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MOJO 397 – December 2026: Bob Dylan

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MOJO 396 – November 2026: Neil Young

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MOJO 395 – October 2026: The Beatles

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MOJO 394 – September 2026: Depeche Mode

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MOJO 393 – August 2026: The Rolling Stones

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MOJO 392 – July 2026: Paul McCartney

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MOJO 391 – June 2026: Joni Mitchell

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MOJO 390 – May 2026: Foo Fighters

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MOJO 389 – 2 Covers: Miles Davis + Punk At 50

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MOJO 388 – March 2026: Small Faces

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MOJO 387 – February 2026: David Bowie

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MOJO 379 – June 2025: Pulp

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MOJO 386 – January 2026: The Smiths/Best Of 2025

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MOJO 385 – December 2025: John Lennon

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MOJO 384 – November 2025: Bob Dylan

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MOJO 383 – October 2025: Robert Plant

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Angine De Poitrine live reviewed: Alien duo deliver frenzied math-rock attack

Michael Kiwanuka Performs At Usher Hall

Michael Kiwanuka Fudge reviewed: North London soul man’s most personal statement yet.

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Richard Thompson – Hippies, Thugs And Heroes reviewed: Fairport guitarist delivers one of the bleakest, and best, records of his career

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Richard Thompson: “I come from a folk background, where songs about mining disasters and incest are normal…”

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Fontaines D.C. Dopamine Chamber reviewed: Past, present and possible future collide on 90s-influenced fifth album.

Fontaines D.C. on new album Dopamine Chamber: “It was really, really intense…”

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Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue: “I was frightened he might get killed and dumped in the bayou…”

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Cameron Winter – Live At Carnegie Hall review: Geese frontman’s starling New York solo show captured

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MOJO’s New Kate Bush Special Is Out Now!

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Neil Young On Donald Trump: “I don’t wish any ill on him. I just wish that he wasn’t there.”

16th Annual Bridge School Benefit Concert in Mountain View - Day Two

Thom Yorke on Neil Young: “That was the most in awe I’ve ever been of anybody…”

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Teenage Fanclub – Do Not Dare To Dream review: Sombre reflections on life

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Every Genesis Album Ranked

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Bruce Springsteen’s Greatest Albums Ranked!

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Elton John: His Best Albums Ranked!

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New Music

**The Troxy, London, Monday, October 19, 2026**

If someone had told you a year ago that the most talked-about band in London in the autumn of 2026 would be a funky math/prog-rock duo from Quebec with a microtonal double-neck and polka-dot papier mâché heads, claiming to be aliens called Khn and Klek, well, they’d have been laughed out of wherever it was they said it.

But who’s laughing now? Certainly not Khn (guitar) or Klek (drums) since they ‘speak’ only guttural gargles amongst themselves and sometimes to the audience. We’re meant to sort of know what they mean, and guess what, we sort of do.

ADP’s biggest UK headline show to date (one of two consecutive nights at the 3,600 capacity Troxy) is also MOJO’s third ADP show of the year. That means we’ve got through the phase of pure wonder at their costumes and baffling instrumental mastery and are in a position to judge the nuances. Firstly, this is Angine taking a more ‘rock’ line through their set list than usual, possibly in tribute to the straightahead heavy psych of their (also Québécois) support act, Gros Mené (translation: Big Minnow). Khn’s guitar tone has a tad more gnarl and their attack overall – but especially during a sizzling Sarniezz – is a little more frenzied and less fastidious. MOJO writer Jim Wirth’s insistence that he can hear some Allman Brothers in them suddenly makes perfect sense.

Angine start hard, with the fractured Zep riffing of Angor, and spend the whole night going harder, while you sense the audience slowly acclimatise to the shock of seeing these crazies in the flesh and begin to respond physically (there’s a tiny mosh enclave – a mosh Andorra – which grows slowly but steadily into a mosh Catalonia). One can empathise – only once you finish speculating how difficult it must be to play this ludicrously complex yet irresistibly danceable music with a two-foot rubber proboscis between you and your fretboard (Khn) or peering through a slit in a towering Count Binface-style helmet thing (Klek), it’s possible to deep dive into the music itself. Once you do, it’s dizzying: Khn’s swirling microtonal eddies lift you up; Klek’s precision beats nail you down. You’re assaulted by the King Gizzard psych-punk of Mata Zyklek, taken on a kaleidoscopic journey through the ever-changing Fabienk. It ends, as all nights on their UK tour have, with the Anatolian Hawkwind freakout of Sherpa, where the borders of reality appear to move in and out at a frightening rate.

Bands with strong visual or performance elements always face a dilemma at some point. How do you change it up while keeping the schtick in balance with the music? The Hives broke through with black shirts and white ties; upgraded to white jackets; returned recently with Nudie-ish suits (still black and white, though). They’re more than the sum of their sartorial choices but it’s what they’re known for. How will Angine sustain their mythology, long-term? Will there be an ill-advised unmasking, _à la_ Kiss? For a minute or two tonight, your correspondent closes his eyes and makes Angine De Poitrine an entirely audio experience. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it rocks.

### Angine De Poitrine, The Troxy, October 19, 2026, Setlist:

**Angor  
Yor Zarad  
Tamebsz  
Mata Zyklek  
Ababa Hotel  
Sarniezz  
Fabienk  
Sherpa**

“\[Create\] the kinds of things that you think are beautiful… not what you think sounds good to someone else” – Chick Corea.

