U2 have announced full details of their long-awaited 15th studio album, Carnaval De Luz. Due out November 13, it’s the band’s first LP of new material in nine years following 2017’s Songs Of Experience, and 2023’s Songs Of Surrender, which featured pared-down reworkings of songs from across their career. Taken from it, you can listen to new song Silencio below:

Speaking on the Irish Times podcast yesterday (23 September), Bono revealed the album’s title, describing the record as “strong stuff”. Recorded with producer Jacknife Lee, Carnaval De Luz includes a duet with Dolly Parton. Co-written with Parton and Snow Patrol keyboardist Johnny McDaid last year, Torn is described by the band as a tender country song detailing broken family ties, and features Parton’s last recorded vocal performance before she passed away on August 25 this year.

• READ MORE: Every U2 Album Ranked

The album also features contributions from long-time U2 collaborator Brian Eno, who co-wrote and played synthesisers on Go (Carnaval De Luz), The Greatest Show On Earth and Can’t Stop Us Now, and Eno’s co-producer on The Unforgettable Fire/Joshua Tree/Achtung Baby, Daniel Lanois, who plays pedal steel on Torn.

“Roll up, roll up, roll up! Bring your purple socks, your broken hearts, your rose-tinted naivety… oh be amazed in the hall of mirrors. There will be loud guitars, deep bass, some ecstatic rhythms and, yes, some silver tears will make an appearance!” writes Bono in a statement from the band, put out in a week that marks 50 years since Larry Mullen Jr. pinned a note to the noticeboard of Mount Temple Comprehensive School saying: ‘Drummer Seeks Musicians To Form Band’.

“’Cause in the near distance just outside our carnival of light there are all kinds of creatures… the same imagination that brings us our creativity can also bring us monsters. So we make the drums louder. We build a bigger fire. We make our stories wilder and funnier. We make the melodies sweeter and the songs, they better shine, because if the world is in darkness we better not be.”

“It’s a messy, provocative, sacred collection of songs,” adds The Edge, “and features the first-ever use of flat-wound strings on a U2 recording. Just saying.”

Carnaval De Luz, arrives after two surprise-announced EPs, Days Of Ash and Easter Lily, landed in Spring. Both releases signalled a return not only to more politically charged subject matter, but also the band’s roots in Dublin’s punk and post-punk scenes.

“We are turning the amps on,” Adam Clayton told MOJO’s Tom Doyle in 2023. “I certainly think the rock that we all grew up with as 16- and 17-year-olds, that rawness of those Patti Smith, Iggy Pop records… that kind of power is something we would love to connect back into.” The bassist then suggested a (jokey) working title for U2’s long-gestated 15th studio album: Songs For Fighting.

“I just want to write great tunes,” added Bono of their plans for the record. “Because that’s where U2 started – with big choruses, clear ideas. And let’s go back there but do it with some petrol and some matches”.

The desire to return to a noisier, more guitar-based sound – what Bono described as an “unreasonable guitar record” – was echoed by The Edge.

“I would love that to be the next U2 record! I think the guitar is coming back. I really feel it. And I would like to be part of that,” he told MOJO’s Keith Cameron in March of that year.

“I’d like to be the vanguard of this resurgence of guitars! Don’t get me wrong – talking to people I know who work at Fender, they’re selling more guitars now than they’ve ever sold. But in terms of popular culture, there’s been a drift away from the instrument, it would be fair to say.  And I think that pendulum is going to start swinging the other direction. Because it’s such an incredibly expressive instrument. The few bands that are using it well, it’s still fresh. Doesn’t necessarily have to feel like you’ve heard it all before.”

The artwork and full track listing for Carnaval De Luz is below:

Go (Carnaval De Luz)

La Reina

Street Of Dreams

The Mirror Maker (Rosalía)

Superficiality

If The World Is At War We Better Not Be

Silencio

The Greatest Show On Earth

Glorify

Midnight Sunshine

Can’t Stop Us Now

Torn (Feat. Dolly Parton)

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Willie Nelson & Family/ Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts

Hartford Healthcare Amphitheater, Bridgeport, Connecticut, September 23, 2026

In 1961 (or so), Willie Nelson wrote Funny How Time Slips Away, a dozen years later, Neil Young titled an album after his song Times Fades Away. Many decades have passed, but on Tuesday night, these two legends demonstrated their continuing refusal to accept the realities of the calendar as Nelson, at age 93, and 80-year-old Young delivered warm and moving performances at Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Hartford Healthcare Amphitheater.

• READ MORE: Neil Young Exclusive: “There’s nothing left on the shelf that I didn’t think was good – it wouldn’t have made it to the shelf!”

This Saturday, the pair will once again headline Farm Aid, the annual benefit for the organisation they helped found 41 years ago. (This year’s event takes place in Virginia Beach, Virginia.) Since Young and his current band, the Chrome Hearts, hadn’t been on a stage in almost a year, two warm-up dates were hastily booked: this show and another on Thursday night in Philadelphia.

Following an impressive set of soul-inflected country from 19-year-old hotshot Ty Myers (whose new album is a Willie Nelson tribute), Shotgun Willie opened, as always, with Whiskey River. He banged out 20 songs in an hour, with barely a pause between numbers, and while he raced through some of them, others – like a pensive Angels Flying Too Close To The Ground and an extended Georgia on My Mind – showed him still digging into this familiar material with his incomparable, unpredictable phrasing, still searching for nuance in these words and feelings.

The hits kept coming – Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys, On The Road Again, You Were Always On My Mind – but the bare-bones support (two acoustic guitars, a stand-up bass, a drum kit consisting of a single snare, and harmonica from longtime associate Mickey Raphael) bravely left Nelson with nowhere to hide. He gave himself some vocal rest, with his son Micah (who did double duty, playing with both of the night’s bands) and guitarist Waylon Payne taking occasional leads, but even on those numbers Nelson sang harmony or played a guitar solo; his jagged, funky break on Merle Haggard’s Workin’ Man Blues earned one of the night’s biggest reactions.

When Young joined Nelson on stage, though, it wasn’t for a big hit or a knockout moment but for a fittingly modest, open-hearted duet on Are There Any More Real Cowboys?, a song from Young’s 1985 Old Ways album that they had previously recorded together. The emotional peak came with Nelson’s defiant version of Tom Waits’ Last Leaf – “The autumn took the rest/But it won’t take me.” To call him a national treasure does not do him justice.

Young took the stage in front of a backdrop reading Love Earth and video screens urging Keep Freedom Free. But in this politically charged moment, he mostly kept things mellow and contemplative. Opening with Long May You Run may have just been a shout-out to his backing band (the line “with your chrome heart shining”), but it also laid out the theme which dominated the set – reflection on ageing. Song after song addressed the passing of time – Old Man, Heart of Gold, Daddy Went Walkin’ (from 2000’s Silver & Gold).

• READ MORE: Neil Young's 50 Greatest Songs - Chosen by R.E.M., Chrissie Hynde, Billy Talbot, Nils Lofgren and more

The big news was the first-ever performances of two songs from Young’s brand-new, fiftieth studio album Second Song, which came out last week. He introduced Casting Me Away From You, which was written in 1965 but officially unreleased until now, by saying “Some of ‘em are old, some of ‘em are older, this is the oldest one – I was there!” He wandered over to the piano for a sweet rendition of the Tin Pan Alley-tinged Earth Girl, and seemed elated when they pulled it off – “We made it!” he said, raising his fists in triumph.

The set stayed almost entirely in Young’s country-shuffle mode. “It’s all the same song, you’ll notice that,” he said before going into Comes A Time. But if the first ten songs felt a little too similar, he raised the stakes with a lovely Harvest Moon and a muscular, gorgeous After The Gold Rush.

After a quick break, Young shifted gears for the final two songs. He broke out Living With War for the first time since 2014, in a new acoustic arrangement that gave a more intimate spin to the still (always?) tragically relevant lyrics. Then Young strapped on an electric guitar for the first time all night and kicked into an extra-sludgy version of Rockin’ In The Free World. As the Chrome Hearts thudded, he started a chant of “Take America Back” before unleashing that signature explosive squall, sending the 5700 audience members back into the night with a final scream for justice at a time of national crisis.

It is simply stunning that these giants continue to deliver at such a high level at their advanced age, and it felt appropriate to see them on the first day of fall, as the inaugural chill of the season filled the air. It’s hard to imagine a world without them.

Willie Nelson & Family/ Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts, Hartford Healthcare Amphitheater, September 23, 2026, Setlists:

Willie Nelson And Family

Whiskey River

Stay A Little Longer

Still Is Still Moving To Me

Bloody Mary Morning

I Never Cared For You

Die When I’m High (Halfway To Heaven)

Workin’ Man Blues

Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys

Angel Flying Too Close To The Ground

On The Road Again

You Were Always On My Mind

Good Hearted Woman

Georgia On My Mind

Help Me Make It Through The Night

Everything Is Bullshit

Last Leaf

Are There Any More Real Cowboys? (with Neil Young)

I Thought About You, Lord

Will The Circle Be Unbroken

I’ll Fly Away

Neil Young And The Chrome Hearts

Long May You Run

Human Highway 
Comes a Time

Casting Me Away From You (Live debut)
Earth Girl (Live debut)

Old Man

Heart Of Gold

Daddy Went Walkin’

Harvest Moon

After The Gold Rush

Living With War

Rockin’ In The Free World

Main photo: Willie Nelson and Neil Young during the 30th Annual Bridge School Benefit at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, California, October 23, 2016 (Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

He was as mortal as the rest of us, yet few of us publicly vow that we “want to be a force for good” like John Coltrane did. Initially he was just another young saxophonist who came of age in the 1940s, heavily influenced by Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker and the alto king’s long, dexterous, rapid-fire bursts of notes. Trane worked with masters like Dizzy Gillespie and honked with rhythm & bluesologists like Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson. His first professional recording was in 1949, but it wasn’t until his on/off association with trumpet titan Miles Davis from 1955 through 1960 that the broader jazz base took notice.

With Miles, he recorded classic LPs ’Round About Midnight, Milestones and the best-selling jazz album of all time, Kind Of Blue. When Trane’s heroin addiction and drinking caused a rupture twixt him and Davis in ’57, the High Priest Of Bebop Thelonious Monk took him under his cowl at New York’s Five Spot. The younger man cleaned up and thrived, soon returning to Miles and also recording as a solo artist.

His skill as a tenor and soprano saxophonist remains unparalleled, with an immediately recognisable full tone that brimmed with a life force and shook the walls with a single note. When that note was strung together with dozens of others in a short phrase, the impact was dazzling. “This country has not produced a greater musician,” noted music scribe Edward Strickland in 1987. Trane’s focused sense of higher – yes, spiritual – purpose further distinguished him. In the 10 years between 1957 and his death from liver cancer in 1967, he grew from mainstream jazz artist to leader of the avant-garde to beyond-musical shaman. “The first time I heard John Coltrane, the sound of his tenor sax seared through my chest like a white hot poker,” Byrds co-founder Roger McGuinn told MOJO in 2017. “I was hooked.” We wager anyone new to Trane would feel the same...

10.

John Coltrane

Blue Train

Blue Note, 1957

Coltrane’s first future-classic album as leader and an early example of his signature “sheets of sound”, a term coined by journalist Ira Gitler and the most quoted phrase in Trane’s career. Gitler defined it as an “exhilarating intensity of rapid exigent runs”. Four of the five cuts are Trane originals that established him as a superlative composer. The dramatic title track is a jazz classic – a brassy blues co-driven by the composer on tenor, trumpeter Lee Morgan and trombonist Curtis Fuller. Fifty-seven years after its release, Blue Train endures as a masterpiece, audibly filled with Coltrane’s self-confidence and power of expression.

9.

Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane

At Carnegie Hall

Blue Note, 2005

There are too few recordings of Trane with Monk, but all are first-rate. You chose this one because of its remarkable provenance, because although it was recorded in 1957, the tape was left forgotten and mouldering and in fact was not rediscovered and released until 2005 whereupon ravenous fans – to put it mildly – became delirious with joy. The sound is bell-clear and both masters are at game-top. Trane spent countless days practising with Monk at the pianist’s crib and it shows in their relaxed-but-tight performances of the latter’s originals. Thelonious tickles playful arabesques and polyrhythms on the 88s while Trane and the rhythm section have his back.

• READ: John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy Evenings At The Village Gate Reviewed

8.

John Coltrane

Soultrane

Prestige, 1958

Coltrane’s fourth studio album as leader mostly comprises ballads and mid-tempo struts, but the unsurpassed regal tone of the tenor – and those sheets – elevate Soultrane even above the ubiquitous excellence of that era’s hard bop. Trane cruises the stratosphere at the outer limits of the upper register in Billy Eckstine’s ballad I Want To Talk About You – a wonderful reminder that he was as unique a balladeer in the grand tradition as he was a fearless experimentalist. On the record’s one race-horse, Irving Berlin’s Russian Lullaby, Coltrane bursts at the seams, ceaselessly pushing the envelope of sonic possibility – a preview of the future when he’d shred said envelope.

7.

The Miles Davis Quintet feat. John Coltrane

All Of You: The Last Tour 1960

Acrobat, 2014

If not the leading man, Trane was the second lead on Miles Davis’s Milestones and Kind Of Blue in 1958 and ’59. On these two groundbreakers, Miles and Trane deviated from common Western scales, playing in sinuous, undulating modalities – exotic and beguiling to many ears. Despite their tempestuous relationship, Miles called Trane “The greatest tenor I know” and talked him into touring Europe in spring 1960. This new 4-disc release of radio broadcasts and private recordings from that jaunt has tech shortcomings, but is an extraordinary document of an historic collaboration of giants.

• READ MORE: MOJO Time Machine: Miles Davis and John Coltrane play Newport

6.

John Coltrane

Giant Steps

Atlantic Jazz Masters, 1960.

Speaking of giants, this appropriately titled LP affirmed Trane’s reputation as a top-shelf composer. Naima, Cousin Mary, Syeeda’s Song Flute, and the title track – in fact every cut on the record – have become jazz standards, oft-covered by near-peers in concert halls as well as unknown pianists in dimly-lit dives. Given his later rep in some semi-circles as the potentate of pandemonium, Coltrane’s facility with rich melody is proof of the adage that one must know the rules before one breaks ’em. As jazz chronicler Nat Hentoff reminds us in the original 
linernotes: “There is… an extraordinary amount of sensitivity in Coltrane’s work.”

5.

John Coltrane

My Favorite Things

Atlantic Jazz Masters, 1961

Trane’s major/minor modal rendition of the title track was so catchy, Atlantic released an edit as a single and it became a radio hit. He called it “My favourite piece of all those I have recorded.” He joyfully flutters like a butterfly on soprano sax through Rodgers & Hammerstein’s standard. “You can play lighter things with it,” he noted, referring to the soprano. The album features his first Classic Quartet including McCoy Tyner (piano) and Elvin Jones (drums). That pair would be deemed greats-in-their-own-right – the pianist pounds left-handed lightning bolts and cascades right-handed raindrops; the drummer limb-thrums thunder.

4.

The John Coltrane Quartet

Africa/Brass

Impulse!, 1961

Influenced by African and Indian music with an opportunity to arrange for a large ensemble including singular multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, Africa/Brass is gloriously dense. Producer Creed Taylor called it “tribal”. Title track Africa is based on a single chord and modal improvisation. Sections sound as if the horns are mimicking vocal chants that rise and ebb. And Trane’s soprano on McCoy Tyner’s arrangement of the traditional Greensleeves takes us back to Favorite Things turf. By the way, dear rockers, this is one of two Trane albums (along with Impressions) that helped inspire The Byrds’ Eight Miles High – another holy modal sounder.

3.

John Coltrane

Live At The Village Vanguard

Impulse!, 1962

The A-side of the initial release was comprised of gospel-inspired workout Spiritual and the standard Softly, As A Morning Sunrise – both sublime. But it was Chasin’ The Trane, the track that makes up the B-side, that provoked outrage from the press, similar in response to Stravinsky’s The Rite Of Spring and electric Dylan. With his Classic Quartet, now including Jimmy Garrison on bass, Trane blows for 16 exhilarating minutes on Chasin’… with-out a clear structure. “The use of sound for sound itself,” enthused the free jazzer Archie Shepp. “Sputtering inconclusiveness,” snarled one critic. But for Coltrane’s producer, Bob Thiele, this was the “Big Bang” of avant-garde jazz.

2.

John Coltrane

Ascension

Impulse!, 1966

Still sounding truly avant-garde 48 years later, Trane smilingly referred to Ascension as “a big-band thing” – his smile no doubt wryly connoting that earlier, more accessible genre. If Chasin’ The Trane was 
controversial, this album was utter heresy to purists. The 11 men herein perform 40 minutes of loosely organised chaos with a profound and relentless intensity. It’s musical abstract expressionism, beloved in its time by both black power activists and acidheads and it stands today as one of the greatest recorded pieces of music ever. (It has been found useful in clearing the room of squares.) Recommended are collections with Editions I and II of the title track – if you dare.

1.

John Coltrane

A Love Supreme

IMPULSE!, 1965

It opens with the auspicious banging of a gong and is followed by the simple, hypnotic repetition of one of the most recognisable four-note riffs in Western music, joined by the piece’s title sung like a mantra. This four-part suite with the quartet reflects Trane’s belief that everything is seamlessly and infinitely interconnected: “I believe in all religions.” Each quartet member solos and there are temporal and tonal variations, expressing palpable shifting emotions: blues (of course), inquisitiveness, reverence, exultation and – ultimately – serenity. The uplifting atmosphere was unlike anything heard before in jazz – but then that’s the innovator’s gig, isn’t it?

Madness’s 1981 biopic Take It Or Leave It was, it’s been said, a movie with no script, a cast of non-actors and a producer/director who’d never made a film before. “That’s all true!” vouches frontman Suggs. That said, it was a memorable and gritty evocation of the Nutty Boys’ fresh-faced genesis and formation in late-’70s north London.

As they did for Slade In Flame last year, the BFI has restored the film in 4K for an October 2 cinema release and a Blu-ray/DVD edition. There’s also a launch event at the BFI Southbank on September 30 where all seven Madness members – including long-absent lodestar Cathal ‘Chas Smash’ Smyth – will be present for a Q&A.

It’s all some distance from the modest-budget origins of the film. Enabled by the group’s first big royalty cheque, it was shot on the hoof on grainy 16mm film in less than two weeks in March 1981 (that year Madness released four singles and an album and toured Britain, Europe, Australia, Japan and America). The script, such as it was, involved interviewing band members about their early days and then returning to the old haunts – the Dublin Castle pub, the Rock On record shop and Pathway Studios among them – to recreate what really went on there.

“We were easily bored, young, stupid men,” says Suggs, “which was part of the joy of it. It wasn’t the sort of fun we were having making pop videos – we thought we could do something a bit more realistic about the drudgery of it all, in a sort of film noir, British kitchen-sink way… those slightly free-form films about ordinary working-class situations and people. It’s got a really strange atmosphere, partly because it was so close to the real events it was depicting.”

While Suggs cites films including Kes, Bronco Bullfrog and Cathy Come Home as inspirations, director/Stiff Records supremo Dave Robinson had Scorsese’s Mean Streets in mind (tellingly, Madness keyboard player Mike Barson wears a hat like Robert de Niro’s character Johnny Boy throughout).

You can really see the talent in those guys, the real band and the reality of what actually occurred.

- Dave Robinson

“There’s good improvisation all over it,” says Robinson, who fell off a gantry and broke his leg during the shoot and confirms that nothing was left on the cutting room floor. “It was very real, quick, offhand, not contrived – our best shot. The boys were a bit mumbly, very in-joke kind of people, but you can really see the talent in those guys, the real band and the reality of what actually occurred, absolutely true, 100 per cent.” Robinson confirms that the painful looking headbutts that Smyth and late Madness roadie Chalky exchange when dancing to Swan Lake at Ladbroke Grove’s Acklam Hall are indeed genuine. Robinson and Suggs agree, meanwhile, that sax man Lee Thompson has a particular screen presence.

Fans won’t need telling that the launch bash will be the first time the seven core Madness members have shared a stage since 2014. “The Magnificent Seven!” laughs Suggs, who says he didn’t know it was happening until MOJO told him. “I was talking to Cathal the other day actually, I haven’t seen him for a while. I’m really pleased, because he’s a big part of that film and the whole history of the band.”

Could he rejoin the band, wonders MOJO, in hope?

“Well, he wanted to take a break, and then the break sort of went on,” says Suggs. “He writes poetry and stuff, but hasn’t felt inclined to write pop music for a while… so 
I don’t know. That’s in the lap of the gods.

“Take It Or Leave It has been sat on the dusty shelf at the back of the video rental shop,” he concludes. “So it’s rather nice it’s been restored. It didn’t lead to much success in the cinema at the time, but it was still a great moment.”

Take It Or Leave It is released in cinemas on October 2 and on BFI Blu-ray/DVD on October 19. For details of the BFI Southbank premiere on September 30 visit whatson.bfi.org.uk.

Portrait: Kerry Brown

Back in the early 80s the nihilistic, fright-wigged peperami of early performances by theatrical Melbourne spleen-punkers The Birthday Party appeared on a collision course with destruction, and when hard drugs notoriously entered the mix, there was writing of sorts on the wall. And yet Nick Cave has turned into one of our most consistent artists, evolving new aspects, plumbing new depths and finding more areas of life and love to explore in his unique, grimly wry baritone.

These days, with the man himself long since clean and serene, most years bring new gold from the Cave mine, as his group, The Bad Seeds, have morphed slowly from the savage Weimar avant-bluesmen of 1984 debut From Her To Eternity into something far deeper, wider in scope, surviving potentially crippling line-up upheavals (notably, the departures of Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey) as they rage, rage against the dying of the light. Here, MOJO’s team of experts have compiled what we believe to be the definitive list of Nick Cave's greatest ever songs…

30.

