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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MOJO 367 – June 2024: Kate Bush

MOJO 366 magazine cover, featuring Pearl Jam and Pearl Jam CD

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MOJO 366 – May 2024: Pearl Jam

MOJO 365 cover, featuring Liam Gallagher and John Squire

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MOJO 365 – April 2024: Liam Gallagher & John Squire

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MOJO 364 – March 2024: Paul McCartney

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Stevie Wonder Stars In The New Issue Of MOJO Magazine!

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The Beatles On Now And Then, The Best Albums Of 2023, U2, Blur And More In The Latest Issue Of MOJO!

MOJO 361 cover featuring The Rolling Stones

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MOJO 361 – December 2023: The Rolling Stones

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Dylan, Beatles, Zeppelin, Kate Bush Star In MOJO’s 30th Anniversary Issue

The Beatles and George Martin Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at Abbey Road Studios in 1967

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The Beatles’ Most Ground Breaking Songs

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Bruce Springsteen’s Best Albums Ranked!

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A Complete Unknown Review: Astute portrait of Dylan’s rise

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Shane MacGowan’s 20 Greatest Songs

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The Beatles’ Christmas Records

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The Best Albums Of 2024

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Pearl Jam: All The Albums Ranked

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Paul McCartney Live Review: Timeless mastery and seasonal cheer

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MOJO’s New Led Zeppelin Special Is Out Now!

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ELO’s Jeff Lynne: “This is not a farewell to music!”

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Keith Richards Interviewed: “We’re born to have fun. If you take it too seriously, you’re f\*\*\*ed…”

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The Best Reissues of 2024

Paul Weller and Bobby Gillespie Brixton Academy December 13, 2024

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Paul Weller, Primal Scream, Kneecap And More Review: Eclectic lineup come together at Gaza benefit

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The Who: Every Album Ranked

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Ringo Starr: “It was an absolute surprise to me!”

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Manic Street Preachers: “Failure is ingrained in the band as much as success.”

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New Music

THE BEATLES’ SONGWRITING skills have been the the staples of pop culture commentary ever since the first waves of Beatlemania. Less often mentioned are the groundbreaking production tricks and ideas that made their records the benchmark for creative recording in the last century, and beyond. The group’s remarkable thirst for newness, allied with the ingenuity of producer George Martin and the team of engineers at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios, gave rise to cutting-edge sonics and daring studio exploration which are now often taken for granted.

There’s no-one better to explain how the group and their collaborators created new sonic worlds than Beatles recording experts **Brian Kehew** and **Kevin Ryan**, authors of the benchmark Beatles-in-the-studio book, _:a[Recording The Beatles]{href='http://www.curvebender.com/rtb.html' }_.

Here, Brian and Kevin select and rank the tracks which showcase The Beatles at their most technically innovative and groundbreaking...

"Post Les Paul and Mary Ford, the concept of layering voices or guitars was not new, but was it ever executed so beautifully? For Because, the simple melodies of the vocal were in an arpeggio - one note after another spelling out the notes of a chord. Each track of melody featured George, Paul and John together - that classic Beatles vocal mix. But then with one melody essentially triple-tracked by three Beatles, more melodies were laid on (each one a triple) to flesh out the sound. The result is a gorgeous texture, a stack of Beatles in full chorale mode. The Moog is featured, though subtly, in a way that disguises its status as "a synth". Another unusual keyboard is the basis for the track: a Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, a late '60s version of the baroque instrument but with a stylish Perspex top and Danish-furniture legs!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL0tnrl2L\_U

"We're used to it now, but the stark, cold mood of Eleanor Rigby is largely due to George Martin's brilliant string arrangement. In direct contrast with Yesterday and most other Beatles string parts, Rigby was recorded with microphones placed right up to the strings, close enough to intimidate the players. Normally strings were recorded at a distance to retain the ambience and smoothing of room reverb. But Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick knew the song required a special touch, and the rough and scratchy strings bring a strident urgency to the atypically dark McCartney lyrics. Oddly, McCartney has always said he could have done a better job on the vocal, as he had a bit of a cold when it was recorded. True, the lack of power and control can be heard once you know this historical detail, but the frailty and slight wobble of his voice actually works better for the pathos of the track."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EqMmGlTc\_w

"I Want You (She's So Heavy) illustrates the impact of Billy Preston on the Beatles sound (you didn't think John or Paul played those tricky organ licks, did you?). More importantly, the song leads deep into drone/power-rock territory with the gargantuan riffage at the end - using eight layers of guitar tracking, the wall of strings hammering on and on, cycling endlessly. Meanwhile, a storm of noise rises up - played by Lennon on a newly-acquired Moog modular synthesizer. Lennon eschewed the keyboard as controller, instead patching the Moog's noise module straight into a set of filters, each set up somewhat like a modern graphic equalizer. Playing the knobs of the equalizer allowed a wide range of noise tones to crest and fall, a tornado of intensity peaking higher and higher until an unexpected off-time edit (cut point chosen by Lennon) brings the whole structure to an immediate and shocking halt."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNL6bd7SpDE

