spend time with his new family [Peart married second wife Carrie Nuttall in 2001; their daughter Olivia was born in 2009], but I had to do some soul searching. Then when Neil got brain cancer of course I felt like a complete heel, and my resentment dissipated immediately. But I still needed help with various feelings.

Professional help?

Yes, I started talking to a therapist. I’ve gone down that road a couple of times and find it helpful. And the whole memoir endeavour seemed to be part and parcel of all that. There were some unresolved issues from my childhood – the passing of my father, for example. So it was cathartic for me to review those things. But before I knew it I had over 1200 pages of manuscript, which should not be imposed upon any human being. My editors trimmed it to a more reasonable 500 pages or so.

Let’s go back to the start. What music first blew you away?

Oh, Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison was one of the first songs where I was kind of awestruck. That guitar riff was haunting to me, and it was the first single I ever bought. Then it was For Your Love by The Yardbirds. I was also a big fan of The Supremes.

Your bass playing influences include James Jamerson as well as Paul McCartney and Yes’s Chris Squire. Has your funkiness been overlooked?

(*Laughs) White Canadians aren’t funky, dude! But I’d hear these fantastic bass lines on Motown records and years later I discovered many of them were by James Jamerson. Toronto wasn’t that far from Detroit – that Motown influence definitely seeped in. Of course, what I chose to play was blues-rock. But I didn’t really like ‘real’ blues – I liked the way you Brits did it and sent it back across the ocean.

Your closest childhood friends were a certain Aleksandar Živojinović, and Oscar Peterson’s son Oscar. Outsiders bonding?

Yes. The minute Alex and I sat together at school we started laughing, and we haven’t stopped almost 60 years later, which is a fucking rare thing in this world. Oscar was a big loveable guy, always up for a beer or ten. Like Alex and I, he had this demented sense of humour. Oscar and I never once talked about him being black and me being Jewish, but we were very aware of being outsiders.

It was only after your father’s death that you learned he had been a musician, and that your mum had insisted he leave his balalaika behind after their liberation from the camps…

When my aunt told me that, I thought, ‘She’s just making this shit up.’ My dad died when I was 12, but he never talked about music to me. My parents had survived the Holocaust and were trying to build new lives in Canada, so I guess he had bigger fish to fry. When I eventually spoke to my mum about it she was very sheepish, though.

Alex has spoken of seeing your mum’s concentration camp number on her arm when he was a kid – the shock of that.  Was the weight of what your family had experienced a constant presence?

Every child of Holocaust survivors will tell you a different story, but I was fortunate in that my mother wasn’t afraid to talk about it. It literally gave me nightmares when she *did talk about it, but I felt I understood what they had gone through. It didn’t make me a kinder teenager, though. I was still desperate to get out of the house and join the circus. It was only years later that I was able to look at her life much more sympathetically and heal any rift between us in those difficult teenage years.

Rush’s self-titled 1974 debut was heavily influenced by Led Zeppelin. You saw them in Canada as a kid, right?

It was life-changing. [Rush’s first drummer] John Rutsey had seen them on their very first trip to Toronto at this little club called the Rockpile. As soon as the first Zeppelin LP dropped we all bought it and thought, ‘What is this?’ It had a kinda Humble Pie vibe, but it was broader and the brushstrokes were bolder. We were in ecstasy, jabbering about them non-stop. That fall they came back to Toronto and John, Alex and myself sat in the second row. I didn’t think they were beings who walked – they floated onto the stage like gods.

From the outset, you and John Rutsey wanted different things?

John was a real rocker. Into glam and the glam image and a drummer in the spirit of [Free’s] Simon Kirke. Alex and I soon realised our musical differences with John could not be overcome, plus John had legitimate health fears related to his diabetes and it was clear that touring America wasn’t on the cards for him. We were hungry to expand our sound, and he was not. So when Neil walked in to audition that day and blew us away, we knew we had found our fellow traveller.

All three of you were virtuosos…

Alex was always incredibly talented and spontaneously creative. Those big fat Serbian fingers of his meant his guitar strings didn’t stand a chance! And they gave him a tone which was not like that of his heroes. Then Neil came in and had a catalytic effect on our creative corpuscles. Neil lifted me up as a bass player. I’d like to think I pushed him too.

Yet your third album Caress Of Steel bombed. In your book you tell of playing it to Kiss’s Paul Stanley and “the guy who sang Strutter every night” looking perplexed.

Right (*laughs). I can’t look at Caress Of Steel as successful, but we had to try a concept record sooner or later. When you’re contracted to release two albums a year, you record what you write. And as naive as parts of that record were, some of it is kinda cool and some of it is kinda funny.

Then came 1976’s 2112, the record where you defined your early sound.

Our confidence had been shaken by the response to Caress Of Steel, but we knew we wanted to make a great record or die trying. We didn’t recognise 2112 as a quantum leap forward when we were making it, though. We didn’t have the objectivity to see why it succeeded and Caress… failed.  But clearly, 2112 was more passionate and cohesive, and had better songs. Career-wise, it saved our bacon.

• READ MORE: The Making Of 2112: “If we’re going to go out, we’ll go out doing our crazy shit…”

In 1978, a snarky NME piece by Barry Miles accused Rush – and Neil in particular – of “proto fascism”, and pilloried Neil’s admiration for Russian-American writer, Ayn Rand.

It’s amazing how long that mud stuck. Part of the way we used Rand’s inspiration was defiantly anti-totalitarianism, as played out in the sci-fi plot of 2122. And, fairly obviously, we were never fascists. Thatcherism was rising in Britain. The Left were understandably freaked out, and I didn’t blame [Miles] for having the belief system he had. But to suggest that 2112 was suckering kids into a right-wing mantra with fascistic overtones was wrong-headed and irresponsible.

Rand arguably aged badly after neoliberalism’s merging with neoconservatism in the 2000s. Do you regret the connection with her?

Many of the American libertarian dudes that I have very little respect for are Rand devotees, it’s true. But I don’t regret the connection, no, because I was a 23-year-old kid, and Rand’s writing in The Fountainhead really stimulated my brainwaves. Also, no-one is the finished product at 23, and we should all reserve the right to disagree with our younger selves.

How did your hard rock peers view Rush? As eccentrics?

They didn’t necessarily like our music, but we always got technical respect, even if they weren’t going to buy our records and study them. Musically, we were more of an influence on the generation that came after us. Bands like Primus, and the whole Seattle grunge scene. With very few exceptions, we got on well with bands we toured with, especially if they liked a drink. Nazareth drunk us under the table, though!

The received wisdom about Rush was that they weren’t druggy. But you dropped Purple Owsley microdots in 1969 and got into cocaine in the ’80s and ’90s. How come we didn’t know?

Well it wasn’t like Zeppelin. People weren’t writing about what happened on the tour bus, so that saved us from prying eyes. We could fuck ourselves up in private.

The book explains why you quit cocaine.

Well, firstly our touring schedule in those years was insane. We once did 23 one-nighters in a row, all in different cities. Our youthful energy was finite and at some point the cocaine was actually useful. And fun. My buddies would meet me stage left during the drum solo and we’d do some lines. Then there was a night in Texas where a buddy and I were trying to score coke, and, terribly, we used some fans to acquire some. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror the next day. I could hear my mother’s voice: “Nice Jewish boys don’t drink beer.” Nice Jewish boys don’t exploit their fans to score coke, either.

Neil’s views on fame and fans were spelt out on Limelight on Moving Pictures [1981]: “I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend.” Was there an agreement: you write the lyrics, we’ll do the meet and greets?

