MOJO 356, featuring Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake

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MOJO 356 – July 2023: Joni Mitchell

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MOJO 355 – June 2023: Lou Reed & The Velvet Underground

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MOJO 354 – May 2023: David Bowie

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MOJO 353 – April 2023: Depeche Mode

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MOJO 352 – March 2023: Bob Dylan

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MOJO 351 – February 2023: Pink Floyd

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MOJO 350 – January 2023: Blondie / The Best Of 2022

The cover of MOJO 349, featuring Arctic Monkeys

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MOJO 349 – December 2022: Arctic Monkeys

The cover of MOJO 348, featuring The Beatles

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MOJO 348 – November 2022: The Beatles

The cover of MOJO 347, featuring Kate Bush

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MOJO 347 – October 2022: Kate Bush

MOJO 346 cover, featuring Bruce Springsteen

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MOJO 346 – September 2022: Bruce Springsteen

MOJO 345 magazine cover, featuring Patti Smith

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MOJO 345 – August 2022: Patti Smith

The cover of MOJO 344, featuring David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust

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MOJO 344 – July 2022: David Bowie / Ziggy Stardust

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MOJO 343 – June 2022: Liam Gallagher / Grateful Dead

MOJO 342, with blue-haired Jack White on the cover

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MOJO 342 – May 2022: Jack White

MOJO 341 magazine cover, featuring The Beatles’ George Harrison

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MOJO 341 – April 2022: George Harrison

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Noel Gallagher Interviewed: “I’m Defending My Right To Make Music That’s Not Indie Rock.”

Bruce Springsteen Murrayfield Stadium May 2023

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Bruce Springsteen Live in Edinburgh Reviewed!

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The Style Council: All The Albums Ranked!

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Inside The Creation Of Joni Mitchell’s Court And Spark

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Sparks Reviewed

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Calexico Reviewed

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Shirley Collins Reviewed

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Paul Weller: All His Albums Ranked!

Bruce Springsteen; March 25, 1980 on the roof of the Power Station recording studio during sessions for the 1981 album The River in New York City

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Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Reviewed

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Tina Turner Dies Aged 83

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Bob Dylan In The ’60s: His Best Albums Ranked

Noel Gallagher Reviewed!

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Bob Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom Reviewed

ANDY ROURKE Hammersmith Palais, on March 12th, 1984

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“The Smiths Were A Gang. A Band Of Brothers…” Andy Rourke Interviewed

The Smiths Bassist Andy Rourke Dies Aged 59

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The Smiths’ 50 Greatest Songs Ranked!

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The Beatles’ Last Show At The Cavern

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MOJO VIP

**Earlier this year MOJO was invited to Noel Gallagher’s London recording studio to hear the new High Flying Birds’ album, Council Skies: Cue classic, Oasis-esque tunes, remixes by The Cure and Pet Shop Boys and an unnerving topless Noel teacup…**

Noel Gallagher is surprised – at talk of Paul Weller (and New Order’s Stephen Morris) joining Michael Rother on-stage at the latter’s 50 Years Of Neu! gig at the Clapham Grand last November. “Fucking hell!” he says disbelievingly. “Wow. Where was I then?”

Presumably finishing off his fourth High Flying Birds LP Council Skies. It follows 2017’s David Holmes-produced _Who Built The Moon?_, and comes after a long-planned period of inactivity complicated by Covid. The first record to feature his current High Flying Birds line-up, it’s also his first recorded at his new Lone Star Studios in north London. “I’m the last fucking songwriter in the world to get his own studio,” he says of the custom-built facility. “It’s taken me ’til I’m 50 fucking five.”

Time, phases of life, and deep roots are, it seems, integral to _Council Skies_. The title is borrowed from a book by Sheffield artist Pete McKee. Shot by Mancunian music photographer Kevin Cummins, the cover art finds the band’s live gear set up on the original centre spot of Manchester City FC’s now-demolished Maine Road ground. At a listening session at Lone Star – where MOJO drinks tea out of one of the curious ‘Footballers With Tits’ mug range, featuring a topless cartoon Noel – the LP’s sound covers the range of its author’s long career, from unifying singalongs to psych-experimentation, with guest guitars by Johnny Marr adding to the distinct Manc-ambience. Is it nostalgic, asks MOJO?

“It’s quite reflective but it’s not nostalgic,” says Gallagher. “Maybe Easy Now, which sounds quite Oasis-y. But the songs have a certain up-and-down mood to them. Pretty Boy’s a fucking party tune. It’s my fourth studio album and it encompasses, I think, everything that I’ve done in the last 13 years.”