"...Walrus remains a standout track, if only for its all-round oddness. Whether George Martin could fully comprehend the images and concepts of the LSD-baptised Beatles is moot, but his execution of warped moods remains peerless. Again, the cellos were close-miked, bringing out the scratchiness over the warm notes. Lennon's voice is deliberately distorted, one of the earliest such treatments on a vocal. In the middle of the two halves, the song breaks down and the whine of a radio being tuned (Ringo) is inserted. In the mix, the radio experiment caught just a snippet of Shakespeare's King Lear being broadcast (these were the days before sample clearances). When it came time to do the stereo mix, the happenstance of the radio breakdown could not be recreated, so it had to be 'borrowed' from the mono mix, with some special EQ on opposite sides to fake a stereo effect. The Mike Sammes Singers were employed to add a backing chorus, which was an odd choice, given their reputation for light, poppy repertoire. But George Martin's score, and the surreal text ("Stick it up your jumpah!" etc.) gave a disturbing effect that delighted Lennon. As its writer would go on to say about the track, 'Enough little bitties to keep you going, even 100 years later.'"

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

(Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967)

"Lennon's discovery of a vintage circus poster inspired some of the most unique and vivid Beatles lyrics. For the musical backdrop, he requested the track be evocative enough to allow him to "smell the sawdust". With years of experience creating sonic draperies for some of the world's best comedy records, George Martin set himself to work. The Abbey Road harmonium paralleled the vintage sound of the accordions and steam organs of turn-of-the-century travelling shows, while an opening line played on the Mellotron stood in for a calliope. For the middle section, Martin took vintage steam-organ recordings and printed them to tape. He then cut the tape into short fragments and threw them up in the air to randomise them. Collected and re-spliced, the various circus organ parts gave an off-time forward-and-backward swirl of circus notes. Most never notice it, but the instrumental waltz section (1.01-1.30) alone is among the Beatles' masterpieces. The group and George Martin played it live - each part done to perfection in a full take. Two organs play runs of harmony, a modified guitar sound (with volume pedal) and a tambourine were recorded at half-speed, then played back at normal speed - an octave higher than recorded. Yet another Beatles time-bending experiment that removes the song from the normal world."

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

"Famously, this is two unrelated compositions stitched into one, Lennon's news-reading musings sandwiching McCartney's morning wake-up call. In the closing part of each half, when the vocal suggests we are being 'turned on', massed orchestra layers begin to climb over each other in a huge din. Originally counted off as an empty space to be filled later, the idea came to crescendo the orchestral musicians (more used to specific written parts) by running each instrument from its lowest to its highest note. Knowing one "run" of it might not sound strong and scary enough, the band had asked for the impossible the night before: 'Can we synchronise two tape recorders together to get more tracks?' Literally overnight, technical engineer Ken Townsend delivered exactly that. The result is spectacular and unique in pop, a tone-sculpture that climbs higher and higher following the lyric lead. And for the finale, when the orchestra had indeed peaked and stopped on tape, the band layered a mass chord of three pianos and a reed-organ on the floor of Abbey Road's Studio 2 (not many studios can offer three differing pianos at once). This was not really 'playing piano' in the normal way, but more a musical exclamation mark using pianos as purely percussive instruments."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usNsCeOV4GM

"One of three tracks called Revolution they recorded in 1968, this is the apex (or low point, depending on your view) of the Beatles' exploratory side. Like many '60s musicians in various fields, the Beatles had been inspired by, which incorporated found sound and tape manipulation to create new textures and sounds. Revolution 9 is best seen as a musical sculpture, bringing together disparate pieces to create a unique form - a typically iconoclastic move by the world's most popular and best-selling group (George's _Electronic Sound_ LP and John and Yoko's _Two Virgins_ were to follow), unlikely to be rivalled by any genuine hit-making act (even :a[Radiohead]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/radiohead-the-ten-best-albums/' } or :a[Bjork]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bjork-interviewed/' }) in our lifetimes."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF7SgFtSbaI

"Certainly a beautiful and iconic Beatles song, recorded first as more of a 'band' track with the usual Beatles instrumentation: drums, bass, guitars and keyboard (the beautiful Mellotron flutes heard at the opening). Later, John felt it didn't capture what he was hoping for, so a more esoteric version was effected with strings and horns over a thick percussive backing track. Neither was satisfactory to Lennon, so he asked if the two could be combined. George Martin explained it would be quite tricky, as they were at different tempos and in different keys. As luck would have it, the faster one was in the higher key, so they could be matched by slowing the tape machine, thereby dropping the pitch _and_ the key simultaneously. Casual listeners never detect the splice, but the two halves are quite different pieces (sonically they are completely different, excepting the Lennon vocal). Even so, the resulting arrangement works brilliantly, as the complexity and intensity of the track intensify from beginning to end."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtUH9z\_Oey8

