Mojo - The Music Magazine

At the risk of stating the bleedin' obvious, there are two schools of Bruce Springsteen fan. Firstly, there's the smiley advocate who is happy to refer to Springsteen as 'Broooce' or 'The Boss', holds Born To Run to be his true blueprint release, has no problem with the cheesy sax breaks of this man, saw nothing wrong whatsoever when the E Street Band appeared like this, in public, and regards something like this laugh-it-up rock'n'roll spume as the good-time pinnacle of Springsteen achievement. Then there's the moody snob, whose Quality Bruce criterion is either Darkness On The Edge Of Town or Nebraska, who swoons at any low-key Bruce track that stars our multi-millionaire singer as a married discontent trawling the nighthawk bars or a ghostly blue-collar Joe on the lam from a New Jersey lawman, and who can't help but wince when Patti Scialfa turns up at the 2.45 mark, or Roy Bittan's Yamaha Grand starts plink-plonking away.

Of course, both gangs can live happily alongside each other, and do so regularly at Springsteen concerts, but with his last two albums, 2007's Magic and the recent Working On A Dream, it would appear that the Broooce fans have gotten hold of the critical reins and have started awarding the man four star reviews for albums of songs that would fail to pass muster on 1992's Human Touch or Disc 1 of The River. However, the praise poured on such weevilly sentimental self-parodies as Magic's Gypsy Biker or ...Dream's truly horrible Queen Of The Supermarket ("Each night I take my groceries and I drift away"!), would be less galling if it didn't also follow in the wake of 2005's oddly forgotten Devils & Dust.

Sitting somewhere between the lonesome short-storytelling of Nebraska and 1995's The Ghost Of Tom Joad and the low(er)-key, murky country-rock highlights of 2002's The Rising, D&D was Springsteen divested of his boondock bluster, singing in that confederate whisper he reserves for his more human and damaged tales and shifting into a lonesome coyote howl on tracks like All I'm Thinkin' About and Maria's Bed for those rare moments of romantic transcendence. Produced with a hushed echo that suggested a singer on a bare stage under a single spotlight, D&D's besieged, forsaken mood found a songwriter at his real emotional peak, pulling moments of hope, sunlight and dustbowl poetry from the grey rain and barbed promises of Bush's America.

If the E Street ever do decide to hook up with someone equal to their worth - like Sting, or Tracy Chapman - there will be many Bruce Springsteen fans out there who'll be cheering the decision, albeit in a hushed, lonesome whisper.

For months and months my youngest daughter has been enchanted with the soundtrack to a fairly cheesy TV advertisement for beds, which for one so reluctant to actually go to bed is more than faintly ironic. However, her fascination is just the latest example of a classic soul tune successfully re-purposed as a sales tool. The Dells first recorded Oh What A Night in 1956, when the Chicago quintet were at the intersection where a definable style, doo wop, morphed into the new and equally distinctive vocal group format of soul. The difference? Well, certainly a harder gospel edge to Marvin Junior's (left) lead vocals, while the traditional harmonies retain a sweeter frisson of romantic promise. Written by the two leads, baritone Junior and tenor Johnny Funches, its vocal arrangement, with Verne Allison and Michael McGill adding harmonies and producer Calvin Carter depping for absent bass singer Chuck Barksdale, is a performance of exceptional maturity. Add understated instrumental accompaniment - piano, drums upright bass, a fine sax solo by Lucius Washington - for an epic of emotional fulfilment. Nine years later, after Johnny Carter's expressive falsetto replaced road-weary Funches, Stay In My Corner was an even more eloquent single. Still celebrating love, here Junior's tough voice sounds a touch uncertain as he pleads for constancy. "There'll be times when I may fail... bitter days may prevail," he admits, but just one kiss will make the days sweet. Looks like tosh on the page (screen?) of course, but the intricacies of vocal interplay and the strength and sheer beauty of the delivery make it all so utterly convincing. After 10 years on Vee-Jay, The Dells moved to Chess, who'd originally recorded then rebuffed them, but by the end of the '60s they had re-recorded both Oh What A Night and Stay In My Corner. Their reworking of the latter, in particular, stood comparison. The vocal arrangement had evolved into an even more baroque beauty with Junior Marvin holding one note for 17 breathtaking seconds. Hear those versions on The Great Ballads (Chess, 1998). But seek out the Vee-Jay takes first.

As his solo career didn't properly get in motion until 1999's Rock Art And The X-Ray Style, Joe Strummer didn't overdo it when The Clash finally expired in the mid-'80s. But if the quiet years meant he was backing up with an excess of music, much of it must have burst out on Global A Go-Go, where punk mentality achieves fusion with massed global flavours and other ethno-hoedown-techno moves. As the effervescent Bhindi Bhagee, where Strummer exults in the variety of international cuisine he can get on his west London high street, says, this music is; "Ragga, Bhangra, two-step Tanga (sic), Mini-cab radio... Brit pop, hip hop, rockabilly, Lindy hop, Gaelic heavy metal fans fighting in the road..." With old busking pal Tymon Dogg's violin to the fore, Strummer tells stories in that familiar phlegmy bark; woeful protest song Shaktar Donetsk empathises with an immigrant who got to Britain in the back of a lorry, Johnny Appleseed considers the working man crushed by labour, and Magnificent Seven/Radio Clash-alike Cool 'N' Out gabbles urban beat poetry and decides "what's it all about? ...punk rock what it's all about." It's a remarkable record for a man who was pushing 50, and as the closing, wordless 17 minute traditional tune Minstrel Boy moves from waltz to flamenco to silence, his loss seems ever more acute.

Nebula's 2001 album, Charged, was the possible pinnacle of stoner rock. Like some cool plan hatched in the 1973 weed fug of a US high school rec room, Charged had one aim. To rock, but, like, really well? Feeding such classic fuzz-blues influences as Blue Cheer, Hawkwind, early Sabbath, and Mudhoney through every single effects pedal in the shop, the end result was a riff-dealing, chrome dude of minimalist intent, looking for something to do, finding it, doing it and then doing it again. Louder. Such was the gimlet-eyed glaucoma focus of Charged, it made smart sense for Eddie Glass, Ruben Romano and Mark Abshire to return to their early EPs and show us exactly how this clarity of blare began, following the trio's respective departures from California hair-surf collective Fu Manchu. Rough-edged, preoccupied with sunbursts and monsters, the EPs served as a necessary stepping-stone to glory, a band honing their wailing slug-rocket sound into something grand and oily. Rather than present them as-were, the boys shuffled and supercharged these old tracks, adding groovier keyboard lines and bluesier vocals, turning tracks like the screaming drag-strip space-trip of Full Throttle (from the Meteor City EP) into brain-amped robot monsters. Like history, but cooler. "What is the Nebula goal?" said singer/guitarist Eddie Glass when I spoke to them in 2002, "To be loud, but not too loud. If it feels good, it's good." As a stop-gap blast of speeding bong squall Dos E.P.'s does just that. Get it. Got it? Feel good? Good.

Some records you feel in your skin, in your hair, in your teeth even. This is one of those for me: a collection not of songs so much as creeping things. Neil is in subterranean mode, a lost man in a dark hole, under the influence of insalubrious guitarist/fiddler-for-hire Rusty Kershaw, a code-red drug monster in permanently rank dungarees.

Kershaw, argues this indispensable volume, was the eminence grise of On The Beach, packing LA's Sunset Sound studio with second-hand furniture to loosen the vibe while his wife Julie cooked up "honey slides", a muddy concoction of honey and griddled marijuana. Deeper and weirder than a hash-cake high, it helped the music achieve an aura of fugged detachment not a million miles from that of Sly Stone's There's A Riot Goin' On.

Honey slides would certainly explain the title track, where Young's band journey so far into the zone you wonder if they'll ever return: Graham Nash pedals the wobbly Wurlitzer piano way down low, Ben Keith paddles his hand drum in an aural representation of background anxiety and Young's guitar solo would kill itself if it could. Motion Pictures is dedicated to Young's hell-raising actress partner (and mother of first son Zeke) Carrie Snodgress, but if anyone wrote anything so enervated and mean for you you'd dump them in a second.

This is the genius of On The Beach. There's no window-dressing, neither musically nor sentimentally. Ambulance Blues may sound harsh - "You're all just pissing in the wind / You don't know it but you are" - but it's addictive rather than depressing. Then there's Revolution Blues. Working up a threatening ambience, Kershaw broke furniture and slithered over the studio floor in imitation of a python. Inspired, Young sang the song in the guise of Charles Manson, wreaking lyrical vengeance on self-satisfied celebrity LA. As he concludes, with the astonishing couplet "Well I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars" you can almost see David Crosby, playing rhythm guitar on the track, shudder. Riding Rick Danko and Levon Helm's thrusting, knife-fight groove, it's as great a piece of ensemble rock music as has ever been recorded.

Wise heads may argue that proper Dexys Midnight Runners albums Searching For The Young Soul Rebels or Don't Stand Me Down should take precedence over this 2003 best-of. But, as well as giving a vivid sprint through the fiery career of style-obsessed auteur Kevin Rowland, two previously-unreleased songs give hope that the story isn't done yet. First the familiar stuff; played by (in turn) a pugnacious docker-boxer soul band, a dungaree'd Celtic soul band and an Ivy League-clad bizarro soul band, here are Geno, Show Me, Plan B and 13 more fantastic singles and album tracks that strive and search for what buttock-clenching Tamla tune There There My Dear calls "the new soul vision". The two new songs, though, reveal a different Rowland to the one who forced his bands to go jogging and dictated what haircuts they had. Terror-stricken but determined, the strident Manhood - suitably his first new recording since this majestic bafflement of 1999 - is the most striking, with its tragic-comic lines, "Are you always feeling guilty? / Yes / Do you envy those who are carefree?/ Listen, I'm so scared that I plan my every move", while in closing track My Life In England he looks back on an early youth spent trying to fit in with bittersweet fondness. Since this release and its accompanying tour, Rowland's been silent but for one song, It's OK Johanna. This sounds like it was recorded at home, but still shows that his voice and willingness to reveal all are holding up. Can we hear some more, Kevin?

Born in Woodland Alabama in 1934, the sixth child in a family of nine Vern "The Voice" Gosdin (who died on April 28 from a stroke) lived a life steeped in music. Although schooled in the family gospel group, who broadcast as the Gosdin Family Gospel Show, it was playing on the southern country circuit with his brother Rex that Vern's fiery musical baptism came about. "Vern and Rex could sound exactly like the Louvin Brothers," Flying Burrito Brother Gib Guilbeau told Alec Palao in 2003, "So they used to play gigs as them... sang all their songs, got paid and split. Nobody ever knew who they really where." Rex and Vern cut their first record, A Lonely Lonesome Street, in Nashville in 1959 before moving to California and becoming part of the early '60s Bakersfield bluegrass scene (Chris Hillman, Jim Dickson, Glen Campbell, Clarence White). Rex and Vern ended up in Chris Hillman's Hillmen. When they disbanded, Vern was asked by Dickson if he (but not his brother) fancied joining a new Beatles-inspired electric folk group called The Byrds. Vern declined, preferring to stick by Rex. Dickson had them open for The Byrds - Vern, Rex, Clarence White and whatever drummer they could find and when Gene Clark split from The Byrds he drafted in Vern, Rex and Clarence to help out on his solo debut. Vern also added guitar and harmonies to The Byrds' Younger Than Yesterday and the duo cut a series of tracks with a backing band of White, Hillman and Michael Clarke. But those tracks either flopped or failed to be released so the brothers cut their hair and then cut the Sounds Of Goodbye LP for Gary S Paxton's Bakersfield International label. Joined by Bakerfield's "wrecking crew" of Clarence White, Gene Parsons, Gib Guilbeau and Wayne Moore the Gosdins went down a melancholy, rough Nashville route: high harmonies, twelve string tapestries and multiple heartaches. It was a sound that McGuinn stole wholesale for his next Byrds incarnation, even going so far as to draft White and Parsons into his band. This compilation brings together that album with every Byrds-related track the brothers ever cut, a melancholy missing link in the late history of '60s country rock.

In 1992, grunge was hip, Madchester had gone quiet and electronic dance music was thumping out its serotonin-depleted zombie metronome like there was no tomorrow. So where did The Stairs' pre-decimal blues rock racket come from? Having said that they wanted to retrace all of music since the '60s to find out where it all went wrong, this Liverpool three-man outfit weren't telling. Instead, having possibly heard some records by The Kinks, Stones, Byrds, Doors, Yardbirds, Spencer Davis Group and other '60s aces, they simply spooled out an LP's worth of energetic, gutsy, live-sounding tunes about keeping weird hours, scrambled brains, a woman gone and said goodbye, and on first two singles Weed Bus and Mary Joanna, the benefits of the 'jazz woodbine.' (The latter came with a free 'Stairtex Record Cleaner', nice and soft on one side for your vinyl, 'Destroys all Compact Discs'-rough on the other.) Damn them, they split too soon, after just one LP and some storming live shows. Frontman Edgar Summertyme, he of the extra-enunciated growl and rubbery bass runs, would later lose the 'Summertyme' and become Edgar Jones, working with Paul Weller and St Etienne before forming primordial R&B outfit The Joneses. And what is this true believer's newest vehicle? A bluesy, rocking three-piece called Free Peace who'll be supporting Oasis (again) in June.

Where are Ten Benson? Their website (last updated in 2007) has few clues, merely a catalogue of personnel changes and internecine conflicts that simultaneously map their transformation from motley McJobbers, dressing up stolen metal riffs in all manner of ironic livery - vocoders, butchers' smocks, funny voices, the lot - to tattooed long-haired hillbillies trawling through the Hoxton abyss. There's Youtube footage of them playing a poorly-attended gig at London's Shunt Lounge in June of last year (538 views) which suggests they're at least not dead and that the on-off conflict between permanent member, vocalist/guitarist Chris Teckkam and drummer Karl Hussey is back off again. *SKP found them at their peak, serving up a bloody chum-bucket of in-bred metal and croaking crack-pipe vocals, singing of tits, heartbreak and war. This was no place for subtlety, unless it was a subtlety so slight as to be obscured by maggoty filth. Highpoints included the degenerate Buttholes racket of Come Home To Me and misguided single, One Way Ticket - ZZ Top's Legs, severed from the torso, dumped in a wood-chipper, spraying fat and noise. At this point it all sounded like a game they were playing with signifiers of American rock and the complex iconography of the greasy trucker's cap as it became co-opted by the Shoreditch twat and his ilk; tongue-in cheek even if it was someone else's tongue. More recently, they seem to have immersed themselves in the method of their madness. We only hope they're eating regularly.

They may forever be associated with old Shakey, but Crazy Horse were so much more than Neil Young's on-call foot soldiers. As The Rockets, Danny Whitten, Billy Talbot, Ralph Molina, Bobby Notkoff and Leon and George Whitsell were the archetypal Californian schlubs, spending their days in Laurel Canyon smoking cheap weed and jamming loud country-blues. An album of vaguely psychedelic R&B slipped out in 1968, but Whitten, Talbot and Molina soon broke off on their own, quickly enlisting the talents of producer/arranger Jack Nitzsche and guitar wunderkind Nils Lofgren to record this, their deliciously primordial debut. The band's instrumental work on Young's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and After The Gold Rush was enough to secure them a deal with Reprise and the sessions for Crazy Horse began in late 1970. At its heart are the five contributions from guitarist Danny Whitten. The hard-driving honky-tonk of Downtown and Dirty, Dirty (the latter featuring Ry Cooder on slide guitar) and - best of all - the redemptive ballad I Don't Want To Talk About It, point towards a great songwriter just warming up. Unlike the huge West Coast successes of the early '70s (Déjà Vu, Eagles, Young's Harvest) Crazy Horse is copper-bottomed rock, the band's garage origins gleaming through on the blunt grooves of Gone Dead Train and Nobody. Sadly, Whitten's heroin use soon became uncontrollable. Ditched by his band mates, he drifted for a year before Young once again came to his rescue. It wasn't enough. Whitten died of an overdose on November 18, 1972. Listen to Lofgren's ravaged rocker Beggar's Day; it's difficult not to think of Whitten's losing battle when over the pugilistic crash of cymbals we hear: "I've lost control of my darker side / A world all for free on a nastier side."

"I even made her forget about old Elvis / Now I'm the only one she calls her pelvis." So yelped Rudy Jiminez Grayzell, on a motorvatin' 1957 slice of Sun rockabilly entitled, simply, Judy. Ah, rock'n'roll dreams. When Sam Phillips bought that radiator shop at 706 Union Avenue, Memphis Tennessee in 1949 and set up the Memphis Recording Service he'd promised, famously, to "record anything-anywhere-anytime." He also said that Sun would be a place "where the soul of man never dies." There were success stories: Cash, Perkins, Orbison, Jerry Lee, Charlie Rich - all present and correct here with cuts that range from the necessary (I Walk The Line, Blue Suede Shoes, Great Balls Of Fire) to the oddball (Jerry Lee's Ubangi Stomp). And though Elvis is represented by just two tracks - My Happiness and That's When Your Heartaches Begin from his July 1953 demos - his ghost haunts all eight CDs.

The pre-Elvis cuts on CD 1 showcase some of the mongrel Memphis blues and country that Phillips championed and Elvis learned from (Junior Parker, the Prisonaires, Rufus Thomas) but chiefly, this is a collection that showcases hopeful truck-tanned dreamers like Hayden Thompson, Mack Vickery and Jack Earls, working-class guys taking unpaid leave from dead-end 9-5s, loading up their rig and driving in from Florida/Oklahoma/anywhere/nowhere to make it in this new frontier of rock'n'roll. Like any metaphorical push to the west, any gold rush, there were to be more paupers than millionaires. But it's the oddities and the failures that prove the highpoints of this glorious 190-track collection: the pouting, pomaded rockabilly hopefuls, who, in straining ever harder for the prize, came up with a hoodlum mix of sex, speed and upright bass that Elvis and RCA never dreamed of.

Witness Warren Smith's threatening retread of Slim Harpo's Got Love If You Want It, the frog-growl bolero-swing of Macy Skipper's Bop Pills, and the froth-flecked insanity of Tupelo construction worker Jimmy Wages' Miss Pearl. There are hundreds of others here, Billy Riley, Sonny Burgess, Billy Emerson, unheard, well-known, all just as good, and that's before you've even made it to the wailing nitro-powered blues and mournful country on Disc 6. What with Stuart Colman's 72-page booklet, covering the background stories of each artist - lonesome death, alcoholism, shotgun suicides, car-crashes all figure - and the label's directionless post-'50s flounder, a Sun label retrospective can't help but come with a black border. But, as Sam Phillips promised, the souls live on. A box of wailing souls, then... go on, open it up.

Known for his work with Grant Lee Buffalo in the early '90s, Grant Lee Phillips has maintained a steady solo output, but his first remains just about his best. As is quoted on the back of the CD by Phillips himself, "recorded over the course of three days in October '99, Ladies Love Oracle is just me in the raw, me in the dark, me in the basement. Sometimes a sketch says more than a mural". The analogy rings true, and although these songs are stripped back, they are exemplary of the craft with which Phillips approaches his songwriting. His weathered but delicate voice weaves through these beautifully melancholic songs about love and loss, such as in the tune Folding: "Oh what a painful lament / Knowing what was / And not knowing where it went" before leading to the chorus "Darling I'm folding / I'm tired of holding onto a love untrue". These songs are honest, and they are open - laid out bare without any loud instrumentation for the lyrics to hide behind. Grant Lee Phillips is one of the better songwriters active in America today, and Ladies Love Oracle is brimming with proof.

A future work, The French Horn In Pop, will be a slim volume but this album must form its soundtrack. By the time they came to record their fourth album, Philadelphia group The Delfonics were in the forefront of their native city's sweet soul genre. Signed to Stan Watson's Philly Groove label, they had met in Thom Bell a young writer-arranger-producer of exceptional musical erudition who was central to the development of Philly soul. The Delfonics were Cain and the Hart brothers, William and Wilbert, the former sibling a fine songwriter responsible for all but one of the 10 tracks here, seven of them co-written with Bell. Their first big hit, 1968's La La Means I Love You, had established the group's falsetto and high-tenor lead vocal style, but this album's first track trumped it. Announced by an immediately ear-catching intro courtesy of that standard instrument of soul, the aforesaid F horn, and leads shared by Wilbert (first verse) and William (second), Didn't I (Blow Your Mind This Time) boasts a formidable Bell ballad arrangement. Whereas, say, Phil Spector would collect a huge orchestra and blast away, Bell's orchestrations and conducting are more measured and clear, and the better for it. The song's storyline - partner repeatedly cheats, comes back each time, but now partner gets mind-blown by walking back in as other partner is walking out - is as sweet a kiss-off as you'll hear. (In fact, in the UK, La La and another earlier US hit, Ready Or Not Here I Come (Can't Hide The Love), only became hits after Didn't I had charted, which is some indication of its sweet soul supremacy.) Almost as good: Trying To Make A Fool Of Me, introduced by a sweeping string and woodwind arrangement that, like several of the tracks here, have the cinematic romp of a Western movie soundtrack (John Ford, not spaghetti) to provide the richest accompaniment imaginable. Other great Bell moments: the instrumental Delfonics Theme and Over And Over, one for ensemble drummers. After this album, Cain left the group and Bell split from Philly Groove. And that was the end of The Delfonics' Top 40 pop action. Sigh.

By 1969, Dale Hawkins was a 32-year old rock'n'roll veteran. In the space of twelve years he'd conjured up the mythical ur-rock Chess stomper Suzie-Q with teen guitar sensation James Burton, introduced Burton and fellow guitar legend Roy Buchanan to the Chess stable, recorded a string of 'billy rock stompers, fronted a prime-time TV show and toured himself into the ground. At the fag-end of his time as a producer and A&R man with Larry Uttal's Bell Records, the speed-wired Hawkins cut this, only his second studio album with a dream team that included Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder, Bobby Charles, Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, the Memphis Horns and some fellow called "Dirty John" on the piano. For Hawkins, L.A., Memphis... was little more than a stolen bit of fun. "Larry had already sold his share of the label to Screen Gems," the man told me in 2006, "so he said, Look Dale, go do one. I wasn't ready but my friend, Joe Osborn, great bass player, had a studio in his basement in LA, so we rounded up Ry Cooder, and James Burton, Taj Mahal and Paul Humphrey on drums. Joe played an 8-string bass. The only other time we used that bass was on McArthur Park. But I had been on a roll, man, for too long... was it a sober album? Well, I have to say... no."

The result is a snarly, lazy, pushed-to-the-gills swamp-soul stunner, up there with Link Wray's 1970 Polydor debut and Tony Joe White's Continued, albums that, to use Hawkins' own phrase, were "bridge-crossers", ignoring genre-divisions in favour of mixing it up in a down-home stew of gospel, blues, rockabilly, R&B and country. Standouts range from the joyous Bobby Charles co-write La La, La La to wired and weary covers of Candy Man, Hound Dog and Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town. When I asked how he came up with such a warped and wild delivery on these covers the man broke into in a fit of giggles. "Ahhaha-haha! Oh maaan! Hee-hee. I appreciate you sayin' that but I could have done it a lot better. I was so Goddamn tired on that session I think I sang all the wrong words to some of those songs. At the time I was ashamed."

Is there another '60s-vintage muso still operating on a level with Robert Wyatt? One who makes records as good as any in his or her catalogue? For the former Soft Machine drummer, of course, there was no moment of transfiguring pop stardom, no place in some illusory pantheon to preserve - and you sense it is, in part, his humility that keeps his music on the straight and narrow. Comicopera is typical Wyatt in the way it sits next to you and whispers in your ear, sharing often uncomfortable ideas in that friendly, melancholy voice. In other ways, it's all-new Wyatt, sharing personnel with 2002's Cuckooland (notably, Gilad Atzmon on sax and Paul Weller on guitar) but lacking its predecessor's nuages of keyboards, using sampled/treated voices to haunting effect and sounding all-told more immediate, live and quirkily melodic.

And while Cuckooland split into two parts (with 30 seconds of silent intermission) Comicopera divides into three. Act 1 - subtitled Lost In Noise - is domestically inclined, incorporating a ravishing, mordant account of a long-term love affair (Just As You Are), with vocals shared by Wyatt and pure-toned Brazilian chanteuse Mônica Vasconcelos, and lyrics ("It's that look in your eyes / I know you despise / Me for not being stronger") that bear poet wife Alfreda Benge's trademark lack of sentimentality. It may yet prove Wyatt and Benge's best claim to have written a "standard".

Part 2 - The Here And Now - steps out of the Wyatt front door to gruffly engage with the world. There are deadpan jokes ("It's a beautiful day... but not here") amid simply serendipitous moments of music, especially where Atzmon's tenor, Orphy Robinson's steel pans and Wyatt's plashy percussion interact in a way the word "jazz" does not quite describe. In a brilliant gambit, the segment ends with a song from the perspective of a bomber pilot, happily blitzing the crap out of an unspecified Arab homeland, and another from the p.o.v. of the victim, whose hellish disorientation is uncannily summoned in the desperate, repeated refrain: "Something unbelievable is happening to the floor!"

Wyatt says this bitter, apocalyptic punctuation mark made an immediate return to Anglophone pop seem inappropriate, a betrayal even. So Act 3 - Away With The Fairies - goes Latin. It's pretty enough, with a moving Hasta Siempre Commandante saluting Che Guevara with the help of a swinging Italian combo, and a dense Orphy Robinson vibraphone instrumental providing variety. But after the in-your-face engagement and subversive pop twists of Acts 1 and 2, it feels superfluous and defocusing. Think of it as an additional EP and immediately it feels less 'wrong'.

Concluding circumlocution aside, Comicopera gets to you quicker and stays with you longer than any previous Robert Wyatt album. It's hard to imagine a record more original or full of life, from any artist of any age, it's that damn good.

Riffling through the racks at HMV this week it struck me as ominous the quantities of the rising Glasgow combo's debut that sat there unbought. Perhaps it was a brand new batch, replacing those that had disappeared just minutes earlier, clutched by a cohort of the soon-to-be-amazed. Let's hope so, for everything about Checkmate Savage is amazing, from the spooked stories of supernatural activity narrated in Rick Anthony's broad, baritone brogue to the astonishing, genre-busting backings, which have taxed every inch of my taxonomical lexicon (currently I'm favouring "Heavy Motorik Folk" or "Krautrock meets the Stone Of Scone"). While in the hands of younger men in tighter trousers this would come off as some trendy urban fusion (it would be easier to ask who isn't a bit motorik right now) the Phantoms make you think not of other bands, but of a menhir at twilight, in a remote glen empty of all but the dead. The Howling allies banshee wails to a nuggety rock groove; Folk Song Oblivion conveniently sounds like its title, and features the cracking line "You have a voice so loud / You break the mountainside"; Crocodile is a chthonic invocation embroidered with artful laptoppery (there's a rhythm that sounds like someone tapping their teeth), but the detail is not the thing here, not when there's such windswept melody and anthemic singalonga vocal fun to be had amid the delicious mystery and oddness. One of those records that comes out of nowhere and, unbelievably, they're just as good live.

He knows all about refusing for years; after 1997's Maladjusted and before 2004's You Are The Quarry, Morrissey simply withdrew to Los Angeles, retaining a regal silence bar the odd tour and curiosities with cool sleevenotes like this. Years Of Refusal, an album full of powerful, pulse-stimulating tunes sung by a charismatic provocateur in full control of his instrument, is also full of people hanging in stasis, from the chemically-coshed protagonist of Something Is Squeezing My Skull to the paralysed, isolated narrator of Black Cloud. There is also doubt, and intimations of mortality that seem more than the ghoulish chain pulling of yore. Is pained valediction You Were Good In Your Time addressed to David Bowie, Morrissey's one time tourmate, or is he talking to a future version of himself? And do its final two minutes of spectral underwater atmospheres and muted voices speaking French attempt to capture the sound of dying itself? Certainly, One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell, with its declaration, "And when I die I want to go to hell!" draws attention to the extinction that awaits us all. Best not to dwell on it too much. But as All You Need Is Me points out, we'll miss him when he's gone.

Arhythmic, atonal, noisy and free, Derek Bailey existed so far outside the bounds of regular jazz, that he doubtlessly would have been miffed to be included in any list of great jazz albums. Playing since the 1950s, this Sheffield-born guitarist moved to London in 1966 where he played in various improv collectives with the likes of Tony Oxley, Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy and George Lewis. An original idea of Tzadik label owner John Zorn, Ballads was, in conception, pure science-lab experiment, getting the ultimate spontaneous guitar improv iconoclast to play such sugary jazz standards as Laura, You Go To My Head and When Your Lover Has Gone and standing well back, with some protective goggles on. Given the liner-notes aside that Bailey went to the trouble of finding a guitar that was "totally inappropriate for playing standards", and the fact that this is Bailey's (un)usual approach to jazz guitar, the results should scar and burn but they do anything but. Bailey started out playing standards in small jazz groups in the '50s and Ballads stands as the jazz equivalent of Krapp's Last Tape, the sound of a man unpicking the warp and weft of his romantic past, pulling dissonance out of the beauty, and vice versa. The result is a spikily beautiful thing and the ideal starting point for anyone hoping to force themselves into the knotty briar that surrounds the mysterious edifice of free jazz.

Despite their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame last year, the music of Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff's Philadelphia International label not infrequently seems under-valued, over-shadowed by Motown and Stax, the other major soul independents of the '70s and early '80s. Perhaps its emergence at the same time as disco is partly to blame, yet Philly swam with the political, social and spiritual undertow Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield had brought to early '70s soul, and with great arrangers such as Thom Bell, Bobby Martin and Jack Faith, a house band every bit the equal of Motown's Funk Brothers and Booker T. And The M.G.'s at Stax, plus an exceptional horn-string orchestra (MFSB), created a sophisticated and influential new sound. Arguably the best body of work, and most cautionary tale, to be found among the acts on the Philly roster is that of Teddy Pendergrass. A proven hit-maker as the vocal focus of Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes' greatest hits (I Miss You, and If You Don't Know Me By Now, both 1972; The Love I Lost, 1973; Bad Luck and Wake Up Everybody, both 1975), the drummer turned braggadocio frontman quit in 1976 to embark on a meteoric solo career. Although not his biggest-seller, his 1977 debut launched Gamble & Huff 's newest Philly soul project with an emphatic wallop. Big-voiced, expressive, gospel-powered, Pendergrass attacks the uptempo material with a breathtaking vigour, often on the edge of losing control (eg. The More I Get, The More I Want). Which makes his tender readings of ballads like And If I Had and the hit single The Whole Town's Laughing At Me always a surprise, simply because of the power you know is held there in his voice, straining to be unleashed.

After almost two decades as a celebrated miserablist and mournful heir to Mark Eitzel or Leonard Cohen's crowns, the Smog lifted from Bill Callahan's artist credit with 2007's Woke on a Whaleheart (his first LP under his own name), and from his heart too, the album suggested. Made during, and seemingly inspired by his relationship with harpist and adorable pixie Joanna Newsom, ...Whaleheart revealed a new, lighter Bill, igniting the flickers of empathy first spotted on the 2003's, Supper. His famously gloomy baritone seemed less brooding now, musing on what nature and love had to offer life. Bill himself seemed to physically blossom; he even smiled in photographs. And I am assured that he is now considered a bonefide Indie Hottie. This was the kind of love that transforms people. And with the end of that relationship fans of Bill's mortuary slab deadpan might expect him to return to the safe ground of alienated misanthropy. Because that's what men do when relationships end, isn't it? Grow beards, read hardboiled crime fiction and reassure themselves that it's not just them, life really is shit.