Stranger Than Kindness

(from Your Funeral… My Trial, 1986)

A keynote Bad Seeds song not written by Nick Cave.

In 2010, Cave declared Stranger Than Kindness his favourite Bad Seeds song. That it was written (with Blixa Bargeld) by Anita Lane, Cave’s erstwhile girlfriend and catalyst for some of his key ’80s work, clearly heightens its desolate tension, while Bargeld’s layered cheese-grater guitar and Mick Harvey’s brushed drums amplify the dreadful sadness of lyrics like “You caress yourself/And grind my soft cold bones below”. As Lane later explained: “It was just how I felt one day.”

29.

Breathless

(from Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus, 2004)

Mr. Bluebird lands on Cave’s shoulder. At least on first play.

Strummy acoustic guitar and Warren Ellis’s wonky flutes usher Cave into a Disney Technicolor world with fields filled with “happy hooded bluebells” and fish popping their heads up from the “bubbling brook”. On the surface, his heart is swelling with so much love that it’s fit to burst. But then darkness falls and Cave reveals that he’s “without” the object of his affections; that’s why he’s obliged to seek their spirit in nature. An unusually chirpy song of loss, then.

28.

Leviathan

(from Ghosteen, 2019)

Making the unbearable transcendental.

Has anyone sung the word “love” more often and with more shades of meaning? Here it’s the flotsam you cling to when all is wrecked, when you sit for hours in a parked car by the sea, knowing only that “I love my baby, and my baby loves me”. Around Cave’s battered mantra, music looms out of glower and nuages, Kaushlesh Purohit’s sparing tablas underpinning a swelling synth melody that becomes an angel choir that tears at your heart. And the Leviathan? It’s the elephant in the room.

27.

Do You Love Me (Part Two)

(from Let Love In, 1994)

The encyclopaedia of taboo subjects reaches the 'p' word.

A song about uneven power relationships so good, Cave included it twice on Let Love In: first as a ramalam, with the singer pitted against a prospective wife; the second slowed to a Spaghetti Western death march, rewritten as the account of a young boy being sexually abused in a cinema. Cave channels Peter Straub’s source story, The Juniper Tree, into finely-wrought lines: “The clock of my boyhood was wound down and stopped.” Plus, a significant arrival, as Warren Ellis’s violin makes its Bad Seeds debut.

26.

Jesus Alone

(from Skeleton Tree, 2016)

High-voltage surveillance of all terrestrial life.

The coincidence between the death, in 2015, of Cave’s son Arthur and the opening lines here remains chilling: “You fell from the sky / Crash landed in a field / Near the River Adur.” Two plummeting figures, both in Sussex. Yet the song was written in 2014. Distorted drones underpin a narrative that moves on to Tijuana druggies and African doctors. The compelling physics-lab feel and a fellow album track called Magneto suggest an art-rock Marvel hero. Super power: omnipotent horizon-wide observation.

25.

No Pussy Blues

(from Grinderman, 2007)

Oo-er! It’s Grinderman’s Carry On Midlife Crisis…

If his songs are miniature movies, here’s the sex comedy: pushing 50, the narrator, who happens to be a goatish rock star with a moustache, realises that young women find him profoundly resistible, despite his posing and flattering like the young blades do, over music taut and raging, Warren Ellis giving it some Rowland S. Howard on two brutalist solos. In 2008, a digital-only remix EP added novel visions of Cave as mooby and receding disco-dancing dad, at once confessor and reveller in his shame.

24.

More News From Nowhere

(from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, 2008)

Hair-dye enthusiast revealed as face of Grecian 2008.

This spiraling narrative supposedly mirrors Homer’s The Odyssey, with a contemporary cast taking the place of Poseidon and pals. Textual analysis from classical scholars is pending, but rock dissection identifies both Van Morrison’s ex-wife Janet Planet and Deanna, title character of the 1988 Cave song with shared musical content. The free-associative lyrical frisson is grounded by a beautiful bell-like guitar figure and a lovely, chugging impetus; nigh on eight minutes here, but feeling like it could roll on forever.

23.

Stagger Lee

(from Murder Ballads, 1996)

The legend of a Missouri bad-ass gruesomely reimagined

After black pimp ‘Stag’ Lee Shelton shot Billy Lyons for swiping his hat in St Louis in 1895, the tale was recounted in numerous folk songs, before landmark takes by Mississippi John Hurt (1928) and Lloyd Price (1959). Recording in Melbourne for Murder Ballads was almost complete when an update was suggested by sticksman Jim Sclavunos. Over Martyn Casey’s predatory bassline, Cave duly revamped it for a blood-thirsty late-20th-Century, adding fresh twists, including a lippy barman slain, and sumptuously nasty dialogue.

22.

City Of Refuge

(from Tender Prey, 1988)

Widescreen call to arms provides “difficult” fifth LP’s secret weapon

It rolls into focus, inspired by Blind Willie Johnson, out of a heat-haze of howling hillbilly harmonica and acoustics wristed by Bargeld and Kid Congo Powers in readiness for whatever wicked entity this way comes. Thomas Wydler’s snare and Roland Wolf’s organ rattle and hum as Cave’s paranoia shape-shifts into exodus. Run! From what? Unspecified bad deeds? Gutters “running with blood” that will “spew you out”, its diabolically encroaching walls of dust seemed to find purchase anew after 9/11 – “You better run and run and run…”

21.
The Carny

(from Your Funeral… My Trial, 1986)
A Brechtian allegory of the touring life ensnares MOJO’s Andrew Male…

Nick Cave first entered Hansa Studios in October 1982 to record The Birthday Party’s Bad Seed EP. He was there six months later for the band’s flailing deranged abdication, the Mutiny! EP. Situated on Kothener Strasse, adjacent to the Berlin Wall, this former builders’ guild hall had, from 1933 to 1945, housed Joseph Goebbels’ Reichsmusikkammer which promoted “good German music” and helped suppress “degenerate” works by jazz musicians, modernists and Jewish composers. This knowledge caused The Birthday Party great hilarity, prompting them to adorn both EPs with swastikas. “It was a belly laugh,” Mick Harvey told author Ian Johnston. “We were in this horrendous historical environment. The swastika was an obvious reference to that [and] it just came in, rather than suppressing it, like a lot of Germans would.”

However, during the Weimar years the building was also home to an art gallery owned by George Grosz, a Neue Sachlichkeit artist who specialised in depicting criminals, gangsters and outsiders, characters who dwelled outside the normal conformist life.

“Cave summons images of flapping bird-girls, dwarves with faces like dying moons.”

         Three years later it’s this Berlin, and that of Grosz’s contemporaries, playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, that occupies the forlorn lurching soul of Cave’s early narrative epic. Overflowing with the same baroque gothic language that bulged the pages of his then still unwritten novel, And The Ass Saw The Angel, the song tells an uneasy Brechtian tale of a troupe of circus performers abandoned by one of their own who kill and bury his “bow-backed nag”, Sorrow.

         With Mick Harvey building a mood of bilious sideshow disquiet on organ, glockenspiel, xylophone and the plectrum-plucked guts of a grand piano, and Blixa Bargeld voicing the ruthless Boss Bellini (who shoots the horse before declaring “the nag was dead meat/We can’t afford to carry dead weight”) this sickly, weaving song is, of course, an allegory for the Bad Seeds, a group of wearied entertainers sloughing off their burdens, and saying goodbye to an old way of life.

Augmented by Bargeld’s mournful howling guitar (intended to emulate the dying squeals of Sorrow), Cave’s trail-whistle harmonica, and his multi-tracked voice summoning images of flapping bird-girls, dwarves with faces like dying moons, and dead horses floating on the rain-sodden earth, it is, of course, a nightmare vision of debased humanity and one that, as depicted in Wim Wender’s 1987 film, Wings Of Desire, can have an almost hypnotic hold on an audience. But it is also a blackly comic fairy tale, a self-parodic reworking of the majestic Tupelo, and a curdled romantic vision of cursed touring vagabonds, led by a ruthless taskmaster and doomed to keep on moving through the beating rain and onto higher ground.

20.

Push The Sky Away

(from Push The Sky Away, 2013)

Soul-stoking, slow-burning mantra for creative endurance.

From an album inspired by Google search whims, the title-track is spare, elegiac and just a bit woo-woo; poignant poetry for transcendental YouTube yoga. “You’ve gotta just keep on pushing/And push the sky away,” chants Cave. A children’s choir softly repeat his mantra as Warren Ellis’s cosmic, ruminating synth patterns rise and fall in heartbeat time. Peaking with Cave’s ultimate affirmation: “And some people say it’s just rock’n’roll/Aw, but it gets you right down to your soul.” Amen.

19.

Saint Huck

(from From Her To Eternity, 1984)

Foreshadowing Stagger Lee, a viciously Weimar Mississippi murder ballad.

His parents an English teacher and a librarian, bookworm Cave wrote compulsively and, no longer lyrically cramped by sharing the spotlight with Rowland S Howard’s guitar, he uncorked the ink on The Bad Seeds’ debut LP, the murder ballad Saint Huck blueprinting many more to come. Inspired by his recent stay in Berlin, Cave’s theatrical Americana grimoire updates the Bertolt Brecht of Happy End and Mahagonny, eliding and martyring Mississippi icons Huckleberry Finn and Elvis Presley to a brooding bass line from hell’s own pit band.

18.

Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

(from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, 2008)

New Testament, New York, new sensations

What if Lazarus resented his resurrection? What if he became famous, decadent and utterly lost? What if he missed the grave? Cave rerouted a Grinderman demo called Rockabilly Lazarus via Larry Sloman’s Houdini biography and Lou Reed’s street-hassling New York stories, then soldered it to a relentless industrial blues. His persona is defrocked priest-turned-stand-up comic. The first time he sang, with a camp shudder, “Oh, poor Larry”, bassist Martyn P Casey laughed so hard that he couldn’t play.

17.

The Weeping Song

(from The Good Son, 1990)

Nick and Blixa go the full Ken Dodd.

As Walker Brothers-balmy as a crate of triple-ply tissues, The Weeping Song delivers abundantly on its title’s premise: the women are weeping, the men are weeping, everybody’s weeping. Nick Cave, too, sounds drenched in lachrymose, as big daddy Blixa lays on him the hardest truth that “the children… are merely crying, son… True weeping is yet to come.” Arranged like a traditional folk round, The Weeping Song is a paragon of new era Bad Seed blues.

16.

Bright Horses

(from Ghosteen, 2019)

Caught between imagination and reality, a writer chooses faith.

Recording The Boatman’s Call in 1996, Nick Cave demoed a sentimental ballad of assurance for son Luke, entitled Sheep May Safely Graze. Afterwards, Blixa Bargeld told Cave, “Sing that to your boy. Spare the world.” But people change. So does the world. We need reassurance. To a simple Chopinesque berceuse and wordless chorale, Cave articulates the uneasy necessity of faith. The bright horses of our sentimental imagination may not be real, but that doesn’t negate our belief in them, or in the simple fact that our loved one’s coming home on the 5:30 train.

READ: NICK CAVE'S TEN GREATEST ALBUMS

15.

Deanna

(from Tender Prey, 1988)

Bonnie And Clyde goes rollicking garage-punk.

There was a real Deanna, who returned to the Cave narrative when One More Time With Feeling director Andrew Dominik revealed in MOJO 278 he’d dated her three months after the singer. ‘Her song’ authentically details her mother’s “Ku-Klux furniture”, covered in white sheets while the two loved-up hell-raisers house-sat for her, but otherwise it’s a lurid psychosexual fantasy of plotted robberies and killings. The organ-dripping accompaniment evolved from a jam on The Edwin Hawkins Singers’ Oh Happy Day – sweet sacrilege.

14.

Skeleton Tree

(from Skeleton Tree, 2016)

A numbed fugue finds crumbs of comfort in the chaos of existence.

Its parent requiem’s closing song, this bruised, haloed distillation of grief is Cave at his most Orphic, discerning the undiscovered country beyond and the son he had lost. To brushed drums, piano and washes of electricity, sparing references to a “jittery TV”, fallen leaves and a candle in a window articulate loss and non-loss, while the payoff “Nothing is for free” reveals the human condition in all its tragedy and beauty. The outro is lent haunting charge by an unidentified woman’s voice.

13.

People Ain’t No Good

(from The Boatman’s Call, 1997)

Hymn to misanthropy, popular with kids.

“They never do what you want ’em to/Cuz people ain’t no good.” So yelped Lux Interior on 1986 Cramps track, People Ain’t No Good. Cave’s never said it inspired his funereal ode to solipsism and romantic failure. Nor did he admit to the influence of Auden and Larkin in this very English tale of love defeated by time. The elegiac soundtrack to Shrek’s rejection by Princess Fiona in Shrek 2, this is probably responsible for a whole new generation of doubters and pessimists.

12.

We Call Upon The Author

(from Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, 2008)

Totally Lit.: Cave demands a cosmic edit.

Playing the embittered writer souring in his “bolthole”, Cave turns the universe into one immense literary feud. Over a squalling, rogue-typewriter groove, he criticises Charles Bukowski (“a jerk!”) and Wallace Stevens, although his chief nemesis is God, an author whose plot twists (“Third World debt/Infectious disease”) have tipped into the grotesque. “Prolix! Prolix! Nothing a pair of scissors can’t fix!” yelps Cave, mocking his own use of “myxomatoid” and “jejune”, maybe, but also demanding one last scything edit of an 
incoherent world.

11.

Jubilee Street

(from Push The Sky Away, 2013)

A rebirth on Brighton’s dark side. MOJO’s Victoria Segal takes a walk…

“There’s a certain type of song that I write, and that gets the kind of Bad Seeds treatment,” says Nick Cave during The Making Of Push The Sky Away, a short film made as the band recorded their 15th album in the wisteria-draped idyll of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. “It’s important for us to tear away from that way of going about making songs.” Swerving old patterns paid off: after Grinderman’s boys-together spree and the hectic visions of Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!, the looped, spacious Push The Sky Away felt like a crucial resetting of the Bad Seeds’ clock, a powerful, self-willed rebirth.

No song embodies this process as clearly as Jubilee Street. Named after a road in the singer’s adopted hometown of Brighton, it starts like classic Cave noir – there’s a girl, she’s called Bea, she’s a prostitute with “a history but no past”. Quickly, though, it escapes the red-light murk, culminating in an ecstatic, breathless act of transcendence: “I’m transforming/I’m vibrating/I’m glowing/I’m flying/Look at me now.”

It’s not just the song’s damaged narrator in flux: this is the sound of the band splitting their grimy Grinderman skins, rejuvenating, reshaping. Based around one of Warren Ellis’s deceptively languid riffs, it repeats and repeats, almost imperceptibly building up the pressure until the metamorphosis is complete.

“This is the sound of the band splitting their grimy Grinderman Skins.”

There is a dark story here: the narrator visits Bea, she vanishes, “the Russians move in” and there’s a hint of blackmail and incrimination – “the problem was she had a little black book/And my name was written on every page”. More unnerving is hearing Cave sing “I got love in my tummy”, as disturbing as the presence of the Ecole Saint Martin children’s choir – a flash of innocence in a song scarred by experience. Yet the hard-boiled storyline cracks: the narrator’s burdens are replaced with “a foetus on a leash”, a nightmarish image of rebirth. He sheds his guilt, his possessions and ultimately, his body: “I am alone now/I am beyond recriminations”.

Cave has said he struggles with “the tyranny of the narrative”, storytelling songs that have one thread to pull. “Dylan wrote like that,” he said in 2013. “I can’t bear them, to be honest – you know, ‘The Ballad Of Such And Such’… you hear it once and you’ve got the gist of it.” Jubilee Street, titled in sly opposition to Desolation Row, breaks those shackles like the narrator sheds his Sisyphean “wheel of love”, his “10 tonne catastrophe on a 60 pound chain”.

So destabilising is Jubilee Street, Cave wrote a song about its creation – Finishing Jubilee Street, where, like a medieval mystic, he puts down his pen on Bea’s world and spins into a dream where he has a young bride called Mary Stanford. That’s what Jubilee Street can do, it implies – change dreams, shift reality. Look at it now.

10.

Ghosteen

(from Ghosteen, 2019)

How a master songwriter came so far for beauty

If the challenge that illuminates Ghosteen is how “to write beyond the trauma”, it found its purest manifestation in the 12-minute title track. The slow-motion blend of strings and synths is both ominous and cocooning, like Scott Walker’s Farmer In The City remixed by Cluster, while the chorale that arrives halfway through is almost unbearably lovely. A reminder that opposites – “This world is beautiful” and “the past with its fierce undertow won’t ever let us go” – can co-exist, in spite of everything.

9.

Straight To You

(from Henry’s Dream, 1992)

A love song for the end of the world.

The promo clip, where the Bad Seeds variously accompany a fire eater, a belly dancer and a magician, in some kind of theatre-cum-crypt, is pretty daft. But the song? A Cohenesque hymnal with the kind of organ riff Al Kooper played for Dylan, here invocations of bad-Bible cataclysm prelude something more powerful still - a giving in to the ultimate mystery of love. This metaphysical revolt is realised with such devastating clarity it becomes an intimate mass moment to rival any in rock.

8.

Mutiny In Heaven

(from Mutiny EP, 1983)

If heroin is Heaven, a thrillingly impenitent mutineer’s shanty.

By Cave’s own reckoning the summit of his Birthday Party songwriting at the very moment they were morphing into The Bad Seeds (Blixa Bargeld surreptitiously replaced Rowland S Howard’s guitar parts), Mutiny In Heaven was penned overnight under pressure to fit a bass line too good to waste. In unacknowledged riposte to The Velvet Underground’s Heroin, far from “feeling like Jesus’ son” Cave’s “threadbare soul teems with vermin” and scabrous Catholic rebellion as he bails from Lou’s “kingdom” with a gleeful piratical swagger. “Utopiate”, indeed.

7.
(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For?

(from The Boatman’s Call, 1997)

Let love in: Cave seeks and finds on epic ballad.

There is a woman in this love song – she wears a coat, she’s crying – but her physical presence is almost entirely theoretical, an embodiment of the myth of “the one”. Cave’s stately, beautiful imagery of war, geology and astrophysics – plus a reference to the Sermon On The Mount – blows up romantic yearning onto a heroic scale, drums and vocal just slightly too slow to echo the exquisite ache of delayed gratification. A great marble monument to longing, it’s a spectacular pedestal for the right person.

6.

Red Right Hand

(from Let Love In, 1994)

Milton provides killer title. Peaky Blinders feel the benefit.

Amid a bowel-freezing death-knell, a moody bass riff and wild oscillator abuse by Cave himself, this whisper-to-a-scream Bad Seeds set cornerstone chillingly portrays a Mephistophelean figure whose money-grabbing occurs at any human cost – his ‘red right hand’ the evidence of his bloody misdeeds. The third verse implies a drug dealer to whom Cave, then mid-rehab, may have handed over ‘stacks of green paper’; the fourth suggests a smarmily amoral TV host à la Jeremy Kyle. All told: not a nice guy.

5.

The Ship Song

(from The Good Son, 1990)

Romantic reconciliation, as willingly lost battle.

Cave’s got Anita Lane’s name tattooed on his right arm, beneath a dagger-impaled skull-and-crossbones. An on-off item and occasional writing partners from the late ’70s, their lively arguments often ended with Cave advising her to do her absolute worst and move on. Set in a Sylvan landscape with the singer harmonising with himself, this graceful, oxygenated ballad remembers this and acknowledges the garment-rending end of the affair, as it waltzes into the twilight. Often covered, impossible to match.

4.

Tupelo

(from The First Born In Dead, 1985)

Elvis is born. The end is nigh!

On April 5, 1936, the fourth deadliest tornado in US history hit Tupelo, Mississippi, smashing homes to matchwood and driving pine needles into the trunks of trees. Hundreds were killed, but among the spared was Elvis Aaron Presley, age 1. Nigh on 50 years later, Tupelo’s tribulation becomes rock’n’roll’s creation myth – Elvis transformed by a babbling, possessed Cave into messiah or anti-Christ, his stillborn twin a ghastly sacrifice, while Harvey and Adamson’s rumbling cloud of bass and drums promise a terrible judgment.

3.

From Her To Eternity

(from From Her To Eternity, 1984)

Houseshare horror lodges in the mind.

Post-Birthday Party, Cave said he was no longer “kicking people in the teeth”; instead, he delivered a sickening gut-punch with the title track of the Bad Seeds’ debut. Written with Anita Lane, this fetid tale of obsession unfolds like a nasty jailhouse confession, the narrator over-sharing his fixation on his weeping upstairs neighbour. The band performed it in Wim Wenders’s Wings Of Desire, but it belongs somewhere infernal, rictus piano and spasming guitar mirroring a man moving towards an atrocity, the killer inside coming out to play. VS

2.

Into My Arms

(from The Boatman’s Call, 1997)

Cave’s greatest love song: a wounded beauty, with a dark, desperate undertow.

Cave was wounded when he wrote Into My Arms – the breakup with Viviane Carneiro, the mother of his son Luke, and his failed romance with Polly Harvey. Plus he was in rehab, in Somerset, trying (but failing, this time) to kick heroin. On Sundays the patients were allowed out to go to church. So Cave went to church. Back in the clinic, sick from withdrawal, he quickly wrote the words to the melody that was already in his head. Interpolating love, loss longing and God. The subject, as Cave said in a lecture on songwriting a year later, ultimately of all love songs. The song is a beauty, but a wounded beauty, with the dark, desperate undertow of a man calling in a void, praying to someone he knows is not there. Born form pain, it was, and remains, his greatest love song.

1.