**[READ: OASIS AND SOLO THE BEST ALBUMS RANKED!](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/oasis-and-solo-top-ten-albums/)**

He admits lockdown influenced the way he wrote: “I wrote it on acoustic guitar, which is what I would do in the past,” he says. “It was the position that David Holmes took me out of when I was writing stood up at a fucking synthesizer on Who Built The Moon?. All that stuff was so far away from what I’m known for… The best songs I’ve written have always been inclusive and about ‘us’ rather than ‘me’, you know.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSqBwZz2GFo

Also widening the appeal are remixes by The Cure (Pretty Boy) and Pet Shop Boys (Think Of A Number). “To my ear, Pretty Boy sounds like a cross between The Cure and The Cult, an era of alternative music which I fucking love. I was fucking so blown away that \[Robert Smith\] got involved. I went to see the Pet Shop Boys at Glastonbury, fucking amazing. I thought the track was very ’80s, and they’d just done a remix for Weller, and they agreed to do it. It’s fucking quite the thing, let me tell you.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMjCzA8ayY

Does he feel he’s defending something with Council Skies? “I feel, sometimes, that I’m defending my right to make music that’s not fucking indie rock and to jump around artistically. You feel like when you’re making Pretty Boy or \[2019 EP\] _Black Star Dancing_, you have to justify why you’re doing it, because people want you to rewrite fucking Don’t Look Back In Anger 14 times on an album.”Well he mentioned them. In a summer when Pulp and Blur are playing huge outdoor gigs, does he think there might be anything going on with a certain former band of his? "No."

**COUNCIL SKIES IS OUT 2 JUNE VIA SOUR MASH. READ MOJO'S VERDICT [HERE](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/noel-gallagher-reviewed/)**

**Iconic photos of Oasis, Pink Floyd, Depeche Mode and more! Guest curated by Noel Gallagher, 50-year retrospective of the work of MOJO photographer Jill Furmanovsky opens in Manchester. Take a sneak preview of some of the photos inside [HERE](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/iconic-photos-of-pink-floyd-oasis-amy-winehouse-and-more-feature-in-new-exhibition/)**

**Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band**

A MINUTE OR SO SHY OF 10PM, THE MEMBERS OF THE E STREET BAND WAVE FAREWELL AND MAKE TO LEAVE. Standing between them and a well-earned post-show refreshment is Bruce Springsteen, who insists on dispensing handshakes, smiles and hugs to each. But instead of following his team down the off-ramp, the skipper turns back towards the 52,000 crowd. Almost exactly three hours since he walked onto the stage, Springsteen isn’t ready to leave yet. “Thanks Edinburgh,” he smiles. “We won’t leave it so long to come back next time.”

You’d hope he means it – because Bruce Springsteen and his band last played in Scotland’s capital 42 years ago. In another 42, he’ll be 115. Even his prodigious reserves of energy and stamina might struggle with a granite-tough full-force stadium rock revue at that age. So this hint at a next time feels significant – dare one say, hopeful.

Springsteen’s recent records have been informed by mortal thoughts, and each tour since the 2008 and 2011 deaths of E Street Band comrades Danny Federici and Clarence Clemons haunted by loss. Earlier at Murrayfield, after an eye-popping E Street revamp of _Nebraska_’s Johnny 99 from death row blues to uptown honk, the E Street ensemble vacated the stage for a solo Springsteen rendering of Last Man Standing, the keynote song on 2020’s _Letter To You_, a tribute to the teenage Springsteen’s first band The Castiles, all of whom bar Bruce have passed away. Now, at the evening’s end, he again straps on his battered acoustic guitar and plays out with I’ll See You In My Dreams, an elegy to friends lost along the way, with music the cipher for those left behind to make sense of the emptiness. “The road is long,” he sings, “and seeming without end.”

> If the set's underlying theme is sombre, its momentum is perpetually ascendant...

If the set’s underlying theme is sombre, its momentum is perpetually ascendant. An opening segment heavy on hard blast anthems – No Surrender, Prove It All Night, The Promised Land, Darkness On The Edge Of Town, core texts from Springsteen’s baked asphalt interior – permits barely a pause for applause, and certainly no time for chitter-chatter. Ghosts invokes the spirit of the fallen to give the survivors strength to power home its jack-hammering gospel (“By the end of the set we leave no one alive”). There’s respite during Out In The Street when Springsteen and Jake Clemons work the front rows much like The Boss and Big Uncle Clarence once did.

Then, a centrifugal pivot into the band’s genesis loosens everyone up: the jazzy longueurs of Kitty’s Back and The E Street Shuffle cede the focus to the supplementary horn, percussion and vocal sections, while a cover of The Commodores’ Nightshift sees Bruce entreating the soul gods to transport his physical self through the set’s second half. Via Because The Night’s heady mass singalong, we’re ushered into the upper echelons of Jersey Shore-lore, an apparently limitless succession of melody, memory and Steve Van Zandt guitar changes that starts with Backstreets and ends on Thunder Road.

