SATURDAY GIGS
Hookworms are one of the year’s biggest stories. Jonathan Wright hears strange tales of self-reliance, reinvention and touring – but only in the evenings, at the weekend or during the holidays…
INTERVIEW
Don’t give up the day job. It used to be a jibe thrown at musicians and bands who, to put it politely, weren’t quite up to snuff. These days, though, as demonstrated by the remarkable year in which Leeds electronic-psychedelic quintet Hookworms’ Microshift LP crashed the Top 20, it may be time to amend that barbed comment, to make it into a question: why give up the day job?
“It’s impossible to do [Hookworms] full-time”, says frontman Matthew ‘MJ’ Johnson, as he reflects on the economics of the contemporary music biz. “Look at Wild Beasts”, he adds, who announced their split in 2017, citing financial stress as one of the key reasons for calling it a day: “One of them said he was still living in a shared house sharing a bedroom with his girlfriend, and it’s like, ‘What’s the point in doing this?’ I’m 33, I don’t want to have to live like that, and I think we all have jobs that we enjoy, and we have social lives, and playing music for us is just a hobby – and I think it’s nice like that because I don’t think the band would still be together if we’d tried to do it full-time.”
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About Long Live Vinyl
As the exhaustive new 15-disc David Bowie boxset, Loving The Alien, hits the streets, Long Live Vinyl lifts the lid on the period between 1983-88 when Bowie became a global pop megastar. Through exclusive interviews with Nile Rodgers, Carlos Alomar, Reeves Gabrels and Hugh Padgham, we bring you the inside story behind Bowie’s biggest decade, as well as an in-depth look at the reimagined Never Let Me Down 2018 album that’s the highlight of the new boxset.
Elsewhere in this packed issue, we speak to Mark Lanegan about making his most spontaneous album to date with Duke Garwood; Hookworms reveal how they’ve become one of the UK’s most exciting live acts – while holding down day jobs; Cornershop look forward to their long-awaited new album; and Matt Berry kicks off the countdown to National Album Day.
Dennis Morris tells us about his career photographing bona fide music legends including Bob Marley and the Sex Pistols; our Classic Album is Primal Scream’s 1991 collision of garage rock and dance music, Screamadelica; we round up 40 Essential Queen albums; and The Trip heads to Bordeaux on a French cratedigging adventure.
If all that’s not enough, we bring you the widest range of new album, reissue, turntable and accessory reviews anywhere on the newsstand.