The Mercy Seat

(single, 1988)

Guilt or innocence? Or is it just the human condition? Whichever, MOJO’s Keith Cameron is transfixed…

On May 10, 1998, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds squeezed into the small London premises of independent radio station XFM and recorded four songs for broadcast. It was release day for The Best Of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, but XFM’s studio constraints pointed a reduced group configuration – Cave, Martyn Casey (bass), Mick Harvey (guitar), Conway Savage (piano), Thomas Wydler (drums) – towards the acoustic arrangements of Cave’s most recent studio album The Boatman’s Call, from which Brompton Oratory, Into My Arms and Lime Tree Arbour were played. To close the session, however, Cave returned to The Mercy Seat, a 10 year-old song about killing and guilt. History had already proven it exceptionally malleable, yielding acoustic ensemble versions, solo piano ballads, even a spoken word performance at the 1996 Poetry Olympics. The original recording was an intemperate storm; here it became a regretful elegy. Regardless of shape, The Mercy Seat is Nick Cave’s most-performed song, his masterpiece. The numbers don’t lie. As he told MOJO in 2017: “There’s a reason why we’ve played that song at every gig since it was released.”

         Today we associate the song with epic grandeur – even Cave has suggested it’s his My Way – so returning to the source brings surprises. Released in June 1988 as a prelude to the Bad Seeds’ fifth album Tender Prey, The Mercy Seat is alchemised from industrial turbulence, mechanised loops of Mick Harvey hammering the E and B strings of a bass guitar with a drumstick. Having worked on the lyric over a period of six months, Cave’s initial motivation when entering Hansa Tonstudio in September 1987 was to create a song with the same relentless predatory threat of Suicide’s Harlem. Less than a year after its release, however, he had begun essaying acoustic treatments, a template he would return to over the next two decades. Today, dispatched with widescreen symphonic power by the current Bad Seeds, performances of The Mercy Seat foreground its melancholy over the infernal vortex.

         It’s that side of The Mercy Seat which attracted the imprimatur of a legend. When Cave heard that Johnny Cash was covering The Mercy Seat, he reportedly said: “Man, I can die now.” But unlike some other songs in his American Recordings series – Nine Inch Nails’ Hurt, for instance – Cash doesn’t truly conquer The Mercy Seat for himself. The efficacy of The Man In Black’s version depends on its relationship to Cave’s, as a sort of playful rejoinder to the original’s brimstone ambiguity. In Cave’s telling, the narrator is “nearly wholly innocent” of whatever crimes have led him to “Dead Row”; Cash, by contrast, declares himself “totally innocent”. Whereas Cash can’t seem to get inside the song’s skin, Cave is buried troublingly deep, progressively tainted by its malevolent spirit, complicit in each mounting layer of contradictory testimony: “And anyway I told the truth/But I’m afraid I told a lie.”

"The Mercy Seat has become so indelible because we all feel the weight of its preoccupations."

         Cave wrote The Mercy Seat concurrent with his novel And The Ass Saw The Angel, while also immersing himself in the story of Australian outlaw Ned Kelly and hard-boiled crime literature, a prelude to his role in John Hillcoat’s brutal prison drama Ghosts… Of The Civil Dead. A copious intake of amphetamine and heroin compounded his volatile mood, and possibly contributed to the fluctuating lyrics, itself an aspect of the protagonist’s conflicted relationship between good and evil. Does the song’s ongoing evolution mirror the author’s accommodation with the person he was when he wrote it?

          Beyond question, however, is that The Mercy Seat has become so indelible because we all feel the weight of its preoccupations. This is far more than just a song about a bad guy dying in the electric chair. Amid the crushing totality of its seven minutes and 18 seconds, from queasy-voiced opening, through minor key expository verses and thence onwards to its epic resolution, The Mercy Seat plays out like a hysterical *danse macabre*, like The Seventh Seal soundtracked by Death’s pick-up band. Amid all the chaos and accumulated sonic distress, via Blixa Bargeld’s needling guitar and strings that flail the senses like the surreal visions which haunt the condemned killer – “The face of Jesus in my soup”; “A hooked bone rising from my food” – The Mercy Seat is a lament for man’s inhumanity. The sorrow is felt most keenly in the pathos of Christ, the “ragged” (or sometimes subsequently “wretched”) stranger, a carpenter quite literally nailed by the tools of his trade. How do we judge the institutionalised killing of a man whose guilt is presented to us as a question of perspective? Where’s the motive? Where’s the proof? Who weighs the good hand against the evil? Head shaved and fixing to die, in a single verse he’s both pitiable (“Like a moth that tries/To enter the bright eye/I go shuffling out of life”) and insouciant (“And anyway I never lied”).

         The song’s final five minutes simply comprise its de facto chorus, an eight line descending stanza that begins, “And the mercy seat is waiting” (or “burning”, or “glowing”, or “smoking”), repeated, 14 times, in a litany of reckoning for the day that everyone must face. Some 10 years ago, Blixa Bargeld, the Bad Seed who stood at Cave’s side during the feverish Berlin period from whence the song emerged, said: “I know that Nick sometimes used to say, ‘When I die, I can say I wrote The Mercy Seat’. It must have been really important to him.”

Convinced they’d compromised their punk ethics with the glossy Nevermind, Nirvana resolved to make their third album a stripped-back, no-frills affair – whether their record company liked it or not. Cue an intense 10-day recording session with their hardcore hero Steve Albini at the controls, and an LP that would alarm the band’s label and cause a rift between band and producer. Read on for the curious story of IN UTERO, the group’s final studio album.

• READ MORE: Inside Nirvana’s Last Ever UK Show: “The band was fractured in more than a few ways… it was touch and go”

BRENT SIGMETH WAS SURE of three things as he turned up at Pachyderm Recording Studio for the first day in his new job. First, he knew that none other than Steve Albini was booked to come in. Second, he knew that Steve Albini was coming in to record a band called The Simon Ritchie Bluegrass Ensemble.

Right away, this sounded curious. Who the hell were The Simon Ritchie Bluegrass Ensemble? Brent had certainly never heard of them. Although Albini had recorded at Pachyderm before, it was to make albums with established artists of some renown, notably The Wedding Present and P.J. Harvey. Situated 40 miles south-east of Minneapolis, surrounded by woods and with only the ‘town’ of Cannon Falls (population: 3,400) by way of local civilisation, Pachyderm is an isolated residential studio, offering clients comfort and privacy. Distractions in the immediate neighbourhood are few; bands go there to get away from the irregularity of their ‘normal’ lives, to get a job done. Although not the most expensive example of such a facility, it was way beyond the means of most of the bands Albini worked with, recordings which usually took place at his home studio in Chicago.

All this, and the fact that ‘Simon Ritchie’ was actually the real name of Sid Vicious, led Brent and his colleague Bill Satler to conclude that if Albini was bringing in a band requiring a pseudonym, then this was not just any band. Whoever it turned out to be, Sigmeth was sure of a third thing: that one of his chores on his first day as house engineer at Pachyderm Recording Studio was to drive to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, collect the mystery outfit and take them to what would be their home and workplace for the next fortnight. He was not expecting a group of bluegrass musicians.

Midway through February 1993, thick snow lay on the ground in Cannon Falls. Minnesota winters are notoriously harsh, with temperatures struggling to rise above double digits below freezing. So when an articulated truck loaded with band gear arrived that evening, it was unable to negotiate the final hill up to the studio. When Brent and Bill, the outgoing engineer, took a four-wheel drive van to help out, the true identity of Pachyderm’s latest clients became known: Nirvana.

“And then I had to go to the airport to pick them up,” says Brent. “On my first day at work! Which was kinda wacky. I was supposed to hold up a sign that said ‘The Simon Ritchie Bluegrass Ensemble’. Which I didn’t! I just waved at them. Kurt and Krist were coming through and I said, I’m your ride. They figured it out.”

When Brent Sigmeth started work at Pachyderm he was fresh out of engineering school and looking for a job. Having grown up in Cannon Falls, it seemed common sense to approach Jim Nickel, Pachyderm’s owner, and see if he’d give this local boy a shot. Nickel hired him, and Brent was still settling into his new home when his illustrious housemates arrived.

“So there I was, this person pretending that he wasn’t a bit star-struck and confused about how Nirvana showed up in his living room almost unannounced!” he laughs. “It seems surreal now, ’cos it was the first thing I was involved with here. It was definitely really super-inspiring that as an engineer I got to see Steve Albini work. He’s brilliant. I think it’s his overall grasp on the engineering tools he works with. He knows what he’s using and he knows what he’s doing, he’s very intelligent about it. He’s all about sonic integrity, which I appreciate. I think him and Nirvana was a really cool union of creative people.”

Few now would dispute Sigmeth’s assessment. In Utero was then and remains today an awesome piece of work. As well as a torrid personal treatise from a troubled but fearless artist, it also presents some of the most graphic rock ensemble performances ever committed to record. At the time, however, and at each stage of its genesis, the third Nirvana album was an object of often fierce, sometimes bewildering contention. Much of this centred upon two factors: the phenomenal commercial success of Nirvana’s second album, and the subsequent decision to make its successor with Steve Albini.

Of course, had Nevermind not disrupted the weft and weave of popular music so fundamentally, their teaming up with Albini would hardly have been worthy of mention. Slightly but significantly older than the band, Albini recognised them as people and knew the cultural milieu from which they had sprung. His years playing and touring with Big Black and Rapeman made him a contemporary of Sonic Youth, considered the model for independent bands operating with integrity on a major label. Nirvana signed to Geffen’s DGC imprint in early 1991 largely because Sonic Youth had done so two years previously. Nirvana’s managers were also Sonic Youth’s managers. Success, inasmuch as Nirvana had bothered to conceive of it, would be to sell as many records as Sonic Youth.

Or maybe the Pixies. On completion of Nirvana’s first UK tour shortly before the end of 1989, Kurt Cobain told this writer that his favourite album of the decade was “definitely Surfer Rosa by the Pixies”. The record had been produced by Steve Albini. In April the following year, Nirvana were making the long journey from Seattle to Madison, Wisconsin for their first recording session with Butch Vig, who would eventually produce Nevermind. On the van stereo was Surfer Rosa. Krist Novoselic remembers the scene vividly.

“We were somewhere like Montana or North Dakota. Chad was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and Kurt was sitting in this chair in the back that was higher up than the others. He’s sat there, like he was in a throne (laughs), gripping the elbow rests, and then he lifts up his finger, like an edict, and he goes, ‘This shall be the snare sound we shall have!’ And then the tyre blew out. Pow! I guess it was kind of a fulfilment of that edict.”

In particular, Kurt was drawn to how Albini managed to convey the natural acoustics of a rock band playing together in a room. Which was absolutely not how Nirvana were represented on Nevermind. With its double-tracked vocals, drum samples and radio-friendly gloss, Nevermind was a synthetic impression of what Nirvana really were, as much a tribute to the work of mixer Andy Wallace as anything the band actually played.

IT'S INTENSELY BEAUTIFUL BUT AT THE SAME SIME IT'S VERY DARK AND ABRASIVE. WHEREAS NEVERMIND WAS KIND OF LIKE A BUBBLEGUM RECORD.

Krist Novoselic

“I know Kurt liked the way Nevermind sounded,” says Novoselic. “That was just a reaction, a reaction to a lot of things. It was kind of a reaction to get Albini. We didn’t wanna be sell-outs and Albini is known for having integrity. It just seemed like it made sense, going back to our roots instead of just making another really slick album. The material on the record, too, was dark. It’s a dark record. It’s intensely beautiful but at the same time it’s very dark and abrasive. Whereas Nevermind was kind of like a bubblegum record.”

ONCE NIRVANA HAD DECIDED that their third album would not be a retread of their breathtakingly popular second, then Steve Albini was the perfect choice of producer. For a start, he famously disavows the notion that he ‘produces’ records at all. Instead, he strives to ‘record’ bands the way they sound, taking pride in doing a good, professional job. Whether or not he likes the band’s music is secondary; an irrelevance, even.

Nirvana had always recognised the value of gesture politics: working with Albini was a single-digit salute to the forces of commerce, to whom they had sold their soul and then watched it commodified like a zesty new brand of processed cheese.

“After Nevermind, we had the power,” Dave Grohl told Q writer Phil Sutcliffe. “Our A&R man at the time, Gary Gersh, was freaking out. I said, Gary, man, don’t be so afraid, the record will turn out great. He said, ‘Oh, I’m not afraid, go ahead, bring me back the best you can do.’ It was like, ‘Go and have your fun, then we’ll get another producer and make the real album.’”

“I don’t think they were behind it!” laughs Novoselic. “But we’d sold enough records to do whatever the hell we wanted.”

The week before he got a phone call from Kurt Cobain asking him whether he might be interested in making a record with Nirvana, Albini had been moved to write a letter to one of the British music weeklies denying a story alleging that he already was. Months of unfounded speculation that his name was on the producer’s chair for the new Nirvana album had, he claims, cost Albini work among his underground peers.

“I started seeing stuff in the fanzines that I was above working with the small bands, that I had ‘sold out’, that I had done this horrible thing. And at that point, I hadn’t even spoken to the band. I had never spoken to them! I think I did get a drunken phone call from Kurt one night while he was on tour, maybe a year prior, but he didn’t identify himself…”

Once he did get the invitation from Cobain, Albini had to excuse himself and embark upon a little homework. “As absurd as it sounds, at the time I wasn’t that familiar with Nirvana’s music. Y’know, I had heard it at other people’s houses. I couldn’t count myself a fan at that point and I didn’t think particularly that they were the best of the bands of that generation and of that geographic/temporal nexus. I picked up their other records and listened to them. It didn’t really change my impression. Their weakest album is obviously Nevermind. It’s also the least representative of the band as I knew them. As their friends described them, that record was the least like they were.

“I GOT A DRUNKEN PHONE CALL FROM KURT ONE NIGHT WHILE HE WAS ON TOUR, MAYBE A YEAR PRIOR, BUT HE DIDN’T IDENTIFY HIMSELF.”

STEVE ALBINI

“There was a strange intensity to all their records, and there was a sort of subtle perversion to almost everything that came out of Kurt’s mouth that I liked. And Dave Grohl is an absolute monster of a drummer, so it’s hard to imagine a record with him drumming on that wouldn’t at least be fun to listen to.”

Thus brimming with enthusiasm, Albini spoke once more to Cobain. He suggested he write up a proposal of how they might make a record together, what the good and bad approaches would be. Even at this preliminary stage, Albini showed his hand unambiguously: virtually everything he suggested was the diametric opposite to how Nevermind was recorded. They would work quickly and efficiently, the way Nirvana would have worked when left to their own devices in the early days. The record company wouldn’t like this, of course, but then in Steve Albini’s vision of how to make the next Nirvana album the record company wasn’t part of the equation. They weren’t even going to be paying for it.

“Let the band be in charge of everything… I was suggesting they make the record themselves, using their own money. I’d give them whatever assistance I could, but I wasn’t going to get particularly involved with the music, I wasn’t going to be making musical suggestions. It would be my standard job.”

The band agreed. They would go to Minnesota for a self-imposed deadline of two weeks and make a record with Steve Albini. Recording costs: $24,000. Much wrangling then ensued between Albini and Gold Mountain Entertainment, Nirvana’s management company, about how much he was going to be paid. Gold Mountain suggested a form of royalty arrangement, whereby Albini would recoup a percentage of every copy of the record sold. Although this meant he could earn around $500,000, Albini refused – “I’m disgusted by that concept, and that’s an absurd amount of money.” Instead, he proposed a one-off flat fee of $100,000 up front.

“That seemed to satisfy everybody,” says Albini. “I think at that point there were still people who were sort of justifying their jobs by being suspicious of me. Saying, ‘Well, we don’t want to waste a lot of time and money with this guy if it doesn’t work out.’ People oblivious to the notion that I have never worked on a record where it didn’t work out. I am not a cantankerous freak where my peccadilloes might upset the applecart and stop progress on the record…

“The record company was not going to be involved in the record from a production standpoint, and they were paying lip service as though that were a good idea, but it was obvious that made everybody feel very uncomfortable. It was obvious they had a Plan B folder somewhere.”

Given Nirvana A&R man Gary Gersh’s aforementioned comments to Dave Grohl, this seems very likely. Albini added a clause to his financial proposal to Gold Mountain, stating that if anything he recorded with Nirvana was to be altered subsequently, then he preferred to do it himself.

“So, that was it. We went to Minnesota. Twelve days later, we had a record.”

AFTER DRIVING FROM THE airport with Brent Sigmeth, Kurt Cobain, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic arrived at Pachyderm to be greeted by Albini, his studio maintenance technician Robert S. (Bob) Weston IV, Carter Nicole Launt, a macrobiotic chef who happened to be dating Weston at the time and whose job it was to cater to the diverse culinary needs of the workers… and Launt’s dog, Z. Only these seven people were present for the entirety of the session. At the behest of the band, no one from Geffen or Gold Mountain visited at any point.

Work on the making of In Utero started in earnest on Valentine’s Day 1993. The three band members set up their equipment, then began recording the basic tracks. The set-up was the same for each song, except for the faster, more aggressive songs like Tourette’s and Very Ape, where the drums were recorded in a kitchenette adjacent to the main recording space, which was found to have its own natural reverb. Brent Sigmeth remembers watching intently as Grohl’s drum kit was painstakingly mic’ed up; indeed, it was Albini’s knowledge of microphone technique which most impressed Cobain. He estimated 30 were used for the drums alone.

For most of his guitar parts Cobain used a cheap guitar which, according to Albini, looked like it came from a pawn shop. On one song he played a rare allaluminium guitar called a Veleno, originally made popular in the ’70s by Grand Funk Railroad, which Albini had brought along specially. Albini ascribes the strained, distorted guitar sounds on In Utero to a Fender Quad Reverb amp of which Cobain was particularly fond, in which three of the four power tubes were either broken or missing. Generally, however, Albini doesn’t recall recording Nirvana any differently from any other band.

“On every record there are a few little things that somebody asks you to do that you have to figure out. At the end of Rape Me, there was meant to be this really extreme vocal… (pause). Ah, I can’t remember which song it was. I think it was the Milkmaid song, or whatever it’s called [Milk It], the vocal had to sound more crazy than it had up to that point. So I had to find a way to make the vocal leap forward at the end. Those are things you solve at the moment.

“But there were no magic tricks. There was no, Well, we wrapped the microphone in foil and put it in a bucket of sand! (Laughs) Whenever anybody involved in making a record tells you stuff like that he’s either feeding you a line, or if they actually went to that much trouble to do something like that they probably didn’t know what the hell they were doing. Making records is a very straightforward process, it’s not black magic. You put up a microphone and listen to what it sounds like. If it doesn’t sound good you put up another one.”

• READ MORE: “I think I’m going to puke…” Inside Kurt Cobain’s Last Photo Session

THE AVERAGE DAY AT Pachyderm began at around 10am, when everyone got up and hung around the house eating breakfast. At noon, the band and engineers would make their way down to the studio where they would work until evening. Meanwhile, Carter Nicole Launt would prepare lunch, which would be delivered to the studio mid-afternoon, then dinner, which was a big family-style affair around a table. Launt remembers each member of the band had particular food requirements.

“Krist was a vegan,” she says, “so no dairy and no meat. Kurt, he had a little erratic schedule of eating. He liked frozen pizza and he would get up in the middle of the night and make himself something. Dave was kind of the all-American eater. Nothing too strange!”

After dinner, there might be some TV action. Late evening it was back to the studio, until midnight or maybe 1am. Aside from one weekend trip to Minneapolis to see local hardcore grotesques the Cows and a couple of forays to the local mall – Kurt’s visit, to buy a present for Z the dog, caused some consternation among the youth of Cannon Falls – the band never left the studio/house complex, and never wavered from their daily routine.

Albini and Weston estimate that basic track recording took four, maybe five days, then a couple of days overdubbing and five days mixing. That the album was completed slightly ahead of the two-week deadline is tribute not only to Albini’s work ethic but to the provision for the job in hand made Shutterstock by Nirvana. “They knew the material, they’d figured out all the little details,” says Steve. “I don’t know how quickly the songs were worked up, but they certainly weren’t sitting down in the hallway trying to come up with more words or whatever. They were as prepared as any band I’ve ever worked with.”

“We just focused intensely on rehearsing,” recalls Novoselic. “That’s the thing that we did best. Just got in the rehearsal room and knuckled down. We had the songs down tight. So we showed up in Cannon Falls, we set up our gear and we started playing. We tracked almost all the songs in the first two days. Some of the songs, I think over half of the songs, we did first take. We knew that Albini didn’t wanna deal with some bigtime rock band or have to coddle some half-assed musicians. So, we knew how to rock! We’d been rockin’ for years, we had our licks down. I remember Albini standing there by the tape machine with his arms folded, bobbing his head and we would just pop ’em out one after the other. ‘Well, that sounded good. Let’s do this song.’ The record was recorded really fast.”

For most of the songs, Kurt’s lyrics were finalised only on the day of recording. Not in the hallway: more likely in his head. Once, he sent Carter Nicole to the local grocery to buy some cherry-flavoured lozenges to soothe his sore throat. These became the “cherry-flavoured antacids” mentioned in Pennyroyal Tea. He subsequently claimed in an interview with Dutch magazine Oor that “only half the compositions were ready. The rest originated from messing around in the studio.”

Nirvana’s “messing around” on In Utero puts the hard graft of most other groups into cruel perspective. That they were able to conjure such potent material under such circumstances and then render it with such trenchant conviction reaffirmed how precious this band really was. A two-day demo session with Jack Endino in Seattle the previous October had been a half-hearted affair – unsurprising, given that Cobain and Courtney Love were embroiled in a battle for custody of their two-month-old daughter Frances Bean – with Kurt singing on only one of the six songs recorded (Rape Me) and a reportedly tense atmosphere prevailing.