Well Bill has the first two down. His literary-chic beard bristling, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle opens with Jim Cain, a song that takes it's name from unflinching American crime writer James M Cain. "I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again," goes the plot. Yet his voice is so warm, the heartbeat drums womblike and reassuring, lulled by Bill's gentle guitar and swelling strings. For a dark place it certainly sounds beautiful. And so it continues. Eid Ma Clack Shaw is haunted by a dream of a departed lover so lucid "The hairs stood on my arm". Later the same night his subconscious throws up a perfect song, one with "all the answers/like hands laid on". He scribbles down the words and reads them back in the morning as (possibly) "Eid ma clack shaw/Ze boven del bah..." and a whole chorus of the most delightful gibberish. Who could not love indie's own Professor Stanley Unwin? While the arrangements are as lush and gorgeous as the imagery is dramatic: French horns, organ, cellos, and skies full of black and screaming leaves, twitching withers (equine metaphors a Callahan speciality) and, fabulously, a Rococo Zephyr, which he describes stepping over two lovers, as if it were a sort of giant bird, while a female soprano trills behind him. It's quite lovely.

Only in the final song, the near-ten minute orchestral mantra Faith/Void, does the hard headed, rational male return, as Bill considers life's secular truths, concluding gently but firmly that: "its time to put God away", as if he was talking to a toddler at bedtime. Clearly there is no seat for 'probably' on his bus.

Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is like blossom in spring; its not like we didn't know that Callahan's dark, wintry twigs were capable of such vibrant colour, but it's still a surprise after a harsh winter. Time to stop and admire.

History can be a cruel and merciless beast. Gene Clark, a tall, shy folk singer from Missouri, knew that only too well. When he quit The Byrds in the spring of 1966, he left in his wake a run of self-penned hit singles - Eight Miles High and I Feel A Whole Lot Better among them - that catapulted the folk collective from West Hollywood scenesters to international stars. He'd spent less than two years as the group's mop-topped, songwriting spine, before internal squabbling and an unshakeable fear of flying prompted his hasty exit. He was just 21 years old. Like Brian Jones, Clark battled with demons (alcohol, drugs, depression) throughout his life, but in contrast to his friend in the Stones, he made it out the '60s alive, going on to produce a handful of bewitching solo albums that are still yet to receive the acclaim they deserve.

On its release in 1974, No Other barely scrapped into the American top 200, its preoccupation with Zen-mysticism and ambitious Nashville-esque arrangements jarring with Clark's core country-folk crowd and failing to meet the rock community's more outré demands (despite the lavish artwork). Once again he seemed unable to keep up with the times. But with hindsight No Other is his most complete work. A large, sprawling set of songs that succeeds in delivering the "cosmic American music" that Gram Parsons spent his final years searching for, but ultimately failed to find. The title track is a super-cooled synth hymn to inner reflection with Clark's disembodied vocal delivering such soul-searching epithets as, "then the pilot of the mind must find the right direction" and "all alone we must be part of one another".

The album's two love songs, Lady Of The North and From A Silver Phial, are also propelled by this quest for spiritual calm - the latter a west coast ballad bravely wrestling the line, "said she saw the sword of sorrow sunken in the sand of searching souls". By the time he came to record these songs Clark had ditched Hollywood, for the quieter confines of Mendocino, Northern California where he surrounded himself with a maverick producer (Thomas Jefferson Kaye) and a stellar selection of session players who were more in step with the new, meditative Clark. "Have you seen the old world dying?" he asks amid the minimal, acoustic bliss of Silver Raven. Certainly Gene Clark had seen his former self disappear at the dog end of the 1960s but despite his efforts ultimately, he would never fully recover from No Other's commercial failure. What should have been his crowning moment, proved to be his undoing. Once a Byrd always a Byrd it seems. But Gene Clark left us so much more.

Most of the bands that frequented the Flamingo Club in Soho and other soul-orientated venues of the mid'60s offered genuine value, but George Bruno Money's Big Roll Band invariably left the warmest glow. As musicianly as Georgie Fame And The Blue Flames, Herbie Goins And The Nightimers or the Graham Bond Organisation, they also had the populist touch of Jimmy James And The Vagabonds and Geno Washington And The Ram Jam Band thanks to the wide-ranging wit and general bonhomie of the leader. Recorded in one working day, their debut album captures the accomplished sweep of the best Flamingo bands, the 12 tracks approximating to the basis of a Big Roll Band 45-minute set. The six-piece band's uptempo covers all swing with a real drive - James Brown's I'll Go Crazy, Rufus Thomas's Jump Back, Chuck Berry's guitar-centric Sweet Little Rock And Roller transposed to organ and Jimmy Reed's Bright Lights Big City - while instrumentals such as Big John Patton's organ work-out Along Came John and Lalo Schifrin's The Cat stretch the leader and his exceedingly able band which included guitarist Andy Summers, yes, that one. Back Door Blues, It Should've Been Me and My Wife Can't Cook allow Zoot's predilection as a lubricious blues raconteur in the mould of early Atlantic Ray Charles to flourish. Zoot and his Big Roll Band were never likely to achieve the pop-rock cross-over acclaim of the bombastic guitar-focused blues-based bands of the later '60s, although drummer Colin Allen (Stone The Crows), bassist Paul Williams (Juicy Lucy, Tempest and others), Summers and, indeed Zoot himself adapted well enough to rock-centric outfits. But this is when they were real big rollers.

There's a special pain and frustration in being an admirer of The La's - Lee Mavers' There She Goes hitmakers who spent years recording different interpretations of the same songs with eminent producers like John Leckie and Mike Hedges, only to scrap them all because planetary alignments were off or a lead was the wrong colour. This somewhat unhinged pursuit of unmeasurable perfection is what made Mavers, a tunesmith of rare ability, jack it all in for afterlife acclaim shortly after the final, band-disowned Steve Lillywhite-produced version of the album came out in 1990. There've been a few surprise tours in the interim but he hasn't released anything new since, leaving the field open to various collections of demos and alternate takes of mostly familiar songs. This BBC round up is probably the best of them. Marvel at how bursting with enthusiasm the band sounds on four tracks made for Liz Kershaw in 1988 - is this the definitive recording of foreboding album opener Son Of A Gun? And how fantastic is the studio cut of Over, previously only hearable as a b-side done in a shed on a tape recorder? Two slower re-arrangements of band mission statement Timeless Melody also sweeten the pot, as do a pair of starry-eyed takes of the not-on-the-album, doomsday Ibero-skiffler Callin' All. It's all splendid fodder for making your own fantasy La's album, though it will leave you resolutely stuck at square one, listening to the same songs in different forms, still wishing Mavers would finally get his finger out. But then again, the great man has just turned up on playing a few songs on Pete Doherty's solo tour - go on, Pete, see if you can get him to put another record out...

The music industry is full of people you have no desire to meet (Eric Clapton, Jon Bon Jovi, Sting) and those you wish you'd never met in the first place (The Beastie Boys, Brian Molko, the drummer from Dodgy) but I really wish I'd had a chance to run in to Duke Pearson. Blue Note pianist, producer and arranger, Pearson was also, from 1963 to 1970, the label's A&R man, the spirit of the label as it moved from the hard bop of repute into the warmer, beguiling post-Miles post-bop sound of Herbie Hancock, Jackie McLean, Joe Henderson and McCoy Tyner. If Pearson is on an album, whether as pianist, arranger, producer or band-leader it's usually a mark of quality and a sign that the album will, after the obligatory straight-ahead hard bop opener, have a cool, lucid, soft-cushioned summer feel, a sense that the jazz being made is about intimacy, community and enchantment rather than just bare blowing and base speed. Nat Hentoff described his approach as "non-competitive", an anathema to many blokey jazz-heads but exactly right for this time of the year when wintry isolation turns to feelings of warm affiliation. Plus, I like the look of him: that mix of studiousness, melancholy and (yes, I'm guessing here) kind-heartedness that you can hear in his music. Sweet Honey Bee is certainly the best place to start, the only jazz album I possess that perks the ears of all house guests (and I include A Kind Of Blue and Time Out in that). Dedicated to his beautiful wife Betty (who appears with Duke on the cover of the LP) it's an album made with a melodic buoyancy, by a pianist in the fine flush of romance, playing together with the stellar line-up of trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, flautist James Spaulding and sax genius Joe Henderson, softly assisted by a rhythm section of Ron Carter on bass and the never forceful Mickey Roker on drums. It's an album for romantic summer evenings, for cooking in the kitchen with the windows open or hanging out on the fire escape as the world speeds by below. It lifts the spirits. Unfortunately, it would appear that the current Blue Note edition, despite being heralded as a Rudy Van Gelder remaster, was taken from a vinyl copy, crackles and all. It deserves a decent reissue, even if Duke won't be around to see it. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the mid-'70s and passed away in 1980. Never got to meet him. Met this guy. That's the world, sometimes.

Harking back to a time when putting your own mark on other people's material was not the same indicator of creative bankruptcy it is now, Chan Marshall's first covers album from 2000 is an extraordinary expression of the artist's bleakly beautiful vision. More make-unders than reworkings, her lovely, evocative voice with minimal accompaniment is all it takes to make The Stones or Smog songs sound almost indistinguishable from her own (though one of them actually is her own: a serene revisiting of Is This Hole from 1996's What Would The Community Think LP). Her choice of songs doubtless introduced some fans of 1998's spectral Moonpix to artists like Nina Simone or Michael Hurley for the first time. As it was in pre web-time, you may recall, exploring musical references made by your favourite no-job, too-much-time-to-record-shop muso was one of the best things about being a teen reading the music weeklies in the 1980s and '90s. Chan Marshall has a blues pianist for a father and probably had no need to discover Moby Grape via interviews with Dinosaur Jr or whoever, but the point is her versions don't require fitting into any existing musical schema to appreciate them, what she communicates through these songs is so clearly herself. (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction is perhaps best of all. Stripped of its chorus and Jagger's puff-cheeked bluster, it becomes a sighing, soulful blues, blood warm and shiveringly intimate.

"Thus treads heavily the titanic STEELY DAN, casting a long shadow upon the contemporary rock wasteland," wrote a pseudonymous Donald Fagen on this LP's sleevenotes, "aspiring to spill its seed on barren ground." Now there's ambition. Luckily there was a little more to Can't Buy A Thrill than simply scoring some yucks against the Church Fathers. The first official album by Fagen and partner Walter Becker, New Yorkers in Los Angeles, was an acerbic, high IQ collection of immaculately turned-out songs that blended R&B and rock, and saw time running out on a cast list of "gentleman losers" whose lives were "boiling over" in various stages of dissipation, whether by personal foul-up or predetermined bad luck. Yet as on the Fagen-sung gloomy cha-cha Only A Fool Would Say That, there's a quality of sympathetic sarcasm present too - let he who is without sin, etc. - and for all the cleverness, with smilingly bitter break-up hit Reelin' In The Years there's still room for a bongload and a drive with the top down in ways guaranteed to beguile us expecting-rain England Town saps. There's the occasional odd note - soon-to-go vocalist David Palmer's clear and athletic tones heard on kept man's blues Dirty Work, for example, seem to shear off the maladjusted cynicism and humour of the group - but overall this is pure class, more than enough to disprove its own title.

Two decades spent playing at the side of Muddy Waters could do strange things to a man. Brought into Chess Records' hallowed studio for the first time in 1953, Otis Spann, a puffy-eyed piano-playing giant from Mississippi, became the perennial Chicago blues sideman. A larger-than-life character in more ways than one (he once pursued a career as a boxer), Spann contributed almost all of Waters' landmark performances, including his seminal set at the 1960 Newport Festival. Nine years later Spann enlisted the talents of a young British blues combo then hauling their Chess-indebted jams across the States. Like the Rolling Stones before them, Fleetwood Mac were dumbstruck to find themselves occupying the same space as their heroes. A session was booked for January 9, 1969 at Chicago's Tel Mar Studios and, with Spann's regular drummer S.P. Leary taking the place of Mac's Mick Fleetwood, Danny Kirwan, John McVie and Peter Green went to work. Adept at both speedy barrelhouse boogie (Walkin') and gently soused ballads (Ain't Nobody's Business), Spann roars through this record, chuckling away as Green delivers some of his most impassioned solos. The master and the apprentice made a formidable team, but it can't have been plain sailing for the shy, troubled Green. Listen to his full-tilt guitar work during I Need Some Air - you can hear the nerves. Like all great bluesmen, Spann instinctively knew when not to play, the spaces between the flighty trills of Ain't Nobody's Business testament to his taste. Eight originals and two covers later, The Biggest Thing Since Colossus was in the can. Sadly, it would prove to be one of Spann's last offerings. He succumbed to cancer in 1970.

Ah, the allure of a great album sleeve. I first bought this back in 2006 at Arthur magazine's groovy downtown LA freakfest, Arthur Nights, because: a) I needed to spend money on something cool; b) the cover looked like Nick Drake's Bryter Later; c) I had just had my molecules rearranged by the Boris live onslaught, an experience akin to standing on some Dorset cliff-top while the wind blows your hair back, the sea-spray batters your face and a chaotic Japanese power trio plays inside your Thinsulate hat. I already owned their 2003 album, Amplifier Worship but I'd never really played it as that particular serving of psychedelic doom-sludge had sounded a bit, well, plodding, to me. Well, this is anything but. Akuma No Uta plays like a metal audition tape with Boris proving themselves superhumanly and repeatedly on it, with everything from SunnO)))-esque amp drone (the wailing ten-minute sulcus gouge of Introduction) and proggy post-rock tripscapes (Naki Kyoku) to super-stoner Sabbath-psych (Ano Onna No Onryou) and three-minute gut-fuzz black metal drumslaughts (Ibitsu). Playing with the limits of heavy production, peppering the album with pops, clicks and distorts Akuma No Uta creates an ever-present atmosphere of auditory collapse, as if these relentlessly joyous riffs and pounding drums were constantly driving your stereo to the dangerous abysmal overhang of its three year warranty.

In the marbled hall of the rock'n'roll era's brain warping rhythmic breakthroughs - see also Bo Diddley's 'shave-and-a-haircut, two bits' beat, the Amen Break or Clyde Stubblefield's Funky Drummer - there's a special plinth for the "motorik" beat devised by the late drummer Klaus Dinger for his band Neu! A good place to immerse yourself in it - not always for the most logical reasons - is the second long-player by Dinger and his guitarist/ electronicist partner Michael Rother. As on the first Neu! album, you're initially held in magnetic suspension by the ten-minutes-plus opening track, but while that album's Hallogallo was a clean grid of forward motion, here Für Immer (Forever) turns up the synths, colours, thunder crashes and riffage to build inexorably into an altered state of sublime repetition. Thereafter, Spitzenqualität is the Neu! beat played inside a steel tank and the yabbering Lila Engel is where their punk side begins to foam in earnest. Then you can flip it over to hear what can happen when a band runs out of cash before finishing their album properly; Dinger and Rother just got existing tracks and speeded them up (78 rpm!) or slowed them down (16 rpm!) to fill the space. It's as preposterous and aggravating as it sounds, but isn't this what krautrock was supposed to be about? Dinger and Rother would split soon after but would reform on two more occasions, and their endless monorail of 4/4 nirvana is recognised this May by the new compilation Brand Neu!, which sees Oasis, Kasabian, Primal Scream paying tribute. The beat goes on, für immer.

In their hymn to Ray Davies Tahiti 80 singer Xavier Boyer, French-English dictionary in hand, deadpans in his glassy tones: "He gave up pop music to play squash with Ringo Starr / But that does not matter / When you listen to his selected dis-cog-rapheey". And yes, they just rhymed "Victoria" with "Australia". This tendency to earnest, almost simplistic sentiment paired with hi-tech, sophisticated pop and a bouncy, high shine production sounded irresistibly fresh in 2000. Add neglected orch-pop genius Eric Matthews on trumpet and blissful backing vocals and you've got a minor cult hit (and indeed an actual hit in Japan). Inevitably lined up along side Air's Moon Safari and Phoenix's United in a new wave of French dance pop at the time of release, Tahiti 80 never really fitted at those sorts of clubs. Theirs was a much cleaner, hygienic sort of fun. No songbirds in aspic at their parties, this was a band for groovy beach parties, Zombies fans flying kites in summer and songs about getting your hair cut when it gets too long.

Rarely can a record's commercial potential have been more poorly served by its cover, as the furore over its sexism ("What's wrong with being sexy?") or otherwise, utterly overshadowed the merits, or otherwise, of the music within. Although, "commercial potential" seemed the last thing on the minds of Atlanta's finest as they followed their mainstream-goosing neo-boogie opus, The Southern Harmony And Musical Companion, with a record designed to blow their own minds, and damn the torpedoes. Gone sets the tone with its Santana-funk intro and blazing lead break by gouched out axe-prodigy Marc Ford. It's ravished, drugged, gone, teetering between good trip and bad as Chris Robinson lies "blind, naked and scared", delivering the hippest, weirdest vocal performance of his career. From top-to-bottom, this is a glorious exercise in too-muchness, raising the bar for all that follows. Luckily, what follows includes the epicly low-slung A Conspiracy, latin crush-groove High Head Blues and all manner of super-groovy jams, wherein drummer Steve Gorman epitomises the seemingly-oxymoronic "precision drag" of all great blitzed rock while Robinson wades dizzily through a swamp of poison, sex and paranoia, his "divine spark" flashing as clouds conspire above his head ("I overheard them say, 'I wish he was dead'"). Whether out of guilt or fear or drugs or hubris or all of the above, rock bands always go mad after their big hit, and the record that follows is invariably the most interesting of their career. Amorica is one of those, with bells on.

"We've found the groove. Have a good time. Make sure your seatbelts are fastened," says vocalist Shawn Smith by way of introduction to 20th Century, the fifth track on Brad's debut album. As if to emphasise Smith's opening gambit, Brad lock into an unfeasibly funky groove centred around Stone Gossard's percussive guitar pattern, underpinned by Jeremy Toback's fluid bass line and drummer Regan Hagar's backbeat. It sounds effortless and fun. Which was probably the point.

Formed in late 1992 by Gossard following a gruelling two-year stint on the road promoting Pearl Jam's Ten debut, Brad came together when the guitarist got back to Seattle and decided to call up his former Mother Love Bone bandmate Hagar to jam. Hagar turned up with ex-Bliss singer Shawn Smith in tow and when Gossard ran into LA-based bassist Jeremy Toback around the same time, Brad was born. A week's rehearsal followed, then some off-the-cuff recording at Avast! Studios with producer Brendan O'Brien.

Despite its casual origins, Shame is a startling debut, straddling the funk/rock divide whilst entertaining none the excruciating clichés associated with, say, Dan Reed Network. Lithe, one-take opener Buttercup showcases Smith's soulful vocals; the blues-peppered Screen and the Zep-vibes of Down crank the quality. The result: a delicious, well-kept secret of an album that's retained its charm long after the grunge gold rush subsided.

Now read an exclusive Pearl Jam interview in this month's issue of MOJO magazine where Stone Gossard, Eddie Vedder and co. re-live the days of Ten - the album that nearly destroyed them!

We don't generally do singles in Disc Of The Day, but the news that Ian Broudie is to release his first Lightning Seeds record in 10 years had me pondering: could producing this 45 by Glossop haircuts The Bodines be the best thing the scouse pocket-popster ever did? Back in March, 1986, the 17-year-old me was convinced that CRE028 was the best thing yet to have happened to him: its rush of guitars making his heart swell in just the way he imagined romantic infatuation might strike (he was wrong, but in ways he had not predicted), its too-fast Motown drums pummelling like an out-of-control heartbeat, its supercool "'60s bird" cover starlet the paradigm of the kind of girlfriend that surely lay in wait, please God sometime soon. There's no other record that sounds quite like it, not amongst its C86-compiled contemporaries, nor recorded since. Echo & The Bunnymen were clearly a model - bassist Tim Burwood rocked the Les Pattinson; and Broudie produced EATB's Porcupine after all - but The Bodines were lighter, feathery but barbed. In Therese, there is an alchemy to the way the two glass-smashing rhythm guitars fit together - and Broudie lets them float, somehow untethered, in a sonic fever of love, while singer Michael Ryan declares, in a still-arresting piece of poetry, that she "scares the health out of me". Suspended between intensity and elaborately staged insouciance - the strange mesosphere of the late-adolescent male - hangs Therese, never bettered.

These days Ansell grafts out a path in the acoustic folk scene, but back in 1986 his solo debut The Englishman Abroad put him firmly at the synth-pop forefront, where he had the better of contemporaries like Howard Jones (who gallantly makes an appearance on this album, too). Ansell's fate was to return to the fringes, and yet this album fulfilled every notion of what the New Romantic way of electronic pop was all about: edgy, funky rhythms out of the Japan playbook, well wrapped in synthesizers and the odd rocking guitar. Inject the name Rupert Hine as producer and stardom surely beckoned... or not. What happened? Perhaps Ansell was too clever. Hardy's England is a tale of the titular novelist suddenly appearing to a startled commuter opening his copy of Far From The Madding Crowd, while Indian Restaurant is a harder-edged tale of unemployment and the working man's dream. Not exactly standard New Romantic fare, but the times were lean and Ansell had his eyes open. Plenty of thought also went in the music, which is introvertedly danceable - if such a thing can be imagined - and amid an array of great melodies, Hardy's England sports a chorus that wouldn't have been out of place as a chant for the Barmy Army to belt out during Tests or as a BBC World Cup Anthem. Reissued on CD through Voiceprint, hosting a set of extra tracks (minus point - the track order of the original LP has been jostled about and is not as good), this is an album that was a bit too smart for its own good. However, fans of prime '80s synth-pop should have no trouble acknowledging its merits.

It's too easy, almost four decades after its original release, to forget just how distinctive Santana's debut LP sounded to most music fans in 1969. Yet the intervening years have done nothing to dilute the album's explosive power, or its revolutionary blend of musical styles, so often copied by later bands but seldom matched. Recorded over a matter of weeks in May '69 and released in late August, the album was an instant hit, but while the infectious first single Evil Ways (brought to the band by their ever-chart-savvy manager Bill Graham) was clearly a stab at the pop market, the rest of the album represents an audacious and inspired mix of blues-rock (Persuasion, You Just Don't Care), Jazz Fusion (Treat) and Afro-Latin stompers (Jingo, Savor) that astounded heads everywhere. As special as the first album is, though, the material on the second CD arguably constitutes the brightest jewels in the Legacy Edition crown - Santana's entire live set at a little affair called the Woodstock Music & Arts Festival, officially released in its entirety for the first time here. The band's scene-stealing appearance in front of the 250,000-plus crowd of stoned, barely-clad hippies, and the inclusion of their incendiary performance of Soul Sacrifice in the 1970 Woodstock film and albums, transformed them from a little-known Bay Area jam band (without a record to their name, in fact, as Santana was released shortly after the event), into platinum-selling stars before the year was out. The intensity of those live cuts contrasts markedly with several tracks taken from aborted album sessions in January, which seem timid compared to the music the group would be producing just a few months later. Together they paint a compelling portrait of just how far, and how quickly, the band had developed by the time they hit that famous stage on Max Yasgur's dairy farm, and cemented their place in musical history. Perhaps it was the effects of those whirlwind days that prompted a slightly confused Gregg Rolie to announce to the masses - "It's nice to be here in New York... are we... we are in New York?" after their opener Waiting. Or maybe it was just the brown acid.

Given that songs now float out in the cold electronic ether, untethered from their natural homes, the idea of treasuring an LP because it has a great opening track seems about as relevant to the modern world as sending important messages by fax and keeping the phone in the hall. But, if we're still allowed to cleave to such outmoded ideas, can I put forward Come Back To Me from Sammy Davis Jr./Buddy Rich's The Sounds of '66 as the most darned exciting way possible to kick off a vinyl long-player. The album was cut live at The Sands Lounge in Las Vegas in the early hours of the morning in May 1966 and finds the singer in bold and bullish mood. Prior to 1960's desegregation, black artists who played the Vegas venues - like Nat King Cole, Count Basie and Sammy - were still excluded from the hotels, casinos and restaurants. Davis was instrumental in breaking Vegas's colour bar and The Sound Of '66 is that of the valiant conqueror, albeit one with an almighty chip on his shoulder. However hard he tried, fellow Vegas "buddies" like Frank and Dino still regarded Sammy as a bit of a joke. The more Sammy tried to prove his worth, the more desperate he looked; while Frank bathed in the cool aquamarine light and Dino made it all look so drunkenly easy. But boldness, desperation and arrogance are the stuff of rock'n'roll and Come Back To Me kicks even before the track starts, with Sammy's sharp spoken-word introduction setting the early hours scene ("As I look at my watch now it's a quarter after five. In Las Vegas it is still swingin'") and setting conductor George Rhodes and drummer Buddy Rich free of the traps ("Go, George!"). He also tells us that "for the next ten or twelve sides" we should "just relax, sit down and swing with us," but there's fat chance of that as Rich gloriously bashes and wallops his way through What Now My Love, What Kind of Fool Am I and even Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead and Davis holds on tight, bellowing and barking over these smooth classics in a manner that can best be described as SLEAZY. Cut for Sinatra's own Reprise label, Sounds Of '66 sounds like a boot in Frank's face, a belting big band supper jazz ba-boom that is as far removed from the hipster now scene as you could possibly imagine and, for that reason, it also sounds gloriously transgressively wrong. It makes young people feel ill. Another reason to marvel at its out-of-the-past power.

One of the best uses of music in a movie I've seen in recent times was the deployment of Warren Zevon's Lawyers, Guns & Money during the credit sequence of Alex Gibney's recent Hunter S. Thompson documentary. How apt that a film charting the life and times of the shotgun-toting Dr. Gonzo should end with this tale of a wayward American youth "gambling in Havana" and "hiding in Honduras". Good friends for years, the pair shared a passion for what Zevon's one-time label-mate Tom Waits' referred to as "the lowside of the road". Guns, drugs, alcohol, women: they spent the '70s indulging in them all.

Zevon's eponymously titled Asylum debut peered into the life of the down-and-out in Los Angeles. It would quickly secure the then frantically boozing songwriter sizeable critical acclaim. *Excitable Boy, its leaner, meaner follow-up, took the party into the Billboard Top 10. Propelled by the howls of breakthrough single Werewolves Of London, EB sees Zevon revelling in the unsavoury personae he so often delights in adopting. A particularly nasty zenith is reached during the exuberant piano strides of the title track, in which the "excitable boy" rapes and kills "little Susie" before digging up her grave and "building a cage with her bones". Then there are the eerie verses of Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner - a militaristic hymn that sees the revenge-fuelled protagonist "still wandering through the night" happily decapitating all and sundry. Even when he reaches for the pretty ballads a shadow is briefly cast - witness Accidentally Like A Martyr's opening gambit: "The phone won't ring / And the sun refuses to shine / Never thought that I would pay so dearly / For what was already mine".

Perhaps it's all there in the artwork. When it came to assemble the cover, Zevon insisted that his headshot was touched-up to the nth-degree. His straggled mop of blonde hair brightened, his bad complexion concealed. Savage stories beneath soothing surfaces - they never sounded so good.

As the MOJO soundtracks reviewer I'm often asked (well, I have been asked) why I would want to listen to a piece of music once it's been severed from its companion film. Well, there's a bunch of reasons, of course: sometimes a soundtrack is an excuse for a composer or musician to experiment with a new style that works strangely well when removed from its betrothed; sometimes I like the nostalgic Proustian rush brought on by an old piece of film music; sometimes, as in this instance, the soundtrack is as close as I ever want to get to the film itself. Call me a meek Arnold Ridley stay-at-home but I don't want to watch Gaspar Noe's Irreversible, maybe the Wikipedia plot description will help to explain why. Why, even without the benefit of such an 'uncompromising' narrative, the film's soundtrack, by Daft Punk's Thomas Bangalter, possesses a lurching dystopian unhealthiness, the swirling electronic sickburp of clubland going wrong, teeth grinding on a cheap cocktail of silver filings and Nazi crank, and three of everything morphing together on the ever-moving mirrored ceiling: a kind of cross between this and this. UK editions added the sobbing, sobering adagio from Mahler's 9th and an excerpt from Beethoven's 7th but the soundtrack works best when you can hear it straight through, from the leaden sci-fi dirge of the title track to the nuclear wind of digital noise that is the end, via the bad-drugs filth rush of Outrage. The chances of getting me out to a club these days - unless it looks like this - are very slim and Bangalter's soundtrack has effectively become the vivid aural maggot that worms in my head every time the ludicrous suggestion arises.

In 1998 The Beta Band were largely the preserve of the kind of boys who worked in record shops, excitedly packing these hard-to-find-on-vinyl four-trackers into their one-armed rucksacks for an evening trading blows of indie one-up-manship at places like London's ICA. None more underground - and just how the fans liked it. But obscurity was not The Beta Band's objective, and when they finally called it a day after seven years the group cited the disappointing commercial return for their efforts. Listening to their first three EPs (subsequently compiled onto one CD) still lends support to that ambition. Their debut EP, Champion Versions, was mixed by the Verve's Nick McCabe and while the sound is endearingly naïve on all three records, the group's unselfconscious mix of styles - blues (Dog's Got A Bone), turntable clicks and hip-hop cut-ups (The House Song), folk (Dry The Rain) and Steve Mason's haunting, choral vocal (a deadpan Fleet Fox) - was peerless then and is still timeless now. Noel G was a fan (before he and Weller would endorse anyone with similar hair...), the music press loved them (though it was largely unreciprocated) but the wider world weren't ready for this shock of the new. As the mantric Dry The Rain put it on opening that first EP: "This is the definition of my life / Lying in bed in the sunlight / Choking on the vitamin tablet / The doctor gave in the hope of saving me." It's easy to imagine commercial success saving them these days (when if you can't claim at least three oxymoronic influences and a lifelong love of Afrobeat you're no-one) but a decade ago The Beta Band were just too far out to be reached.

Tyrone Davis started out as bluesman Freddie King's valet and, vocally, was in thrall to Bobby 'Blue' Bland, but he developed a style that hitched the Southern soul idiom to the arrangements, production and playing of Chicago soul. It was a North-South combination that often hit dazzling heights. The majority of Davis's best performances find him standing on the doorstep or working the phone, begging his woman, whom he's precipitately quit, to take him back. True, just as many of his songs celebrate love and constancy (eg. I'll Be Right Here on this album), but the more powerful and convincing storylines are those in which his narrator is an almost completely unreconstructed male facing down his demons, temptations and mistakes. His first hit, Can I Change My Mind, finds him walking out, waiting for his partner to call him back, as she's done many times before. This time she doesn't. It's a perfect short story. Turn Back The Hands Of Time, his biggest hit (Number 3 US Pop) and title track of his second album, again finds him regretting that hasty departure, those repeated infractions. He rarely finds the grass is greener. Let Me Back In also finds him "standing here knockin', baby, please let me in" after the briefest fling has ended with the 'other woman' very quickly deciding she doesn't want him after all. Outstanding tracks from the first half of the '70s pepper his time on the Brunswick subsidiary, so buy 2-CD set The Dakar Records A's and B's: The Hit Singles, to get the full picture. That way you'll hear Was I Just A Fool (not on Turn Back...), beautifully poised singing with complete understanding of and feeling for the lyric. Not everything on this album is falsehood, gloom and pleading. On easy-grinding dancer Love Bones he begs his boss to cut down on the overtime so he can "get on home to check my love bones". On which note, as the office clock chimes 6, I must be going.

