MOJO-383-cover-Robert-Plant-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 383 – October 2025: Robert Plant

MOJO 382 covers, featuring Brian Wilson and Suede

MOJO-382-covers-Brian-Wilson-Suede-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 382 – September 2025: Brian Wilson / Suede

MOJO-381-cover-The-Beatles-Featured-Image.jpg

MOJO 381 – August 2025: The Beatles

MOJO_380_cover_Oasis_featured_image.jpg

MOJO 380 – July 2025: Oasis

MOJO-379-Pulpletterbox-1400.jpg

MOJO 379 – June 2025: Pulp

MOJO-378-cover-Queen-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 378 – May 2025: Queen

MOJO_377_cover_Genesis_Featured_Image.jpg

MOJO 377 – April 2025: Genesis

MOJO 376, The Jam and Paul Weller – two collectable covers

MOJO-376-cover-The-Jam-Paul-Weller-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 376 – March 2025: Paul Weller

MOJO 375 magazine cover, featuring The Rolling Stones

MOJO_375_cover_Rolling_Stones_featured_image.jpg

MOJO 375 – February 2025: The Rolling Stones

MOJO 374 magazine cover, featuring Neil Young and The Best Albums Of 2024

MOJO-374-cover-Neil-Young-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 374 – January 2025: Neil Young

MOJO-373-cover-David-Bowie-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 373 – December 2024: David Bowie

David Gilmour, on the cover of MOJO magazine, number 372

MOJO-372-cover-David-Gilmour-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 372 – November 2024: David Gilmour

MOJO 371 magazine cover, featuring Bob Dylan

MOJO-371-cover-Bob-Dylan-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 371 – October 2024: Bob Dylan

MOJO-370-cover-Nick-Cave-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 370 – September 2024: Nick Cave

MOJO-369-cover-Stevie-Nicks-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 369 – August 2024: Stevie Nicks

MOJO-368-cover-Paul-Weller-featured-image.jpg

MOJO 368 – July 2024: Paul Weller

Blur-hero-3.jpg

Blur: All The Albums Ranked

Margot-Price-2025_crop.jpg

Margo Price Hard Headed Woman Reviewed: Outlaw country queen re-embraces her roots

Santana-Hero.jpg

Santana’s Best Albums Ranked

John-Fogerty_-David-McLister_crop.jpg

John Fogerty – Legacy Reviewed: Creedence man re-records his classics

The-Clash-Hero.jpg

The Clash’s Best Albums Ranked!

Oasis-1997_Alamy_Crop.jpg

Noel Gallagher On Be Here Now: “We should never have made that record then…”

Wolf-Alice_Rachel-Fleminger-Hudson_crop1.jpg

Wolf Alice The Clearing Reviewed: Indie rock outfit take it back to the ‘70s

The-Who-Hero-2.jpg

The Who: Every Album Ranked

Gary-Numan-1978_Getty.jpg

Gary Numan: “It was really, really mental…”

The-Who_the-Oval-1971_Gijsbert-Hanekroot-Redferns-Getty.jpg

The Who Live At The Oval Reviewed: Legendary ’71 Show Out At Last

Aretha-Franklin-Hero.jpg

Aretha Franklin’s Best Albums Ranked

Deep-Purple-Tokyo-1972.jpg

Deep Purple Made In Japan Reviewed: Revered ‘72 live album remixed and expanded

Robert-Plant_Tom-Oldham_crop.jpg

Robert Plant: “To do it for the sake of it was never what Led Zeppelin were about…”

Cass-McCombs-Press-Pic.jpg

Cass McCombs Interior Live Oak Reviewed: Elusive songwriter continues to mesmerise

BST25_NEIL-YOUNG_ISHA-SHAH_CROP.jpg

Neil Young Live In Charlotte Reviewed: Young blazes despite sound issues

Taylor-Swift-Hero.jpg

Every Taylor Swift Album Ranked

Time Machine

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

Magazine

Latest Issues

Back Issues

Recommends

Audio

Preview Only

Staging Mode

Articles

Stories

The Mojo List

New Music

Thanks to a swaggering role in Britpop’s naughty ’90s carry-on, the four men of **Blur** are haunted by depictions of themselves at their most annoying and cartoon-like. But peer back – into the punky chaos of the pre-Blur Seymour, and back further, into teenage epiphanies aroused by The Jam, The Specials and New Order, into singer/songwriter Damon Albarn’s boho background (his father Keith managed Soft Machine) and apprenticeship in music theatre – and the soul of a fascinating, polymathic pop phenomenon emerges.

As a young indie band on the rise, 1988-91, Blur were rowdy and puppyish. Rhythms were a war between drummer Dave Rowntree’s heads-down flailing and Alex James’ pert, elasto-poppy bass lines. Graham Coxon’s guitars could be relied upon to surprise – his sizzling riffs on Syd-Barrett-goes-baggy single There’s No Other Way were a killer calling card – while his fellow alumnus of Stanway Comprehensive, Colchester, Damon Albarn, wrote the songs and sang with sssibilant esssesss.

They liked to get in your face, often drunkenly, but their big bet, on English-flavoured pop at grunge’s apex, paid off. The subsequent alignment of UK pop culture behind them went to their heads, or did them in, or both, but it’s to their credit that when it came the crash fuelled music that bore the scars, in the scratchy comedown vibe of Blur, the deconstructive urges of 13, and beyond, into idiosyncratic solo projects.

