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MOJO 383 – October 2025: Robert Plant

MOJO 382 covers, featuring Brian Wilson and Suede

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MOJO 382 – September 2025: Brian Wilson / Suede

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MOJO 381 – August 2025: The Beatles

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MOJO 380 – July 2025: Oasis

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MOJO 379 – June 2025: Pulp

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MOJO 378 – May 2025: Queen

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MOJO 377 – April 2025: Genesis

MOJO 376, The Jam and Paul Weller – two collectable covers

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MOJO 376 – March 2025: Paul Weller

MOJO 375 magazine cover, featuring The Rolling Stones

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MOJO 375 – February 2025: The Rolling Stones

MOJO 374 magazine cover, featuring Neil Young and The Best Albums Of 2024

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MOJO 374 – January 2025: Neil Young

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MOJO 373 – December 2024: David Bowie

David Gilmour, on the cover of MOJO magazine, number 372

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MOJO 372 – November 2024: David Gilmour

MOJO 371 magazine cover, featuring Bob Dylan

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MOJO 371 – October 2024: Bob Dylan

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MOJO 370 – September 2024: Nick Cave

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MOJO 369 – August 2024: Stevie Nicks

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MOJO 368 – July 2024: Paul Weller

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The Who Live In New York Reviewed: Townshend and Daltrey Triumph At Final NYC Show

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Inside The Making Of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited

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Noel Gallagher: “Definitely Maybe was the last great punk album…”

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The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives Reviewed: Swedes still amped up to 11

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CMAT – Euro-Country Reviewed: Irish singer emerges as 2025’s best pop star.

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Blur: All The Albums Ranked

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Margo Price Hard Headed Woman Reviewed: Outlaw country queen re-embraces her roots

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Santana’s Best Albums Ranked

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John Fogerty – Legacy Reviewed: Creedence man re-records his classics

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The Clash’s Best Albums Ranked!

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Noel Gallagher On Be Here Now: “We should never have made that record then…”

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Wolf Alice The Clearing Reviewed: Indie rock outfit take it back to the ‘70s

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The Who: Every Album Ranked

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Gary Numan: “It was really, really mental…”

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The Who Live At The Oval Reviewed: Legendary ’71 Show Out At Last

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Aretha Franklin’s Best Albums Ranked

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### Madison Square Gardens, New York, Saturday August 30, 2025

“This is the 36th time we’ve performed at Madison Square Garden,” said :a[Pete Townshend]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/pete-townshend-the-who-are-not-done-yet/' } as The Who took the stage at “The World’s Most Famous Arena” on Saturday night, “and it probably won’t happen again.”

There it was, before we heard a note—_probably_. This was the New York City stop on the Song Is Over farewell tour, though as we know, The Who first claimed that their touring days were over in 1982, becoming a punch line for every artist who’s announced their retirement ever since. Nor did these dates launch smoothly, from Townshend and Roger Daltrey baiting each other in the press to the still-mysterious sacking of drummer Zak Starkey during rehearsals to two out of the first four shows being postponed for an unexplained illness in the band.

But whatever the future turns out to hold, they rolled into MSG—the site, most memorably, of their stunning, show-stealing performance at the 2001 all-star Concert For New York City following the 9/11 attacks—ready to play. Delivering 22 songs across two hours, Daltrey and Townshend displayed remarkable strength and consistency, not just for two octogenarians but by any standard.

They’re well aware of their own reputation—“When we’re shit, we’re really shit,” Townshend said at one point—and while a Who show sixty-plus years into their career doesn’t offer the explosive chaos of the glory days, Daltrey’s voice was steady and strong and Townshend’s guitar work went for filigree over brute force.

They stuck mostly to the hit-filled setlist from the first few shows; the night’s big news was the inclusion of Long Live Rock for the first time in over a decade, on which Townshend revealed a growly but impressively powerful delivery. NYC local Katie Jacoby, who joined them on several recent tours but not this one, raced onstage to play the violin solo on Baba O’Riley. A bit perversely, the tour’s major nightly addition has been the first-ever live performances of Goin’ Mobile, but with the vocals handled by Pete’s brother, supporting guitarist Simon (which, to be fair, he pulls off nicely).

Daltrey and Townshend don’t move too much—no scissor kicks or knee-slides at this age—but Pete made a point of starting his first solo on the opening I Can’t Explain with some high-speed windmills, and Roger even got in a couple of abbreviated mic swings before the night was done. Most crucially, Daltrey’s sometimes erratic voice has become a bit more declamatory, but it seldom wavered; he hit the big notes in Behind Blue Eyes and Love Reign O’er Me, and when he didn’t quite nail the ending on the latter, Townshend signaled him to do it again and he stuck the landing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5yedbfy6Y4

It wouldn’t be a Who show if everything was perfect. Daltrey forgot the words in the middle of Won’t Get Fooled Again and complained about the air conditioning. Cry If You Want from _:a[It’s Hard]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/46rjSfrOaPBPX8npn50l0A?si=7Mc16UJ1TFW7PQFQBRYEyg' }_ is an odd, meandering addition to the set. Last-minute replacement drummer Scott Devours, from Daltrey’s solo band, plays all the right parts (the crashing re-entry in Who Are You, the thunderous break in Won’t Get Fooled Again), but they felt overly studied and polite.

As the Who seemingly wrap up their work, it’s notable how _:a[Quadrophenia]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/3JV6BIIXo3mj6GLIGH9p8a?si=tEwVB9hZS-aa9ctiPqN7Zw' }_ has taken the spotlight from _:a[Tommy]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/5cT7ee1sy2oEbFalP4asS4?si=DS0fSAXARcyb9AgpNS3DrQ' }_ as their great statement. The tragic mod opera got full feature treatment—a four-song mini-set, including a heartfelt I’m One from Townshend and a dazzling 5:15 that offered the night’s most fevered performance—while _Tommy_ was represented only by Pinball Wizard with a See Me, Feel Me coda.

