Mojo - The Music Magazine

DATELINE: LONDON, YESTERDAY. Celebrating the unveiling of this year's MOJO Honours shortlists, HMV turned their Oxford Street store over to MOJO and attracted a cavalcade of musical talent, delivering a series of astonishing epiphanies to an exclusive band of hardcore fans and gobsmacked passing shoppers.

Festivities began in lyrical fashion, as The Lightning Seeds' Ian Broudie treated the crowd to a quickfire selection of deftly-crafted pop cuts culled from Cloudcuckooland (1989), Sense (1992) and new album, Four Winds (set for release on May 25). In recent years, Broudie has taken something of a back seat, producing chart-bothering LPs from the likes of The Coral, The Zutons and The Subways, but with that crystalline voice undiminished by the passage of time, it's great to hear him out front once again.

Pure proved its classic-song credentials in this stark, man-and-12-string setting, and a new song - Still Feel The Same - referenced the scouse songwriter's punk-era genesis as a member of Big In Japan. "There's not many songwriters who've recorded a tribute to themselves!" he quipped to MOJO post-set, before revealing that the show had inspired him to investigate the acoustic route more fully in future.

The Pretty Things, dressed in gangster uniform of black suit, white shirt, black tie, took the stage half an hour later, quickly bringing record browsing to a stop, as all ears tuned to the gloriously nasty sound coming from the back of the store. Opening their set with The Beat Goes On, an anthemic stomper taken from 2007's Balboa Island, the Pretties then turned to a blunt, unpolished cover of Johnnie Dee's Don't Bring Me Down (a top ten smash for the band in 1964). The title track from their 1968 psychedelic opus SF Sorrow saw long-serving axe-man Dick Taylor drawing sitar-like drones from his guitar while singer Phil May hollered incantatory lyrics to a now visibly hooked audience.

Proceedings were then given a full dose of the psychedelic as She Says Good Morning and a particularly brutal L.S.D. were uncoiled, before the band reawakened their roots with the Bo Diddley-indebted boogie of Do You Really Love Me and Rosalyn.

On this evidence, the 2009 version of The Pretty Things (guitarist Frank Holland, bassist George Perez, drummer Jack Greenwood and backing vocalist/percussionist Mark St John join May and Taylor) might just be the most rocking version of the band yet. 45 years since Rosalyn marked their graduation from SE London's art school blues boom, their songs remain armour-plated nuggets of youthful rage. HMV Oxford Street, plus the onlooking Sergio Pizzorno and Chris Edwards from neo-psych stompers Kasabian, had never seen anything quite like it. The "leaked" news that the Pretty Things would be presented with MOJO's Hero Award at the Honours List ceremony proper on June 11 was just the icing on the cake.

With their store reduced to rubble, HMV had a mere four hours to complete running repairs before the cloudburst dreampop of School Of Seven Bells kicked off the evening's session. As Oxford Street's shopworkers and salarymen clicked their heels at the end of another working day, the trio of gossamer-voiced lovelies Alejandra and Claudia Deheza and guitarist/noise-sculptor Benjamin Curtis invited all-comers into the synaesthesic soundworld of their current album, Alpinisms.

MOJO readers and web site users have nominated School Of Seven Bells for this year's Breakthrough Act award, and on the evidence of this stormy and visceral reinvention of their recorded oeuvre, rightly so. But there may be tears on the tourbus come June 11, for the trio are currently opening for White Lies, also nominated in the Breakthrough category. "We'll settle for a tie," said Curtis, diplomatically.

Kasabian are currently jockeying for the title of top British rock group, and the daring pop experiments of their pending album, The West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, look set to earn them respect in hitherto unimagined quarters. "Respect" was certainly the theme as Kasabian's beanpole axe dude Sergio Pizzorno joined MOJO earlier in the day to record a video interview with Phil May and Dick Taylor from The Pretty Things. Serge's love for the rock'n'roll originals oozed from every pore as he quizzed May and Taylor about the crazy ideas and Heath-Robinsonesque studio techniques that poured into their 1968 masterpiece, SF Sorrow.

So when Pizzorno and bandmates Tom Meighan, Chris Edwards and Ian Matthews took the stage to close a day of Launch-based rock action they did so with the bearing of a band who knew that the bar had been raised. Tracks from their forthcoming third album acquired a searing psychedelic halo, and Bruce Springsteen will need to be aware that in Underdog, Vlad The Impaler and lead-off single, Fire, Kasabian have the juice to turn their recently-announced Saturday night Glastonbury slot into a daunting "follow-that!" throwdown. At HMV, back-catalogue gems Empire, Shoot The Runner and Club Foot rewarded the faithful, but the good news for the previously-unconvinced is that Kasabian are getting weirder. And better.

Have we seen future MOJO Honours List winners at work? Of course we have. The Pretty Things pick up their gong on June 11 (return to MOJO4music.com for on-the-day-updates). Earlier, Pizzorno told Dick and Phil that their records sent him on a journey that he hopes will never end. Amen to that, Sergio. The Pretty Things are MOJO Heroes incarnate.

By Ross Bennett & Danny Eccleston

Photographs by: Mattia Zoppellaro

For more on the 2009 MOJO Honours List, head over to our mini-site HERE.

Look out for more Launch pictures in an under-construction Picture Gallery.

Live footage and backstage interviews are also in the works!