**“Springsteen gave himself artistic immortality…”** [**Read MOJO’s verdict on Deliver Me From Nowhere, the inside story of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 masterpiece Nebraska**.](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bruce-springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-reviewed/)

No time for the artifice of an encore, no exodus and return – just a brief group bow, then back to work with Born In The USA and a final stretch that wrings the emotions, impels the limbs and lungs to places many of us had forgotten, and remembers to serve that crucial side of E Street cheese, as Springsteen and Van Zandt do their Statler & Waldorf routine. “The only conclusion Steve? No one wants to go home!”

But go we all must, sooner or later. Like a de-scripted Springsteen On Broadway, the 2023 Springsteen & E Street tour is a show that tells a story, one whose ending is clear. Frank Sinatra liked to leave his audiences with a benediction: “May you live to be a hundred and the last voice you hear be mine.” Springsteen’s version – “I’ll see you in my dreams” – feels a little more plausible, and definitely less sinister.

Prior to that lone performance of Last Man Standing, he’d given his one monologue, noting: “At 15, it’s all tomorrows. At 73, it’s a lot of goodbyes… seize every day.” This isn’t religion, it’s only rock’n’roll. And the last man standing could well be its last word.

No Surrender/Ghosts/Prove It All Night/Death To My Hometown/Letter To You/The Promised Land/Out In The Streets/Candy’s Room/Darkness On The Edge Of Town/Kitty’s Back/Nightshift/Mary’s Place/The E Street Shuffle/Johnny 99/Last Man Standing/Backstreets/Because The Night/She’s The One/Wrecking Ball/The Rising/Badlands/Thunder Road/Born In The USA/Born To Run/Bobby Jean/Glory Days/Dancing In The Dark/10th Avenue Freeze-Out/I’ll See You In My Dreams

**[Read: Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Albums Ranked!](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/bruce-springsteens-top-10-albums/)**

When **Paul Weller** split up **The Jam** at the height of their powers in 1982, he broke the hearts of thousands. Unveiling his new project with former Merton Parka **Mick Talbot** (later to be joined on a more permanent basis by drummer **Steve White** and singer **Dee C. Lee**) less than six months later, many were perplexed by the new contemporary pop direction the former angry young mod had taken. But for those who stepped on board, **The Style** **Council** made some of the most joyous and adventurous music of Paul Weller’s career. By Weller’s own admission, not all the band’s albums always hit their mark, but with some of his greatest-ever songs in there and a sense of fun and adventure he’s only really recaptured in recent years, they provide one of the richest chapters of his musical history. Here, MOJO rates and ranks all The Style Council’s LPs. Not all the group’s posthumous releases and collections are included, party because 1998’s _The Complete Adventures Of The Style Council_ five-disc boxset did such a comprehensive job rounding up the band’s wide-reaching recording career that compilations such as 2020’s partly Weller-curated _Long Hot Summers_ only really rearranged the furniture. Bearing that in mind, fold your rain mac over one arm, grab yourself a cappuccino and enjoy...

**[Read: Paul Weller All The Studio Albums Ranked!](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/paul-weller-all-his-albums-ranked/)**

At the start of the ‘90s, The Style Council’s stock was at an all-time low. Even their leader himself was struggling to drum up support for his new solo career. Following the top twenty-charting release of Paul Weller’s solo debut, however, Polydor clearly thought it was worth giving the vaults a sweep. Released in 1993, _Here’s Some That Got Away_, took the lead of successful Jam odds and sods round up _Extras_ and gathered together B-sides, rarities, unreleased recordings and demo versions. Many of the inclusions presented the band stripped of a lot of the customary studio sheen of the previous decade, with tracks such as the original demo of A Stones Throw Away from 1985 and folkie protest B-side Bloodsports sparkling with a quiet soulfulness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VErYp4Nfgcg

Much to his later chagrin, Paul Weller was so enamoured with the sophisticated polish of mid-80s soul and R&B hits by artists like Luther Vandross and Anita Baker that he stripped out all the old analogue gear in his Solid Bond studios and replaced it with state-of-the-art recording equipment. _The Cost Of Loving_ was Weller move to recontextualise The Style Council - who up to that point had been digging into mod’s European roots - as a modern soul group with their eyes fixed on the other side of the Atlantic. Released as two 12-inch singles, the album got the super smooth production down pat, but Weller - perhaps distracted by falling in love with Dee C. Lee at the time - neglected to really come up with the songwriting goods to go with it, later admitting to nicking much of standout first single It Didn’t Matter from David Sea’s 1984 single Night After Night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xmh7DIh39x4