The Pachyderm session, by contrast, was characterised by dedication to the music and much camaraderie, notably between the band and their producer. Practical jokes were a speciality: prank phone calls to, among others, Evan Dando, Gene Simmons and Eddie Vedder, as well as indoor pyrotechnics…

“We had this Isopropyl alcohol in the studio to clean tape heads with,” remembers Brent Sigmeth. “Steve was taking a nap one day in the lounge. Dave took this alcohol and poured it on his baseball cap and walked into the lounge, lit his head on fire and went, ‘Steve! My head’s on fire!’ Steve woke up and looked at him with his flaming head, frowned and just went back to sleep. We still have the remains of the hat here somewhere.”

“It was the easiest recording we’ve ever done, hands down,” Cobain later told Nirvana biographer Michael Azerrad. “I thought we would eventually get on each other’s nerves and end up screaming at each other. I was prepared to have to live with this person who was supposedly a sexist jerk, but he was surprisingly helpful and friendly and easy to get along with.” Krist Novoselic: “The guy’s a sweetheart! He’s a totally mellow dude. Steve’s from Montana!”

From his perspective, Albini says he tried to strike a balance between respectable professionalism and sympathy in his day-to-day interaction with the band. “They were the same sort of people as me. I admired and respected them. I never tried to be intimately friendly with any of them. They had been subjected to a million fleas jumping out from the bushes at ’em. People wanting something from them, people wanting to be a part of their show. The least I could do was to give them the courtesy of having them being in control of our relationship. I didn’t try and get too inquisitive into Kurt’s life. As much as I grew to admire and respect them, I didn’t want them to feel like I was another one of these fuckers trying to latch onto their rocket.”

“WHEN COURTNEY LOVE TURNED UP IT DID AFFECT THINGS. I THINK IT WAS STRESSFUL FOR KURT. SHE WAS CONFRONTATIONAL WITH PEOPLE THERE.”

CARTER NICOLE LAUNT

THE ARRIVAL OF COURTNEY Love a week into proceedings disrupted the harmonious atmosphere. Albini, having previously described Love as a “psycho hose-beast”, will not be drawn on the subject (“I don’t have anything to say about her”).

“It did affect things, definitely,” says Carter Nicole Launt. “I think it was stressful for Kurt. I think she put a lot of pressure on him and wasn’t always as approving of the way the songs were. She was very critical of his work, and actually was kind of confrontational with people there. Yeah, it definitely was stressful. I just think it made people uncomfortable, to bring a lot of their personal things into the public arena. We were strangers, basically, to them. It made him uncomfortable.”

But by the time of the final playback, nothing could dampen an ecstatic mood. Wine and cigars were the order of the evening.

Albini: “Everybody was really happy. There was this really serious, really congratulatory sense of accomplishment. I thought they did a great job. I’ve been asked repeatedly if Kurt was on drugs while I was there.

And I’ve been around people who use dope a lot, and on the one hand I know how they behave and on the other hand I know how deceptive they can be. And my best estimate was that no, he wasn’t, he was being very productive. That was a period of his life where he was very focused. He was focused on making this record and he didn’t want to let the other guys in the band down. He was committed to the task. He was as sober – and I use that adjective to mean serious – as anybody I’ve ever worked with in the studio.”

• READ MORE: Nirvana Play UK For The First Time

THUS NIRVANA LEFT MINNESOTA happy and satisfied. It wasn’t to last. One or two weeks after the Pachyderm session had finished, Cobain called Albini to tell him that Nirvana’s A&R man hated the album. “He said, ‘It sounds like crap, there’s way too much effect on the drums, you can’t hear the vocals,’” Cobain later told The Stud Brothers in Melody Maker. “He didn’t think the songwriting was up to par. And having your A&R say that is kind of like having your father or stepfather telling you to take out the trash.”

Gary Gersh wasn’t alone. The band’s management were hardly enamoured with what they’d been handed. Nonetheless, Cobain stressed to Albini that the band were determined the album should be released as it was. “I know for a while there was a reactionary element to our mindset back then,” Novoselic recalls. “I know for a while I felt like we shouldn’t touch it as a point of principle. But that’s not very rational. That stuff clouds your judgment.”

Albini: “The next thing that happened was that I got a call from a journalist in Chicago saying that Geffen’s publicity department had gotten in touch with him and off the record had told him that the new Nirvana record was awful and that it was all my fault. That it was unreleasable and that I had fucked up, and what did I have to say about that? What I said was that Nirvana made the record they wanted to make and the record company could stick it up their ass… I believe actually that he got a call from Gary Gersh – Gary Gersh was saying this to anyone who would listen, ’cos I was hearing it from a number of different sources.

“The word was out that I had fucked up this Nirvana record. And I don’t know if that was being done specifically to embarrass me or if it was being done just to put pressure on the band. I really don’t know what the rationale was.”

Greg Kot’s article in the April 19 issue of the Chicago Tribune, headlined ‘Record Label Finds Little Bliss In Nirvana’s Latest’, was seized on by other titles, from Village Voice and Rolling Stone upwards. In the meantime, Kurt Cobain had again called Albini, this time to tell him that the band were having second thoughts and were thinking of remixing some tracks. Steve feared that the band’s insecurities were being manipulated by their label. Worse, it seemed he was being set up as the villain of the piece, the inveterate noise guru who’d ruined the next Nirvana album. Albini called Kurt to say he didn’t think that he could improve on the Pachyderm mixes.

Albini: “Then Krist called me and said, ‘Y’know, it just doesn’t sound as good as it did in Minnesota.’ And I reiterated that I felt like we’d gotten the full monty, I felt like we’d gotten everything we could out of the master that we could when we were in Minnesota. And that I was still of the opinion we shouldn’t tamper with it.”

“GEFFEN HAD TOLD THE JOURNALIST THAT THE NEW NIRVANA ALBUM WAS AWFUL AND IT WAS ALL MY FAULT. THAT IT WAS UNRELEASABLE AND I’D FUCKED UP.” 

STEVE ALBINI

The band, however, was becoming increasingly glum about the Pachyderm recordings. They were determined to remix two songs – All Apologies and Heart-Shaped Box. And if Albini didn’t think he could improve upon his own recordings, he would clearly take a dim view of anyone else trying. Especially if one of those people happened to be, say, Andy Wallace, who had remixed Nevermind. In the end, he acceded to the wishes of the band, and gave them his blessing to “tinker around” with his recording. Krist Novoselic now says he feels the band simply didn’t have enough time to reflect properly on what they had recorded at Pachyderm.

“That was the thing with Steve, it felt like once the record was done it was completely done. That’s when the record label kinda stepped in and said, ‘Hey…!’ We had a confrontation about the situation. Maybe I shoulda spoke up at the time. I think it’s a great-sounding record. It’s a highly artistic record. I don’t know who else could have produced it except Albini.

“But,” he laughs, “you know why we had to remix Heart-Shaped Box? You should hear the original version of that song, the guitar solo has this effect on it, it just sabotages the whole song. Steve and Kurt were colluding! I would go to Kurt, Why are you sabotaging this beautiful song by putting this hideous abortion in the centre of it? He’d be like, ‘Well, I think it sounds cool.’ I don’t even remember what their arguments were. Some statement against commercial radio or something, the popular mainstream aesthetic… I dunno! I guess I finally got my way. Scott Litt was an opportunity to change things.”

By the time Nirvana had repaired to Bad Animals studio in Seattle with R.E.M. producer Scott Litt in early May, the reverberations caused by Kot’s article were seismic. Newsweek ran a fullpage story on Geffen’s alleged infringement of Nirvana’s artistic control, backing the essence of the piece. Geffen issued a press release quoting Kurt as saying, “There has been no pressure from our record label to change the tracks we did with Albini. We have 100 per cent control of our music. The band felt the vocals were not loud enough on a few of the tracks. We want to change that.”

Nirvana wrote a letter in response to the Newsweek article, criticising writer Jeff Giles on the grounds that he “ridiculed our relationship with our label based on totally erroneous information.” The letter was subsequently reprinted as a full-page advertisement in Billboard. In the Geffen press release, meanwhile, company president Ed Rosenblatt stated: “As I have assured the members of Nirvana and their management all along, we will release whatever record the band delivers to us.”

Which, in the end, they did. The version of In Utero that finally went into the shops on September 21, 1993 was exactly what Nirvana delivered to Geffen, exactly what the band wanted people to hear. The album was as recorded in Minnesota with Steve Albini, save for the two remixed tracks – both of which were released as singles – and a remastering session at which, in the assessment of Bob Weston, the band hoped to “change the overall sound of the album. The stereo doesn’t sound as wide. The guitar has been flattened out a bit. On the original mixes the guitar would just leap out.

“But,” adds Weston, “even with the changes that were made it’s a great record. The songs are great and the recording is great and the performances are great. And besides, it’s their record. If they wanted to remix a few songs and do a lot in the mastering, that’s their prerogative. All that matters when you make a record is that the band is happy with the final result.”

These are sentiments with which Albini concurs, though he feels that the final mastering was “overbearing. For my own personal satisfaction, because I worked on that record and felt close to it, I felt like it sounded better before any tinkering was done. When they sent me a copy I put it on and instantly I was disappointed in the mastering.”

Yet it was as much the media brouhaha over the mooted remix of the album which soured his relations with the band, during a period when both parties should have been basking in the glow of a good job well done. In interviews around the release of In Utero, Kurt Cobain repeatedly stated the shitstorm had all been Albini’s fault, that he had no reason to be so paranoid. But as Kurt himself once sang: “Just because you’re paranoid/Don’t mean they’re not after you…”

GREG KOT, FOR ONE, feels Albini has been hard done by. Like all good journalists, to this day he continues to honour the confidentiality of his sources who told him off the record that Steve Albini had made an “unreleasable” album.

“But I will say that it was several people in the Geffen hierarchy, including highly placed people,” avers Kot. “Not publicists. There were people involved who would know the inner workings of Nirvana. The problem is that nobody wanted to go on the record. It was more people spouting off, and I thought, How much of this is real? In order to run a story I needed to have somebody on the record who would comment on this, who would talk about what kind of pressure was on the band at the time. And, of course, I called Steve.

“My impression when I talked to Steve was that he was aware that the band was under some kind of pressure from the label and he was able to confirm basically everything that I had been told by people within the label. That’s pretty much it.”

Novoselic, meanwhile, has nothing but warm regard for the album which, eight years after it was created, represents Nirvana’s unwanted epitaph, as well as the band’s towering artistic peak.

“Y’know man, it’s my favourite Nirvana record, and I’ll you why – there was a lot of stuff going on with the band, externally and internally, there was a lot of pressures. But when we walked through that door we left all that stuff outside the door. We just played music, we worked together really well, we were laughing, we were concentrating, we were open. And that really shows on the record. We didn’t mess around. Nobody got bombed, everybody was focused and clear-headed. I’m really proud of it, it’s a beautiful record. Sometimes the lyrics on In Utero are really creepy. I listen to ’em now and it’s like – why didn’t I hear that back then?”

It may have been Nevermind that broke the mould, but it is In Utero that curates the soul of Nirvana. And along with Dave, Krist and Kurt, it was Steve Albini who made it what it is. Small wonder that today the producer who insists he is nothing of the kind, is left with mixed emotions about the affair.

“It was just the ugliest side of the record business,” he reflects. “All these people trying their hardest to manipulate every situation, and just chewing up people in the process. It was fucking hideous. It was really disgusting to me. And I think everyone involved in that, I can’t understand how they can live with themselves. So I haven’t listened to that record a whole lot. If I think about it, I think about it fondly. I really enjoyed meeting the band, I have a lot of respect for them as people and musicians. I’m really proud of the job that I did – with the reservation the band and I are probably the only people who have genuinely heard the work I did!

“Not long ago, I was asked to play it for somebody who was in the studio and wanted to hear it, for some reference to something. So I played bits of it, and it brought me back. It brought back the whole experience. I really enjoyed working on the record. I’m really sad Kurt’s gone. And I would do it again.”

This feature appeared in MOJO's deluxe Nirvana special, Nirvana Come As You Are 1987-1994. More info and to order a copy HERE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

18.

Beady Eye

BE

Columbia, 2013

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

17.

Liam Gallagher

C’Mon You Know

Warner Bros, 2022

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

16.

Different Gear, Still Speeding

Beady Eye/Dangerbird, 2011

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

15.

Oasis

Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants

Big Brother, 2000

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

14.

Oasis

Dig Out Your Soul

Big Brother, 2008

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

13.

Liam Gallagher

As You Were

Warner Bros, 2017

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

12.

Liam Gallagher

Why Me? Why Not

Warner Bros, 2019

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

11.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Chasing Yesterday

Sour Mash, 2015

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

10.

Liam Gallagher John Squire

Liam Gallagher John Squire

Warner Bros, 2024

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

9.

Oasis

Be Here Now

Creation, 1997

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

8.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Sour Mash, 2011

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

7.

Oasis

Heathen Chemistry

Big Brother, 2002

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

6.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Who Built The Moon?

Sour Mash, 2017

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

5.

Oasis

Don’t Believe The Truth

Big Brother, 2005

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

4.

Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Council Skies

Sour Mash, 2023

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

3.

Oasis

The Masterplan

Creation, 1998

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

2.

Oasis

(What’s The Story) Morning Glory

Creation, 1995

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

1.

Oasis

Definitely Maybe

Creation, 1994

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

• READ MORE: Every Oasis B-Side Ranked!

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

Picture: Getty Images

On September 19, 1973, Gram Parsons passed away aged just 26, but not before two solo albums, rich in country soul, fulfilled a portion of his promise. The tragedy and, perhaps, the inevitability of that loss is still felt by friends and fellow musicians. In this extract from MOJO’s 2023 feature on Parsons, his life and his music, Grayson Haver Currin charts the winding road that led to GP and Grievous Angel, a road that saw him jettisoning The International Submarine Band, fleeing The Byrds, going cold on The Flying Burrito Brothers and getting booted  out of the sessions for Exile On Main Street…

BY MARCH 1972, GRAM PARSONS – 25, in Los Angeles for less than five years – was already unsure how he still fit into the music industry, or if he ever had.

“One of my problems is understanding the necessary business requirements for anything – wanting to ignore them… but knowing certain things are necessary to get anything happening,” he said that month during a discursive and narcotised conversation with Chuck Cassell, A&M Records’ communications head. (The full tape was released three decades later as Big Mouth Blues.)

“But I like the bright lights, and that’s part of country music,” Parsons opined. “The country guy in the big city, who doesn’t know where to go.” In just four years, Parsons had already bailed on three bands, including two of his own. Before LHI label boss Lee Hazlewood could even release The International Submarine Band’s Safe At Home, one of the first bona fide country rock records, Parsons was flirting with The Byrds, a band that had helped lure him to California but seemed on the verge of break-up itself.

In fact, when Byrds bassist Chris Hillman found himself waiting in a bank line alongside Parsons in early 1968, the eternal opportunist told him the ISB was already done. Hillman invited him to a Byrds practice that night. “He knew his way around our songs, and could sing, too,” Hillman wrote in his memoir, Time Between. “Keyboard player? Not really, but he more than made up for it with some songs he had written and brought in to play for us.”

Parsons’ five-month stint with The Byrds was pivotal for the band, himself, and the sound of rock at large. His deepening interest in country redirected a group on the cusp of cutting a heady concept album that traced music’s evolution through the 20th century. Hickory Wind, his paean to the bygone innocence of his Southern youth, became a linchpin for The Byrds’ country turn on Sweetheart Of The Rodeo. Much to the chagrin of the staid Grand Ole Opry, they played it by surprise when they became the first rock band to perform at country’s ‘mother church’, the Ryman in Nashville.

But by the time Columbia could issue Sweetheart, the band had excised most of Parsons’ vocals. They worried not only about potential legal entanglements with Hazlewood but also that it would misrepresent The Byrds, since Parsons stopped touring the moment The Rolling Stones showed up for their London gig at the Royal Albert Hall. He refused to continue to South Africa, insisting he was a conscientious objector to apartheid, though the band was playing there as protest.

“It wasn’t for political reasons. It was because he wanted to stay in London,” Roger McGuinn snapped in an inter view less than a year later. “He dug it there, dug Marianne Faithfull and The Rolling Stones. He wanted to stay in that scene.”

Parsons’ restlessness didn’t end there. By the time McGuinn inveighed against Parsons, he and Hillman had already reconnected as the Flying Burrito Brothers, playing lots of country and smoking lots of weed in Topanga Canyon. “Gram and I shared a common vision to bring real country music to a rock audience with a hip sensibility,” Hillman wrote. “We agreed it would make sense for us to join forces.”

The Gilded Palace Of Sin, the Burritos’ debut, was the scintillating culmination of everything Parsons had already done, with R&B and rock frisson tucked inside classic country ache. But Parsons couldn’t stay. He became convinced that Chris Ethridge was a great bassist who didn’t understand country and that ‘Sneaky Pete’ Kleinow was a pedal steel ace who wasn’t fit for the gig. He stuck around only long enough to make sure the second album didn’t become what he dubbed “a freak hit”.

For Jet Thomas, Parsons’ already evident lack of stickability was a familial legacy – a by-product of trust fund and tragedy. “He had too much money. That was one of his biggest problems. He didn’t need money, and everyone else around him did. They couldn’t afford to get drunk and not perform. He could. It was his way to cope.”

In the fall of 1971, after Parsons had overstayed his welcome at the Stones’ Exile On Main St. sessions in France, he rendezvoused with the Burritos in the South, sitting in with them in Charlotte and Baltimore. He was impressed by their new musicality, especially the alacrity of steel player Al Perkins and champion bluegrass fiddler Byron Berline.

“It was probably just a compliment,” remembers Perkins, laughing, “but he said, ‘If you’d been the steel player when I was in the band, we’d probably still be together.’”

Idle praise or not, the comment was telling. More than two years since his last real record, new music was on Parsons’ mind…

Photo: Getty Images

This article originally appeared in MOJO 359.

Echo & The Bunnymen - Apples For Isaac

★★★★

BMG

“Don’t need protecting, don’t need correcting,” insists Ian McCulloch on combative opener Take Me By The Hand. Anyone who read the late David Cavanagh’s unsettling interview in MOJO 297 might have doubted Mac’s ability to stand up for himself, musically or otherwise, so the fact that the Bunnymen’s thirteenth studio LP is lucid and moderately lovely is a minor miracle.

• READ MORE: Echo & The Bunnymen Interviewed: “We’re the most relevant, most glorious and noble of bands on the planet!”

Apples For Isaac (title lifted from the joyous Hijacked) has style and swagger, with lead single Brussels Is Haunted an ecstatic psychogeography field trip through the Belgian capital, featuring Plastic Bertrand, the Battle of Waterloo, cassis and bier blonde. The metaphysical concerns of The Honey, An Unstoppable Force and We Prayed In The Dark show that Mac knows he cannot defy the laws of gravity forever, but with Apples For Isaac the Bunnymen have fallen upwards.

Apples For Isaac is out September 18 on BMG.

Tracklisting:

1. Take Me By The Hand
2. Can't Be Sold
3. Brussels Is Haunted
4. I'll Be Your Sunshine
5. Hijacked
6. The Honey
7. An Unstoppable Force
8. The Light That Surrounds You
9. Lab Rats Ran
10. Asimov
11. We Prayed In the Dark

“You can’t help thinking about mortality – how’s the world gonna cope without me?”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our interview with Echo & The Bunnymen in full. As the album many fans thought they’d never see finally arrives, Ian McCulloch opens up about bust-ups with his long-serving lieutenant, Will Sergeant; peace talks with his old bête noir, Bono; and The Bunnymen’s unexpected young goth fanbase – “They were looking at me like I was Nosferatu…” Mac tells Tom Doyle. More info and to order a copy for a delivery wherever you are HERE!

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“So what do I do now that I’m 65?” Neil Young pondered in his 2012 memoir, Waging Heavy Peace. “Retire? Nope. I can’t stop moving long enough to do that.”

Throughout the 21st century, Young has generally kept moving so relentlessly, and so quickly, that his fans can be forgiven for suffering from a little whiplash. There have been 20 studio albums, six live albums, two memoirs, approximately 30 obsessively curated Archives releases, at least seven movies, innumerable tours, a revolutionary car, a Toblerone-shaped rival to the iPod, an energetic sideline in political activism, some business with model railways, and a brain aneurysm. For starters. It’s a level of productivity that puts his contemporaries to shame, but the speed and urgency of it all means the quality control hasn’t always been flawless.

• READ MORE: Neil Young Exclusive: “There’s nothing left on the shelf that I didn’t think was good – it wouldn’t have made it to the shelf!”

“I often think that when Neil Young had something on his mind in the past, he’d write a song about it. In the 2000s, he’d write an album,” writes MOJO reader, Rog Hildreth, and he has a point, as do the other readers who got in touch to help collate this list who note how the death of long-serving producer David Briggs in 1995 meant there was no one to push back against some of Young’s less-considered, more rushed ideas.

But that lack of a critical filter has its benefits, too, and Young’s post-millennial hyperactivity can also be seen as a unique insight into how a genius is driven to capture and release every single creative idea he comes up with. So many ideas, so many songs, it can be easy to overlook the really good ones – to underestimate the strength of Neil Young’s fecund later years.

As he releases yet another late-career gem in the shape of Second Song, MOJO presents a guide to the riches buried in Neil Young’s 21st century motherlode – 10 albums deserving of more prominence in that vast canon. Here are domestic dramas, radical rallying cries, Crazy Horse firestorms, Nashville delicacies, home baked rock operas, hip-hop haircuts, lost classics and a live album full of animal noises. Don’t believe everything he says: in the past 25 years, it definitely hasn’t been all one song…

10.

Living With War

Neil Young

REPRISE, 2006

Some of Young’s 21st century albums have felt like spur-of-the-moment responses to whatever’s specifically preoccupying him that month: electric cars vs gas-guzzlers (Fork In The Road, 2009); corporate farming (T_he Monsanto Years_, 2015). The most enduring of these often scrappy dispatches is Living With War, “metal folk protest music” (his words) that bluntly eviscerates George W Bush and his Iraq war with the help of Young’s Freedom-era rhythm section of Chad Cromwell and Rick Rosas, a trumpeter, and a 100-voice choir. The juxtaposition of scrawny garage band and bombastic chorale is odd but effective; an alternate version, Living With War: “In The Beginning”, strips off the overdubbed backing vocals for enhanced rawness.