Yeah. Neil hated all that. In the early days when our meet and greets were after the show, Neil was already gone, cycling to the next gig.

Remarkably, his lyrics for Red Sector A [from 1984’s Power Windows] were partly a portrayal of your family’s experiences in the concentration camps.

Yes. He and I had had a conversation about the day my mum was liberated from Bergen Belsen. I told Neil how shocked my mum had been when she realised that their world had not been destroyed. She had assumed everyone was dead, that there was no hope. That affected Neil deeply, and I was very appreciative of those lyrics. I could sing them with real heart.

You haven’t had many outsider collaborators, but Aimee Mann sang on Time Stand Still, from 1987’s Hold Your Fire.

She was amazing. We were all totally mesmerised, complete goofballs around her. She sang beautifully and trusted us with her voice.

Those late ’80s records were more technology-orientated. What did peers make of Rush hiring Andy Richards [Propaganda, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Grace Jones] on additional synths?

We weren’t ones for discussing our intentions with management, the record company or anyone else. If we were going to make a foolish mistake, that was on us. Peter Collins [producer of 1985’s *Power Windows] said, “We’ll work in England – I know some musicians there who’ll bring us right up to date.” We agreed without realising quite what would happen. Andy Richards brought tons of kit with him: the Andy Richards show. Alex was freaked out, but I was intrigued.

You acknowledged the influence of various British New Wave bands. What did you want a piece of?

With Ultravox, say, there was a rich musicality there. We were a riffy hard rock band who wanted to learn more about song structure and write better melodies. We wanted to be more compelling and didn’t want to stand still.

But the reduced role for guitar alienated Alex: “I’ll just play what you want me to play,” he said, echoing what George Harrison said to Paul McCartney. Was that the closest Rush came to splitting?

Probably. But I was blind to it. Alex didn’t express his frustrations to me overtly, and I was too up my own ass to hear him anyway. I was in love with what we were doing and feverishly learning from this process. And Neil was always for change, always for experimenting. Alex, too – he’s one of the great guitar experimenters of all time. But he felt his territory being encroached upon and understandably felt unhappy.

The book is good on how the band took over your lives. You talk about a “dereliction of duty to my wife and son.” How did you mend that?

Nancy and I worked hard to rebuild our relationship. Through all our difficulties, we loved our son Jules, who was being victimised by our estrangement. We did therapy and started telling each other how we felt about pretty much every fucking thing (laughs). You realise that a successful relationship without an open dialogue is a pipe dream – it’s not going to happen.

The pages where you write about Neil losing his daughter are very moving, Neil falling into your arms and saying “You understand!”

It was a deeply terrible loss to witness, and very hard for Alex and I to know what our roles were. We’d visit Neil in London, where he and Jackie were holed up, running from the awful event, and I’d bring in the clown, Alex, who was somehow able to make them laugh. They needed to hear about lives that had not been destroyed.

Then ten months later Neil lost Jackie to cancer. He said her broken heart was one of the causes.

It was just unbelievable what was being thrown at this guy.

While Rush was on hold, you went to Morocco with Nancy, where you had a chance encounter with Robert Plant…

Yes. He was amazing. Nancy and I arrived at the hotel sweating. We’d been biking with a group of strangers in the Atlas Mountains, hoping none of these lawyers who had a bit of dough were Rush fans. I’m putting the key in our door and there’s this guy in the corridor who looks a lot like Robert Plant. Anyway, about half an hour later he introduced himself at dinner and his advice was so heartfelt. Sometimes your heroes are worth meeting. Later, when Page & Plant were playing Toronto, he invited Alex and I along. I told Robert I wasn’t ready to be out in public, and he said, “You know, sooner or later you guys will have to get back to your lives.” So we went to the show and had a ball.

Meanwhile, Neil was on 55,000-mile solo motorcycle journey from northern Canada to Belize and back, trying to re-build his “little baby soul.” You must have had your doubts about how he might fare?

You couldn’t stop him. If Neil wanted to do something, he could impose his will, but you accepted *that Neil in order to get all the other great things he had to offer.  We were deeply worried, but we had a little network of friends keeping watch, mapping his whereabouts: “He was here a couple of days ago, and he seemed OK.”

Then Neil met Carrie Nuttall, who, in less than a year would become his second wife. She was clearly a catalyst in Rush regrouping in 2001 after four years away...

We were so happy for him (chokes up). He was very damaged by his losses, but she opened the skies for him, and there was a new positivity that made us feel we didn’t have to worry. He quit smoking. OK, that didn’t last (laughs), but Neil was in the best shape of his life. We still didn’t know if Rush had a future, then he emailed saying it was time for him to seek “gainful employment”.

What did it take for Rush to get back on track for 2002’s Vapor Trails?

It was a year of our lives. At first, we sounded like a bad Rush covers band. We took over a small studio in Toronto and bedded down there. Neil again became the incredible drummer he always was and his lyrics became a different, even more eloquent story. There was a lot of back and forth required between us for me to sing them, but it worked out.

Did you have a new perspective?

We felt like we had nothing to lose anymore. We’d been given a second chance and that relaxed us. Even through the darkest times, the bedrock of our friendship was always oddball humour and it started evidencing itself in the bizarre rear-screen projection films we were making for the live shows [which included Lee as kilted Scotsman ‘Harry Satchel’], and in the fake chicken rotisserie ovens I had on stage instead of amp stacks.

The group’s renaissance and wider acceptance really grew from 2010 onwards, partly because of Scott McFadyen and Sam Dunn’s 2010 documentary Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage…

Yes, I think our female fanbase increased a lot. Women could see that we were all family guys, and they liked that.

But you had these health issues: Alex’s arthritis and Neil’s tendonitis. Given he now had a young daughter, Olivia, was Neil’s retirement inevitable?

Probably. Neil was an uncompromising artist in the truest sense. So, not only was he torn every time he left his new family to tour, he also had this lingering fear of letting the side down. Few things scared Neil more than no longer being able to play as well as he could.

When Neil told you about his brain cancer, how did you and Alex cope with the stress of keeping that secret?

We didn’t cope. It caused Alex and I serious stress. We got very good at lying. Friends would ask point blank: “I’ve heard weird things about Neil – is he OK?” You love these people who are asking out of genuine concern, but you’ve made this unequivocal decision. We had to remain loyal to Neil’s wishes.

What are your fondest memories of your final visits with Neil?

It was always better when Alex and I went to LA together. I’d embarrass Alex and Neil would laugh. We had a few good dinners, a couple of good lunches. We’d sit with him in his ‘Bubba Cave’, this office-slash-garage where he had his prized car collection: his Silver Shadows, his Lamborghinis and Aston Martins. It was his inner sanctum and the three of us would go at it with a few fingers of Macallan.

How was he in spirit?

Often as if there was nothing wrong. And other times not so much. But he did not want to talk about his fucking illness – he would brush it away: “Mustn’t grumble!” So three-and-a-half years like that. Sometimes we’d meet other musician friends of his there. Stuart Copeland, for example.

Looking back, what are you most proud of? Rush’s music? Or the integrity with which you conducted yourselves?

I have a hard time thinking of myself as someone with integrity. It’s not for me to say. I think I’m most proud of our unwillingness to compromise. It was not always in our best interests, but we couldn’t help it. I loved that about us.

Did you have to clear a lot of stuff in the book with Alex?

Well, for the first time, I asked him why I briefly got kicked out of the band in 1968, and about why he allowed that to happen. He was very sheepish and did a lot of looking down (laughs). Then when I finished the book, the first person I sent it to was Alex. And he wrote me (suddenly overcome with emotion)… the most beautiful letter.