On June 18, 2025, MOJO interviewed Michael Kiwanuka about his then-unannounced fifth album, _Fudge_, a surprise addition to his catalogue given that he was still promoting _:a[Small Changes]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/michael-kiwanuka-small-changes-review/' }_, released the previous November. To these ears, the 2024 LP was a good yet disappointing effort – as if he and producers Danger Mouse and Inflo had tried   
to create a classic soul album using a template rather than any emotions Kiwanuka felt at that moment. “Now I know you’ve listened,” was his response.

A month later, everything had changed: Kiwanuka had a haemorrhagic stroke that put him in intensive care: at the time of writing, he has not been home for more than 14 months. Though MOJO ran a small review upfront of its originally planned release, _Fudge_ remained largely unacknowledged until September 2026, when the singer went public with the extent of his health issues and announced it as his next LP.

Recorded at the same time as _Small Changes_ yet approached as a reaction to those sessions, _Fudge_ has the feel of a man wrestling with the direction a successful career had taken him. By his own admission, Kiwanuka had only recently begun reaching the audience he sought; now he was eschewing the trappings of fame, recording alone in a shed with equipment he’d bought himself. In intent, at least, _Fudge_ can be filed alongside :a[Stevie Wonder]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/stevie-wonder-greatest-deep-cuts/' } taking artistic control or Marvin Gaye going on strike until Berry Gordy relented on issuing _:a[What’s Going On]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/2v6ANhWhZBUKkg6pJJBs3B?si=6BF_Rs9NQyKpdQR2MqgR8w' }_.

The first track, Summer Clothes, opens with that Chick Corea quote as a statement of intent, but as it closes you hear Kiwanuka in the studio: “I don’t know what I’m doing… I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.” The implication is clear: this is his break-up album – not in a romantic sense, but from the musical relationships that brought him here. It’s no less emotional for that. “I know who I want to be,” he sings on Love In My Heart; later cautioning on Move In My Direction: “I don’t know how to get there.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyv7buFhdvk

Kiwanuka is pointing the finger of blame at himself; as a consequence, _Fudge_ is a raw, emotive listen, with light relief hard to come by. Summer Clothes puts it bluntly: “You made me sad so I had to go.” Sing drives the feeling home: “I need miracles to wash away the pain.” For many, many reasons, you hope there will be another chapter to follow, shining light into these dark corners.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7esTGcAwxcM

To quote Corea again: “You have to learn your own heart… that’s what’s beautiful, so you have to pursue that.” And this, as Michael Kiwanuka has demonstrated here, is where soul lies.

Summer Clothes  
California  
Just Another Moment  
Drowning In Your Heart  
Love In My Heart  
Across The Sky  
Stars  
Move In My Direction  
You Sent Me Flying  
Steve's Paradise  
Sing  
Swings And Roundabouts  
Etching On The Fourth Side

**Get the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/mojo-397-december-2026-bob-dylan/' }!**

## Richard Thompson -  Hippies, Thugs and Heroes

The hypnotic closing jangle on the first Richard Thompson album since 2024’s _:a[Ship To Shore]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/richard-thompson-ship-to-shore-review/' }_, Siren captures another poor sap heading on to the emotional rocks. “It’s only love that stops my breath and makes me sigh and stare in wonder,” sings the ever-mournful Thompson, that desperate desire to love and be loved overriding all the flashing danger signs. “Only you and you alone can sing the spell that I fall under.”

At 77, the musical spell cast by the bumbling former Fairport Convention man with the magic talking guitar is largely unbroken. Not a man given to wild flights of fancy, he has been making intense, gloomy and largely brilliant solo records for well over 55 years, with the chorus of Roll Over Vaughan Williams – the opening track on his 1972 debut, _:a[Henry The Human Fly]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/4HEio8TGfOeggpOJaL9tIR?si=YzsKJSs1SPm9z49T9dF7Rw' }_ – setting a Henny Penny precedent: “Live in fear, live in fear.”

The sky has not fallen on his head just yet, but his latest outing is one of his darkest and bleakest regardless. A kind of short story collection, _Hippies, Thugs And Heroes_ finds a selection of innocents lining up to meet their fate, Gashlycrumb Tinies-style. Bashed together briskly by his American band, with the assistance of his wife Zara Phillips and long-serving accordion maestro John Kirkpatrick, it offers precious little in terms of light relief; nothing about vintage motorbikes, Jimmy Shand records, or teenage sex from the early ’60s. Instead, it is a Leviathan-worthy vision of a world governed by man’s basest instincts, where life tends to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and (if you are lucky) short. Depending on your outlook, it may be his best since 1999’s _:a[Mock Tudor]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/5vekSonP4ARZOUPjBRKTzR?si=nvSS3t8GScW_aGikdmTmgg' }_, his best since 1975’s _:a[Pour Down Like Silver]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/1hxNIvdrpV9v0PmTU5CGdY?si=bZ8kuSV1SoKALwULSkdVng' }_, or his best full-stop.

Byrds of ill omen flutter ominously over opening track Sorcerer’s Apprentice as Thompson stares into the face of evil and finds a disturbing lack of reason. “It dawns on me that you’re not quite well, you’re not quite compos mentis,” he sings, addressing the malevolent force in the room. If that Phil Ochs line is true – “half the world is crazy, the other half is scared” – it doesn’t take a genius to work out which side of the line Thompson thinks he stands on.