33 years on from the release of their debut single, Blur are back with us. In July they played two of the biggest shows of their career at :a[Wembley Stadium]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blur-live-at-wembley-stadium-review/' } and have just released their ninth studio album, _:a[The Ballad Of Darren]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/blur-the-ballad-of-darren-review/' }_. One of their best, perhaps? Or maybe not? Read on to see where it comes in our rundown of every Blur studio album ranked…

By the band’s own admission, their 1991 debut was an exercise in paddling around in post-baggy, pre-Britpop waters trying to find an identity. As such, much of _Leisure_ can feel underdeveloped or, as on the Madchester beats tacked on beneath the likes of Bang, an exercise in hitching themselves to someone else’s bandwagon. That being said, it’s an album that also contains two bone fide classic Blur singles (She’s So High and There’s No Other Way) and on the churning, narcotic fog of Sing, an indicator of the depths and possibilities that lay ahead.

Stranded in Hong Kong for five days in 2013 after the cancellation of Japan’s Tokyo Rocks Festival, Blur knocked up an entire album’s worth of new material in their downtime, which Graham Coxon later took to _Parklife_/_Modern Life Is Rubbish_ producer Stephen Street to polish up enough to convince Damon Albarn they had a Blur-worthy collection on their hands. Despite its ad-hoc creation, _The Magic Whip_ provided a fine comeback. Humid and tightly-packed, with the hum and buzz of Coxon’s guitars stuttering and spluttering throughout, here was Blur in their 40s: world-weary at times and audibly frazzled, but reconnected to their spirit and identity in way that we hadn’t heard since the end of the '90s.

The final instalment of Blur’s ‘life’ trilogy, The Great Escape may have felt like Parklife Pt2 in some respects, but it’s also an eerily accurate bellwether of British pop culture in the mid 90s. The Oasis-squashing Country House reveals a new level of irony when you realise it was sending up Food boss Dave Balfe, and while Charmless Man and Stereotypes may now sound like brash cousins of more detailed character studies like Tracey Jacks or For Tomorrow, The Great Escape also contains some of Blur’s finest ever moments: Scott Walker homage The Universal and He Thought Of Cars – a seasick knot of distortion and melancholy that pointed the way to a richer future away for the shadow of the Britpop monster they had helped to spawn.

Given the mid-project departure of Graham Coxon (at least he left the vertiginous guitar nuages of epic closer, Battery In Your Leg) this is victory from the jaws of defeat. Recording in London and Marrakesh, with the help of Norman Cook, and with The Clash’s Combat Rock on Albarn’s mind, Blur hosted a multi-ethnic meltdown on their blithest record since Britpop flag-bearer Parklife, with Maroc-punk nuttah We’ve Got A File On You and Black Grapey drug-paean Brothers And Sisters balancing the transfiguring, melancholy pop of Out Of Time. A slightly patched-together, demo’d vibe adds charm but – surprise – it lacks something. That’s it: Graham Coxon.

Perhaps it’s too early to tell where Blur’s ninth album should fall in a rundown of the band’s greatest work, but _:a[The Ballad Of Darren]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/blur-the-ballad-of-darren-review/' }_ certainly sounds like the record Blur _should_ be making in 2023. With the group themselves playing :a[two nights at Wembley Stadium]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blur-live-at-wembley-stadium-review/' } shortly before the record’s release, Britpop nostalgia is clearly a booming business still, yet the looking back that takes place here isn’t a cheery hark back to past glories, but a sadness for what’s been lost as the band navigate middle age together. Despite its glammy guitar stomp, and even an ‘Oi!’ from Albarn, St Charles Square paints a picture of the singer broken by fame, hiding from success and succumbing to the fear (and worse), and when Coxon joins Albarn to sing of travelling around the world together on The Ballad it’s a bittersweet acknowledgement of their shared lost innocence. As Coxon told MOJO recently: :a[“It sounds like Blur, but men.”]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blur-graham-coxon-interviewed/' }

Much truer to Blur’s art-punk soul than their nebulous debut, Leisure, this could still have been their last gasp without the intervention of the Food label’s oft-maligned Andy Ross/David Balfe axis. Their demand for singles gave rise to Chemical World and the aching For Tomorrow, Albarn’s first mature conceptions. Meanwhile, Modern Life… looks back, in Colin Zeal’s homage to The Teardrop Explodes’ Went Crazy, and forward, in Starshaped’s pre-echoes of End Of The Century, and Coxon rocks harder than on any Blur album. Bonus: 2012’s two-disc reissue gives you the pivotal Popscene. “Lost on the Westway” was Albarn, not for the last time.

In the late ’90s, experimental drug use turned Albarn on to music’s texture, groove and soul, while William Orbit’s mix of the Blur album’s Movin’ On convinced the group of the uses of electronica. Orbit would produce 13, taking the bonnet off Blur and exposing its innards – the raw nerves of Albarn’s split from Britpop consort Justine Frischmann included. Stompy gospel-folk (Tender) and gnarled pop (Coffee & TV) thus met indie-dub (Battle) and opiated prog (Caramel) in a trip into inner and outer space. Sadness and weirdness combine in the devastating closing song No Distance Left To Run and in Trailerpark, the roots of Gorillaz are beginning to show.

The patient on the cover’s gurney could have been Blur themselves, ravaged by Britpop excess and the Pyrrhic skirmish with Oasis. In its wake Graham Coxon, disaffected by The Great Escape’s overwrought Parklife redux, got what he wanted: a re-indiefied Blur complete with lo-fi scuff and a heart of darkness (his You’re So Great could be Dinosaur Jr.). And yet Classic Blur™ tropes shine through: clever/dumb pop gambits like Song 2 and M.O.R.; Ghost Town overtones in Britpop time-caller Death Of A Party; the Hunky Dory-isms of Strange News From Another Star. Simultaneously Blur’s most fatigued and yet effortless album.