"You've heard songs about pub rock, oral sex and junkies," emotes solitary man Lawrence over frosty orch-synth whooshes on this album's last song. Pardon? But he isn't bluffing; The Great Pub Rock Revival, Grandad's False Teeth and Glue And Smack, are, respectively, about those very same aberrant subjects. Tough to carry off such tunes if you were Richard Ashcroft, for example. But being ex-Felt chief Lawrence, they amount to subtly blended flavours of transgression, insight and ridiculousness that make for an oddly affecting album of barbed jokes, vertiginous despair, and, yes, romance. Revisiting the glam-bovver template of 1992's Back In Denim with extra synthesizers and programmed drums, at 18 tracks there are possibly too many songs here, though standouts include mockney-mocking pub piano grotesque Job Centre, juvenile punk memoir Jane Suck Died In '77 and the rubbery Brumburger, with its dark vacuities and references to abortion. Through it all Denim's "Brummie Lou Reed" singer, who once said, "Denim is really about saying 'no' to everything", sounds completely sincere. Curious to think that some people, not least his record label, thought that he was about to sell some records now that Britpop was here. Instead he would remain the connoisseur's choice, and retired to the fringes where he made music like this, and where a strange myth continues to grow.

Call it what you want: post-punk, nascent indie - Mark E. Smith was hating it as early as 1979. It was a scene, it implied shared values, and Smith pronounced them bogus. In this scabrous, sub-lo-fi live album's keynote address, Cary Grant's Wedding, he hilariously equates the old Hollywood celeb system with the rise of "new wave personalities": "Cary Grant, slaughterer of innocents / Add on 30 years, it's Jake Burns"

That Smith could be bothered to set up the mostly harmless Stiff Little Fingers frontman for such a put-down (what about Geldof, or Sting?) is typical of his unique perversity; with fellow travellers like Smith on the post-punk "scene", who needed proper enemies? For this reason alone, Totale's Turns would be a fascinating instalment of Fallness, sharing with The Stooges' Metallic KO whatever's the inverse of a communion with an audience. The sleevenote, by Smith nom de plume Roman Totale XVIII, complains of an "80% disco weekend mating" crowd at the Doncaster show contained herein, an assessment underlined by the mute Northern opposition and slightly stunned dribbles of applause which pass for audience response. But what kind of audience did Smith want? Not punks: "Are you doing what you did two years ago?" he sneers, presumably at a gobber. "Well, don't make a career out of it." Not studenty post-punk types spouting the "left wing tirades" he spears in Fiery Jack. Nor the Lambert & Butler-wreathed "death-circuit" zombies of the Working Men's Clubs.

Say what you like about Smith: he's an equal-opportunities hater, and when it informs the music, as it does throughout the evil tension-fug of Totale's Turns, it has a transcendent quality. Behind him, the Hanley-Riley-Scanlon-Leigh line-up are like a serrated hunting knife sawing through sheets of aluminium. But palpably, sweatily nervous, too, knowing their best will not be good enough for Smith and their worst - cf. drummer Mike Leigh's overambitious tom rolls in No Xmas For John Quays - will be rewarded with a public flogging (Smith: "Will you fucking get it together instead of showing off?").

It was a hell of a strange way to announce a new career with a new label. Perhaps Smith was saying that a soft Southern label would not change The Fall, that he hadn't bought into the budget-buy mini-star-worship creeping back into British rock and if he must air The Fall's dirty linen to prove it, then he would. As he concludes in New Puritan, a terrifying squiggle of new-beat-poet mental illness, included here in spectral home-demo form, "It's only music, John." But as Totales Turns continues to prove, in all its weird and hostile complexity, it is and it isn't.

From the shadowy backstreets of Manhattan's urban sprawl to the exalted outer limits of spiritual salvation, The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady delivers a mammoth emotional wallop that runs the gamut from grime to glory. Through its six parts, Mingus and his 11 hotshot players conjure images of creeping hobos, fawning sophisticates, domestic loneliness and a mind on fire. Born in Arizona and raised in Watts, Mingus found his voice on the double bass, but like his hero Duke Ellington he was equally at home as a band leader and composer. An outspoken, volatile character prone to depression, he spent a spell in the late-'50s in New York's Bellevue psychiatric hospital, before delivering this - his emotional meltdown set to music. A pressure cooker of queasy rhythms and squawking sax solos, TBSATSL swings between Ellingtonian grace and jam session spontaneity. Everywhere - even behind Track C's sweet piano melody, played by the man himself - there lurks the bristling underdog, ready to take on a world that has done nothing but spit in his face. In fact, there's so much going on in here that Mingus turned to the only person he could trust to make sense of it all - his psychiatrist. "He tries to tell people he is in great pain and anguish because he loves," wrote Dr Edmund Pollock in his original sleevenote. "His music is a call for acceptance, respect, love understanding, fellowship, freedom - a plea to change the evil in man and to end the hatred." Suffice to say, there's no easy way in to this album (for that look to the equally brilliant Mingus Ah Um). But if you consider yourself a thrill seeker, lift the lid on TBSATSL and face the hurricane head on.

In 1992, it emerged that Tin Machine was a means to an end for David Bowie. As a method of working, it was as prescribed as the Oblique Strategy cards laid down by Brian Eno during the making of the late-'70s series of Low, Heroes and Lodger. It was a creative process to focus Bowie's attention on something other than the recording of another disappointing pop album to follow Tonight and Never Let Me Down, and to that end, it worked. A relatively busy 10-year period then ensued, starting with the release of Black Tie White Noise (imagine a Young Americans follow-up, minus the cocaine) and this unusual and low-key release, commissioned for the BBC's adaptation of Hanif Kureishi's novel, for which Bowie teamed up with multi-instrumentalist Erdal Kizilcay.

Beyond the sighing title track/theme (check out a young Steven Mackintosh, and his unconvincing hair), the album appeals to Bowie fans smitten with the experimental studio fiddling of the late '70s. Sex And The Church is a minimalist soundscape built on a platform of early-'90s house and treated spoken word vocals. South Horizon and The Mysteries are instrumentals reminiscent of Low, with Bowie commenting in the sleeve notes that an improvisational approach was taken, and all faders muted on all tracks bar the one being recorded. Dead Against It is back to the stripped-down rock approach of Tin Machine, and in terms of songwriting, is probably the highlight of the album.

Also included is the first recording of Strangers When We Meet, which in its re-recorded form (on the 1.Outside album), went on to become a firm favourite with Bowie's 1990's alt.rock set of fans. In fact the Eno-esque instrumental Ian Fish, U.K. Heir is the only point where you really start to wonder what exactly Dave was on. So minimalist, there's almost no music - just a period of static, white noise, and some lonely bass synth notes for company. There may come a day when I understand how this fits into the wider scheme of things, but it hasn't happened yet.

The Buddha Of Suburbia was deleted shortly after issue, and owing to its experimental sound and low-profile release, was never a commercial success. Yet fans of art-Bowie agree that this is among his very best albums, with a spirit of diversity, recession and urgency which has 'early '90s Britain' written all over it. Incredible stuff.

In the music scene of 1975, R&B believers Dr Feelgood's declaration that their first album was in Mono was met with confusion from some longhaired, mellow quarters. But simplifying and cutting down on fat were central ideas to these proto-punk pub rock legends, who came out of Canvey Island, looked like a group formed by Inspector Regan from The Sweeney and were named for the song by New Orleans' handsome brute Piano Red. Like a more malignant, Essex version of the early Rolling Stones, they reimagined US jukebox music with soulful The More I Give, the New Orleans nearly-ska Twenty Yards Behind and the speedy Bo Diddley of I Don't Mind, while standouts include the no-messing Roxette and the breakneck, hunted All Through The City, which is actually faster than the live version on the Stupidity LP (with its lyrics "Watch the towers burning... the sky is full of aeroplanes" it sounds so sinister post-9/11). It's advisable to check live film of the band, too, where rhythm-lead guitarist Wilko Johnson jerks and stares his way across the stage while wolfish vocalist Lee Brilleaux growls, glowers and blows his gob iron. Wilko left the Feelgoods rather pointlessly in 1977, though they'd have their biggest chart success after he'd gone. Roll on Oil City Confidential, Julien Temple's film about this most amazing of groups.

I'm currently reading The Rest Is Noise, the multi award-winning history of twentieth century classical music from always-interesting New Yorker music critic, Alex Ross; and I'm already a teensy bit disappointed. Ross is a great writer and his ability to convey the beauty and strangeness of such modern 'difficult' works as John Adams' Death Of Klinghoffer or Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel has resulted in rather more money being spent on CDs every week than should really be decent for someone who, you know, gets everything for free anyway. So maybe I was expecting something more than a whistle-stop tour of the 20th Century's big names (Sibelius, Britten, Messiaen etc) in The Rest Is Noise. When I opened the book I looked for lesser, weirder composer guys like Toru Takemitsu, Salvatore Sciarrino and this fellow, Giacinto Scelsi. Sciarrino isn't in it and Takemitsu and Scelsi get a paragraph a piece, both of which are wiki-lite in detail. Fine if there's really nothing to say, but Ross has written at length about Scelsi in the past and why wouldn't newcomers to this troublesome classical world want to know about a castle-dwelling playboy Italian count who was friends with Schoenberg, Cocteau and Virginia Woolf, and, following a post-war crack-up, became a committed Buddhist, refusing to be interviewed or photographed, choosing instead to identify himself by a line under a circle, a symbol of eternal bliss.

The works on Natura Renovatur were assembled between 1956 and 1970, after Scelsi had rejected received notions of composition in favour of taped sessions of automatic writing and trance states, subjecting his collaborator and cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, to extended ondiola improvisations and elaborate tales of an Asian tribe who could "hunt birds by launching sound". The end result is a series of beautifully sinister one-note variations on a theme of near-stillness, the sound of something immeasurable moving towards you, very slowly, through the air, like a vast, inevitable, yet blissful catastrophe. Maybe Scelsi will make it into the book of Ross's collected New Yorker articles, a work that will doubtlessly be more idiosyncratic, personal and passionate than The Rest Is Noise, and closer in spirit to the music Ross is writing about, after all.

When Wire convened (or rather de-convened, of which more later) to record their third album for Harvest, they were not the united front that had annexed art-punk all for their very own with their scabrous 1977 debut, Pink Flag, and the following year's cubist-pop masterpiece Chairs Missing. Buying themselves onto a tour with Roxy Music hadn't helped, and the vision of this once-vital group reduced to the Ferry-centric lounge lizardry of Manifesto had sown more seeds of existential discomfort. Wire's way of working had become more fractured, too, alienated from itself, and yet the resultant dislocation and froideur made for thrilling avant-pop. Though Wire worked in shifts, The White Album this ain't, and the band's personalities are seen in fascinating combinations, perfectly encapsulated in the bookish new wave of Map Ref. 41°N 93°W, where Graham Lewis's Borgesian lyric ("a deep breath of submission had begun") is artfully shoehorned into an almost sprightly melody and typical art-urchin vocal by Colin Newman. Elsewhere, the gothic toll of Lewis's I Should Have Known Better ("I haven't found a measure yet to / Calibrate my displeasure yet") defines the uneasy tone (what on earth were they reading) while faint echoes of Bowie-Eno, Pete Brown and Alex Harvey seem to call time on the golden decade of British art rock. 154 held a mirror up to life, then broke it, and while the press reviews sounded a note of universal acclamation, it was also the death knell of Wire's fecund first phase. They would be back, but changed.

"I'm doing non-hypnotic music to break up the catatonic state," once said Don Van Vliet, 20th Century musical visionary and shaman of avant-garde sound. A big, bolshie bear of a man with a penchant for high-voltage blues, unruly rhythms and baffling wordplay, Beefheart's music has polarised listeners from the very start. With the rotating personnel of the Magic Band behind him, the Captain shattered the 12-bar structures his heroes (Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker) adhered to, re-assembling the base elements into a unnerving meld of key-jumping guitar runs and free-jazz freak-outs. The sprawling Trout Mask Replica is often held as his masterpiece, but ...Decals..., its 1970 follow-up, is a far more concentrated burst of Beefheartian brilliance. Giving the record its creeping sense of anxiety are the marimba runs of Art Tripp who leads us into the likes of The Clouds Are Full Of Wine (Not Whiskey Or Rye) with foreboding thunks. Straight grooves are abandoned in favour of tense, trebly guitar snaps (courtesy of Zoot Horn Rollo) that give his wild beatnik flourishes (Mama, mama, here come Doctor Dark / Horse clippin', clappin' 'n his ol' hooves makin' sparks) a sense of looming danger - like some salivating monster emerging from a drain clutching a bunch of John Coltrane records. It's also very funny (witness the opening gambit of the title track: "Rather than I want to hold your hand / I wanna swallow you whole / 'n I wanna lick you everywhere it's pink / 'n everywhere you think / Whole kit 'n kaboodle 'n the kitchen sink"). If there was ever an album that needed a prompt CD reissue, it's this one. What are you waiting for record label people? Hell, it's even got its own pre-prepared advertisement!

That is, until part four of the erm, trilogy, Life, followed posthumously in 2004. But since Cash's life was so informed by love, God and murder let's assume it's what he would have wanted. All the compilations in this series are great; compiled by Cash himself from his pre-Rick Rubin years with Sun, Columbia and Mercury and wonderfully annotated with notes by Cash and in the case of Love also by June Carter Cash, who reflects so touchingly on the couple's now famous introduction by Elvis Presley, their marriage and lifetime together, only the hardest heart could fail to be moved. The songs themselves amply demonstrate Cash's lightness of touch with a love song, despite his obvious fervour for the subject. Opening with the Sun classic I Walk The Line, with its most wonderful, non-syrupy declaration of commitment: "because you're mine, I walk the line". That line may have blurred on occasions during Cash's lifetime but no-one listening to him sing could doubt his strength of feeling. From there the set is non-chronological, following its thematic thread through familiar classics (Ring of Fire, I Still Miss Someone) and the less well-known, spanning 1956 to 1996 and turning up a few gems on the way. Oh What a Dream (from The Fabulous Johnny Cash, 1959), in which Johnny falls for a divine vision in a dream before meeting his real life angel back on earth, is both funny and romantic. "Sir, I'll have you know / I met you just a while ago / You're welcome for to sit / But calm yourself a bit!" implores the celestial one, hilariously. Now available as a box with its three metaphysically themed companions, Love is testament to the warmth, humour and nobility Cash showed all his subjects, and most lovingly his fabulous wife, June.

"We hadn't even proper-sounding tapes of them ourselves, except for a few dire bootlegs that we bought at our concerts," said Morrissey of the songs The Smiths recorded for John Peel and David Jensen's radio shows in 1983. So in November 1984, they collected them on Hatful Of Hollow with some singles and B-sides, and sold it in a gatefold sleeve for £3.99. Bargain! Consequently, their debut LP, released just nine months earlier, is in some quarters considered an inferior introduction to this unique band, and comparing the versions of Reel Around The Fountain or You've Got Everything Now, it's not hard to see why. Natural sounding and emotionally charged, they seem to be free of The Smiths' studio-tanned desire to leave nothing to chance, and show a band in such possession of their powers they could capture the definitive takes of songs working against the clock at a BBC studio. The guitar-and-voice Back To The Old House, for example has a bereft majesty that its later, full-band arrangement lacks, while, slotted between Peel versions of Handsome Devil and Still Ill, the out-of-body-experience that is How Soon Is Now? is revealed as one of the group's key recordings, rather than the 12" single extra it started life as. A mere three months later the group released the also-fabulous Meat is Murder LP, but then, magic was a common thing for The Smiths.

The badinage between Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in the brand new MOJO had us thumbing through the record shelves to reacquaint ourselves with the astonishing catalogue of this prolific and consistent team of songwriter/producers. Weaving through an improbably varied roster, we lit on this 1962 album. A former Drifters' lead singer blessed with a wonderful baritone rivalled in soul circles only by Levi Stubbs, Ben E. King was also a talented songwriter in his own right back in the day, when albums weren't recorded as albums but were collections of hits with assorted B-sides, covers and material that didn't quite cut it on 45. Still, this third solo album drips with class from Stan Applebaum's sophisticated charts and song credits for Leiber, Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun, Phil Spector, Doc Pomus, Mort Shuman, Gerry Goffin and Carole King to the baion beat that gave distinctive Latin American sway to their productions at this time. Perhaps the session of October 27, 1960 best epitomises how times have changed. First they taped Leiber & Spector's Spanish Harlem, so good it was in the shops and the charts by January. Then they recorded Pomus & Spector's First Taste Of Love, a smaller hit, and Young Boy Blues, and still had time left before the end of the session. Did Ben have any work in progress? Only a song he was reworking for The Drifters. They ran it through, Leiber & Stoller suggested some changes and the take was nailed before the end of the session. And that's how Stand By Me was made. Apologies for sounding so sour but in 2009, despite unimaginable advances in technology, it's impossible to conceive of two classic songs as durable and inspiring as Spanish Harlem and Stand By Me being committed to tape in four months let alone four hours. Other favourites here: the title track, a fairly blatant rewriting of Stand By Me (but everyone from Holland-Dozier-Holland to Lennon & McCartney recognised the sense in recycling a good idea) and On The Horizon, a hot, hazy incantation as Ben, like Odysseus on his wanderings gazing at a passing vessel, dreams of golden ships, love and rescue.

Now sadly 'on ice' Comets On Fire's constituent parts have become so successful the original psych rock monster feels like something of a supergroup. Guitarist Ben Chasny is now free to concentrate on his luminous, lysergic folk outfit Six Organs Of Admittance, while drummer Utrillo Kusher has just released a second Colossal Yes album and co-founding guitarist Ethan Miller's rootsier Howlin' Rain have made two great albums in one chicken shack (or something like that...). Adding Chasny to Comets' original four-piece in 2003 ushered the group away from the acid-fried, Californian jam band party scene towards the Sub Pop label and bona fide killer rock group status in just one LP (2004's whopping Blue Cathedral). But this, its 2006 follow-up, is their masterpiece. There are enough freaked-out, pummelling riff rockers to get lost in (Dogwood Rust, Holy Teeth) but also impressive diversions into jazz and piano blues (Jaybird and Lucifer's Memory respectively). Always key to the group's sound, Noel Harmonson and his vintage Echoplex effects exercise enough restraint so as to render the vocals on Lucifer's Memory and Hatched Upon The Age perfectly audible, prompting one senior MOJO editor to ask: "Is it wrong to like them best when they sound most like The Black Crowes?" No, it is not. And if the spirit of Canned Heat's Blind Owl Wilson should visit during the snake-hipped, erotic groove of Sour Smoke, then go with that too, dude.

Not to be confused with Jimmy Rodgers the father of country music, Jimmy without a 'd' is one of the forgotten heroes of Chicago blues, a killer rhythm guitarist with Muddy Waters' Headhunters and a slurry-smooth blues vocalist in his own right, adept at every shade of urban blues and R&B, from wine-buzzed come-ons (You're The One) to lit-up liquor-stomps (the peerless Sloppy Drunk, covered by everyone from BB King and Little Walter to The Black Crowes and ZZ Top). Backed on this collection by his own variation of Waters' Headhunters (Little Walter on harmonica, Otis Spann on piano, Willie Dixon on bass, Elgin Evans on drums and Waters himself on guitar), Rogers is all about the rhythm, and his sides betray a sophistication (barroom vocal harmonies and twin-guitar lines interlocking with Eddie Ware's moody boogie piano) that the blues copyists of this world will be forever ignorant of. Rogers effectively retired from music in the 1960s, running a clothing store that burned down in the rioting that followed Martin Luther King's assassination. He returned to the studio in 1972 to cut an album for Leon Russell's Shelter label in 1972 but this is the one to track down and, crazily, the CD currently goes for nearly £40 on Amazon. If ever a blues album needed a remastered reissue with extra tracks, it's this one.

Talking Heads frontman and writer David Byrne told producer Brian Eno that their third LP was "music to do housework to". Bearing in mind this album has a song called Paper, which equates paper with romance, who knows what metaphors might be gleaned from hoovering or doing the laundry? This kind of disengaged reasoning, where seemingly unconnected phenomena become so many connecting synapses, is all over Fear Of Music, which came in a sleeve embossed with the pattern of stainless steel flooring. But if it can be oblique and nervy - see how opener I Zimbra places gibberish verbiage by Dada poet Hugo Ball within a dense Afro-rhythm-a-thon - there's a sense of vitality and even fun in this whistle-able, propellant music that somehow seems milliseconds out of sync with itself. There are some top pop moments; Life During Wartime manages to sound mundane and dangerous, and Cities sees Byrne barking like a dog; the sweetly sad Heaven, meanwhile, makes eternal life sound dead boring as "a place where nothing ever happens." The feverish rhythms and outré psych-states would find more commercial expression on 1980's Remain In Light, but to play music as strange as this and still get paying customers is still a thing of wonder.

Although Darlene Love was arguably his best and most versatile singer, no group better epitomised Phil Spector’s grasp of the pop record than The Ronettes. With lead singer Veronica Bennett (who became Ronnie Spector) the focus at both ends of the teenage emotional spectrum – in fact her interpretations of boundless optimism and hopeless despair were not so very far apart – and supported by the straightahead harmonies of her elder sister Estelle and cousin Nedra Talley, they sat atop producer Spector’s enormous productions. Actually, the lack of emotional weight in the vocals add to the effect of The Ronettes’ pop records. The Number 4 UK hit Be My Baby, Baby, I Love You, (The Best Part Of) Breakin’ Up, Do I Love You and the outstanding Walking In The Rain, are all on this one hard-to-find album (or you can hear them on the third recommendation below). On the original album, a version of Ray Charles’ What’d I Say does not sit well with the group, and their Chapel Of Love is a better cover. But with four Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry/Spector songs, two Cynthia Weil/Barry Mann/Spector tracks and three from Vini Poncia/Pete Andreoli/Spector, the album is a masterclass in Brill Building pop songwriting and Spector production. Also, the image. Clearly, these girls were not exposed to the classes in deportment or lessons in presentation favoured by other well-known hit factories of the day. But over 40 years later, chez Ronettes is plainly where Amy Winehouse found her best-known look (this one, not this one). Musically, we’d be intrigued to hear her reinvent any one of the above-named hits.

In this current age of electronic downloads and free stuff, where kids listen to autotuned R&B through tinfoil speakers secreted in the back of their megapixel phones, and many upstanding music fans seem happy with the middle-aged club-bathroom mitherings of this man and his band you have to admire any modern artist who can still make the full-length CD album a thing of beauty, mystery and carefully-crafted wonder. Refusing to give their proper names and purporting to hail from the Kingdom of Wessex, brothers ‘Tim and Roo Farthing’, aka “operatives A & B”, have, since 2004, been recording haunted pastoral soundtracks born of fabricated, fantastical narratives, enthralling sound symphonies that realign our understanding of the strange, shuttered world beyond the everyday. Their forthcoming release, The House On The Causeway, was purportedly recorded in a permanently fog-shrouded house at the end of a man-made granite promontory off the Dorset coastline (between Black Ven and Golden Cap, walking fans), while its Lovecraftian predecessor, 2006’s Styne Vallis, told of the legend of a Wessex town flooded in 1970 to make way for a reservoir, a reservoir that only ever served the surrounding area with grey, stagnant water. This is where it all started, a disarmingly delicate arrangement of glockenspiel, electronica, acoustic guitar, harmonium, glass harmonica, found sounds and strange ice-hung vocals that gradually shift, change and darken as the ‘microphone’ is cast down into the earth, coming upon everything from Buried Chandelier (416 metres) to A Layer Of Clay (897 metres) and, finally, the Glassworks (1 mile). Sure, if all you ask of non-mainstream music is that it smells a bit and does this then Reigns might all sound a bit, well, fancy, but they are currently making modern ‘underground’ music with a Janus-like awareness of the past and the future, tiny little CDs rich with ambition, invention and a novelistic imagination. I’ll still have them long after I’ve got rid of all that turgid guitar rock rebellion.

Let’s be honest, Barbados is not renowned as a hotbed of psychedelic hard rock. Hence, in 1968 guitarist/frontman Michael Bishop and drummer Errol Bradshaw swapped Caribbean climes for the decidedly more gloomy environs of Wolverhampton where they formed the awfully named Luv Machine. Grafting their way to equal billing with the likes of Elton John and Uriah Heep at London’s Marquee, they secured a deal with Polydor, recording this sole effort before splitting on the eve of its release in January ’71. Virtually non-existent sales of the album followed (unaided as it was by the one of the worst album sleeves of all-time – an un-PC depiction of a lady’s legs akimbo, grafted on to a record player), resulting in an LP that has long been the sole preserve of those flush enough to shell out in excess of 250 pounds for a copy.

Three years ago, however, the album itself was repackaged (thankfully in a different sleeve) and reissued by Rise Above Relics – the retro imprint set up by Cathedral frontman Lee Dorrian. An avid record collector himself, Dorrian’s desire to see this album back in print is down to the fact that, for all its post-Hendrix, soulful hard rock charm, this 12-tracker boasts the kind of neo-punk-oid appeal that animates the most enduring work of ‘70s stalwarts like The Groundhogs and The Edgar Broughton Band. If the likes of the Sabbath-gone-soul groove of Witches Wand, the psychedelic jumble of It’s Amazing and the sneering Portrait In Disgust anchor the band’s weightier credentials, the Traffic-type balladry of Reminiscing is clearly a stab at a single that never was. The album’s highlight however is the Staples Singers-on-steroids groove of Happy Children – a track that almost single-handedly makes this album worth the price of admission and which will have fans of MOJO’s Heavy Nuggets compilation flapping their flares in unbridled approbation.

“Deep Soul records will be just what their name implies,” read the 1969 manifesto of the late Dave Godin’s then-new label: “non-commercial recordings, but recordings which are of such sterling quality it would be a sad loss to the artistic development of the whole soul scene not to make them available to the minority who are hip enough to appreciate them now and not at some indefinite date in the future.” In the end, the imprint only proffered six singles, but Godin’s unending passion for the sanctified sounds of the American South has ensured the sub-genre of Deep Soul – a place where gospel holler meets R&B sass - remains a refuge for troubled minds and broken hearts to this very day. Of the four brilliant volumes of rarities and classics compiled by Godin and released on the Kent Soul label, this is the one I’ve found myself returning to the most.

Among tried and tested humdingers from Bobby Womack, Irma Thomas and James Brown lie unearthed gems from Toussaint McCall (I’m Undecided), Rozetta Johnson (Who Are You Gonna Love (Your Woman Or Your Wife)) and Robert Ramsey (Like It Stands) – the latter propelled by a Stax-esque groove that would sit happily among Booker T. & The MG’s most celebrated arrangements. Here are tales of the down-and-out and the emotionally scarred; people whose spirits may be smashed, but somehow, through the phalanx of horns, the country-twang of the guitar and the testifying power of the vocals, can still lift themselves out the darkness (check out the mournful strains of Doris Duke’s He’s Gone for a real wallop of heavy drama). From Etta James to Rick James, the gritty side of soul doesn’t get much better than this.

The term “shoegazing” was allegedly coined* to describe an early Moose gig (vocalist Russell Yates had his lyrics taped to the floor; guitarist K.J. “Moose” McKillop was hypnotised by his stomp boxes) but it was a “style” the band had already moved beyond by the time their debut album, …XYZ, emerged in 1991. The sophisticated, country-flecked indie pop of that record’s exquisite Little Bird pointed the way to a genteel hybrid – recalling Felt’s early ’80s attempts to rehabilitate ’60s West Coast paradigms, but stirring a soupçon of country and Burt Bacharach into the mix. It got them dropped by Virgin-funded “mindie” (major-indie, keep up!) Hut, but stood them in good stead for their 1994 follow-up, which happily aped the first even down to the collage cover art. The whole thing is like rolling through bluebells, ever so faintly aware of the absurd cheesiness of the scene (well that’s what Meringue’s “badabadabaaa”s are saying to me), drunk on skippy, syncopated acoustic guitars, marimbas, flutes and dreamy, Cocteaus-lite atmospheres, with the same impossible hipstress fantasy figure that haunts all post-punk fey-pop. In the middle, presiding like a pop emperor who knows he’s the shiznit, sits I Wanted To See You To See If I Wanted You, Moose’s best ever song, and UK pop’s best entry in the Forever Changes Emulation Olympics. Better than its title, if such a thing can be imagined.

*In Sounds magazine, reckons Wikipedia. Others say NME. Anyone know for sure?

Opening with his blood-warm, wailing take on Leonard Bernstein’s Somewhere, Blue Valentine is generally acknowledged to be the easier of Waits’ gutterside Asylum years recordings. In a good way. Released as our jazz cool barfly was on the cusp of launching parallel careers in acting and film composition, it’s an album of tuneful arrangements (strings, horn, piano and guitar added to his canon) and strong narratives, populated by his by-now familiar parade of grubby hoodlums, broken-hearted hookers and old soaks with sourmash voices and bad luck stories. And yet it’s Waits at his most romantic too. The ill-fated tryst in Red Shoes By The Drugstore (“And it’s Christmas Eve / In a sad café / When the moon gets this way”) is positively uplifting by his standards. Over on Kentucky Avenue our protagonist promises “I’ll steal a hacksaw from my dad / And we’ll cut the braces off your legs / And we’ll bury them in the cornfield.” And if that’s too much corn for you (I well up just thinking about it…) then move along to the album’s closing title track, its masterpiece, with Tom accompanying himself on guitar, tortured by regret and his “blind and broken heart” - the most poignant valentine since Charlie Brown’s.

Bill Callahan’s latest record, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, is a rare bird indeed – one of those albums that unites the MOJO office in a communal swoon of awe. It’s also sent us spinning back through the Callahan back catalogue to this exquisite combination of deft lyrical conceits and beautiful chamber-rock arrangements by Jim O’Rourke. Then dallying with Cat Power (hence the moggie/lightning sleeve art, say indie romance rune-readers) Callahan turns in aching meditations on the boy-girl thing – with Held (“For the first time in my life / I am moving away… From within the reach of me”) a simple, wise declaration of love-as-soul-repair – atop his usual agglomeration of bursting-flashbulb word-images, our favourite here being the allusion to “the type of memories / That turn your bones to glass”. Callahan’s sad, dry, arresting baritone is somehow diffidently in-your-face (well, you try it) and O’Rourke’s touches (I’m imagining the disarming intervention of the Chicago Children’s Choir on Hit The Ground Running is his work) constantly tasteful-yet-surprising. Take a dip here and the ultimate reward is River Guard: the most empathetic rock song about a guy supervising swimming convicts ever.

By the early ’70s The Heptones were eight years old and had recorded with Coxsone Dodd, Joe Gibbs, Harry J, Niney The Observer and many others. Their leader, Leroy Sibbles had established his name as an esteemed session bassist and arranger for Studio One and the band had made a name for themselves at the forefront of a mellow, spacier, bass-led rock-steady sound. Then, in 1973 Sibbles emigrated to Canada to become a pop star. It was, he said “the worst thing that I ever did… I was trying my best to keep up as much as I could, but I lost touch with what was happening here in Jamaica." Despite cutting several decent albums for Pete Weston's Micron label Sibbles felt the need to reconnect with his Jamaican roots. Signing with Island, The Heptones recorded the now legendary Party Time album with Lee Perry. Released a year earlier however, and regularly overlooked, is this lazily mellow exercise in reggae reconnection. Sibbles’ decision to re-cover such Heptones classics as Fatty Fatty, Mama Say and Book of Rules, polishing the rock-steady with sweet Farfisa, soul guitar, sax and string arrangements, alienated many irate irie-ists. However, the weird mix of Sibbles’ slightly sinister echoed diction with this smooth production and lyrics like I’ve Got The Handle (“I’ve got the handle, baby / you’ve got the blade / So you don’t try to fight me girl / ’cos you’ll need first aid”), lends Night Food an eerie glow, where something wicked lurks behind the palm trees. The perfect summer barbeque CD, it also works pretty well when the shadows grow long on the lawn and the sky turns black and orange, or when heavy snow bounces the sodium glow of street lamps back into the night-time front room.

