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Not going off on a major one, honest, but Miles Davis…

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… is on the cover of the new Mojo – he was born 100 years ago – with a modern jazz CD in tow, so that’s great.

Meanwhile, there is an alternative front cover with the Sex Pistols re: a 50th Anniversary, surely less specific, with the same CD in tow.

Erm, and I’m NOT on a major one, honest, but doesn’t Miles carry the mustard to just be the person on the front cover without a back up of white – don’t kid yourself- whose anniversary could kinda be any time from now to 2028?

Dodgy subject, and nothing to do with dodgers, but that’s right isn’t it|?

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  3. A tentative marketing experiment by Bauer Media?
    See which cover sells the most copies and factor the result into Mojo’s future direction?

    Modern jazz is on a bit of an upswing with the gig-going public, as anyone might have noticed. Is punk on a downswing?
    Will we see more jazz in the mag (Moosey Alert!!) and less punk?

  4. Aren’t they just trying to sell two copies to collectors?

    I love Miles more than I can really describe, and agree that he towers over music like a giant. I don’t particularly care about the Sex Pistols, but each to their own. They contributed to culture, rather than to music, I would say.

    As an aside, I think that Punk is responsible for the longevity of the artists it tried to push aside. All those prog bands realised that they needed to have more tricks up their sleeves & not just keep repeating themselves.

    • I’m sure they like the idea of collectorist-types buying the mag twice, but realistically not that many of them will.

      But, referencing a comment further down, it would not really surprise me to hear that they regard subscribers as inherently cooler and therefore they’d only send them the Miles cover.

      • As a subscriber I wai with bated breath to see which issue arrives.I prefer the Miles.
        This isn’t the first time they have done this and it definitely is aimed at collectors. Ordinarily the cover doesnt interest me but happy to see he interest it has garnered just on here.

        • In the heyday of the music mag it made quite a bit of sense to do the alternative cover/alternative cover CD trick to boost sales. I’m sure it had the required result if not done too often.
          In these days of diminishing sales and tightened customer belts, is it actually worth the extra outlay? I suspect extra sales on the strength of it would be minimal.

          To cock a snook at Uncut is a different matter, however.
          As in “We can still afford to do the likes of this, can you?”

    • Punk was supposed to sweep aside all that came before it – it didn’t, and in truth it used what came before it to give it it’s root (what is simpler than a three chord thrash, or a re-write of VUs Rock & Roll / Sweet Jane).
      And many of the key faces of Punk were Prog and Reggae fans before the spiked their hair
      What it did do was inject some energy into proceedings, show what is possible, and give a kick to procrastination and move the world on.
      “Punks can’t play” – general tosh. Some couldn’t, rode the wave and disappeared. Those that could/found they could, got better and more confident. And it gave a road in for those that could play a bit.

      • The older I get, the less revolutionary punk seems. It was fantastic at the time, I loved it. Most of the musicians today are happy to admit that they just wanted to be in a band. Punk made that possible.

        I have found Rotten tiresome for many years. It was him who made the Pistols seem dangerous and a threat to the establishment. No other band came close.

        • The Sex Pistols with Frank Carter are scheduled to play the south of Italy this summer. You’d think southern Italians would be all “good on them!” as so few name acts ever venture down south. But no. Online comments mostly reflect my friends’ view that “without Johnny Rotten it’s not the Sex Pistols, it’s just a tribute band”. A ridiculous attitude, in my opinion, given that Lydon has indeed become something of an embarrassing twerp. He’ll always deserve respect for fronting two great bands (plus for being his wife’s carer) but I imagine he’d be awful fronting the Pistols now. Whereas I really like Carter. I’ve only seen him on YouTube (and haven’t heard his voice) but he looks great; he looks ideal for the band and with him they seem revitalised.

          • From the videos I’ve seen, Frank Carter does a really good job. For those who still think Lydon is edgy, perhaps they should stay away. Frank Carter might not swear or blow his nose as well as Lydon does.

            • I can’t get my head round anyone other than Lydon as singer vocalist for the Pistols.

              He might not be the world’s best singer, but he was the right one for the Sex Pistols. And for PiL.

              See also: Barney singer vocalist of New Order.

              • @fentonsteve

                My thoughts exactly re the Pistols though I say that without hearing anything by the Frank Carter line up.

                I’ve just finished the second volume of Steve Morris’ autobiography. Bit nerdier then the first volume and Barney’s singing ability is mentioned more then once.

                In other news, I’ve been clearing out the attic today. I found an enormous pair of KEF speakers and a TEAC V-615 Tape Deck…

  5. To go off at a tangent – 50 years since The Sex Pistols were the NEW thing. Where did the time go?
    As far as significance goes, and how they relate in comparison to Miles, it’s a bit like comparing Jack Vettriano to Michelangelo.