2024 is the 50th Anniversary of Rush’s debut album. Might you and Alex perform together?

I honestly don’t know. For a guy who’s supposed to be retired I’ve never been busier in my effin’ life. After my book tour, Alex and I are going away on holiday together. I’m sure we’ll talk more about it then.

This article originally appeared in MOJO 362.

Bob Dylan

Edgefield Amphitheater, Portland, Oregon, June 4, 2026

As the applause rises up in response to Bob Dylan’s piano filigree that closes out a hip-shaking version of Bo Diddley’s I Can Tell, a young woman in a 1960s-styled floral print dress and shag hairdo turns to her fellow fans to exclaim, “He’s having fun!”

• READ MORE: Bob Dylan’s Greatest Songs, Chosen By Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, Nick Cave And More...

She sounds thrilled and somewhat relieved. It’s been four years since his last appearance in the Portland area: a strong but slightly downcast performance at the ornate Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. So, when Dylan’s return to the region was announced earlier this year, billed as an ‘In Concert’ show rather than part of the Rough & Rowdy Ways Tour, the chatter among fans began in earnest. Was a whole new show on the horizon? And what about these rumours that during the week of secretive rehearsals Dylan undertook at a Portland soundstage there were backup singers in the mix? The excitement of what possibilities lay ahead tonight only trebled when the t-shirts on sale at Edgefield revealed that this run of U.S. shows had been dubbed The Long Hot Summer tour.

For this first night of that 35-date venture, the reality is less ground-shaking than some might have anticipated. Ambling onstage wearing all black save for a cream-colored anorak (hood pulled up over his head, naturally), the 85-year-old is accompanied only by his regular band: guitarists Bob Britt and Doug Lancio, bassist Tony Garnier, and drummer Anton Fig. And the setlist for the night is mostly a blending together of material heard on the Rough And Rowdy Ways and Outlaw tours. Not a disappointment by any stretch but not the radical shift in protocol some were hoping for.

Make no mistake, Dylan still has a few puckish tricks up his sleeve. Past the midway point, Anton Fig picks up brushes and starts a woozy beat. It’s a familiar rhythm, and the buzzing in the audience starts up immediately. Rainy Day Women #12 and 35, played for the first time since July last year, electrifies the capacity crowd. Even the folks in the pricier seats closest to the stage are soon on their feet, gamely trying to sing along – an impossible task as Dylan messes with the meter and pacing of the lyrics. He even chuckles a bit at the start of the first chorus. It’s not so much a replication of his familiar break in the recorded version, more a bemused reaction that it took this long to get some attendees moving.

The other surprise causes much less of a collective stir but for the Dylanologists among us is a revelation: the first-ever live performance of Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby. Though recorded with The Band in Woodstock in 1967, the song never saw the official light of day until the release of the 2014 set The Basement Tapes Complete. Dylan sticks mostly to the template of that original recording in tonight, anchoring the light boogie with his impressively nimble piano work. Yet it’s the twin acoustic guitars of Lancio and Britt that shine as they both gently dance between rhythm and lead.

Is Dylan truly having fun up there as the young woman stood in front of me insisted? It’s hard to tell, but there’s no denying that the whole night has a looseness to it that was missing from his 2022 Portland date. The set may largely be made up of tunes that are part of the regular tour rotation, but there’s a feeling on stage tonight of things being constructed on the fly, which make it feel unpredictable.

Following I Can Tell, Dylan passes a word to Fig that quickly spreads on stage, resulting in a wonderfully cockeyed take on Together Through Life’s Forgetful Heart. During a stripped-back and haunting run through Under The Red Sky, Dylan grabs a nearby harmonica, wheezes a couple of notes out of the instrument, and immediately sets it down. He doesn’t touch anything but his piano again.

The final song of the night, Crossing The Rubicon, is minimalist blues brilliance in the style of a Muddy Water burner; all hard, downswinging chords and brawny drum hits. It proves to be the perfect closing statement, a firm slamming of the door as Dylan and his gang of faithful companions set off on this latest pilgrimage across the U.S.

Bob Dylan, Edgefield Amphitheater, Portland, Oregon, June 4, 2026 Set List:

To Be Alone with You

I Can Tell

Forgetful Heart

Axe And The Wind

When I Paint My Masterpiece

Early Roman Kings

Under The Red Sky

I’ll Make It All Up To You

All Along The Watchtower

I Contain Multitudes

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35

Share Your Love With Me

Baby, Won’t You Be My Baby

Soon After Midnight

Man In The Long Black Coat

Crossing The Rubicon

Photo: Bob Dylan in Hyde Park, July 12, 2019 (Dave J Hogan/Getty)

Formed in Toronto, Canada in 1968 and active until 2015, Rush began as Led Zeppelin wannabes and ended up being the geeks who inherited the earth. Their long road to critical and cultural rehabilitation took in grandiose prog and UK new-wave influences, Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart wearing their virtuosity increasingly lightly until 2012’s chops-laden last hurrah, Clockwork Angels.

• READ MORE: Rush’s Geddy Lee Interviewed: “Nazareth drunk us under the table!”

Banger Films’ intimate 2010 profile Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage was an important milestone that further-widened their audience. Capturing the loveable, beating-heart of Rush and their enduring three-way bromance, its rich archive footage - and a memorable scene in which Lee, Lifeson and Peart share an increasingly drunken dinner - underlined what fans already knew: this was a goofball group of astonishing talents; a band who sounded and interacted like no other.

Famously self-sufficient - “It was hard to believe only three guys were making all that sound”, Thin Lizzy’s Brian Roberston once told this writer - Rush were unusual amongst bands who’d began as hard-rock acts. Like David Bowie, say, their sound was always shape-shifting, and unlike, Aerosmith, say, they quickly abandoned the more hackneyed terrain of hard-rock lyrics to explore philosophy, ethics and the human condition.  Sure, Caress Of Steel’s 1975 song I Think I’m Going Bald was fun, but antidote to all drummer jokes Neil Peart would grow to become a highly-acute wordsmith, hence 1993’s Cold Fire, a brilliant portrayal of a relationship in trouble.

There was no happy ending. Geddy Lee’s 2023 memoir My Effin’ Life revealed that, prior to Peart’s heartbreaking passing to brain cancer in January 2020, he and Lifeson had kept the drummer’s illness a secret for three years, as per his wishes. Earlier, Rush had bowed-out with 2015’s final, acclaimed US tour R40, which celebrated Peart’s 40 years in the band. This weekend, Lee and Lifeson will play their first show together as Rush since Peart's passing (keep an eye on MOJO4MUSIC for our live report on Monday). In anticipation, MOJO's chief Rush-nerd James McNair has ranked every album from the band order of greatness, from the worst to best.

Every Rush Album Ranked...

19.

Test For Echo

(ATLANTIC, 1996)

“We were a bit burnt creatively” Geddy Lee conceded. While Test For Echo was as virtuosic as ever, its title track made for a dirgy, rather pedestrian opener and much of the album sounds like a gallimaufry of off-cuts. Even Peart’s lyrics seemed less honed, Dog Years’ talk of canines “chasing cars in doggy heaven” lacking his usual pedigree. The run-up to Test saw Lifeson make solo LP _Victor_and Peart release a Buddy Rich tribute album while Lee spent time with his infant daughter. When Rush reconvened, inspiration levels were low, indulgences such as Driven’s three bass-guitar tracks indicative of a rare wobble.

18.