With its sprightly Latin rhythm, yakkety saxophone, democratic handclaps and
join-in-able lyric, Tequila is an evergreen standard of novelty booze songs.
When this b-side got flipped and charted big in 1958, common sense dictated
that session aces The Champs should make a quick album that sounded like it.
This is where it could have got complicated, as Tequila composer and sax man
Danny Flores had quit soon after the hit, though he’s still there on the
formation riding sleeve. But pros that they were, a reconstituted Champs,
led by guitarist Dave Burgess with Jimmy Seals on sax and Dash Crofts on
drums (later to find fame as Seals & Crofts in the ’70s), got down to
business with an album of sock hop rhythm and bluesers with yet more blaring
saxes and Duane Eddy-ish guitars. Gimmickily referencing trains, Mexico and
robots - it was the late ’50s after all – they’re loose and spontaneous,
not obviously delinquent but perhaps a little too lively for comfort, as on
the fab dive bar piano on Train To Nowhere, Tequila’s downgraded a-side. But
if it can exist without earnest evaluation – see how the band go into
default ballroom mode with the Somewhere Over The Rainbow-like I’ll Be There
– it still captures the daffy excitement of one afternoon fifty-odd years
ago.

Joe Bussard has been collecting records for the last 50 years. To date, he’s amassed over 25,000 supreme vinyl specimens of old-time folk, blues, country, gospel and jazz. His Maryland basement acts as an unrivalled library of American roots music widely regarded as the finest collection of its kind in the world. In 2003, Bussard was persuaded by the Old Hat label to compile some of his favourite shellac discs onto (whisper it) CD. The result was this 24-track compilation. Anyone who’s seen Desperate Man Blues – the 2003 film documenting his quest – will be familiar with this man’s infectious, jittering enthusiasm. A mean guitar/mandolin player himself, the cigar-chomping perma-grinning Bussard lives these sides every time he puts the needle to the record. Down In The Basement’s cornucopia of country-blues, string band zingers, hot jazz and southern pastorals spans 11 years (1926-37) and, with its cast of characters from across the States, a hundred lifetimes. From The Dixon Brothers spectral, terrifying School House Fire to the shimmying horns of Fess Williams’ Hot Town, these songs act as a passport back to the monochrome trials of Depression-era America. And it’s not only super rare one-offs; cuts by Blind Blake, Uncle Dave Macon and Gene Autry sit happily among such unearthed gems as Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull’s Original Stack O’Lee Blues (Bussard owns the only original copy of the latter). Through the crackle and hum of the record player, here is the sound of working folk facing each day head on. And thanks to likes of Joe Bussard, their stories will always sound best at 78rpm.

In a very real sense, this Disc Of The Day is random. Not in the bastardised ‘yoof’ understanding of the word (currently translating as ‘unlikely’, or ‘weird’) but in the sense that whenever my iPod is set to ‘shuffle’ it always seems to favour the Pixies’ paradigm-shifting second album. That a seemingly rational piece of hardware should have begun to share my entirely emotional connection to this record seems extraordinary (unless you believe in something like Cosmic Ordering, then it’s probably to be expected) but then, this is a record that changed our view of how hard rock could sound and a generation of bands from Nirvana and beyond would ape it’s quiet/loud dynamic and economic delivery. Following the raw power of 1988’s Albini produced Surfer Rosa, Doolittle was a relatively sophisticated sonic big sister who benefited from both the disciplined technical assistance of Gil Norton and from the fact that Black Francis was enjoying an unsurpassed creative purple patch and a briefly fizzing personal chemistry with bassist/singer Kim Deal. The taut thrills of songs like Dead and Tame, or grand theatrics on Debaser or Monkey Gone To Heaven sound brilliant in isolation (ie. on shuffle) but together they make a unique, unsurpassed whole. One that brims with ideas and cryptic lyrical kinks: violence, longing and most favoured by my Nano, the carnal creepyness of Number 13 Baby (“Six foot girl gonna sweat when she dig”). Perhaps technology really is evolving?

Given his recent high profile and appearance on Folk America, there has been much chattering on the blogosphere of late as to whether Mr. Seasick Steve is, you know, a genuine hobo or no different from say, this guy who once sat by a railroad and saw a train going by and thought he’d write a song about it, or this guy, working that tramp angle for all it’s got. Those who feel somewhat soiled by the accusations levelled at Mr Steve and feel the need to drink deep of the rusty soup-tin of gas town authenticity should check out the abstract raga pluckings of Eddie "One String" Jones. Jones was discovered on LA's Skid Row in 1960, carrying a 2x4 plank, with a single broom wire stretched along it, and a tin can mounted over one end. Although discovered isn’t strictly true. He had, in fact, approached folklorist Frederick Usher himself, and spanked his 'diddley bow' (or three-quarter banjo) by sliding a half-pint bottle along the wire with his left hand, striking the wire near the tin can with a whittled stick in his right, demonstrating “the onliest music that can't be captured by six strings”. Released at a time when musicologists were desperate to order and classify the sub-genres of African-American music, One String Blues ending up in the ‘ethnic musics’ section of public libraries, and its potential audience of stoners, goof-offs and garage freaks really missed out, because “One String”’s sound is WEIRD: droney grooves and minimalist beauty accompanied by Jones’s gabber-patter which sounds literally out-of-this-world. Accompanied by the more straightforward melancholy blues of South Carolina harmonica man, Edward Hazelton, One String Blues is a masterclass in moon-touched authentic madness for anyone still troubled by the memory of this.

A fantastic and disconcerting journey through a murky post-punk world. Produced by Martin Hannett, it was always going to have a Factory sound – even though it was originally put out on the RSO label) – and I've often thought of it as the greatest record Factory never released. Its format is standard - two sides of 3-minute pop songs – but that's about as close to convention as it dares to drift. Murray shows a surprising willingness (given her back catalogue to that point) to engage with melodic vocals – breathy and urgent on Time Slipping, wide-eyed and credulous on Dream Sequence 1 – but, while there are any number of odd-pop gems, they’re shrouded in post-industrial, nigh-on-apocalyptic arrangements. If you can track down the vinyl album there’s the bonus of one of the great album covers (a Peter Saville design, natch); the cover of the (now unavailable) CD version is much less spectacular but does have the bonus of the inclusion of Murray's subsequent single Searching For Heaven. Summing it up – it's like Joy Division with female vocals but none of the despair. A great and lost little album.

Many fine sax players passed through Ray Charles’ classic horn section of the late ’50s to mid-’60s, but two stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, a fact we were reminded of last month when the death was announced of David ‘Fathead’ Newman. Fathead: Ray Charles Presents David Newman has already featured as a MOJO Disc Of The Day, but More Soul by Hank Crawford stands tall beside it as a second imperishable reminder of the section’s pre-eminence. Crawford, who joined the Charles band in 1957, primarily held down the role of baritone sax player with Brother Ray, but like his boss he was an accomplished and expressive alto saxophonist. As well as allowing him to stretch out on that instrument, More Soul sees Hank in the role of arranger, another of his gigs with Charles. Essentially, this is the Ray Charles small band of the day, vamping after hours. Indeed, that October 7 in ’61 they had played at Harlem’s Apollo until 1am, taken the short ride down to Broadway and the Atlantic studios and the record, seven tracks, was finished before dawn, roughly in the time it takes a 2009 rock band to get a bass drum sound, in fact. In a bold move, particularly for a septet, Crawford’s arrangements dispense with piano, aside from a little comping by Hank, which vividly opens out the sound of brass and horns, and gives a greater weight and clarity to the bass/drums rhythm section of Edgar Willis and Milt Turner. Newman’s sweeter-toned tenor was the perfect foil for Crawford’s raspier, heartfelt readings, and the latter’s reinterpretations here of the ballads Angel Eyes and Misty, are genuinely, bluesily, moving. Two James Moody pieces, Boo’s Tune and The Story, a hip, swinging take on Bobby Timmons’ Dat Dere and Crawford’s likeably skittish Four Five Six are other highlights on this exceptional companion piece to Fathead.

As well as working his studio magic with the likes of Lee Perry and Augustus Pablo, and initiating King Jammy and Scientist into the mysteries of dub, the mighty works of reggae sound magus King Tubby are many. But even bearing these achievements in mind, there’s something rare and remarkable about this early synth-dub album which is thought to come from 1976, and was originally pressed in tiny quantities and then released in a blank sleeve with the wrong label. Now that’s cool. It utilises spry but solid rhythms from Jacob Miller’s LPs Tenement Yard and Jacob ‘Killer’ Miller, originally produced by the Lewis Brothers from his band Inner Circle, and mixes Tubby’s three-dimensional sound sculpts with the robo-burble, trill and squelches of Inner Circle keyboardist Bernard ‘Touter’ Harvey’s synth, to bizarre and absorbing effect; “There’s groups like Tangerine Dream that you would hear of,” Touter told David Katz, a made man of reggae scribes, in the informative sleevenotes; “there's Stevie Wonder on the radio, playing all kinds of things on Living For The City… the Moog synthesiser was the talk of the century at that time.” Other instruments include the xylophone, possibly played by Augustus Pablo, with sounds shifting in and out of the mix and the music’s sonic building blocks alchemically altered (but how? See reggae polymath Chris Lane’s writing on Tubby’s secret bass-manipulating filter control, the ‘Big Knob’), creating spatial anomalies, new depths and dimensions and coolly minimal atmospheres that are propulsive and reflective at the same time. So what happens when King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller In A Tenement Yard? He dubs him, and us, out into space.

There may be many reasons why so much ’80s pop culture reached back to the ’50s and early ’60s: a revolt against the modernism of synthpop and newfangled computer games? A deep Reagan-embodying need for ‘simpler’, wilfully naive times? Wry echoes of a previous Cold War era? On release, Los Lobos’s fifth album certainly had a timely out-of-timeness to it, channelling the vulnerability and aliveness of early rock’n’roll and soul. There’s an Orbison-like purity here, and, as the title and cover suggests, this too is music of the night. Songs to dance to, (All I Wanted To Do Is Dance, Set Me Free (Rosa Lee), ache to (River of Fools), or to just give you the Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes. Songs that don’t make sense in the yuppie AOR-hoovering big cities but seem perfect for the barely populated, heat-quivering, black-skied, smalltown night-time streets of early Jim Jarmusch films. You half expect a dusty Tom Waits to stagger into one of the songs. Time travelling, cheerily goosebumping, sensitively midwifed by the magic hands of T-Bone Burnett… and did I mention beautifully well-performed?

New York’s Third Bardo were part of an underground scene overflowing with long-haired, Brit-R&B copyists who peddled identikit songs to increasingly apathetic audiences. So what makes this quintet stand out? Why do they occupy a place in the pantheon of ‘60s rock curiosities while so many of their contemporaries lie forgotten in the gutter? Two reasons spring to mind.

Firstly, there’s the name. Naming your band after a chapter in The Tibetan Book Of Dead was always going to intrigue the uninitiated and, in 1967 at least, welcome the baying in-crowd. Either way, the moniker alone may have been enough to ensure they would remain a perfectly branded artefact of the era. Then there’s today’s disc of the day – a towering example of American garage at its most noisy and menacing.

Although a handful of other tracks have surfaced over the decades, The Third Bardo only released one 45 during their short-lived existence. Recorded during their first (and last) studio session, I’m Five Years Ahead Of My Time begins with a minor chord riff – a sound that evokes the same sense of looming terror as the four note refrain in Pink Floyd’s Shine On You Crazy Diamond – before rumbling into an eastern-flavoured mod-thump redolent of their West Coast counterparts The Chocolate Watch Band. The lyrics: “I'm living somewhere in a new dimension / I'm leaving everyone so far behind / Don't waste any time girl / Step inside my mind / I'm five years ahead of my time” may be firmly rooted in the prevailing hippie vernacular, but Jeff Monn’s Jagger-snarl ensures this is no patchouli-scented love-in. Swathes of US suburbia fizzed with the sound of people stomping on fuzztone boxes and turning amps up to 11; few produced better results than this.

I mean, look at that cover. What is it? Turkish pop vinyl from the late ’60s? Some Far Eastern folk prog madness reissued by Finders Keepers? Nope, it’s album number four from Oregon DIY pop whiz Greg Olin, a man who, as far as this writer is aware, is about as desirous of self-promotion as these two chaps. Whether I played it out of boredom, curiosity or a rare combination of both I can’t remember, but what was contained within came as an extremely a pleasant shock. Rather than enduring some crackly Manolis Angelopoulos soundalike I was ushered into a gently loping indie country popworld suggestive of Beck kicking back with The Sons Of The Pioneers, albeit after a lot of this had been consumed. Coloured by vibraphone and soft second line horns, suffused with the kind of lazy warmth that might come upon you whilst dozing on the couch, in the sunlight, at the rented flat of an out of work friend, Easy Not Easy’s throwaway lyrics are glimpses of the passing-by world on the other side of half-closed venetian blinds, reminiscent of the quiescent genius of UK poet John Tottenham. Olin has the ability to turn apathy into a blissful artform. The fact that he is seemingly unarsed about promoting this just makes it all the more true. In fact, a quick check reveals that another album came out in 2007. Not so as you'd notice.

…And possibly the only album on that list to feature band members with names like Pink Eyes, Mustard Gas and 10,000 Marbles. Fucked Up are an office favourite among those of us who feel nostalgic for the thrills of US hardcore but can’t face trawling the post-Green Day corporate punk landfill for the next three-minute thrill. Instead, we’re basking in Fucked Up’s multi, multi-tracked, guitar-washed romanticism, in which singer Pink Eyes barks and bellows with all hardcore’s brutish might, only, about how “The Essees still wait for the returned Elijah” (Days Of Last) or his desire to embrace “the purity of obscurity” (Black Albino Bones). Fucked Up aspire to more than just gatecashing Black Flag’s TV Party, though their hearts swell with the same adrenaline rush and countercultural loathing. The acceleration on opener Son Of The Father is enough to fill any jaded Hüsker Dü fan with joy. Now if Bob Mould would change his name to Gulag...

Having released three albums in two years, all of which topped a million sales in the US, the four-piece of Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward relocated to Los Angeles where they rented a palatial villa in Bel Air. There, as well as turning their hand to the small matter of writing new material, the four-piece gave full reign to the irregular lifestyle they’d developed during the last 18 months on the album-tour-album hamster wheel by indulging in near-Olympian feats of excess.

"By the time we got to Bel Air we were totally gone," admitted Iommi, "It really was a case of wine, women and song, and we were doing more drugs than ever before."

“At the time we had a guy who travelled around with us with a suitcase of cocaine," adds Ozzy. "I'm sure most of it was Johnson's arse powder, mind you. Anyway, we were just taking stuff trying to pretend that we felt good."

Snowblind was one of the first tracks written by the band, who promptly informed the label that they wished to christen their fourth album after their drug of choice. When the record company baulked and changed the title to Vol. 4, Sabbath merely contented themselves with thanking “the great COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles” on the album sleeve and amplified Ozzy’s non-too-subtle whisper of the word “cocaine” on Snowblind to avoid any ambiguity as to the track’s subject matter.

Despite the band’s increasingly frayed state, musically Vol.4 is arguably Sabbath’s finest hour, showcasing both the band’s power as well as their oft-overlooked sonic subtlety. Opener Wheels Of Confusion/The Straightener remains one of their heaviest and most nihilistic moments (Osbourne finding himself “Lost in the wheels of confusion/Running through a valley of tears”), while conversely Iommi’s softly picked Laguna Sunrise provides a melodic reflection on their home-from-home and emerges as a quest for peace.

The slow-crawling Cornucopia, meanwhile, matches piledriving heaviness with bleak visions of insanity and self-confession (“I don’t what’s going on/I am all torn inside!” bellows Ozzy) while St Vitus Dance (despite its rheumatic title) veers towards country rock territory. The thunderous Supernaut is one of Sabbath’s most gargantuan and accomplished moments, built around a dextrous Iommi riff and underpinned by Bill Ward’s rhythmic breakdown – the latter matching fellow Black Country hero John Bonham in terms of might and versatility, and adding a soulful edge to the band’s patented crunch.

Most telling of all, however, is the piano-led ballad, Changes, charting the band’s own increasingly fractured state of mind and the realisation that what had started out as hi-jinx was tipping towards dependency and alienation.

"The album cost around $65,000 to make and we'd spent about $75,000 on coke,” reflects Geezer Butler. “We managed to wreck the house in Bel Air, with Ozzy having waterfights with hose pipes inside the house all the time. I didn't realise how nuts we'd gone in until I went home and the girl I was with at the time couldn't recognise me.”

A nihilistic chronicle, close to four decades on Vol. 4 remains timeless, cathartic and heavy – in more ways than one.

Blackballed by the New York scene after Television’s demise cued a terrible junk spiral, Richard Lloyd cut Field Of Fire in rural Sweden, and while the production is fashionably boomy and his singing gruff at best, there’s something not to be denied about Soldier Blue or Watch Yourself, stirring trad rockers that make Tom Verlaine’s solo efforts sound overly academic. Meanwhile, you’re never too far from a rapier insertion of Lloyd’s Strat, the author of Television’s thrilling high-wire excursions and on especially astral form on the Marquee Moon-esque title track and poignant Pleading. Disc 2 is Lloyd’s contemporary version, a fix rather than a complete re-recording and an attempt to remove gloss rather than pile it on. It is a forgivable indulgence, but in truth the best aspects of Field Of Fire – its passion, jeopardy and guitar solos – have dated not a jot.

Whereas Sam Cooke, Johnnie Taylor, Lou Rawls and many others quit gospel quartets for wider fame and wealth in secular soul and pop careers, Claude Jeter repelled all blandishments and stayed steadfast and true to his first calling. Blessed with a gorgeous tenor that swept into falsetto to great effect, Jeter formed the Four Harmony Kings in 1938. By turns they were renamed the Silvertone Singers (to avoid confusion with another act) and finally The Swan Silvertones. Their best recordings, made in the ’50s and ’60s for Specialty and Vee-Jay, included many Jeter-penned gospel classics – How I Got Over, The Day Will Surely Come, He Won’t Deny Me – often featuring his interplay with the tougher tenor of Solomon Womack or raspy hollering of Rev Robert Crenshaw. And why should we audiences outside the gospel field give a hoot? Well, aside from the fact that they often sing like a crazed rock’n’roll quartet, there is a keynote couplet from Jeter’s composition Mary Don’t You Weep – “I’ll be a bridge over deep water if you trust in my name” – used by Paul Simon as the root of his most famous song, and you can hear the phrasing of Jeter’s tenor and falsetto leads echoed in the singing of Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson and Eddie Kendricks, to name but the four most obvious soul giants. Hear his arrangement of I’m Coming Home or final verses on I Cried for imperishable proof. Claude Jeter never stepped outside the world of his church, but his voice still resounds in soul and pop across the years.

In the annals of great Top Of The Pops appearances, a big hand should go to the Associates’ August 1982 performance of 18 Carat Love Affair (always a part of this LP really, and finally appended with the 2000 CD reissue). While unique singer Billy MacKenzie emotes and teases the dilemmas of carrying on a secret, possibly gay affair, instrumentalist Alan Rankine strums a guitar made of chocolate, which he eventually gives to the audience to chomp on. Par for the course for this Dundee group, who once opined that the best way to make an album was to “start with a climax and then go further”. As Sulk indubitably does; mixing soul, film music, disco, Burt Bacharach and a post-punk sensibility, its sound is one of European psychedelic pop, not American rock’n’roll. With unorthodox song structures that scorn verse-chorus-verse and every instrument sonically manipulated with overdubs run wild, it seems at first like an album playing in reverse, starting with an instrumental, and following with an experimental sequence that includes the languid, intoxicated No, where spy film moodiness meets impending hysteria in some undersea cavern. The strangeness shifts with the old-money side two, which includes chart hits of heightened sensuality Party Fears Two and Club Country. Biographer Tom Doyle calls these pop moments “kaleidoscopic”, and it is like they’re dazzlingly refracted through stained glass; similarly, MacKenzie’s operatic voice is an astonishing instrument – as near as dammit black and female when they cover Diana Ross’s Love Hangover (again, a single added to the reissue). The duo would split the same year, and Billy’s story would end tragically when he killed himself in January 1997, which gives this LP’s curiously Smiths-like take on the infamous “Hungarian suicide song” Gloomy Sunday sombre extra resonance when listening back. But hear Sulk to see him in all his glorious, unique, out-to-lunch vitality.

Perched between the flute-laden funkiness of his self-titled solo debut and the route-one rock retrenchment of Stanley Road, Wild Wood remains Paul Weller’s most exquisitely balanced album, with soul stirrings, pastoral folk-rock vibes and stinging Revolver guitars dissolving into an elegant and exciting sonic hybrid. Meanwhile, Weller’s in a conflicted “who am I?” phase, and his music benefits from the self-analysis (Has My Fire Really Gone Out?, All The Pictures On The Wall) and vulnerability (Wild Wood) that would ebb away with his Britpop-era rehabilitation. As this illuminating diversion into demos (more Paul Weller than Wildwood in their tadpole phase) and contemporaneous sessions reveals, Weller was calling a truce with the hippies he’d once derided, and sensitive, alternate versions of Neil Young’s Ohio and Tim Hardin’s Black Sheep Boy are the bonus blessings. One of the great British rock albums just got better.

What happened just as Coventry’s Selecter put out Celebrate The Bullet? John Hinckley shot US President Ronald Reagan! Consequently, Radio 1’s Mike Read wasn’t impressed, the record stiffed and the band split soon after, unable to escape the rapid and grisly death of the ska craze. Listen to parts of their second LP - where straight-up tunes retain the spry but passé skank-pop sound that featured on their 1979 2-Tone debut Too Much Pressure - and you can sort of see why. But there is other, more sophisticated material here. Take the sombre title track, a lilting, melancholy lament with a sub-aqua, suffocating quality and a languid bassline, which is either about murder or suicide. Within, Neol Davies’ guitar playing combines blues and jazz textures and Pauline Black emotes a stern kind of anguish; the dub trombone solo is by one Barry Jones, who played on the very first Selecter recording. Hear Washed Up And Left For Dead next to its instrumental version Last Tango (In Dub) and the mood evoked is like that of their old labelmates The Specials’ Number 1 Ghost Town or, years before the fact, the bass-heavy, punky sounds that would come out of Bristol in the ’90s. But nothing could save them; Celebrate The Bullet’s lyrics of communication breakdown and betrayal suggest a group with too many internal tensions to survive.

For someone who always charged his songs with such a powerful emotional current, Fred Neil – supremely gifted songwriter and mainstay of the Greenwich Village folk scene – revealed very little throughout his years of making music. A man who liked to keep himself very much to himself, Neil released five albums betweem 1964 and 1970. This Capitol release is his best, painting a crystal clear picture of a troubled soul beset, as he sings in Badi-Da, by “an aching pain”. Combining coffeehouse blues with hee-hawing country progressions, the songs on Fred Neil are for most part weary, lonesome tales from a rain-soaked nowhere-land - a place where his sonorous vocal echoes resoundingly.

From the electric shimmers of The Dolphins to Green Rocky Road’s bluesy repetitions, each track remains untouched by the passage of time. Only during the final bluegrass-hypnosis of Cynicrustpetefredjohn Raga do we momentarily catch a glimpse of the Eastern flavours then snaking their way into the mainstream. This is very much Fred’s world. Everybody’s Talkin’, the rolling ballad that would finance Neil’s retreat from the music industry after it became a hit for Harry Nilsson in 1969, manages to meld a dazed lyric (Everybody’s talkin’ at me / I don’t hear a word their sayin’) with an upbeat desire to escape (“I'm goin' where the sun keeps shinin… Goin' where the weather suits my clothes”) back to his Florida homeland. He’s detached and dissatisfied, the outside world a constant, unstoppable distraction. By all accounts, this was Fred Neil through and through. Over the years Bob Dylan, Tim Buckley, David Crosby and John Sebastian (who played harmonica on Neil's Bleecker & MacDougal album) have all cited him as a major influence. “I still don’t know exactly where I’m going myself,” he told Hit Parader in 1966. He’s not the only one.

I’ve been listening to this record on the way into work; Berlin techno duo Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus’ collection of the minimalist 12” dubscapes they recorded as Rhythm & Sound between 1997 and 2001. It should be ideal for the 23 minute train journey from Walthamstow Central to Oxford Circus as the CD’s collection of basal heart-beat rhythms and dusty, grey details always manages to lull me into a state of vivid REM sleep (sorry, REM sleep). However, the dreams I’ve been having are weird. Rhythm & Sound’s soundworld is subterranean, industrial and treacherous, evoking the echoing booms, clacks and heavy goods throb of European freight trains moving beneath concrete flyovers in the sodium-suffused urban night before the Wall fell.

In between the bleary glances at passing tube signs I keep dreaming of other, more sinister transports, carrying giant white canisters through be-fogged underground interzones. Of course, the locomotives I’ve been dreaming of are from Troy Kennedy Martin’s faultless 1985 TV nuclear apocalypse drama Edge Of Darkness. Because there was only ever one thing wrong with that series and that was this. But stick this on instead and you have a soundtrack that evokes the perfect Edge Of Darkness atmosphere of sequestered evil and creeping radioactive dread. Plus, as Von Oswald and Ernestus’ continue to hide from the prying media gaze, slipping into anonymity, you imagine they might identify with Bob Peck’s fate at the end of Edge…, disappearing back into nature, as a black flower on the Scottish hillside.

Kites; the voice of John Arlott; an Ernie Isley guitar solo: Paris-based quartet Tahiti 8 join a select collection of stimuli clinically proven to bring on an instant summer rush. Maybe it’s their sound: suede-soft and just slightly synthetic, with debts to ecstasy-nibbled Gallic house and super-sophisticated guitar pop from The Zombies to Cardigans. Maybe it’s the chords: jazz-tinged, instantly “French” in that way briefly championed by ‘80s hipsters including Terry Hall (on The Colourfield’s lovely Virgins & Philistines LP), Ben Watt and The Style Council.

In a comfortingly familiar way, Tahiti 80’s second album matched the best bits of their 2001 debut, Puzzle. Once again, Anglophone vocalist Xavier Boyer writes earnest but sings nonchalant, pitching somewhere between Colin Blunstone and Eric Matthews (once again, Matthews himself provides trumpets and backups). And as before, it’s glorious entente of old and new technology, with big brass and sad-disco strings (courtesy Richard Hewson – of James Taylor’s first album and Let It Be) cavorting amid the bubbles and sniiiit!s of computery percussion while Médéric Gontier’s guitars needle groovily away, as if sewing a smiley face patch on pair of worn flares. Somehow there is a surfeit of hummable, up-tempo, depression-nuking pop (1,000 Times, The Other Side, Separate Ways and Get Yourself Together could all conceivably soundtrack ads for sanitary products) that doesn’t make you want to vomit.

Meanwhile, under the surface frolics there’s a constant, low background hum of melancholy, reinforcing the impression of Tahiti 80 as a kind of pop culture coelacanth – an él band somehow beached in the early 21st Century, afforded a state-of-the-art production makeover but with no obvious place (apart from Japan of course) to call home. Vive le pop, we say.

We’ve all done it – prevented guests from hearing songs all the way through by jumping up every thirty seconds to change what’s on the stereo and saying “you’ve got to listen to this.” Coldcut, AKA long-serving DJs and occasional hitmakers Jonathan More and Matt Black, did something similar when collating this masterful hour and ten minutes of beats, bass, speech and sound, except with structure, grace and style. With such names as Boogie Down Productions, Harold Budd and Jello Biafra thrown into the blender alongside mid-’90s dance producers such as Photek, Jedi Knights and Coldcut themselves, the result is undeniable; a heavily rhythmic jungle of polyrhythmic perversity, with drum and bass, techno, funk, hip-hop and more all tweaked and augmented with sound effects, deck dexterity and dialogue from old movies (Ed Wood Jr’s fave spooky psychic Criswell is one contributor). Comic and dark by turns, it attains a state of foaming mentalism when Ron Grainer’s original theme for Doctor Who shimmers into earshot, but finally winds down into anaesthetised contentment. With shout outs to such pioneers of the cut-up as William Burroughs, Grandmaster Flash and Double Dee and Steinksi, it still cuts the mustard as proof of what can be done with a pile of records and some decks, if you’re prepared to make the effort. And if it’s possibly problematic in the common or garden club environment, if consumed in an armchair, brain cells will dance.

Delaney Bramlett, who died on December 27 at the age of 69, once ruminated on the songs he and his wife Bonnie had written during the late 1960s: “The kind of music we’re doing ain’t Nashville and it ain’t Memphis. I think it’s a country sort of gospel that folks’ve been doing for a long time.” That divide, between the hillbilly sounds of Music City USA and the gospel-blues hollers of Tennessee’s southern counties had been narrowed by the likes of Ray Charles, Charley Pride and Stax Records’ amalgamation of white and black players. Delaney and Bonnie’s hippie collective of session hotshots took things a step further. Home, their first album of sanctified, country-soul grooves, boasted a roster of extraordinary musicians, many of whom had been responsible for solidifying the southern sound of the late ‘60s. The Memphis Horns, Booker T & The MG’s and Leon Russell all lend a hand – even William Bell steps in to provide backing vocals on the prairie-funk of Isaac Hayes and David Porter’s My Baby Specializes. Not that the central duo couldn’t hold their own. Before joining forces in 1967, D & B had cut their teeth with some of the very best – Delaney honing his guitar skills with the house band of TV show Shindig! and Bonnie providing vocal support for Count Basie, Albert King and Ike & Tina – and that assurance is all over Home. A Long Road Ahead is the sound of The Band relocated way south, It’s Been A Long Time A Coming and Get Ourselves Together hit a pure pop-soul vein, while Bonnie’s tear through Piece Of My Heart is as tender as it is uproariously loose. Soon the pair’s rootsy strain of soul-stirring R&B would intoxicate some of rock’s biggest stars, most strikingly Eric Clapton and George Harrison, who both soaked their first major solo offerings in church sounds learned from Delaney & Bonnie. But upon its release, Home was derided in some circles as being a mere pastiche – white folks playing at being black. But since when has that been an obstacle to greatness? (The Rolling Stones, anyone?) And when the music is this exuberant, who cares?

As I write this, Gazprom the state-owned Russian gas company have severed all fuel supplies travelling through Ukrainian pipelines, intensifying the political barney that has arisen out of a pay dispute between the two countries and plunging Europe into deep freeze. All supplies to Romania have been cut, Slovakia has declared a state of emergency and Bulgaria says it will run out of gas within days. It is a time to huddle round the wood-burning stove, conserve energy and find solace in whispered songs of winter hope from Eastern Europe. And while some of you might already know the poems of Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Pushkin well enough to regail us with their mystic power, others might wish to tend their ailing spirits by listening to Valentin Silvestrov’s hushed and rarified arrangements. Having possibly instructed baritone Sergei Yakovenko and pianist Ilya Scheps to sing and play as if a mountain of snow were about to fall on their heads - Yakovenko singing softly into your ear lest the FSB are listening in at the door - Silvestrov does away with all the emotive melodrama of the usual classical song cycle, delivering a two hours of placid, haunted ambience that moves forward with the slow, steady unyielding force of a glacier. Originally recorded for the Russian Melodiya label in 1986, but finally issued by ECM in 1999, Silent Songs must surely be the most beautiful collection of 20th Century lieder in existence, a harmonic union of Ukranian and Russian genius. If only. Huddle in, snuggle up and listen in.