"The last track on _Revolver_ was actually the first song recorded for the album. Not only was its droning bass and drums a stylistic departure for the group, but the recording of the song is the perfect illustration of the Beatles' experimental epiphany. Having dubbed the rhythm track and the vocals (with Lennon's voice fed through a rotating Leslie speaker intended for organs) the group began to look for other elements to add. John and Paul - though Paul particularly - had recently begun to explore the world of avant-garde records and experimental sound recording. Taking inspiration from German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, McCartney recorded several tape loops in his home studio, capturing abstract, repeating phrases onto literal loops of tape that cycled repeatedly through his tape recorder. Back at Abbey Road, these loops were loaded onto multiple tape machines, which were fed to the recording console. As the tape loops played endlessly, the group and engineer Geoff Emerick were able to raise and lower the volume of each loop at will, creating a sonic collage that faded in and out. One loop, the sound of Paul laughing, was transformed into a seagull-like sound when played back at a much faster speed. Other loops featured tamboura performances by Paul and an orchestral chord lifted from a classical LP. Some loops were played forward, some in reverse, all at different speeds, adding a cosmic texture emphasised by McCartney's guitar solo (also reversed): a sucking, familiar-but-not-familiar effect soon to be copied by tribes of would-be psychedelic yoyagers."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4BuziKGMy4

"Not the best-known Beatles track, but in many ways the most complex they ever recorded. This single track features nearly every Beatles 'trick' they invented. There are changes created by the slowing down and speeding up of the tape. There is the swirling psychedelic twirl that comes from phasing/flanging. There is an electronic doubling of George's voice. In the end section, there are heavy echoes on the cellos, stuttering away, at times repeating so heavily as to turn into feedback. And most unusual, the track was mixed first, then played through a spinning Leslie speaker. This jumble was recorded back onto the original tape, but in reverse! So the spinning backward version of the entire song fades in and out throughout the forward version. Still with us? Legend has it that they ran the signal through the Leslie so loudly that the speaker was permanently damaged."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coz0TmK2ZIg

In 2014, **Bruce Springsteen** inducted the E Street Band into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. During his 16-minute speech, the 64-year-old singer from Long Branch, New Jersey, himself elected in 1999, praised the many members of his core backing band, from his first encounter with Vini ‘Mad Dog’ Lopez in April 1966 to the arrival of :a[Nils Lofgren]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/nils-lofgren-interviewed/' } and Patti Scialfa in 1984.

It was an intelligent, witty, poetic tribute to a shifting team of players who’ve accompanied Bruce on-stage for 50-plus years across 21 studio albums. It was also – and let’s be honest – brash, sentimental, self-regarding and a little embarrassing. In short, it was very Bruce Springsteen.

> Springsteen is too emotional, romantic, impassioned and flawed for ‘cool’.

From his defiantly gauche 1973 debut, _Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J._ to a recent championing of Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, Springsteen has never looked for ‘cool’. He is too emotional, romantic, impassioned and flawed for ‘cool’. It’s what his fans love about him and what his detractors carp on about, failing to realise that the multimillion-selling mythopoetic audacity of 1975’s _Born To Run_, the bandanas, cut-offs and gated drums in the _Born In The USA_ package, _The Rising_’s arena-scale emotional storytelling about a post-9/11 America, and the joyous anti-war knees-up of The Seeger Sessions, all succeeded or failed as a consequence of conviction and faith.

This list is more for the newcomers, neophytes and non-believers than established fans, concentrating on self-penned studio albums in the belief that the best route to Springsteen is through the songs. Then :a[see him live]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bruce-springsteen-live-review/' }, fresh in the knowledge that beneath the four-hour live-show cliché of self-regard that is ‘The Boss’, runs a deep strain of self-doubt and Catholic guilt, directed at himself, his songs’ troubled characters and the country in which they dwell...

**The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle**

Springsteen’s second studio album finds the nascent Boss still filled with a sense of hope, his romantic summer dreams played out amidst a bustling South Beach cast of sharp-dressed kids, wily pimps, rude boy prophets, factory girls, alleyway phantoms and crazy boardwalk hustlers. Recorded between May and September 1973 at 914 Sound in Blauvelt, New York with the loose rag-tag ensemble of Clarence Clemons, Danny Federici, Garry Tallent, David Sancious, “Mad Dog” Lopez and Suki Lahav _TWTI&TE-SS_ draws on big band jazz, 70s funk, Detroit show bands and NuYorican soul to craft an ornate theatrical vision of wild blue-collar romance that remains Springsteen’s most joyous and uplifting album. The sound of a warm New Jersey sunset just before the screen door slammed and the dark clouds of Thunder Road rolled in.