The Song Is Over would be the obvious closer (though they actually left it out of the Boston show earlier in the week and cut it short in this rendition), but things wrapped up with Daltrey and Townshend alone on stage performing Tea & Theatre from 2006’s _:a[Endless Wire]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/2EQYiDShXSFZvryFM61Vv9?si=LpJ1Mz4GTZG794VAhdb3VQ' }_, the newest song in the set. Pete sat in a chair with an acoustic guitar, and on the final verse, Roger draped his arm around his partner’s shoulder. Maybe a touch hokey, but moving nonetheless, especially when Townshend noted, before leaving the stage, that the pair have been in a band together since 1961. “Whatever it is we have between us,” replied Daltrey, “we connect on a different level and it’s very weird.”

Earlier in the set, Townshend said, “I don’t know how hard you people work for a living, maybe you work very hard, but this job is fucking easy. Roger may disagree with me, but I don’t know why I get paid for this.”

The Who have never been a band that made it look easy. But if this really is the last time New York sees this duo on stage together, they went out on top. As the curtain comes down, there’s still no substitute.

### The Who Madison Square Gardens August 30 2025 Set List:

Describing the beginning of _Highway 61 Revisited_’s opening salvo, Like A Rolling Stone, Bruce Springsteen ventured “that snare shot sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind”. Dylan contemporary Phil Ochs said of the album, “It’s impossibly good… how can a human mind do this?” Hyperbole aside, _Highway 61 Revisited_ remains one of rock’n’roll’s sacred texts, widely regarded as the base metal from which all subsequent poetic, transcendent rock music has been wrought.

With its intoxicating swirl of beat poet hip and biblical allegory, visceral rock’n’roll and cerebral balladry, contemporary wit and old weird America, the album captures a 24-year-old Bob Dylan at the moment of his ascension from needle-sharp folk provocateur to visionary rock deity. It’s an album that simultaneously looks backwards and gallops forwards, dragging popular music into the modern age with it.

Dylan had shunned political folk songs on 1964’s _:a[Another Side Of Bob Dylan]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/3q1W9iVdyuwVOGKn696Oh0?si=UFvQm3aZTQCJbwZ10jTg6w' }_, and gone even further on the subsequent Bringing It All Back Home by adding electric instruments and Symbolist poetry-inspired lyrics, much to the disdain of Greenwich Village’s puritanical folk intelligentsia. Dylan was consciously stepping into the pop spotlight, but he was taking his literate songwriting with him. If this was pop, it was some way from the sunny love songs still favoured by The Beatles. Indeed, with the August 1965 release of _Highway 61 Revisited_ the competition suddenly began to look distinctly frivolous.

The album was recorded at Columbia’s Studio A in New York, initially with _:a[Bringing It All Back Home]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/1lPoRKSgZHQAYXxzBsOQ7v?si=HUYxvVisQeC7BKTO2pnJCg' }_ producer Tom Wilson at the controls, later replaced by Bob Johnston. Many of the musicians who had graced its predecessor were recalled, including bassist Harvey Brooks, pianist Paul Griffin and drummer Bobby Gregg. Key additions were Paul Butterfield Blues Band guitarist Mike Bloomfield and session man Al Kooper, who turned up simply to watch before joining in on Hammond organ – an instrument he’d never touched before.

Early sessions issued a landmark: Like A Rolling Stone. Musically it may have stolen from Richie Valens’ La Bamba, but lyrically it came from an entirely different universe. A raging, vituperative epic whose venom-spitting lyrics were edited down from pages of what Dylan dubbed “vomitifc” scrawling, its rhetorical chorus (“How does it feel/To be without a home/With no direction home/Like a rolling stone?”) made an anthem of existential angst. The song chimed with the album’s overarching sense of restlessness, substituting logical narratives for surreal juxtapositions, sardonic put-downs and elliptical symbols. In June, Like A Rolling Stone was released as a single, racing to Number 2 on the US chart where it threatened to dislodge Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe.

Work continued after July’s Newport Folk Festival at which a leather-jacketed Dylan had fronted the all-electric Butterfield Blues Band, deepening the gulf between him and the folk caucus still further. Emboldened, Dylan and collaborators cut the remainder of Highway 61 Revisited in a whirlwind six days at the beginning of August.

If Like A Rolling Stone signposted Dylan’s conversion to unfettered rock’n’roll, then the amped-up, meta-rockability of tracks such as Tombstone Blues and From A Buick 6 confirmed it in spades, Bloomfield’s wild lead guitar punctuating Dylan’s hipster delivery like a sparkling knife blade. Contrast came by way of Queen Jane Approximately’s stately folk rock – rippling cascades of piano and organ offsetting Dylan’s yearning opaque lyrics.

The ennui of It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry owes something to the tradition of Dylan heroes Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers. Part weary lament, part swaggering country blues, it manages to seem both earthy and esoteric. Ballad Of A Thin Man, led by Dylan at the piano, is musically more sophisticated. An elegantly jazzy ballad, it’s another of Dylan’s withering put-downs – his wounding, anti-critic barbs simultaneously hymning the generation gap: “You know something is happening/But you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mr Jones?”

The album’s title track transplants the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to the Midwest. Highway 61 runs from Louisiana right up to Dylan’s hometown Duluth, Minnesota and on to the Canadian border. Between the wars it was a major artery taking African Americans – and with them the blues – north in search of industrial employment. It serves Dylan as a resonant metaphor for his own migration from folk piety to electric provocateur and beyond.

Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues finds Dylan in stoned, road-weary limbo, initially lost south of the Mexican border, then ranging over the landscape from “Rue Morgue Avenue” to “Housing Project Hill”, before heading “back to New York City”. He drops drug references along the way (“I started off on burgundy/But soon hit the harder stuff”), while the band turn a slow 12-bar blues into a thing of heavy-lidded beauty.

On the closing Desolation Row the electricity abates. As if cocking a snook at the naysayers, Dylan returns to the folk form, ably abetted by West Virginian Charlie McCoy’s liquid guitar runs, saving his most outlandish lyrics for this 11-minute digression peopled by an exotic cast of heroic grotesques, from Cain and Abel to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Desolation Row remains one of Dylan’s signature works, an epic of moral bankruptcy; an apocalyptic troubadour ballad as imagined by surrealistic filmmaker Luis Buñuel.

Dylan would move on again with the following year’s _:a[Blonde On Blonde]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/4NP1rhnsPdYpnyJP0p0k0L?si=m68XGkllRR6Sk689Hckv_Q' }_, but by then the folk rock floodgates would be open and his groundbreaking days numbered. It’s easy to overlook just how fast Bob Dylan was moving in the mid-’60s; luckily he lingered long enough to commit _Highway 61 Revisited_ to posterity.

__This article originally appeared in MOJO The Collectors Series: Bob Dylan Essentials. Keep an eye on :a[mojo4music.com]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com' } for news of our next deluxe, special edition bookazine.__

**1994 was :a[NOEL GALLAGHER]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/people-want-you-to-rewrite-dont-look-back-in-anger-14-times-noel-gallagher-interviewed/' }'s _annus mirabilis_. :a[Newly singed to Creation]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/oasis-dwarfed-everything/' }, he had the songs in his back pocket that were about to make Oasis the biggest band of their generation. On the anniversary of their debut album _Definitely Maybe_'s release, Noel looks back at the year that changed everything for :a[Oasis]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/oasis-and-solo-top-ten-albums/' }, and for British music...**

“We always had unshakable self-belief in Oasis. Going into the start of 1994 we didn’t have :a[Supersonic]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJKpUH2kJQg' }, but everything else was already written. Everybody who heard the demos of what would become _:a[Definitely Maybe]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/3LzKUdUTdJb6P7xGN6SotC?si=R-rH417RRnCDWmw5tzBFvQ' }_ were freaking out, so we just wanted to seize the moment. We’d been talking the talk amongst ourselves for a couple of years and when it came down to it, we were ready. Every minute I spent awake, I just knew it was going to happen.

"Back then, I’d hear :a[Blur]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/blur-all-the-albums-ranked/' } or :a[Pulp]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/pulp-at-finsbury-park-reviewed/' } or :a[Suede]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/suede-interviewed/' } on the radio and think – fuck these idiots. But looking back at it now, it was an amazing time for indie music, or whatever you want to call it. But we were ready to take over. We were ready to wipe everybody out. I thought Blur, Pulp, The Stone Roses, The La’s, whoever, they were great people and they had one or two great tunes, but we had twelve. However loud they were, we were louder. However fast they were, we were faster. However good they were, we would trump it. They were all great bands, but we were better. It was as simple as that.

"My ambitions were way bigger than just selling out Brixton Academy. Every band I met that was always their ambition, maybe even do two nights. I’m not arsed about Brixton Academy or John Peel. We’re going to take U2 on. That’s where my band are heading. I don’t give a fuck about Felt or Ned’s Atomic Dustbin. I’m aiming for bigger shit than that. Once you’ve written :a[Rock 'N']{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aatEBIZHNU' }:a[Roll Sta]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aatEBIZHNU' }:a[r]{href='https://open.spotify.com/track/17z8eLCkciVamEqXJS6Ri8?si=37e69332e6b04951' }, :a[Live Forever]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDe1DqxwJoc' }, :a[Supersonic]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJKpUH2kJQg' }, :a[Slide Away]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8ri1s5O8wU' }, it’s like, come on, everybody get out the way now… The confidence came from the fact that we had these songs and we could fucking play them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n\_Zhk-U8Jaw

"Highlights for me was the night I wrote Supersonic, recorded it and mixed it in one night and when we played Glastonbury. We went on between Echobelly and some other shit indie band and just went on and rattled through _Definitely Maybe._ It was the biggest crowd we’d ever played to and that afternoon we got the chart position for \[_third single_\] Shakermaker. It was at number eleven and it was at that point everyone just strapped themselves in. It was like being in a rocket ship that was taking off. How I’d describe it, before _Definitely Maybe_ came out, our singles had put us in pole position in the Grand Prix. We had the best car, were the best drivers and were revving up waiting for the green light to go and fucking annihilate everybody. We’d been going round the country telling everybody we were the best thing since The Beatles, so we wanted to let them know what the fuss was about.

"_Definitely Maybe_ was the last great punk album in many respects. We were a punk band with Beatles melodies. We had no effects, barely any equipment, just loads of attitude, 12 cans of Red Stripe and ambition. If you listen to that and _:a[Never Mind The Bollocks]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/6ggO3YVhyonYuFWUPBRyIv?si=UXhpM4D4SAC3ePOiQAOVeg' }_, they’re quite similar. That album was about the angst of being a teenager in 1977. Fast forward to 1994 and _Definitely Maybe_ is about the glory of being a teenager. It’s being down the park with a ghetto blaster distilled. It’s no coincidence that it’s lasted this long. Maybe there have been technically better or bigger records since, but that album is the real fucking deal. There’s no bullshit on it. It’s an honest snapshot of working-class lads trying to make it. It’s about shagging birds, taking drugs, drinking and the glory of all of that.”

An edited version of this interview originally appeared in MOJO 360.

