Brother Sky
Ex-Can singer and free ‘metaphysical transporter’ Damo Suzuki left us on February 9.
“IF BY ACCIDENT something happens, for me it’s much better and more interesting than if I plan to do something,” Damo Suzuki told MOJO in 2018. “Then,” he added with a look of terrible boredom, “it’s getting really like work.”
He put this philosophy into practice like few others, staying true until the end to his ideals of spontaneous performance, and the wordless whisper/scream vocalising he once described as “the language of the Stone Age”. This millennium, across the world, he went on stage with like-minded strangers without rehearsal and let whatever was possible manifest. Dubbed Damo Suzuki’s Network, these ad hoc line-ups of ‘Sound Carriers’ ranged from trios to formations of over 50, and ages from 15 to over 80. Suzuki, a Liverpool FC fan who compared these performances to football games, admitted he did occasionally give guidance, but only with a minute to spare – all the better to jump in at the deep end. “With the
“The music is… a mindsport, with the result of making everybody happy.” DAMO SUZUKI
music there is no winner and no loser,” he told me. “But it is a sport
– a mind-sport, with the result of making everybody happy.”
He was born Kenji Suzuki in Oiso, Kanagawa prefecture in Japan on January 16, 1950. Raised by his indefatigable mother Kimie after his architect father died when he was five, the young Suzuki was a devotee of soul and The Kinks. In search of adventure, he left Japan aged 18 and headed to Sweden and Ireland. In April 1970 he was in Munich appearing in the same production of Hair as Donna Summer when he was spotted “making a happening” on the street by bassist Holger Czukay and drummer Jaki Liebezeit of Can. Can had recently lost vocalist Malcolm Mooney and were paralysed: sensing a perfect fit, Czukay invited Suzuki to join them for a gig that night.
His arrival ushered in a golden time of creative fulfilment for Can, whose albums were comprised of edited, hypnagogic improvisations. 1970’s
featured defining Suzuki moment Mother Sky, with classics (1971),
(1972) and (1973) following. There was even a West German chart hit with TV crime theme
Spoon in 1972. Yet, uncomfortable with pop stardom and now a Jehovah’s Witness, Suzuki left after an August ’73 gig in Edinburgh and returned to normal working and family life.
After facing cancer aged 33, he came back to music, in time for The Fall’s berserk 1985 tribute I Am Damo Suzuki. After fronting The Damo Suzuki Band and Dunkelziffer, from 2003 he was settled into his neverending tour, improvising gigs with local musicians. Being diagnosed with cancer again, in 2014, did not stop him. When MOJO met him in Cologne in 2018, he spoke frankly about being on morphine, and how being on-stage made him feel “free… better than normal.” That year he published his freewheeling memoir and treatise I Am Damo Suzuki with Paul Woods, appeared at a tribute gig for Jaki Liebezeit in Cologne and played with the final line-up of The Fall in Manchester. He continued to play live his way until 2020, and received an inspiring documentary portrait in Michelle Heighway’s 2022 film Energy.
His good humour, thoughtfulness and will to live made a permanent impression, and it is hard to believe such a spirit can be gone from the world. Damo told us that what he sang had no literal meaning, but that “I take much more of an emotional thing from that spontaneous feeling, the feeling you cannot programme.” He added, “maybe I’m communicating the endless wide possibility of joy to come.”
Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett
Wailer, reggae bass giant
BORN 1946
AS BOB Marley’s bassist and band leader in The Wailers throughout the 1970s, Aston Francis Barrett was the man who led the pack and introduced the world to the joys of reggae’s over-amplified bass culture.
He was born and raised initially on Beeston Street in downtown Kingston, in the thick of Jamaica’s incipient music business, and after building his own bass guitar, he and his younger brother Carlton became a dynamite rhythm section for hire, moonlighting as welders to get by. In gigging combo The Hippy Boys, they played on 1969 organ instrumental The Liquidator and were rechristened the Harry J All-Stars. After that was a UK hit, they toured Britain under another alias, The Upsetters. In an ensuing capacity as fledgling producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s core studio band alongside guitarist Alva Lewis, they backed the Wailers vocal trio on their ground-breaking recordings with Perry circa 1970-71, which birthed roots reggae’s collision of Rasta ideology and sultry Caribbean funk.