Everything haters hate about Blur, with its yob-march title track a kind of pustulant, contempt-attracting beacon. But don’t blame Parklife for the excesses of the era it presaged with its artful brashness and pop-art palette (a bit like Alf Garnett – you saw the cautionary irony, or you didn’t). Admire instead the heady alt disco of Girls And Boys, swaggering ultra-Kinks of End Of The Century and the Elgarian melancholy of This Is A Low: key planks in an accidental state-of-the-nation address laced with brio, stylistic dressing-up and tunes. Sometimes records are successful because they are great. This is one of those.

“I will make country albums again,” Margo Price told MOJO circa 2023’s _:a[Strays]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/margo-price-reviewed/' }_, her fine, shrooms and psychedelia-led wander off-piste. What’s a tad surprising, perhaps, is just how quickly and wholeheartedly she has re-embraced her roots. With its classic country lexicon – rhinestones, liquor stores and tear-soaked Kleenex all figure – _Hard Headed_ _Woman_ is the first LP Price has made entirely in Nashville, her home of some 20 years. Tracked in RCA Studio A, that hallowed space frequented by :a[Loretta Lynn]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/country-music-icon-loretta-lynn-dies-aged-90/' }, :a[Dolly Parton]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/dolly-partons-greatest-albums-ranked/' } et al, it also has the blessing of Waylon Jennings’ widow Jessi Colter, who, sensing a good fit perhaps, urged Price to cover her husband’s song Kissing You Goodbye, a work that’s more scorpion sting than smooch.

Sometimes reverent flame-keeper, sometimes agitator and square-peg in a round hole, Price has remained irrepressibly individual, this lending her current place at the forefront of country’s ever-evolving dynasty extra spark and edge. It helps, too, that she writes from the crucible of her own extremely testing life, as unflinchingly detailed in her sometimes funny, often tragic 2022 memoir, :a[Maybe We’ll Make It]{href='https://www.waterstones.com/book/maybe-well-make-it/margo-price/9781477333112' }. When Price sings Losing Streak here, or duets with Tyler Childers on last chance saloon ballad Love Me Like You Used To Do, she convinces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW8XCKTjLPg

_Hard Headed Woman_ sees her big personality fire straight-talking, sometimes blackly comic lyrics – “All the cocaine in existence/Can’t keep your nose out of my business” – while taking her music to new places. Yes, LP number five has chicken-pickin’ Telecaster and lachrymose waltzes, but Price’s take on 1975 George Jones B-side I Just Don’t Give A Damn swaps the original’s sedate front-porch trot for an itchy, horns-imbued groove seemingly built for the funkiest line-dance ever. With Matt Ross-Spang, producer of her 2016 debut _Midwest Farmer’s Daughter_, back at the controls, Price penned these songs with a trusted inner circle including her spouse Jeremy Ivey. Not for her, clearly, those ‘too-many-cooks’ writing pile-ons that can dilute an artist’s identity.

Close To You is a stirringly spare evocation of how romantic obsession can trump all other concerns, even the fall of democracy. Elsewhere, too, Price is anything but diluted, hence Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down. A juke joint floorfiller meets song of solidarity, it was part-inspired by the late Kris Kristofferson’s famed words of condolence to Sinéad O’Connor after she was booed off stage at :a[Bob Dylan]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/bob-dylan-greatest-songs/' }’s 30th Anniversary show at Madison Square Garden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyhzsMWC4sw

That Price should identify with O’Connor – another phoenix from the flames whose stellar musical career was forged despite the most testing of backdrops – makes perfect sense, of course. Thank god, then, for gentle souls and bold, hard-headed women.

_Hard Headed Woman is out August 29 on Loma Vista Recordings_

**ORDER: :a[Amazon]{href='https://www.amazon.co.uk/Headed-Woman-VINYL-Margo-Price/dp/B0FB5NWCV9/?tag=mojotag-21' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Rough Trade]{href='https://www.roughtrade.com/en-us/product/margo-price/hard-headed-woman-1' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[HMV]{href='https://hmv.com/store/music/vinyl/hard-headed-woman' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}**

1\. Prelude (Hard Headed Woman)  
2\. Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down  
3\. Red Eye Flight  
4\. Don’t Wake Me Up (ft. Jesse Welles)  
5\. Close To You  
6\. Nowhere Is Where  
7\. Losing Streak  
8\. I Just Don’t Give A Damn  
9\. Picture  
10\. Love Me Like You Used To Do (ft. Tyler Childers)  
11\. Wild At Heart  
12\. Kissin You Goodbye

****Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films. More info and to order a copy :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/robert-plant-stars-on-new-mojo-cover/' }!****

Carlos Santana’s guitar tone is a distinctive thing - a raw, howling blues-cry delivered with Hispanic inflections and a pent-up eroticism. Throughout his five decades making music, however, the man himself has resisted being pigeonholed. “I never really like a low ceiling,” he once told this writer. “I don't like being put in a box, like I’m the Latin rock guy.” The only musical classification that he’s happy with, and which he says defines his sound and style, is one that he devised himself: ‘multi-dimensional interdenominational music.’

For Santana, it’s a term that embodies what he’s about: music that has no limits and operates on multiple planes, including the spiritual. Santana the band has gone through seventy-two different line ups, with the bandleader himself as shamanistic lynchpin, whose searing, soaring, guitar playing holds all together.

But it wasn’t always that way. In the late-‘60s when the group first emerged as a blues-based jam band in San Francisco, they were a more democratic unit, who blew minds at Woodstock with a sound that had never been heard before - delta blues steeped in percussive salsa grooves. Successful from the get-go, it was in the seventies when the band truly blossomed, and each album they made was a thrilling sonic trip. Though they struggled both commercially and creatively in the late eighties and most of the nineties, in 1999 Santana reinvented his band as a Latin R&B-tinged act and hit the jackpot with _Supernatural_. Despite all of the band’s recent successes in terms of sales, hits and Grammy awards, though, it’s their classic seventies work that has endured best of all, and really encapsulates what this extraordinary musical adventure is really about.