Crazy people are running all over town on _Hippies, Thugs And Heroes_, though. The strutting Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking tracks a chemically assisted dalliance between a “Kings Road hippie” and a “Saucihall thug”, with a shuddering :a[Jethro Tull]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/jethro-tulls-best-albums-ranked/' }-sized riff helping to drown out the sound of loveless debauch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZraHbGa3sE

She Burns It All, meanwhile, is another unhappy trip to the psychiatric ward (Thompson previously visited on Grey Walls from 1991’s _:a[Rumor And Sigh]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/5udGf9RoW9Sjda4yD0R7mQ?si=VCs1Pql-R0Cr32Byg_thuA' }_). One of his most unusual songs, this otherworldly duet with Phillips has echoes of early ’70s :a[Nico]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/nico-remembered/' }/Kevin Ayers, and reaches the worrying conclusion that neither “Mandrake root or holy water” can soothe a sick soul.

Some people are ill, then, but others are just bad. The lopsided Stringer imagines the truth that underpins the heroic outlaw ballads as it portrays a toxic thug who “murders for pleasure” but somehow wins the public’s affection. “The poor and the needy they sing of his exploits; they feed him and hide him like one of their own,” sneers Thompson, every inch the policeman’s son. “But Stringer is a scoundrel, a taker a user; he cares about Stringer and Stringer alone.”

However, the Stringers of the world may be a symptom of a greater malaise. Muggers and thieves are rampant on the Ayn Rand-via-Joe Brown knees-up of Everybody’s Stealing – a grinning, Cajun-spiced reminder that, 50-plus years on from the release of Thompson’s Larkin-esque End Of The Rainbow, tycoons and barrow boys continue to rob with impunity.

The poor, the gentle and the wounded, meanwhile, continue to suffer. A sort of funky Brother, Can You Spare A Dime, Unsung Hero laments how working people tend to get overlooked in a society that only really has time for big names, while the ominous jangle of Pauper’s Grave is a sombre rumination on a dead drunk, decorated with a suitably mournful strathspey guitar solo. Thompson notes that his luckless John Doe was found with “nothing in his pocket but a letter nearly fallen apart; he read the thing so many times he must have learned it by heart”, and it may be that love – the painful, unresolved, unrequited kind – carves a deeper gouge through _Hippies, Thugs And Heroes_ than any other human foible.

A wronged partner feels the sting of humiliation on The Soul In Me, while Make Believe You Don’t Know Me tiptoes around the frozen wreckage of an impossible affair, apparently with a gloomy brass band for company. The wistful Pipe Dream (a grandson of Don Gibson’s mournful 1955 country smash Sweet Dreams) offers a brief moment of wistful prettiness, but even then it is a song about watching the twinkling fragments of a broken heart tumbling down to earth.

The Big Smoke, meanwhile, echoes :a[The Smiths]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/the-50-greatest-smiths-songs-ranked/' }’ London, unsettled chords and mournful strings a reminder that – in Thompson’s universe – a new career in a new town offers no escape from old-world misery. “I’ve made up my mind this is my time the big smoke is calling,” he sings, the sombre musical accompaniment making it clear that this joyful decision represents the opening of a new portal into Hell.

_Hippies, Thugs And Heroes_ is, then, a bit of a downer, but those who have found their way to Thompson’s songs – via Fairport, or fellow travellers like :a[Robyn Hitchcock]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/robyn-hitchcock-the-confuser-reviewed/' }, :a[Tom Verlaine]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/televisions-unreleased-fourth-album-unveiled/' }, Bob Mould, Pere Ubu, :a[R.E.M.]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/rem-their-best-albums-ranked/' } and now :a[The Tubs]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/the-tubs-hard-life-reviewed-folk-rockers-deliver-brutal-truths-on-superb-third-album/' } – will know how intoxicating his kind of gloom can be. Like fellow Muswell Hillbilly :a[Ray Davies]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/ray-davies-interviewed/' }, Thompson also knows how to place the tiniest corona of hope around the big black sun of this material, a clumsy little half joke or a sudden luminous flash of guitar enlivening the darkness. Thompson’s central message remains stark, though. Bad things happen to good people; bad things happen to bad people; bad things happen all the time. However – as the poor sap on Siren knows – only one person can sing this kind of spell quite so bewitchingly. To the rocks. Full speed ahead.

_Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is out October 16 on New West Records._

This Friday, former Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson releases his 20th solo album _Hippies, Thugs And Heroes_. Even by Thompson’s famously gloomy standards, it’s one of his bleakest records: a selection of short tableaus populated by murderers, drunks and the downtrodden. “It is a Leviathan-worthy vision of a world governed by man’s basest instincts,” writes Jim Wirth in :a[MOJO’s five-star review]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/richard-thompson-hippies-thugs-and-heroes-reviewed/' }, “where life tends to be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and (if you are lucky) short.” _Hippies, Thugs And Heroes_ is also, however, one of the best albums of Thompson’s storied career, on a par with previous high watermarks _:a[Mock Tudor]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/5vekSonP4ARZOUPjBRKTzR?si=nvSS3t8GScW_aGikdmTmgg' }_ in 1999, and 1975’s _:a[Pour Down Like Silver]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/1hxNIvdrpV9v0PmTU5CGdY?si=bZ8kuSV1SoKALwULSkdVng' }_.