**Live! The Style Council At Home And Abroad**

Recorded on the road as they promoted 1985’s chart-topping _Our Favourite Shop, …At Home And Abroad_ is a punchy rattle through a setlist that leant on _…Shop_ favourites like Shout To The Top and Walls Come Tumbling Down. Though the band are muscular and tighter than a crab’s arse throughout, producer Pete Wilson’s mix can feel flat and one dimensional over its 12 songs. Taped a year previously and released in 1997, fans are advised to check out _In Concert_ for a more dynamic document of The Style Council’s live prowess.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n43gF95P\_\_Y

When Paul Weller first heard Detroit house in the mid ’80s he fell in love, interpreting the raw beats and gospel-like vocals as the natural successor to Motown and, by extension, what ’80s mods should be listening to. Unfortunately, no one else agreed with him. When The Style Council debuted their new direction at the Royal Albert Hall in 1988, fans tore up their programmes in disgust and his label refused to release the resulting album. Listen to _Modernism: A New Decade_, though, and the surprise isn’t that Weller had the audacity to try his hand at dance music, but what a decent fist he made of it. While it veers towards faceless Italo-house at times, it’s got some great moments, chief among them the freewheeling funk-out That Spiritual Feeling. With Weller’s stock high again 10 years after its creation, it finally got a belated release in 1998 as part of the _The Complete Adventures Of The Style Council_ box set.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S90oK-H\_Cc

**The Singular Adventures Of The Style Council**

The anything-goes approach that defined The Style Council meant that while they produced some of the finest tunes of Paul Weller’s career, they also threw out some stinkers along the way. If you want to head straight for the wheat, the band’s first greatest hits compilation is a fine introduction to the Modfather’s most divergent and adventurous decade. By Weller’s own admission, The Style Council’s albums could be hit and miss, but there’s no denying the brilliance of their singles. Have You Ever Had It Blue?, A Solid Bond In Your Heart, Shout To The Top!, Walls Come Tumbling Down!... they’re all great. There’s perhaps no better argument for Paul Weller’s genius as a writer of pop – with a capital P – songs than this.

**Introducing The Style Council**   
Polydor, 1983

Intended as an overseas-only release, this mini-LP was so widely imported into the UK that it was essentially the band’s debut. True, there were moments on The Jam’s swansong LP, _The Gift_, which hinted at where Weller was heading, but coming just a year later, the difference between the two groups illustrated here is startling. From the shimmering and defiantly un-retro pop of Long Hot Summer to the slap bass and horn-powered jubilation of debut single Speak Like A Child via a handful of club mixes and alternative takes (the early version of Headstart For Happiness is essentially optimism bottled and put onto tape), Paul Weller has never sounded so carefree and cheerful. Not all his fanbase may have gotten on board, but he’s audibly having a hoot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b\_gqRZ9xkU

Mauled by critics, rejected by fans and up to that point the worst-selling album of Paul Weller’s career, _Confessions Of A Pop Group_ has since been rightly reappraised as a classic. Sumptuous, piano-led melancholy (It’s A Very Deep Sea, Changing Of The Guard) sits comfortably alongside fantastic ’80s soul bangers (Life At A Top Peoples Health Farm, How She Threw It All Away) and ambitious musical suites inspired by Erik Satie and The Beach Boys (The Little Boy In The Castle/A Dove Flew Down From The Elephant). Admittedly, some of the lyrics are a bit pretentious and even inexplicably take a dig at Radio 4’s long-running “everyday tale of country folk” The Archers at one point, but it’s an essential purchase for any Weller fan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHTEGP3QoHE

The divergent strands Weller wanted to explore in The Style Council coalesced on their second album proper. Pop, politics, funk and modern soul came together in an ambitious and eclectic sonic manifesto. The group were bona fide pop stars at this point and as such it’s a surprise now to hear just how politically fired-up these songs are underneath their polished, chart-friendly sheen. You can’t imagine Duran Duran banging on quite so much about collectivism and the economic perils of free market capitalism. The sense of adventure stops it from becoming po-faced though, with the Marx-goes-Motown insurrection of Walls Come Tumbling Down! remaining one of Weller’s finest-ever singles. Even a spoken-word appearance from Lenny Henry on The Stand Up Comic’s Instructions turned out considerably less misguided than it sounds on paper.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5HfOipwvts