After the relatively fallow years of the eighties and nineties – the last non-live album before this was 1992’s _Milagro_ - a fresh and reinvigorated incarnation of the group emerged in 1999 with this collaborative, R&B-steeped set. Featuring a panoply of guests ranging from Lauryn Hill and Cee-Lo Green to rapper Everlast and Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana might seem like a sideman on his own record, but his guitar is the sonic glue that binds the disparate elements together. Sales-wise, it catapulted Santana into the stratosphere, and many of the band’s subsequent albums have adhered to a similar template.

As its earworm of an opener - the sublime Latin groover Dance Sister Dance – demonstrated, _Amigos_ was defined by its return to first principles. Helmed by Herbie Hancock’s then-producer Dave Rubinson and featuring smoothly soulful new vocalist Greg Walker, it was less exploratory and more commercial than the albums that preceded it, featuring salient funk and soul characteristics as well as staying true to the band’s signature meld of blues and Latin music. The set contains the classic Santana ballad Europa and, propelled by Shaft-style wah-wah and a disco beat, the US hit Let It Shine.

One of Santana’s biggest selling albums in the UK - it spent 27 weeks in the album charts, peaking at number seven - this was a sprawling double LP that was a seemingly arbitrary blend of new studio cuts with live tracks recorded in Europe during 1976. While the in-concert performances illustrated that late-‘70s Santana were an incredibly slick but still exciting live attraction, the studio material found them exploring the more open jazz-fusion style of their earlier ‘70s albums. Highlights include a scintillating six-minute live retooling of Black Magic Woman that transcends the original studio version. Their last great album of the ‘70s.

Co-led by the distinctive combination of Carlos Santana’s blistering fretboard work and Greg Rolie’s soaring organ chords, this incendiary debut was the launch pad for the sextet’s fierce amalgam of electric blues-rock and percussive Afro-Cuban grooves. Key to the band’s rhythmic drive were drummer Michael Shrieve and percussionist Jose ‘Chepito’ Areas, whose contribution to a stirring version of Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji’s Jingo was vital. Though consisting mostly of instrumental jams - including the sublime Soul Sacrifice - the album’s strongest vocal track is a cover of the Willie Bobo-associated Evil Ways, which became Santana's maiden US hit single.

An underrated and often overlooked gem in Santana’s catalogue, the group’s sixth LP followed the jazz-fusion trajectory of their previous two albums: indeed, in his 2014 autobiography, The Universal Tone, Santana, described it as “the third part of a trilogy along with Caravanserai and Welcome.” Featuring new band members Leon Patillo (vocals/ keys), Jules Broussard (saxes) and drummer Ndugu Chancler, as well as telling cameos from Flora Purim, Airto Moreira and bassist Stanley Clarke, Santana pushed the jazz-rock envelope even further with such exotic, extended Weather Report-style work-outs as Aspirations and the epic Promise Of A Fisherman.

Santana’s fifth long player opens with turbulent squalls of sound rising from guest contributor Alice Coltrane’s cosmic organ, signalling the band’s deeper exploration of jazz-fusion territory. Keyboardist Tom Coster replaces original co-founder, Greg Rolie, while former Pharoah Sanders’ vocalist Leon Thomas lends his distinctively rich tones to several tracks. There are also impressive cameos by Brazilian husband-and-wife duo, singer Flora Purim and percussionist Airto, while Mahavishnu Orchestra leader and axe deity John McLaughlin also participates. Flame-Sky is a stunning showcase for Santana’s guitar prowess while Mother Africa is a thundering percussive jam with a wailing Coltrane-esque saxophone.

**Carlos Santana & Mahavishnu John McLaughlin**

Both followers of spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy, Santana and McLaughlin shared a mutual passion for the music of John Coltrane, which was the inspiration behind this mind-blowing collaboration that took Santana into the liberating realm of spiritual prog-jazz. The centrepiece of the album was a transcendent realization of Coltrane’s hymnal, A Love Supreme. Although some jazz purists lambasted it, in their defence Santana opined, “John McLaughlin and I didn’t really give a shit what people thought of it. It’s not like we were trying to put a moustache on the Mona Lisa. We did it out of respect.”

“I felt we needed to walk a tightrope with Caravanserai,” said Carlos of the band’s fourth album, recorded in ’72. Representing a transitional phase - the original line-up had split by then - it’s regarded as a significant milestone in the canon, as it witnesses the expansion of their sonic palette by playing more open-ended, jazz-fusion-leaning grooves. Certainly, the overall feeling is looser, less-structured and more experimental; an approach that is crystallised by the album’s nine-minute coda, Every Step Of The Way, which builds slowly before evolving into a propulsive improvisational vehicle for Santana’s guitar pyrotechnics.

Empowered by their momentous ’69 Woodstock appearance, the group’s second LP exceeded their molten debut. Wrapped in a memorable Mati Klarwein cover painting, it scored the US hit Black Magic Woman - a piquant, percussion-heavy retooling of the Peter Green-scribed Fleetwood Mac classic - and also yielded a turbo-charged take on Tito Puente’s salsa anthem, Oye Come Va. By contrast, the blissful ballad, Samba Pa Ti, showed the group’s lyrical and sensitive side. The album’s title, incidentally, refers to ancient Gnostic mysticism, and was an early manifestation of Carlos Santana’s interest in worlds beyond.