Mad for more Oasis? Pick up MOJO's newly updated bookazine, **MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Oasis Essentials 2025 Special Edition**, for the definitive guide to Oasis’s albums, songs, films and books. **:a[ORDER YOUR COPY HERE!]{href='https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.greatmagazines.co.uk%2Fmojo-the-collectors-series-issue-64&amp;data=05%7C02%7Cchris.catchpole.contributor%40bauermedia.co.uk%7Ced20bed5469c42df46b008ddb49128d4%7C0e79f3f34eeb48ed815e2876c379e863%7C0%7C0%7C638865257753051640%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=nkliFu4ydP%2BnV0u7W2k9fyvomtTqKTtADVggbW0wmzI%3D&amp;reserved=0' }**

## The Hives - The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives

“Chewin’ on a plastic pen/It’s trying to kill my brain again,” yelps Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist amid O.C.D.O.D.’s blistering 1:45 duration. Such chinks in The Hives’ armour of invincibility are rare, their playful braggadocio otherwise amped to 11 as per usual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0KJLcY7-r4

Billed as an “arena album” comprised of 12 potential singles, _The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives_ rails against nanny states (Legalize Living) and less specific ills (Enough Is Enough). It also packs not wholly unfamiliar configurations of deeply felt and furious riffage, but with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D adding “magic touches” alongside trusted-hand Pelle Gunnerfeldt (Viagra Boys etc), new ground is breached too. The title track, inspired by the band’s current motto, is a powerful evocation of The Strokes going electro, while Path Of Most Resistance taps a kooky, Devo-ish guitar hook. If your gym playlist needs refreshing, look no further.

_The Hives Forever, Forever The Hives is out now on PIAS_

**LISTEN/BUY: :a[Spotify]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/3iE2EtiK9bWxYqhkzCgea0?si=65-DNkPNTzaMbOkVSkoPug' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Apple Music]{href='https://music.apple.com/gb/album/the-hives-forever-forever-the-hives/1803614308' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Amazon]{href='https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hives-Forever-VINYL/dp/B0F2TSP7MR/?tag=mojotag-21' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Rough Trade]{href='https://www.roughtrade.com/product/the-hives/the-hives-forever-forever-the-hives#51559413809483' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[HMV]{href='https://hmv.com/store/music/vinyl/the-hives-forever-forever-the-hives' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}**

1\. (Introduction)  
2\. Enough Is Enough  
3\. Hooray Hooray Hooray  
4\. Bad Call  
5\. Paint A Picture  
6\. O.C.D.O.D  
7\. Legalize Living  
8\. (Interlude)  
9\. Roll Out The Red Carpet  
10\. Born A Rebel  
11\. They Can’t Hear The Music  
12\. Path Of Most Resistance  
13\. The Hives Forever Forever The Hives

**Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films. More info and to order a copy :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/robert-plant-stars-on-new-mojo-cover/' }!**

With Take A Sexy Picture Of Me, a sparkling, razor-sharp soul anthem about body shaming, CMAT delivered one of the best tracks of the year. Thankfully, Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson’s third album reveals there’s plenty more where that came from.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU-q3tJjFoQ

While A Good Man Cries and the barn dance-storming Tree Soix Foive are rooted in the country pop the 29-year-old broke through with, Thompson is operating on a much broader and bigger scale here. Not least with :a[Jamie Oliver Petrol Station]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTWg-Ky6VZU' }: an unexpected krautrock-driven thumper about being irritated by the TV chef while on tour. “I don’t know anyone that’s making anything that’s like my music,” :a[she told MOJO’s Victoria Segal recently]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/mojo-382-september-2025-brian-wilson-suede/' }. “I often get really miscategorised because I dress so silly and I’m loud and I’m quite funny or whatever.”

Loaded with zingers, Thompson’s self-deprecating humour couches some sometimes painfully insightful self-revelations (“I’m a writer, I don’t do crushes / I do problematic attentions” she notes on closer Janis Joplining), and a sharper political focus (:a[the title track]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SVNTv44C4g' } details the devastating human impact of Ireland’s economic crash). While references to Kerry Katona and Coronation Street might be lost on international markets, _Euro-Country_ is everything great pop music should be: smart, subversive, and tremendous fun.

**ORDER: :a[Amazon]{href='https://www.amazon.co.uk/EURO-COUNTRY-VINYL-CMAT/dp/B0F29HQ3R6/?tag=mojotag-21' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Rough Trade]{href='https://www.roughtrade.com/product/cmat/euro-country#51510908420427' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[HMV]{href='https://hmv.com/store/music/vinyl/euro-country' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}**

Billy Byrne From Ballybrack, The Leader Of The Pigeon Convoy

****Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films. More info and to order a copy :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/robert-plant-stars-on-new-mojo-cover/' }!****

Thanks to a swaggering role in Britpop’s naughty ’90s carry-on, the four men of **Blur** are haunted by depictions of themselves at their most annoying and cartoon-like. But peer back – into the punky chaos of the pre-Blur Seymour, and back further, into teenage epiphanies aroused by The Jam, The Specials and New Order, into singer/songwriter Damon Albarn’s boho background (his father Keith managed Soft Machine) and apprenticeship in music theatre – and the soul of a fascinating, polymathic pop phenomenon emerges.

As a young indie band on the rise, 1988-91, Blur were rowdy and puppyish. Rhythms were a war between drummer Dave Rowntree’s heads-down flailing and Alex James’ pert, elasto-poppy bass lines. Graham Coxon’s guitars could be relied upon to surprise – his sizzling riffs on Syd-Barrett-goes-baggy single There’s No Other Way were a killer calling card – while his fellow alumnus of Stanway Comprehensive, Colchester, Damon Albarn, wrote the songs and sang with sssibilant esssesss.

They liked to get in your face, often drunkenly, but their big bet, on English-flavoured pop at grunge’s apex, paid off. The subsequent alignment of UK pop culture behind them went to their heads, or did them in, or both, but it’s to their credit that when it came the crash fuelled music that bore the scars, in the scratchy comedown vibe of Blur, the deconstructive urges of 13, and beyond, into idiosyncratic solo projects.