Vapor Trails

(ATLANTIC, 2002)

Having lost his daughter Selena in a car crash and his first wife Jacqueline to cancer, Vapor Trails was an Olympian feat of courage for Rush’s drummer, who had to regain equilibrium after years without playing. “Pack up all those phantoms / Shoulder that invisible load”, ran Peart’s lyric for Ghost Rider, referencing the epic motorcycle journey he’d undertaken while grieving. Pointedly, there are no synths on Trails, a stark, ultimately positive LP which accrued hard miles to get back. Its jarring, overly-compressed sound fell foul of the loudness wars, but was somewhat spruced up by a 2013 remix.

17.

Snakes & Arrows

(ATLANTIC, 2007)

After the creative palette cleanser that was 2004 rock covers EP Feedback, Lee, Lifeson and Peart’s penultimate studio release was the first of two with avowed Rush nut and sometime Foo Fighters producer, Nick Raskulinecz. Though the LP’s three instrumentals are decent, YYZ or La Villa Strangiato they ain’t. Replete with some of the distinctive chord voicings Lifeson used so memorably on 1978’s Hemispheres, opener Far Cry impresses, while harmonically-daring deep cut Bravest Face is a Rush song like no other. A decent if somewhat obtuse LP, Lee & Lifeson’s jam-sessions still audible beneath the songs.

16.

Hold Your Fire

(MERCURY, 1987)

Home to fellow Canuck Aimee Mann’s guest vocal on poignant classic Time Stand Still, Hold Your Fire was something of a last hurrah for Rush’s more keyboard-heavy output. The twee oriental woodwind samples on Tai Shan have certainly dated, and songwriting quality-control dips as the record progresses, but icy opener Force Ten and Open Secrets - a moving study of guardedness within romantic relationships - go deep. Elsewhere, producer Peter Collins’ vision for Mission involved overdubbing the colliery parps of Heaton Chapel, Stockport’s William Faery Engineering Brass Band. Perhaps a mix where they’re actually audible will emerge one day.

15.

Presto

(ATLANTIC, 1989)

New label, new producer. Pleased that late ‘80s Rush sounded “more like The Police  than a heavy rock band”, Rupert Hine encouraged Lee to sing lower, thus aiding the intelligibility of lyrics such as that for The Pass, a powerful, empathetic anti-suicide song. Presto rations keyboards carefully, dials-up Lifeson’s acoustic and electric guitars, and, despite some proto math-rock exceptions (Show Don’t Tell; Superconductor) places renewed emphasis on ‘the song’, hence Lee sings more harmonies. Lyrically, Peart had playful, ingenious fun with the aptly-titled Anagram, writing “There is tic toc in atomic.”

14.

Rush

(MOON, 1974)

Unmistakably Zeppelin-esque, Rush’s raw, impassioned debut came on-radar when Cleveland’s WMMS FM put blue collar-friendly closer Working Man on heavy rotation. Zero record company interest hitherto had led Rush manager Ray Danniels to found Moon records for the LP’s release. Solidly helmed by original drummer John Rutsey on his only album with the band, Rush’s unreconstructed hard-rock has the horn (Need Some Love; In The Mood), opens with Finding My Way’s giant-slaying riff, and offers no hint whatsoever of the savvy reinventions to come. Lee and Lifeson’s raw power is already palpable, though.

13.

Counterparts

(ATLANTIC, 1993)

Save for their superhuman swan song Clockwork Angels, Counterparts was Rush’s last truly great record. Lifting the lid on its dry title and uncharacteristically bland cover-art reveals taut gem Cold Fire, depicting an acute all-night discussion between a couple close to separation, and soaring anthem Nobody’s Hero, in part about Peart’s gay friend Ellis Booth, who had died of AIDS-related complications. As ever, Lifeson’s instinctive guitar solos are tangibly emotive responses to the subject matter. Funky/sci-fi-ish instrumental Leave That Thing Alone and Stick It Out are also special, the latter boasting Lee and Lifeson’s heaviest unison riff in years.

12.

Caress Of Steel

(MERCURY, 1975)

Much weed was smoked while making Caress Of Steel, and you can tell. Rush’s first side-long epic The Fountain Of Lambeth charted a pilgrim’s progress from birth to death, while Tolkien-influenced oddity The Necromancer married Peart’s trippy spoken-word narrative to heavy, admirably limber riffage. Long a curious outlier of Rush’s catalogue, the LP sold poorly and took part-justified flak for artistic over-reach, yet it’s ripe for critical rehabilitation. Bastille Day’s French Revolution-inspired dynamism still thrills, while Lakeside Park - recalling a young Peart’s summer-job running fairground attractions on the shore of Port Dalhousie, Ontario - has wistful magic and a lyrical Lifeson solo.

11.

Clockwork Angels

(ROADRUNNER, 2012)

At some level Rush knew Clockwork Angels was likely their last record, and together with producer Nick Raskulinecz they pulled out all the stops. Fans couldn’t quite believe seven-minute single Headlong Flight’s old-school chutzpah: jaw-dropping instrumental interplay, a frenetic, 70’s Rush-style wah-wah solo and Peart’s heartfelt look back on all that Rush had achieved: “I wish that I could live it all again!” Sublime closer The Garden, meanwhile, revealed hard-won wisdom and offered closure: “The measure of a life is a measure of love and respect / So hard to earn, so easily burned.”

10.

Roll The Bones

(ATLANTIC, 1991)

The second of two Rush LP’s produced by Rupert Hine, Roll The Bones’ obvious stand-out is Bravado. Similar in sentiment to Rudyard Kipling’s If, and built around Lifeson’s hypnotic guitar arpeggios, the song’s music is measured and restrained. The rap bit on Roll The Bones’ title track sounds even more iffy 35 years on, it’s true, but the record’s meditations on fate, probability and luck pay further dividends on Ghost Of A Chance. “Somehow we found each other / Somehow we have stayed”, runs one couplet. Though actually about Peart and his then-wife Jacqueline, it could have been describing the magical happenstance of Rush.

9.

Fly By Night

(MERCURY, 1975)

Rivendell is quaint, Tolkien-influenced juvenilia, but with Neil Peart now anchoring-the band post John Rutsey’s departure, Rush became a power-trio of astonishing facility. They never sounded heavier than on adrenalised, super-tight opener Anthem, while By-Tor And The Snow Dog (1976 live album All The World’s A Stage packs the definitive version) was their first proper epic. Though some of the Led Zeppelin-isms which characterised their self-titled debut remained, Peart’s arrival on lyrics as well as drums ensured no more dumb pick-up songs á la Rush’s In The Mood. All this, plus In The End’s immense power-chords.

8.

Power Windows

(MERCURY, 1985)

Sequencers, triggered drum-samples and massive synth pads were go, but Lifeson’s power chords and some decidedly funky Lee bass were essential to Power Windows too. Teeming with layered detail, it’s aged far better than 1987’s less-focused Hold Your Fire. With its brilliantly bonkers Lifeson riff from 1.19, Territories made an acute critique of jingoism / isolationism which still resonates. Elsewhere, Rush explored financial politics on gung-ho opener The Big Money. Together with new producer Peter Collins, they also utilised a 30-piece orchestra and 25-piece choir while working across five different recording studios. Excessive? Definitely. Strong results? For sure.

7.

Grace Under Pressure

(MERCURY, 1984)

Mid-period Rush’s most emotionally-charged LP, Grace Under Pressure got the balance between synths and guitars about right. It took its name from a Hemingway quote and its own gestation process, which saw sometime Supertramp producer Peter Henderson co-helm proceedings at the 11th hour. Afterimage mourned tape-op Robbie Whelan, who had died in a car crash, while the astonishing Red Sector A was Peart’s heartfelt, anonymised account of Lee’s Holocaust-survivor mother Malka’s interment at Auschwitz. An agitated, humane and passionate record, Grace also explored tensions between world superpowers on Distant Early Warning.