_Our Favourite Shop_ is normally cited as The Style Council’s best record, but their debut album proper has aged far better. Inspired by reading Colin MacInnes’ 1959 novel Absolute Beginners towards the end of The Jam, Weller and new wingman Mick Talbot delved far deeper into the roots of modernism. As the title suggests, _Café Bleu_’s vibe is one of Continental sophistication: languid, jazzy chords conjuring up images of Gitane smoke drifting over the Seine and an immaculately cut rain mac folded over one arm. The solo piano version of My Ever Changing Moods showed the barking teen behind the likes of “A” Bomb In Wardour Street had developed a smooth soul voice to match his heroes, while the decision to let a young Tracey Thorn take the lead on the gorgeous The Paris Match was inspired. Only A Gospel really misfires, proving that rap was a creative stone that should have definitely remained unturned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ea6Vg1oOVZA

**[“He Always Had A Great Spirit About Him…” Paul Weller Remembers Ian McLagan](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/he-always-had-a-great-spirit-about-him-paul-weller-remembers-ian-mclagan/)**

_Portrait: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo_

**As Joni Mitchell preps for her landmark June 10 show, MOJO explores another key watershed: _Court And Spark_. Crazy chords, unreliable beaus, jazz cats and a drunk Lennon litter the path to her second great masterpiece, an intimate self-portrait and dissection of the LA scene’s Gatsby-ish bacchanal. In this extract from MOJO’s cover feature, we set the scene for the creation of a whole new phase in Mitchell’s astonishing musical development**...

**[READ THE FEATURE IN FULL!](https://members.mojo4music.com/read/july-2023/joni-mitchell? utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj)**

Situated just south of the corner of Sunset Boulevard and North La Brea Avenue in Hollywood, the A&M recording studio lot was one of the most happening spots in Los Angeles in 1973. Formerly the site of Charlie Chaplin’s film studio (where he’d encountered The Kid in 1921 and eaten his boot in The Gold Rush in 1925), it had been bought by A&M Records’ Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss in ’66 and quickly become one of the premier recording facilities in southern California.

“You would see everybody walking around the lot,” remembers Cheech Marin, one half of stoner comedy duo Cheech & Chong, who recorded a series of albums at A&M and who would appear in a cameo skit on Joni Mitchell’s pivotal sixth album, _Court And Spark_. “It was Leon Russell and The Carpenters and Joe Cocker and Joni Mitchell. We showed up and everybody would go, ‘Who are these two guys recording outside in the courtyard?’”

LA in ’73 was fast changing. Many of the Laurel Canyon hippy musicians were now rich, and mellowing marijuana had been replaced by ego-boosting hits of cocaine, which was de rigueur in both the recording studios and record company boardrooms. The previous November, Carly Simon’s cryptic Number 1 song You’re So Vain had been marketed via promo mirrors handed out to radio DJs, both to reflect the song’s title and provide a handy surface for chopping out a line.

> I played John Lennon something,  he said ‘Oh, it’s all a product of overeducation. You want a hit, don’t you? Put some fiddles on it!’
> 
> Joni Mitchell

As night fell over Hollywood and the bars closed at midnight, sometimes the party moved on to A&M, where the notoriously riotous sessions for John Lennon’s _Rock’n’Roll_ album were taking place, overseen by a gun-packing, amyl nitrate-sniffing Phil Spector. More than once, Joni Mitchell dropped by: one time with her new buddy Jack Nicholson, another time with Warren Beatty. Lennon’s girlfriend at the time, May Pang, later recalled the ex-Beatle had bitched behind Mitchell’s back that the hip actors were “Joni’s trophies”.

**“Both Sides Now invites you to count its rings, count every shift in meaning over the course of a life...” [Read MOJO’s verdict on Joni Mitchell’s At Newport, recorded at last year’s surprise Joni Jam.](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/joni-mitchell-at-newport-reviewed/)**

In the studio next door, Mitchell was finessing the altogether more focused _Court And Spark_. Bored and drunk, Lennon gatecrashed proceedings to offer Joni some unsolicited advice.

“I played him something,” she later recalled. “\[He said\] ‘Oh, it’s all a product of overeducation. You want a hit, don’t you? Put some fiddles on it!’”

The irony being that at a time when Lennon was regressing to rock’n’roll first principles, Mitchell was undertaking a daring progressive leap; _Court And Spark_ would be the album to transform her from confessional folk singer into the queen of LA jazz rock. In many ways, it would be just as starkly emotional as her previous landmark, 1971’s _Blue_, but with its raw sentiments soothed by its rhythmically-driven songs and glossy production. Here, as she vividly described in its eerie piano ballad title track, she was exploring “the city of the fallen angels”: songs about deranged parties, failed therapy sessions and lovelorn Bel Air sadness.

> Joni reached a point where, to my mind, she was writing about rich people.
> 
> Randy newman

Like Lennon, however, not everyone was buying into Mitchell’s new direction. “Joni reached a point where, to my mind, she was writing about rich people,” Randy Newman later carped to MOJO writer Barney Hoskyns. “And I lost interest.”

