Theories, rants, etc.

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THERE WAS, I CONFESS, A MOMENT OF doubt as we pieced together the elements that’d make up MOJO 388. Would major features on the Small Faces and The Style Council prove to be too much Mod?

Reading the stories by Tom Doyle and Ted Kessler soon put us right – if the Mod spectrum could encompass two albums as diverse as Ogdens’ Nut Gone

Flake and Café Bleu, then so could MOJO. And anyway, we could put them alongside artists unimaginably far away from the Mod world: Rob Halford, reflecting on his unique path through heavy metal with Judas Priest; Suicide’s Alan Vega, bloodstained avatar of electropunk; Yes, charting the furthest extremes of prog. There would be spiritual revelations from Alice Coltrane (admittedly, a Paul Weller favourite), folk from Dick Gaughan and The Unthanks, B.B. King at 100, the Skids transcending punk. Bill Callahan, Ezra Furman, Bob Lind and Neil Young. Even Status Quo. As The Cappuccino Kid wrote gauchely in his sleevenotes to Café Bleu, it’s all “A vision of beauty, hope and togetherness, that I will forever believe. Truly, and you only have to reach out and grasp and you’ll make that scene…”