It shouldn’t work but it does. Spiky scouse pop songs, hollerin’ sea shanty vox, baroque post-rock guitar twiddling and abstruse lyrical conceits (love amongst casino employees; a clockwork toy circus that becomes a metaphor for everything): bizarre bedfellows that turn out to be uncannily compatible. Hot Club De Paris claim to have bonded over XTC, Don Caballero and The Minutemen, and indeed singing bassist Paul Rafferty shares the plaid-clad piratical vibe and busy four-string attack of the latter’s Mike Watt, helping make his band more of a connoisseur’s proposition than their radio-frotting near-relatives, Futureheads and Young Knives. But the extra work involved following the mix-and-match time signatures and complex, twangular riffing of guitarist Matthew Smith is more than rewarded with irresistible adrenaline surges, pearls of lyrical wit (viz: “sometimes it’s better not to stick bits of each other in each other...”) and a poetic way with the first stirrings of romance.

Few bands would openly attempt to recreate the disjointed aesthetic of The White Album on their debut, but over a decade after its release …Dusk At Cubist Castle has endured as a 27-track lysergic opus. A blitz of short, infectious power-pop opens its account with so many hooks, harmonies and jangling guitar lines that the tempo seems unsustainable. Yet it takes a full 16 tracks before Olivia Tremor Control’s momentum finally begins to let up, petering out into a dark and sprawling sound collage – the antithesis of the restless songwriting that came before – that’s guaranteed to divide listeners.

To some, this is the sound of OTC immersing themselves in a musical continuum begun by psychedelic sound pioneers such as Bill Holt and Terry Riley. To others, it feels like an expenditure of ramshackle recordings piled on top of each other until the conceptual strain becomes too much. Either way it’s mind-boggling art, with exceptional levels of depth and detail etched by writers Bill Doss and Will Cullen Hart over three years on a humble bedroom four-track. While the fortunes of Olivia Tremor Control (they disbanded in 2000, briefly reuniting for an ’05 ATP appearance) may have been different had they cooled it with the abstract instrumental sequences, commercial success was simply never their priority. To have wished them a different fate would have been to wish for a different band.

Sometimes, record labels can be astonishingly ahead of the curve. There was I, this time last year, wondering if, in the wake of his recent death, I could interest a record label in compiling a CD of Porter Wagoner’s more lunatic compositions, and then I discovered this terrifying gem. Compiled by the oracular David Thrussell in 2006, The Rubber Room is subtitled “The haunting, poetic songs of Porter Wagoner” and it should have a Parental Advisory sticker on the cover, such is the horror contained within these gore-soaked two-and-a-half minute playlets. A not entirely welcome Christmas gift, it sound-tracked January 2007, filling the cold January days with ghoulish tales of death, murder, and dipsomania set in the fetid pool rooms, shuttered gaming houses and treacherous front rooms of country Babylon. From the storytelling wife-killer of The First Mrs Jones to the cuckolded husband of The Cold Hard Facts Of Life (who walks in on his wife’s wild sex party and stabs the participants to death), every song seems to starts with a jaunty perk of slide guitar and ends in a blood bath.

Whether wallowing in sodden self-pity or boiling with the righteous anger of the red-top tabloids Wagoner never strikes you as one of life’s liberals, and a compilation like this – whilst highlighting his unease around native Americans and unmarried mothers – also reveals a streak of true evil – as on a song like Woman Hungry, in which the narrator holds that “When a man gets woman hungry he will find a meal somewhere”. Christ! The best country tales are often the stuff of Greek tragedy, in which man is powerless in the face of overwhelming fate, but these songs are pure baroque opera that push further into the mouth of madness than even George Jones or Ray Price at their craziest. It’s perhaps fitting that, in one of his last recordings, Wagoner was back in the rubber room, with Committed To Parkview a song written by Johnny Cash about the time Wagoner spent in the “rest home” in the mid ’60s. Welcome to his nightmare.

Winter has no fears for the lover of melancholia, the kind of sadness that is somehow delicious; moreish you might even say. I blame my seemingly hard-coded taste for melancholy partly on the children’s literature and television that were the staples of my generation – from the people=shit subtext of the late, great Oliver Postgate’s Clangers narrations to the Scandinavian gloomscapes of Tove Jansson’s Moominland. But whatever the cause, Kind Of Blue is always the best companion, not the too-hearty back-slapping sort, but one who understands all too well where you’re at. Especially on a day like today, when post-New Year revel self-loathing may still nibble at the psyche.

It’s in this kind of context that Miles’s trumpet makes best sense: careful as an OAP crossing an icy road, gentle as a nun nursing the sick. Then there’s pianist Bill Evans, introducing So What with those troubled notes of sophisticated resignation. Whenever covered, So What becomes an excuse for breeziness; on Kind Of Blue it’s the broken, nothing-matters complaint of the 5am barfly. Besides, it’s hard to imagine a sextet better balanced than on this track; Cannonball Adderly, here as elsewhere, emphasising the silver lining with bubbling trills on the alto; John Coltrane on the tenor, scratching an itch that won’t go away. Without Evans – Wynton Kelly takes the keys on Freddie Freeloader – the band play great, but straighter, less in the emotional depth-charge terrain of, say, All Blues.

Kind Of Blue’s place in music history (it’s the first “modal jazz album” – wish I really understood, rather than merely knew what that meant) can sometimes obscure its everyday qualities. I don’t think I’ve played one piece of recorded music more often or derived more comfort from another. Winter could last six months of the year, as long as I could hibernate with Kind Of Blue.

It’s the scarves that give it away. And the way Art and Paul are seen legging it down the road, in search of digs with a log fire and a warm bluestocking. Accordingly, Sounds Of Silence is full of cold sunlight and a quality of crispness, aloneness and alienation (albeit the choosy, slightly superior alienation of the undergraduate) that make it perfect, in the words of the resounding I Am A Rock, for a winter’s day in deep and dark December. In Dylan/Cash producer Bob Johnston’s musical womb, S&G turn their collars to the cold and damp, a seasonal choir of two. Acoustic guitars make a thorny bed and the odd augmentation (a trumpet here, a harpsichord there) offers cold comfort. Simon the writer is distracted, diffused – the warmer feelings smothered, self-sabotaged or in exile, in England where his heart lies. And while some of these songs are epic, they are somehow also parsimonious (the title track feels like an opera, but it’s only 3.05), as if Simon is loath to give everything he’s got, and in truth the hotter-blooded songs – the off-the-peg folk-rock of Somewhere They Can’t Find Me and We’ve Got a Groovy Thing Goin’ – are the least convincing. That’s Simon for you – no warmer now than he was at 20, and somehow most at home shrouded in a New York winter, or lashed by sleet on Widnes station platform, surrounded by silence.

No doubt many momentous events happened at the Great Yarmouth Folk Club Christmas party in December 1972, but of most importance to fans of English gothic was the formation of short-lived spook-folk trio, Midwinter. After failing to compose anything for the promised party, other than an intrumental duet of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, guitarists Paul Corrick and Ken Saul enlisted the help of local teenage vocalist Jill Child whose interest in weird East Anglian folklore lent their simple folk groove a dark lyrical slant. Despite occasional bum notes from all three vocalists, and a tendency for some of the guitar solos to go on that bit too long, Midwinter’s tales of slain lovers, damned sisters and devils on horseback (like this
Not this) possess the same cold fog of creeping dread as the short stories of M.R. James. Midwinter came to an end when Child left for college in 1974 and Ken and Paul formed Stone Angel, but somewhere along the way they lost their eeriness.

This Christmas we have been advised to think ‘Winter’ for Disc of The Day. So, snowy concept albums? Frosty electronica? Warm, snugly ‘60s crooners? Well, you can take the girl out of suburban gothdom… but my imagination leapt to The Cure’s bleak ’80s trilogy: 17 Seconds, Faith, Pornography. The chilliest of the three, 1981’s Faith starts in church with Holy Hour’s slurry, distorted bass reflecting the druggy mire that slowed much of the album’s recording sessions, with Robert Smith’s internal conflict of beliefs played out in the pews. This is no candlelit midnight mass to warm the soul, and Smith’s inherent convictions offer cold comfort. Grief abounds on Faith. Now just the trio of Smith, drummer Lol Tolhurst and bassist Simon Gallup, all three had lost or were losing loved ones at the time and feelings of despair and abandonment are raw, particularly on the self-explanatory The Funeral Party, Other Voices, the harrowing title track and Drowning Man (Robert: “I was waiting for the vocals to start, forgetting that I was the singer…”). Only on the urgent Primary does the pace pick up to above funereal, but it’s no less pessimistic in its unpicking of a long-term love (Smith being, famously, the most happily married man in rock, who to this day insists on playing the romantic Eeyore). But even at their most hopeless The Cure inspired devotion from their fans and certainly the forlorn vocals bought out the mothering instinct in this alienated teen. The deluxe, stocking-filler version includes the Carnage Visors soundtrack and a CD of 1980/81 rarities. Brrrrr!

What, might you ask, has a soundtrack to a film set in the exotic climes of New Guinea have to do with the icy chill of winter? Head outside with your headphones in place, cue up the title cut from the Floyd’s third movie soundtrack and witness the ominous synth throb of Obscured By Clouds chime in perfect unison with the stark cold weather. There is your answer. Writer/director Barbet Schroeder’s La Vallée may feature the mysterious tropics of Oceania, but for this writer, OBC has always conjured images of endless antarctic plains, winter rays of sun and an overwhelming sense of isolation. The record has often been derided – in some instances by the band themselves – as a hodgepodge of songs rather than a coherent album. Committed to tape during a speedy two week burst in an 18th Century château on the outskirts of Paris, …Clouds acts as a bridging point between the lengthy experimentations of 1971’s Meddle and the crowning soundscapes of their 1973 masterpiece, The Dark Side Of The Moon. Indeed, the record was made during a break from the Dark Side…sessions and it’s Obscured By Clouds’ mish-mash of styles that makes it one of Floyd’s most endearing works. At its core is the groan of Rick Wright’s VCS3 synthesiser – a then-new piece of kit which, alongside David Gilmour’s reverb-heavy guitar figures, gives the album its sense of horizon-chasing expanse. But for every moment of celestial wandering (the title track, Absolute Curtains, Mudmen), there’s a somewhat uncharacteristic diversion into American flavoured country, blues and folk. Through it all, that sense of crisp, cool air and bright mornings remains inescapable. Even the reverb on Nick Mason’s snare drum sounds like he’s chopping his way through a thick layer of frost. “So let me in from the cold / Cause there's a chill wind blowing in my soul,” sings Gilmour on Wot’s…Uh The Deal. Hell, not even the band can find a way into the warm.

As the board of EMI, TV-booting lorry drivers and Mirror journalists knew, in the seventies John Lydon and the Sex Pistols were a threat to the very fabric of society. Now, with eyebrow-raising developments like this, their power as Wreckers Of Civilisation may have ebbed somewhat. This isn’t the case, though, with PiL’s totemic Metal Box, which showed Lydon plumbing freezing new depths, cut off from all human warmth in the drug-disordered company of Year Zero-minded former Clash guitarist Keith Levene and low frequency bassist Jah Wobble. Contained on three 12” singles housed in a film canister was some of the strangest dance music ever, evoking frigid nihilism yet sounding angrily alive. The songs were constructed from jams; Levene’s nerve-scraping guitar playing and Wobble’s speaker-busting dubular basslines, plus the tense contributions of a variety of drummers and Rotten wailing his psychoses, make for a powerful chemistry. In ten-minute opener Albatross the singer declares independence from what went before (“Still the spirit of ’68” – this was Hawkwind/Can fan Lydon talking), while on the fearsome skank Swan Lake (aka Death Disco) he sings to his terminally ill mother. This formation of the group would end the following year (Wobble and Levene would both take PiL tapes and release them themselves). But cold and unyielding Metal Box – arguably the sonic equivalent of this - remains a challenge and an enigma to be savoured.

Judging from the disturbing, ergot–spiked religious visions created by such artists as Matthias Grunewald, Lucas Cranach and Hans Baldung Grien, life as a justified Lutheran gig-goer during the Northern Renaissance was no barrel of laughs. Stuck in the deep cold woods of Northern Germany, subsisting on berries and roots and a healthy dose of religious terror, there were doubtless few moments of joyous uplift. In fact, this high Renaissance mass from Michael Praetorius is just about as loaded as it got. The most prolific German composer of the high Renaissance, Praetorius was born in 1571, the youngest son of a Lutheran pastor. Working in the courts of Wolfenbuttel and Dresden between 1600 and 1616, he composed the basic repertoire for Germany’s Lutheran churches. When first heard, this version of the Mass - recorded with almost the entire population of Roskilde crammed inside their terrifying 12th Century Gothic cathedral - might at first strike listeners as familiar… why yes, that’s the tune they’re singing as they torch Edward Woodward in The Wicker Man! By turns thrilling and terrifying, as the massed ranks of Zealand bash out these epic storm-tossed shanties to Christ, this is a CD that simultaneously conjures up the bleak, black cold of ancient European forests and blasts you into Christmas day with the uplifting force of the Law of God! After all, if Praetorius could warm your soul after a day like this, then you part-timers, sniffling through the credit crisis, may feel yourselves truly galvanized.

Let’s be upfront about this. In the present context Ice Man denotes ‘cool’, not cold and frosty. Quitting The Impressions in 1958, Jerry Butler became a polished balladeer on Vee-Jay and signed to Mercury in 1967. He met emerging producer-songwriters Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and the three of them crystallised like snowflakes. A formative soul album that doesn’t have a weak track, Ice Man is their best together, a brilliant showcase for Butler’s often bittersweet voice – veering sharply between croaked anguish and smooth seduction – and a prototype of the Philadelphia International sound Gamble & Huff would develop in the ’70s. Nine of the 11 songs were Gamble-Huff-Butler compositions and the best sound about five years ahead of their time, thanks to the cultured arrangements of Thom Bell and Bobby Martin. A key track is Only The Strong Survive, which has become a totemic soul message. Opening with a piece of mother’s advice about a broken romance, the title is spun out into a lifetime philosophy; “you gotta be a man, you gotta take a stand… don’t you know that things are gonna change… don’t ever feel that you can’t make it” have a resonance far beyond affairs of the heart. Ice Man included hits such as Hey, Western Union Man, Never Give You Up (often covered as Never Gonna Give You Up) and the lovely Are You Happy. They’re full of deft touches, such as the first notes of How Can I Get In Touch With You, which quote directly from the original Make It Easy On Yourself, Butler’s US hit three years before The Walker Brothers’ UK cover. The album closes on two poignant ballads: Go Away – Find Yourself and I Stop By Heaven. In the former, a wearied Butler – “Little by little you make me feel less than a man. Tired! Heaven knows that I am” – sends his love away to work out the demons she is taking out on him; in the latter he is thoroughly, warmly content as the notion of Walk Around Heaven All Day is secularised into a quite sublime love song.

This album’s solitary, snowy genesis is well known now (Wisconsin winter: man retreats to an isolated cabin to lick the wounds of both romantic and band breakdown; shot gun; venison stew; basic recording equipment; songs emerge; the indie nation has a new weird hero. Keep up at the back!). What’s still remarkably is the emotional response the album has prompted since it came out in March. Seeing him (or rather ‘them’ - Bon Iver live shows now boast Justin Vernon plus three) play live recently I was struck by what a varied, well-adjusted crowd he drew. Families and smart thirtysomething couples sat alongside the indie fans and lone wolves you’d expect to turn out for Vernon’s rustic contemporaries like Will Oldham or Smog. For Emma, Forever Ago has touched hearts that Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie albums might fill with fear, by placing plain truths (about relationships, endings, new beginnings) in an enigmatic setting, sung in Vernon’s blood-warm falsetto, either vulnerable with just guitar or multi-tracked to a choral flourish. Lovelorn songwriters are nothing new of course and Vernon isn’t trying to break new ground musically, either, but this is an undeniably special album. Despite its slightly queasy title, it’s far from romantic. It’s a man working through emotional turmoil, mumbling through a break-up beard about “Lapping lakes like leary loons” (Flume) and gradually working through his grievances (“All your love is wasted? / Then who the hell was I?” asks Skinny Love). Until finally the pain is processed, the snows thaw and Vernon emerges into the light with Re: Stacks, the closing number. “This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization / It’s the sound of the unlocking and the lift away / Your love will be safe with me.” Never mind cognitive behavioural therapy, perhaps we all just need to retreat to the woods sometimes.

After his still-stunning run of solo records in the late ’60s, Scott Walker’s ’70s were arid, with bland, unhip LPs called things like Any Day Now and We Had It All squandering one of pop’s greatest voices. But, possibly driven by the guilt and shame of mugging tunes like this, a radical shift leftwards resulted. 1984’s Climate Of Hunter was in theory a comeback, but all norms were off in this deep-shadow collection of songs for dreams and nightmares (see Scott’s shocked look in the cover pic, taken by the late Bob Carlos Clarke). Session bass ace Mo Foster recalled that working on it was like “playing upside down”: here were unorthodox rhythms, synthesiser drones and frozen string arrangements stalking a singer sonorously intoning lyric fragments that suggested much but revealed nothing. Opening track Rawhide may well concern the frozen, preserved corpse of an ice age cowherd, the Palaeolithic cave paintings of Lascaux and the constellation of Taurus. Stars, twinkling in a night sky, recur, as does cold, blood and bones, like some ritual checklist waiting to be decoded. Sleepwalkers Woman is most like the old Scott, a luminescent four minutes of orchestra and voice that rises and falls and speaks of exile and confession. An appearance on The Tube and the single Track 3 notwithstanding, it sold hardly at all, prompting Scott to go back to art college and dream up the Spanner Trial-Harrison Birtwistle-Nine Inch Nails sounds of 1995’s Tilt. Not to worry. Listen to this in the small hours of a cold night and be transported.

It’s a testament to Ryan Adams’ mercurial songwriting ability that a record essentially made up of leftovers and ‘non-releases’ from previous albums stands out amid a discography as long as the singer’s pharmacological shopping list. Ethan Johns’ laissez-faire production style complements Adams’ songcraft perfectly, especially on Cry On Demand, a song whose playful, bittersweet melancholy captures the essence of the album. Demolition garnered accolades from a steadily growing list of celebrity Adams-fans, including Elton John, Alanis Morissette and Bono, who all saw the genius buried within the mayhem of Adams’ on/offstage performances. Even nonchalant rocker Starting To Hurt achieves the kind of the intimate, credible stadium feel that U2 have been striving for their entire career. Since embarking upon a somewhat erratic solo career that often threatened to disappear amidst the ether of regrettable YouTube clips, Adams has self-documented his rocky ride, up, down and around the block. The achingly poignant lyrics on Hallelujah show Adams’ frustrating awareness of his own tendency to balls things up: “If I could have a simple love, how would it feel and what would it mean? / I’d only trade you in, for a Mary Magdalene.” Art, imitating life, imitating art, imitating life, ad infinitum.

Here’s an exciting business model the beleaguered majors might want to revisit; advertise in mags for members of the public – you know, binmen, dinner ladies, mental patients – to send you £££’s in exchange for setting any lyrics they’ve written however banal or unhinged to music, all the while suggesting that chart fame and wealth could follow. This was the slick trick as practised by the US ‘Song-Poem’ industry in the ’60s and ’70s, when crack teams of musos-for-hire would conveyer belt as many as thirty of these submissions a day (various styles) before sending back a few copies to the blindly hopeful mugs who paid up. While sense says most of the results were merely awful, sometimes the transaction smashed together the super-weird and the hyper-normal and created a kind of anti-matter X Factor, with astounding consequences. This comp cherrypicks from a series of Song Poem collections, with a payback similar to a yucksome found photograph or shopping list. Among the terrible-yet-essential inclusions are tunes explaining why a good imagination is better than pornography (All You Need Is A Fertile Mind), a soul shaker about being in hospital (City Hospital Patients) and a jazzily sauntering salute to America’s lunar missions, The Moon Men (“This cut is close to perfection,” says Ex-Germs drummer and Song-Poem gourmet Don Bolles). Elsewhere Rodd Keith, the Phil Spector of Song-Poems, gives form to the sublime acid trip travelogue Ecstacy To Frenzy (sic) and the bumping, grinding Beat Of The Traps, wherein drum kits are eroticised. Whatever zone the song-poem auteur entered, Keith was totally there. His other works here include a song where he pretends to be a woman (I’m Just The Other Woman) and singing a cod-dignified patriotic song in praise of Richard Nixon. An extra glow of pleasure comes with the knowledge that none of these unique works would have existed had not their writers chanced the dough to have them made – thanks a lot John M Kurzawa, Mary Clignett, Dom Betro and the rest. It’s enough to leave you wondering if jazz really was the only original American art form.

Supergrass are my ‘Unsung Heroes’ in the MOJO Poll every year they have an album out and 2008, alas, is no different. Diamond Hoo Ha is yet another minor classic, by fans, for fans of classic verse-chorus-middle-eight pop-rock (with added psychedelics): the shiny stuff which makes your heart beat faster and your mouth cheer. The first three tracks – and singles – maybe sail too close to playful homage to sway the unconverted (tonight, Matthew, we’re going to be… the White Stripes! The Stooges! David Bowie!). By track four, however, things get interesting and their stew develops its own ’grassy flavours, with bouncing tales of dark days, sleepwalking through windows, overindulging in who knows what, the ebb and flow of friendship and inspiration. No two tracks sound the same – 345 is almost proggy, Whiskey And Green Tea is mentally oriental, Ghost Of A Friend bungs in a Mick Ronson foot-on-the-amp solo – but even the catchiest songs have intricacies and loving details to reward repeated play. This is as warm, generous and pleasurable an album as you’ll hear today. What more could you possibly want?

Not that he’d ever tell you himself, but Nick Lowe is one smart dude. When I first heard this CD, back in 2001, what struck me was the gentle economy of his writing. In his 23 years as a solo artist of melody and wit (31 if you count his time with Woodbridge country-rockers Brinsley Schwartz) Lowe had honed his lazy, Cajun-on-Thames country cool into something unassumingly… classic. By mixing his own, acutely observed compositions with such mongrel soul classics as Johnny Rivers’ Only A Fool and Poor Side Of Town, Lowe was quietly placing himself in the great pantheon of blue-eyed soul saltimbancos, gentlemen from the mild side of town who could craft a deep heartbreak ballad that Bobby Bland would be unable to tell from the real thing. Seven plus years on, The Convincer still, erm, convinces with such countrified tales of middle-aged dissipation as I’m A Mess, Homewrecker and Lately I’ve Let Things Slide. And Lowe’s rich, folk mythologising of a bypass on the A30, Indian Queens – but what also strikes me now is Lowe’s production with Neil Brockbank. A subtly engineered throwback to the warm, analogue sounds of Chess, Hi and Bearsville, The Convincer now sounds several steps ahead of the curve, capturing a comforting retro mood that has been the recent holy grail of everyone from James Hunter and Richard Hawley to Pete Molinari and Eli “Paperboy” Reed. Well, as if you didn’t know it boys, Nick beat you to it.

Surely one of the most anthologised artists ever, this late-’90s Barry best of has stayed near the top of my personal heap of as yet unfiled CDs for over ten years. Not just for its unusual mix of his TV themes, soundtrack work and oddities like the gorgeous, quivering Girl With The Sun In Her Hair (from a 1968 Sunsilk shampoo advert) but because these extraordinary, quirky pieces have proved essential in all manner of social situations, particularly at this time of year. Barry’s Bond soundtracks are a middle class dinner party staple, of course, and they are well represented here from Shirley Bassey chewing her way through Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever and Matt Monro’s swooning From Russia With Love to the imposing Thunderball and the shrill drama of 007 with its nerve-shredding piccolo flourish. I can wholeheartedly recommend the ominous, thrilling swell of Space March (Capsule In Space) from You Only Live Twice as the prefect accompaniment to slightly tipsy, suspense-filled Jenga on Christmas Day (just not too near the speakers; all that vibrato might be construed as cheating), and the wistful Midnight Cowboy to lull you through the drunken late afternoon. Should the chilling Persuaders Theme or idiosyncratic jazzy Beat For The Beatniks (from Never Let Go) make you unpopular with the family, you can always skip on to his later, lusher orchestral works like Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves’ John Dunbar Theme.

Much as we’d like to think we’re above such matters, notions of cool, credibility, and up-to-the-minute hipstery play a key role in MOJO’s Disc Of The Day. After all, if we’re going out on the bow of the MOJO webship to proclaim our love of an album then we sure as hell want to make sure it's something ultra hep even if not always very good. As a result, we’ve so far overlooked every single Beatles album, such Stones classics as Between The Buttons and Exile On Main Street while the only Dylan album we’ve tackled so far is Self Portrait. Hmm… Also problematic is the good album by the stoopid, square or, like, totally finished band. Who wants to go up against the behemoth that is the MOJO Message Board and proclaim their love for, say, Slowdive’s Souvlaki, Hole’s Celebrity Skin or The Dandy Warhols’ Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia. Oh, all right then! For a band with so few original ideas, who’d already spent three years passing off Kinks riffs and Velvet Underground atmospherics as their own pop nous and distracting us with nudity, TTFUB was, at least audacious in its thievery. Opening track Godless melds the intro drone of Viginia Plain with the 12-string Chiffons guitar riff of George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord and then kinda admits that it has no further ideas, settling down into a hypnotic trance of barefaced pilfering. This drones on for two further songs of brass-led headswim psych that suggests early Ride backed by Blood Sweat And Tears (what?!). With tracks like Shakin’ it all gets a bit meta. Is this The Dandys doing Wire doing Addicted To Love or, more likely, the band taunting Elastica for their own larceny by comparing them to Robert Palmer? Yes, it’s also got that Nokia ad track on it but at its best TTFUB is like seeing a bunch of Portland drug fiends living it up on wasteground with the belongings of others, flipping them the finger and carrying it off with rude style.

The news that Labelle – Nona Hendryx, Sarah Dash and Patti LaBelle – had re-formed set one a-pondering as to the success, or lack of it, achieved by the three women during the hiatus. After Labelle, Nona made a brash, in yo face rock-soul album, Sarah a nondescript light soul album. And Patti? After the extraordinary collision of funk and glitz that was Labelle flared and fizzled by the middle of the ’70s, the outstanding soul singer who had first formed the group as Patti LaBelle And The Blue Belles back in 1962 recorded for CBS in the second half of the 1970s with moderate success and then, at the start of the 1980s, signed to Philadelphia International. On paper, the perfect match: LaBelle was a Philly native and knew many of the label’s main players. In practice, the liaison simmered but never really gripped the emotions. Hard to say why. A classically good singer, more in the mould of the great jazz ballad stylists than the soul screamers as her version here of Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be?) attests, LaBelle’s powerful voice will find the love in any melody. That her soaring flights of fancy (hear the end of If Only You Knew) perhaps became a template for the likes of Celine Dion, Mariah Carey and several hundred dreadful ’90s copyists is scarcely the messenger’s fault. On I’m In Love Again, the Philly A Team – Kenneth Gamble, Leon Huff, Bunny Sigler – share production. Aside from two dance tracks (Body Language and I’ll Never, Never Give Up) which are poor indeed, the title track, Lover Man and a version of Womack & Womack’s Love Bankrupt are all sound performances. The direction was to be a beacon to subsequent, more commercial recordings, with the Number 1 duet On My Own three years down the line. Still, it will be fascinating to hear the three reunited.

“I knew you’d come back, we always do,” sings a sober Suggs on Saturday Night, Sunday Morning; “like thieves returning to the scene of the crime.” North London’s long-serving lachrymose party band certainly revisited some old habits on 1999’s Wonderful, and left incriminating evidence with their fingerprints all over it. Starting its lengthy gestation after their earth-moving Madstock reunion seven years previously, it brought a familiar sound of upbeat, reggae-leaning pop tunes with a side order of tea dance-skinhead with strings, and undercurrents of bittersweet ambivalence. Their time off hadn’t eroded their abilities; among the gems are lead single Lovestruck (cheery chorus, frowny verses) which echoed 1983’s hit The Sun And The Rain, and gave voice to a man drowning in booze, all dignity gone; another was underworld phantasmagoria-with-swanee-whistle Drip Fed Fred, which saw Madness inspiration Ian Dury’s last appearance on record. Meanwhile the waggish, Wurlitzer-waltzing Going To The Top warns young bands to beware fickle fame, lending the album a sense of being a therapy-session for a group who’d been through the ‘80s pop-mangle and almost lost their minds. After the album reached number 17, the seven would splinter once again. Still they were unable to stay away; after releasing the covers LP The Dangermen Sessions in 2005, they’re currently polishing The Liberty Of Norton Folgate, their metaphysical history of London.

Bolstered by a healthy competitiveness, the deep musical kinship between veteran axe-slingers Collins and Copeland and the rising star Cray is instantly apparent. From the first notes of T-Bone Walker’s T-Bone Shuffle, to the sign-offs at the end of Blackjack, there is a synergy and cohesiveness that can only be achieved by friends intent on collaboration rather than individual grandstanding. While Collins hogs the lead breaks, the others get ample opportunities to display their talents, backed by a rock-solid crew from Albert’s group The Ice Breakers. Copeland unleashes his throaty growls to perfect effect on the raucous Lion’s Den and the slow-burning blues of Bring Your Fine Self Home, which features some steamy harmonica work from Collins.

Cray’s soulful vocals are the perfect counterpoint to his companions’ gruffer tones, lighting up the simmering lust of The Dream and the bouncing groove of She’s Into Something. As you would expect, the album offers up a feast of passionate and inspired blues guitar from all three – a tribute not only to the mutual respect these men had for one another, but to the vitality and beauty of the music that drew them together in the first place.

Do you “do” angular? If you’re a British band of a certain age – let’s say mid-20s – chances are you do. In fact it’s hard to imagine you garnering a small profile and contrived, soon-to-embarrass photograph in the Radar section of NME without a hint of herk or jerk to your quirk. Perhaps you stencilled it off the first or second XTC album; or if you’re super-super-cool you own this, the most explosive, punky-funky spazz-out to crawl mangled from New York’s No Wave apocalypse. Granted, you’ll never grow the clanging steel balls of Contortions majordomo James Siegfried, aka Chance, a pouting, bequiffed crazy who channelled his rejection by the black funk and jazz artists he lionised by reincarnating as a Brundlefly amalgam of James Brown, Johnny Rotten and assault-saxman John Zorn, turning R&B on its head and eyeballing his audience until they punched him to the floor. But who could?

Buy remains Chance’s manifesto in wax, and from the stitched-together art-bikini of its cover star, it’s a record that revels in the joins, with Jody Harris’s sci-fi Jimmy Nolen guitar slashed by Pat Place’s randomized bottleneck blasts, and Chance’s uncontrolled saxfart offering another destabilising influence. Meanwhile, Don Christensen’s cudgelled drums ooze menace and stand-in bassist David Hofstra’s dead-eyed dub probing maintains its sang-froid in the face of Chance’s yelped exhortations to engage in gymnastic congress or admit you DESERVE TO DIE!! Because The Contortions are all geniuses of sorts, it’s brilliantly focused chaos, shunning the locked-in unisons of trad rock, punk or R&B but unerringly arrayed around an all-but-invisible funk source, building through nine tracks like an itch you can’t scratch until they climax (we use the word advisedly) with the mind-boggling india rubber lurch of Bedroom Athlete, the ne plus ultra of punkfunk, whereupon it’s time for a post-coital fag (as they almost certainly never said in CBGB). Soon, the Contortions would become James White & The Blacks in an effort to cash in on Siegfried’s kinda-charismatic avant-lounge lizard persona, but the Buy line-up would not survive to see the record’s release. Maybe you can’t stretch a band as taut as Chance did without it breaking.