**"She's ahead of the curve, the pack, whatever you've got..." [Read MOJO's verdict on Joni Mitchell's The Asylum Albums (1972-1975)](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/joni-mitchell-reviewed/)**

“I can only say that you write about that which you have access to,” Mitchell responded in her defence. “So, if you go from the hippy thing to more of a Gatsby community, so what? Life is short and you have an opportunity to explore as much of it as fame and fortune will allow.”In truth, Mitchell had always been ambivalent about success. _Court And Spark_ would only serve to make her even more famous. With its release, on January 14, 1974, it was to become her biggest album: hitting Number 2, going double platinum and marking the beginning of a whole new phase in her astonishing musical development.

**"I was blown away by this woman..." [Read the story of Court And Spark in full!](https://members.mojo4music.com/read/july-2023/joni-mitchell? utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj)**

**Their 26th album. Whatever they had, they haven’t lost.**

Now in their sixth decade of releasing albums and soon to headline the Hollywood Bowl, the biggest show of their career, it’s hard to think of a band who, for all their sales fluctuations, have been so consistently outstanding for so long. The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte echoes 1982’s Angst In My Pants (the title track), Propaganda (the super-exuberant Nothing Is As Good As They Say It Is) and even 1988’s Interior Design (We Go Dancing, which namechecks Skrillex and Kim Jong Un), without sounding like they’re replaying themselves, and they’ve never clattered as much as they do on The Mona Lisa’s Packing, Leaving Late Tonight. Ron Mael’s lyrics are elegiac, witty and forensically detailed (“then, your sweater caught my shopping cart”); Russell Mael delivers them exquisitely and they specialise in ear worms. How on earth do they do it?

_The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte is out now via Island_

**[READ MOJO'S VERDICT ON ALL THE MONTH'S BEST MUSIC](https://members.mojo4music.com/). Plus, receive every new issue of MOJO on your smart phone or tablet to listen to or read. Enjoy access to an archive of previous issues, exclusive MOJO Filter emails with the key tracks you need to hear each week, plus a host of member-only rewards and discounts by [BECOMING A MOJO MEMBER](https://members.mojo4music.com/membership?utm_source=dynamic&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=bau_moj&utm_content=content_moj)**

**Joey Burns and John Convertino mark 20 years of blurring the boundaries**

The Tarahumara, a group of indigenous people in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, are renowned for their prodigious ability to run long distances. It’s a skill that gives them a remarkable power to hunt down birds and deer, exhausting their prey long before their own legs tired of the chase. Yet there are some things that they haven’t been able to outpace – not least the opium trade that has crept across their land, the cartels using them to transport their goods, turning them into grimly literal drug runners.

Singer and multi-instrumentalist Joey Burns, one half of Calexico’s core duo along with drummer John Convertino, was thinking of the Tarahumara when he was writing Quattro (World Drifts In), a track from 2003’s _Feast Of Wire_. “World drifts in and world’s a stranger,” sings Burns over the relentless percussive push and heel-snapping brass, “From the day you’re born/You’ll always hit the ground running.” The band’s fourth album is powered by this urgent rush and scramble, whether it’s driven by the need to escape something or to keep up with it. It’s a record in constant human motion, full of people flung forward by forces they can’t control, the places they inhabit hollowed out or flooded, their horizons shifting all the time.

Burns and Convertino first came together in the early ’90s as the rhythm section for Howe Gelb’s quixotic desert beatniks Giant Sand, early adopters of the decade’s alt-country ideas. They moved with Gelb from California to Tucson, Arizona, dabbling in filmic atmospherica by working with Bill Elm’s lounge-jazz act Friends Of Dean Martinez. Calexico, formed in 1996, was something different, however, even the name – a Californian border town – suggesting a band dedicated to pushing at frontiers, blurring all kinds of state lines. They used Latin music not for cactus-shirted novelty, an exotic tequila trill, but a way of pushing at Americana’s hard borders. If 1998’s _The Black Light_ and 2000’s _Hot Rail_ saw them break through, _Feast Of Wire_ sharpened their vision, that lacerating, mouthful-of-ashes title signposting the territory they wanted to explore – those places where, as on Woven Birds, you can be “crushed by the promise of hope”.

> Feast Of Wire is a record in constant human motion.

On the parched polka of Sunken Waltz, there’s both a homeless man praying for a real rain to come and wash “whole Western states” away and “Carpenter Mike” who “dropped his tools and his keys and left”, shucking off the comforts of the “gated neighbourhoods” to vanish into the wild, a sane response to an insane world. There’s the subject of Not Even Stevie Nicks… who Thelma-and-Louises his car off a cliff and “into the blue”, caught by the band in eternal freefall; on Across The Wire’s “Alberto y Hermano”, brothers struggling on a potentially life-changing journey north from Mexico, “dodging the shadows of the border patrol”. Behind the crisp, sun-struck brass and button accordion there’s nightmarish imagery: an eagle eating snakes, “a lake of sleeping children”. Woven Birds, meanwhile, is a Tex-Mex Ghost Town, Burns showing what’s left behind over tumbleweed rolls of percussion and zig-zag flashes of distortion: “The plaza in the village/Where mission bells used to ring/Is now a pile of stench and ruin.”