2006’s _We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions_ was a watershed in Bruce Springsteen’s career and a necessary palate cleanser for singer and fans. A freewheeling live-band studio recording of Pete Seeger-popularised folk songs, it appeared to give The Boss a new lease of life, banishing introspection. It also led to the most exuberant straight-ahead rock album of his career. Yet _Magic_’s outwardly carefree E Street Band sound is in fact a meticulously layered, Brendan O’Brien-produced illusion that purposefully quotes the outfit’s past glories. Similarly, Springsteen’s new, seemingly concept-free writing style is rich with allusion and metaphor, the cracks in his voice bringing autumnal melancholy to ostensibly bright summer-pop daydreams.

The songs on this subdued, concise low-key follow-up to 2002’s _The Rising_ were penned as far back as 1995, amidst the exhaustive sessions that also produced _The Ghost Of Tom Joad_. Although revered by many, _TGOTJ_ is also an unrelenting waterless desert slog of an album that quickly runs out of shade after the melodic shuffle-beat lament of Youngstown. Far better is _Devils & Dust_, where Brendan O’Brien’s low-end production brings a protective intimacy to Springsteen’s sombre world of workers, losers and ghosts, while Soozie Tyrell’s violin and Bruce’s playful falsetto on such sweet country-soul sketches as All I’m Thinkin’ About and Maria’s Bed shine a warm light of romantic hope on an otherwise harsh American landscape.

Seven months on from his acoustic audition for Columbia Records’ John Hammond, and after a dumped singer-songwriter session, Springsteen’s debut was cut in a week with a pick-up band of fringe New Jersey buddies. Informed by the street-band steam-of-consciousness of Van Morrison and the wild mercury arrogance of mid-’60s :a[Bob Dylan]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/bob-dylan-greatest-songs/' }, Greetings is a nervous, urgent spill of hipster verbiage and snotty attitude with a core of arrogant cool, thanks to the dive-bar soul-jazz backing of proto-E Street gang-bangers David Sancious, Garry Tallent, Vini Lopez, Danny Federici and, on Spirit In The Night and Blinded By The Light, new arrival Clarence Clemons.

He was basking in the afterglow of _Born In The USA_, married to model Julianne Phillips, and living in sunny LA. But in the spring of 1987, Springsteen returned to his low-tech New Jersey studio, utilising drum machine, keyboards, close-miked vocals and multi-tracked guitars to record a song cycle foretelling the end of his marriage. In Two Faces, Brilliant Disguise and the heartbreaking Valentine’s Day, Springsteen wrote his most painfully honest lyrics, melodic songs of romantic doubt and defeat rendered claustrophobic by compressed digital production. The sound of a lonely millionaire immured in a bare white room, asking the world who he is, and exactly what he might be worth.

Despite having sold nearly 28 million copies, _Born In The USA_ might be the oddest album in Springsteen’s canon. Beyond the extensively reworked title-track, which grew out of the protracted ‘Electric Nebraska’ sessions at New York’s Power Station between January 1982 and June 1983, the majority was recorded rough-and-ready, Springsteen’s bare Creedence chords bolstered by Danny Federici’s Leslie’d Hammond, the eastern drone of Roy Bittan’s Yamaha CS80, Max Weinberg’s super-miked drums and Clemons’ ghostly sax, together lending a ‘roid-rage unreality and psychopathic remove to the wretched characters inside the deceptively bright pop nightmares of I’m On Fire, Dancing In The Dark and Cover Me.

A double-album of leftovers from the protracted sessions for _Darkness On The Edge Of Town_, Springsteen’s fifth began partly as a sop to guitarist Steve Van Zandt, incredulous at Bruce’s ability to create and discard three-minute pop gold. The River’s surface glistens with such joyous AM radio throwbacks as Sherry Darling, Crush On You and Ramrod, yet in its dark depths lurk bleak defeated narratives like Independence Day and Stolen Car. Album closer Wreck On The Highway points to the unreliable narrators of 1982’s Nebraska while the existential chest-beating of Hungry Heart can now be seen as the faultless blueprint for the triumphant dissociative pop of 1984’s _Born In The USA_.

Following two acclaimed flops, Springsteen and newly assembled E Street Band spent 18 months trying to capture the epic blue-collar fantasies in the singer’s head. It had begun as a kandy-koloured flame-job, with orchestra, choirs and revving engines, but journalist and future manager Jon Landau helped a manic Springsteen and miserable band to strip the beast down, allowing Roy Bittan’s piano, Clarence Clemons’ King Curtis lamentations and Bruce’s own autobiography to install the pop urgency with a melancholy truth, where every joyous call for small-town escape (Thunder Road; Born To Run) is answered with a city-limits stop-sign of surrender (Backstreets; Jungleland).