  7. As a subscriber (I must remember to cancel) my copy arrived today with Miles on the front so I didn’t get a choice. Still I’d probably have chosen that one. Maybe all subscribers will get the Miles one as Bauer classifies them as cool dudes. 😃

    It’s the obituaries that worry me, when I started buying it it was people born in the 20s or 30s usually who’d shuffled off to Buffalo. Now they’re my age or even younger.

  8. Humour me as I haven’t read a music mag since The Word shut up shop but why have they put Miles Davis on the cover of this issue when the centenary of his birthday isn’t until 26th May?

  11. I bought a bunch of music mags on Friday (some new, some older issues I missed last month – my newsagent’s often miss sending back the old issues, which I’m grateful for) and managed to spill the content of my water bottle onto all of them in my bag while returning home from work.
    So I spent a long time yesterday morning blowdrying them, and they’re all wrinkly and puffed up now… Not that I have time to read them, but out of a life-long habit, I still occasionally get the urge to buy them, and when that happens I usually go crazy and buy everything I can find.
    Then only skim them, most of the time. It’s a waste of money, but the habit it hard to break!

  12. Mojo finally appeared in the postbox on Saturday morning. Emblazoned on the cover, over a vintage photo of a leering Lydon, are the words, “Punk at 50 How it changed everything”.

    I nearly lobbed the whole mag into the bin. What Crass stupidity, what a misrepresentation of historical fact. What a pile of shit. Malcolm will be pissing himself laughing somewhere in the ether. Maybe the real reason why they put that on the cover was to agitate some derision – no such thing as bad publicity – in which case they succeeded.

    Luckily, there are several really good articles about musicians who really made significant contributions to ‘everything’.

  13. I always find myself surprised when the blog seems to dismiss the impact of Punk Rock. It’s informed and influenced a huge volume of the subsequent music I’ve enjoyed.

    I get that some of the posturing and Year Zero stuff was a bit daft, and drew up battle lines that remain under patrol. But when you get beyond that there’s still this weird unbroken line that stretches up from Garage Rock and the Velvets, through the Stooges, the Ramones, the Pistols and on to Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Fugazi, Metallica, Green Day, Surf Curse, Knocked Loose and on and on. And then there are the cousins – Wu Tang, Prodigy, the Beasties, Tyler the Creator, etc.

    No one is obliged to listen to any of it, obviously, but my own musical life story would have been very different indeed without Punk. Maybe that’s another demerit.

    • And post punk, all that really interesting stuff that was coming out in the ca 1978-82 era. I was a little young for punk and was slightly scared by it to be honest. However I caught up later and I think Anarchy in the UK is one of the greatest singles of all time. A generalization, but I think there are periods where British music ruled the world and was more exciting and way ahead of anything else. Like 63-67, 77-82 and, yes, the mid 90s

      * some great punky stuff out of New York too

      • I concur. As an aside and I’m not pointing fingers here this is just an observation, an observation not just about this or indeed just about music but it astounds me when people are so eager to pick a side in aspects of life that are so not requiring of that response. It’s a cover on a music mag ffs. Yet another moment when I seriously wonder why the fu*k am I bothering with this site.
        I’m off out to pound the paths of the parish. I’ll probably listen to The Pistols and some Miles Davis as I do so.

        • Yes, this is an excellent point. Both the Sex Pistols and Miles are fantastic, and it would be a far gloomier world without either. Why would you choose between them when you really don’t have to?

          • The impression I get is it’s to try and validate your choices and musical taste. Something I expended considerable energy on in my teens – Ted Nugent was clearly way more talented than Alvin Lee, Steve Hillage couldn’t hold a candle to Tony Iommi. And so on.

            It took me more years than I’m happy to admit to see that dismissing things I didn’t like just limited my field of enjoyment. Still lots of music I don’t like but that’s my loss, nothing more. That said, Hillage still owes me a pint from the night I met him at an SDP meeting in the Castle and Ball in Marlborough, so I’m not going back on that one.

          • I loved the Punk wars. The only group I didn’t see at the time was The Sex Pistols but I did try. Councils round my way banned their gigs with very short notice. The audiences were so small, the bands were often on first name terms with the punters. It was quite the adrenaline rush just getting to the gigs without being beaten up. For me, The Damned don’t get enough credit. I especially loved The Clash for their take on reggae. The Banshees were amazing before they ever released a record.

            Punk was very shortlived. The Sex Pistols made just four fabulous singles (I had them all when Bollocks came out and felt filled off by the album). I regard Punk as more of a political or cultural movement. It did provide a much needed reset for guitar music. Dance was doing very well, thank you. What followed, 1978-1982, was the time of my life. There was such a wide variety of music hitting the charts, some of it, such as PiL’s Death Disco, wildly experimental.

            I was already aware of Miles Davis. Once I dug into his catalogue properly, I discovered he was far more revolutionary and more challenging than Punk. I have more records by him than any other artist. I still play them regularly. There isn’t much 1976/77 Punk I listen to nowadays, sadly.

            Having said all that, I’ll go off and fish out Rock And Roll Swindle for those rehearsal recordings.