Below, Thompson speaks to Jim Wirth about the inspiration behind some of the nefarious characters portrayed on the album, what music he listens to for fun, and why he’s actually far more cheerful in real life than his songs might suggest. “I think I’m a happy, upbeat person,” he says. “If the music turns out not to be that way, I don’t know what’s gone wrong…”

**Should we think of _Hippies, Thugs And Heroes_ as a short story collection?**

“It’s a short song collection. All songs tell a kind of a story. I suppose on this record some are more narrative than others. Cocaine Walking, Booze Talking: I was just trying to capture a certain kind of 1960s character; characters who get altered by the drug experience. Stringer is really more based on fantasy and conversations between my father, who was from the Metropolitan Police, and my uncle Frank, who was on the railways, talking about the gangs in Brighton. I kind of invented Stringer as a kind of a typical Brighton gangster.”

**It feels like a bleak record, even by your standards.**

“I come from a folk background, where songs about mining disasters and people having incest with their sisters are normal. If things are slightly more contemplative or introverted or sad \[on this record\], that’s not really the intention. I intend to be serious sometimes. I think there’s a place post _:a[Highway 61 Revisited]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/inside-the-making-of-bob-dylans-highway-61-revisited/' }_ to be serious in popular music. So, serious? Yes. Intending to be depressing? No. Some people do depressing much better than I do – far more naturally gifted at it. I think I’m a happy, upbeat person and if the music turns out not to be that way, I don’t know what’s gone wrong.”

**You made it fairly briskly; is that how you like to work?**

“I planned for five days recording and we made it in three. Sometimes you go into the studio and it’s uphill. You’re pushing and there’s tracks that never quite settle. This one  just went really quickly. We just ripped through stuff. It was great. That’s ideal on a record. You don’t want to sound like you’re on take 35; you want to sound like you’re on take one all the time.”

**She Burns It All is about as strange a song as you have recorded.**

“It’s unusual in its structure, and I’ve got my wife Zara singing almost like counterpoint in some places to the vocal. It’s just a different way of constructing a song, really, for me. It’s about how your suburban life, your attitude to other people, all these things can get blown away by love. You can see it as a spiritual song or just a straight-ahead love song.”

“I listen to classical music, jazz. I listen to vintage rock’n’roll, and I listen to popular music from the ’20s and ’30s. I just think sometimes you have to go back to go forwards and to be inspired.”

**You like baroque pop records like Love’s _Forever Changes_ and the first Left Banke album; have you never been tempted to make something like that?**

“I think if I did, it wouldn’t quite come out right. I’m happy to use more folk elements, if you like. I’m happy to throw in hurdy-gurdies and Salvation Army bands and fiddles, accordions etcetera onto a record. To me, that’s a kind of authenticity that’s reflecting my soul a bit more.”

_Hippies, Thugs And Heroes is out October 16 on New West Records. Read MOJO's five-star review **:a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/richard-thompson-hippies-thugs-and-heroes-reviewed/' }**!_

The sound of a band expanding their universe – growing bigger and bolder with each record – never loses its thrill. Upon their arrival in 2017, in an era when guitar music was regularly declared to be in terminal decline, Fontaines D.C. powered on through, painting in primary colours and frontman Grian Chatten’s vivid poetry. If their first three albums, culminating in 2022’s _:a[Skínty Fía]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/0aVN6rMKthfuAdDXn8RTXf?si=vpHHIJx_R7yRZP-s1-QHKA' }_, seemed intent on rebooting indie rock, it made 2024’s _:a[Romance]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/fontaines-dc-romance-review/' }_ and their abrupt pivot into electronics all the more surprising – not least because the band also underwent a sudden 1990s visual makeover of floppy hairdos and rave colours.

It’s worth remembering that, for the members of Fontaines D.C., that decade is as distant as the 1960s were to :a[Oasis]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/oasis-and-solo-top-ten-albums/' } and :a[Blur]{href='http://V' }. And so, in effect, with _Romance_ the group beamed themselves into a version of the 1990s that never quite existed: one built from the progressive promise of :a[The Stone Roses]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/inside-the-making-of-the-stone-roses-debut-album/' } jamming along to breakbeat records, :a[Happy Mondays]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/shaun-ryder-this-aint-our-planet-its-an-experiment-in-a-zoo/' } retooling their songs with remix electronics, and :a[The Young Gods]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36PnotCVYLM' } chopping up their grinding performances in samplers. It was a brief window before bands turned guitar-centric and traditional again with Britpop – and it’s this unrealised, future-facing 1990s that Fontaines D.C. continue to explore on _Dopamine Chamber_.

In fact, they ditch the guitars altogether – save for Conor Deegan’s rumbling bass – in brooding opener Six Shot Morning, morphing into a synth band whose sixth member is producer James Ford (returning from _Romance_) adding icy chords on a vintage, telephone exchange-proportioned ARP 2600. At other points, they disappear as a band altogether, as in the first two minutes of One Man, leaving strings and keyboard effects to carry the song until acoustic guitars and a rolling drum tattoo enter the picture. It makes the unexpected blasts into rock – everyone hitting the grunge pedals at once in Happy For You, and the metallic two-note solo in Tongue – all the more surprising and effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OsIwKHppho

Meanwhile, Chatten’s depiction of “the darkest room, on the brightest day” in Where Is Gone? encapsulates a record that veers between the shadows and the light. In Mimesis, a super-catchy New Order-styled pop song about burnout, he notes, “Well everybody’s depressed/We’re running on a wheel”, before offering support: “I’m here to fight your corner/My heart is open”. The fact that this is a band operating in an age of absolute sensory overload is made explicit throughout _Dopamine Chamber_: a term from One Man describing the empty, addictive rewards available at the touch of a button in our hyperconnected world.