33 years on from the release of their debut single, Blur are back with us. In July they played two of the biggest shows of their career at :a[Wembley Stadium]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blur-live-at-wembley-stadium-review/' } and have just released their ninth studio album, _:a[The Ballad Of Darren]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/blur-the-ballad-of-darren-review/' }_. One of their best, perhaps? Or maybe not? Read on to see where it comes in our rundown of every Blur studio album ranked…

By the band’s own admission, their 1991 debut was an exercise in paddling around in post-baggy, pre-Britpop waters trying to find an identity. As such, much of _Leisure_ can feel underdeveloped or, as on the Madchester beats tacked on beneath the likes of Bang, an exercise in hitching themselves to someone else’s bandwagon. That being said, it’s an album that also contains two bone fide classic Blur singles (She’s So High and There’s No Other Way) and on the churning, narcotic fog of Sing, an indicator of the depths and possibilities that lay ahead.

Stranded in Hong Kong for five days in 2013 after the cancellation of Japan’s Tokyo Rocks Festival, Blur knocked up an entire album’s worth of new material in their downtime, which Graham Coxon later took to _Parklife_/_Modern Life Is Rubbish_ producer Stephen Street to polish up enough to convince Damon Albarn they had a Blur-worthy collection on their hands. Despite its ad-hoc creation, _The Magic Whip_ provided a fine comeback. Humid and tightly-packed, with the hum and buzz of Coxon’s guitars stuttering and spluttering throughout, here was Blur in their 40s: world-weary at times and audibly frazzled, but reconnected to their spirit and identity in way that we hadn’t heard since the end of the '90s.

The final instalment of Blur’s ‘life’ trilogy, The Great Escape may have felt like Parklife Pt2 in some respects, but it’s also an eerily accurate bellwether of British pop culture in the mid 90s. The Oasis-squashing Country House reveals a new level of irony when you realise it was sending up Food boss Dave Balfe, and while Charmless Man and Stereotypes may now sound like brash cousins of more detailed character studies like Tracey Jacks or For Tomorrow, The Great Escape also contains some of Blur’s finest ever moments: Scott Walker homage The Universal and He Thought Of Cars – a seasick knot of distortion and melancholy that pointed the way to a richer future away for the shadow of the Britpop monster they had helped to spawn.

Given the mid-project departure of Graham Coxon (at least he left the vertiginous guitar nuages of epic closer, Battery In Your Leg) this is victory from the jaws of defeat. Recording in London and Marrakesh, with the help of Norman Cook, and with The Clash’s Combat Rock on Albarn’s mind, Blur hosted a multi-ethnic meltdown on their blithest record since Britpop flag-bearer Parklife, with Maroc-punk nuttah We’ve Got A File On You and Black Grapey drug-paean Brothers And Sisters balancing the transfiguring, melancholy pop of Out Of Time. A slightly patched-together, demo’d vibe adds charm but – surprise – it lacks something. That’s it: Graham Coxon.

Perhaps it’s too early to tell where Blur’s ninth album should fall in a rundown of the band’s greatest work, but _:a[The Ballad Of Darren]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/blur-the-ballad-of-darren-review/' }_ certainly sounds like the record Blur _should_ be making in 2023. With the group themselves playing :a[two nights at Wembley Stadium]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blur-live-at-wembley-stadium-review/' } shortly before the record’s release, Britpop nostalgia is clearly a booming business still, yet the looking back that takes place here isn’t a cheery hark back to past glories, but a sadness for what’s been lost as the band navigate middle age together. Despite its glammy guitar stomp, and even an ‘Oi!’ from Albarn, St Charles Square paints a picture of the singer broken by fame, hiding from success and succumbing to the fear (and worse), and when Coxon joins Albarn to sing of travelling around the world together on The Ballad it’s a bittersweet acknowledgement of their shared lost innocence. As Coxon told MOJO recently: :a[“It sounds like Blur, but men.”]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blur-graham-coxon-interviewed/' }

Much truer to Blur’s art-punk soul than their nebulous debut, Leisure, this could still have been their last gasp without the intervention of the Food label’s oft-maligned Andy Ross/David Balfe axis. Their demand for singles gave rise to Chemical World and the aching For Tomorrow, Albarn’s first mature conceptions. Meanwhile, Modern Life… looks back, in Colin Zeal’s homage to The Teardrop Explodes’ Went Crazy, and forward, in Starshaped’s pre-echoes of End Of The Century, and Coxon rocks harder than on any Blur album. Bonus: 2012’s two-disc reissue gives you the pivotal Popscene. “Lost on the Westway” was Albarn, not for the last time.

In the late ’90s, experimental drug use turned Albarn on to music’s texture, groove and soul, while William Orbit’s mix of the Blur album’s Movin’ On convinced the group of the uses of electronica. Orbit would produce 13, taking the bonnet off Blur and exposing its innards – the raw nerves of Albarn’s split from Britpop consort Justine Frischmann included. Stompy gospel-folk (Tender) and gnarled pop (Coffee & TV) thus met indie-dub (Battle) and opiated prog (Caramel) in a trip into inner and outer space. Sadness and weirdness combine in the devastating closing song No Distance Left To Run and in Trailerpark, the roots of Gorillaz are beginning to show.

The patient on the cover’s gurney could have been Blur themselves, ravaged by Britpop excess and the Pyrrhic skirmish with Oasis. In its wake Graham Coxon, disaffected by The Great Escape’s overwrought Parklife redux, got what he wanted: a re-indiefied Blur complete with lo-fi scuff and a heart of darkness (his You’re So Great could be Dinosaur Jr.). And yet Classic Blur™ tropes shine through: clever/dumb pop gambits like Song 2 and M.O.R.; Ghost Town overtones in Britpop time-caller Death Of A Party; the Hunky Dory-isms of Strange News From Another Star. Simultaneously Blur’s most fatigued and yet effortless album.