One of the undoubted jewels in the discography, Abraxas’ follow-up was the last to feature the Woodstock line up. With future Journey man, Neal Schon (then just 15), brought in on additional guitar, the album’s blend of high-voltage, percussion-driven Latin-rock instrumentals (Batuka and the super-dynamic samba, Toussaint L’overture) together with soulful vocal tracks (Taboo) and boogaloo funk (Everybody’s Everything) both consolidated and extended the singular style that the band had patented on their first two LPs. A glittering creative pinnacle in the group’s back catalogue, its sheer imaginative reach is belied by its functional numeric title.

## John Fogerty - Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years

There’s no arguing with these 20 songs. They’re brilliant. Those of a certain vintage will be singing along at the top of their lungs with every single one, from Up Around The Bend to Fortunate Son.

There’s no arguing with Fogerty’s singing either – it’s as commanding as ever – nor his distinctive guitar; part anger, part mad joy, like he’s playing on a mountain mid-Apocalypse. As for the arrangements, they’re pretty much can’t-believe-it’s-not-Creedence, with a band that includes his sons Tyler and Shane.

Fogerty has fought bitterly for half a century for ownership of his songs, right down to breaking up his band. What brought him to record this album was finally winning back his publishing rights. Among the highlights: Bad Moon Rising, rich and swampy; Run Through The Jungle, its eerie paranoia perfect for the Vietnam era; and Down On The Corner, a classic sweating city street song.

_Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years is out now on Concord._

**BUY: :a[Amazon]{href='https://www.amazon.co.uk/Legacy-Creedence-Clearwater-Revival-years/dp/B0F9HFGGX2/?tag=mojotag-21' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Rough Trade]{href='https://www.roughtrade.com/product/john-fogerty/legacy-the-creedence-clearwater-revival-years#51927181066571' } | :a[HMV]{href='https://hmv.com/store/music/vinyl/legacy-the-creedence-clearwater-revival-y-92dd5cc' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}**

When they first entered a recording studio, demoing tracks for Polydor in January 1977, it’s unlikely **The Clash** imagined that, 35 years later, they’d be one of rock’s biggest heritage acts. For a start, bassist **Paul Simonon** still had notes painted on his fretboard to help him play, vocalist **Joe Strummer** couldn’t sing, and drummer **Terry Chimes** had left a week earlier, defeated by wearying internal politics. Worse still, producer Guy Stevens had, while drunk, sacked guitarist **Mick Jones** from another group just 18 months before.

The omens weren’t good, yet within six months or so The Clash, by then signed to CBS, had become the most culturally vital group in Britain with _The Clash_. Militant and stylish art-school guerrillas, they were to play Robin Hood to fellow punk architects the :a[Sex Pistols]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/john-lydon-his-ten-greatest-albums/' }’ dastardly Guy Fawkes. By the end of the ’70s, they’d outlived most of their first-wave punk peers and, with drum wizard **Topper Headon**, were creating sprawling, ambitious LPs that mixed punk rock with reggae, soul, jazz, rockabilly, dub, hip hop and more.

It was a pioneering brew that, together with Joe’s personal/ political lyrics, would turn The Clash into international rebel icons, inspiring a million copy-cat punk acts plus several more waves of visionary musicians, from the Beastie Boys and :a[Madonna]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/madonna-interviewed/' } to :a[Manic Street Preachers]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/manic-street-preachers-their-best-albums-ranked/' } and Gorillaz (who’d later include both Mick and Paul).

Adding to their six original studio albums came post-Clash ventures, notably a decade’s worth of Big Audio Dynamite plus several Carbon-Silicon albums (Mick), one solo LP and three with the Mescaleros (Joe), a single outing from Topper (1986’s _Waking Up_), while Paul teamed up with former Whirlwind singer Nigel Dixon as Havana 3AM, joined :a[Damon Albarn]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blurs-damon-albarn-interviewed/' } for two albums as part of The Good, The Bad & The Queen and released an album with Galen Ayres as Galen & Paul.

It would perhaps be unfair to Albarn to consider TGTB&TQ’s two LPs ‘Clash solo records’ (you can visit our rundown of :a[the best Blur, Gorillaz and Damon solo albums]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/blur-and-damon-albarn-the-best-albums-ranked/' } for that). So focusing on the core creative do of Strummer and Jones, here’s MOJO’s pick of the albums that demand your attention.

### **Elgin Avenue Breakdown (Revisited)**

Strummer’s pre-Clash pub rock band were dismissed by the singer as “yesterday’s papers” when he saw the Pistols in March 1976. But this expanded edition of an early ’80s compilation proves vital elements of his word-smithery and vocal delivery were in place by 1975, not only on the spirited Keys To Your Heart – a Chiswick 45, the band’s only official release – but also on the sardonic Sweetie Of The St Moritz and lilting, Dylan-circa-_Desire_\-tinted Sweet Revenge, which prefigures the ethnic folk-pop-rock of _Sandinista!_ There’s even a prescient live version of that album’s Junco Partner.

Back after a near-fatal bout of pneumonia caught from his baby daughter, Jones created a seamless, spellbinding suite of techno-drenched electro-rock on this, the classic BAD line-up’s final album. Cut while sampling legalities were still fuzzy, it features a raft of clips that could never grace an album subsequently, sourced from Jones pop cultural lodestones such as Powell & Pressburger’s film A Matter Of Life And Death, the Great Escape, Honky Tonk Women, The Who and George Formby. A sensual lushness suffuses the sublime dancefloor pop of Contact and Around A Girl In 80 Ways, sung by a softer-voiced Mick.

Expanded from a 10-inch vinyl LP, _Black Market Clash_ – featuring early rarities, notably the 1977 NME freebie version of Capital Radio – _Super BMC_ was re-tooled in the early ’90s to serve as a CD B-sides compilation. Good job, too, as from 1977 to ’80 Clash flipsides were rightly held in awe, the likes of 1977, The City Of The Dead, The Prisoner, Pressure Drop and Groovy Times every bit as special as their A-sides. This collection remains the only home for the group’s cover of Booker T. & The M.G.’s Time Is Tight – though, oddly, the original Capital Radio is dumped for its powerpop 1979 re-tread.