6.

Hemispheres

(MERCURY, 1978)

With hindsight, Hemispheres’ Apollonian and Dionysian-concept embroiled Side One outstays its welcome. Despite some fine moments (witness Lifeson’s barnstorming solo at 6.24 and the song-suite’s acoustic coda), it’s also stymied by a key too high for even Geddy Lee to sing, as he later acknowledged. Turn instead to concise, powerhouse Circumstances and Rush’s greatest instrumental, La Villa Strangiato. Part inspired by a nightmare Lifeson had, the latter was subtitled “an exercise in self-indulgence”, but wasn’t, really. Initially, Rush thought its many virtuosic sections would preclude live performance. Not so. They nailed ‘em.

5.

Permanent Waves

(MERCURY, 1980)

New decade, new-ish Rush. UK Number 13 single The Spirit Of Radio proved a challenging dance for Legs & Co. on Top of the Pops, while Entre Nous, about the limits of empathy, reflected Peart’s growing acuity re the minutiae of human relationships. Deep-cut ballad Different Strings was also masterful, guest pianist Hugh Syme - also Rush’s cover art mastermind from 1975 onwards - bringing colour before Lifeson’s feral, slow-evolving solo. Like Peart’s lyrical focus, Lee’s voice was also changing. Fan favourite Freewill was the last Rush song he would sing at the very top of his range.

4.

Signals

(MERCURY, 1982)

Signals was the final Rush album produced by Terry Brown, who’d also helmed their previous eight. Its quality-controlled songwriting embraced nascent digital tech on synth-driven study of suburban ennui Subdivisions, while Lifeson’s guitar sound became more processed, a little more abstract.  Electric violinist Ben Mink guests on avowed classic Losing It, wherein Peart’s lyric sketches the slow, painful fade of artistry due to ageing or ill-heath. Poignantly, this would be the drummer’s own fate prior to his 2020 passing. The Analog Kid and Chemistry are ace too; thoughtful, arresting songs which see Rush embrace new-wave tropes.

3.

2112

(MERCURY, 1976)

1975’s commercial nadir Caress Of Steel necessitated 2112, the high-energy mother of all comebacks. Partly a futurist concept LP set in the dystopian city of Megadon, where music has been banned, Side 1 borrowed from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture and Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem as Rush battled those killjoy Luddite priests of The Temples Of Syrinx. Non-conceptual Side 2 packed weed connoisseur’s travelogue A Passage To Bangkok, early gem Something For Nothing, and Lifeson’s classy, pinch-harmonic-laden solo on The Twilight Zone. Resplendent in white silk kimonos on 2112’s back-sleeve, Rush were hot property again, wilder instincts vindicated.

2.

A Farewell To Kings

(MERCURY, 1977)

Featuring tubular bells and Lee and Lifeson on double-necks, 11-minute, Samuel Taylor Coleridge-inspired epic Xanadu was Rush at the peak of their pomp. But Kings also featured succinct, altruistic anthem Closer To The Heart, a singalong fave at gigs thereafter. If Lee’s increasing use of Minimoog and he and Lifeson’s Taurus bass pedals spoke of a band in stylistic transition, recording the LP at Rockfield studios in Wales spoke of Rush’s growing international appeal. Bookended by Lifeson’s courtly classical guitar, Kings’ title track remains a true classic, Lee’s powerful tenor operating at altitude.

1.

Moving Pictures

(MERCURY, 1981)

Propelled by air-drummer fave Tom Sawyer (don your Zildjian finger-less gloves at 2.31), Moving Pictures took Rush out of theatres and into stadia. “Our immediate financial worries disappeared”, recalled Lifeson of this UK and US Number 3. Vital Signs’ nodded at The Police. Limelight was Peart’s lucid debunking of fame; Witch Hunt his ever-pertinent take-down of prejudice. Image-wise, Rush’s stack-heels and waist-length hair had long-since ceded to mullets and skinny ties, but their metamorphosis wasn’t quite complete. The Camera Eye’s nod to New York City and London’s vibrancy had old-school élan, time-signature changes and all.

Photo: Fin Costello/Redferns

In 2014, Bruce Springsteen inducted the E Street Band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. During his 16-minute speech, the 64-year-old singer from Long Branch, New Jersey, himself elected in 1999, praised the many members of his core backing band, from his first encounter with Vini ‘Mad Dog’ Lopez in April 1966 to the arrival of Nils Lofgren and Patti Scialfa in 1984.

• READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen's 50 Greatest Songs

It was an intelligent, witty, poetic tribute to a shifting team of players who’ve accompanied Bruce on-stage for 50-plus years across 21 studio albums. It was also – and let’s be honest – brash, sentimental, self-regarding and a little embarrassing. In short, it was very Bruce Springsteen.

Springsteen is too emotional, romantic, impassioned and flawed for ‘cool’.

From his defiantly gauche 1973 debut, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. to a recent championing of Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, Springsteen has never looked for ‘cool’. He is too emotional, romantic, impassioned and flawed for ‘cool’. It’s what his fans love about him and what his detractors carp on about, failing to realise that the multimillion-selling mythopoetic audacity of 1975’s Born To Run, the bandanas, cut-offs and gated drums in the Born In The USA package, The Rising’s arena-scale emotional storytelling about a post-9/11 America, and the joyous anti-war knees-up of The Seeger Sessions, all succeeded or failed as a consequence of conviction and faith.

This list is more for the newcomers, neophytes and non-believers than established fans, concentrating on self-penned studio albums in the belief that the best route to Springsteen is through the songs. Then see him live, fresh in the knowledge that beneath the four-hour live-show cliché of self-regard that is ‘The Boss’, runs a deep strain of self-doubt and Catholic guilt, directed at himself, his songs’ troubled characters and the country in which they dwell.

Bruce Springsteen's Best Albums Ranked...

10.

The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle

COLUMBIA, 1973

Springsteen’s second studio album finds the nascent Boss still filled with a sense of hope, his romantic summer dreams played out amidst a bustling South Beach cast of sharp-dressed kids, wily pimps, rude boy prophets, factory girls, alleyway phantoms and crazy boardwalk hustlers. Recorded between May and September 1973 at 914 Sound in Blauvelt, New York with the loose rag-tag ensemble of Clarence Clemons, Danny Federici, Garry Tallent, David Sancious, “Mad Dog” Lopez and Suki Lahav TWTI&TE-SS draws on big band jazz, 70s funk, Detroit show bands and NuYorican soul to craft an ornate theatrical vision of wild blue-collar romance that remains Springsteen’s most joyous and uplifting album. The sound of a warm New Jersey sunset just before the screen door slammed and the dark clouds of Thunder Road rolled in.

9.

Magic

COLUMBIA 2007

2006’s We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions was a watershed in Bruce Springsteen’s career and a necessary palate cleanser for singer and fans. A freewheeling live-band studio recording of Pete Seeger-popularised folk songs, it appeared to give The Boss a new lease of life, banishing introspection. It also led to the most exuberant straight-ahead rock album of his career. Yet Magic’s outwardly carefree E Street Band sound is in fact a meticulously layered, Brendan O’Brien-produced illusion that purposefully quotes the outfit’s past glories. Similarly, Springsteen’s new, seemingly concept-free writing style is rich with allusion and metaphor, the cracks in his voice bringing autumnal melancholy to ostensibly bright summer-pop daydreams.

8.