Everything haters hate about Blur, with its yob-march title track a kind of pustulant, contempt-attracting beacon. But don’t blame Parklife for the excesses of the era it presaged with its artful brashness and pop-art palette (a bit like Alf Garnett – you saw the cautionary irony, or you didn’t). Admire instead the heady alt disco of Girls And Boys, swaggering ultra-Kinks of End Of The Century and the Elgarian melancholy of This Is A Low: key planks in an accidental state-of-the-nation address laced with brio, stylistic dressing-up and tunes. Sometimes records are successful because they are great. This is one of those.

“I will make country albums again,” Margo Price told MOJO circa 2023’s _:a[Strays]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/margo-price-reviewed/' }_, her fine, shrooms and psychedelia-led wander off-piste. What’s a tad surprising, perhaps, is just how quickly and wholeheartedly she has re-embraced her roots. With its classic country lexicon – rhinestones, liquor stores and tear-soaked Kleenex all figure – _Hard Headed_ _Woman_ is the first LP Price has made entirely in Nashville, her home of some 20 years. Tracked in RCA Studio A, that hallowed space frequented by :a[Loretta Lynn]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/country-music-icon-loretta-lynn-dies-aged-90/' }, :a[Dolly Parton]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/dolly-partons-greatest-albums-ranked/' } et al, it also has the blessing of Waylon Jennings’ widow Jessi Colter, who, sensing a good fit perhaps, urged Price to cover her husband’s song Kissing You Goodbye, a work that’s more scorpion sting than smooch.

Sometimes reverent flame-keeper, sometimes agitator and square-peg in a round hole, Price has remained irrepressibly individual, this lending her current place at the forefront of country’s ever-evolving dynasty extra spark and edge. It helps, too, that she writes from the crucible of her own extremely testing life, as unflinchingly detailed in her sometimes funny, often tragic 2022 memoir, :a[Maybe We’ll Make It]{href='https://www.waterstones.com/book/maybe-well-make-it/margo-price/9781477333112' }. When Price sings Losing Streak here, or duets with Tyler Childers on last chance saloon ballad Love Me Like You Used To Do, she convinces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SW8XCKTjLPg

_Hard Headed Woman_ sees her big personality fire straight-talking, sometimes blackly comic lyrics – “All the cocaine in existence/Can’t keep your nose out of my business” – while taking her music to new places. Yes, LP number five has chicken-pickin’ Telecaster and lachrymose waltzes, but Price’s take on 1975 George Jones B-side I Just Don’t Give A Damn swaps the original’s sedate front-porch trot for an itchy, horns-imbued groove seemingly built for the funkiest line-dance ever. With Matt Ross-Spang, producer of her 2016 debut _Midwest Farmer’s Daughter_, back at the controls, Price penned these songs with a trusted inner circle including her spouse Jeremy Ivey. Not for her, clearly, those ‘too-many-cooks’ writing pile-ons that can dilute an artist’s identity.

Close To You is a stirringly spare evocation of how romantic obsession can trump all other concerns, even the fall of democracy. Elsewhere, too, Price is anything but diluted, hence Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down. A juke joint floorfiller meets song of solidarity, it was part-inspired by the late Kris Kristofferson’s famed words of condolence to Sinéad O’Connor after she was booed off stage at :a[Bob Dylan]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/bob-dylan-greatest-songs/' }’s 30th Anniversary show at Madison Square Garden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyhzsMWC4sw

That Price should identify with O’Connor – another phoenix from the flames whose stellar musical career was forged despite the most testing of backdrops – makes perfect sense, of course. Thank god, then, for gentle souls and bold, hard-headed women.

_Hard Headed Woman is out August 29 on Loma Vista Recordings_

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1\. Prelude (Hard Headed Woman)  
2\. Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down  
3\. Red Eye Flight  
4\. Don’t Wake Me Up (ft. Jesse Welles)  
5\. Close To You  
6\. Nowhere Is Where  
7\. Losing Streak  
8\. I Just Don’t Give A Damn  
9\. Picture  
10\. Love Me Like You Used To Do (ft. Tyler Childers)  
11\. Wild At Heart  
12\. Kissin You Goodbye

Carlos Santana’s guitar tone is a distinctive thing - a raw, howling blues-cry delivered with Hispanic inflections and a pent-up eroticism. Throughout his five decades making music, however, the man himself has resisted being pigeonholed. “I never really like a low ceiling,” he once told this writer. “I don't like being put in a box, like I’m the Latin rock guy.” The only musical classification that he’s happy with, and which he says defines his sound and style, is one that he devised himself: ‘multi-dimensional interdenominational music.’

For Santana, it’s a term that embodies what he’s about: music that has no limits and operates on multiple planes, including the spiritual. Santana the band has gone through seventy-two different line ups, with the bandleader himself as shamanistic lynchpin, whose searing, soaring, guitar playing holds all together.

But it wasn’t always that way. In the late-‘60s when the group first emerged as a blues-based jam band in San Francisco, they were a more democratic unit, who blew minds at Woodstock with a sound that had never been heard before - delta blues steeped in percussive salsa grooves. Successful from the get-go, it was in the seventies when the band truly blossomed, and each album they made was a thrilling sonic trip. Though they struggled both commercially and creatively in the late eighties and most of the nineties, in 1999 Santana reinvented his band as a Latin R&B-tinged act and hit the jackpot with _Supernatural_. Despite all of the band’s recent successes in terms of sales, hits and Grammy awards, though, it’s their classic seventies work that has endured best of all, and really encapsulates what this extraordinary musical adventure is really about.