The effect on Grian Chatten’s lyric writing often appears to be a kind of dissociation that, with its frequent moviemaking references – the “cinematic feeling” in Marianne, the “melancholy hearts in a motion film” of Six Shot Morning – makes parts of the record feel as if they’re unfolding on a screen. There’s also a sense of others furtively capturing images, in the singer’s deadpan suspicion, voiced in the latter song, that “Silicon Valley took a photograph”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWNxWy012Ro

Along with sonic expansion, Fontaines D.C. have set the bar even higher in terms of their songwriting. Chatten is a great melody writer in the sense that he sticks to the hooks without much variation, reducing the tunes to their essence without giving the sense that he’s preparing to spoon-feed them to the growing crowds who’ve come to sing along to :a[Starburster]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHocVRUlvkk' }, :a[I Love You]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty9Pcg3qrmU' } or :a[Boys In The Better Land]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abxGaMCDhmU' }. Here, Japan, tucked away as the penultimate of the 11 tracks, features a naïve melody that recalls early-years :a[Noel Gallagher]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/noel-gallagher-interviewed-mojo-30/' } in its smart simplicity, even if Chatten uses it to describe a mutually cold partnership – the kind of romance in which both parties are using one another.

Often, in the songs that focus on relationships, the lines are intriguingly blurred. In Happy For You, a slow-burning mid-pacer that builds and builds from its chorus-effected :a[Cure]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/the-cure-every-album-ranked/' } guitar intro, Chatten – ever the short story writer, so we shouldn’t necessarily confuse the singer with the song – details an argument with a partner that results in a breakup, sweetened with a conciliatory gift of flowers. “On leaving I key your car,” he adds, revealing a sly act of revenge-motivated criminal damage.

Elsewhere, Chatten is a wholly unreliable narrator. In the baggy synth pop of Marianne, he appears to be reaching out to someone in trouble, but is he saving her from danger or inviting her into his own hazardous world? “I can help you disappear,” he promises or, possibly, warns. “This could be your fatal match.” Amid the ’80s goth contours of You Miss Me, he turns even more menacing. “You’re messing with something you don’t know,” he croons in a sinister tone, hinting that this dodgy character might even be doping his partner (“Your smile comes out of my pocket”), before the sky brightens with a deceptively uplifting chorus that features a Stone Roses stomp and stabbing, ’60s strings.

The latter era is exquisitely evoked in Where Is Gone?, the most surprising cut on _Dopamine Chamber_, being a duet with Rosalía that comes across like some imagined Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra duet arranged by :a[Ennio Morricone]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/ennio-morricones-best-albums-ranked/' }. Gently driven by forever-changing orchestral fills from drummer Tom Coll and adorned with lovely, unobtrusive strings, it’s a cryptic love song dealing with nothing less than the mystery of death. Featuring lines that sound as if they’ve been written in another language, with something lost in their English translation – “The picture frame is surely wrong”, “There’s no way I’m going back to how I feel” – it’s a baroque pop beauty that further demonstrates Fontaines pushing at their stylistic boundaries.

Grian Chatten says that ultimately, he wanted _Dopamine Chamber_ to “feel a little bit like the human race’s life flashing before its eyes”. In the end, with closer Intimate, he’s viewing “the ruins of the human dream”, while returning to his cinematic motif: “Colourful ending, so pretty in the final scene”. It’s a bleak vision, yet one that’s elegantly rendered by the group throughout the album, both sonically and lyrically, by mixing the past, present and possible future. As dark chroniclers of their age, Fontaines D.C. are here to illuminate the gloom.

_Dopamine Chamber is out October 16 on XL Recordings._

1\. Six Shot Morning  
2\. Marianne  
3\. Mimesis  
4\. Happy For You  
5\. Demolition  
6\. Tongue  
7\. One Man  
8\. Where Is Gone? (with ROSALÍA)  
9\. You Miss Me  
10\. Japan  
11\. Intimate

This Friday, Fontaines D.C. release their fifth album _Dopamine Chamber_. Recorded in the Suffolk countryside and Palmero, Sicily, with producer James Ford, it sees the Dublin five-piece further explore the dystopian world they mapped out on 2024’s _:a[Romance]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/fontaines-dc-romance-review/' }._

Much like its predecessor, _Dopamine Chamber_ veers away from the punk- and post-punk-inspired sound of the band’s first three albums in favour of a more electronic-influenced palette. Songs such as brooding opener Six Shot Morning, the :a[New Order]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/joy-division-and-new-order-best-albums-ranked/' }-like Mimesis, and Happy For You’s goth/grunge/greebo hybrid imagining an alternative reality 1990s where the dance-rock crossovers that characterised the start of the decade set the direction of travel for the next ten-plus years.