9.

Barn

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

REPRISE, 2021

Following the retirement of Frank ‘Poncho’ Sampedro, it took a while for Young to rebuild Crazy Horse, recalling Nils Lofgren for the first time since Trans in 1983. The three reunion albums thus far – Colorado(2019), Barn (2021), World Record (2022) – are patchy and harbour one great album of songs between them, but Barn is the most consistent. Heading West, Welcome Back, Don’t Forget Love and the heroically chuntering Canerican are all keepers here, and Lofgren’s barroom piano adds knockabout bonhomie. Lovers of the epic Crazy Horse, though, should swerve to the Rick Rubin-produced World Record for the 15-minute late classic Chevrolet.

8.

Second Song

Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts

REPRISE, 2026

As evidenced on 2025’s Talkin To The Trees, Young’s current backing band, The Chrome Hearts, are adept at channelling Crazy Horse’s monolithic stomp. Yet it’s their grace and sensitivity – their Stray Gators acoustic sway - that comes to the fore on Second Song. Young’s 50th studio album sits on a continuum that stretches from Harvest and Comes A Time, through to more recent laid-back jewels Silver And Gold and Prairie Wind, via 1992’s Harvest Moon. With two tracks, I’ll Love You Forever and Casting Me Away From You, originating from his pre-Buffalo Springfield days, the vibes are warm, reflective, and not a little frayed around the edges, as Young’s commitment to spontaneity only becomes more militant with age.

7.

Silver & Gold

Neil Young

REPRISE, 2000

Young’s first album of the millennium came after prolonged manoeuvres with Crazy Horse and coded as a reaction to their crunchiness. Silver & Gold fits reasonably well into the ‘New Harvest’ bracket of Young’s catalogue, with the focus on acoustic country rock, and with the presence of Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt on backing vocals. The general mellowing extends to a conciliatory Buffalo Springfield Again (Young eventually reunited that band in 2011) but, as with many latter-day Young albums, the standouts are lost songs from previous decades: Razor Love and the title track, both first attempted in the early 1980s.

6.

Prairie Wind

Neil Young

REPRISE, 2005

Prairie Wind occupies a similar aesthetic space to Silver & Gold, and shares many of the same musicians, but it’s a richer-sounding, more robust record – perhaps more Old Ways 
than Harvest – with generally superior songs. Mortality is the overriding preoccupation, as Young prepares for a brain operation and navigates his father’s failing health. A warm and companionable album as much as a reflective one, nevertheless, Prairie Wind also makes room for a goofy Elvis tribute and a Chris Rock quote. The title 
track is, loosely, a big band blues on the riff of The Needle And The Damage Done – 
and superb.

5.

Chrome Dreams II

Neil Young

REPRISE, 2007

In a classically confusing Young move, Chrome Dreams II is the sequel to a 1977 album that he didn’t actually release until 2023. And while many of his 21st century albums are thematically tight, Chrome Dreams II is successfully all over the place, folksy reveries crashing up against R&B vamps and molten electric workouts. None of the songs figured on the original Chrome Dreams, but many are old, unreleased and re-recorded – apart from the sensational, horn-augmented lurch of Ordinary People, an 18-minute burner mystifyingly left in the can since Freedom’s 1988 sessions.

4.

Greendale

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

REPRISE, 2003

The rock opera in Young’s canon, after a fashion. Greendale’s detailed and affectionate portrait of smalltown America is actually more like a ramshackle community theatre production on the smallest of scales, with Young, the ornery sentimentalist, telling his stories with unvarnished charm. Ridiculed at the time, the songs have proved much more resilient and flexible than expected, so that eco-anthems Sun Green and Be The Rain became critical parts of Young’s summer 2025 tour with The Chrome Hearts. The only Crazy Horse album without a second guitarist, Sampedro not being required to flesh out these sinewy, patiently unravelling guitar-bass-drums jams.

3.

Toast

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

REPRISE, 2022

2002’s Are You Passionate?, with Booker T & The M.G.’s, usually ranks as one of Young’s weaker albums, but it holds one tantalising track: Goin’ Home, salvaged from an abandoned Crazy Horse session. That entire set finally surfaced in 2022 as Toast, a document of a disintegrating relationship (with, presumably, second wife Pegi Young) marked by the Ditch-like desolate lyrics and Crazy Horse in _Sleeps With Angels_mode, at their most nuanced and empathetic. On the gorgeous Gateway Of Love, Young’s guitar-playing is notably elaborate, even jazzy.

2.

Le Noise

Neil Young

REPRISE, 2010

A regular criticism of later-period Neil Young has been that ever since the death of producer David Briggs in 1995 he’s lacked a critical voice to mediate on his records, to edit the relentless flow of songs. As the punning title implies, that role on Le Noise is taken by Daniel Lanois, who subjects the solo Young’s voice and guitar to a dizzying array of FX. The sonic detailing is impressive, the songs even more so – not least drug memoir Hitchhiker, finally rendered to Young’s satisfaction after being first attempted at the Zuma sessions in 1975.

1.

Psychedelic Pill

Neil Young & Crazy Horse

REPRISE, 2012

The longest hiatus in Crazy Horse history lasted from Greendale in 2003 until 2012. But the last stand of the line-up with Sampedro was spectacular: an online 37-minute jam, Horse Back; a jolly album of folk standards, Americana; and the masterpiece Psychedelic Pill. Young’s 34th studio album is also his longest (87 minutes) and the one that most effectively capitalises on the heavy meditative zones Crazy Horse can manifest from the crudest of tools. Opener Driftin’ Back transcends its random pensées – “Gonna get me a hip-hop haircut” – for 27 minutes of wallowing instrumental bliss-out. Ramada Inn (Going South), meanwhile, is an all-time great Young song, a poignant evocation of relationship breakdown played out in slow motion. A live album of the ensuing Alchemy tour remains stuck in Young’s infinite queue of pending Archives projects.

“We’re doing major damage...”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our world-exclusive interview with Neil Young in full, in which Neil lifts the lid on the making of Second Song, reflects on his past, the state of the world, the current incumbent in the White House, love, and the still mysterious magic of songwriting. Plus, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke recalls an awe-inspiring visit to his hero’s home; Spooner Oldham and Micah Nelson reveal the inner workings of Neil’s latest band; and we look back at Young’s seminal 1968 debut LP. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

In the new issue of MOJO – on sale now – we’re granted an exclusive, ultra-rare interview with Neil Young on the eve of his brand-new album, Second Song. Speaking at his home in Colorado, Young reveals how the record came together, discusses his relationship with the past, finding peace with his wife Daryl Hannah, and his still mercurial approach to making music - “a song shows up, and we just see what happens,” he tells Grayson Haver Currin. In this extract from the interview, Young reflects on his attitude towards his vast body of unreleased work and teases what the next instalment of his acclaimed Archives series might be…

• READ MORE: Neil Young's 50 Greatest Songs

Second Song recalls [2000’s] Silver & Gold, especially the way you’re examining your past and present but thinking about what’s ahead, too. You’ve always done that – avoiding the temptation of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake.

I’m just here, just doing what I do. I try not to think about it too much. But you mentioned that album, Silver & Gold. A lot of people have mentioned that in reference to this record. At the same time as I wrote [the song] Silver & Gold [around 1981/82], within a year or two, I did another record called Hit 39. Silver & Gold was one of the songs, and I recorded it in Nashville with a lot of people, all these great Nashville musicians. I recorded Silver & Gold maybe eight times, but it never felt like it was the one. Now I think it is the one that’s on Hit 39. There’s a lot of music in there, a lot of feelings in Hit 39. It might come out next.

Your archival devotion is fascinating, because some people are so scared of the things they haven’t put into the world. You’re not.

I didn’t have time to put it out. Sometimes entire records are just left on the shelf, because I just kept on going. I wasn’t going to take that record and not put it out. I had already finished it, organised it. It was sitting there, but I just kept on going. I would put out the next one.

Have you ever felt that something sitting on the shelf wasn’t worthy of coming out?

There’s nothing I left on the shelf that I didn’t think was good. It wouldn’t have made it to the shelf. (Laughs) And the Archives is just the way I am. I like to save things. I like to collect things. I have a bunch of songs, so I save them, collect them, put them in a bunch of different places. For years, for decades, for centuries, people have had archival concepts, so there’s nothing new about it. I just applied it to all my work. I was good at keeping the facts. I kept the dates, the people who played, where we played, who produced it, as well as the songs. They were all together, as a collection; they all needed each other.

There are artists, of course, who are anti-archive, who want the stuff they never released to disappear when they die. How do you respond to that mindset?

I feel sorry for them! They did all this stuff. Why don’t they like it? Why do they want to hide it? What happened? I don’t understand that kind of thinking. If you did it, you did it. There it is – you own it. Why not keep track of it? Let someone else decide if it’s any good. Who gives a shit?

There’s a worry that, if you release something bad, it diminishes something you released that’s amazing. But art needn’t work that way.

It doesn’t matter at all. There’s no comparison.

“The whole idea is to not know what you’re doing...”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our world-exclusive interview in full, in which Neil lifts the lid on his latest album, reflects on his past, love, the current incumbent in the White House, and the still mysterious magic of songwriting. Plus, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke recalls an awe-inspiring visit to his hero’s home; Spooner Oldham and Micah Nelson reveal the inner workings of Neil’s latest killer band, The Chrome Hearts; and we look back at Young’s seminal 1968 debut LP. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts - Second Song

★★★★

REPRISE

At the start of 2026, MOJO enlisted the help of our readers to compile a guide to the best new Neil Young albums of the 21st century. It had proved, thus far, a hectic and complicated 26 years: by our count there had been 20 studio albums, six live albums, two memoirs, approximately 30 Archives releases, at least seven movies, innumerable tours, a revolutionary car and a Toblerone-shaped rival to the iPod.

• READ MORE: Neil Young Exclusive: “There’s nothing left on the shelf that I didn’t think was good – it wouldn’t have made it to the shelf!”

Young’s 21st new album of the 21st Century, however, is strong evidence that the Top 10 we constructed needs revision. Second Song is comfortably his best since the molten sprawl of 2012’s Psychedelic Pill, the last hurrah of Poncho Sampedro-era Crazy Horse. And while Young’s current backing band, The Chrome Hearts, can channel the Horse’s monolithic stomp, it is their grace and sensitivity – their Stray Gators acoustic sway - that comes to the fore on this late-period classic.

Second Song, then, sits on a continuum that stretches from Harvest and Comes A Time through to Silver And Gold and Prairie Wind, via Harvest Moon – a record that also featured significant contributions from the Chrome Hearts’ keyboardist, Spooner Oldham. The vibes are warm, reflective, not a little frayed around the edges, as Young’s commitment to spontaneity only becomes more militant with age. “You don’t want to think about it. You don’t want to have it practised,” Young told us recently, in the interview that heads up MOJO 396. “The whole idea is to not know what you’re doing.” “Even jazz guys work the stuff out a little more,” bassist Corey McCormick confesses to MOJO’s Grayson Haver Currin for the same piece.

The younger members of The Chrome Hearts are evidently fast learners, however, and flexible accomplices. Second Song’s title track unravels haphazardly over 11 minutes, but the playing is constantly empathetic and inventive – the dulcimer with which Micah Nelson tracks Young’s acoustic was a spur-of-the-moment decision, which complements the silvery flow of the song.

• READ MORE: Neil Young's 50 Greatest Songs

It’s a song of memory, of old ways, but not one that’s exactly predicated on melancholy defeat. “Too much has changed around us,” Young sings, beautifully, between bursts of harmonica, as drummer Anthony LoGerfo keeps up a measured swing, “but we can bring it back somehow.”

“I disassociate it from the time frame,” Young tells Grayson, and that feels like a critical theme of the record itself – one where old memories and songs, old and young collaborators, become blurred and interdependent, collapsing in on one another in Neil’s autonomous zone. I’ll Love You Forever was first recorded by Young in 1964 with his teenage band, The Squires, and if you listen to the original on the first Archives boxset, it sounds like an enchanted bit of adolescent twang; a lonesome surf ballad to a first love. Revisited 62 eventful years later, however, the lyrics have a new resonance – a paean to the miracles of finding a soulmate later in life, in the shape of Daryl Hannah – and the music has matured into a cosily evocative echo of Harvest Moon.

There’s nothing unusual about Young digging out and re-recording lost songs from his vaults, of course, but going as far back as the time before Buffalo Springfield is new, and a neat way of showcasing the robust consistency of his songcraft that was there from the start. Casting Me Away From You originally dates from 1965, and manifested on Archives Volume 1 as a clean-cut folk revival strummer with his friend Comrie Smith. Now, in the hands of The Chrome Hearts it’s fuller-blooded, knockabout country; a wholly successful resurrection.

• READ MORE: Neil Young's Best Albums Ranked

The best songs, though, are three new burners: the title track, Day After Day and Soon I Might Be Going. Day After Day has that off-the cuff air of many latterday Young songs, as if he’s articulating every random passing thought. This time, though, the overall effect is more cohesive than whimsical, a flowing evocation of ongoing personal contentment. “Now the sun is out and the snow’s melting on the roof,” he sings. “I hear the water drops falling so the day is here/ You’ll be coming down the stairs and I’ll make a special cup for you.” The artlessness is touching, the improvising delicacy of the Chrome Hearts perfectly attuned as it rolls on; a Colorado reverie, with echoes of Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, that’s stronger than some of Young’s other freeform paeans to Hannah in recent years.

Soon I Might Be Going, meanwhile, rides in on stunned electric powerchords, a masterpiece of how internal and external weather, the personal and political, nature and mortality, become entangled in ever more profound and perhaps confounding ways. It’s an open letter of a kind, possibly addressed to his daughter Amber Jean (their relationship the focus of the more upsetting Dark Mirage, from 2025’s Talkin’ To The Trees), that also finds room for a sorrowful allusion to Donald Trump “tearing down the old White House”. The mood is valedictory, the feedback shade and Oldham’s organ adding a fraught undertow to the strikingly lovely lilt of it all. But even here, there’s a recognition of the temporal nature of things, the possibility of change and “waiting for a song”: for better or worse, all these things shall pass.

Second Song is out September 18 on Reprise.

Tracklisting:

1. The Foggy Edge Of Time
2. Day After Day
3. Earth Girl
4. Second Song
5. Casting Me Away From You
6. Soon I Might Be Going
7. I’ll Love You Forever

“We’re doing major damage...”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read our world-exclusive interview with Neil Young in full, in which Neil lifts the lid on the making of Second Song, reflects on his past, the state of the world, the current incumbent in the White House, love, and the still mysterious magic of songwriting. Plus, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke recalls an awe-inspiring visit to his hero’s home; Spooner Oldham and Micah Nelson reveal the inner workings of Neil’s latest band; and we look back at Young’s seminal 1968 debut LP. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are HERE!

Beck - Ride Lonesome

★★★★★

CAPITOL

Sighing strings, a mournfully-strummed acoustic guitar, then a lovelorn voice entering the picture, crooning, “I don’t know where I’m going/But it feels like I’ve been here before/Somewhere down the dark of the night…” Few would have been happy to learn of Hansen’s 2021 divorce from his wife Marissa Ribisi, but there’s a strong argument that a heartbroken Beck produces his best work, as evidenced here within the first 45 seconds of the affecting Bleed. Among his numerous catalogue highpoints, 1996’s Odelay was the postmodern dazzler, but it was 2002’s Sea Change (written in the aftermath of a breakup from long-term girlfriend Leigh Limon) that truly tugged the emotions and positioned Hansen among the greats.

• READ MORE: “Bob Dylan said, ‘What do you think of this kid called Beck? I want to make a record the way he makes records...’”

Ride Lonesome arrives as the latest instalment in his series of acoustic albums (one part Neil Young, one part Nick Drake, but unmistakable as anyone other than Beck) that also includes Mutations (1998) and Morning Phase (2014). Returning from those records are the sympathetic/simpatico team of drummer Joey Waronker, bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, guitarist Smokey Hormel and keyboard-player Roger Joseph Manning Jr., along with Nigel Godrich (mixing). Hansen’s 78-year-old father David Campbell (string arranger for everyone from the Stones to Streisand and regular contributor to Beck’s albums) is meanwhile back to collaborate with his son on the baroque orchestrations, not least the swooning score for In The Night, with its distinct echoes of Drake’s River Man.

Here, as in Sea Change’s gorgeous opener The Golden Age, lonely nocturnal drives are a balm to Beck’s troubled soul. But where that song referred to motoring through the desert with “the window down… the moonlight on your skin” there’s recklessness and danger to Run Away’s depiction of the singer turning “the headlights off” as he cruises through the city. “There’s nothing left to say on desolation day,” he laments.

Sonically, almost every element (save generally for Waronker’s fat, ’70s-dry drums) is swathed in reverb, adding to the air of dreaminess, while in Disappearing Act, Hansen and Manning Jr. layer their voices in the style of a two-man CSN&Y. Those who were left unaffected by the dayglo pop of 2017’s Colors or even the synthscapes of 2019’s Grammy-winning Hyperspace will find much to love here.

Strong from start to finish (perhaps also as result of it being his first album in seven years), *Ride Lonesome’s track eight (of 12), Slow Canyon, for example, is one of Hansen’s greatest songs, the essence of his longing captured in a six-word chorus: “I want you/Yes I do”. Saving perhaps the best for last, closer Beyond The Light, in some ways a sister song to The Golden Age, elegantly weaves all the strands together over five-and-a-half slow-burning, self-healing minutes. You wouldn’t want to wish more emotional turbulence on Beck Hansen, but this is a stunning display of the alchemy of turning pain into sheer beauty.

Ride Lonesome is out September 18 on Capitol.

Tracklisting:

1. Ride Lonesome
2. Run Away
3. In The Night
4. Failed Words
5. Bleed
6. Disappearing Act
7. For Your Love
8. Slow Canyon
9. It Ends Right Here
10. Falling Through My Hands
11. If You Don’t Know What Love Is
12. Beyond The Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything about Amy was like one big diary...

Nick Shymansky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark Ronson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She was really struggling. Physically and mentally...

Sam Beste

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soul Mining: Amy Winehouse’s Lost Gems

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

What It Is (Demo)

On: Frank Deluxe Edition

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

Someone To Watch Over Me

On: Frank Deluxe Edition

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

Love Is A Losing Game (Demo)

On: Back To Black Deluxe Edition

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

I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know

On: YouTube

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

This article originally appeared in MOJO 260

Picture: Alamy

An exclusive interview with Neil Young on the occasion of his new album release. Includes: the lowdown on Second Song; the inner workings of his killer current band, The Chrome Hearts; a look back at Young’s 1968 solo debut; plus – Thom Yorke expresses his awe.

ORDER YOUR COPY HERE!

Also in the issue: the incomparable Dolly Parton; the intergalactic John Coltrane; the enigmatic J.J. Cale; UB40’s Ali Campbell comes out swinging; the Tao of ‘Sad Beck’; the miracle of Echo & The Bunnymen. And: The Kinks; Martha Reeves; Madness; Gil Scott-Heron; Richard Thompson; Cabaret Voltaire; Elastica; Elvis Costello; Popol Vuh; John Prine; Susannah Hoffs; Marillion; Masayoshi Takanaka; Rhiannon Giddens: and more!

THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD is The Goldrush: Neil Young Covered. Fifteen amazing versions of key Neil Young songs, featuring Low, Ty Segall, Drive-By Truckers, The Meters, Bill Frisell, The Feelies, Emmylou Harris, Tindersticks and more!

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CONTENTS MOJO 396

NEIL YOUNG An ultra-rare, super-exclusive interview with Young, as an extraordinary new album restates his unbending faith in serendipity. “A song shows up, and we just see what happens,” he tells Grayson Haver Currin.

JOHN COLTRANE Upon his centenary, we celebrate ’Trane’s impact and assess his legacy, along with Carlos Santana, Vernon Reid, Nubya Garcia, Patti Smith, Grateful Dead and more.

ECHO & THE BUNNYMEN With the LP some thought we might never hear, Ian McCulloch returns. But who are these new young goth fans? “They were looking at me like I was Nosferatu!”

J.J. CALE The laconic, fame-allergic guitarist who rolled with Russell, captivated Clapton and has now inspired a whole hit TV drama series. Andrew Male investigates.

GIL SCOTT-HERON How Black politics, poetry and “the dons” of jazz and funk combined on The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: “We managed to capture lightning in a bottle.”

ALI CAMPBELL The original voice of UB40 with a tangled tale of brotherly loathe, plus a lifelong mission to spread reggae from JA, via Balsall Heath, to the world.

BECK Inspired by an enigmatic western to get the old gang back together, pop’s Peter Pan has delivered a ‘Sad Beck’ classic. Bob Mehr gets the lowdown on Ride Lonesome.

CABARET VOLTAIRE Reunited, at least in part, Sheffield’s sonic terrorists remember post-punk anthems and electro mantras, plus fallen comrades: “We were like brothers.”

REVIEWED Richard Thompson / Elvis Costello / David Bowie / Teenage Fanclub / Ezra Collective / King Crimson / Johnny Marr / Cleo Sol / Arthur Brown / Jake Xerxes Fussell / Rick Wakeman / Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Eels / Dragonflies / Arthur Brown / Funkadelic / Agnes Obel / Osees / Jess Williamson / The Olivia Tremor Control / Gilla Band / Bill Orcutt / Ann Peebles / The Mary Wallopers / Fat Dog / Bloc Party / Kristin Hersh / Josh Rouse / Can / Soft Cell / Eli Paperboy Reed / Gurriers / Tom Morello / Chaka Khan / Beabadoobee / Phil Collins / Suede / Grateful Dead

PLUS Dolly Parton – a legend departs / Unheard Kinks songs emerge / Madness biopic revives / John Prine tribute takes shape / How To Buy… Marillion! / Martha Reeves tells it like it is / Unique Jam tape for sale! / Rhiannon Giddens: pleasure and pain in The Carolina Chocolate Drops / Tara Clerkin Trio arise / Masayoshi Takanaka takes a bow / Elastica expand! / Adieu, Glen Hansard, Frank Beard, Vicki Wickham, William Orbit, Janie Bradford, Bill Oddie… / and – eek! – it’s all back to Jennifer Herrema’s!