After the relatively fallow years of the eighties and nineties – the last non-live album before this was 1992’s _Milagro_ - a fresh and reinvigorated incarnation of the group emerged in 1999 with this collaborative, R&B-steeped set. Featuring a panoply of guests ranging from Lauryn Hill and Cee-Lo Green to rapper Everlast and Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana might seem like a sideman on his own record, but his guitar is the sonic glue that binds the disparate elements together. Sales-wise, it catapulted Santana into the stratosphere, and many of the band’s subsequent albums have adhered to a similar template.

As its earworm of an opener - the sublime Latin groover Dance Sister Dance – demonstrated, _Amigos_ was defined by its return to first principles. Helmed by Herbie Hancock’s then-producer Dave Rubinson and featuring smoothly soulful new vocalist Greg Walker, it was less exploratory and more commercial than the albums that preceded it, featuring salient funk and soul characteristics as well as staying true to the band’s signature meld of blues and Latin music. The set contains the classic Santana ballad Europa and, propelled by Shaft-style wah-wah and a disco beat, the US hit Let It Shine.

One of Santana’s biggest selling albums in the UK - it spent 27 weeks in the album charts, peaking at number seven - this was a sprawling double LP that was a seemingly arbitrary blend of new studio cuts with live tracks recorded in Europe during 1976. While the in-concert performances illustrated that late-‘70s Santana were an incredibly slick but still exciting live attraction, the studio material found them exploring the more open jazz-fusion style of their earlier ‘70s albums. Highlights include a scintillating six-minute live retooling of Black Magic Woman that transcends the original studio version. Their last great album of the ‘70s.

Co-led by the distinctive combination of Carlos Santana’s blistering fretboard work and Greg Rolie’s soaring organ chords, this incendiary debut was the launch pad for the sextet’s fierce amalgam of electric blues-rock and percussive Afro-Cuban grooves. Key to the band’s rhythmic drive were drummer Michael Shrieve and percussionist Jose ‘Chepito’ Areas, whose contribution to a stirring version of Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji’s Jingo was vital. Though consisting mostly of instrumental jams - including the sublime Soul Sacrifice - the album’s strongest vocal track is a cover of the Willie Bobo-associated Evil Ways, which became Santana's maiden US hit single.

An underrated and often overlooked gem in Santana’s catalogue, the group’s sixth LP followed the jazz-fusion trajectory of their previous two albums: indeed, in his 2014 autobiography, The Universal Tone, Santana, described it as “the third part of a trilogy along with Caravanserai and Welcome.” Featuring new band members Leon Patillo (vocals/ keys), Jules Broussard (saxes) and drummer Ndugu Chancler, as well as telling cameos from Flora Purim, Airto Moreira and bassist Stanley Clarke, Santana pushed the jazz-rock envelope even further with such exotic, extended Weather Report-style work-outs as Aspirations and the epic Promise Of A Fisherman.

Santana’s fifth long player opens with turbulent squalls of sound rising from guest contributor Alice Coltrane’s cosmic organ, signalling the band’s deeper exploration of jazz-fusion territory. Keyboardist Tom Coster replaces original co-founder, Greg Rolie, while former Pharoah Sanders’ vocalist Leon Thomas lends his distinctively rich tones to several tracks. There are also impressive cameos by Brazilian husband-and-wife duo, singer Flora Purim and percussionist Airto, while Mahavishnu Orchestra leader and axe deity John McLaughlin also participates. Flame-Sky is a stunning showcase for Santana’s guitar prowess while Mother Africa is a thundering percussive jam with a wailing Coltrane-esque saxophone.

**Carlos Santana & Mahavishnu John McLaughlin**

Both followers of spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy, Santana and McLaughlin shared a mutual passion for the music of John Coltrane, which was the inspiration behind this mind-blowing collaboration that took Santana into the liberating realm of spiritual prog-jazz. The centrepiece of the album was a transcendent realization of Coltrane’s hymnal, A Love Supreme. Although some jazz purists lambasted it, in their defence Santana opined, “John McLaughlin and I didn’t really give a shit what people thought of it. It’s not like we were trying to put a moustache on the Mona Lisa. We did it out of respect.”

“I felt we needed to walk a tightrope with Caravanserai,” said Carlos of the band’s fourth album, recorded in ’72. Representing a transitional phase - the original line-up had split by then - it’s regarded as a significant milestone in the canon, as it witnesses the expansion of their sonic palette by playing more open-ended, jazz-fusion-leaning grooves. Certainly, the overall feeling is looser, less-structured and more experimental; an approach that is crystallised by the album’s nine-minute coda, Every Step Of The Way, which builds slowly before evolving into a propulsive improvisational vehicle for Santana’s guitar pyrotechnics.

Empowered by their momentous ’69 Woodstock appearance, the group’s second LP exceeded their molten debut. Wrapped in a memorable Mati Klarwein cover painting, it scored the US hit Black Magic Woman - a piquant, percussion-heavy retooling of the Peter Green-scribed Fleetwood Mac classic - and also yielded a turbo-charged take on Tito Puente’s salsa anthem, Oye Come Va. By contrast, the blissful ballad, Samba Pa Ti, showed the group’s lyrical and sensitive side. The album’s title, incidentally, refers to ancient Gnostic mysticism, and was an early manifestation of Carlos Santana’s interest in worlds beyond.

One of the undoubted jewels in the discography, Abraxas’ follow-up was the last to feature the Woodstock line up. With future Journey man, Neal Schon (then just 15), brought in on additional guitar, the album’s blend of high-voltage, percussion-driven Latin-rock instrumentals (Batuka and the super-dynamic samba, Toussaint L’overture) together with soulful vocal tracks (Taboo) and boogaloo funk (Everybody’s Everything) both consolidated and extended the singular style that the band had patented on their first two LPs. A glittering creative pinnacle in the group’s back catalogue, its sheer imaginative reach is belied by its functional numeric title.

