Aidan Moffat
Arab Strap’s merciless observer gawps in awe at Slint’s Spiderland (Touch And Go, 1991).
SLINT WERE already a favourite band before Spiderland came along; I’d ordered their first LP, Tweez, at the local record shop after hearing John Peel play their song Darlene in early 1990. The LP took months to arrive, but my mates and I were soon obsessed with its mischievous, jazz-tinted hardcore and cryptic, private-joke lyrics. There was no information about them anywhere, but the sleeve had a contact address, so we wrote them a letter from Falkirk to tell them we loved them.
At that time, only Sounds magazine ever mentioned them, and I remember seeing the news that a second LP was coming – I couldn’t wait, and the release was delayed a little, so for two months I’d phone Fopp in Edinburgh every Monday morning from the pay phone at school to ask if it was out, until one day they said they’d just received a promo, so they’d sell me that for £10. I walked straight out of school and got the train to the city, bought it and returned to meet my mate Dave at the school gates. Then we went back to my bedroom, drew the curtains and listened to Spiderland in darkness.
It sounded so different – the youthful mischief was gone, and in its place were these tense, emotional songs with slower rhythms and stories of ghosts, vampires and heartbreak, which could all explode in raging noise at any second. But there was a tenderness too, a maturity and vulnerability that took us by surprise. The timing was perfect: I was almost 18, in my last year of school, and it seemed like we were all growing up together. It thrills me the same way now, too, with its balance of beauty and rage, and those howling, cathartic crescendos. The best albums transport you to their own world for a while, and 40 minutes through Spiderland is a journey I’ll always love taking. Arab Strap’s I’m Totally Fine With It; Don’t Give A Fuck Anymore is out May 10 on Rock Action.
EX-PINK FLOYD and R.E.M. producer Joe Boyd was hoping to make a timely follow-up to his 2006 psychedelic memoir White Bicycles when he embarked on a book about global music. Things got rather out of hand. Some 15 years on, the ex-Witchseason and Hannibal Records boss has finally put the finishing touches to And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music. As he tells MOJO with a shrug: “Once you get in, you can’t stop.”
An inter-continental meander that takes in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, Latin America, the Caribbean and plenty more places besides, the book’s 800-plus pages sparkle with gossip, political intrigue and unlikely connections. Reflecting on how paradigm shifts can come from existing sounds being copied badly, Boyd posits that modern Latin music may be rooted in the 18th centur y, when musicians of African origin in Haiti were compelled to play fashionable English countr y dances to entertain French settlers.
As he seeks to track the musical crosscurrents that have fed into Western pop, Boyd hits a rich vein of telling anecdotes. “Like George Harrison and John Lennon lying in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s bathtub tripping in the summer of ’65 while Jim McGuinn and David Crosby explained Indian music to them,” he says. “As soon as Harrison got back to London, he went to HMV and bought all the Ravi Shankar albums.”
The title of the book is a lyric from Paul Simon’s 1986 LP, a voyage into South African sounds Boyd felt was much misunderstood. “Everybody felt so virtuous that by buying Ladysmith Black Mambazo records they were somehow
“Religions and authoritarian governments hate most authentic types of music.” JOE BOYD
supporting the ANC,” he says. “The music of
is basically Zulu, and the ANC hated that, because the South African government supported Zulu independence as a way to undermine the anti-Apartheid movement.”
As Boyd discovered frequently, traditional music has often come under heavy political manners. Eastern Bloc authorities disdained Bulgarian female harmony groups like the Kate Bush-endorsed Trio Bulgarka, Brazil’s military dictatorship exiled the leaders of the Afro-psychedelic Tropicália movement, while Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries took a dim view of the Yorùbá-derived rhythms of Cuban music. “Religions and authoritarian governments hate most authentic types of music because it involves women freeing themselves and moving their bodies on the dancefloor,” he says.
For Boyd, the kinds of sensuous rhythms despots once loathed are ver y much in retreat, assailed not by state repression but the relentless march of the drum machine. However, he insists the work of the artists he writes about so lovingly here will stand the test of time.
“When you hear a Congolese rhythm section from the ’70s or Tony Allen playing with Fela Kuti or Chano Pozo playing with Dizzy Gillespie, you’re hearing a remarkable expression of human civilisation,” he says. “Music that’s made live in the studio by great musicians looking each other in the eye and picking up the intensity in a nanosecond, and changing the feel just by a nuance of the way somebody plays a bass line. That’s going to live for ever.”
Joe Boyd’s And The Roots Of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music is published by Faber on July 4.
“HE CHANGED the way I thought about songs and singing,” Thom Yorke remarked of Mark Mulcahy, whilst Nick Hornby devoted a chapter to the man from Connecticut in his 2002 book 31 Songs. But of all those to endorse this compelling, golden-throated storyteller, the most unexpected must be BBC TV’s politics weekly The Andrew Marr Show, who flew over the re-formed Mulcahy-fronted Miracle Legion in 2016.
“They cancelled our appearance because of Brexit!” Mulcahy guffaws. “But they said they’d still film us, and broadcast it later – but there we were, having breakfast with Boris Johnson… a total nutso.”
The scenario was another near debacle for the band, whose bristling brand of collegiate jangle had been undermined by line-up shifts, label bankr uptcies and comparisons to the more bankable R.E.M. “It wasn’t the worst thing,” says Mulcahy. “But you know, they say a lot of bands sound like The Beatles, but they mean The Kinks.”
Forming in 1983, Miracle Legion hung on for 10 years before guitarist Ray Neal left. Mulcahy and their second rhythm section formed Polaris, ostensibly to write music for the US cable show The Adventures Of Pete & Pete (written by two hardcore
Mulcahy juggles new project Birdfeeder with a resurgent solo career.
Birdfeeder’s Woodstock is out via Soul Selects on April 12.
“There we were, having breakfast with Boris Johnson… a total nutso.” MARK MULCAHY