The release of Guns N’Roses’ Chinese Democracy has sent me careering back into the realm of the true hard rock heavyweights, a place where fast-living comes with a lachrymose aftermath, and there’s always time for a cheeky innuendo. “[Steven] Tyler has a gift for the dirty line as well as the dirty look,” wrote The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, no doubt referring to track five on Toys In The Attic – a faithful take on blueser Bull Moose Jackson’s Big Ten Inch Record, wherein the satchel-mouthed singer hollers, “She gets all excited / When she begs for my big ten inch.” Beyond the wink-wink, nudge-nudge of this and the equally saucy Adam’s Apple, lie the anthems that would give the band their first true wallop of mainstream success. Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way, their first crossover singles, remain perfect synchronisations of riff and vocal, with Joe Perry’s clipped Les Paul and Tyler’s ragged rants conjuring images of the backstage distractions that would consume the band over the next few years. But the most telling moments of Aerosmith’s best album arrive in the form of Toys’… final tracks. Round and Round pauses the Stonesy shimmies for a fully-Ledded echo of Physical Graffiti (released two months previously), while melancholic epic You See Me Crying remains one of Tyler’s finest moments as both a songwriter and a singer. Somewhere in the middle of these two songs, between hard rock and a somewhat softer place, lies the heart of a band that would go on to take the tenets of this record (women, chemicals, women) to the absolute limit. They would barely make it out of the ‘70s alive.

This has to be right up there with Abba Gold as a collection of singles so deeply ingrained in the collective consciousness you’ll know every track, even if, like MOJO’s editor, you’d really rather not. But there is no denying the pop nous behind Ms Ciccone’s first 15 years of hits, here brilliantly packaged in, gasp, chronological order (terribly old hat these days – but why?!). It’s a period of her career so closely identified with the MTV generation it’s virtually impossible to hear these singles now without mentally rerunning her equally impressive video collection, in which Madonna variously enacts Catholic pyschodrama for Papa Don’t Preach; dark eyed exoticism blown in from La Isla Bonita (aided by a guitarist who may or may not be the long haired one from Charles And Eddie and recasts Fritz Lang’s Metropolis as a high-camp manifesto for girl power-in-a-monocle for Express Yourself (simultaneously launching the career of Fight Club director David Fincher). It’s no wonder both Madonna and Hollywood saw no reason why she shouldn’t be a successful actress – she’s certainly capable of outstanding performances. If only she’d stayed in London, we might have seen her in Chicago by 2010 (right after Dani Behr’s run ends).

When I interviewed Evan Dando in 2003 he was keen to point out that the beer we were chugging down at 11am was of the alcohol-free variety. That he was also transforming the beer cans into dope bongs seemed of little consequence – here was a new, cleaner Evan, off the heavy drugs and booze since September 11, 2001. Dando had been due in court on September 12 that year, charged with opening a bale of hay on-stage and telling a cop to fuck off. “They said, 'Mr Dando? Your hay incident has been made completely irrelevant by today's historical events.’” That day did something to Evan Dando. It almost settled him down. The result was Baby I’m Bored. Following the jet-trash drive of 1996's vastly underrated Car Button Cloth Dando had intended to spend 1997 skiing. Instead he found himself in a New York crack den, looking after a friend’s two Rottweilers, and stopping the rats, real and imaginary, from chewing on the carpets. But in early 1998 he met and married Newcastle-born model (and BIB cover star) Elizabeth Moses and started rebuilding his life. After recording with John Convertino, Joey Burns and Howe Gelb from Giant Sand and Calexico, he started writing with Ben Kweller, Tom Morgan and Ben Lee and, following an endearingly ragged live album, Live At The Brattle Theatre, cut Baby I’m Bored with Jon Brion.

Beyond its basic artwork and bumper-sticker title, Baby I’m Bored is a sweetly assured album of dog-end days and fresh start mornings, an album that possesses the same low-key endorphin buzz as the best kind of Sunday morning hangover. In addition to Dando’s own illuminated country ballads of recrimination and remission, the most striking moments are in his interpretations of Ben Lee’s All My Life and Hard Drive, sweetly melodic mantras of amelioration that Dando occupies as if they were his own compositions and not just the perfectly crafted gifts of a loving fan. Not that MOJO would ever wish a hangover on anyone but, when it comes, here is the perfect elixir.

Having served his apprenticeship as a jobbing guitarist on the US chitlin circuit, honing soul, blues and R&B licks to perfection, Jimi Hendrix’s freak flag flew in the UK when he found drummer Mitch Mitchell, his perfect, expansive percussion partner. When their exceptional empathy and telepathy frayed, a consequence of an exhausting touring schedule, Hendrix lighted on Buddy Miles as the drummer to take his music to the next phase. A funkier, more solidly in-the-pocket drummer Hendrix had met during his Stateside apprenticeship, Miles was far less likely to spiral off into extensive extemporisations and offered a more grounded alternative direction, a return to those R&B/soul roots as exemplified on Miles’s funk standard Them Changes. Also, someone to help with the lead vocals and take on a greater burden of composition – Miles had been a singer/drummer/songwriter in Electric Flag, the multi-racial Chicago blues-rock band.

After Hendrix’s death dissolved Band Of Gypsys, Miles relaunched his solo career, and in 1970 used his best song to date as the title and lead track. It’s the best thing here – it would be the best thing on most records – although his version of Rufus Thomas’s Memphis Train is fun and the instrumental Paul B. Allen, Omaha, Nebraska, a feature for organist Andre Lewis and the guitarist Marlo Henderson (soon to join Stevie Wonder’s exceptional Wonderlove band) is pretty fine. Energetic, enthusiastic, Miles was the epitome of the drummer as reliable, rooted timekeeper. All he lacked was a Jimi Hendrix. But then, didn’t we all.

A fine album that, even so, is really about one song. UK Number 1 smash Are ‘Friends’ Electric? was recorded in a basement in London’s Chinatown that was accessed through a trap door. But to what psychological sub-stratas did Gary Numan (né Webb) descend when he initiated this majestic, enigmatic sonic event? Written at home on an old upright piano bought by his mother, the self-taught Numan devised an odd set of chords, bum note and all, and ended up bolting it onto another uncompleted song. The motorik, pulsing result, made with band Tubeway Army and the then-cutting edge Minimoog, Polymoog and a Roland SH 2000, is equal parts synth-pop, rock and ballad. It presides over Replicas, a Philip K Dick-inspired sci-fi concept LP where an evil super-computer equates order with liquidating humans and controls an army of sex-robots (the ‘Friends’ of the title) to keep the population passive. Numan, who later revealed he had Asperger’s Syndrome, would go solo and score another chart-topper in 1979 with Cars, and still records and tours today, being hailed as an influence by the likes of Trent Reznor, Dave Grohl and Afrika Bambaataa. In 2002 Sugababes scored a massive hit by re-recording a bootmash that spliced Are ‘Friends’ Electric? with Adina Howard’s rude US hit Freak Like Me, but for sheer immaculate creepiness, nothing beats the original.

With the news that a musical about one of Britain’s greatest songwriters and performers is about to premiere in London maybe the time is right to dig out one of the stranger releases from this king of the London stage. Ain’t It Funny was the second half of MGM’s two-album deal with Newley and his long-time writing partner Leslie Bricusse, sealed in the wake of Sammy Davis Jr’s success with his cover of The Candy Man, written by Newley and Bricusse for Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory Mel Stuart’s 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s adventure. The first album for MGM, Pure Imagination, was effectively Newley and Bricusse treading water, a mix of new and rerecorded collaborations including some four songs culled from the Wonka soundtrack. However, Ain’t It Funny was something else.

Born to a single mother in Hackney in 1931, Newley had left school at 14 before finding success as a child actor, playing The Artful Dodger in David Lean’s Oliver Twist. . For a while he could do no wrong, writing for the stage and directing, scoring hit after hit and starring in what can safely be described as the world’s first post-modern sit-com. But by the early ’70s cracks were beginning to show. Newley’s marriage to Joan Collins was on the rocks and the 40-year-old was going through some kind of mid-life crisis. Album opener Overchewer (geddit?) finds Newley lamenting his inability to get with the times (“Here comes the middle-aged silent majority Geritol rock’n’roll star”) while Easy For You Captain Candy is Tony’s mean-spirited dig at Sammy Davis Jr, making all those millions covering such Newley-Bricusse tracks as What Kind of Fool Am I?, Gonna Build A Mountain and, of course, the Candy Man. However, the majority of the album is comprised of black-cloud break-up ballads ranging from the all-alone country lope title track (“When you’re down you’re down I guess / Why spread around that old virus of gloom”) to the painfully simple Me Without You and the operatically vicious I Do Not Love You (“I’m not the fool who’d follow you”). Nearly ten years since his death from cancer Newley is yet to be reinstated as a genuine showbiz great and national treasure but if you’re at all interested in why anyone should care here is a good place to start.

Twice in as many weeks I’ve hurried excitedly round the corner and into the MOJO office to find out “who’s playing Carwash Hair?” or “Is it The Soft Bulletin Day?” Only they weren’t. And it isn’t (not until Hawkwind month ends at any rate…). Fooling me into this Proustian rush of heady ‘90s avant-pop is the new Deerhunter album. Loose and groovy, it’s become a firm office favourite (which is rare in a room full of bat-eared malcontents). And while it’s really only the first few seconds of Cover Me that open the album with that Dave Fridmann-fried psychedelic balm in an obviously recognisable way, the rest of the record still shares the Mercury Rev/Flaming Lips ability to balance melody with sonic disturbance. Little Kids is a lulling, Velvets-y ballad that brings back happy memories of Ultra Vivid Scene and the title track builds from a whisper to an ecstatic, pulse-quickening roar. But best of all is Nothing Ever Happened, its motorik groove bundling along a melody that seems close to suffocating before the EEW-OO! keyboard line swoops it up to an euphoric high, before segueing into the next track as if it nothing special had just happened. Whistle that, art department!

Dirt Farmer, Helm’s most recent solo album, was much played in the MOJO office when it was released at the end of 2007, got a four-star star review (MOJO 169), but in one of those inexplicable quirks of panel voting failed to make our Best Of The Year list. Personally, I was dumbfounded. As so often. But it was not the first time Helm had made an overlooked album. Thirty years before Dirt Farmer, he’d gathered a quorum of likeminded players (Booker T. Jones, Dr. John, Duck Dunn, Steve Cropper, Paul Butterfield among them) to breeze through 10 songs, nine covers and his own Blues So Bad, co-written with Henry Glover. From a brisk arrangement of Kokomo Arnold’s Milk Cow Boogie, something he might have played with The Hawks since time immemorial, Earl King’s Sing, Sing, Sing (Let’s Make A Better World), with co-Band veteran Garth Hudson on unmistakable accordion, and Fred Carter’s A Mood I Was In are just three of the light, rootsy delights. Other highlights: Chuck Berry’s Havana Moon, Dr. John’s Washer Woman, Paul Butterfield’s harmonica, Helm/Rebennack’s That’s My Home, but above all that distinctive Helm voice, tuneful as a tinkling bell, easy rolling as Old Man Mississippi, and his unobtrusive but exact drumming.

Fred McMahon must have called me at MOJO one day but I have no recollection of it. All I know is that, back in 2004 I received a CD burn of this album in the post. Given I’d forgotten he’d even called my natural next response would have been to stick the CD straight in the listen-to-later box, and get on with something far less important. But written on a post-it note stuck to the back of the CD case were the words “Sorry it took so long” and a signature that looked a lot like “F.J. Mc”. Then there was that cover - an oval Victorian picture frame containing the image of a perplexed, apprehensive young man, standing next to a pot plant, looking like he’d was posing for some 19th Century photographer, before going off to fight in the American Civil War. Then there was that album title, Spirit Of The Golden Juice, suggesting something mystical yet seedy, transcendental but intoxicating. It needed to be played. Well, Spirit of The Golden Juice doesn’t come upon you like a great album. It neither pounces nor creeps but is just there, like you’ve walked in on the middle of it and it’s always been playing. The opening track, Sister, Brother “begins” with a short military drum paradiddle before guitar and drums flop into a lazy, seemingly eternal time-keeping groove, interspersed with lonesome twangs of Gibson echo as McMahon sings “Sister, brother/come and hold my hand/don’t let me walk away/help me stand.” McMahon’s voice is something else: nervous, beaten, wary, possessing some of Fred Neil or Tim Hardin’s folk presaging but without their junkie meanness or arrogance. If Spirit has a weakness it’s also its strength: every song sounds the same, keeping to the same lazy rhythm and possessing the same delicate, mournful melodic drift, with only the lyrics changing. But it’s in those lyrics that you get to the heart of the album. On one track he is a drifter who “forgot the way back home”; on another, a man back from a five-year sentence who doesn’t understand how the world works. “I never knew what they meant by duty,” he sings on Five Year Kansas Blues, while on the beautifully sad Early Blue we find him cowering in his room during daylight “I try to hide from people…” Turns out that McMahon was a Santa Barbara surf guitarist who joined the USAF in 1965, receiving orders for a tour of duty of Vietnam two years later. The darkness at the heart of Spirit Of The Golden Juice is combat fatigue, PTSD.

“I know I’ve lost a good part of my life,” he sings on the reverberant, premonitory title track, “But I’d do it again / As will most men / Keep on ’til I die.” And what is The Spirit Of The Golden Juice? “That song is about my experiences in Viet Nam, Thailand and the PI,” he tells lysergia.com, “The ‘golden juice’ is I. W. Harper bourbon which was the fuel of the times.” Fred McMahon currently works in computer repairs. If you go to his website http://fjmcmahon.com/ and drop him a line he’ll burn you a copy of his album for $19.95, including postage and packing. Tell him MOJO sent you.

Here in the UK the days have turned cold, the nights are drawing in and the season is ripe for the sonic warmth and psychic chill of Papa John’s solo debut. The evangelist of the a free and easy life under vibrant, Californian skies, by 1969 Phillips had found himself at the centre of a new, dangerous vortex, propelled by high-grade pharmaceuticals and an assortment of LA nasties. Written within the confines of his cavernous Bel Air mansion – frequented by The Manson Family barely two years before – Wolfking would become one of the first albums to sift through the shards of the hippie ideal and look into the cold, black eyes of what lay in wait – namely, Drum’s junkie scum on the prowl (“Some robbers they don't need no knives or guns babe / They come get you where you are / Somebody's come and stole my blackbird drum, baby / You know they took them from my car”). Doors are locked, curtains closed and a sense of foreboding lurks beneath the searching pedal-steel, lulling acoustic guitars, soulful harmonies and church-tinged pianos, and the album’s defining moment – a confession of surrender from this high priest of the US counter-culture – arrives amid the gentle folk wanderings of Topanga Canyon: “Oh Mary, I'm in deep waters / And it's way, way over my head / Everyone thought I was smarter / Than to be this dead”. The burnt-out languor of the ’70s singer-songwriter wave starts here.

The sadly curtailed career of hypomanic writer-performer Robert Calvert – he died of heart failure aged 43 in August 1988 – includes some striking ‘Mad Bob’ anecdotes, like the time he went for then-bandmate Lemmy with a sword onstage, or when he chased Hawkwind’s limousine on foot after they abandoned him in Paris, all the while wearing an army uniform. Yabbering, maximalist solo discs like Captain Lockheed And The Starfighters (a Goon Show-esque concept-gangshow about the post-war German Luftwaffe, starring Viv Stanshall? Why not) bear out this unpredictable persona. But Freq, produced pretty much single-handed during the miners’ strike of 1984-85, shows a more sober side. It combines cold, ungrooving synth-rock with field recordings from the picket lines - “Arthur Scargill is a first class wanker” opines one interviewee of the former NUM President - and archly reflects on industrial decline, unemployment, ecological decay, state surveillance, genetics and other science gone bad. But as on opener Ned Lud, named for the mythic leader of the Luddites, it also mixes fatalism with its feelings of frustration and anti-Thatcher anger, not least in All The Machines Are Quiet’s plaintive “all we’re asking is a living wage.” All of which means that Freq still resonates, with an extra kick of now-ness delivered by The Cool Courage Of The Bomb Squad Officers, a song about the defusing of a terrorist device.

Chas E Foote, the doyen of London drum dealers, liked to tell a story about Mitch Mitchell, remembering how the then-unknown urchin bopped into his Golden Square store in the mid-’60s to try out some drums. “These sound good,” the future Hendrix time-bomb told Foote, “but can my mate have a go? I’d really like his opinion…” Mitchell popped out, popped back in and, Foote’s jaw dropped. His “mate”, now sat on a drum stool socking out paradiddles was… Peter Sellers.

Mitchell’s child-actor background guaranteed that little would awe him in the world of showbiz, and it served him serenely in the service of Jimi Hendrix, the locus of sometimes paralyzing outbreaks of awe among his peers. Manic Depression, the track that had me running back to Are You Experienced in mourning last week, is its perfect encapsulation. It’s hard to say who the star is of this track: Hendrix’s dark, thrill-filled riffing or Mitchell’s lurching, rolling, ride-cymbal-clanking drum attack. As the track ends, in what is basically a drum solo with a Hendrix-Noel Redding vamp sparing its blushes, you’re forced to acknowledge – if you were ever in doubt – that this was anything but a vehicle for Hendrix’s axe-heroics, but a miraculously melded team reimagining the protean rock template.

Jazz was Mitchell’s mother’s milk, and the trashy, slightly “out” feel he brought to R&B owed something to Ginger Baker, but as much to the great Coltrane quartet’s Elvin Jones. In fact, there’s something of the Jones/Coltrane dialectic in Are You Experienced’s Third Stone From The Sun – which rides in on Mitchell’s classic bop tish-kertish, before Hendrix’s tripped-out sheets of sound kick in and the trio head spacewards, kept on course by Redding’s selfless, Suicide-style boogie. (Incidentally, has anyone else pondered the similarity between Third Stone...’s dreamy riff and the Coronation Street theme?)

For all the heavy goings-on, there’s an element of airiness to the Experience – a space within their sound – that marks them out from The Who and Cream and survives even an out-and-out proto-metal assault like Purple Haze (also available on this album’s modern reissues). In 1967, there was still much more to come, but the Experience’s bid for Best Ever Rock Band status was already in. The title, if it’s to be theirs, belongs as much to Mitchell as as it does to Hendrix himself.

If Fiona Apple’s reputation as a Maya Angelou-quoting, self-help-bible-bashing Women In Rock cover star saw her unfairly ghettoised (and it certainly had - what male songwriter of similar breadth and appeal would be dismissed as a “kook”? Hello, Anthony?!) Then the rumours surrounding the delay of her third album didn’t help. Suppressed by her record label? At loggerheads with her producer? The subject of an online pressure group and apparently on the verge of packing it in to explore the therapeutic benefits of farm animals. Whatever. See wikipedia for the full poop. When it was finally released in Extraordinary Machine was, happily, strong enough to disassociate her from the Lilith Fair stereotype forever. It’s not that her obvious eccentricities and willingness to draw on personal trauma are absent, but they are tempered. Extraordinary Machine is an evolutionary step on from the piano-pounding grit of her debut, Tidal, and the baroque artfulness of The Pawn (here’s the full 90-word title). The elaborate arrangements on the opening title track offer a clue to the original sessions, with pizzicato strings, marimba and dramatic flourishes propelling it to centre stage. It’s a masterpiece, but a whole album might leave you uncomfortably full. Instead we get roomier piano-driven arrangements and familiar failed relationships on Window (“Better that I broke the window than him / Or her / Or me.”) or Not About Love (“I miss that stupid ape”), plus an insistent chorus and Beach Boys-ready theremin on the knowing Please Please Please (“Please, please, please / No more melodies / They lack impact, they're petty / They've been made up already”). It’s moody, oddly funny, self-aware and crucially, transcends the hype.

Oftentimes, Joni Mitchell’s called her weird tunings “chords of inquiry” that remain “unresolved.” There’s no shortage of questions on her first album, ranging from what it’s actually called (word is, pressing-plant bungling made it appear eponymous when it wasn’t, or maybe it was) to why she saved already-written gems Both Sides Now and Urge For Going for later release, to what the commanding songs and atmospheres within the LP’s folky-acoustic grooves are actually signifying. It’s split into two five-track suites entitled ‘I Came To the City’ and ‘Out Of The City And Down To The Seaside’, but despite the presence of two fairly straight, up evocations of urban and rustic living (that’s Night In The City and Sisotowbell Lane, respectively), elsewhere those Chords Of Inquiry hold resolute sway. Other hitmakers of the year were happy to ride the Magic Bus or even suggest this; here were reflections of greater, possibly autobiographical gravity, where romance grows and withers as the narrator swings between sounding 16 and 90, her dextrous, operatic voice combining with boundlessly melodic guitar to stunning effect. Sadness is often observed, but the singer doesn’t go overboard; in Marcie, a frustrated protagonist awaits a letter from a man who’s possibly referred to in closing song Cactus Tree, who is in turn awaiting a reply to a letter that he’s sent. Laconic references to “being so busy being free” further put the cap on hippy utopianism. Later in her still-jazzing career we’d get pop chart success, sudden leftward shifts and uncommon artistic triumph, but was anything quite so beautifully haunting as this?

Ronnie Walker has a vocal style that separates the men from the boys, with the men standing all the way over there, by the bar, coughing gruffly lest notions of masculinity be assaulted by their proximity to this high-pitched purveyor of falsetto heartbreak. Walker started young, just 15 when he recorded spookily sad soul valediction I’m Saying Goodbye for Bell Records in 1966. With its roots in desolate doo-wop, Walker’s echo-chambered head-register drifted through mists of grieving girls and funereal organ, establishing a sound that seemed cloaked in old velvet, bidding farewell from the other side of a ghostly veil. This is the Philly sound, before Philly meant too-smooth Gamble & Huffness, a lonely wail forged for cheap, capturing the eerie curse of unrequited love in the days when teenagers were sold romance as an out-of-reach ideal in True Confessions magazine and scared single by urban legends in which smooching led to venereal disease, horrible highway carnage or encounters with The Hook. Walker’s 1967 single for Phillips, Really, Really Love You b/w Ain’t It Funny epitomises this wandering soul sound, Ronnie’s tragic upper register reverberating in a discount echo-chamber like the disembodied voice of some tuxedoed prom-night ghost, looking down on his bride to never-be, his tormented treble filling the night with an ethereal spookiness that says vampires at the window as much as lovers at the door. Amazingly, the ever-youthful Walker is still recording and underneath the disco uplift his is still the sound of deep spectral heartbreak.

Of all the fan-fleecing formats dreamed up in record company marketing departments in recent years, the two-fer has to be the greatest innovation. Not least because they’re great value (these two come in at less than a fiver on amazon) but also because some albums work perfectly in pairs, the juxtaposition adding a fascinating dimension of relative history. Heard back-to-back, Big Star’s first two albums from 1972 and 1974 plot the testy relationship of songwriters Chris Bell and Alex Chilton. A two-man dialectic, their personal conflict and song-writing one-upmanship propelled them to such heights as Bell’s Feel – which opened Big Star’s debut with such a wonderful, frustrated stomp, and Chilton’s gorgeous channelling of parent-stifled romance, Thirteen (“Tell him what we said about Paint It Black!”) – and yes, I chose to ignore the paedo-interpretation of that song. Every note of #1 Record is priceless; even bassist Andy Hummell’s India Song, with its clunky phrasing and off-key flute solo, serves as perfect punctuation to the Chilton/Bell ding dong. By the end of 1972 Chris Bell had had enough and the group disbanded, later reforming as a three-piece for a rock writers’ convention and eventually releasing 1974’s Radio City. Without his co-writer and free from the strain of their relationship’s dysfunction, Chilton’s melancholic tendencies still found no relief, channeled to heartachingly beautiful ends on O My Soul, You Get What You Deserve and the rightly celebrated September Gurls. Bell’s presence still loomed, and though uncredited, his involvement the early stages of recording is most evident on Back Of A Car’s melodic chime. Ironically, it’s one of the album’s greatest moments. Can’t live with him, can’t live without him.

For aficionados of deep southern soul, it doesn’t get much better than James Edward Carr. The son of a preacher man (and how apt is that?), Carr was born in Mississippi and spent his formative years immersed in the gospel sounds of the church, eventually honing the rasping vocal style that would turn his later recordings into timeless classics of the genre. You Got My Mind Messed Up was his debut LP for Memphis’ Goldwax Records – a fledgling label run by Quinton Claunch and home to his matchless collection of late ‘60s sides. Carr’s original take on Dan Penn and Chips Moman’s The Dark End Of The Street remains the definitive version of the song – that gentle ripple of organ opening the door to a performance of ravaged passion and heartache that’s up there with the hits of Otis or Aretha, Sam Cooke or James Brown. Better still are the countrified strains of I Don’t Want To Be Hurt Anymore and Forgetting You, the latter’s piercingly high shrieks peppering a story of confusion, uncertainty and loneliness. Looking at his heavy, hooded eyes peering down from the sleeve photograph, one wonder’s whether James Carr could have been anything other than a soul singer, but by all accounts he had no idea just how good he was. Perhaps his gift lies somewhere in that fissure between power and innocence. Carr’s later life would be marred by mental instability and emotional distress, heavy anti-depressant use and a thwarted comeback in the 1970s doing nothing to aid his already fragile state - he died in 2001 following a lengthy battle with lung cancer. It’s worth investing in his entire Goldwax output, but if you’re looking for a way in, this is a breathtaking place to start.

Before The Fat Boys gave him a comeback hit of sorts with The Twist (Yo Twist!) in 1988, Chubby Checker’s last trip to the charts had been back in 1965 when he scraped into the US Top 50 with Let’s Do The Freddie, a half-hearted discotheque coronach based around the irksome on-stage gyrations of flash-in-the-pan UK pop gurner Freddy Garrity. A pop career over, at the age of 24? Well, not quite. Towards the end of the ’60s the still-young Checker found himself living in Holland and working with notorious record company “entrepreneur”, Ed Chalpin, the man behind the much-flogged Jimi Hendrix/Curtis Knight chitlin-circuit recordings. With Chalpin, Checker cut this Europe-only psych cash-in which, despite its pungent whiff of cynical trend surf, stands up rather splendidly as a rare example of moonshot Aquarian psych soul. The album starts on a super-stoopid high with the massed-voices drum-freak of Goodbye Victoria (“Everybody’s going to the moon”) and the post-Jimi acid-guitars and cave-chants combo that drives the oddly threatening My Mind Comes From A Higher Place (title!) but barely flags after that. As with Chairmen Of The Board’s mid-’70s incarnation you almost suspect the spiked demon hand of Parliafunkadelicment to be involved somehow, especially during the wacked-out carnival beats and rubber riffs of Stoned In The Bathroom and the bad-trip Christ requiem He Died. But there’s also Checker’s freaky Arthur Lee/MC5 assimilation Love Tunnel (“Don’t get caught up in the love tunnel / You got to have it ’fore you lose your mind!”) before it all ends with a literally deranged organ and drums hippie-hitchhike fuzz freakout entitled Gypsy in which Checker makes very little actual sense - “Yes, I’m trying to find myself! / I’m a gypsy! / I don’t give a damn / Trying to find my mind / Movin’ cross the highway / Comin’ to your town to see your FACE! / Time is a wastin’ / and no time to WASTE!” – but is as exciting as hell while he doesn’t. While it’s hard to imagine how this was ever a legitimate release, with master tapes squirreled away somewhere safe, Chequered (also released as New Revelation and Goes Psychedelic, vinyl fans) is an album desperately in need of a clean and tidy reissue so that we can remember that even this man went far out into inner space as America entered the ’70s.

Things weren’t exactly harmonious between main XTC songwriter Andy Partridge and Skylarking producer Todd Rundgren, who was brought in to answer charges that the Swindon group were just too English to translate internationally. Yet if their collaboration at Rundgren’s Woodstock studio were businesslike-to-hostile rather than chummy, the results were sublime. Here was finely-tuned pop nous with strings and West Country Beach Boys harmonies, used to make an album of symmetry and poetry that, in a continuous flow, takes in all life stages before concluding where it began. Amniotic opener Summer’s Cauldron, complete with heat haze and the literal sound of birds and bees, begins a trio of songs touching on fecund nature – singles Grass and The Meeting Place both frankly celebrate outdoor nookie. Songs of everyday magic, marriage, domestic aggro and pregnancy follow, but after the dream-jazz of Mermaid Smiled, payback comes with the hepcat existentialism of The Man Who Sailed Around His Soul (as with The Meeting Place, a video was filmed at Portmeirion in north Wales, homaging 1967’s surrealist spy series The Prisoner) and the self-explanatory Dying. But with benign pagan Sacrificial Bonfire showing new life springing from decay, it’s hard to feel the universe is anything less than benevolent. The CD issue adds on b-side-turned-single Dear God, a coolly angry comment on religion that’s just as pertinent 22 years on.

Just now, with Gruff Rhys solo projects stacking up and drummer Dafydd Ieuan indulging the human wreckage that is Rhys Ifans in vanity glam overreach The Peth, there’s a suspicion of winding-down chez SFA. You could say they’ve earned a breather after a phenomenal burst of creativity established them as the UK’s first properly post-techno psych-rock band. Radiator is proof enough of their first-flush brilliance, its garish and devil-may-care genre-stew throwing prog keyboards, dance beats and singalongaglamfolk into witty and joyous juxtapositions, all serving a think-for-yourself, cool’s for fools manifesto eloquently dispensed by the whimsical, adenoidal Rhys. Later, they would sandpaper the joins of their soundworld and deliver Rings Around The World (legendary working title: Text Messaging Is Destroying The Pub Quiz As We Know It) – utterly beautiful in a Pet Sounds redux kind of a way (it was MOJO’s album of the year, 2001 – trouncing Dylan’s “Love And Theft” among other heavyweights). But for those who preferred them cheekier, more gauche or simply (as in the case of The International Language Of Screaming) rocking like crazy Clangers, there will always be Radiator.

This week sees singer/guitarist Doug Martsch bring Built To Spill back to the UK to play the band’s third album in its entirety at one of ATP’s inspired Don’t Look Back shows. Released in 1997, Perfect From Now On became a turning point for the band in more ways than one. Their first album for Warner Brothers, sonically it was a triumph of indie dream-realising. A set of epic, articulate essays in which Martsch’s stream of consciousness ideas are stitched seamlessly together with just enough studio gloss to sound impressively otherworldly but never disjointed. Though they have much in common with Pavement’s meandering aesthetic, the songs are more psychedelic and less abrasive, though they successfully juggle with similarly complicated arrangements and jagged guitar play. And while Stephen Malkmus addressed the indie nation knowingly, tongue in cheek, Doug was a more fragile soul. An emotional dreamer, gazing into space from the back row while Malkmus led the indie underclass in revolt. On nifty six-minute opener Randy Described Eternity he’s a small, plaintive voice shouting into a hurricane (“stop making that sound!”) while Untrustable Part 2 closes the album with Doug concluding sadly that “God is whoever you perform for”.

Someone, somewhere must have thought that, like Pavement, Built To Spill could go overground, but a tour with Foo Fighters the year this came out pushed Martsch over the edge and the breakthrough turned to breakdown. Though the follow-up was if anything more pop (1999’s irresistible Keep It Like A Secret), Martsch couldn’t face overseas touring and resigned from the international fame game. These days, Built To Spill’s records rarely even get released in the UK, though the fervour of their cult following remains undimmed. See you down the front.