This restless surge is matched by the instrumentation: the brass and strings of Mariachi Luz De Luna (Jacob Valenzuela and Fernando Valencia); Paul Niehaus of Lambchop’s pedal steel; accordion, synthesizers and Convertino’s vigilant, reactive drums, sidewinding close to the scrubby edges of a song in some places, breaking cover in others.

It’s no surprise that _Feast Of Wire_, with its themes of migration and dispossession, should feel like such a timely reissue in 2023. In 1998, Burns spoke of the migration build-up on the Tucson borders, about the “double-speak” of the “land of the free”. “I think, the music finds its way of going through the barbed wire or past the helicopter’s electric eye,” he said. “The future looks bleak with no sign of change,” sings Burns on Across The Wire, and while Trump-era wall-building and child-caging might have darkly exceeded the direst prognostications, it’s a line that isn’t so much prophetic as dismally pragmatic. There’s a real currency to the ecological and economic storm clouds gathering around Sunken Waltz, or the tarry strings of Black Heart, a song in step with Barry Adamson’s cinematic night visions, or Bristol trip-hop transposed to a different kind of South-west, a rattlesnake-wrestling Portishead, Tricky’s Ponderosa in a pick-up truck.

Besides its imagery of a hostile environment – snake fangs, rusted metal, repressive barriers – Black Heart also shows a deep empathy: “One man’s close pursuit/Is another man’s last chance,” sings Burns. It fits that _Feast Of Wire_ should be a record rich in instrumentals, creating space to think, ensuring their storytelling isn’t filling all the space from the top down. While Pepita’s hand-stitched post-rock, Close Behind’s unholstered Morricone menace or Stucco’s glassy piano are dramatic, they’re not manipulative, not so much concerned with ramping up the tension but reflecting it. There’s also an awareness of the need for moments of joy and resistance: Güero Canelo for example, R.E.M.’s Underneath The Bunker with a diamond glint of street-level danger, or the spaghetti-electro of Attack El Robot! Attack!. A live show recorded in Stockholm in 2003 that is included here shakes off the dust, brings out a pop of pop, encourages a communal buzz, the songs tipping from dusty melancholy into defiant exuberance.

Around this time, Calexico would customarily end their performances with an encore of Love’s Alone Again Or, included here in both live and studio versions. It’s not hard to understand why they would be drawn to its mariachi brocades and gilts, but there’s also that suggestion of universal communion beneath its lovelorn loneliness, the idea that, “I could be in love with almost everyone”. _Feast Of Wire_ understands how strange the world is, how cruel it can be, how exhausting it is to have to hit the ground running, over and over. Yet its openness, its refusal to limit and be limited, quietly guides this music towards a better place.

_Feast Of Wire is out now on City Slang._

Named after Mount Caburn, a hill not far from her home in Lewes, East Sussex, the third album since the folk Grand Dame’s unexpected 2016 return tours a number of significant personal landmarks. Collins’s oak-toned, 87-year-old voice re-engages with some traditional songs she first recorded in the ’60s and ’70s (Hares On The Mountain and a twinkly Fare Thee Well My Dearest Dear) while long-term collaborator Pip Barnes weaves her memories of song-collecting in the States into the buoyant High And Away. A 1980 rendition of Hand And Heart (based on a poem written by Collins’ uncle) is a reminder of the hurricane force of her voice in times past, but with its own low-key sparkle Archangel Hill stands testament to a musical third act every bit as engaging as anything that went before.

**It’s hard to imagine now, but at the turn of the '90s Paul Weller - former leader of The Jam and The Style Council, chart-topping voice of a generation and one of the greatest songwriters since Lennon and McCartney - found himself without a record deal and unsure if he would ever make music again. The remarkable second life kick started by his 1992 debut solo album has produced a body of work that seventeen studio albums in has eclipsed that of his former bands combined. Here, MOJO ranks and rates every single one of the studio albums that have made up one of the richest solo careers in modern music..**

**[Read: The Style Council All The Albums Ranked!](https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/the-style-council-all-the-albums-ranked/)**