The troubled nighttime visions that peppered The River spilled onto the 4-track Portastudio demos Springsteen recorded in his Colts Neck, New Jersey home on January 3, 1982. Although intended as a speedy E Street Band teaching-aid, it’s difficult to imagine what the group made of Springsteen’s resultant grey cassette. Recorded just days after President Reagan’s first State of the Union address, :a[Nebraska’]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/bruce-springsteen-deliver-me-from-nowhere-reviewed/' }s brooding folk narratives utilise guitar, harmonica, mandolin, organ and the fevered spirits of Hank Williams, Chuck Berry and Dostoyevsky, to craft a keening bare-boards howl of fear, loneliness and desolation, the displaced ghosts of America’s outlaw past calling out for a kind of strange atonement.

Blindsided by success, kept from the studio by legal battles with former manager Mike Appel, the 27-year-old Springsteen locked himself and a breadline E Street Band in his New Jersey farmhouse and began disassembling _Born To Run_’s B-movie romance and Wall Of Sound production. With pop candy held back for _The River_, _Darkness On The Edge Of Town_ became a cracked vessel for the dusk-hour thoughts of _Born To Run_’s hometown heroes. From the upbeat defiance of Badlands to the dragstrip requiem of Racing In The Street, here were teenage rebellion and high-school dreams turned inward, Springsteen’s arid widescreen production imbuing every tragic narrative with what he would later describe as “austere, apocalyptic grandeur”.

In A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s surprisingly sharp film about :a[Bob Dylan]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/the-mojo-list/bob-dylan-greatest-songs/' }’s ascent to fame, music is a weapon. Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), whom Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) seeks out as soon as he arrives in New York in January 1961, famously slapped “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his guitar, but there are other means for a song to draw blood. Take the way :a[Joan Baez]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/joan-baez-dylan-steve-jobs-dr-king-and-me/' } (Monica Barbaro) falls for Dylan when she sees him perform the homicidal disgust of Masters of War in the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis, or how the two of them tussle on stage in April 1965 over the opening chords of Blowin’ in the Wind — a symbol of what he no longer wants to be. Every performance is a flag in the ground or a shot to the heart. In fact, the whole movie feels like a bomb waiting to go off. The fuse is lit when Dylan first meets Pete Seeger (Edward Norton) at Woody’s bedside, timed to detonate four-and-a-half years later at the :a[Newport Folk Festival]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/time-machine/1960s/bob-dylan-triumphs-at-newport/' }.

Mangold and Scorsese collaborator Jay Cocks have wisely stuck to the narrative arc of Elijah Wald’s 2015 book :a[Dylan Goes Electric!]{href='https://www.waterstones.com/book/dylan-goes-electric/elijah-wald/9780062366696' } The director’s 2005 :a[Johnny Cash]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/johnny-cash-songwriter-review/' } movie :a[Walk The Line]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-oNSs_XMxI' } was a sturdily conventional biopic: rise, fall, resurrection. But for Dylan the period covered here was all rise. It was the folk scene, as Seeger imagined it, that fell. Arguably this is not really a Dylan biopic at all. Citing Robert Altman’s busy ensemble dramas, the director is telling the story of a milieu rather than an individual.

Our hero (or anti-hero) materialises out of nowhere, with his Huck Finn cap and tall tales about working in the carnival, as mysterious to the viewer as he was to the denizens of Greenwich Village — the clue’s in the title. A Complete Unknown would make a great double bill with the Coen brothers’ :a[Inside Llewyn Davis]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuQ8pz-5WLY' }, which ends pretty much where this begins, with Dylan sweeping into town like a coming storm: the 19-year-old It Boy who inspires wary fascination whenever he opens his mouth. “He was electric,” recalls folk musician Jim Kweskin in Wald’s book. “You couldn’t take your eyes off him.”

> As Dylan, Chalamet’s eyes are shrewd and hooded, constantly working the angles and searching for the exits.

While most biopics are an attempt to understand and explain immense talent, this one is more about how it feels to be in the vicinity of a talent that defies such attempts. So instead of trying to unravel Dylan’s motivations (a fool’s errand), Mangold shows us him through the eyes of his contemporaries: Baez’s cool, regal scepticism, Seeger’s twinkly pride, manager Albert Grossman’s (Dan Fogler) flashing dollar signs. As Seeger’s wife Toshi, Eriko Hatsune barely speaks a word, but her face suggests that she’s the only person who can clearly track the shifting dynamics.