Panting to get your hands on Dust-To-Digital's five-CD Goodbye Babylon, but alarmed by the outlay? In which case, quench your thirst for super-charged spirituals with this single-discer. A 28-track rush of live, bare-bones gospel that stacks frantic vocal dramas up against sanctified group blues. A host of celebrated icons such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, The Soul Stirrers and Mahalia Jackson provide some of the most rowdy and rhythmic moments – Jackson's sweltering performance of The Power Of The Holy Ghost being a real highlight. The clap of hands, the stamp of feet, the choral harmonies and the moaning and groaning of the soloist – there's an unhinged quality to it all that makes some of rock’n’roll's original progenitors sound timid in comparison. There's also a feeling of unpredictability – that slow, low murmuring followed by... wait for it... wait for it... an eruption of voice and clanging piano. It's the equivalent of “the drop” in dance music, but rather than a cavalcade of pulsing breaks and beats, you’re treated to a string of melodic improvisations fired by an untutored vocal dexterity. Regardless of belief, the intensity of these recordings is undeniable. Goodbye Babylon, hello soul music.

Finding a decent scary CD to soundtrack the apple ducking and pumpkin carving of the old Celtic New Year has never been easy. After all, you want something beyond the obvious, don’t you, but something that isn’t too upsetting yet avoids the kitsch of this. The soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s existential Johnny Depp noir western (possibly ‘inspired’ by an earlier Rudy Wurlitzer script, it says here), Young’s Dead Man score is a reverberating chord of sustained distortion and decay, an apocalyptic echo-growl of electric guitar, pump organ, and detuned piano shards, that suggests the scrabbling emergence of some ancient demon from inside the fragile egg-shell earth. This mood of unearthly creation and disturbing visions is further enhanced by a constant squall of surface noise, fragments of whispered cryptic dialogue and readings of William Blake’s poems of cosmic creation and fiery catastrophe by Depp and co-star Gary Farmer. Make it the rumbling soundbed of doom for your ghostly tales and torch-under-the-chin ghoul-gurning and you’re guaranteed one thoroughly chilling night in.

Loretta Lynn was already a mother of four by the time she recorded her legendary debut single, I’m A Honky Tonk Girl, in 1960 at the age of 26. Since then, she has enjoyed four decades of hits, but while her sister Crystal Gayle always sugared the pill, Lynn’s career has been defined by her no-nonsense approach to matters of the heart. This set, her first since 2000’s Still Country, was no exception, and the result remains an enthralling, personal album.

The title track whisks us back to her childhood (“Sittin’ on my daddy’s knee/Listening to the stories that he told”) and relates the tale of her parents’ courtship. Story Of My Life ends the cycle, retelling her own story in a manner which is as self-deprecating as it is warm. In between, Little Red Shoes is a spoken word piece that revisits childhood memories, augmented by ghostly musical backing. Rawer is the lament of Miss Being Mrs. “I lie here alone/In my bed of memories” sings Lynn, drawing on her own solitude since the death of husband Oliver ‘Doo’ Lynn in 1996. In truth, the pair’s relationship was tumultuous, and such is Lynn’s honesty that, despite her loss, she doesn’t flinch from telling it like it was. “We have nothing left in common/Your thoughts are not like mine,” she sings on Trouble On The Line, a track that chronicles the relationship in the frankest fashion and on which the late Doo receives a co-writing credit.

Musically, Jack White’s production is sympathetic and warm, his Blanche/Raconteurs pals relishing their task as Lynn’s backing band and helping her enjoy a Johnny Cash-like commercial resurrection when the album delivered her highest US pop chart placing to date. White and Lynn’s empathy is evident on their duet on Portland Oregon, a track that won them a Grammy for Best Country Collaboration With Vocals in 2005. Van Lear Rose itself is such a creative triumph that Lynn scooped a second Grammy for Best Country Album. Proof indeed that, even in her seventies, the fire still burns in the coal miner’s daughter.

Michael Mann’s 1986 movie Manhunter makes for enjoyably traumatic viewing - full of tension, horror and, and thanks to Brian Cox’s diabolic Hannibal Lecter, the fearful suspicion that murderous evil lurks within us all. The soundtrack features two songs from Shriekback’s Oil And Gold, an album that, like Manhunter, was underrated on release and which can still leave strong impressions on the susceptible mind. With shiny eels coiling among feathers on the cover and more sea life inside (songs are called Hammerheads, Coelacanth and Fish Below The Ice), it’s a vivid and imaginative collection of sinister atmospheres and moral ambiguities – why is the narrator of bass-spanking funk-rock chant Malaria so happy to be losing his marbles? – leading one commentator to call it, “Gormenghast Disco”. Later come moonlit underwater ballads, like the terminal-sounding Manhunter-inclusion This Big Hush where the planet’s in perpetual night, the zombies are coming and death is approaching. There’s more robust apocalyptic fun in the pulsing and contagious almost-hit single Nemesis, wherein 2000AD’s alien freedom fighter is dispatched into Colonel Kurtz’s camp off Apocalypse Now (its 12” run out groove message, incidentally, read ‘WANKED BY THE TERRAPINS OF CHRIST’ – arf!). Co-vocalist Carl Marsh left half way through the recording to leave XTC man Barry Andrews to sing the rest, but thanks to the one-ness of the band in performance and mind, you’d never notice there were two singers.

Got it for Christmas 2005, stuck it on the iPod, forgot about it. And then… slowly, it started to creep in. Brushed jazz drums, acoustic guitar, Bryter Later-esque strings, and in the middle of it all, Brooklyn-based Texan Duncan's soft Lou Barlowesque tenor, drifting in and out of mix, the way extraneous noises bleed into daytime dreams. At first, I couldn’t date it, despite occasional synth swirls, and comparisons to Rundgren or early Badly Drawn Boy. Some lost classic from 2001? 1974? But Eno/Talk Talk fan Duncan’s narcoleptic storytelling and distant nighttime sounds soon took hold. Listening to the album as a whole, instrumentals of rainfall, cars-on-gravel and windchime-static breaking up the misty, lulling songs, it sounds, well, right – calming, assured, beautiful – and you can see why the man himself would reckon, as he suggests on his myspace, that his music sounds like this. As the man sings on blissful opener, In A Way: “In a time of wordy music/ Ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. Aaaaah!"

Esther Mae Jones was born two days before Christmas 1935 in Galveston, Texas. Like so many of her future soul contemporaries, she cut her teeth singing in the local church before being spotted at the age of 13 by rhythm and blues maestro Johnny Otis. The newly christened “Little” Esther Phillips (she swiped the surname from a gas station billboard) quickly racked up a string of hits for the Savoy and Federal labels, her sassy, southern purr belying her teenage years and eventually grabbing the attention of Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. Her 20s were plagued by heroin addiction, but by the early 1960s, as Ray Charles turned to the Grand Ol’ Opry to record his pioneering Modern Sounds In Country And Western Music, Phillips entered the studio to cut her version of Ray Price’s Nashville smash, Release Me. A pop hit, its success would permit her to cover The Beatles’ And I Love Him (a Fabs’ favourite) and open the door to this album of country standards, all torn from the plains of the south by Phillips’ caustic gospel-blues timbre. Her splintered vibrato recalls the jazz-flowing cool of her hero Dinah Washington, but a soupçon of Diana Ross-esque delicacy ensures these tremulous tones are very much her own. The tempos are pulled back, the bluesy piano dressing gives the songs a smoky, bar-at-midnight-taste and the evergreen string arrangements add class and elegance. There’s her wrenching take on Charlie Rich’s No Headstone On My Grave or her mellifluous run through Just Out Of Reach’s string of lonesome verses, in which she sings: “Dreams that just won't let me be / Blues that keep on botherin' me / Chains that just won't set me free”, the latter a fitting description of a life battered by the drug and drink problems that would eventually push her into an early grave. The diminutive girl with the big voice died in 1984. She was 48 years old.

Burn-ing i) adjective: ‘Characterised by intense emotion’; ii) noun: ‘the act of burning’; “he’s outside on the back porch right now, burning something”. As titles of country music albums go, Burning Memories takes some beating, conjuring as it does those twin worlds of romantic pain and self-destructive pity that imprison the archetypal country barfly, seat of his pants slick from the barstool, hand in the shape of a glass… Few were better at creating this spectral, smoke-woven world of longing and loathing than Ray Price. The man who brand-marked the 4/4 bass-driven country shuffle sound of the 1950s backed by high fiddle and steel guitar, Price gave his sound a radical overhaul in the next decade, wrapping massed strings and harmony vocals around a pop crooning style that suggested Mario Lanza doing Porter Wagoner after a whisky-soaked boozathon in some unseemly motel dive. Amidst Don Law and Frank Jones’ vast, haunted dancehall production, Buddy Emmons’ steel guitar, Floyd Cramer’s piano and dark shadows of violin swirl around troubled Ray as he walks a beer and sawdust world of lonely faces and those memory-stained rooms where sadness lurks, an ever present entity “that’s been here since you've been gone… in every chair where I sit down.” Price’s new sound eventually became the vilified template for ’70s pop country, the kind of production that the Outlaw Movement rebelled against – but listened to now, after a surfeit of alt.country preciousness, it sounds astonishing; swirling, drunken, eerie and poetic: the sound of hard booze and heavy heartbreak lifting a mind high up into the black, black clouds.

For more than twenty years, UB40 have been known for a globe-straddling pop-reggae sound unlikely to alienate one’s grandmother, but it wasn’t always like this. Released as the 2-Tone boom was wilting and named for the dole claim form, Signing Off was a singular British take on Jamaican music, in some ways truer to the reggae source than 2-Tone but with a punky, multi-cultured sensibility of its own. Recorded in just three days by players still learning their instruments, it’s a superb balance of lightness and weight, as spry, skanking tunes rub up against militant lyrics made soulful by vocalist Ali Campbell (could it have hurt that his dad was Scottish folk lefty Ian Campbell?). The politics have aged remarkably well: Burden of Shame and Food For Thought address still-festering symptoms of the British disease, while wealth-redistribution inciter Little By Little and the 12-minute Maggie Thatcher horror dub Madame Medusa (“run for your life before she eats you alive!”) are nothing if not credit crunch-applicable. There are mellifluous instrumentals and a cover of Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going To Rain Today for relief, but even so, two protest songs from the album crashed the singles chart. As did double-A side The Earth Dies Screaming/Dream A Lie – the former song once bringing the imminence of global nuclear death and the words “Half eaten meals lie rotting on the table, money clutched within a bony hand” to kids’ Saturday morning laff-riot Tiswas.

Of all the many memorable transformations wrought by Motown’s Hitsville hothouse in the 1960s, perhaps none was more remarkable than that of The Four Tops: four men in their thirties, comfortable in their supper club routine of standards, jazz phrasing and easily crooned harmonies, metamorphosed into million-selling pop stars at the forefront of the label’s international expansion. Spearheaded by the certain power and wonderful expressiveness of the quartet’s lead singer, the great Levi Stubbs, and steered by the songs of Holland-Dozier-Holland, Reach Out was their fourth studio album, and is awash with hits – Reach Out I’ll Be There, 7 Rooms Of Gloom, I’ll Turn To Stone, Standing In The Shadows Of Love and Bernadette (all written and produced by H-D-H) plus their atmospheric cover of The Association’s Walk Away Renee, and though they’re less at home with Monkees hand-me-downs Last Train To Clarksville and I’m A Believer (one can hear, if not condescension, then a certain lack of engagement with the lyrics) they’re much more comfortable with Tim Hardin’s If I Were A Carpenter. Ultimately, Levi Stubbs’s voice conquers all: strong, beseeching, teetering on the edge of heartbreak, bursting with the thrill of new love, that explosive tenor joyfully roaring out “Bernadette!” or healing the world’s pain with the sheer exultation of this album’s mightily comforting, all-encompassing bear-hug of a title track. Proving that too much of a good thing can be wonderful, Reach Out is available as a twofer with On Top.

With the Archive saga still rumbling on (latest rumour: it’s now about 36 Blu-ray discs that none of us will have the kit to play and even fewer can afford), next month promises a timely reminder of what’s so great about the old bird in the form of Sugar Mountain Live At Canterbury House 1968, a concert album recorded over two nights in Ann Arbor, Michigan that launched Young’s career as a solo artist. Included are five songs from Young’s late ’68 debut (re-released in ’69 with the now-familiar Neil Young banner across the top) to remind us how many great songs came out of that period. A commercial dud at the time and ignored in Stalinesque-style on his Greatest Hits, Young’s debut wasn’t an easy “in”, granted, and it sounds largely unlike successive Neil Young albums (despite Jack Nitzsche’s arrangements), with his trademark keening voice mostly taking a backseat. But despite a lack of familiar reference points the songs are truly remarkable. Ever perverse, Young chose to open his singer-songwriter debut with an instrumental, the beautiful Emperor Of Wyoming, pointing the way to a lovelorn future on Harvest and Comes A Time, while the original version of country-rocking standard The Loner is justly the album’s most celebrated track, though epic closer The Last Trip To Tulsa makes a valiant bid for equivalence and shines on the Sugar Mountain record, too.

Minimalist composer and world-class egghead, Anthony Moore was one third of the avant-garde trio Slapp Happy. His second solo album, Flying Doesn’t Help, was credited to A. More, while the scratchy cover pic and exaggeratedly London-accented vocals suggested a seasoned muso hanging on to the coattails of punk. Calculated or not, it works. Slapp Happy aficionado John Peel played these tracks religiously in 1978, but many listeners must have thought they were hearing some box-fresh newcomer. Judy Get Down and Girl It’s Your Time should have become new wave anthems in the vein of Another Girl, Another Planet, Lucia sounds like John Cale fronting early Ultravox!, while War Just Us juggles jittery rhythms and punky shouting with ambient drones. A. More came and went, but Anthony Moore was last spotted writing lyrics for Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright, and sitting in on MOJO’s interview with same. When asked about Flying Doesn’t Help, a look of disbelief flashed across his face. Shortly after, he moved to Cologne and became a university professor. Perhaps we scared him off.

My favourite Pavement record is, not coincidentally, the least “cool” – the one where singer Stephen Malkmus’s barrage of pop culture ref-riffing lets up, and in place of arch allusions to Smashing Pumpkins and Geddy Lee, there’s an absence, a sense of loss deeply felt and only vaguely obscured by cleverness. At the same time, this was the point – now that reliable new drummer Steve West had bedded in – that Pavement’s balance of post-Fall clattering and knee-weakening melody began to tilt in favour of the latter. Wowee Zowee’s rapprochement with classic rock brings the poignant country textures of Pueblo and bluesy grumbles of Half A Canyon, while the band’s experimental inclinations – check the woozy cello on Fight This Generation’s 4am bar rant – augment rather than diffuse their impact. Grounded could be their best ever song, its mournful, needling guitar intro uncoiling darkly into cloudbursts of anguished distortion, adding dread gravity to Malkmus’s pseudo-nonsense about daughters playing contract bridge and the howled declaration: “boys are dying on these streets!” In the end, this is why Wowee Zowee lingers when, for all their strengths, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain or Brighten The Corners do not. Like a shrink’s ink blot test, Malkmus’s seemingly random spew is pregnant with unsettling images (like Rattled By The Rush’s arresting “caught my dad cryin’”), unresolved hurt and intimations of mortality (“Check that expiration date, man / It's later than you think”). He’s blue and green, green and blue and, for once, connected with the universal id.

1994’s Give Out But Don’t Give Up was mostly slop-sink siphonings of low energy Stones knock-offs, both Sly and Rolling. But by their fifth album rock’n’roll lifers Primal Scream (not that one, this one), now joined by Stone Roses bassist Mani, were operational once more. Filching its title from 1971’s speed fiend road movie Vanishing Point, here was rock action, wiry grooves and heavy electro-magnetic atmospheres, conveying charges both positive and negative. In the former category are the three singles, Burning Wheel, Star and Kowalski - the people-powered Star featuring Augustus Pablo and the Memphis Horns, while the bass-shuddering Kowalski gives it up for the hero of Vanishing Point augmented by movie samples courtesy of Cleavon ‘Super Soul’ Little. Less forgiving is Out Of The Void, an out-of-body transmission from the far side of Screamadelica where the DTs kicked in two days ago, they can’t turn the strobe off and the curtains are nailed shut – what else can Bobby G say but “I’ve got the fear” (how he must have jumped to hear the persistent ringing of doorbells during the nightmare dubscape of Stuka). Claustrophobic closer Long Life is more of the same, a belated realisation of the psychic cost of the f*cked, bombed‘n’sorted hedonism of Scream lore. But despite this, Vanishing Point is more pleasure than pain, and, compared to the cudgels to the head of 2000’s LP XTRMNTR, it’s also a good deal easier to listen to. Interested parties, also check the speaker-busting Adrian Sherwood-mixed dub counterpart, Echo Dek.

Question: is there a back catalogue in a bigger mess than that of The Animals? Answer: no, but it was always thus. First off, The Animals were one of many unfortunate mid ’60s British acts imprisoned in a Byzantine Mickie Most contract who also got lumbered with a somewhat acquisitive manager, the late Mike Jeffery, who happily overlooked his artists’ well-being in the service of his own. What then happened over at Decca and MGM is anyone’s guess. In 1966 the band released three albums – Animalisms in the UK and Animalization and Animalism in the US – all powerfully produced under the watchful eye of the benevolent Tom Wilson and all containing a confusing remix of each others’ tracks. Since then, no-one has adequately cleaned up or remastered the Wilson tracks and a series of muffled, fudged, confusing and dishonest releases have emerged over the past twenty years, seriously denting the Animals legend. However, while The Singles + still suffers from the poor quality control of currently available masters it at least offers a compelling career overview of one of the most exciting bands of the ’60s. From the raw, spare sound of such Tyne blues venom shots as It’s My Life and We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, via feverish, over-amped Wilson productions of live screamers like Inside Looking Out to the proto-Earl Brutus brown-ale psych of Monterey and Sky Pilot, few catalogues can compare with the rough, boreal growls and vibrant, electric daftness of The Animals, but until digital justice is done it might still be an idea to track down the vinyl.

In rock lore there is a special circle of hell reserved for The Clash’s despised, airbrushed-from-history Cut The Crap, which was credited to a replicant version of the group created after guitarist Mick Jones was booted out to form Big Audio Dynamite in 1983. But when Jon Savage, the current capo di tutti capo of rock critics calls it an “ambitious and moving state-of-the-nation address with innovative use of rap rhythm and atmosphere,” doesn’t it deserve another listen? Fronted by Joe Strummer with manager Bernard Rhodes co-writing and co-producing, it was an anomaly then and remains so; intended to be a simultaneous look back and leap forward, the resulting farrago of crunching drum machines, cheap synth, ‘77-vintage punk guitar and terrace chanting at times echoes its own working title, Out Of Control. But if you need intestinal fortitude to listen to the baffling We Are The Clash and Dirty Punk, the reflective Three Card Trick and the single This Is England stand up with the Jones-era songs. Strummer’s in splenetic, idealistic form and his theme is, as ever, justice for all and an equitable distribution of wealth, so beneath all the postcard punk baroque Ceefax bluster (not to mention Rhodes’ crash-the-plane-into-a-mountainside hubris), it’s still The Clash, dammit. ’83-’85 guitarist Vince White has expressed hopes that Strummer’s vocals could one day get a Free As A Bird-style rebirth using live instruments. What do you say, Mick Jones?

Like their one-time employer Bob Dylan, The Band – those mysterious, hat-headed fellows tinkering away in a basement in upstate New York – have been the subject of 40 years of dissection. Their journey from Ronnie Hawkins’ instrumental lackeys to Dylan’s electric pioneers; revered musical geniuses to misplaced stadium fillers, has been pulled apart on a regular basis ever since their debut, 1968’s Music From Big Pink, re-focused the creative impulses of rock’s main players. So rather than delve back into byzantine nuances of Greil Marcus’ Weird Old America and the idea of The Band as a portal back into a lost history of the US, I’ll simply say that this is my favourite-sounding record of all time. Time then, to doff our caps to producer John Simon, whose deft touches at the desk, not to mention his sousaphone bass boogie on Rag Mama Rag and his in-a-round studio set-up managed to cajole a loosely gelled, rattle’n’hum brilliance right out of the walls of Sammy Davis Jr’s old poolhouse – the LA outpost hired for the recording of The Band. The component parts of each song are instantly recognisable – Robertson’s biting guitar runs on King Harvest (Will Surely Come); Manuel’s cracked vocals on Whispering Pines; Hudson’s exploratory organ work on Up On Cripple Creek. All these, and many more, are brought together in an old-time, downhomey mix. There are images galore - lantern-lit medicine shows, backwoods clearings and porch-stoop gatherings to name but a few. Released in September ’69 the album would take The Band into a period of perilous, uncomfortable stardom that would slowly chip away at the foundations of the group, but play this record (preferably on vinyl) on a crisp autumnal day, windows open, the smell of last night’s rain still fresh in the air and be transported back to Sammy’s poolhouse, the click of a tape recorder cutting through the tobacco-scented space and signifying the start of something very special.

If there exists, somewhere in a filing cabinet marked ‘gross oversimplifications’, a list of singers that could be described as ‘chameleonic’, art metal supremo Mike Patton would surely be at the very top. In a career spanning a clutch of bands, dozens of collaborations and countless guest vocals, his throat has produced an astonishing range of noise, from orthodox crooning on Faith No More’s cover of the Bee Gees I Started A Joke to death growls and obscene faux-rapping on Mr. Bungle’s eponymous debut LP. And it seems the diversity of his activities in the last ten years is more than a match for the versatility of his voice – actor, soothsayer, indie label head (Ipecac Recordings – “Making People Sick Since 1999”), video game voice artist, and, most significantly here, expert builder of supergroups.

Patton formed Tomahawk in 2000 with Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), John Stanier (Helmet) and Kevin Rutmanis (The Melvins), with their self-titled debut emerging a year later. It delves into the psychology of a serial killer of the old-cabin-in-the-woods, abandoned-sawmill strain. It’s a concept that drips with threat, perversion and deranged silliness. In short, it’s prime Patton territory, and he milks it for every last drop of humid atmosphere. From the album opener Flashback, on which guitars mimic the ticking of crickets whilst Patton feverishly delves into a gender-confused childhood, to the deformed bluegrass of Cul De Sac, this is one of Patton’s most unified, cinematic and, if you can believe it, accessible records. When considered in the context of Mike Patton’s hyperactive career, Tomahawk provokes two questions. How does he fit it all in, and, more importantly, how is it all so bloody good?

Losing the master tapes of a record in a studio fire must be galling, leaving the sole remaining DAT tape in the back of a hire car even more so. However, to finally retrieve said tape only to discover your label has just gone bust would see even the hardiest of bands crumble under the weight of their misfortune. Regrettably for Shack’s Mick and John Head this is precisely the fate suffered by their masterful Waterpistol – originally slated for release in 1991. Although the influence of Madchester is apparent in places (most notably on Sgt Major and Dragonfly) there’s a smoky haze lingering over Waterpistol, and a woozy, jazz-flecked lightness of touch that places it closer to the output of the Heads beloved Arthur Lee than the sounds then emanating from across the Pennines. Yet despite its debt to West Coast folk-rock and psychedelia, Shack’s second LP is very much a record rooted in the inner cities of a post-Thatcher Britain. Painting a picture that is almost Dickensian in its list of characters and reprobates – the trackies, wreck-head girlfriends and under-classes lost to heroin that populated the streets of the Heads’ native “Kenny” loiter on the corners of every song - Mick writes with an awareness that he’s drifting steadily towards his city’s murky underbelly, yet too enchanted by its damaged beauty and clouded by his own opiated romanticism he appears unable, or perhaps unwilling, to change course. Who knows, if Shack had been a little more fortunate we might have had more bands sounding like Love in the mid-‘90s and less like over-amplified versions of Herman’s Hermits.

Twenty five years on, For All Mankind, Al Reinert’s documentary about the Apollo space missions remains the definitive record of America’s journey to the final frontier. Watching clips of Reinert’s spellbinding drift through the tranquil haze of the 20th century’s greatest pipedream today, is a profoundly melancholy experience. When Reinert started work on the film in 1982 the Apollo program had already been mothballed for seven years, following the Apollo-Soyuz hands-across-space Test Project in 1975, and America was reeling from the first wave of Reaganomics – inflation, unemployment and an out-of-whack defence budget. Apollo had been ditched for Ares and For All Mankind was a long goodbye to the optimism, innocence and adventure of the space programme. If we seem so much further from that idealism today, it only adds greater weight to Reinert’s film and its accompanying soundtrack. Drawn to a documentary that tapped in to the wonder and sadness of the Apollo footage - weightless euphoria on the edge of infinite darkness – at a time when the only hope for space adventure was this Eno’s masterstroke was in identifying a link between the idea of ‘the frontier’ as a cornerstone of American identity and the knowledge that the astronauts were listening to the country sounds of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens up there. The result was a soundtrack that captured the slow, sad going away of the final frontier with fading memories of Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel guitar adrift in an abysmal space of infinite echo and unfathomable wonder. That tracks like An Ending (Ascent) now appear on every other BBC documentary about the loss of the American dream, or soundtrack the hallucinatory nature of the coming apocalypse only underlines the power of Eno’s score: a valediction to the American dream that captures the profound beauty and sadness in a 20th Century civilization’s long, slow fade. Expect to hear it even more in the coming months…

Often described as the British equivalent of The Grateful Dead, Mighty Baby grew out of the ashes of top mod mob The Action. Moving from clean-cut Carnaby-clothed types peddling tight soul covers under the auspices of George Martin, the five-piece morphed into a hirsute outfit in thrall to the post-Byrds, psychedelic West Coast sound. Following a period of indecision and musical experimentation - during which they moved in the same managerial circles as Pink Floyd and Hawkwind - the Kentish Town crew found themselves signed to the fledgling Head Records, run by John Curd, who also bestowed their new moniker upon them.

This astonishing debut, produced by the legendary Guy Stevens (back), illustrates the band’s deft, soulful amalgam of post-Traffic grit and CSN&Y-styled melody, no more so than on the surprisingly lithe opener, Egyptian Tomb. Equally uplifting is the post-psychedelic Same Way From The Sun, while I’m From The Country suggests that the former Action men had undertaken a similar musical journey to that of fellow mod Steve Marriott... who’d recently graduated from the Small Faces onto the rootsier, rockier Humble Pie. Sadly, Mighty Baby would not enjoy the same success as the Pie. When their debut failed to chart, Head found itself in financial difficulties, forcing the band to jump ship to Mike Vernon’s Blue Horizon label for their equally ill-fated second LP, A Jug Of Love.

After delivering a handful of fine but commercially under-achieving albums for Blue Note in the late ’60s and early ’70s, ex-boxer and B-3 organist Reuben Wilson left the renowned jazz label seeking a broader, funkier and (hopefully) more lucrative musical direction. Following a short stint with the Groove Merchant label Wilson moved over to Chicago’s Cadet Records, where he set about putting together both a group and a set of songs capable of significant crossover appeal. The Cost Of Living was in reality a large and loose aggregation of some of America’s most talented musical figures, including photographer-turned-producer Esmond Edwards (John Coltrane, Roland Kirk), guitarist Elliott Randall (Steely Dan, Doobie Brothers), drummer Bernard Purdie (James Brown, King Curtis), and noted R&B singer Sammy Turner. Not surprisingly, the music created by this all-star band was simply exhilarating. Album opener What The People Gon’ Say is a steaming slice of blaxploitation-era funk, laced with urgent wah-wah guitar and wailing brass. The illicit-love tale In The Booth, In The Back, In The Corner, In The Dark is pure Philly Soul that rivals The O’Jays’ best, while the prowling bass lines and sensual moans of Back Rub would be the perfect soundtrack for a designer chocolate commercial. Soul/funk rave-up Tight Money is a guaranteed party starter, as is the slick proto-disco groove of Stoned Out Of My Mind. The title track itself is a six-minute masterpiece of mid-’70s fusion, awash with darting flute and organ melodies, phasing horns and shout-along choruses. Unfortunately for Wilson, 1975 was also the year Cadet’s parent label Chess Records finally crumbled under the weight of its prolonged financial problems. With little cash for promotion or distribution the album never stood a chance, sinking quickly from view; this year’s belated CD reissue should finally help put this lost classic back onto the stereos of funk fans everywhere.

In Brian Belle-Fortune’s sterling 1999 study All Crews Muss Big Up: Journeys Through Jungle / Drum & Bass Culture, he notes how the path to the largely instrumental, hi-tech drum and bass sound that followed was set when, “In early ’95, there was a conscious decision by the DJs, not to play anything ragga-oriented or with a full vocal.” And so the era of what was sometimes called Ragga Jungle was over. It’s a period that’s collected on this top drawer compilation, which sees the raw, fast sound of UK raving spliced with reggae bass and dancehall MCs. This 13-track set delivers blow after devastating blow - see how X-Project, AKA Tottenham’s Congo Natty, remixes the Barrington Levy/Beenie Man ganja track Under Mi Sensi into a startling clash of hip-hop, breakbeats, ragga and dub, or the unignorable sonic event that is DJ SS’s re-rub of Cutty Ranks’ trigger happy Limb By Limb. Other important names present include Shut Up And Dance and The Ragga Twins, both showing how this powerful sound came to be. And even though nothing here dates from after DJ Zinc’s 1995 banger Super Sharp Shooter, Rumble In The Jungle retains its feeling of love-it-or-run-out-the-door sonic adventure, as Cutty Ranks-loving Father Ted character Father Fintan Stack would agree.

Are we still basking in the hazy glow of an Indian summer? Is the autumn light still diffused by high clouds and soft morning mists? Rain, you say? Oh well. At least there were those last few stolen days of blue skies and bright sunlight, when sounds and voices carried clear and sparkling on the cold, crisp air and certain pieces of music sounded more magical than ever. This was mine. A festive gift from my brother last Christmas, bought on the strength of a good review in The Wire (I know, I know) I’d played The Mountain Record just the once and found it, well, wanting. You see, Fujimoto is one of an ever growing group of Japanese musicians like guitarist Taku Sugimoto or Daisuke Miyatani who give as much weight to silence as melody, using either field recordings, found sounds or the hiss and creak of their own overmiked surroundings to create new ‘rooms’: ie. soundtracks with the power to transform your listening environment into a space with another mood, and, erm, energy altogether. Approached with the wrong outlook, The Mountain Record can sound no more innovative and groundbreaking than somebody learning to play the guitar whilst listening to a BBC Sound Effects Record. However, at home the other night, with the back door open, the neighbours’ cat sprawled on the lawn, and a just-opened bottle of Bourgogne Chardonnay on-the-go this mix of lazy humming, electronic scratches, Orff-ic piano, acoustic guitar, children’s melodica, distant voices, rustling leaves and crunching gravel felt like the stored soundtrack of our missed summer. All that’s needed now is one of those sunrise simulator alarm clocks and the cavern of the coming winter can be approached with full emotional protection.

Unless you think the guy on the cover is holding a reefer (it’s actually the suave gent’s pocket square) there’s little about the cover of Having A Good Time that conveys either the chaos within or the wildness of the band who brought it into being. Allow Dr. John to explain. While interviewing him back in 2000 for MOJO’s Last Night A Record feature we got to talking about New Orleans party music and specifically Bobby Marchan who sang with Huey ‘Piano’ Smith & His Clowns. I’d read that Marchan had started out leading a troupe of female impersonators at New Orleans' Dew Drop Inn before recording with The Clowns, and that he regularly dragged up when out with civilians but Mac elaborated. “The Clowns was all queer,” he said, “you’d see them walking down the street, all be painted and dragged up. In New Orleans ‘clown’ was ‘queer’ and they was like this queer gang with Bobby as the boss.”