Devils & Dust

COLUMBIA 2005

The songs on this subdued, concise low-key follow-up to 2002’s The Rising were penned as far back as 1995, amidst the exhaustive sessions that also produced The Ghost Of Tom Joad. Although revered by many, TGOTJ is also an unrelenting waterless desert slog of an album that quickly runs out of shade after the melodic shuffle-beat lament of Youngstown. Far better is Devils & Dust, where Brendan O’Brien’s low-end production brings a protective intimacy to Springsteen’s sombre world of workers, losers and ghosts, while Soozie Tyrell’s violin and Bruce’s playful falsetto on such sweet country-soul sketches as All I’m Thinkin’ About and Maria’s Bed shine a warm light of romantic hope on an otherwise harsh American landscape.

7.

Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J.

COLUMBIA 1973

Seven months on from his acoustic audition for Columbia Records’ John Hammond, and after a dumped singer-songwriter session, Springsteen’s debut was cut in a week with a pick-up band of fringe New Jersey buddies. Informed by the street-band steam-of-consciousness of Van Morrison and the wild mercury arrogance of mid-’60s Bob Dylan, Greetings is a nervous, urgent spill of hipster verbiage and snotty attitude with a core of arrogant cool, thanks to the dive-bar soul-jazz backing of proto-E Street gang-bangers David Sancious, Garry Tallent, Vini Lopez, Danny Federici and, on Spirit In The Night and Blinded By The Light, new arrival Clarence Clemons.

6.

Tunnel Of Love

COLUMBIA 1987

He was basking in the afterglow of Born In The USA, married to model Julianne Phillips, and living in sunny LA. But in the spring of 1987, Springsteen returned to his low-tech New Jersey studio, utilising drum machine, keyboards, close-miked vocals and multi-tracked guitars to record a song cycle foretelling the end of his marriage. In Two Faces, Brilliant Disguise and the heartbreaking Valentine’s Day, Springsteen wrote his most painfully honest lyrics, melodic songs of romantic doubt and defeat rendered claustrophobic by compressed digital production. The sound of a lonely millionaire immured in a bare white room, asking the world who he is, and exactly what he might be worth.

5.

Born In The USA

COLUMBIA 1984

Despite having sold nearly 28 million copies, Born In The USA might be the oddest album in Springsteen’s canon. Beyond the extensively reworked title-track, which grew out of the protracted ‘Electric Nebraska’ sessions at New York’s Power Station between January 1982 and June 1983, the majority was recorded rough-and-ready, Springsteen’s bare Creedence chords bolstered by Danny Federici’s Leslie’d Hammond, the eastern drone of Roy Bittan’s Yamaha CS80, Max Weinberg’s super-miked drums and Clemons’ ghostly sax, together lending a ‘roid-rage unreality and psychopathic remove to the wretched characters inside the deceptively bright pop nightmares of I’m On Fire, Dancing In The Dark and Cover Me.

4.

The River

COLUMBIA 1980

A double-album of leftovers from the protracted sessions for Darkness On The Edge Of Town, Springsteen’s fifth began partly as a sop to guitarist Steve Van Zandt, incredulous at Bruce’s ability to create and discard three-minute pop gold. The River’s surface glistens with such joyous AM radio throwbacks as Sherry Darling, Crush On You and Ramrod, yet in its dark depths lurk bleak defeated narratives like Independence Day and Stolen Car. Album closer Wreck On The Highway points to the unreliable narrators of 1982’s Nebraska while the existential chest-beating of Hungry Heart can now be seen as the faultless blueprint for the triumphant dissociative pop of 1984’s Born In The USA.

3.

Born To Run

COLUMBIA 1975

Following two acclaimed flops, Springsteen and newly assembled E Street Band spent 18 months trying to capture the epic blue-collar fantasies in the singer’s head. It had begun as a kandy-koloured flame-job, with orchestra, choirs and revving engines, but journalist and future manager Jon Landau helped a manic Springsteen and miserable band to strip the beast down, allowing Roy Bittan’s piano, Clarence Clemons’ King Curtis lamentations and Bruce’s own autobiography to install the pop urgency with a melancholy truth, where every joyous call for small-town escape (Thunder Road; Born To Run) is answered with a city-limits stop-sign of surrender (Backstreets; Jungleland).

2.

Nebraska

COLUMBIA 1982

The troubled nighttime visions that peppered The River spilled onto the 4-track Portastudio demos Springsteen recorded in his Colts Neck, New Jersey home on January 3, 1982. Although intended as a speedy E Street Band teaching-aid, it’s difficult to imagine what the group made of Springsteen’s resultant grey cassette. Recorded just days after President Reagan’s first State of the Union address, Nebraska’s brooding folk narratives utilise guitar, harmonica, mandolin, organ and the fevered spirits of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry and Dostoyevsky, to craft a keening bare-boards howl of fear, loneliness and desolation, the displaced ghosts of America’s outlaw past calling out for a kind of strange atonement.

1.

Darkness On The Edge Of Town

Columbia 1978

Blindsided by success, kept from the studio by legal battles with former manager Mike Appel, the 27-year-old Springsteen locked himself and a breadline E Street Band in his New Jersey farmhouse and began disassembling Born To Run’s B-movie romance and Wall Of Sound production. With pop candy held back for The River, Darkness On The Edge Of Town became a cracked vessel for the dusk-hour thoughts of Born To Run’s hometown heroes. From the upbeat defiance of Badlands to the dragstrip requiem of Racing In The Street, here were teenage rebellion and high-school dreams turned inward, Springsteen’s arid widescreen production imbuing every tragic narrative with what he would later describe as “austere, apocalyptic grandeur”.

• READ MORE: Bruce Springsteen: “How your country steers itself is under your stewardship…”

"There is a rule in rock and roll," The Clash's Joe Strummer once declared, "you're only as good as your drummer." Fortunately for The World's Greatest Rock And Roll Band, they also had the greatest drummer. The dapper, unflappable, jazz-loving Charlie Watts may often have seemed wryly amused, or even bemused, by his bandmates in The Rolling Stones' antics both onstage and off, but his technique and swing were what allowed The Stones to truly roll, where their contemporaries could merely rock. Without Watts' versatility, dexterity and telepathic communication with guitarist Keith Richards, The Stones may well have never graduated from the South London R&B covers circuit. Certainly there would have been no Get Off Of My Cloud, Paint It Black, Gimme Shelter, Honky Tonk Women or Can't You Hear Me Knocking. Even when the Stones went off the boil, Watts' inventive, intuitive playing still gave them an edge. On the eve of the resumption of their No Filter tour in 2021 - The Stones’ first gigs since Watts' death in August that year - Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood spoke with MOJO writer David Fricke about their memories of Watts, his central role in the band, and how he changed their music and lives...

• READ MORE: Keith Richards's Interviewed: “We’re born to have fun. If you take it too seriously, you’re f***ed…”

"He held the band together for so long musically because he was the rock the rest of it was built around."

Mick Jagger

Interview by David Fricke

Looking back at Charlie, what was his impact on the sound when he joined the Rolling Stones in January, 1963? He came from a serious jazz background. What did he change in the way you, Keith and Brian Jones played blues and R&B?
Some jazz drummers don’t want to play that. But he wasn’t one of those. And he wasn’t just a straight rock drummer. We played with rock drummers before. We played with Carlo Little, who used to play with Screaming Lord Sutch’s band. He had two bass drums – it sounded great. But it wasn’t Charlie. Charlie brought another sensibility, the jazz touch. And he didn’t play very heavy. Sometimes, if I got him mad enough, he would. That was the only way I could get him to play really heavy – to get him mad.