Recorded a year before Strummer’s death, with his pre-fame busking partner Tymon Dogg in tow, the Mescaleros’ second album said more about the mature Joe than any other post-Clash record. Drawing on ethnic-folk and percussion-driven African and Latin musics, especially the tropical Mondo Bongo, joyful work-song Johnny Appleseed and comic Bhindi Bhagee (a Kiwi tourist is re-directed to London’s multi-cultural heart after asking to buy mushy peas). Lyrically, he unleashed a torrent of richly textured, half-crazed mondo-lingual street wisdom.

Jones’s comeback, after being fired by The Clash in 1983, was shaped by the same passion for electronic dance beats that had so distanced him from Joe and Paul in the group’s last days. Yet, though some of its ’80s bass and drum sounds seem dated, Mick still knew how to write a great tune, and the sharp, sledgehammer punk-hop of Medicine Show and E=MC2, veneered with Jonesy’s sarf London twang, became instant classics. Add to this ex-Clash video-maker and top Dread Don Letts’ toasting, a raft of film samples, and the future sound of London (so to speak) was born.

A contrary bunch, The Clash opted to record their second LP with the most un-punk producer imaginable: Sandy Pearlman, mentor of American AOR rockers Blue Öyster Cult. Fraught sessions in London, San Francisco and New York shaped their most ‘rock’ album, a polished, powerful guitar fest giving a platform to the band’s growing interest in world affairs – Euro-terrorism, the rise of neo-Fascism, third world crises – and obsession with writing about London, drugs and themselves. Has great guitar solos, bold lyrics and some of the group’s finest tunes, Safe European Home, English Civil War and Tommy Gun among them.

The last hurrah of the classic line-up, _Combat Rock_ was the album that launched the group into the international rock stratosphere, yielding the dancefloor smash Rock The Casbah and Mick’s lopsided garage-rocker Should I Stay Or Should I Go? Trimmed down from a rambling double album to a punchy single LP by producer Glyn Johns, it’s musically suffused with the funky atmosphere of a graffiti’d, rap-infected New York (where it was made), and lyrically with the humid, psychedelic Vietnam visions of Apocalypse Now, The Clash’s _film de jour_. Topper’s addiction had seen him fired by the time it hit the racks.

The UK press thought The Clash had lost it. Six sides? Jazz? Kids singing old Clashclassics? But this extraordinary three-LP set saw the group embark on a musical voyage into their own heart of darkness, a journey through rap, dub, soul, Latin and beyond. But the band super-excelled here whether covering reggae-soul hits (The Equals’ Police On My Back), crafting trenchant rock (Somebody Got Murdered), venturing into contemporary black forms (The Magnificent Seven) or writing some uncategorisable gems such as Something About England or Charlie Don’t Surf. Two-and-a-half hours of weird, mind-bending brilliance.

Rock was never quite the same after this, a speed-stoked protest record that caught the frustrations and cheap thrills of mid-’70s London youth, seen through the prism of Joe’s poetic, wry, comic-book mind. His images of tower blocks (London’s Burning), unemployment, newspaper scandals (Janie Jones), boredom (Remote Control), drugs (48 Thrills) and civil unrest (White Riot) were brought to life by Mick’s clever key changes and guitar interplay and the rock-reggae treatment of Junior Murvin’s Police & Thieves established the important punk-Rasta axis. _Never Mind The Bollocks_ came six months later, making _The Clash_ UK punk’s primary LP.

By the end of the decade, punk had eaten itself and synths were about to take over. But, inspired by their trips to America, The Clash saw a radical way forward: rocking up the black R&B, reggae, jazz, ska and funk influences they loved so much. There was some rock on this Guy Stevens-produced 2-LP masterpiece – the title track, Spanish Bombs, Clampdown – but elsewhere it was a Ladbroke Grove-styled soul rebel stew, capped by classics like Train In Vain and Rudie Can’t Fail. The 25th anniversary edition adds a disc of demos and compelling footage of the group in the studio. And Pennie Smith’s shot of Simonon smashing his bass on the cover is, arguably, rock iconography’s high point.

The big no-no is 1985’s _:a[Cut The Crap]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/3E01XjnmC1HdxTE8dPuEkn?si=B8xf5E7-RMK8TvfNIu5Dig' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}_, the post-Mick’n’Topper line-up’s grand electro-rock folly (though lead track This Is England is a triumph); Simonon isn’t even on it, making it debatable whether it’s really The Clash at all. Topper’s 1986 solo album, _:a[Waking Up]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISrs7wvQ5c' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}_, is a straightforward by-numbers showcase, it won’t ruin your life if you don’t hear it. Strummer’s soundtrack to the Alex Cox film :a[Walker]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/3Nh26x9vrXaQAbRPgUxGtX?si=l0fLCK5jQrCfVe4OMHac3Q' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}has piquant Latino moments, especially the lovely Filibustero, but flags.

Released on August 21, 1997, Oasis’ third album had the unenviable task of following up the colossal, era-defining success of 1995’s _(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?_. Oasis had hit a career peak the previous summer, performing two nights at :a[Knebworth Park in August 1996]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZqo1bYgkRs&amp;list=RDIZqo1bYgkRs' }. But rather than taking a well-needed break, they came straight off the aborted US leg of the tour and hurtled into the sessions for _:a[Be Here Now]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/021D07OEcg0c4tUCilc7ah?si=d1zMyP6-RG6B1dkV9Nb5zg' }_.