Being watched like that can mess with a man’s head. As Dylan, Chalamet’s eyes are shrewd and hooded, constantly working the angles and searching for the exits. He’s the smartest person in any room, and he knows it. When he tartly compares Baez’s lyrics to “an oil painting at the dentist’s office,” she snaps back, “You’re kind of an asshole, Bob.” He doesn’t reject the diagnosis, and nor does the film. As in the Dune movies, Chalamet plays the chosen one with an underrated capacity for destruction. At times he has the air of a dangerous child, easier to love than to like.

On a date with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning), Dylan sees :a[Now, Voyager]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9jjojoPkl4' } and says of Bette Davis’ character, “She didn’t find herself. She just made herself into something different.” Sly and wiry, Chalamet is playing a man whose whole life in New York was an evolving performance. As the clothes darken and the sunglasses come on, he grows increasingly mannered and alone, trapped by his own pathological contrarianism and dedication to inscrutability. He is often seen in long shot, standing apart from his supposed peers.

Beyond the tremendous core trio of Chalamet, Norton and Barbaro, all of whom learned to sing and play their songs remarkably well, lies an outer ring of vibrant performances. Will Harrison is a suitably Mephistophelean Bobby Neuwirth and Boyd Holbrook superb as Johnny Cash, the blazingly charismatic cheerleader and shit-stirrer. Norbert Leo Butz’s portrayal of Alan Lomax as a bullnecked reactionary may be somewhat unfair on Lomax but does give us some hilarious lines. “It’s the Newport Folk Festival,” he roars. “Not the Teen Dream, Brill Building, Top 40, British Invasion Festival!” This machine kills purists.

Mangold and Cocks tailor the facts to tell a very specific story. Fans might grumble about omissions, like the March on Washington (only glimpsed on TV) or Dylan’s UK adventures, but the movie’s world is a closed loop of New York and Newport and cameos of Martin Luther King or :a[The Beatles]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/beatles-64-reviewed/' } would not have improved it. It’s not particularly interested in the politics of the time, but then nor, despite initial pretences, was Dylan. Setlists and recording dates are tweaked to tighten the narrative and sharpen the themes. “People make up their past,” says Dylan, as if to forestall viewer complaints. “They remember what they want to and forget the rest.”

Reportedly, the real Dylan introduced some of his own inaccuracies when he gave Mangold notes on the screenplay. He was the one who requested that his ex-girlfriend Suze Rotolo be replaced by the fictional Sylvie Russo, who gets to stay in the picture all the way to 1965, an increasingly exasperated ambassador from the realm of the normal. In a biopic that rations its cliches, only the decision to relocate the infamous cry of “Judas!” from Manchester ’66 to Newport ’65 feels like an intruder from a cheaper, sloppier movie.

The most significant fabrications involve Dylan’s relationship with Seeger. In reality, the two men didn’t meet in Guthrie’s hospital room but months later, when Seeger had already heard the buzz about the newcomer. One of the film’s juiciest scenes, when Dylan gatecrashes Seeger’s TV show Rainbow Quest, is also complete fiction. Seeger is made out to be Dylan’s patron from day one so as to set up the patricidal drama of the journey from Song to Woody to Like a Rolling Stone.

Some critics have referenced Mozart and Salieri in :a[Amadeus]{href='https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42LebR4ZSfU' } but that doesn’t feel right. Seeger doesn’t envy Dylan’s uncanny talent, he just wants him to use it in the service of peace, justice and folk music. When Dylan plays The Times They Are a-Changin’ at Newport ’64 (another deft invention), Seeger listens delightedly to the line “Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command,” without realising that Dylan means him, too. “You’re pushing candles,” Grossman tells Seeger later, “and he’s selling lightbulbs.”

With his cosy knitwear and a folksy manner that’s a mere banjo string away from that of a children’s TV presenter, Seeger could have been a figure of fun, but Norton and Mangold take him seriously as an idealistic champion of communal endeavour and the golden thread of tradition. He’s the gentle warrior who tended the folk scene’s flame throughout the winter of McCarthyism and heralded the spring. Dylan publicly called the older man “so human I could cry”. So when their relationship curdles into that of an embarrassing dad and an eye-rolling teenager (Cash is the hip, indulgent stepdad), the film refuses to take sides.

This even-handedness is sustained through to the final showdown at Newport ’65. As Wald’s book illustrates, there’s no consensus on how that chaotic, seismic three-song set was received by the 17,000 spectators, so Mangold stages it as a mythic spectacle, midway between the premiere of The Rite of Spring, a 1985 Jesus And Mary Chain gig and the Battle of Gettysburg, with Seeger and Dylan’s more belligerent proxies, Lomax and Grossman, actually coming to blows. The real Lomax complained that Dylan “more or less killed the festival”. It’s not the amplification that causes uproar, it’s the attitude. Here is the final victory of _I_ over _we_; individual liberty over the greater good; the singer over the song. “Freedom from us and all our shit,” says Baez. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

But what does that freedom cost him? When Dylan is coaxed back onstage to perform a solo acoustic song and he chooses It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, you realise that what you’ve been watching all along is a break-up movie. Afterwards, we see him brooding alone in his motel room — no longer unknown but forever unknowable. Triumphant he is not. I was reminded of producer Joe Boyd’s ambivalent account of Newport: “The rebels were like children who had been looking for something to break and realised, as they looked at the pieces, what a beautiful thing it had been.”