Frontman Grian Chatten, meanwhile, uses the album’s neon-lit backdrop to explore the confusion, numbness and sensory overload of modern times. “It’s a bleak vision, yet one that’s elegantly rendered by the group throughout the album, both sonically and lyrically, by mixing the past, present and possible future,” writes Tom Doyle in MOJO’s four-star review. “As dark chroniclers of their age, Fontaines D.C. are here to illuminate the gloom.” You can read MOJO’s full review of _Dopamine Chamber_ **:a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/fontaines-d-c-dopamine-chamber-reviewed/' }**!

Below, Grian Chatten speaks to Tom Doyle about recording the album, the “terrifying level of talent” of _Dopamine Chamber_ guest vocalist Rosalía, stepping up to the stadium rock big leagues, what Fontaines D.C.’s next move might be, and a potential second solo album…

**How did the preparation for this album differ from _Romance_?**

“Well, before we wrote this album, one of the fundamental questions I felt like asking myself was, Do we want to forget about _Romance_ and kind of reinvent ourselves a little bit? Do like a rootsy album, take another left turn, or do we want to continue to pursue whatever this was with _Romance_. It felt like we had more to say in that area musically. More and more as we make albums, we’ve allowed the music to speak for itself. I suppose our music is getting a bit more cinematic. The lyrics were written after all the music.”

**The band recorded _Dopamine Chamber_ with producer James Ford at Decoy Studios in rural Suffolk. Did the isolation help the process?**

“Well, the original idea was to go to La Frette \[Studios\], just outside of Paris, but we had to change it at the last minute because James had gone through treatment for his cancer \[acute myeloid leukaemia\], which fortunately I think is in the all-clear now. It just allowed us to get really deep into it and not get distracted. We only went into the local village about twice, I think maybe over three weeks, and it was really, really intense. We didn’t really leave that 30 square metres for a while.”

**What did your lyric-writing process involve?**

“I wrote all the lyrics abroad. I went away to Vienna and then to Venice and did a very short, compressed writing trip, which was fun. Not all of it is the same in terms of how it responds to the state of the world. But generally speaking, I try to write from kind of an emotional response to things that are happening in the world, and just hint at those things, as opposed to being explicit. I’d rather be implicit like that and be more explicit from the standpoint of the stage.”

**You travelled to a house in Palermo, Sicily to record your vocals. Apparently building an ad hoc vocal booth out of mattresses and cushions?**

“Me and James were laughing because it was like two young lads having a sleepover and building a fort. And of course that is what it is, really. We’re still just at play, y’know. It was a lot of fun, making all the music surrounded by equipment and then doing all the vocals with kind of nothing. Palermo is such a lively place. You’re surrounded by a sense of oldness that commands a certain reverence.”

**What made you want to work with Rosalía on Where Is Gone?**

“Because I think her voice, there’s a classical nature to it, but there’s also something kind of eerily sort of dystopian in it. She was on tour in America, so we sent her over the track, and within 48 hours she’d sent back this vocal. I just think she’s a bit of an auteur. She reminds me of Bowie and Björk. She has a terrifying level of talent. So it’s an honour.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxS3kEhO4zk

**Could she be tempted onto the stage to perform the song live with you guys?**

“I think she could. Nothing’s set in stone as of yet, honestly. But I think she’s up for it.”

**While you were making the album, you were listening to the ‘60s records of Italian singer Mina. We can hear her influence in Where Is Gone? What was the appeal?**

“Just the kind of analogue sense of humanity and the luscious strings and the liveliness of Mina’s vocals is something that kind of informed the nostalgia and sense of humanity that I wanted to put in the record… as something that we’re leaving behind, potentially. I wanted the album to feel a little bit like the human race’s life flashing before its eyes, and \[have\] a kind of spectrum of time. I think the Mina stuff informed how the old days would feel. The rose-tinted feeling of that. It was interesting to pair that with the slightly more dystopian, dark wavey-influenced stuff and have those two interact together on the album.”

**Fontaines D.C. have reached arena and stadium level. How are you adjusting to that?**

“It hasn’t really sunk in yet. When I think about it, it definitely makes me feel a bit overwhelmed and a bit knackered sometimes. I keep trying to contextualise it by thinking about The Cure and Robert Smith and how intact he seems as an individual. So I feel like you can do it and remain true to yourself.”

**How do you feel when you look out at these enormous crowds and see fans singing every syllable of your songs? It must be strange?**

“It is, yeah. The first time we had that was when we were on tour with Arctic Monkeys across America \[in 2023\], and once or twice in the more Irish parts of America, we started to get a bit of a big reception. I remember we were playing Jackie Down The Line, and all these phones went up, in the kind of lighter style, and people were singing. I just heard everyone in the band starting to make loads of mistakes (laughs). We just fucking collapsed.”

**Where do Fontaines D.C. go from here?**

“The best place we can go from here is away for a while. Take a bit of stock, and give people a break from us, maybe for a little while, after this one. I say that to you, but at the same time, I’m still writing a lot of music. I feel like when you do a fair bit of writing, and it doesn’t go anywhere, and it starts to stack up, you want it to go somewhere. So I can get a bit of oxygen or something. I’ll probably end up just writing and writing.”

“Yeah, I think so. I’ve been thinking about it recently. I’ve got a few tunes, and I have a bit of an idea of how I want it to be. I would say it’d be a lot more lively and a bit more kind of festival-ready.”