Having given many of his best songs away as :a[B-sides]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/oasis-every-b-side-ranked/' } (the pick of which would be released as :a[_The Masterplan_]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/15D0D1mafSX8Vx5a7w2ZR4?si=JwJ51YBTTWmTzJFi2FLC1A' } the following year), it dawned on Noel Gallagher that his once inexhaustible stash of classic tunes was starting to run low. As Noel recalled to MOJO’s Keith Cameron, the situation wasn’t helped by intra-band fighting, hubris, and a blizzard of cocaine…

**Noel Gallagher**: “They were turbulent times. A lot of drugs involved. We should never have made that record then. From Knebworth, we have a couple of weeks off, then that American tour collapses halfway through… Relationships between people in the band were either non-existent or fractious. Instead of going, ‘We should go our separate ways for a year or two’, we decided like idiots to go straight into Abbey Road, arguing.

“\[The session\] didn’t last too long. There’s a bar in there! We were just getting pissed all the time. I wasn’t there when we got kicked out, so I’d hazard a guess it was summat Liam had been up to. We moved to Ridge Farm \[in Surrey\]. It took ages to get going. The press had followed us, and because it’s on a farm there’s lots of farm people knocking around, so you would always be looking suspiciously out of a window – admittedly high as a fucking kite – thinking: ‘That sheep’s got a camera. I bet he works for The Sun.’ One night we convinced Liam his bedroom was haunted. When he’d get up in the morning to have breakfast, someone would go in and turn all the pictures back to front or move a lamp. He’d arrive, pale – ‘You been in my fucking room?’ ‘No.’ ’Cos the lamp’s now in the fucking toilet.’ ‘Whooooo!’ Highly amusing.

“We had to go back to London. I’m sure it wasn’t for any technical reasons – just chaos of some description. If I was to have my time again, I would have walked away. Just to get peace and quiet, spend some money. I should be buying a yacht, what the fuck am I doing here arguing with Bonehead about a capo?! In that band, it’s futile. Because you’ve got a singer who speaks a different language, who’s got a brain the size of a frog. Like arguing with a Chinese fella about the German alphabet – there’s no fucking point. You might as well just plug in and play.

“So we went to AIR \[George Martin’s studio in London\]. Pissed all day again. It was getting to that point where no one was allowed in the studio when Liam was singing. I was like, I’m gonna go on holiday… I remember coming back after a month, and listening to it: I thought it was _shocking_. I called Owen and said, We’ve got to go back to AIR… We did the whole album in two days. And that’s what ended up on the record. You could never leave them alone in the studio, any of them.

“The mix is terrible. There was 10 people in the control room – seven of them Liam, pontificating about some such fucking nonsense. It was excruciatingly loud. We were high as kites. We didn’t know what we wanted. I think subconsciously no one really believed it was a great album, just a case of, ‘Fuck it, this’ll do. Let’s get out on the road.’

“If you’re making a record you believe in, there’s no way that \[other\] shit would get in the way. :a[..._Morning Glory_]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/2u30gztZTylY4RG7IvfXs8?si=EU-rheCUQei6Bw-QtKrp9A' } was chaos. The reason it worked is because the songs were great – or they were better than _Be Here Now_. We recorded _:a[Definitely Maybe]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/inside-the-making-of-definitely-maybe/' }_ three times! There was all manner of shit going on around the group then. But the songs were better. So that’s the fundamental problem of this album. I look back on it as a real missed opportunity. It goes back to giving all those great songs away as B-sides – The Masterplan, Half The World Away, Acquiesce…

“The original idea was to have four separate album covers: Bonehead was gonna design one, Alan was, I was, Guigs was – but Liam was gonna be in all of them. ‘_Be Here Now_’, right? Geddit?! No, neither did anybody else. Someone said, ‘This is going to cost over a million quid…’ ‘OK, maybe we’ll just have one album cover.’ In the stately home where we shot it, there was a famous painting of a fox hunt. Someone had drawn a cock and balls on a horse jumping over a fence chasing the fox, with a felt pen. We had to buy the fucking painting! It was a lot of money; I do hope Bonehead’s got it in his toilet.”

**This interview appears in MOJO’s latest Oasis special, _Oasis Essentials 2025 Special Edition_. The definitive guide to Oasis’s albums, songs, films and books, newly updated for this summer’s reunion shows. More info and to order a copy :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/oasis-special-out-now/' }!**

Having begun their shift away from indie rock to pop (particularly of the dream variety) on 2021’s _:a[Blue Weekend]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/1zt521PK0lam6J79DNMIJi?si=4J6Dy1hxS02xNebh2-h06w' }_, with _The Clearing_ Wolf Alice determined to make an album with the sterling melodies and radio friendliness of mid-’70s :a[Fleetwood Mac]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/fleetwood-macs-greatest-songs/' }. In the breezy Just Two Girls, their take on the Mac is more akin to that of Jenny Lewis’s, while opener Thorns reveals layered harmonies of a distinctly :a[ABBA]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/the-book-of-abba-review/' }-like flavour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXOgzXmd5Zo

Recorded in LA and overseen by Greg Kurstin (Adele, :a[Paul McCartney]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/paul-mccartney-his-best-albums-ranked/' }), it’s a record that expands their horizons while keeping one eye on commerciality. Bloom Baby Bloom dabbles in Latin rhythms, and Leaning Against The Wall features Elliott Smith-inspired vocals before unexpectedly veering into the gospel soul of Sault. Throughout, singer Ellie Rowsell is a compelling presence, and the result is Wolf Alice’s best yet.