## John Fogerty - Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years

There’s no arguing with these 20 songs. They’re brilliant. Those of a certain vintage will be singing along at the top of their lungs with every single one, from Up Around The Bend to Fortunate Son.

There’s no arguing with Fogerty’s singing either – it’s as commanding as ever – nor his distinctive guitar; part anger, part mad joy, like he’s playing on a mountain mid-Apocalypse. As for the arrangements, they’re pretty much can’t-believe-it’s-not-Creedence, with a band that includes his sons Tyler and Shane.

Fogerty has fought bitterly for half a century for ownership of his songs, right down to breaking up his band. What brought him to record this album was finally winning back his publishing rights. Among the highlights: Bad Moon Rising, rich and swampy; Run Through The Jungle, its eerie paranoia perfect for the Vietnam era; and Down On The Corner, a classic sweating city street song.

_Legacy: The Creedence Clearwater Revival Years is out now on Concord._

**BUY: :a[Amazon]{href='https://www.amazon.co.uk/Legacy-Creedence-Clearwater-Revival-years/dp/B0F9HFGGX2/?tag=mojotag-21' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'} | :a[Rough Trade]{href='https://www.roughtrade.com/product/john-fogerty/legacy-the-creedence-clearwater-revival-years#51927181066571' } | :a[HMV]{href='https://hmv.com/store/music/vinyl/legacy-the-creedence-clearwater-revival-y-92dd5cc' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}**

When they first entered a recording studio, demoing tracks for Polydor in January 1977, it’s unlikely **The Clash** imagined that, 35 years later, they’d be one of rock’s biggest heritage acts. For a start, bassist **Paul Simonon** still had notes painted on his fretboard to help him play, vocalist **Joe Strummer** couldn’t sing, and drummer **Terry Chimes** had left a week earlier, defeated by wearying internal politics. Worse still, producer Guy Stevens had, while drunk, sacked guitarist **Mick Jones** from another group just 18 months before.

The omens weren’t good, yet within six months or so The Clash, by then signed to CBS, had become the most culturally vital group in Britain with _The Clash_. Militant and stylish art-school guerrillas, they were to play Robin Hood to fellow punk architects the :a[Sex Pistols]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/john-lydon-his-ten-greatest-albums/' }’ dastardly Guy Fawkes. By the end of the ’70s, they’d outlived most of their first-wave punk peers and, with drum wizard **Topper Headon**, were creating sprawling, ambitious LPs that mixed punk rock with reggae, soul, jazz, rockabilly, dub, hip hop and more.

It was a pioneering brew that, together with Joe’s personal/ political lyrics, would turn The Clash into international rebel icons, inspiring a million copy-cat punk acts plus several more waves of visionary musicians, from the Beastie Boys and :a[Madonna]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/madonna-interviewed/' } to :a[Manic Street Preachers]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/manic-street-preachers-their-best-albums-ranked/' } and Gorillaz (who’d later include both Mick and Paul).

Adding to their six original studio albums came post-Clash ventures, notably a decade’s worth of Big Audio Dynamite plus several Carbon-Silicon albums (Mick), one solo LP and three with the Mescaleros (Joe), a single outing from Topper (1986’s _Waking Up_), while Paul teamed up with former Whirlwind singer Nigel Dixon as Havana 3AM, joined :a[Damon Albarn]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/blurs-damon-albarn-interviewed/' } for two albums as part of The Good, The Bad & The Queen and released an album with Galen Ayres as Galen & Paul.

It would perhaps be unfair to Albarn to consider TGTB&TQ’s two LPs ‘Clash solo records’ (you can visit our rundown of :a[the best Blur, Gorillaz and Damon solo albums]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/blur-and-damon-albarn-the-best-albums-ranked/' } for that). So focusing on the core creative do of Strummer and Jones, here’s MOJO’s pick of the albums that demand your attention.

### **Elgin Avenue Breakdown (Revisited)**

Strummer’s pre-Clash pub rock band were dismissed by the singer as “yesterday’s papers” when he saw the Pistols in March 1976. But this expanded edition of an early ’80s compilation proves vital elements of his word-smithery and vocal delivery were in place by 1975, not only on the spirited Keys To Your Heart – a Chiswick 45, the band’s only official release – but also on the sardonic Sweetie Of The St Moritz and lilting, Dylan-circa-_Desire_\-tinted Sweet Revenge, which prefigures the ethnic folk-pop-rock of _Sandinista!_ There’s even a prescient live version of that album’s Junco Partner.

Back after a near-fatal bout of pneumonia caught from his baby daughter, Jones created a seamless, spellbinding suite of techno-drenched electro-rock on this, the classic BAD line-up’s final album. Cut while sampling legalities were still fuzzy, it features a raft of clips that could never grace an album subsequently, sourced from Jones pop cultural lodestones such as Powell & Pressburger’s film A Matter Of Life And Death, the Great Escape, Honky Tonk Women, The Who and George Formby. A sensual lushness suffuses the sublime dancefloor pop of Contact and Around A Girl In 80 Ways, sung by a softer-voiced Mick.

Expanded from a 10-inch vinyl LP, _Black Market Clash_ – featuring early rarities, notably the 1977 NME freebie version of Capital Radio – _Super BMC_ was re-tooled in the early ’90s to serve as a CD B-sides compilation. Good job, too, as from 1977 to ’80 Clash flipsides were rightly held in awe, the likes of 1977, The City Of The Dead, The Prisoner, Pressure Drop and Groovy Times every bit as special as their A-sides. This collection remains the only home for the group’s cover of Booker T. & The M.G.’s Time Is Tight – though, oddly, the original Capital Radio is dumped for its powerpop 1979 re-tread.

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