            I’d still prefer the Miles cover, please. Why not make the Punk one next month with a Punk inspired CD?

    • None of the bands you mention Bingo are ones I think of as punk, and nearly all of those names are in my music collection. The real punk bands in the UK were largely shouty, minimally talented gobshites who just made a loud noise and swore a lot to get on the artificially created bandwagon of the time. They were all over the place by 1977. Some of them were a bit of a laugh, but mostly they just made your ears bleed.

      At the time, meanwhile, we were all wearing out our copies of the brilliant ‘New Wave’ LP that Vertigo put out the same year, presumably so titled because the record company wanted to avoid the word ‘punk’ as what they had was a collection of exciting music, not a collection of worthless drivel. The only use of the word on the album is from The Ramones, who were using it in the original American sense, not the tiresome hype of the Westwood/McClaren/Swells sense.

      I’m not dismissing the impact of the thread of music you describe, I’m dismissing the claim that punk ‘changed everything’. Did it fuck!

      • As I (we) said in our AW Post-punk pod, when I think “punk” I think of the second-division bands like Eater, The Exploited and Angelic Upstarts. The kind which now play that festival in Blackpool.

        Sex Pistols were Chuck Berry riffs played fast (and well) – there’s not much between them and (say) AC/DC or Motorhead.

        • At the time it seemed like there was, even though punk clearly didn’t come out of nowhere. You could make a list of loud, fast, high energy rock songs going from the early 1960s to the 1980s in chronological order, and ask someone who didn’t know, when did punk start?

          I would argue that the only signifier is Johnny Rotten’s vocals.

  14. On a tangent, the punk era clings on fairly robustly in NI. I was at a punk revival show on Saturday in East Belfast, promoted by William Maxwell – a longstanding Year Zero impresario – and featuring late 70s survivors Protex and Brian Young (ex-Rudi) with Glenn Kingsmore’s new band Fluxion (featuring various ‘UK82′-era people, ex-Defects / current XSLF) and Colin Crooks’ (ex-PBR Streetgang) new band Bad Noise Monster, featuring Stonefish colossus Bob Moodsy on drums.

    It was great fun – and Fluxion were a revelation. They have a terrific 7″ single out, ‘The Unsheltered’ – below – which suggests that the DNA of punk has some killer tunes left in it yet (albeit it seems to me there’s a lot of NWOBHM in Fluxion too – and SAHB is Kingsmore’s all-time fave band).

    Having said all that, I’ll be buying this issue of Mojo – I’m not a regular buyer – on the strength of the Miles Davis cover/disc. A shame they blinked and thought it necessary to have a split cover.

    • That is indeed TERRIFIC!

      For me that’s a million miles away from the audio-torture I experienced live far too many times in England in 1976/77 whenever I failed to avoid being in the same venue as some band of hopeless, gormless noise merchants, which is what I associate with the term punk.

      That’s more the sort of thing I loved (and still do) that came from the Clash/Jam/Secret Affair/Costello/Joe Jackson ends of things!

      • I think you’re bang on with those influences – certainly, from what I recall of seeing Kingsmore’s list of his top 50 fave artists on social media, the Jam and Clash are high up, with SAHB at the top (the likes of the Beatles and Who in there too).

        The highlight of FluXion’s 30-minute set on Saturday was their version of the Defects’ ‘Metal Walls’ (the first song GK wrote) from their 1982 debut LP, and re-recorded on 2013’s ‘Policophobia’ (a version close to the FluXion one, with Dave Greer’s vocal – in my view – superior to Buck Defect’s vocal). ‘Politiocophobia’ version here:

  15. Let us not forget “Ellen’s Folly”, the tale of the collapse of The Word sales as a consequence of Mr E’s insistence of going with Beck one month, rather than the bankers of Bob, Bruce, Bush or Bowie. Not up there with in terms of the indignation that a top 100 list or a cover choice seems to be able to generate but perhaps a clue as to why mags do this. Albeit it’s unlikely to be for much longer.

  16. Well Miles was a punk you could say, provocative, didn’t give a shit, did as he pleased. John Lydon did some experimental, profound music in his own right, as did Miles, albeit briefly with Metal Box before reverting to his pantomime charicature. Not a million miles from each other.

      • I have always assumed that the magazines either get paid for being on the app and/or it boosts their circulation so they can get more money from their advertisers. I spent the best part of 50 years buying, firstly, two or three music weeklies, and then from Q onwards various magazines each month. The fact that I ‘read’ Mojo in about 15 minutes yesterday reminds me why I stopped subscribing.

  20. I get Mojo popping up on my Kindle app and occasionally read it. I looked across the grid of front covers from the past two years or so. All usual suspects, plus Bowie or Beatles every couple months.

    But any non-white faces? Well, there’s Stevie Wonder and er… maybe it might have been good to have gone with Miles for the front cover.

    *That said not all editions show up in my app and its very slow to update, so I might have missed some covers

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