Of course, we know how this played out — the book isn’t called Does Dylan Go Electric? — but we’re still riveted because Mangold puts us in the shoes of those who had no idea. He invites us to listen like them, too, so that these 60-year-old songs sound like the future, crackling and volatile. This urgent freshness is the movie’s greatest achievement. As Sylvie says of folk music, every old song was new once.

_A Complete Unknown is in UK cinemas from January 17._

**Get the latest issue of MOJO for the definitive verdict on the month's best new music, reissues, music books and films. More info and to order a copy :a[HERE]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/magazine/latest-issues/mojo-375-february-2025-the-rolling-stones/' }!**

Scorning predictions of his demise, year upon year, **:a[Shane MacGowan]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/spider-stacy-remembers-shane-macgowan-he-understood-the-essence-of-what-made-something-matter/' }** finally left us in November 2023. What he leaves, in terms of his spirit and the music of **:a[The Pogues]{href='https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/stories/spider-stacy-remembers-shane-macgowan-he-understood-the-essence-of-what-made-something-matter/' }** – its poetry of defiance, devotion and degradation – is unlikely ever to be matched. But was there enough of it? “He wrote so many great songs in a short space of time,” argues his friend and chronicler Ann Scanlon told MOJO earlier this year. “How many songwriters can say that?” Indeed, and as testament to MacGowan’s singular genius, MOJO has compiled his 20 greatest songs…

**Gabrielle**   
(The Nips single, Soho/Chiswick, 1979)

Summer-of-’76 ace face ‘Shane O’Hooligan’ was hardly seen as a song writerly prospect, until November 1979 when his band The Nips (nés Nipple Erectors) served up this well-constructed slice of reincarnated ’50s rock’n’roll. Its transmission of central London’s buzz is offset against Shane’s baleful yearning for the titular ex. In the mid-2010s, the song’s publishers were reputedly touting Gabrielle for inclusion in Pop Idol. _AP_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bDDAOJV1xU

**Transmetropolitan**  
(from _Red Roses For Me_, Stiff, 1984)

First track on their debut LP, Transmetropolitan was The Pogues’ mission statement. Sulphate-paced accordions and violins ride a tub-thumping punk-folk groove as pie-eyed piper MacGowan machine guns not-quite expletives, leading his down-at-heel troops through a riotous London junket. Gloriously unrefined to its last defiant cry of “I ain’t going home tonight!” _AC_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBJ8C6jWhVA

**Dark Streets Of London**   
(from _Red Roses For Me_, Stiff, 1984)

Scrapping Ralph McTell-style sentiment, MacGowan maps the purgatory of poverty on The Pogues’ full-pelt debut single. Denied the warmth of Hammersmith’s pubs and bookies, he’s instead chilled by memories of “the place where they gave ECT”. Yet heart-breaking nihilism is undercut by the song’s animal heat, an unextinguishable blaze in the dark. _VS_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc6wJlLLe5Q

**Boys From The County Hell**  
(from _Red Roses For Me_, Stiff, 1984)

Often dismissed as a mere drinking song, this rip-roaring Dubliners-esque romp was darkness itself. Set against a bleak, rainy backdrop, it’s an unsettling celebration of ultra-violent retribution narrated by the amoral son of a blueshirt (Ireland’s fascist party) whose brother participated in My Lai. _JA_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psTqudN7t1M

**The Sick Bed Of Cúchulainn**   
(from _Rum, Sodomy & The Lash_, Stiff, 1985)

The roistering life given mythical heft, as MacGowan takes the Irish warrior demi-god of the title carousing through time and space. Heroic battles are fought against blackshirts; Irish Republican heroes are encountered during the Spanish Civil War; drink flows, relentlessly. Written in 1985, it proved a manifesto for MacGowan’s next 37 years, a quest to challenge the limits of apparent indestructibility. _JM_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAKZ9eyuhiY

**The Old Main Drag**   
(from _Rum, Sodomy & The Lash_, Stiff, 1985)

A ruined life crunched into three minutes, this pitiless tale of Piccadilly rent boys and police brutality expresses a very physical humanity: alleyway sex, bloody violence, slow death. What startles beyond the Tuinal-spiked narrative, though, is how MacGowan suddenly stops singing, delivering his last words with a trapdoor snap. No consolation, no hope. _VS_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGnW7ZiByAM