That one of the most gifted songwriters this country has ever produced was putting out a covers album suggested that Paul Weller’s creative juices were running dry in the early noughties. _Studio 150_ provided an interesting peek into Weller’s record collection (Allen Toussaint’s Hercules, Early Morning Rain by Gordon Lightfoot, Gil Scott-Heron’s The Bottle and Tim Hardin’s folk lament Don’t Make Promises are among the tunes covered), and his version of Wishing On A Star has its own sparkle but you can’t escape the impression of an artist treading water creatively. A change was gonna come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFNVphdH1Ds

_Illumination_ bagged Weller his first UK number one album of the 2000s but it found him unsure of where he was and what he should be doing. Lead single It’s Written In The Stars was excellent, a horn-sampling neo psychedelic soul stew that harked back to the playfulness of his solo debut a decade previously, but elsewhere surprises and memorable tunes were few and far between. It was the first time Weller worked with Noonday Underground’s Simon Dine as producer, however, so it was important for setting up a creative partnership that would help the remarkable creative rebirth of _22 Dreams_ six years later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2DAB6OT\_dY

By some distance the most abstract and experimental record of Weller’s entire career, his soundtrack to 2017 boxing flick Jawbone fulfils its brief masterfully. The extended tone poems herein were fantastic exercises in building tension and atmosphere, while the two traditional songs that anchor it – the bruised Ballad Of Jimmy McCabe and rueful Bottle – were folk-leaning, deftly finger-picked acoustic numbers with his now age-worn voice telling the struggles of the film’s central character with real pathos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7x5gHVDmYI

There was a three-year gap between the cocaine and booze bluster of _Heavy Soul_ and _Heliocentric_ and the mood here was largely one of rueful reflection: of dusting himself off and having a breather, for benefit of his own sanity more than anything. Written in tribute to Ronnie Lane, opener He’s The Keeper was in a similar vein to the hugely successful retro rock of _Wild Wood/Stanley Road_, but _Heliocentric_ was largely a record fashioned from a quieter mix of pastoral folk and ballads. The soulful piano-led Frightened laid out his insecurities barer than ever before, Sweet Pea My Sweet Pea was a joyous Faces-y ode to his kids, while the almost Jam-like swirl of There’s No Drinking, After Your Dead sung the importance of living the life we’re given while we still can (Weller at this point still a few years off calling last orders on his own drinking). Solid but not spectacular, it was the last record he made with long-term foil Brendan Lynch, suggesting his feet were once again starting to itch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUx-E8w3ctU

_Sonik Kicks_ was the third and final album made with producer Simon Dine following the astonishing volte-face of _22 Dreams_ and Mercury-nominated _Wake Up The Nation_. Again, songs were largely written in the studio and based around sound beds, samples and cut ups rather than the more traditional one man and his acoustic approach. Though its origins may have been experimental (Lou Reed’s near-unlistenable 1975 LP of feedback _Metal Machine Music_ was an unlikely early influence), it threw up some of his most fleet-footed pop songs in years, including The Attic’s sci-fi doo wop and Blur-like That Dangerous Age, where he pokes fun at his own perceived mid-life crisis. Energised and playful, it was another delight in an ongoing purple patch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_mGucuejMQE

Simon Dine was out for Weller’s 12th studio album, would his newfound sonic experimentalism go with him? Not if the mind-crushing Led Zeppelin on acid assault of opener White Sky was anything to go by. Recorded with psychedelic production duo Amorphous Androgynous it kicked off an album that balanced a stoner’s love of sonic tickles and experimental textures with meaty, soulful songwriting and musical muscle. Even when it ventures into far-off reaches of the cosmos, it’s never at the expense of a tune. A perfect bridge between his trad rock past and rulebook shredding present.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vARCtbWH-cE

Weller initially set out to further explore some of the territory mapped out on _Saturns Pattern_ for the follow-up but landed somewhere elsewhere entirely. _A Kind Revolution_ had its feet back on planet earth, but its genre-hopping mix of sounds and styles was anything but unadventurous. The breezy, jazzy swish of Hopper – an ode to US painter Edward Hopper – was a highlight, as was the Café Del Mar groove of One Tear, featuring Boy George on backing vocals. But the album’s heart was the soulful The Cranes Are Back, a warm piano ballad that salutes the hope and rejuvenation of starting afresh. Something that is perhaps the only constant in Weller’s ever-changing career.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZy7mMLrZh4

With hindsight, we can see 2005’s _As Is Now_ as Weller drawing a line under the first chapter of his solo career before he moved away into more adventurous musical waters. At the time, though, he sounded like a man rejuvenated. The lythe Blink And You Might Miss It, punchy Come On/Let’s Go and From The Floorboards Up’s in-your-face Dr Feelgood-like pub rock front burned with a fire that many had assumed had long since gone out. Much as he had on The Jam’s valedictory swansong, _The Gift_, if he was going to call time on an era, he was going to do it in style.