In Midnight Rambler, he did a lot of different things in the space of one song: He got heavy, he could swing, he could do it slow. It was a concise lesson in how good he was.
He could do quite subtle cymbal work in some places. Then he could play off my [vocal] riffs with the audience. If you’re a singer, you have a relationship with a drummer which is all about the dance, the accent you’re doing physically as well as vocally. The most obvious example of that was when James Brown had a second drummer. All he’d do was hits when James moved his body or went “Hey, hey.” That guy just watched James, so if he kicked his leg in a certain way, he would accentuate it. Charlie and I had that. We would get into a groove. He would understand what I was trying to do, and I would understand what he was trying to do. That was different from a guitar player’s relationship. And I had that with Charlie, developed over many, many years.

What do you think he saw in the Stones that convinced him want to join?
He enjoyed playing the music because it was very eclectic. He was an eclectic drummer. He loved jazz, but let’s be brutal: jazz doesn’t pay. Of course, we weren’t getting paid much. That’s why he didn’t join us for a long while. We’d ask him to join, but he had a lot of gigs with different bands. Keith and I had already played with Charlie with Alexis Korner. It wasn’t like he came in for an audition. We knew what it was like to play with him, and he knew what it was like to play with us. He fitted in. He gave a swing to the band – the swerve and subtlety. And he could also be straight-ahead when you wanted to be. Get Off Of My Cloud – there’s nothing particularly subtle about the drumming on that. He could do that. He was in the pocket.

Many people don’t realize that as a graphic designer by trade, Charlie had a major role in the look and aesthetic of the Stones’ albums and tours. What did he bring in design and vision to the image of the band?
It was a lot of subtle touches. Album covers were very important to the image of the band. And we learned stuff from [original manager] Andrew Loog Oldham – he was into getting the right album cover, making a statement out of it. Charlie and I started to get involved early on – the fine details of the colours; the way the original photo changes in being printed; choosing typefaces. Sometimes there were mistakes. But it was a challenge. We picked art directors, really good people we could work with on logos and stuff like that. And Charlie was very much a part of the team that designed those really big stages like the one for the Steel Wheels tour. We would kick around all these ideas to come up with these big stages. He helped me a lot with that.

Is there a special memory of Charlie – an incident or story – that sums up what he brought to the Rolling Stones and how he changed each of you in ways that people might not know?
The thing about Charlie was that he was such a quiet guy. I can’t think of that incident when he came into the room and said, “We should do this like this!” I can always remember when he sat down and played Can’t You Hear Me Knocking. He established this great rock beat, then switched it to Latin jazz.

The thing about Charlie was that he was always there, always played beautifully and was always willing to discuss what to do about it – how he could make it better. He held the band together for so long, musically, because he was the rock the rest of it was built around.

We had a lot of wonderful times apart from playing music together. We used to go and watch cricket. And when we’d get together, we didn’t talk about music. We talked about art, which he knew a lot more about than I did. But the thing he brought was this beautiful sense of swing and swerve that most bands wish they could have. We had some really nice conversations in the last couple of years about how all this happened with the band. It’s a huge loss to us all. It’s very, very hard. But we had wonderful times, and Charlie made some wonderful music.

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones: Rare And Unseen Pictures!

"Charlie was my bed. I could lay on there, and I know that not only would I have a good sleep, but I'd wake up and it'd still be rocking."

Keith Richards

Interview by David Fricke

Charlie joined The Rolling Stones in January, 1963. But you, Mick and Brian Jones had already played with Charlie when you were all in the band led by the British blues singer Alexis Korner.
He was getting paid; we weren’t. Mick, Brian and I had been drooling for Charlie for months. Charlie said, “I’d love to play with you guys, but I need a couple of regular gigs.” Then Charlie started coming to rehearsals, which was all we ever did in those days – rehearse. There never was a gig. Charlie was fascinated by the Chicago drummers – [Jimmy Reed’s drummer] Earl Phillips; Fred Below and Francis Clay [at Chess Records]. To him, they were jazz players, not rock’n’roll, which of course they weren’t either. Somehow Charlie crossed that fine line. Charlie could make it roll and most drummers have never been able to do that.

What do you think he saw in the Stones that made him join – and stick with it?
I never did ask him that myself: “Why the hell did you join us, man?” I presume it was something he heard in the music we were listening to and trying to play. Also, he had that sense of adventure: “I’m just going to be another jazz player in a big pond. Or I can hang with these crazy guys and see where it goes.”

The thing that Charlie and I had from day one was we would cringe at the crassness of showbiz and its demands. Charlie would run a mile rather than do a promo. In a way, the difference between Charlie Watts on stage and the person is in the way he dressed: on stage, T-shirt, a pair of leisure pants and a pair of Capezios. That’s it. Whereas in real life, private life, Charlie was Mr. Style, man. His joy was to go to Savile Row and have these suits made. It was his playground. His tailor could tell you more about him than I could.

Is there a special memory of Charlie – an incident or story – that sums what he meant to you and the band?
I was jotting down a couple of things that I miss. Charlie had an incredible sense of humour. And my joy was I loved to crack him up. If you could hit that spot, he wouldn’t stop, and it was the funniest thing in the world. He had an incredible sense of humour that he kept to himself unless you sparked it. And then it could be painful to laugh.

I can’t think of any one moment, because with Charlie Watts, it was his consistency. A most vital part of being in this band was that Charlie Watts was my bed. I could lay on there, and I know that not only would I have a good sleep, but I’d wake up and it’d still be rocking. It was something I’ve had since I was 19. I never doubted it. I never even thought about it. Only now am I thinking about it. At the same time, I know I have a very good man who understands that in Mr. Jordan. Without a drummer, you ain’t nowhere.

• READ MORE: The Rolling Stones: Why Mick Taylor Had To Go

"The Stones got a real steal when they got Charlie."

Ronnie Wood

Interview by David Fricke

What were your earliest impressions of Charlie?
My brother Art was playing with Charlie at the time they asked him to join. Charlie said to Art, “I’ve got this offer to join the interval band over at the Marquee.” Art said, “Yeah? What are they called?” “They’re called The Rolling Stones. It might be a gig for a year or so.” That was how I first heard about Charlie. Art would come home and tell me about his friend. Then I saw them at the Richmond Jazz Festival in 1963, and the tent was moving like an elephant. I thought, “This looks like a good thing” – all this Chuck Berry music and blues coming out.

The Stones got a real steal when they got Charlie. They had other guys before, but Charlie was clearly important to them, because they asked him a couple of times to join. Charlie just did it so much better. It was a natural feel that he had. Nobody had to explain, “I want you to play like this or that.” He just had it straight away, that Stones feel.

What was it like when you played with him on your first tour with the Stones in 1975?
It was very encouraging, very inspiring. And it was reciprocal. You wanted to play right – leave the holes, the right amount of gaps. But you wanted to be dynamic in what you said with your instrument. And this is no exception, this new approach that we have at these rehearsals. Our sound man who does our monitors said, “This is the best part of my life, the Stones’ rehearsals. I never enjoy myself more.” You can’t get a bigger compliment than that.

• READ MORE: “He was too pretty to be a Rolling Stone…” The guitarists who nearly joined The Stones

Is there a special memory or story you have about Charlie that sums him up for you as a musician and friend?
It’s quite a famous story; you’ve probably heard it before. We were at a video shoot, in the trailer backstage, sitting around twiddling our thumbs. And somebody said to him, “Charlie, after 30 years, you must have done a lot of hangin’ about like this.” And he said, “Yeah, five years work, 25 years hanging around.” That kind of sums him up. He certainly had his powerful views. But he said it with his playing. He just spoke through his instrument.