As The Wailers signed with Chris Blackwell’s Island and went ‘outernational’, ‘Fams’ and brother ‘Carly’ underpinned Marley’s vision throughout, their spacious rhythms playing a huge role in reggae’s global crossover. Even though Marley’s original vocal cohorts Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston quit in ’73, Barrett would appear on their respective solo masterpieces, Legalize It and Blackheart Man, as well as numerous classics as part of Bunny Lee’s house band, The Aggrovators, and with other JA giants including Burning Spear, Yabby You, Keith Hudson and Augustus Pablo.
Along the way, ‘Fams’ also mentored bass titan Robbie Shakespeare and inspired countless others, such as Jah Wobble. After Marley’s death in ’81 and Carlton’s murder in ’87, Aston helped carry the torch with The Wailers Band on and off, until a series of strokes at home in Miami silenced his low-end thunder, and sadly finally claimed him, aged 77, on February 3.
Andrew Perry
Dexter Romweber
Flat Duo Jets honcho BORN 1966
DEXTER Romweber formed his first group when he was 10, drafting in his sister Sara to play pots and pans. This bracing back-tobasics aesthetic remained a constant throughout his years fronting rockabilly two-piece Flat Duo Jets. Formed in North Carolina and named after Gene Vincent’s guitar, the “power duo” enjoyed an early showcase in documentary Athens, GA: Inside/ Out, alongside R.E.M., The B-52’s and Pylon, while their eponymous debut, recorded in a garage, won them the support of The Cramps and David Letterman. Fleetingly signed to Geffen in the late ’90s, Flat Duo Jets never tasted mainstream success, splitting in 1999. But their chaotic energy and earthy songcraft were influential on many, including Jack White, who released a 7-inch of Romweber playing alongside his sister Sara in 2009 and remarked,
“You have no idea how long I’ve waited to hear that guitar tone in my studio.”
Stevie Chick
Tich
BORN 1944
IF 1965 had Brian Jones and 1967 Monkee Peter Tork, 1966’s leading hitmakers Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich had their own blond scene-stealer. But beyond the group’s zany facade, Tich – born Ian Amey in the Dozeys’ hometown of Salisbury – elevated that year’s cheerful run of successes with guitar stylings that wouldn’t be out of place on Beck-era Yardbirds material. His trademark fuzz sound would erupt during a song’s ‘rave-up’ section, never more roaringly than on Hold Tight!. He also brought various textures to the group’s work – electric mandolin on Bend It!, flamenco lines on The Legend Of Xanadu. Tich went further still on 1967’s goth-psych flipside The Sun Goes Down, his electronically enhanced notes nudging the song into ‘freakbeat’ cult status. After Dave
Dee’s departure in 1969, Tich helped keep the group together, though by the mid ’70s, DDDBM&T had become a nostalgia act. Tich’s favourite colour was red.
Mark Paytress
Steve Wright
BORN 1954
BORN IN Greenwich, Steve Wright worked in the BBC record library opposite Broadcasting House before beginning his DJ career in Reading in 1976. He joined Radio 1 in 1980 and debuted his long-running Steve Wright In The Afternoon show a year later. Adopting the zany, character-led US ‘zoo format’, it ran for 12 years. Purged from Radio 1, in 1996 he joined Radio 2, where his afternoon show was resurrected (when it was axed in 2022 he signed off with Queen’s Radio Gaga) and his Steve Wright’s Sunday Love Songs ran until his death. He also regularly presented Top Of The Pops and voiced archival re-rub Top Of The Pops 2, and released numerous singles, with 1991 novelty I’ll Be Back by Arnee And The Terminators reaching Number 5. He also unwittingly sparked The Smiths’ 1986 hit Panic, when he played I’m Your Man by Wham! after news broke of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. For a time Morrissey could be seen wearing a T-shirt of Wright’s face and the slogan Hang The DJ: Wright bought one himself.
Ian Harrison
“Steve Wright unwittingly sparked The Smiths’ 1986 hit Panic.”
Mojo Nixon
BORN 1957
WITH SONGS such as Donald Trump Can Suck My Dick, and a tendency to encourage crowds to chant things like “Let’s castrate Michael Bolton”, Mojo Nixon was never destined for a career in the Diplomatic Service.