An abridged version of this interview appears in the latest issue of MOJO Magazine, on sale now. For more info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are **:a[CLICK HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/mojo-397-december-2026-bob-dylan/' }**.

**As Bob Dylan returns to UK shores once more and a new box set of his extraordinary 1976 live shows is unveiled, in the latest issue of MOJO – :a[available to order now]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/mojo-397-december-2026-bob-dylan/' } – we explore the tours that sealed Dylan’s legend. In this extract from our cover feature, Ray Padgett takes a trip back to the second leg of the Rolling Thunder revue, a tour beset by ill omens: not least Dylan’s failing marriage.** **However, as the new 36-disc set makes clear, bad vibes were nightly transformed into incendiary performances and unpredictable reinventions…**

Early May, 1976. Deep in the Louisiana swamps, the musicians of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue are spending the afternoon with Bobby Charles, the cult hero who’d made an album with The Band in 1972, and who also, in a previous life, had written :a[See You Later, Alligato]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSlvishMSoQ&amp;list=RDhSlvishMSoQ&amp;start_radio=1' }r. On the road down South for the second Rolling Thunder tour, a show has been cancelled and Charles – whom Dylan later calls “one of the most melodious voices ever transmuted into a piece of vinyl” — has invited everyone to his place in the bayou for a barbecue. But he isn’t cooking hamburgers.

According to percussionist Gary Burke, not long before his passing earlier this year, “There were a lot of local characters and this unusual-looking stew. I said, What is this? This guy with a Bowie knife in his belt, somebody you don’t want to mess with in a dark alley, says, ‘It’s alligator. I caught this last night.’”

“There were no plates or utensils or anything,” says Roger McGuinn, one of the tour’s featured performers. “You go and take a handful of alligator, put it in your mouth, and chase it with a beer.”

Everyone stays over, eating alligator, drinking beer and mezcal. Meanwhile, Charles strums his guitar and spins records by 1950s Cajun band the Louisiana Aces. Every time anyone says something memorable, Charles drawls, in his thick Louisiana accent, “Pencil and paper… pencil and paper,” then scrawls it down as a possible future song title.

The guy who caught the alligator calls himself Bird, and he doesn’t take kindly to all these hippie musicians coming into his swamp. Suzi Ronson, partner to ex-:a[Bowie]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/david-bowies-50-greatest-songs/' }, now-Dylan guitarist Mick Ronson, remembers: “They were gambling, and the guy threw this enormous knife. It whizzed right past Mick’s face and stuck in the thing behind him. Then he picked up his gun and laid it across the table. I was frightened that Mick might get killed and dumped in the bayou. Bob Neuwirth rushed in and took Mick outside.”

David Mansfield, the baby-faced 19-year-old who played steel guitar, mandolin, and violin, calls it “a lost weekend” – one of many such moments of chaos on the second Rolling Thunder tour.

Rolling Thunder 1976, it quickly became clear, was not at all like Rolling Thunder 1975. The traveling gypsy carnival spirit of Dylan’s autumn jaunt had departed and Dylan’s mood had plummeted. His marriage to Sara Dylan, who appeared occasionally on the tour but mostly kept her distance, appeared in jeopardy; they would formally divorce the following spring.

_:a[Desire]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bob-dylans-desire-at-50/' }_ had been released in January, but many of the album’s songs, which had featured so prominently on the autumn dates, had been jettisoned. Instead, Rolling Thunder 1976 became the _:a[Blood On The Tracks]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bob-dylans-blood-on-the-tracks-revisited/' }_ tour that had never happened. Idiot Wind, If You See Her, Say Hello, and Shelter From The Storm all made their live debuts in cutting new arrangements. Dylan wrote those songs when his marriage began to struggle. Now, as it collapsed completely, they got angrier.

“That Idiot Wind, oh my god, that’s one of the most impassioned vocals I ever heard,” says bassist and bandleader Rob Stoner of one of the nightly highlights. “And there’s Sara sitting right in front while he’s singing this shit. It was some incendiary emotional stuff to witness.”

As a massive new box set – _:a[The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1976 Live Recordings]{href='https://www.roughtrade.com/product/bob-dylan/the-rolling-thunder-revue-the-1976-live-recordings' target='_blank' rel='noreferrer noopener'}_ – makes clear, dour offstage vibes translated to incredible onstage music. The nine-track _:a[Hard Rain]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/4HQwhbXHJC9FK7H6bVU8WR?si=LPpd5gS0SXK0JAX60W9rXg' }_ live album, released in September 1976, barely scratched the surface. Across 39 discs, fans can now hear almost every 1976 show, some never heard before even by the most dedicated bootleg collector. The set makes a powerful case for a tour that some Dylan fans have given short shrift.

There was an “edgy punk energy” to Dylan’s new sound, says Gary Burke: songs reinvented in loud and aggressive new ways, sometimes screamed at top volume. “It was more wild and uncontained,” adds violinist Scarlet Rivera, a dominant presence with Dylan both musically and visually ever since her playing on _Desire_. “It felt like two different tours.”

