ASK MOJO
Pick our brains and let us answer your music questions, investigate your inquiries and untangle those teasers!
Transfer window: which big names joined existing bands?
After the death of Chad Stewart of Chad & Jeremy, I read that Jeremy Clyde has also played with Peter Asher from Peter & Gordon. This made me think of other known singers joining forces with other established acts – what are the best examples, and who did it most?
MOJO says: If we’re talking becoming an actual member of another successful group, rather than being a guest or a sideman, an early example is Eric Clapton, who’d been in The Yardbirds before he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers in 1965. Other celebrated ship-jumpers include: Wilko Johnson to Ian Dury’s Blockheads; Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley leaving James Brown for ParliamentFunkadelic; Sammy Hagar succeeding Dave Lee Roth in Van Halen; Dave Mason’s recruitment to Fleetwood Mac; The Move’s Carl Wayne fronting The Hollies; and Ian Gillan, who admitted to having been drinking when he agreed to replace Ronnie James Dio in Black Sabbath in 1983. Some groups have more than one suspect: The Spiders From Mars’ Trevor Bolder played with Uriah Heep from 1976 until 2013, give or take a year, while bandmate Mick Ronson was in Mott The Hoople for 1975’s All The Young Dudes. Arguably the most notable repeat offender is Johnny Marr, who after leaving The Smiths served in The Pretenders, The The, Electronic, Modest Mouse and The Cribs, though we should also mention bassist Dave Anderson, whose bands include Amon Düül II, Hawkwind and the Groundhogs (he also rehearsed with Van der Graaf Generator). Any more candidates out there?
SELL! SELL! SELL!
I was perplexed when I saw Neil Young had sold song rights to Hipgnosis – I thought they were Pink Floyd’s sleeve designers. What’s going on?
Hipgnosis Songs Fund chief Merck Mercuriadis told “digital eco-system blogger” Emmanuel Legrand that his late friend Storm Thorgerson, who ran the Hipgnosis design studio with Aubrey Powell, asked him what he intended to call his new company. “He caught me off guard,” says Mercuriadis, “so, facetiously, but somewhere deep inside, I said, ‘I want to call it Hipgnosis but that name is already taken’. And a few days later he wrote me a letter stating: ‘I want you to have the name.’” Mercuriadis added he “ended up paying for the name” by choosing a logo designed by Thorgerson, but that “even then, I didn’t get a chance to choose
the one that I wanted.” His firm’s ‘upside-down elephant’ emblem, it seems, represents a pachyderm “blown away” by great music.
WHO FADED AWAY BEFORE BUDDY?
I’ve always thought that the fade was a device used when the artist or producer couldn’t come up with a proper finale. But who employed it first?
Fred Dellar writes: It’s a question that has been at the centre of controversy since the era of Thomas Edison. Certainly, some of the acoustic 78s of the early 1900s were faded, mainly for effect. Later, records tended to be abbreviated so that they wouldn’t take up too much playing time on jukeboxes. Operators liked their jukebox plays to be short, neat and profitable. One of the first hits to feature the fade was Cherokee, a 1939 RCA release by Charlie Barnet, a sax-playing bandleader who filled in the time between gigs by acquiring 11 wives.
HELP
I was listening to some Venom records from the ’80s, and the production is not at all fantastic. What’s the worst-sounding commercially released album ever?
MOJO says: Shall we start the ball rolling with the mythic official Magma bootleg where an audience member can be heard sneezing? Over to you!