**ORDER: :a[Amazon]{href='https://www.amazon.co.uk/Clearing-Amazon-exclusive-Picture-vinyl/dp/B0F8NKGN6L/?tag=mojotag-21' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Rough Trade]{href='https://www.roughtrade.com/product/wolf-alice/the-clearing#51822086848843' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}**

**Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films. More info and to order a copy :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/robert-plant-stars-on-new-mojo-cover/' }!**

The Who as we know them could have been two-hit wonders. Months before December ’65’s debut album _:a[My Generation]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/6Oc6Ok1Oawu8lRkjmD4mXy?si=fFao3o_AQoed_kfqQC0y-A' }_, singer Roger Daltrey was dismissed for beating up drummer Keith Moon. He was soon reinstated, promising pacifism, but violence, resentment and intra-band rivalry would remain at The Who’s heart. And thankfully so, since music as powerful as theirs was unlikely ever to be created in an atmosphere of calm.

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

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

Contractual and financial problems dogged them throughout their early days, and two years after their debut 45 I Can’t Explain charted, hit singles were drying up. But this was really the start: wowing America at the Monterey Pop festival in June 1967, the group elected to refine and elevate the album as an artform, a path which reached an apotheosis in 1969 with the ‘rock opera’ _:a[Tommy]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/5cT7ee1sy2oEbFalP4asS4?si=eoHrMgXFQ7yCQySj5dTRCA' }_. Success as a stadium rock act followed, but Townshend’s impulse to eclipse _Tommy_ led the group into another troubled phase, which saw concept album Lifehouse aborted (it was trimmed into the majestic _:a[Who’s Next]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/5mQnSrc0cFV6greyhJJIR6?si=t5nhEIwQQFKE9c382dwRcA' }_) and the appearance of their final magnum opus _:a[Quadrophenia]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/3JV6BIIXo3mj6GLIGH9p8a?si=PjXh3VqvSdSmrIli6FuxIA' }_. The wheels came off in 1978 with Moon’s death, and fallow periods meant virtually no new material until 2006’s Endless Wire, released four years after Entwistle’s death, followed 13 years later by _:a[Who]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/2WuaYvGgx9MS1Vj37aBiyU?si=r04z9tpzTW6YE2RPuirCDg' }_, their last studio LP to date. But their recorded legacy remains vast, deep, and ripe for exploration. We've this list of the band's studio albums and included a compilation, an outtakes LP and the group legendary first live album – simply because they’re key milestones in the Who story and no self-respecting music fan should be without them…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When did rock music begin? Arguably with The Who’s epochal debut, which while indelibly inked with mid-’60s Mod-pop smarts – La-La-La-Lies, The Kids Are Alright, A Legal Matter Baby – introduced a nasty, noisy, disruptive and dark element to the classic British guitar-band sound. The runaway :a[title track]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/the-who-my-generation/' }, basically telling finger-wagging elders who’d probably fought in the war to fuck off, was a speeded-up blues with a mad bass solo and a finale sounding like a bus crashing; but it was the heavy instrumental improv jam of The Ox (Entwistle’s nickname) which dragged music into the future, Moon’s lunatic drumming and Townshend’s evil dog-fight guitar playing announcing a band who clearly didn’t actually care if you liked them or not. Which only made you love The ’Oribble ’Oo even more. The Beatles must have crapped themselves.

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

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

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

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

Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, :a[on sale now]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/robert-plant-stars-on-new-mojo-cover/' }, **Gary Numan** recounts his journey from the leader of London punk outfit Tubeway Army to Top Of The Pops, via the creation of his two best-loved hits and explains his surprise decision in 1981 to retire from live performance.

Hammersmith-born Numan had initially wanted to be a pilot at school (an ambition he would later fulfil when he was granted a private licence and launched his own airline, Numanair, in the ‘80s), but after switching his ambitions to music, he joined local punk band The Lasers, quickly took charge and changed their name to Tubeway Army.

Beggars Banquet boss Martin Mills had been impressed with the demo Numan had brought to his record shop on Ealing High Street and offered them a deal. However, when the singer discovered a synthesizer in the studio while recording the group’s debut album, 1978’s _:a[Tubeway Army]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/6QcGjLkc8Hm9ZcT5owyMMa?si=Wh2yI7hVQFyC5Wbp2IHg_g' }_, he quickly re-charted the band’s course.

“We were definitely a punk band when we signed, but I felt punk was on its way out,” Numan tells MOJO’s Andy Cowan. “Everything changed when we recorded _Tubeway Army_ and I found a Minimoog in the corner. I was desperate to get something electronic out there, to put my marker in the ground.”

The album soon sold out its limited run and the band quickly started work on the follow-up, _:a[Replicas]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/14chsctrt7Rx38fQUbfqFz?si=dDXsf7S0TkagmwwrL3YVlA' }._ “We recorded _Replicas_ almost immediately, all in one week. We only had three or four days to synthesize it, so it was very much find a sound and record it in one take,” recalls Numan. “There are mistakes all over that record – it speeds up, slows down, there’s weird little bum notes.”

The last track recorded for the album, Are ‘Friends’ Electric?’s unusual lyrics concerned a man and a robot prostitute, inspired by the singer’s reading of J.G. Ballard and Philip K Dick. Released as a single in May 1979, it climbed the charts and went to number one for four weeks, with _Replicas_ following suit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEop9nuTSrg

“It has no conventional markers for a hit,” reflects Numan today. “You can’t dance to it. There’s no chorus. It’s very long. It’s about a really weird subject.”

Having brought electronic music to the top of the UK charts, Numan took the first of several surprise career decisions and decided to break up Tubeway Army. Newly repositioned as a solo artist, he quickly penned what would be his second number one single, Cars. Its thumping synth riff driving another Ballard-inspired lyrical theme: autophilia.

Latest on Mojo

Latest Magazine

Latest Articles