## “Oh my god, we’re gonna electrocute Bob!”

**Get the latest issue of MOJO – available to order for delivery now – to read the feature in full, and dive into our other reports on Dylan’s most earth-shattering tours. Plus! Hear a never-before-released track from one of the last shows of the Rolling Thunder Revue. More info and to order your copy :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/mojo-397-december-2026-bob-dylan/' }!**

## Cameron Winter - Live At Carnegie Hall

Hardened music heads might raise an eyebrow at the ongoing canonisation of 24-year-old Brooklynite Cameron Winter, via his destabilising rock band Geese, his 2024 solo album _:a[Heavy Metal]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/7mOrnQqDad3RgYQsJGaaqk?si=btQtaOxjR4GsNOUVUR0J5w' }_ and now, a concert film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. This accompanying soundtrack, however, is a suitably intense and highly persuasive argument that all the praise is justified.

Alone at Carnegie Hall, Winter pares everything back to piano ballads, putting his pinched tonal similarities to Rufus Wainwright and Beirut’s Zach Condon into stark relief. It foregrounds the structural oddness of his songs, too, the way they flirt with the beat-up tropes of singer-songwriter tradition then drag them somewhere weirder: Laura Nyro circa _:a[New York Tendaberry]{href='https://open.spotify.com/album/7x2WkwfDyXqrFxswIhlT6V?si=Lqo4GsgMSk6HS0O8lacNUA' }_ is maybe the best analogue, as The Rolling Stones takes flight from Tin Pan Alley. Three previously unreleased songs, meanwhile – especially the rapturous systems glissando of If You Turn Back Now – are plausibly his best yet.

_Live At Carnegie Hall is out 9 October on Partisan/Play It Again Sam._

**Get the definitive verdict on all the month's essential new releases, reissues, music books and films in the latest issue of MOJO. More info and to order a copy for delivery wherever you are :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/mojo-396-november-2026-neil-young/' }!**

_Main picture: Cameron Winter at London's Roundhouse, December, 2025 (Credit: Lewis Evans)._

Bringing together our two sold-out Kate Bush specials in one sumptuous 260-page bookazine, **MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Kate Bush 1958-2026** presents a deep dive into one of the most remarkable and singular artists of modern times, featuring essays on all her albums, interviews, rare and iconic photos and more, MOJO The Collectors’ Series: Kate Bush 1958-2026 is in UK shops now!

When Kate Bush was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November 2023, singer and super-fan St. Vincent posed a question: “How could someone be this genius and pure and completely free?”

It’s a question that perhaps only Kate herself is equipped to answer – and one suspects she’d be far too modest to do so. Hopefully, though, this bumper 260-page MOJO deluxe special will go some way to explaining her almost supernatural gifts as a singer, songwriter, producer and performer. Bringing together the contents of MOJO’s two previous Kate Bush special editions, it unfolds her extraordinary story through exclusive in-depth interviews and deep-dive features, as well as an album-by-album celebration of her releases.

There are contributions from Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, who helped nurture her talent when she was a teenager, and a behind-the scenes account of her first – and only – major tour in 1979. We also take a forensic look at her 1985 masterpiece _Hounds Of Love_, while Kate exclusively reveals to us the hidden secrets of _The Sensual World_, _Ariel_ and _The Director’s Cut_. She opens up, too, about her phenomenal 22-night Before The Dawn residency at Hammersmith Apollo in 2014, her last live performances to date, while the MOJO team nominate and celebrate her 50 Greatest Songs.

Illustrated with rare and iconic images, and printed on premium quality paper, this is an essential purchase for all Kate Bush fans and music connoisseurs and will make the perfect gift for the festive season.

As Bob Dylan nears UK shores once more and a box set of his extraordinary 1976 shows emerges, MOJO digs in, and reflects on Dylan’s other ground-breaking tours, including 2026’s, with its mysterious rotating cast of guitarists. Also in this issue: back to Amy Winehouse’s _Back To Black_; inside Roxy Music’s _For Your Pleasure_; Chuck Berry’s rock’n’roll legacy; Queens Of The Stone Age return from the brink; Fela Kuti against the world! Plus: Bernie Taupin; Fontaines DC; Jimmy Webb; Alice Cooper; Simple Minds; Brian Epstein; Tony Iommi; Soft Machine; Willis Alan Ramsey; Dhani Harrison; Swervedriver; neo-soul; all back to John Cooper Clarke’s; and more!

**THIS MONTH’S COVERMOUNT CD** is Mystical Children: The Men And Women Of Rolling Thunder. Being 15 tracks by Dylan’s all-star cohorts on his landmark tours, ’75-’76. Includes: Joan Baez, Scarlet Rivera, Kinky Friedman, T Bone Burnett, David Mansfield (collaborating with Richard Thompson, from the latter’s new album), and an exclusive track from Dylan’s upcoming 1976 live box set.

## **:a[HAVE MOJO 397 SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME]{href='https://www.greatmagazines.co.uk/mojo-december-2026?utm_source=mojo4music.com&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_campaign=bau_mojo&amp;utm_content=mojo_december' }**

**BOB DYLAN** As he approaches our shores once more, and a box set of his extraordinary 1976 shows is unveiled, we look at the tours that sealed his legend, from 1964 to now: “It was some incendiary stuff to witness.”

**AMY WINEHOUSE** Twenty years since its release, the people who helped her make _Back To Black_, then watched her fall apart, remember the ecstatic highs and tragic lows.

**BERNIE TAUPIN** He writes the words that Elton John weaves with melodic gold. Now he’s writing music too. Just don’t remind him about Starship’s We Built This City…

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