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Oasis - Don't Look Back In Anger

★★★★

Disney

There is inevitably a huge built-in spoiler to Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace’s joyful document of Oasis’s 2025 tour: the shows were a sell-out global success; nobody stormed off or bailed out; and the whole thing was triumphant enough that there have been hints that there will be more to come. At the London premier, Liam and Noel Gallagher take to the stage cheerily enough together alongside the writer Steven Knight and the creative team. Yet for the first part of Don’t Look Back In Anger, that really doesn’t feel like a guaranteed outcome.

• READ MORE: Noel Gallagher Interviewed: “Definitely Maybe was the last great punk album…”

After a dizzying montage of the band’s lairy Britpop glory days, followed by footage of the cataclysmic 2009 gig in Paris that decisively marked their 15-year split, Noel Gallagher states: “I will not forgive people.” The view doesn’t become any sunnier when his brother turns up to his first band rehearsal, immediately complains about the drum baffles, delivers his songs with mercury-tipped fury, and leaves without saying goodbye. It’s tense, uncomfortable viewing, if a slightly ridiculous snapshot of alpha-male territory-marking.

Yet happily, it doesn’t last. From the moment the band walk on stage at the first show in Cardiff and Liam grabs Noel’s hand and raises it in the air – a gesture that is touchingly replicated with increased ease at every subsequent show – it’s clear that this is going to work. It also means that much of the film’s tension dissipates before the first half is over, resulting in a long, deeply sentimental victory lap.

The superb live footage manages to both catch the grandeur of the occasion and opens up an impressively intimate relationship with band and fans, showing just how many of the audience members were weeping at any given time (imagine a screening of Bambi, and multiply it by 1000). Even Noel says he has to turn his back on the audience sometimes so they don’t see him becoming emotional (fathers and sons singing along are his particularly lachrymose Kryptonite). There’s an attempt to break the swirling, leaping crowd into individuals, too. Fans from Japan, Brazil and Manchester share what the band mean to them – community, escapism, emotional rescue. “Bonehead means the world to me,” says one Brazilian woman, before introducing the dog who bears the guitarist’s name. Female South Korean free-divers sing Acquiesce to each other for courage. The gentle message is that these songs not only travel well, they also accompany people on their most difficult journeys.

Heart-warming though this is, it’s at the expense of tougher questions. The exact mechanics of the reunion are not revealed. There’s an endearing clip of the Gallaghers’ children singing along at a show, but it transpires that the cousins – now “best friends” – only recently met. There’s a trailing history of pain and anger here, but it’s been stripped out of a film that doesn’t quite put in the work on the redemption arc, preferring to head straight for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (not that money is ever mentioned, either).

• READ MORE: Every Oasis, Liam, And Noel Gallagher Album Ranked

It’s no surprise, then, that the best moments of the film come when sharper, quieter emotions can be heard behind the rapturous roar of the crowd. Noel talks of “fixing the narrative”, and it’s hard not to be moved by the slow thaw between him and Liam – hugs and smiles increasing along with ,erous insightful assessments of the other. When the interview camera finally pulls back and you realise they are sitting side by side, it’s unexpectedly moving, Noel’s laughter fond and authentic as Liam contrasts his static stance with poor Mick Jagger, condemned to caper forever.

The message of brotherly love is slightly overdone in places – the decision to focus on a Mancunian priest delivering a sermon about forgiveness a bit too biblical – but a story that is at heart about family, growth, change and age would struggle not to be affecting. Don’t Look Back In Anger is a little soft at its centre, but it’s because – who would have thought it? – these days, Liam and Noel are, too. If Acquiesce was always your favourite Oasis song, this one’s for you.

What We Learned…

The Gallaghers are finally capable of being nice to each other. 
After the decades of needling and rage, it now appears both brothers are happy to offer generous assessments of each other. Noel not only admires Liam’s technique for balancing a tambourine on his head – “it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever seen,” he laughs incredulously - he also admits to being moved by “what he means to people”. Liam, for his part, speaks of being happy - happy! -  for his brother when he sees what these songs mean to their fans.

**
It's a courtesy extended to Bonehead, too...**
Noel admits that he didn’t used to realise the guitarist “had a thing…but he’s got a thing,” he says, emphatically.

The Auld Triangle is one of Noel Gallagher’s favourite songs. 
Before the band’s show at Dublin’s Croke Park, the audience sang along to Luke Kelly’s version of Dick Shannon’s prison lament The Auld Triangle, moving Noel and Bonehead to tears backstage.

The loss of Mani hit the band hard. 
Oasis found out that Stone Roses’ bassist Mani – an inspiration and “dear friend” - had died when they were on their way to their show in Sao Paulo, a loss that only underscored their new “no more bullshit anymore” perspective on life. They dedicated Live Forever to their “hero”, playing in front of his projected image.

They believe they have finally broken America. 
“America. Oasis is coming. You have one last chance to prove you loved us all along.” Despite their combative US tour announcement, the band realised that their reception in the US might be “lukewarm” in comparison with the tour’s European leg. They were wrong. “We finally woke America up,” says Noel.

Don’t Look Back In Anger is a family saga at heart. 
While their fathers’ feud meant they never had the chance to grow up together, Liam and Noel’s young adult children are shown bonding (“getting spangled”) at the shows. Noel admits that seeing fathers and sons singing along in the audience makes him so emotional that he has to turn his back to the crowd, while at the film’s end, the brothers admit to being in better touch with each other than ever. Tonight, they’re rock’n’roll stars, but they also suddenly seem very human.

Don't Look Back In Anger is in cinemas from September 11

Released on this day in 1991, Smells Like Teen Spirit transformed Nirvana from Seattle underground darlings to the biggest band on the planet. The lead single from second album Nevermind, it has shifted over 13 million copies to date and remains one of the biggest-selling singles of all time.

• READ MORE: Krist Novoselic Interviewed: “Kurt had this charisma, this intensity that was compelling to people...”

Speaking to MOJO, Dave Grohl recalls the group writing the song in a friend’s shed and their surprise when the track – in part propelled by its video featuring Kurt Cobain performing in a high school gymnasium – catapulted Kurt and Nirvana into rock’s big leagues, bringing them in front of a whole new audience. “We started to notice there were normal people at the gigs,” Grohl tells Paul Brannigan. “That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here? And it was like, Oh, maybe that video is attracting some riff-raff…”

Dave Grohl: “We wrote Smells Like Teen Spirit in January or February of 1991. We’d been rehearsing in this shed behind someone’s house in Tacoma, Washington. The guy who owned it played in a covers band, a bar band, and he rented out this rehearsal space with a home-made 8-track studio and we rehearsed there for three or four months and that’s where a lot of Nevermind was written.

We’d always start rehearsals with a jam, an open, free-form jam, and a lot of the songs came from that: songs like Drain You and Teen Spirit. At the time we were experimenting with dynamics, with the quiet verse/loud chorus thing: a lot of it was derivative of Pixies and Sonic Youth, but you just knew when the chorus was supposed to get bigger, and you just knew the point of the song where, just when you think you can’t take it any higher, you do take it one step higher.

I didn’t really think much of Teen Spirit at first. I thought it was just another one of the jams that we were doing: we had so many jams like that, that we’d record onto a boombox tape and then lose the cassette and lose the song forever. But Teen Spirit was one we kept coming back to because the simple guitar lines were so memorable.

We played a show in Seattle [at the OK Hotel, on April 17, 1991] to get gas money to go down to Los Angeles to record the record. We set it up at the last minute, it was an afternoon gig and we played that song for the first time and the audience went nuts. I don’t know if it was the rhythm or the melody but people got caught on it pretty quick.

• READ MORE: Inside The Making Of Nirvana's In Utero: "When Courtney turned up it affected things..."

With Nevermind, I thought In Bloom was going to be the ‘smash hit’ off the record, or Lithium. I thought Smells Like Teen Spirit was just another album cut. We recorded it pretty quickly, and I think it was one of [producer] Butch Vig’s favourites, and it soon became pretty clear that it would be the special song on the record. But, of course, at that point we didn’t think anything was going to happen with the record.

I thought Teen Spirit might get on [MTV’s] 120 Minutes and allow us to tour with Sonic Youth, but no one thought it was a hit single because [that] was just unimaginable. I mean the funniest part was seeing the video on MTV. We were touring America just as the album came out in September of ’91, playing places that held maybe 200-300 people, and we’d go back to the hotel and turn on the TV and see our video and go, That’s so funny, we’re on TV, and we’ve just played [legendary ’DC hardcore venue] the 9:30 Club, or whatever! Then with the video came more people and the clubs got bigger and bigger.

The [proper] tour started in Toronto at the Opera House and it seemed like a fairly typical Nirvana gig: there were maybe 500 or 600 people there. To me, you have to remember that was like making it, going from the 32 people who would usually come to see [Grohl’s pre-Nirvana band] Scream in every city to, like, 500 people, I considered that to be the greatest success of my entire life! But the capacity of a lot of the gigs that we were playing on that tour were low – we played a place in Portland, Maine or maybe Vermont where the legal capacity was 67, a tiny little living room of a place, it was chaotic.

When the video hit MTV it made a big difference. That’s when you’d show up to a 500-capacity gig and there were 500 extra people there. We were still in our little bubble – we were in our van, the three of us, Krist’s wife Shelli, our monitor guy Miles, and Monty Lee Wilkes, our tour manager – and it didn’t seem like anything unusual was happening until we’d get to the gig and it was fucking chaos. And we started to notice there were normal people here, what are they doing here? That guy looks like a jock, what the fuck is he doing here? And it was like, Oh, maybe that video thing is attracting some… riff-raff! The only indication that our world was turning upside down would be when you’d get to the venue. Then it would be, Holy shit, these people are nuts!

Teen Spirit definitely established that quiet/loud dynamic thing that we fell back on a lot of the time. It did become that one song that personifies the band. But the video was probably the key element in that song becoming a hit. People heard the song on the radio and they thought, ‘This is great,’ but when kids saw the video on MTV they thought, ‘This is cool. These guys are kinda ugly and they’re tearing up their fucking high school!’ So I think that had a lot to do with what happened with the song. But do I think it’s the greatest single of all time? Of course not! I don’t even think it’s the greatest Nirvana single. And compared to Revolution by The Beatles or God Only Knows by The Beach Boys?! Give me a break! Smells Like Teen Spirit was a great moment in time… but there’s better.”

As told to Paul Brannigan

This interview features in MOJO's Nirvana special edition, Nirvana Come As You Are 1987-1994. More info and to order a copy HERE!

Main photo: Nirvana, November, 1991. Credit: Paul Bergen/Redferns

It was a weekend of beginnings and endings at Wiltshire’s Larmer Tree Gardens as End Of The Road Festival celebrated its 20th birthday with a lavish spend on headliners, flanking video screens on the main stage for the first time and toilet paper in the long-drop toilet shacks that almost never ran out.

In the endings department, the force of nature that is CMAT declared her show the last in the UK for two years (there’s an assault on the Americas planned this autumn and after that, presumably, a lie-down followed by some songwriting). Pulp, too, promised a return to hiatus. As for beginnings, Geese [see our full review of their Thursday night show HERE] are already a phenomenon that (for the many) transcends suspicion around their initial hype, but headlining on Thursday night, it seemed that they unveiled themselves fully. As usual, newer groups found their first converts outside of their coteries of firm fans. The intensity and volume of American feminist hardcore quartet Piss will not be forgotten by anyone who saw them on the smaller Folly stage on Saturday evening. Siran – a folk trio from Slovenia – blew minds with their homemade instruments and incantatory epics.

MOJO heard too many good things to elucidate in full, but here are five of our highlights…

Angine De Poitrine

Woods Stage, Friday evening

With Geese, the Québécois duo were perhaps the most Marmite of the weekend’s big hitters. Their instrumental mix of live-looped, microtonal guitar madness, funky drums, extra-terrestrial schtick and absurd, polka-dot costumes had some shaking their heads in dismay (“It’s Mr Proggy,” noted passing MOJO contributor, John Harris). But though there was an undeniable degree of difficulty, even extravagant virtuosity to their breakneck shredding, it was devoid of pomp and always offset by joy – an understanding of the pleasure-giving potential of a single cymbal hit in precisely the right place. And while there was pantomime in the presentation – moments when they addressed the audience in gargly Soup Dragonese; or points when they broke to converse/argue amongst themselves – the music is both serious and not, able to spiral and transcend in psychedelic dimensions but also to interact with wit. Even Khn’s guitar tone – processed to remove the macho gnarl of the traditional axe hero – seemed to raise an eyebrow at itself. Is it fanciful to suspect that they’re making a point about music as grounds for mutual understanding? Whilst most music involves a conversation between instruments (or a punch-up, if you’re The Who) Angine De Poitrine seem to be all about the exchange. If we feel like we can understand what polka-dot aliens speaking an unintelligible language are trying to say to us with their microtonal crypto-prog, maybe we learn to listen harder to our fellow humans.

caroline

Garden Stage, Friday headliners

Bands at End Of the Road Festival tend to be massive fans of End Of The Road Festival and are prone to tell stories about their previous experiences here. At a point in caroline’s set, guitarist Casper Hughes recalled an extraordinary performance by Low on the Garden Stage in 2019 that set a bar for his band in terms of musical quality and intensity (your writer, who was also there, can vouch). That the UK post-folkers came close is about as high a compliment as can be imagined, and there were moments in their set – when guitars, violins, brass, drums and bass clarinet all blared at once and a trouser-flapping sub-bass blast was simultaneously unleashed – when caroline were the most sonically overwhelming act of the entire weekend. Other times, one simply wondered at the musical and emotional synchronicity of this sprawling 8-piece, arranged in a semi-circle like a therapy group. Extraordinary squalls followed lyrical lulls – defined by the extremes of the band’s two violinists: the often volcanic Oliver Hamilton and the ever-lyrical Magdalena McLean. Even when consciously divided – as on the airily lovely Coldplay cover (NB. not a Coldplay cover) where the band split and performed two different pieces at the same time – they seemed uncannily tethered. Watching caroline over the years, it sometimes looked like a hard road to the band they wanted to be: the multiplicity of voices hasn’t always, perhaps cannot always, gel. Right now, with everything that’s complicated in their music also thoroughly integrated, it looks like they’ve found their Low point.

Madra Salach

Garden Stage, Saturday afternoon

Perhaps the least Marmite band of the weekend, the Irish sextet charmed all-comers with an approach to contemporary-traditional music that seemed equidistant from the dread-drenched drone of Lankum (somewhat represented this weekend by distaff Lankum singer Radie Peat’s other band, ØXN) and the Poguesy ramalam of The Mary Wallopers. Their combination of aching poetry and roister-doistering is incarnate in singer Paul Banks, who carried vulnerability and cultural-historical weight with a grain and richness beyond his apparent years – both celebrating the craic and acknowledging the craic as the possession of people who’ve been denied, or stripped of, much else. The Man Who Seeks Pleasure – a song from this year’s EP, It’s A Hell Of An Age – seemed to spread its keening refrain (“The man who seeks pleasure is the man who seeks pain”) across the EOTR site and was given an even better reading in a ragged-but-right, unannounced second set in the Folly tent late on Saturday night.

Also among the lesser-known artists who left MOJO agog: Kieron Leonard – post-rock epics full of passion and intricate electric guitar architecture in the Folly on Sunday afternoon; Manchester trio Shaking Hand – mixing post-punk, neo-psych and episodic prog moves and starring the nose-to-tail guitar work of singer George Hunter; and Adult DVD – the acid house Sleaford Mods, from Leeds, leading the urban boot stomp in the Big Top tent on Friday evening.

Pulp

Woods Stage, Saturday headliners

It was a daring gambit. Jarvis Cocker and Co, coming to the end of a rapturously received reunion tour stuffed with hits and surfing accolades for 2025 album, More, and guessing, perhaps, that a good proportion of this crowd will have already seen them on this go-around, decided on a presentation focused on deep cuts (plus slide show!). Inevitably, there were EOTR-ers who slunk off in bemusement at an outing for 1985 single Little Girl (With Blue Eyes) (chorus: “There’s a hole in your heart and one between your legs”), but those who stayed received a fuller picture of Pulp, delivered in the most part chronologically. Enhanced by the sophistication of this line-up, songs your writer didn’t know so well or never engaged with at all – 1987’s The Mark Of The Devil; Lipgloss B-side Deep Fried In Kelvin – hit as hard as the hits, revealing more depths to singer Cocker’s street-lit take on Postwar Britain and its tensions between aspiration and lived experience. This was Power Pulp, not Cosy Pulp, a vibe that transformed even their most familiar songs. A case in point: this was Common People at its most feral and frenzied, with the class anger of “You never watched your life slide out of view” restored to a now often-too-comforting ‘Britpop Anthem’. Pulp: as visceral as they are theatrical? There really is a first time for everything.

Super Furry Animals

Woods Stage, Sunday evening

Also, at the end of a 2026 reanimation, the Welsh quintet (plus percussionist) laid claim to the title of All-Time Most Underrated UK Indie Band with a bumper quasi-headline set of 18 songs that thoroughly showcased their uniquely multicoloured mix of glam, psych, dance, classic pop and wonky/wise worldview. Would they baulk at the title? It’s unlikely to bother them, as the era’s most insular group – separated from the Britpop chattering classes by a fug of weed smoke and Welsh-speaking – never cared to make statements or to represent in any way other than through their records, one of which, Rings Around The World, was MOJO Magazine’s Album Of 2001. With the band dressed all in black, keeping badinage to a skeletal minimum and leaving the showmanship (mostly) to artist-collaborator Pete Fowler and Mark James’ pulsating visuals, it would have been a glorious case of the as-you-weres if it weren’t for the maturation and enrichment evident in the approaches to these copper-bottomed songs. Cian Ciaran’s ’70s Rhodes grooving on the Black Mountains Bowie of Demons and Tenby tropicália of Play It Cool was surely defter than of yore, the extended hypno-riffing and 303 bloop fantasia of Mountain People and Slow Life more mind-expanding. The latter featured singer Gruff Rhys in a massive papier-mâché Power Rangers helmet and a hi-viz, a spectacle only topped by the entire band’s disappearance and reappearance in Fowler-inspired hairy monster costumes halfway through a fist-pumping, heart-swelling, and surely apter-then-ever detonation of The Man Don’t Give A Fuck that seemed to go on for hours. Don’t leave it another decade to do this again – please.

(Super Furry Animals pictured at Alexandra Palace Park, July 12, 2026)

The Tubs – Hard Life

★★★★★

MERGE

Iridescent jangle nirvana. Visceral punk energy. Mournful folk-accented vocalese. Stinging oaths of love and hate, with occasional chipmunk harmonies. The third Tubs album contains this and more, to the delight of all who enjoyed the first two Tubs albums for the abundance of said qualities.

One of its 12 songs, however, breaks new ground. Opening with a groovily offbeat drum pattern, Do Yourself A Favor bops onto the dancefloor amid frantic guitar downstrokes and an incessant keyboard riff deserving of its own hand-jive routine. This is actually a Prince song, albeit one with complex provenance and never released in his lifetime. The Tubs infuse it with their Celtic-tinged shimmer, while the lyric could almost be one of Tubs songwriter Owen Williams’ own admonitory put-downs, another splinter of tough love wisdom torn from his journal: he was down, but now he’s “freer than the butterfly”, so “walk on by, baby”. Prince’s nine-minute version extended to improv trash talk; sadly, The Tubs exeunt at 4:09, having added mesmeric nu-wave disco to their repertoire. How perfect that after being compared to Hüsker Dü so often, The Tubs should cover the other molten pop force from ’80s Minneapolis.

Such logic is all over Hard Life, an album that consolidates and amplifies both 2023’s debut Dead Meat and last year’s Cotton Crown, transcending notions of what indie rock is supposed to be in the 21st century. The opening title track’s siren guitar intro is a suitably auspicious entrance, its Whovian powerchordage teeing up a killer first couplet: “Yeah you spend your money on aftershave/But when you go out you still smell the same.” Meet Dr Williams from the toilet circuit school of psychiatry, who feels your pain then throws it back like a bad pint: “The day never comes when you finally know exactly what you’re gonna be/Apart from a fat bloke in a sad pub telling me, ‘It’s a hard life’…”

The extent to which Owen Williams is talking to himself in these wounding, funny, minutely crafted songs is moot. Beyond doubt, however, is The Tubs’ place in the pantheon of great self-referential rock bands. If You Don’t Love Me sees Williams’ heartsore petulance driving career sabotage: “I don’t wanna sell out this tour, don’t wanna play in The Tubs anymore.” Way It Goes ponders a rarely acknowledged dilemma: “If we go back to America then it’s over/’Cos I can’t stand another fucking Yank telling me they’re sober.” On Who’s Gonna Love You Now?, meanwhile, Williams counsels a friend/bandmate/bloke-in-the-mirror against escaping to London to “join The TSG”, AKA The Tubs’ Gob Nation-label affiliates led by drummer Taylor Stewart. This bustling Smiths-go-kinda-Northern soul romp asserts that the departure of original guitarist George Nicholls hasn’t damaged the creative chemistry, with replacement Dan Lucas equally comfortable with those signature up-tempo Johnny Marr filigrees.