In the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now, we speak to Can’s sonic architect Irmin Schmidt about his life in the musical vanguard. In this extended hymn to the genius of Schmidt and his bandmates, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore discusses the huge impact the krautrock masters had on him personally, and the direction music would travel…

“While The Beatles were topping the 1964 charts with I Want to Hold Your Hand Irmin Schmidt, along with Holger Czukay (né Schüring), were heads down in radical music studies at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne under the tutelage of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Henri Pousseur. This was a good four years before the two budding maestros would form Can (née Inner Space) with the idea of incorporating aspects of experimental music concepts gleaned from academia such as the minimalism/maximalism of drone aesthetics, the morphing phenomena of repetition, etc., with avant-garde jazz and the bloody-mindedness of dropping sound grenades of pure noise in their compositions.

“Paul McCartney, in tandem to the interest of these German lads, would find a distinct intrigue in the musique concrète of French composers Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry as well as the sound world of English electronic music composer Delia Derbyshire and the iconoclastic compositions of Englishman Cornelius Cardew. There are photos of Macca attending lectures by Berio in the ’60s (Berio would arrange Beatles tunes for a 1968 recording of avant-garde arias sung by his wife, the renowned Cathy Berberian) and his inspirations would manifest themselves as an element in The Beatles’ brilliant Tomorrow Never Knows and fully and sensationally in their remarkable Revolution #9, a piece constructed entirely from random and artful tape machine editing.

Of course, The Beatles turned on the entire universe, primarily due to their pop wizardry, while Can barely blipped beyond the universities of Deutschland. Frank Zappa heralded Edgard Varèse in the ’60s and the Velvet Underground’s John Cale intimately referenced drone composer pioneer La Monte Young in that band’s sonic strangeness. As a devout listener to each of these three bands in the early ’70s with my pre-teen antennae on vibratory alert I never thought about them as being anything more than groups making, for the most part, idiosyncratic music in the context of what would be considered “proper” rock music. The Beatles were by far the straightest, but Revolution #9 (my favourite Beatles track I must say) would forever win the most outside-the-margins award for sheer experimentation on any contemporary Rock record (at least until I experienced the brain incineration of LA Blues on the Stooges’ 1970 Fun House LP!) By the time punk explodes, particularly via Suicide’s 1977 debut LP, followed by The Normal’s T.V.O.D. and Throbbing Gristle’s United single, there really was no turning back, Beatles or no Beatles.

The Velvet Underground were a bit easier for me to decode seeing as how they exemplified a certain gritty aesthetic born of New York City, an environment I had some connection to, but Can I could only wonder about. Particularly when actually finding one of their LPs in a bargain bin in a local department store’s record and tape department in 1972 as a 14-year-old. I bought it because it was all I could afford. Economics played a big role in my nascent record round-up. Elektra Records couldn’t give away the first Stooges LP so subsequently there would be multiple “cut out” copies stuck in the Woolworth’s bin for mere pennies. I would buy that LP because, well, any band naming themselves the Stooges for God’s sake had to be out of their minds. They certainly looked like trouble with their scowling sneering mugs gracing the cover. Can’s Ege Bamyasi would be released in 1972 and, as with the Stooges, the fact that any group would name themselves such a thing – in this case a banal object found in your granny’s kitchen cupboard, as well as featuring an actual can (of okra!) on the cover – I had to hear it. And it was super cheap!

Some older hipsters had been whispering about “krautrock” here and there and I gleaned that Can and Amon Düül II (whose Wolf City LP could also be found in the budget racks) were as close as I could get to procuring and experiencing this music. Amon Düül II were OK I suppose, but Can’s Ege Bamyasi changed my receptors altogether with its at once laid-back drone groove interspersed by jarring clangs and shouts (and recordings of running water!) I would stare at the back cover displaying circus performers performing live with the band, all long hair and super weird and exotic thinking to myself – What the hell was going on there in Germany?

I extolled Can as a major influence from day one in Sonic Youth. The back-and-forth harmonic guitar riffing on I Don’t Want to Push It from our initial 1982 release was in direct reference to what I had gleaned on Ege Bamyasi. Fifteen years hence Sonic Youth would be asked to re-mix a Can song for Sacrilege, a compilation released on Can’s own label, Spoon (facilitated then by Mute) even though Can was not a working group anymore. Spoon began in 1980 founded and run by Irmin Schmidt’s wife Hildegarde and their daughter Sandra. We decided to not just re-mix the song we were assigned (which happened to be the tune, Spoon, the final track on Ege Bamyasi) but to totally alter the actual track by slowing it waaay down, a minimal exercise which morphed the song into something else entirely. I was afraid this may have been a bit, ahem, sacrilegious, but we received word from Irmin that he and the others loved it.

My first meeting with Irmin happened at a music fest in Belgium around 2014 and I related all of the above anecdotes of being a teenager in thrall to his group to him which I think possibly amused, if not bemused, him. We stayed in touch and after I relocated to London, I connected with him and his family, and we would enjoy dim sum together in Chinatown from time to time. In 2016, a year after Irmin received the Order Of Arts And Letters in France I had been invited to present music in residence at the Louvre in Paris and on one of these evenings I invited Irmin to join me in an extended improvisation, he on prepared piano and me on prepared electric guitar (accompanied by a screening of the artist James Nares’ film, STREET).

While I realised Irmin to be more focused on creating compositional pieces, certainly in the context of soundtracking films (something he had been active in since the ’60s), his sensibility in regard to improvisation was patient and keen and very open. It was an incredible experience for me to be in duo with this gentleman whose work had informed me as much as, say, David Bowie, Tom Verlaine, and Lou Reed, let alone John Cage, La Monte Young, and Glenn Branca.

The following April of 2017 Irmin proposed that I lead an ensemble at London’s Barbican playing the music of Can on a bill where he himself would conduct the London Symphony Orchestra playing his compositions, from both the Can catalogue and his solo oeuvre. He suggested I enlist Can’s first vocalist Malcolm Mooney, which I did, as well as Can percussionist Jaki Liebezeit. Seeing as how so much of the wonder and joy I gleaned from Can’s music came from the rhythmic concept of Jaki I was beyond thrilled. Unfortunately, Jaki passed away earlier that January. As there was no soul on this planet to fill Jaki’s shoes, I employed Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley to play in tandem with the British-Italian percussionist Valentina Magaletti. Also on board were bassist Deb Googe (My Bloody Valentine), guitarist James Sedwards (who had been playing, along with Deb, in my London group), avant keyboardist Pat Thomas, and electronic musician Tom Relleen.

We performed primarily Malcolm Mooney-era Can music (Outside My Door, Father Cannot Yell, Thief, Deadly Doris, Mother Sky, Yoo Doo Right) to a bit of polarization from the audience. Many wished we could be more slavish in replicating the ineffable stonk and slinkiness of early Can while many others seemingly embraced the sonic joy and devotion we delivered in our studious undertaking. No matter the critical ears in the room it was an incredible moment for me to be delegated by Irmin Schmidt to arrange and guide this group into a place where, if my 14-year-old self could ever project into the future from 1972 and foresee that I’d someday become an actual member of Can (if just for one night) I would think it to be the ultimate fantasy projection.

It could only be equal to McCartney inviting me to play a bit of noise guitar action on the forthcoming 60-year anniversary celebration of Revolution #9. But before that happens (!) I will never forget my Can-mania dream coming true through the great musical heart that is Irmin Schmidt.

Thurston Moore, 2026, London.

“Can is in me. I’m part of it…”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our career-spanning interview with Can’s sonic conductor, and keeping of their flame, Irmin Schmidt in full. More info and to order a copy HERE!