Blog Posts by David Sheppard

MOJO celebrates moon landing week with XI classic 'n' crazy tunes about space. David Sheppard sets the controls...

You'll need to have been holidaying on another planet to miss the fact that this week marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo XI mission--mankind's giant leap to the Moon. Human enthralment with our nearest celestial neighbor has taken many forms but it's a fascination that's perhaps found its most persistently evocative expression in music. Where would the love song be without a convenient heavenly body to rhyme with the month of June?

The arc of public wonderment at NASA's achievements can actually be mapped in popular song. It started with awed, early '60s homages like Walter Brennan and the Johnny Mann Singers' bathetic "The Epic Ride Of John H. Glenn" and The Tornados' buzzing, eponymous tribute to the Telstar satellite, evolved into mid-decade space fantasies like Pink Floyd's "Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun" and The Byrds' "Mr Spaceman" before washing

British supermarkets have seen fit to remove copies of the Manic Street Preachers' new album Journal For Plague Lovers from their aisles on the grounds that its cover--a relatively innocuous Jenny Saville painting of an adolescent boy with a slightly livid hooter--may upset the apparently delicate sensibilities of trolley-trundling shoppers.

It will now be repackaged in a Spinal Tap-like plain black sleeve. While this action is proof positive that supermarkets are singularly inappropriate places in which to sell "art" (hey checkout barons, why not stick to selling things we can eat and clean our homes with and leave album retail to those remaining specialist record shops your "pile-'em-high" discounting has yet to put out of business?), it's also just the latest chapter in an often inglorious history of sleeve art censorship.

The Beatles' album Yesterday And Today remains arguably the most infamous example of record cover expurgation. Released by Capitol in 1966, the LP originally

We are living in straitened times. The global economy is in freefall, banks are toppling, unemployment totals escalating. It's getting messy out there. Where to look for succor? To music, that's where--but not just any music. With the fiscal outlook so inexorably grave, commercial pop is, by definition, out of kilter. Whether it's fluffy girl group escapism, euphoric rock or ostentatiously acquisitive hip hop, all kinds of music suddenly feels a bit "wrong." Surely there's no better time, then, to engage with a long tradition of music which actually addresses economic travails head on and waves a defiant finger in the face of recession (indeed, there's an entire genre devoted to doing pretty much that; it's called the blues). Granted, listening to songs won't stop your house being re-possessed, or get discredited downtown fat cats to return their plump, ill-gotten bonuses, but the right music can at least focus the ire of the dispossessed and help transcend incipient privation. To that

Viewers whotuned into Spectacle, the Sundance Channel's widely syndicated ElvisCostello TV talk show, could be forgiven for finding it a very rum affairindeed--the phrase "poacher-turned-gamekeeper" springing rather too readily tomind.

The firstshow proffered Costello as the avuncular host, clipboard in hand, bowlinggentle daisy-cutters at fellow new wave grandees the Police. Perhaps no-one hadreminded the host of his performance on a 1980 BBC Radio One Round Table reviewshow during which he'd opined that, "Somebody should clip Sting around the headand tell him to stop singing in that ridiculous Jamaican accent..."--hisunequivocal parting shot about the Police that evening: "I can't stand them."

Spectacle offers a deeply incongruousscenario for anyone who recalls Costello as the spiky iconoclast of the late1970s--an artist trading in righteous anger and invective who carried a viciousmasonry nail as a weapon and a "black book" of music biz adversaries and wholater foreswore

Roll over Terry Reid and tell Roy Harper the news; Led Zeppelin are set to tour, gobsmackingly minus iconic frontman Robert Plant who, after protracted touring with Alison Krauss, has announced himself hors de combat. The feelings of their figurehead apparently trampled underfoot (perhaps there's been a communication breakdown?), a suddenly galvanised Page, Jones and Bonham Jr, are said to be making a whole lotta Zep plans: world tours, new recordings et al. With Plant rooted, the trio have been auditioning replacement vocalists and one Myles Kennedy (born 1969--the year after Zep launched--and lately of US rockers Alter Bridge, it says here) is widely forecast as the next incumbent.

Of course, Zep have had cause to reconfigure once already--Jason Bonham occupying his late father's drum stool for last year's much-fêted Ahmet Ertegün tribute concert. Less a substitution and more a seamless ascent to the ancestral throne, it proved that drummers, however vigorous or distinctive, don't

When was the last time a new band blew you away with the sheer invention and audacity of their guitar playing? I mean really blew you away... I'm struggling with this one myself. Guitar heroes still walk among us, though they are exclusively of the superannuated variety (note the recent veneration of Jimmy Page and Johnny Marr) and the only plausible challenger to the old guard, Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, is closer to 40 than 30. Whither the singular young lead guitarist?

Four decades after Hendrix, things have backslid to an alarming degree; the flaming plectrum of innovation lost down the back of rock's generic sofa. Every other band now sounds like the Gang Of Four, their Andy Gill-inspired guitars as brittle as shattered glass--a sound that was daringly new and truly unique in 1978. Thirty years later it's become merely gestural--an echo of an echo. New bands like Foals and Vampire Weekend are widely trumpeted for leavening their non-specific indie rock with vaguely African

The English Peasants' Revolt of 1381 was accompanied by the first documented song of proletarian dissent, the Cutty Wren. A jaunty allegory, it essentially advised dragging oppressive feudal landlords into the greenwood, eviscerating and boiling them, then feeding the remains to the poor. Now that's a protest song.

The Cutty Wren begat a noble (if less cannibalistically inclined) tradition of decanting civil opposition into justly inflammatory anthems--a tradition that has birthed such iconic epistles as "We Shall Overcome," "Strange Fruit," "Give Peace A Chance," "What's Going On," "Free Nelson Mandela" and "Fight The Power"--all of them substantive proof of dissenting song's transformative muscle. In 1973, a despotic Chilean junta was so threatened by the oppositional songs of activist-poet Victor Jara that they machine-gunned him to death--not perhaps the best advertisement for a career in protest song but undeniable proof of its potency. Moreover, the political landscape of the