The capital city as malign spirit was a theme of 2025’s Cotton Crown, and it recurs here in Heaven Or London, where Williams portrays “the singer of a ripoff band… wanking himself into an early grave”. His self-abasement plumbs Stygian depths amid Stoogean guitar flare-outs, as Williams Auto-Tunes his voice to helium levels in lieu of his usual harmonist (and erstwhile Joanna Gruesome/Ex-Vöid bandmate) Lan McCardle.

Beyond the high calibre musicianship and arrangements, it’s obvious why The Tubs have stirred a certain constituency who had come to doubt that such a traditionally oriented group could still impact in an age where cultural expression has become self-moderated to the point of banality. Rather than baulking at Stoop To Me resembling not just one but two Bob Mould songs, The Tubs merrily punch through the chord sequence’s adjacency to Mould’s 2014 zinger I Don’t Know You Anymore and then directly quote Sugar in the chorus’s line “If I can’t change your mind”, wrapping the whole in Chris Haigh’s fiddle for the full Fairport effect. Such is their full immersion in the accrued vocabulary of an art form that was never meant to get so old, they somehow make these moves feel fresh.

Faultlessly sequenced, Hard Life’s first half ends with Didn’t I Say, an acoustic charm bracelet on the inevitability of disappointment. Fluted keys burnish this fingerpicked millennial equivalent of Richard & Linda Thompson’s The End Of The Rainbow: “Didn’t I say when the chips are down that no one ever really comes around.” Then Do Yourself A Favor kicks off a thrilling side two, leaning into the deep-dug euphoria of Now And Then, its bleak romantic pragmatism echoing Cotton Crown’s Manic Street Preachers-referencing One More Day (“When you spurn my little Welsh heart”). This time the harmonies are McCardle’s; likewise on Hell, a spring-heeled determination to “let the heart hate what it hates”. The album’s shortest song at 1:43, it’s followed by the longest, In Your Place, a five-minute tower of geometric arpeggios, essentially just a single verse and chorus that repeat then bow to multiple reiterations of the opening melodic figure, its regretful descent like a river searching for a source, echoing perhaps Williams’ bleakest self-laceration: “Loving you’s like looking into a crystal ball and seeing nothing/Nothing there at all,” he and McCardle coo. Following a mid-point break down, the song epically rebuilds, driven by Stewart and bassist Max Warren with incremental guitar licks and fiddle player Haigh’s melancholy skirl.

This masterpiece of tension and release would have made a worthy album closer, yet there’s still one final dagger-twist: As Long As You Leave, a ghostly near-solo Williams rumination upon an impossible love triangle, its beautiful Bert Jansch stylings courtesy of George Nicholls – proof that you can leave The Tubs to become a full-time academic, but The Tubs won’t leave you.

Hard Life is consistent with what we already knew. It benefits from a superior sonic cohesion, thanks to being wholly recorded with Sam Ayres and Rachel Kenedy at their London studio, but the guitarist swap aside, fundamentally nothing else has changed here. The Tubs are an exceptional band, casually delivering brutal truths in the most glorious way. Those not already initiated could do themselves a favour.

Hard Life is out September 11 on Merge.

Tracklisting:

1. Hard Life
2. Who’s Gonna Love You Now?
3. If You Don’t Love Me
4. Stoop to Me
5. Heaven Or London
6. Didn’t I Say?
7. Do Yourself A Favor
8. Now And Then
9. The Way It Goes
10. Hell
11. In Your Place
12. As Long As You Leave

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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Dexys Midnight Runners - LOVE

★★★★

HEAVENLY RECORDINGS

While it painted a self-laceratingly honest portrait, Kevin Rowland’s 2025 autobiography, Bless Me Father, tended to focus more on trauma and regret than on the life-affirming music he’s made as the leader of Dexys Midnight Runners. The process of looking back and taking stock has had a clear impact on LOVE, however, the first album to fly under the full …Midnight Runners banner since Don’t Stand Me Down in 1985.

• READ MORE: Kevin Rowland Interviewed: "This feels like a good ending..."

Always fond of a reoccurring motif, Dexys 7th LP is bookended by My Life In England, Parts 1 and 2. Both are scrapbooks of childhood memories - hearing Irish rebel songs at a church social, acquiring a button-down Madras shirt, Unit 4 + 2’s Concrete And Clay on the radio in the summer of ’65 - lovingly assembled over a jubilant soul swish. They frame a record that, in many ways, serves as an optimistic postscript to the struggles – personal, professional, narcotic – outlined in Bless Me Father.

Taking its title from a chapter in the book, Once A Man, Twice A Child tenderly recounts how he patched up his difficult relationship with his dad whilst nursing him following a stroke. The glowing You’re Alright, meanwhile, is addressed to Rowland’s own grandchildren, its lyrics written when he was in hospital with potentially life-threatening kidney failure in 2024.

2023’s The Feminine Divine found Dexys reduced to a core of Rowland and multi-instrumentalists Sean Read and Mike Timothy, relying on programmed brass and strings. By contrast, LOVE producer David Holmes dresses everything with a warm organic richness. Philly Soul strings lending a sense of glitterball-reflected drama to You’ve Got The Love, and a Barry White-like sensuality to the lonely supplicant of I Want To Be Holding You Next Christmas.

It was Holmes, also, who suggested a cover of Tim Buckley’s Strange Feelin’, pushing the previously jazz-averse singer to improvise his melody line. The result is sublime: over twinkling Fender Rhodes Rowland drifts into Astral Weeks enchanted waters to deliver one of the best vocals of his career.

Speaking to MOJO in June, Rowland, now into his seventies, said this might be his last album and penultimate track, Old Love, sees him lamenting the ego-trampling effects of ageing. “I know I look different, but I feel the same inside,” he sings forlornly over slow-moving piano chords. “I have the same insecurities that I had when I was a child.” It’s a rare moment of despondency on a set characterised by positivity and self-acceptance.

If it indeed were to be Dexys’ final album, LOVE feels like a fitting end to the journey that started with Searching For The Young Soul Rebels - Rowland no longer waiting for his light to turn green and finally sounding at peace with his past.

LOVE is out September 4 on Heavenly.

Tracklisting:

1. My Life In England Pt. 1
2. You’ve Got The Love
3. Once A Man and Twice A Child
4. You're Alright
5. I Want To Be Holding You Next Christmas
6. I’ll Always Love You
7. Strange Feelin
8. It's Over Now
9. Old Love
10. My Life In England Pt. 2

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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In November 2025, Chrissie Hynde released Duets Special, an album of cover versions and musical team ups that saw her partner with Blondie’s Debbie Harry, Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, Low’s Alan Sparkhawk, Lucinda Williams, Cat Power, k.d Lang and more (you can read MOJO’s four-star review of the album HERE). As part of our career-spanning interview with Hynde in MOJO 387 we spoke to some of the artists who appeared on the album about the enduring legacy of the Pretenders' singer. “She’s got this older wise woman strength about her,” discovers Chris Catchpole, “… and she’s fucking hilarious.”

Debbie Harry

"Me and Chrissie first met 1000 years ago! It was very briefly back at the tea party [in 1980 Harry hosted a ‘ladies tea party’ for Hynde, Viv Albertine, Pauline Black and Poly Styrene at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington, see main picture]. Back then there weren’t that many girls doing music and Chrissie had this terrific energy and style. That’s what I was trying to do. I didn’t want to be a daisy - I wanted to be a thorny rose. I’d always admired her and little by little over the years we sort of caught up, and then we toured together in Australia and became friends. We’ve both survived the music industry, which is hard for anyone, not just women. When she said she was doing this project I was in. No hesitation."

Dave Gahan

"The Pretenders came up with punk. They were at the back end like us, but they were a band that could actually play shall we say! I hadn’t met Chrissie when I recorded that track [Dolphins by Fred Neil]. We’ve since met at the Mark Lanegan tribute at The Roundhouse, but [Pretenders guitarist] James Walbourne was the instigator. We were working on [2021 album] Imposter together and she reached out through him. I actually recorded my first vocal take in my bathroom at home because I like the sound in there. I found out she recorded hers in her kitchen which I love. Chrissie’s voice is so unique. The moment you hear the first words she sings on anything you know it’s her. It seems so effortless the way she sings."

Cat Power

"Growing up in all these small towns in the south, everybody loved Chrissie Hynde. It didn’t matter if you were a weirdo, a redneck, a jock, or straight A student. Chrissie’s great. She’s got this older wise woman strength about her and she’s fucking hilarious as well. She’s seen a lot and she’s done a lot and I respect her immensely. Having a friendship with her over the years has really impacted on me, especially as a mother. She was able to be a mother and also write these incredible songs and play guitar and be an icon for girls like me who grew up and didn’t want to play with Barbie dolls – I wanted to climb trees and go play with gorillas! She made being an exception exceptional because she’s so… what’s the word? She’s just so cool."

Alan Sparhawk

"Chrissie showed up to see Low play and elbowed her way in. She’d heard her stuff and decided she wanted to be friends with Mimi. They became good friends, Chrissie would call up and speak to Mimi when she was sick and cheer her up. They had a pretty special relationship. She told us she and Debbie Harry had covered one of our songs with Debbie [2011’s Try To Sleep] and then spoke to Mimi about singing with her. It just came at a bad time when it came to recording it. About a year later she reached out to me which was an honour. At the time I was still reeling and having a hard time hearing my own voice without having Mimi’s voice with me. It was surreal to sing again. It was such a bright light to do that and for her to be happy with it gave me the confidence to move forwards. It really instilled some new and really needed confidence in what I was doing."

"I love Danny Boyle, but I couldn't watch Pistol. I was mortified to be so present..."

This article originally appeared in MOJO 387 as part of a career spanning, and no holds barred, interview with Chrissie Hynde. On the agenda: the Sex Pistols, Frank Sinatra, Morrissey, forging Beatles signatures, and how to deal with obsessive Pretenders fans. "Go fuck yourselves!" she tells MOJO's Tom Doyle. More info and to order a copy HERE.

Main picture: Chrissie Hynde and Debbie Harry at the Royal Garden Hotel, London August 1, 1980 (credit: Chris Stein)

Geese

End Of The Road Festival, Thursday 3 September, 2026

“All people
In times of war
Must go down to the circus”

Geese, 100 Horses

The cult of Geese just got bigger, and broader-based, at End Of The Road Festival. They came to the south edge of Wiltshire via two nights at London’s Troxy. Before that, it was the Reading and Leeds festivals: afternoon shows in tents full of fully amped young ’uns. Last night’s crowd was milder, multi-generational but no less enamoured. It was the band’s first UK festival headline slot – and first night of End Of The Road’s 20th iteration – but they made the burden look light, whilst never abandoning the might-they-fall? tightrope-walking and wilful obfuscation that they cannot resist and is perhaps part of their charm.

• READ MORE: Cameron Winter Live In London Review: Geese frontman delivers a knockout

So what are Geese, exactly? The Brooklyn five-piece revel, it’s clear, in making that question difficult to answer. Often they sound like an experimental operation on the body of classic rock. Mostly the patient survives, sometimes it doesn’t. Occasionally it’s transmogrified. Blues licks – delivered by lead guitarist Emily Green – are indulged. Drum solos – piloted by the flamboyant Max Bassin – really do happen. Last night, when they hammered into a segment of Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive, it was hard not to think of them as genuine carriers of this music’s DNA rather than pasticheurs of a Spotify playlist.

Last night, most things fell together for Geese. Presaged by a weirdly disarming video screen montage of internet memes interspersed with British sporting cameos – darts; cricket; Wayne Rooney’s shinned bicycle kick (roundly but gleefully booed) – it promised fun and Geese, in their deadpan way, delivered. From the off, reluctant pin-up singer Cameron Winter was dialled in. It can’t harm that EOTR’s main stage sound is crystal clear. Big gig audiences can rarely have heard Winter so well – every mumble articulated as clearly as every whooping ascent.

Geese’s perilous leaps between tempos and emotional states also received high marks from the judges. A strange tumbledown version of Get Killed built dreamily until Bassin reasserted himself, smashing his ride cymbal like a reborn John Bonham. Live, Half Real can meander, lacking focus. Tonight it found its thread, its thread being Winter’s yearning falsetto. The expansiveness recalled peak Radiohead.

Then there’s Geese: The Simply Great Rock’n’Roll Band, materialised in the ramalam of Warrior (cue drum solo) and 2122 (cue Floyd). Crusades evoked the chugging sway of The Velvet Underground’s Loaded album. 100 Horses was pell-mell blues-rock. Your writer has seen Geese three times now – and the climax to the latter was the best minute of music in any of those shows. Geese were hitting the sweet spot of pleasing a crowd and pleasing themselves.

At one point, Winter surprised everyone by introducing a song. “I wrote this during a difficult time in my life,” he intoned, coming dangerously close to a revelation or, more dangerously still, a concert cliché. “I had to fight a big, big snake.” He smiled. “It came to my house…” What followed was a guttural, impelled, volcanic Bow Down, that felt like an exorcism of something other than reptilian.

And this is the thing. Geese are fighting something. Winter is wrestling something. What it is is the mystery that keeps you listening hard for clues. It’s there in the quizzical fugue state of Islands Of Men – an unresolving riff and groove you’d quite happily have go on forever. But it’s glaring in Geese’s two biggest songs, the ones that duly arrived at the end.

Taxes – for all its enigmas – has become a protest song of sorts, a song to shout along to if you’re unhappy with how you’re money’s spent (obviously, that’s everybody). That it’s twinned with a clean, high riff like bright sunshine – and like nothing else in the Geese canon – seals the catharsis. Closing their main set last night, it was transfixing.

Trinidad, the keynote of Geese’s current Getting Killed opus, was the inevitable encore. It started swampily, fuzzed and humid. But its hook is its regular explosions of meganoise accompanied by Winter’s crazed ejaculations of “THERE’S A BOMB IN MY CAR!” at which the moshers were unleashed. Again, it felt like an exhalation of multifarious evils.

All this and rock’n’roll too? Geese, you have spoiled us.

Geese, End Of The Road Festival, 3 September, 2026, Set list:

Husbands

Getting Killed

Half Real

Islands of Men

Crusades

100 Horses

2122

I See Myself

Cobra

Bow Down

Au Pays du Cocaine

Long Island City Here I Come

Taxes

Encore:

Trinidad

Photo: Geese at Electric Picnic, Stradbally Hall, Stradbally, Ireland, August 30, 2026 (Kieran Frost/Redferns)

Billy Corgan

Royal Festival Hall, London, September 1, 2026

Even when considering Billy Corgan’s history of bold artistic gambles, on paper this Royal Festival Hall set feels like a big roll of the creative dice. Tonight he is here to re-imagine one of the defining works in the ’90s alt-rock canon: Smashing Pumpkins’ kaleidoscopic double-disc offering Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness. “Mellon Collie was our way of saying, ‘We are not like these other bands,’” he told MOJO back in 2012 of how he conspired to distinguish his group from the second wave grunge bilge clogging up the charts in 1995. Yet for its 30th anniversary celebrations last year, he decided that even that sprawling 28-track act of defiance would not suffice. He may not be with his fellow Pumpkins when he appears onstage in London tonight – sporting a black dress coat pilfered straight from a nosferatu’s closet – but he is not alone. Corgan has an itch that only a 50-piece orchestra, 40-person choir and four opera singers can scratch.

Having previously debuted in Chicago last year, this event – billed as “A Night Of Mellon Collie And Infinite Sadness” – is split into two acts, both completely sidelining the original’s guitar pyrotechnics in pursuit of symphonic grandeur. Of course, some parts of Mellon Collie are custom-made for this treatment anyway. Given their sweeping strings on record, the Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness instrumental and hit single Tonight, Tonight serve as both rousing opening combo and proof of concept. Corgan is nowhere to be seen to begin with, but the orchestra and choir do a superb job of setting the tone. The true stress test comes when Jelly Belly arrives. On record it’s one of Pumpkins’ most adrenalised songs, boasting some breathtaking drumming from Jimmy Chamberlin – here it is reinterpreted as more mournful meditation than aural assault. It somehow works a treat. Between this and the accompanying video screen displaying beautiful artistic impressions of Chicago, changing seasons and glistening oceans, there is already much to admire.

As Act One unfurls, it becomes clear this is not only is the album reimagined, it’s also abridged and re-tracked. Five songs into this new vision, Corgan finally slinks onto the stage for Thirty Three. Despite being greeted with wild applause, he is locked firmly in character. No greeting. No showboating. No guitar to wield. He’s just totally immersed in the lyrics. As beguiling as the likes of Beautiful, Muzzle, Lily (My One And Only) and Stumbleine are afterwards as they are brought to life by opera singers passing the vocal baton to each other, the opening act truly hits its stride in its last two songs with Zero and Thru The Eyes Of Ruby. The former in particular stands out for its transformation into a gothic hymn, its lines being shared between Corgan and the four singers. It’s not every day you hear a trained opera singer belt out a line like ‘bullshit faker’.

Ultimately, the second act proves to be the more successful of two, especially in exploring the adaptability and potential of the source material. One of Mellon Collie’s greatest moments, 1979, has its concussed guitar passages replaced with plucked violin strings, in turn this rendition of the alt-rock daydream leans more into its joyfulness than its wistfulness. Very much operating at the other end of the spectrum is X.Y.U. In lieu of its stabbing guitar lines, it is freshly recast as a dissonant, unnerving masterstroke that finds the middle ground between James Horner’s 1986 Aliens soundtrack and Danny Elfman’s 1989 Batman score.

If there is one big disappointment to tonight’s iteration of Mellon Collie, it’s the somewhat glaring omission of Bodies. That serrated gem will have to wait for another day for its orchestral retrofit. On hand to take away the sting, however, is another classic in the form of Bullet With Butterfly Wings. With the choir delivering its famous ‘the world is a vampire’ intro a capella, it even raises some laughs with just how OTT it is. While Bullet is the album’s calling card, more impressive is Corgan holding court for To Forgive, here possessed with such an intimate sense of drama it actually makes the sprightly Cupid De Locke that follows feel, certainly not unwelcome, but perhaps oddly placed. It’s hard to shake off the spell that had just been cast before it.

The night ends with a stunning one-two of Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans and a reprise of Tonight, Tonight, only this time around with Corgan on vocals. It’s hard to argue with the logic of playing it twice when you see the standing ovation it receives. Last year he called the show’s debut in Chicago “one of the most satisfying experiences” of his life. As he finally breaks character at the end to deliver a cheeky flick of a devil horn to the crowd before scarpering off, you sense he’s inhabiting that feeling all over again. The gamble paid off big time.

Billy Corgan, Royal Festival Hall, London, September 2026 Set List:

Act One:

Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness
Tonight, Tonight
Jellybelly
Galapogos
Thirty-Three
Beautiful
Muzzle
Lily (My One And Only)
Stumbleine

Zero

Thru The Eyes Of Ruby

Act Two:

In The Arms Of Sleep
1979
By Starlight
X.Y.U.
Bullet With Butterfly Wings
To Forgive
Cupid De Locke
Porcelina Of The Vast Oceans
Tonight, Tonight

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Presenting MOJO The Collectors’ Series: The Cure, a 132-page deluxe special edition packed with in-depth features, classic and rare interviews, plus a guide to all the band’s albums. MOJO The Collectors’ Series: The Cure is in UK shops and available for delivery wherever you are now – ORDER YOUR COPY HERE!

• READ MORE: Every Cure Album Ranked!

In the baking hot summer of 1976, a group of teenagers began rehearsing at a suburban family home in Crawley, just a few miles from Gatwick Airport. By all accounts the music they made left much to be desired but, as the first story in this new special edition reveals, after multiple line-up changes and several disastrous local appearances they emerged in 1978 as The Cure, who together with Siouxsie And The Banshees, Joy Division, PiL and Wire would transform the landscape of post-punk music.

Challenging their audience – and being unswervingly single-minded about their often desolate sound – was something The Cure never shied away from, but the band’s leader Robert Smith could also write killer, off-beat pop songs, as early singles like Killing An Arab, A Forest, Let’s Go To Bed and The Love Cats proved. And, throughout a career lasting nearly 50 years, The Cure have kept fans transfixed with albums of both exquisite, wintry bleakness (Faith, Pornography, Disintegration) and giddy pop joy (Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Wish), with their latest studio album, 2024’s Songs Of A Lost World, hailed as a stunning addition to their illustrious canon.

Of course, The Cure have become a by-word for goth, with the image of Smith and the band with enormous backcombed hair, dark eyeliner and smudged lipstick firmly embedded in the public’s imagination. But, as the in-depth features and deep-dive interviews in this deluxe special emphasise, the group has gone through many iterations over the years, shedding members and exploring new sounds against an extraordinary backdrop of sackings, punch-ups, pharmaceutical misadventures, on-the-road meltdowns and, yes, dizzy highs too.

Illustrated throughout with dozens of rare and iconic photographs, this sumptuous bookazine is an indispensable purchase for all Cure fans, post-punks, goths, pop lovers and music connoisseurs.

Order your copy now!

It started on the London stage in 1973, depicting squares Brad and Janet ending up in the laboratory of mad scientist/alien transvestite Dr. Frank-N-Furter, played with indelible glee by a then-unknown Tim Curry. Richard O’Brien’s comedy musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show lovingly parodied sci-fi, Frankenstein and glam to packed houses. Then the 1975 movie version with Meat Loaf flopped… until gleeful audience participation turned it into a self-sustaining movie cult of global proportions. ln light of Tim Curry's passing, its creators look back at the show's monstrous creation...

Richard O’Brien (writer, Riff-Raff): I was playing Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972 when its producer Robert Stigwood gave me the thumbs down. Suddenly I was unemployed, our son Linus was just born, and I was seriously thinking of returning to New Zealand and getting a job. That’s when I did Rocky Horror. The Royal Court gave me £200 just for writing it. In 1973 you could live for a while on that. We approached Rocky Horror in a Brechtian fashion, but our intention was to have fun.

