Yesterday’s Gone
● Christine McVie (above) says the chords and lyrics to Songbird came to her fully formed in a dream. She woke up, sat down at the piano and played and sang the whole song straight away. “It was as if I’d been visited… a spiritual thing,” she said. McVie was so terrified of forgetting it, she spent the rest of the night re-playing the song, until Sausalito’s Record Plant studio opened in the morning and she could record an early version.
Danger Mouse & Black Thought, OSees, Hot Chip, Muse, Julia Jacklin, Ezra Furman, Josh Rouse, Isobel Campbell, Tim Finn & Phil Manzanera, Tall Dwarves, She & Him (pictured) and more.
Your guide to the month’s best music is now even more definitive with our handy format guide.
Fleetwood Mac’s long-reigning queen of the blues explores life, love and male shor tcomings on a remastered solo career resumé. By Mark Blake.
Twenty years on, the long-awaited Toast – and it’s very well-done, says Sylvie Simmons.
A cult figure of English psychedelia compiles his own set of cosmic curios. By Mat Snow.
Sulk
30 Something
Chuck Armstrong ★★★
CD COMPACT DISC DL DOWNLOAD ST STREAMING LP VINYL MC CASSETTE DVD DIGITAL VIDEO DISC C IN CINEMAS BR BLU-RAY
Christine McVie ★★★★
Neil Young with Crazy Horse ★★★★
Twink ★★★★
BMG. CD/LP
LONDON. CD/DL/LP
Shackin’ Up
★★★★★ MOJO CLASSIC
Songbird: A Solo Collection
Toast
David Radford
The album which sent them into the charts with Party Fears Two gets deluxe 40th anniversary edition.
Rooted in the rich soil of DIY, 30 years of the Hartnolls on 2-CD/4-LP.
REAL GONE. LP
★★★★ EXCELLENT
RHINO. CD/DL/LP
REPRISE. CD/DL/LP
You Reached For The Stars:
BILLY MACKENZIE (voice, words) and Alan Rankine (much of everything else) approached pop from deep left-field. After an awkward debut and a year of clamourous, dissonant indie singles, in 1982 they suddenly took off with this tauntingly perverse collision of possibilities. The big hits, Party Fears Two (its piano riff written five years earlier but deemed too like ABBA for the time of punk) and Club Country, were refreshingly weird and histrionic, while No opens with a duet for treated amplifier buzz and jiggled tape measures. Extra discs of outtakes, rarities, remixes and radio sessions underline their apparent ethos: ‘If it’s odd, turn it up, if it’s hooky, fuck it up.’ Stardom didn’t agree with Mackenzie, Rankine retired frustrated, an outcome that ultimately benefited neither. Their spotlight moment still sounds gloriously illogical in all departments.
COLLECTIVELY NAMED after a motorway, brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll from Otford, Kent, preceded Harry Potter in a cupboard under the stairs.