**A Pair Of Brown Eyes**   
(from Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, Stiff, 1985)

Broken-hearted and drunk, our hero is cornered by an old soldier inflicting his tale of still greater loss when, invalided home, he finds no pair of brown eyes awaiting him – anecdotally not a sweetheart’s but his dog’s. Framing its vivid narrative weave, the poignant tune derives from Francis McPeake’s Wild Mountain Thyme. _MS_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNtQ5AnRlz8

**Sally MacLennane**  
(from _Rum, Sodomy & The Lash_, Stiff, 1985)

This rollicking jig was inspired by Shane’s uncle’s pub in Dagenham, which served Sally MacLennane stout to Ford workers. With its twisted tale of prodigal Jimmy croaking on his pint, the track became an indie disco staple, coaxing student revellers to dance to punk’d Irish traditional music, and thereafter delve into the deep, dark world of MacGowan. _AP_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym-Oz0TMSb0

**A Rainy Night In Soho**   
(from _Poguetry In Motion_ EP, Stiff, 1986)

One of MacGowan’s great London songs, but the location isn’t as important as the deeper message of enduring love and the consolations of the uncanny – a romance that leans into the word’s original supernatural connotations. The singer considers his place in the great scheme of things with tender fortitude: “I’m not talking of the first time/I never think about the last.” _JM_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSyL-TrD\_2g

**The Body Of An American**   
(from _Poguetry In Motion_ EP, Stiff, 1986)

MacGowan at his most adventurous, mixing the poetic stage-Irish of Seán O’Casey with the Baroque melodicism of Turlough O’Carolan. Musically, it’s constructed for the parlour, a funereal waltz leading to a celebratory drunken chorus, but the narrative – centred around the wake of an Irish American boxer – is elusive. A song that simultaneously resists analysis yet demands it. _AM_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItFwHE2n8Vs

**Fairytale Of New York**   
(single, Pogue Mahone, 1987)

Not many can boast to have written a genuine standard, let alone a seasonal one. Shane and Jem Finer’s bid for immortality works across time and generations, its rejection of sentimental baubles for a fierce balance of defiance and decay its true wonder. Finer credited Shane for the song’s Broadway melody; Kirsty MacColl is the perfect foil. _DE_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9jbdgZidu8

**If I Should Fall From Grace With God**   
(from _If I Should Fall From Grace With God_, Pogue Mahone,1988)

Later, MacGowan would regret the sophistication that came with the addition of Philip Chevron (guitar) and Terry Woods (mandolin etc), but who can deny the epic woosh and seamless instrumental mesh of this relentless snarl in the face of death, and maybe even damnation? Let him go, boys. Let him go. _DE_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4v6aNjGFFk

**Thousands Are Sailing**   
(from _If I Should Fall From Grace With God_, Pogue Mahone, 1988)

Like Horslips and U2, The Pogues were haunted by the Irish diaspora, its voyage “across the Western Ocean/To a land of opportunity” never more rousingly dramatised than by Thousands…’s writer, former Radiator From Space Philip Chevron. Though no Luke Kelly, lead voice MacGowan utterly owns his bandmate’s poetic panorama. _MS_

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

**Lullaby Of London**   
(from If I Should Fall From Grace With God, Pogue Mahone,1988)

Even in The Nips, MacGowan was London-Irish rather than merely Irish. Lullaby Of London isn’t an overt ode to MacGowan’s city – London is never mentioned – but it couldn’t be set anywhere else. It is, though, unquestionably a lullaby, a sibling for Forever Young, a prayer for the child MacGowan would never sire. _JA_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL2B\_uz5jaE

**The Broad Majestic Shannon**   
(from _If I Should Fall From Grace With God_, Pogue Mahone,1988)

This hymn to Ireland’s great river offered classic MacGowan elements: musicians playing old Irish airs, birds singing, booze, existential sorrow. Yet here the place names along the Shannon lend the song an epic, watery sweep, while the “rusty tin can” and “old hurley ball” possess an intangible Rosebud significance. Not just about a river, but the melancholy flow of life itself. _PG_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMi3AGWsm0I

**White City**   
(from _Peace And Love_, Pogue Mahone, 1989)

Originally intended by MacGowan as an acid house rave-up, then reworked into a Trad Arr salute to the once grand West London dog-track (demolished in 1985) this galloping jig is also a valedictory lament for the loss of a working-class Atlantis and its heady culture of “speed, skill and schemes”. _AM_

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

**Summer In Siam**   
(single, Pogue Mahone, 1990)

Conceived as a four-line miniature with just vocals and rippling light-on-water piano, Summer In Siam is the sound of MacGowan reaching for a state of Zen-like peace. As such, the finished version, with additional harp glissandos and strings, has a bittersweet unease, MacGowan’s lyrical purity chivvied into a more conventional state of romantic bliss. _AM_

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66quTi26YLY

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