Jim Sharman (director): Rocky Horror followed the experimental traditions of the Royal Court but we brought a punk attitude, echoes of glam rock and Weimar cabaret, a new language for musical theatre. That’s why we were in the attic, where the children were sent to play.

Sue Blane (costume designer): Harriet Cruikshank, who took over the 60-seat theatre upstairs at the Royal Court, called to say she was desperate. This director was plaguing her to find a costume designer for an odd musical, but she had tried anyone who was any good and they all turned her down. That’s a compliment, isn’t it?

Richard Hartley (musical director): Jim Sharman said to me: ‘Richard’s got this idea for a rock musical.’ Yeah, like everyone and his dog.

JS: I had done Hair and …Superstar_._ WhenRiff-Raff sings, “Frank-N-Furter, It’s all over” [from soundtrack number Wild And Untamed Thing], it was the end of the Age of Aquarius.

SB: We all met at Richard’s flat in Pimlico. Richard strummed the songs on guitar and we tried to discuss it, but it was a nightmare because we were sitting on his waterbed and kept bouncing around everywhere.

RO’B: Rocky Horror is Adam and Eve, with Frank-N-Furter as the snake.

RH: Like Marc Bolan and the Sweet, Richard used old rock’n’roll chord progressions and it was all pretty simple, but he had a unique talent for a storytelling. He knew not to overcomplicate things.

Patricia Quinn (Magenta): I had seen Little Nell (Nurse Ansalong) because she was a busker on the Kings Road, tap-dancing in a top hat and shorts. Apart from the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes, Nell was the only girl in London with pink hair.

RO’B: Little Nell was cleaning Jim Sharman’s flat, so she was on our doorstep. Seemed silly not to include her.

SB: It was the glam era but the real influence was the budget: £400, minimal even then. I got Tim Curry’s corset from a Glasgow production of Genet’s The Maids, which Tim and I had done, which had been donated from some elderly lady in the Gorbals. It was designed to flatten the body, not lift it. I turned it upside down and back to front and painted it black. I had some fox furs from my great grandmother, the pearls were the middle class bit, and that was Frank-N-Furter.

PQ: The set at the Royal Court consisted of a wooden chair for (Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s muscly creation) Rocky Horror to stand on and make his muscle pose, and a screen at the back.

SB: I had no idea what to do with Nell, but she was a great performer so I based Columbia on her. Magenta was Yvonne de Carlo from The Munsters. A lot of people have credited Rocky Horror with punk, probably because I went for a beaten up, broken down, decrepit look. Partly out of necessity.

RH: We had three weeks to do the whole thing. Tim Curry and Julie Covington [Janet] were the only singers in the cast, but Jim Sharman and I were great fans of the Velvet Underground and Nico can’t really sing but she tells a story, so Pat, dressed as an usherette, told a story about all these films she had seen. That was Science Fiction_._

PQ: I had been an usherette at Notting Hill Gate cinema so I based it on that. And Tim transformed after putting on his high heels. Give a boy high heels and you don’t know where it’s going to lead.

RH: Barry Humphries wrote in his review, ‘Impossible to overpraise.’ Then Jonathan King put out the soundtrack, which we recorded in a single day. A few weeks later, we went into a restaurant and they were playing it.

JS: I had to give my seat up to Rudolf Nureyev.

RO’B: The gay men of London came in their swathes, and Rocky emerged from a wonderful explosion of freedom and newness. A year earlier or later, we wouldn’t have had the same response.

JS: Gay representation had been about self-hatred, like The Boys In The Band. Rocky comes along and it is an unapologetic extravaganza.

Jonathan King (soundtrack producer): I read Jack Tinker’s glowing review in the Daily Mail, went along to the Royal Court, adored it, went backstage and said: ‘I want to make the cast recording this weekend.’ Michael White, who produced the whole thing, asked if I wanted to invest in it, which I did.

PQ: Mick Jagger was interested in playing Frank N-Furter, Bowie was interested, everybody was interested. Within two weeks we were the talk of the town and Mick and Bianca were queuing up to get into the little room above the Royal Court. I walked past them with my nose in the air, pretending I didn’t know who they were, before running into the tiny dressing room and shouting, ‘Jagger’s in!’ That’s when I heard someone groaning. Rayner Bourton, who played Rocky, was in agony after getting glitter under his foreskin. It was powdered glass in those days. We had to cancel.

SB: I always felt guilty about it but I must say, Raynor applied the glitter, not me.

RO’B: The word of mouth was astonishing, Vincent Price on the first night and Elliot Gould on the last. Remarkable given the Royal Court wanted muscular theatre, not lowbrow entertainment.

PQ: Rocky Horror worked because it was short: one hour ten minutes. But that meant it couldn’t go to the West End so we went to the Classic Cinema and then the Essoldo, both on the Kings Road. When the film came along, Jim Sharman, brilliantly, said he wanted the original cast. That’s why the budget was so small and why we could do it in such a short time.

Lou Adler (executive producer): Britt Ekland and I have a boy, Nikolai, who is as old as Rocky Horror: 1973. I went to London to visit them and she said I had to see this show. The ambiance, the usherettes, the outfits… it was an event. I thought: this could run for a long time in LA. Maybe forever.

RH: At the Roxy in LA Lou Adler found Meat Loaf, an Eddie who could really sing. Then he took it to New York and it all went wrong.

LA: I made two mistakes. A show that played in LA before Broadway was thumbs down as far as the critics were concerned, but I took a full page ad in Variety that said, ‘Give our regards to Broadway and tell them Rocky is on its way.’ The other mistake was taking over an iconic theatre, the Balasco on 44th street, and trying to make it a rock’n’roll event. They didn’t like that.

RO’B: New York sees itself as chic and LA as a tart. They have the Met, after all.

PQ: When they told me I couldn’t do Science Fiction I said: ‘Then I’m not doing your film.’ John Goldstone, the producer, told me to come round to his house and look at the set, where I see a pink laboratory, 20 Transylvanians (the formally attired guests for the Rocky creature’s reveal) on motorbikes, and all my dresses by Sue Blane. And I go, ‘Oh, I’m doing this!’

JS: The original plan was to go from black and white into colour, like a dark version of The Wizard Of Oz.

RH: Barry (Bostwick) and Susan (Sarandon, who played Brad and Janet) were sweet. They were a bit like Brad and Janet, although they would be mortified to be described like that. Meat Loaf was a big baby with a fantastic voice.

PQ: We worked day and night because it was a stupidly short period to make a musical. There is a photo of me as Magenta, surrounded by Transylvanians, out cold. There was no time to get to know Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick so they came and left as Brad and Janet.

RO’B: It was exciting, to see how we could get around problems. (Brad and Janet’s science teacher) Dr Scott burst through the wall simply because we forgot we didn’t have a door.

SB: I had a raw deal, staying overnight at Bray studios to work. It was a bit unnerving, being in this huge set with nobody else there. Then the cast started to get ill.

PQ: Only the Americans got ill. Susan Sarandon has dined out on her pneumonia for 50 years. If she mentions it again, I shall scream.

LA: Barry and Susan had a horrendous time, wet, cold and sick. They were thrown into a collection of people who had been friends since the Royal Court, so it was rough on them. Maybe that helped the film, though.

SB: The look for Brad and Janet was Middle America, 15 or 20 years behind Europe in fashion: crimplene and polyester. I bought a new hat for Janet, cheap because it was dented on one side. You can see the dent in the film.

PQ: Jim directed using two faces: a slight smile and a slight frown. He said it was the only way to goad Curry into being more extreme.

JS: I have a quiet way of going about things. With loud results.

RH: We were all deflated because the play had been so much fun and the film was slow by comparison. There is a theory that the audience started shouting at the screen because the film has so many longueurs.

PQ: On the last day of filming Jim said: ‘Just a moment.’ Oh God, what now? I had a three-year-old to get home to. He wanted to create Man Ray’s lips as an animated mouth. I’m at Elstree, miming to (opening song) Science Fiction/ Double Feature, but the mouth kept going out of frame so the cameraman screwed a lighting clamp onto my head. Then my husband Don phoned for a divorce. I said, ‘Tell him I’m clamped.’ Now I’ve got the most famous lips in the world.

SB: The film came out in 1975 and it was a total flop.

LA: [VP of advertising] Tim Deegan was the only person at 20th Century Fox who believed in the film. He previewed it at Santa Barbara and half the audience left, but 15 college kids loved it. Then in 1976 we had bookings at the Waverly in New York and a cinema in Austin, Texas. I’d call the managers each Monday and they’d say, “We did 45 people. But it’s the same 45 as last week.” That’s when I knew we had a film.

RO’B: The film seemed a bit dreamlike to me. I couldn’t understand why it was so long, why we weren’t picking up the cues. Years later a Rocky fan said, “Mr O’Brien, did you leave those gaps so we could say our lines?”

PQ: It was all forgotten until Lou Adler said, ‘You know they’re talking to your film and dressing up as you?’ Sal Piro, master of ceremonies at the Waverly, started the whole shadow cast phenomenon.

RO’B: In 1978 a teenager got us over to Long Island, God knows how, where 1,500 people were answering the lines and throwing things at the screen.

RH: I turned to Richard and said, ‘This is funnier than the film.’

PQ: I did a Rocky Horror tour recently, 15 states in the USA, grandest theatres in the land. This girl, bigger than anyone I’d ever seen, came up and said, ‘Rocky Horror is the only place where I have ever been accepted.’

RO’B: Look at the Transylvanians in the film. They are tall, short, fat, thin, no standard norm, and Brad and Janet look just as freakish alongside them. Rocky Horror has enabled the audience to say: that’s me. It’s not a hymn to beauty. It’s not a hymn to perfection. It’s a hymn to the ordinary person.

JS: With Rocky Horror, a spell was cast. In some strange way, it remains.

This article originally appeared in MOJO 384.

Twice derailed by egomania, hard drugs and Britpop, Suede continue to sashay on – wiser, sturdier and more creative than ever.  In 2025, the band release their tenth album, Antidepressants, which revived Brett Anderson and co.’s formative suburban post-punk influences (Magazine, The Cult, Crass), while pointing vigorously to the future.

• READ MORE: Suede New Album Exclusive: “We can get arty, but it always snaps back to being a rock band...”

It continued a remarkable second life for the band who spearheaded the revival of British guitar music in the early '90s. IN tribute to Brett Anderson's gang of lucre outsiders, MOJO's Victoria Segal ranks and rates every album from the band to date, from the bedsit glam of their Britpop-heralding 1993 debut to the stark, feral energy of their 21st century incarnation...

10.

A New Morning

(Epic, 2002)

Recorded after Anderson cleaned up his act, Suede’s fifth album has its moments – the Haywards Heath Springsteen of One Hit To The Body, Lost In TV’s psychic white-out – but after the distinctive sting of Suede’s earlier work, this competent, non-specific indie was anticlimactic. One good reason to salute this record, though: the band’s “Stalinist” desire to obliterate its memory would eventually spur their re-formation.

9.

Head Music

(Nude, 1999)

Created while Anderson was deep in addiction (see his excellent memoir Afternoons With The Blinds Drawn for bleak details), Head Music was very much Suede “feeling schizo, ever so psycho”, hell-bent on wonky experimentation. Can’t Get Enough carries off the glamtronica racket well, while the ballads – Everything Will Flow, Indian Strings and the diaphanous She’s In Fashion – elegantly veil the worst excesses.

8.

Bloodsports

(Warner Music, 2013)

Sound the horns! After a string of reunion shows, Suede announced a sixth album – a “carnal” cross between Dog Man Star and Coming Up, according to Anderson. It Starts And Ends With You; Faultlines; Barriers: these songs not only erased the disappointments of A New Morning but also blasted a path to a newly creative Suede era. The thrill of the musical hunt, rediscovered.

7.

Night Thoughts

(Warner Music, 2016)

Bloodsports, Anderson said, was still driven by “the feeling that we should try to write pop and rock music.” Admittedly, plenty of that remained on Night Thoughts – not least the hands-in-the-air Outsiders and the Coming Up-worthy Like Kids – but as their comeback gathered momentum, they were increasingly keen to stretch out. The result: a song-cycle inspired by the fears triggered by fatherhood and the strange legacies of family.

6.

The Blue Hour

(Warner Music, 2018)

Inspired by ’70s TV folk-horror Penda’s Fen and glacial Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, Suede broke new ground with this gloriously disconcerting survey of the edgelands, both literal – think barbed wire and abandoned fridges – and psychological. Picking through the hedgerows, they collected songs about dead birds, chalk circles and “the terrors of childhood”, this most urban of bands extending into the rustic strange.

5.

Autofiction

(BMG, 2022)

It’s clear why Suede thought a reset was required here – _The Blue Hour’_s logical next step possibly was a contemporary ballet – but instead of flattening themselves out, Suede amped themselves up, their love of punk (and beyond) fired into these stark, raging songs. The shadows fall darkly, but the sheer feral energy of Turn Off Your Brain And Yell or 15 Again made Autofiction a very bright spot in their catalogue.

4.

Antidepressants

(BMG, 2025)

Plugging once more into dark post-punk energies – Killing Joke, The Chameleons, PiL, The Cure – Suede knocked all the emotional safety catches off with their tenth album. Through a background chatter of mechanised voices, Brett Anderson cuts through sharper and stranger than ever. “You will never be blithe and careless,” he states on Disintegrate’s skull-shaped call-to-arms, but this defiant, death-defying record – as much joyride as memento mori - is the glorious reward.

3.

Coming Up

(Nude, 1996)

After the personal and musical differences that shattered Suede’s first incarnation, Coming Up was deliberately direct, bringing vital proof that Richard Oakes and Neil Codling were strong signings. Trash and Beautiful Ones hit peak outsider-anthem euphoria; By The Sea kept the romance alive, while Picnic By The Motorway’s carbon-monoxide haze was their own perverse Magical Mystery Tour. High on diesel, gasoline, new possibilities.

2.

Dog Man Star

(Nude, 1994)

As omni-talented guitarist Bernard Butler’s last turbulent stand with Suede, Dog Man Star was almost drowned out by the unhappy story of its making. The drama of these songs (cf. The Wild Ones, New Generation) wouldn’t be overshadowed for long, though. A yearning for something bigger and better still shines through the tumble of film stars, thwarted romance and imminent apocalypse.

• READ MORE: Inside The Making Of Dog Man Star: “Brett took loads of drugs and shagged everyone he could. I stayed at home with my girlfriend..."

1.

Suede

(Nude, 1993)

Have you ever tried it that way? A superb act of world-building, Suede’s debut is a portal – or maybe peephole – into an existence that trembles between desperation, ugliness and ethereal beauty. Animal Nitrate, She’s Not Dead or Pantomime Horse drag the listener into places they shouldn’t be: a bedroom, a car, a troubled mind. Quite the introduction to the band.

Photo: Suede, New York, 1994 (Credit: Bob Berg/Getty)

The Waterboys: Fisherman's Blues Revue

OVO Hydro, Glasgow, August 29, 2026

It seems a little incongruous: The Waterboys taking the homespun music they conceived half a lifetime ago in village pubs, modest front rooms, dilapidated country houses, tour buses and backstage areas into the vast and somewhat soulless space of a sponsored concrete arena. Yet it is clear from the outset this evening that there are some significant red lines to the band’s first appearance at the cavernous Hydro: there will be no jumbo screens or flashy video backdrops tonight. Instead, the drama – and there is plenty of that – unfolds against a painted scene depicting a sylvan wooded vale, whose sole concession to big show dynamics is to change colour periodically.

• READ MORE: Mike Scott: “Fisherman’s Blues should have been a triple!”

As ever with The Waterboys, whatever the context, it is left to the music to do the talking. Tonight, the conversation is a vital one. The challenge of the Fisherman’s Blues Revue is simply to reanimate some of the most transcendent music ever made.

Scott swears that this year’s triple CD, Atlantic Rain, will be the final instalment in the four-decades-long saga of Fisherman’s Blues. Released in October 1988, the wild, open-ended sessions for the Waterboys’ fourth album have since provided a bountiful source of additional material. The Too Close To Heaven album of outtakes in 2002 and a two-disc Collector’s Edition (2006) were mere appetisers for the gargantuan Fisherman’s Box in 2013. On stage, too, Scott revisited that era in 2012.

Doing so again with The Fisherman’s Blues Revue, he has invited talismanic fiddler and foil Steve Wickham to return to the fold, as well as recruited Steve Earle to the ranks – a deluxe replacement, of sorts, for absent multi-instrumentalist Anto Thistlethwaite.

It is Wickham who helps this ultimately triumphant show find its sea legs. Alongside Scott, the core band is ‘Brother’ Paul Brown on organ, James Hallawell on keys, bassist Aongus Ralston, drummer Eamon Ferris and splendidly named Norwegian Roar Øien on pedal steel. Initially, they seem determined to batter the Hydro and its soupy sound into submission. In full-blooded voice throughout, Scott leads the charge in cowboy hat and shades, high-kicking his way through an opening salvo of brash, bludgeoning versions of catalogue staples, as though reminding us that, before he followed the fellow who fiddles, The Waterboys were, and always will be, a rock and roll band.

A Girl Called Johnny – not exactly enhanced by Brown’s tiresome histrionics on the keytar – rapidly gives way to The Whole Of The Moon. If it’s a bold move to play the band’s best-known song so early in the set, it’s also an acknowledgement that tonight’s main business lies somewhere beyond the so-called Big Music era.

• READ MORE: "Dylan heard Whole Of The Moon and he liked it..." Mike Scott Interviewed

Cue Wickham, who strolls on stage already tearing into the fiddle line from We Will Not Be Lovers. Dressed in a natty black frock coat – half Falstaff, half Father Jack – his melodic additions and quietly theatrical presence instantly raise everything up a notch. Aired only sporadically over the years, We Will Not Be Lovers is one of the great Waterboys songs, and tonight it rolls on and on, an urgent and unstoppable force.

From there, the night pivots into a full exploration of Fisherman’s Blues, as the band summon the spirit of the songs and their sources in folk, country, blues and gospel. Each musician gradually finds his space in the music as they merge into a highly attuned, endlessly intuitive soul orchestra. There is a mesmerising fluidity to their take on Van Morrison’s Sweet Thing, gilded with Wickham’s lyrical flourishes and Hallawell’s glistening piano runs. As on Fisherman’s Blues, the coda slides into The Beatles’ Blackbird, but here finds a further higher gear at the end, driven on by Wickham’s ascending fiddle melody. Strange Boat, which follows, is gorgeous and becalmed, a kind of cosmic Celtic blues, Øien’s pedal steel finally beginning to assert itself in the mix.

One Fisherman’s Blues veteran whose presence isn’t pre-advertised is Colin Blakey, who joins the band to reprise his flute part for The Stolen Child, the first of many Waterboys Yeats adaptations, and still perhaps the finest. Scott takes on both the enchanting chorus and the spoken recitation at the heart of an astonishing ensemble performance: solemn, precarious and precious, it casts a spell-like aura over both audience and musicians as the first set draws to a close.

Earle joins proceedings at the start of the second set. Aside from cutting short a wobbly version of My Old Friend The Blues, he’s otherwise in fine fettle, ripping through some of his own tunes before indulging in a spot of Trump jibing and airing a pretty new song.

The Waterboys is “one of only three bands I’ve ever wanted to be in,” he tells us, and it’s evident he isn’t just here to make up the numbers. His mandolin brings another crucial ingredient of the Fisherman’s Blues sound to the mix, and by the time he and Scott trade verses on The Rolling Stones’ Dead Flowers – introduced by Scott as a song “by a little known South London blues combo” – the eight-piece combo is fully locked-in.

One of the joys of the show is its unearthing of some of the album’s deeper cuts. When Will We Be Married?, unheard in concert for over a decade, is sung by Earle and becomes a galloping bluegrass koan. A similarly rare outing for Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?, played solo and short by Scott, reveals some new words and a restructured bridge.

The only album track left unplayed is World Party, but given the vastness of the Fisherman’s Blues repository, hardcore fans might lament the lack of other material from the sessions. We do, however, get a first ever live airing for the epic Come Back To Galway, the standout track from Atlantic Rain. It cracks that huge Waterboys sound wide open as it builds, surges then breaks, solos passed around the stage like a good story.

Blakey returns for And A Bang On The Ear, which quickly becomes a full-on hoolie. Earle adds a couple of his own heartsore verses – given his romantic history, it might well have been 20 – as the song gallops along at full tilt. It’s a blast, even if at times no one seems entirely sure what’s going on.

The encore begins with a romp through Earle’s Galway Girl, followed by Fisherman’s Blues in full glorious sail, and a lively nine-piece rendition of the old Carter Family gospel blues, Will The Circle Be Unbroken?, during which Scott and Earle link arms for a quick reel around the stage. If this tour proves to be the final word on the wild, wonderful story of Fisherman’s Blues, it’s a mighty one.

The Waterboys, OVO Hydro, Glasgow, August 29, Set List:

Set 1:

Don’t Bang The Drum

Glastonbury Song

How Long Will I Love You

A Girl Called Johnny

The Whole Of The Moon

We Will Not Be Lovers

Medicine Bow

The Raggle Taggle Gypsy

Sweet Thing / Blackbird

Strange Boat

Dunford’s Fancy

The Stolen Child

Set 2:

Copperhead Road (sung by Earle)

Guitar Town (sung by Earle)

My Old Friend The Blues (sung by Earle)

I Ain’t Ever Satisfied (sung by Earle)

Volver a Celaya (sung by Earle)

Dead Flowers

When Will We Be Married? (sung by Earle)

When Ye Go Away

Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?

Come Back To Galway

And A Bang On The Ear

Encore:

Galway Girl (sung by Earle)

Fisherman’s Blues

Will The Circle Be Unbroken?

Photo: The Waterboys at the Notodden Blues Festival, Notodden, Norway, August 5, 2023 (Per Ole Hagen/Redferns)