Born Neill Kirby McMillan Jr. in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, he grew up nearby in Danville, Virginia, where his father owned radio station WILA. After leaving college, Nixon briefly moved to England in 1979, determined to join The Clash. “I wanted to be Joe Strummer,” he recalled, but “eventually I had to be me.” Back home in 1980 he formed short-lived Denver punk band Zebra 123, then adopted the name Mojo Nixon – a combination of “voodoo and bad politics.” His aim thereafter was “to go too far, too fast,” repeatedly poking at an ever-more-conformist mainstream culture with a sharp stick.
Teaming up with percussionist Skid Roper, by 1986 Nixon was causing a stir with rockabillyinflected songs like Elvis Is Everywhere and Stuffin’ Martha’s Muffin – a calculated jibe at MTV which somehow led the station to hire him to record promo shorts for them, exposing his particular brand of libertarian anarchism to millions. That unlikely relationship eventually disintegrated after they refused to air the video for his song Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Lovechild, but sometimes his targets played along, such as when the Eagles drummer himself climbed on-stage at a Nixon gig to help sing Don Henley Must Die.
Mojo appeared in various films, from Great Balls Of Fire (1989) to Buttcrack (1998), then became the subject of a biographical documentary, The Mojo Manifesto (2022). Carving out a parallel career as a country radio DJ, he also hosted a talk show about politicians, named with characteristic subtlety, Lying Cocksuckers. He died of cardiac arrest on board the annual Outlaw Country Cruise, a day after his final performance.
Max Décharné
Bobby Tench
BORN 1944
A CAPABLE guitarist with a fine blues and soul voice, Londonborn Bobby Tench first played the capital’s clubs with soul-rockers The Gass, who were the house band for
Jack Good’s musical Catch My Soul in 1969, and whose 1970 LP Juju featured Peter Green. An early member of funk band Gonzalez, Tench left to sing with The Jeff Beck Group in 1971, the same year he recorded alongside Fela Kuti on Ginger Baker’s Stratavarious LP. In the ensuing decades Tench played with a remarkable array of talent, including Freddie King, Linda Lewis, Van Morrison and Eric Burdon; he also joined Widowmaker, Boxer and postFamily act Streetwalkers, and led his own band Hummingbird. Other badges of rock’n’roll honour included joining Humble Pie, playing on Topper Headon’s solo LP Waking Up and fronting The Thin Lizzy Band. In recent years, he played with Alan Price.
Ian Harrison
John ‘Duff’ Lowe
Quarrymen pianist BORN 1942
BORN IN West Derby, Liverpool, John Lowe was 15 when his grammar school friend Paul McCartney suggested he play piano with his skiffle group The Quarrymen. And so, in July 1958, he was present when future Beatles John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison – plus drummer Colin Hanton – made their studio debut, recording a cover of Buddy Holly’s That’ll Be The Day and McCartney/ Harrison original In Spite Of All The Danger, at Percy Phillips’ home studio in Kensington. After leaving
The Quarrymen in 1960, Lowe played with Ricky Tomlinson – AKA TV’s Jim Royle – in Hobo Rick & The City Slickers. Possessor of The Quarrymen’s sole acetate, he sold it to McCartney in 1981, who released it on The Beatles’ Anthology 1 in 1994. The same year Lowe rejoined guitarist Rod Davis in a new formation of The Quarrymen, and played with the group until 2017.
Ian Harrison
Henry Fambrough
Spinners voice
BORN 1938
HENRY FAMBROUGH was the smooth baritone whose harmonies helped define The Spinners’ hits including I’ll Be Around, Could It Be I’m Falling In Love and Ghetto Child, the latter featuring his co-lead vocals. From the Detroit suburb of Ferndale, Fambrough started out in doo woppers The Domingoes, who hit the US Top 30 as The Spinners with That’s What Girls Are Made For in 1961. Later acquired by Motown, Fambrough worked as Berry Gordy’s mother’s chauffeur in between hits I’ll Always Love You (1965) and 1970’s Stevie Wonder-produced It’s A Shame. Signed to Atlantic on Aretha Franklin’s suggestion, the group struck gold with Thom Bell-produced 45s including Then Came You, their 1974 US Number 1 with Dionne Warwick. They hit Number 1 in Britain, meanwhile, with 1980’s Working My Way Back To You. Fambrough, their last original member, sang on 2021’s ’Round The Block And Back Again before retiring last year.
Lois Wilson
“I wanted to be Joe Strummer… I had to be me.” MOJO NIXON