Marchan provided the sleazy contralto vocals for such good-time R&B grooves as Don’t You Just Know It and High Blood Pressure and took the Clown gang of Scarface Williams, Peg Leg Martin and the green-haired Eugene Francis on the road (with the equally camptastic James Booker on piano). Backing vocalist Gerri Hall famously maintained that she was more man than the rest of the Clowns put together, but in the studio and in the trades The Clowns were the brainchild of the far more hetero Huey Smith, a genius songwriter who, with his lazy left hand barrel-roll piano and hand-clap rhythms brought a musical drive (and debonair public face) to the mollyhouse call-and-response anarchy of Marchan and co. Unfortunately, this lack of public exposure for Marchan’s Clowns (try finding a photo of the gang) eventually led to a rift. Following the release of the all-killer Havin’ A Good Time LP in 1958 Marchan left Smith and Ace and went back on the road as a female impersonator before signing with Bobby Robinson’s Fire Records and cutting a terrifying cover of Big Jay McNeely’s bad-love sleaze-blues, There’s Something On Your Mind, which famously ends with Marchan shooting dead his girlfriend, her lover and himself.

Marchan later toured with Otis Redding, cut two singles for Stax, recorded the original version of Slade's first hit, Get Down And Get With It and toured the American south as a female impersonator-bandleader before, bizarrely becoming a key figure in the formation of Lil’ Wayne’s NO rap label Ca$h Money Records in 1991. He died in 1999. ‘Having a good time’ doesn’t really come close.

Sometimes their hair gets in the way. Then there’s the “emotionally connected” artwork courtesy of Floyd acolyte Storm Thorgerson. And those pesky oblique concepts (this time the album is based on the content of a diary recovered from the backseat of a repossessed car by late bandmate Jeremy Ward – and possibly as a tribute to him following his death from a heroin overdose in May 2003). Listen to Frances The Mute without any anti-prog prejudice however, and it emerges as the triumphant sound of a band bound only by the imagination of its central partnership of guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala. Indeed, such is the intensity of The Volta’s five-track, 77-minute latino-metal-jazz-punk freak-out that on first listen it is utterly overwhelming. From the Shango-rock opener of Cygnus…Vismund Cygnus through to the The Widow’s epic hooks, the Santana-on-speed vibe of L’Via L’Viaquez (featuring Chili’s man Flea on trumpet no less), and on to the 32-minute-plus suite of Cassandra Gemini (which on the CD version of the album is split into eight tracks at the label’s insistence), Frances builds on the band’s debut, De-Loused In The Comatorium, and references everyone from Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, Refused, The Mahavishnu Orchestra and Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis. The band’s challenging approach is exemplified by their use of ambient noise soundscapes, typified by the opening four minutes of the 13-minute Miranda That Ghost Just Isn’t Holy Anymore, which consists of a looped chorus of Puerto Rican frogs. Ambitious, compelling and ultimately rewarding, Frances The Mute is a writhing orgy of uneasy listening designed expressly for those prepared to eschew mundane 4/4 time signatures in favour of the complex thrills of 13/8.

Between April 1970 and November 1971, Elton John released five records. In that whirlwind 18-month period he released three studio albums, a soundtrack and a live set – an astonishing statistic even by the standards of the day. Elton and lyricist Bernie Taupin’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of songs and ultra-prolific work-rate had already produced one major hit single (Your Song – Top 10 on both sides of the Atlantic) and a classic album of cinematic Americana (Tumbleweed Connection). Hot on the heels of that record came Madman Across The Water, its songs bridging the gap between Tumbleweed’s country-honk narratives and the polished pop sounds of 1972’s Honky Chateau. Levon, a elegiac nod to The Band’s Levon Helm, and minor US chart-botherer Tiny Dancer are propelled by the sort of super-strength piano melodies that, in those days, seemed to fall from John’s fingers on an almost daily basis – the latter a firm live favourite even today thanks to its inclusion in the dreadful Almost Famous. Indian Sunset and the title track are two lengthy, mournful epics that make perfect use of Paul Buckmaster’s ingenious string arrangements and, although it doesn’t hit the same peaks as Tumbleweed’s Burn Down The Mission, the gospel-tinged All The Nasties is an ambitious choral anthem that acts as a fine primer for the finale of Goodbye. But best of all is John’s voice: underpinned by that convincing southern twang, his vocals are effortless, precise and authoritative. Each of his next six albums would hit the US top spot, turning him into the biggest solo superstar of the decade. Madman… is the lost gem that proves he already had everything in its right place.

They’d had strippers on stage, ladled on bass and puerile humour and even caused a riot in Liverpool on the tour promoting 1986’s Licensed To Ill album. But Paul’s Boutique was the quantum jump where New York’s sincere rap parodists Beastie Boys showed what they were really made of. Named for a possibly fictional Brooklyn gentleman’s outfitters and later giving a name to an eaterie on the same site, listened to now it gives a bracing and wondrous view of a world where producers could sample anything without anyone getting legal on them; the quite unbelievable raw materials used here include The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, James Brown, Sly Stone, Pink Floyd, Chic, Jimi Hendrix and The Sweet, all collaged into richly funk-powered rap tracks of seemingly unending texture and variety. Added to this was high-turnover splurges of pass-the-mic Beasties verbiage, name-dropping the likes of Raymond Burr, Alfred E Neuman and Captain Kirk, and variously hailing rockabilly street drinkers, blasting “All the wife beaters and all the tax cheaters / Sitting in the White House pulling their peters” (Car Thief) and demanding everybody shake their rump-ah. And now in this internet age, nonplussed limeys can get hip to the cultural references that activated the Beasties’ brainstems, like basketball ace Hawthorne Wingo, the supa-fine Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham and game show host Chuck Woolery. To understand the true tao of Paul’s Boutique, we say, go here, and then find the Foghat 8-track on the video for Hey Ladies (it’s at 0.36).

On a run-aground deep-sea trawler at the North Pole, amidst beeping sonar and creaking rust-metal, a careful, ice-cold voice - a voice of spectral drift and all the mind-going sadness of HAL in Kubrick’s 2001 – picks its way through the lonely jazz-in-the-shadows heartbreak of Leonard Bernstein’s Who Am I. Barely a minute into List Of Lights And Buoys and 24-year old Susanna Wallumrød and ex Jaga Jazzist Morton Qvenild have pulled you into their sparsely-furnished alternate world where some Jennifer Warnes-esque eidolon reveals tales of romantic grief in reedbeds of Eno-like spooky boom. Beautiful, spare, hypnotic, like Sinatra’s Where Are You?, Aimee Mann’s Bachelor No. 2 and all great torch-song collections, List Of Lights… is the sound of midnight chill, hope and longing whispered by the ghost of relationships who still haunts the old places.

With their latest album, Snowflake Midnight, reminding many of what they loved about the band in the first place, let’s stagger back to a time when an encounter with Mercury Rev was like hacking through a jungle of drug-fried mayhem to a clearing of opalescent beauty. Boces, their second (can it really stand for Board Of Cooperative Education Services?), was their last to feature barking, lumbering co-singer David Baker, and is still the only record to approximate the sound of 8-year-olds on heroin unleashed in the school music room to play imagined soundtracks to Walt Disney’s True Life Adventures while a Balinese gamelan band crash a New Orleans funeral, The Groundhogs fall from the sky and a scary fat tramp impersonates Billie Holiday. The spirit of Beefheart lives in the way the band rename their instruments – here’s Dave Fridmann on Bass Explore, and beaming Muttley/mini-Buddha Sean “Grasshopper” Mackowiak on Dither Guitar – enhancing the impression that this is a reinvention of music using bespoke, previously unavailable tools. Over the years I have developed the suspicion that the record is about the dawning of sexual consciousness – perhaps partly fomented by the upsetting promo vid for Something For Joey, which features a stuffed platypus and musteline porn actor Ron Jeremy – but less controversial is the reflection that it still sounds exciting, unpredictable… and great. Baker went west after this (making a record as Shady with various Boo Radleys), Rev graduated to a more palatable, less explosive incarnation, and Fridmann went on to produce everyone good for the next 15 years, but Boces remains a testament to the infinite boundaries of “indie” before it became the besmirched marketing category we know today.

In 1980 Laurie Anderson was a downtown New York artist, inspired by William Burroughs, crafting multimedia performance pieces with customized violins, keyboards and a $500 National Endowment grant. Following the Iran hostage crisis (when US helicopters crashed in a sandstorm, killing eight US soldiers) Anderson - inspired by Massenet’s O Souverain aria from Le Cid – recorded the h-h-h-h-hypnotic vocoder elegy for pre-Reagan America, O Superman. Hoping to sell 500 mail order copies, Anderson was championed by John Peel, courted by Warner Brothers and expanded the project into a concept album about techno-industrialized apocalypse and post-war American imperialism. Catchy! Well, yes. Remastered to restore a lot of juicy low-end, Anderson’s hypnotic US-minimalism-meets-NY-disco rhythms and deadpan sing-song American storytelling sounds disarmingly beautiful, like melancholy lullabies for ailing robot societies. When I reviewed Nonesuch’s reissue for MOJO magazine last year, I gave it four stars, with the rider “Add a star if that’s your thing”. And if you’re reading this, it probably is.

Those who know Nigel Blackwell’s unique catalogue well know that you can pretty much pick any of Half Man Half Biscuit’s albums at random and be sure of top-drawer amusements whose sharpness and invention seem inversely proportionate to the modesty of their presentation. But even so, there’s something extra-satisfying about Four Lads Who Shook The Wirral. To the sound of tuneful, punky pop with country and northwestern touches, the deadpan singer turns stupefaction with the idiocy of modern life into joyous, somehow benign mockery. Along the way, backpackers, fire eaters and sports commentator Elton Welsby (in drag) among others get the wet carpet treatment, and at one point he instructs the band to let loose with the words “let’s pedestrianise the high street”. This is life lived on a more realistic scale than offered by much rock music – see Soft Verges’ distillation of the weariness that comes from reading Sunday supplement interviews with overpaid celebrity-types, or Moody Chops’ wondering why so many acclaimed musicians strive to appear pained and complicated. Other standouts; A Country Practice, You’re Hard and Turn A Blind Eye. True, in the latter song, Romos and Dani Behr may not have quite the topical cache they once did, but reboot this song to include Alexa Chung or Nu-Ravers and it’d still be valid.

Were British Sea Power robbed in last week’s Mercury Prize steeplechase? Perhaps; but the Mercury is a fickle mistress, and the band’s stirring performance of Waving Flags, complete with ululating Bulgarian choir, must have shifted a few copies of latest BSP LP, Do You Like Rock Music?, and furnishes another opportunity for MOJO to expand tediously on what it is we so like about them – and specifically, their ravishing second album.

The Kendal/Brighton conglom’s first long-player, 2003’s The Decline Of British Sea Power, catered for rare sensibilities. Entranced by nature and mired in history, the intense four-piece sang of birdlife, bravery and Brilliantine, while flinging together aspects of Orange Juice, Joy Division and the Pixies to construct raw, dramatic rock for bookish romantics. It seemed a little arch in places but - like a set of Wills cigarette cards found in a seaside junk shop - it bore an air of melancholy and old-fashioned character.

Open Season was their outreach album, immediately less chaotic and parochial, more serene and accessible, but no less magical than its predecessor. Glacial guitars ping out, describing curt, singalong melodies. Singer Yan (aka Scott Wilkinson), once jarring and querulous, sounds more persuasive. Exemplified by Spectorish single It Ended On An Oily Stage, these are pop songs that make you feel somehow sad, yet promise to sound thrilling on the radio.

They're still young to be making statements like "You better start growing up before you get old", as they do in Victorian Ice (an elegantly consumptive song with its roots in Postcard 45s) but this is part of the appeal: there are values driving British Sea Power that do not drive, say, Kasabian. Open Season's best tune, the luminous Oh Larsen B, is a love song to 3250 square kilometres of Antarctic pack ice that slipped into the ocean in 2002, a gargantuan victim of global climate change. The track's exquisite coda - a motorik meld of Neu! and Eno with echoes of overlooked '90s dreampoppers The Kitchens Of Distinction - sends it off with an elegiac swoon. It's noble music with the power of New Order's Regret or A Design For Life by the Manic Street Preachers.

At a time when '80s post-punk and atmos-rock templates are being pillaged for riffs and production tics, this remains unique music, because British Sea Power's vision is unique. Through their eyes, everything is ending, fading or going away. What's left are shadows and fossils, "carbonate and myth". Items of worth are proving harder and harder to find. Anyone who feels the same should rush to their banner - they'll feel curiously heartened.

Before becoming the attenuated custodian of dreich folk dirges the great Alasdair Roberts fronted this wraithy Scots combo who, from the mid 90s to 2002, crafted hypnotic incantations of arcane country lore, the grim Presbyterian beauty of Roberts’ godforsaken vocals complemented by piano, cello, flute, bagpipes, chimes and guitar. While all of the AO albums are worthy of investigation this farewell bow is perhaps the most bewitching, with Sean O Hagan’s horror soundtrack production and a chorus of weary backing voices perfectly complementing Roberts’ dark-souled fables of cursed ancestors and demonic nature, sung from beds of bones and henbane, through sheets of sinister mist.

On my way to work this morning I saw Ramond Pettibon’s sleeve for Goo on a t-shirt in the window of Urban Outfitters (£32!) They aren’t the first band to be co-opted by high street fashion of course: The Stones and Ramones are Top Shop staples, The Specials are on the same rails as SY and let’s not forget renowned situationist David Beckham’s bejewelled Crass shirt. What this barometer of cool reminds us is that nearly 20 years from it’s release in 1990 *Goo remains a milestone of underground rock; a record that forecast the coming tidal wave of mainstream alt-rock and paved the way for Nirvana to sign to Geffen. On the major’s budget Sonic Youth recorded Goo live in a 48-track studio, which was more problematic than liberating, according to Kim Gordon in MOJO 143. And while Goo may not have the disturbed force of it’s predecessor Daydream Nation, what it lacks in musical chaos it makes up for in sheer weight of tunes. There will always be those who hear Goo’s more accessible songs as Daydream-lite but for those of us coming off the back of twee ‘80s indie they were a revelation. The opening triptych remains staggering: Dirty Boots breakneck charge into Kim’s ghostly turn as Karen Carpenter on Tunic, shivery and beautiful. Then Mary-Christ’s fuzzy, back-beat driven pop. Next up was the single, Kool Thing and Kim’s laconic taunting of guest vocalist Chuck D (standing in for the song’s unnamed subject, LL Cool J) that took them in to the living rooms of MTV generation. The band are on record now as being unhappy with how Goo turned out but for a generation of indie kids it turned on a light and illuminated bands like Husker Dü and Minutemen we might never have heard otherwise.

Even hardened Fall fans were nonplussed by first listens to this. Released not long after the disintegration of the line-up that recorded 2000’s polished The Unutterable, Are You Are Missing Winner sounded mildewed, repaired with gaffa tape, down to its last £2. But on sober reflection it’s the emerging-from-a-swamp, post-plane-crash quality that impresses here. This was a new group pressganged into immediate active service, and it shows in a hard and experimental album that’s been compared to 1979’s Fall classic Dragnet. Punching rocker Jim’s “The Fall” opens proceedings and declares “we are the new Fall” while the comic My Ex-Classmate’s Kids mocks modern parenting, but it’s in the songs less accommodating to the listener that the beatified abnormality of The Fall is manifest; semi-Iggy Pop cover Ibis-Afro Man is a lurching, demented Golem, mixing live and studio recordings in nine and a half minutes that ultimately race off into god knows where. Meanwhile over on Reprise: Jane - Prof. Mick - Ey Bastardo, a reprise of the R Dean Taylor cover Gotta See Jane, the unfortunate Spencer Birtwhistle, ex-drummer for Intastella, is goaded and harangued (“Spen is a bastardo! Spen is a bastardo!”) by a gleefully vituperative Mark E Smith. Thereafter the mainly-drums track cuts out, each time returning with greater spleen and attack; it drips with malignant energy and possibly demonstrates the “creative tension” that Smith runs his group on. Interested parties are directed to the 2006 Castle reissue, which also contains bonus tracks including the nightmarish Distilled Mug Art and the cacophonous Where’s The Fuckin Taxi? Cunt, a charming spoken word swearathon concerning being stuck beyond the reach of the local cab firm, with a detour into Jude The Obscure and Smith badgering guitarist Brian Fanning into taking the strings off his guitar. Top entertainment.

Formed by Yamatsuka Eye in Osaka in 1986, Boredoms began as a kind of sick punch-line to twenty years of Japanese noise rock. Their debut EP, 1986’s Anal By Anal - a slingshot of baby poo tossed into the arena of brow-furrowed seriousness – was followed by Osozeran No Stooges Kyo, a distorted approximation of what would happen if an army of malfunctioning robots attacked a school canteen with a bag of wild boars. Later joined by drum siren Yoshimi Yokota the band signed to Reprise in the U.S. infecting the west with such metallic blursts as 1994’s *Chocolate Synthesizer, hip accessories with which lonely American boys could upset the squares with. But the novelty of ear-splitting electronic noise spliced with gutteral screams, car horns and stop-start guitar bile
soon wore off with audience and creators alike, and Boredoms squirreled themselves away, working on side projects before reemerging with 1998’s Super Are. The sound of Krautrock trance rhythms broadcast on shortwave radio by a crazy person, this dream scape blueprint was refined for the glorious Vision Creation Newsun. Despite being described by that overstatement overlord Julian Cope as a “deluge overload euphoria [that] descended from the highest heavens and whipped me screaming, whirling, teenaged and drooling into my first acid trip/first hard on/first astral projection into a region of unfathomable and untameable NEWNESS” VCN does not disappoint. From the mechanistic whirrs and cymbal shimmers that accompany Eye’s opening cry-whine of “New Sun!” to the kraut riff outro seventy minutes later, VCN is an overwhelming rush of cyclical noise-energy, a mystical wave of grooved phasing and hypnotic drum chants that has the ability to place you in a state of joyous, heightened uplift. It takes you higher, and in the seven years since VCN, Boredoms have refined this sound into something approximating a mass cult chant, a series of ever-expanding live gatherings akin to a revolutionary religious uprising. On July 7, 2007, Boredoms performed 77BOADRUM at Brooklyn Bridge Park in Dumbo, Brooklyn with 77 drummers. See you at 88BOADRUM, then? Or failing that, 99BOADRUM on 9/9/09, wherever that may be.

A mind-stoving 49 years ago, production visionary and independent hitmaker Joe Meek oversaw an otherworldly LP called I Hear A New World. Credited to The Blue Men and unreleased until 1991, it remains a bizarro mix-up of rock and roll and early electronics, delivering intrigue, thrills and headaches in equal measure with its speeded-up vocals and bold eccentricity (it concerns the habits of imaginary alien lifeforms as the Saroos, the Globbots and the Dribcots, in case you’re wondering). But Meek’s longing for contact with extra-terrestrials is perhaps better expressed by the single Telstar, named for the first telecommunications satellite and arguably the greatest instrumental hit of all time. Recorded in Meek’s flat-cum-studio at 304 Holloway Road by beat instrumentalists The Tornados, the song remains a wondrously transporting three minutes of velocity, euphoria and release, with the Clavioline ur-synth to the fore and further escape from earthly constraints provided by its producer’s self-devised use of echo, compression and overdubbing. Meek was also a keen spiritualist – does Telstar’s angelic chorus suggest the final destination might well have been heaven? A UK number one in August 1962, it also made The Tornadoes the first British group to top the charts in the USA, ultimately selling upwards of 5 million copies worldwide and winning Meek an Ivor Novello songwriting award. In May 1963, though, film composer Jean Ledrut sued for plagiarism, the dispute still unresolved by the time of Meek’s bizarre murder/ suicide in 1967. “As a sound man Joe was a genius,” recalled Tornados keyboardist Roger Laverne. “But he had a devil on his shoulder.”

In 1967, The Merry-Go-Round, an L.A. four-piece led by the supreme melodic talents of singer-songwriter Emitt Rhodes, took a brief trundle into the limelight with their local radio smash, Live. The band were quickly crippled by label disinterest, but the 17-year-old Rhodes – fresh-faced and bursting with ideas – wasn’t going to let the indifference of the industry dam his creative flow. He set to work straight away, painstakingly assembling a studio in the family garage and quickly recording many of the songs featured on this 23-track Best Of… An unapologetic Beatles obsessive, Rhodes’ penchant for chiming guitars and tight-knit harmonic arrangements had been glaringly evident since the beginning, but these Anglo-beat influences mask a sound born of much sunnier climes. Like cult-popster and co-mixing partner Curt Boettcher, Rhodes – who played all the instruments on the record himself - laid the foundation for much of the ’70s’ most potent power-pop. His beautiful Emitt Rhodes debut - included here in its entirety – is an album whose sunrise ditties and pretty melodies echo throughout the likes of Todd Rundgren’s Something/Anything and The Raspberries’ Starting Over, to name but two. Unfortunately, vicious contract stipulations with another aloof record company forced his career to stall after just four albums. Rhodes once recalled an incident at his father’s rehearsal space in the mid-’60s that now sounds like a gloomy portent of the troubles that were to follow: “Dennis Wilson broke my drum pedal. He never paid for it or got me a new one. He just broke it and left."

The (genuinely) legendary American producer Jerry Wexler’s credit was appended to so many classic albums that a Top 10 Discs Of The Day might have been more appropriate, but the Queen Of Soul’s breakthrough album is clearly a pivotal ’60s moment for the singer, the label and Wexler. The story is well known. Becalmed at CBS, Aretha was eagerly signed by Wexler and spirited off Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where the producer had unearthed an exceptional group of soulful white session players, much as he’d earlier taken newly-signed Wilson Pickett to Memphis to work with Stax’s Booker T. And The M.G.’s. Wexler’s gift was to identify the kernel of an artist’s genius, focus on that and keep the rest simple. The title track to Aretha’s Atlantic debut and Do Right Woman, Do Right Man were recorded in the South before Aretha’s husband of the time, Ted White, took exception to a roomful of white musicians, got into an argument with one of them, and dragged her back to New York, where the album was completed. Wexler kept it all together, although even by his retelling it’s apparent that Aretha needed precious little ‘producing’, having a very clear idea about how she was going to sing a song, how she would accompany herself on piano, how the background voices would sound and what the groove would be. Wexler gave the great ones space, advised on songs, perhaps suggested discreet sweetenings. But genius is its own best critic – that’s why there are so few of them. So, her version of Otis Redding’s Respect leads off the album, opening out layers of meaning in the lyric, her own writing blossomed (Dr Feelgood, Don’t Let Me Lose This Dream, Baby Baby Baby, Save Me) and her covers of her favourite artists, such as Sam Cooke (Good Times, A Change Is Gonna Come), glow. Wexler had made some outstanding records before, and would make many more after, not just with his preferred jazz, soul and R&B artists but with rock acts too (eg. Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming), but for getting to the very core of an artist’s talent with the minimum of fuss and the maximum effect, this album cannot be beaten.

Back in 1996 computer scientist Danny Hillis had an idea. As western society raced towards the end of the millennium, speeding past one false goal, empty election and financial panic after another, Hillis felt that something was needed to slow us down, help us consider the bigger picture and go back to the idea of a vast, grand and uncertain future ahead of us. To do this he proposed “a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock” as an icon to long term thinking. “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year,” he wrote in Wired magazine in 1998. “The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium… for the next 10,000 years”, a clock of The Long Now. Conveniently, on the Long Now board of members was one Brian Eno who, after christening the organization, set about thinking what kind of sound said clock would make to announce the passage of time. Introducing something of his “hereditary campanological interests”, Eno proposed a system of ten bells with 3,628,800 changes, approximate to the number of days in 10,000 years. For the CD, Eno decided he wanted to hear the bells of the month of January 7003, halfway through the life of the clock. I don’t pretend to understand how Eno did this (there are some terrifying looking algorithms in the CD booklet) but the end result is quite magical, an electronic sequence of clear, dreamlike serenity that somehow suggest both eternal calm and eerie foreboding. It is the perfect soundtrack to that particular kind of hangover where shooting lobe-pain alternates with washes of free endorphin joy. It also slows everything down nicely. On other tracks where Eno emulates “the Russian ‘shock and awe’ style” and “the German ‘hit every bell as often and as hard as possible’ approach”, calm is less easy to come by, especially when he tries to electronically recreate the terrifying clangs and reverberations of the 18th Century Tsar Bell, commissioned by Empress Anna Ivanovna in 1735. The prototype Long Now clock was completed on New Year’s Eve in 1999, when it bonged very slowly... twice. This prototype is now at the Making of The Modern World exhibit in London’s Science Museum. After completing an accompanying orrery, (a planet tracking device) in 2005, the organisation’s next step is to build the actual “monument-sized” version atop (or possibly inside) Mt. Washington in eastern Nevada. There is no projected completion date. As the organisation put it, “it is an ongoing program”. It’s not something you’d want to rush. But, then again, what is?

A belated DOTD tip of the toque to the late Ike Hayes, who long before reaching new generations as South Park’s Chef was a gold standard Stax songwriter/producer in partnership with David Porter, a silver medal session musician in Memphis and, of course, a highly prolific, boldly innovative and unexpectedly commercial solo star. Ike’s style was a cunning mélange of ingredients. Often taking a well-known pop or rock song, Hayes would fashion a meticulously constructed arrangement using a full orchestra in all its rich tonal pomp. Atop this he’d intone a vocal of thick, dark, treacly earthiness, pregnant with sexual implication. His solo debut album in this style, Hot Buttered Soul (1969), and the equally genre-defining blaxploitation soundtrack Shaft (1971) rightly get the standing ovations. But this album, sandwiched between those two, was one of a pair that came out in 1970 (…To Be Continued was the other), which in itself is a terrific monument to his drive, energy and quality control. Movement starts with a modest (for Ike at the time) four-minute interpretation of Jerry Butler’s I Stand Accused, in which he replaces the pain, heartache and yearning of the original with a vocal that promises more pleasure than guilt. The other soul standard on Movement is a seven-minute take on Bacharach & David’s Dionne Warwick vehicle I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself. Starting with a slow, measured instrumental, Hayes’ vocal soon leans toward melodrama. The heat is gradually turned up until at the halfway point drummer and girl vocalists gently steam for 60 seconds before the heat’s turned down again and Ike simmers through a rap-sung outro for another two minutes. It’s a brilliantly modulated arrangement and performance – you can imagine Motown’s Norman Whitfield going, “Damn, that’s where I was headed, but he’s using ballads!” Gamble & Huff in Philadelphia must have thought the same. And you can definitely picture Barry White making a book full of notes.

“Contains Matt Sweeney” is still a hallmark of quality on America’s alternative rock scene, his aptly savage guitar work on 2005’s Superwolf record revitalising the Bonnie “Prince” Billy franchise and, most recently, you may have heard him all over Neil Diamond’s Home Before Dark. Back in “the day”, however, he was helping define “math rock” with Chavez, though truthfully it was always an unhelpful tag; certainly, there’s nothing autistic or overly-cerebral about Ride The Fader, the band’s swansong/apotheosis. As passionate as it is rump-batteringly noisy, putting the lie to the band’s hardcore roots (various members of Live Skull, Bullet Lavolta and Wider) with shiny hooks (several per song, piling on the VFM) and wistful lyricism (Unreal Is Here is pure, contagious wonder), it’s human to the core, with a wide-eyed ingenuousness typified by the lyric “There is nothing to not be amazed at”. Yet there’s no denying the spiralling geometries of Sweeney and Clay Tarver’s gimlet guitars and brainy, disorientating dynamics, and one imagines them in gingham rather than leather. A British parallel might have been a geekier Swervedriver (similarly orchestral in their manipulations of distortion), though Ride The Fader could in truth have emerged from nowhere other than New York. Manna for fans of hard sounds, and guitars for the sake of guitars.

If you ask anyone to run through the list of superstars who made an appearance at The Last Waltz in 1976, the name Bobby Charles is highly unlikely to emerge. But listen to the recording of The Band’s last hurrah and you can hear Robbie Robertson step up the mic, determined to make sure everyone knows that a major talent, revered by every single one of the assembled musicians, is about to take the stage. “He’s a great, great songwriter,” enthuses the guitarist seemingly unsatisfied with the crowd’s response. “He wrote See Ya Later Alligator!” he then yelps, reemphasizing that the Louisiana native standing before them is truly worthy of their respect and cheers. With the likes of Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Dr John and Muddy Waters all waiting in the wings that night, the phrase “great, great songwriter” may have temporarily lost some of its potency, but Bobby Charles deserved the title as much as the rest of them. By the early ‘70s, the former Robert Charles Guidry had penned at least two r&b standards (See Ya Later Alligator and I Don’t Know Why I Love You But I Do) but his solo debut – an album rooted in the slow-groove Cajun-country jams of the south – is his real triumph. Co-produced by Rick Danko and featuring contributions from the rest of The Band, Bobby Charles bridges the gap between the hillbilly, Appalachian sounds of the Catskill Mountains and the swinging, r&b of New Orleans, filling the gap between Music From Big Pink and Randy Newman’s Good Ole Boys. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking Newman had a hand in the likes of I Must Be In A Good Place Now and Let Yourself Go, such are the similarities between the two men’s vocal styles. It took me an eon to find this on CD, but don’t fret - Rhino reissued a very nicely priced version of the album earlier this month, so for those of you who don’t already own Bobby Charles, you now know what to do.

When Andy Irvine, Johnny Moynihan and Joe Dolan came together in Galway in 1966, their goal was a simple one. Taking their name from the followers of King Sweeney in Flann O'Brien’s anarchic At Swim Two Birds, and fired up by the revitalised traditionalism of The Chieftains, Sweeney’s Men attempted to bring about a revolution in Irish folk akin to that which had swept the British and American scenes. Those brave enough to check out their 1966 debut would be hard pushed to find a whiff of revolt, as this is an album that soon became the template for the worst kind of maudlin Celtic folk dribbling. However, by 1969 the band had been reduced to a barely-speaking, always drinking, duo of Moynihan and future Pogue Terry Woods. Blending traditional folk styles with a Tim Hardin confessional style and the then-vogue for cryptic psych-couch psychedelia, the duo attempted to outdo each other with each composition and arrangement. From Moynihan’s dope dream reworking of the Trad. Arr. enchantment Standing On The Shore and Terry Woods’ mystical Go By Brooks to the broken country Stones sadness of Dreams For Me and Brain Jam’s tripped-out folk reel, Moynihan and Woods accidentally produced a mystical, melancholy riddle of an album that could easily stand as the soundtrack to another Flann O'Brien classic, that cyclical folk nightmare The Third Policeman. The band folded a fortnight before the album’s release with Moynihan leaving to form Irish folk berserkers Planxty while Woods joined Orphanage with Phil Lynott before uniting with Ashley Hutchings to set up Steeleye Span, sealing their strange Sweeney’s Men collaboration as a true one-off.

You could write a book about these eight songs. Indeed, MOJO’s own maverick spirit Mark Paytress did just that last year in Break It Up: Horses And The Remaking Of Rock’n’Roll, casting Patti Smith’s debut as key to a cultural revolution, more so even than Sgt. Pepper had been. Whether or not you buy that (and I do!) the striking contrast between Smith’s vivid lyrical stream-of-consciousness and the song’s pop hooks and guitar rave-ups still sounds singularly impressive. Opening with that now-famous assertion of self-accountability: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”, Smith rides in excelsis into her own Gloria (borrowing from Van Morrison’s along the way) and on to an album of such energy and originality it established punk rock as a cultural force to be reckoned with in the mid-’70s, paving the way for new wave and countless sonic experimenters under the art rock banner (to say nothing of shattering female stereotypes – but there’s another book right there). Land, with its urgent narrative about a boy terrorised at school is the album’s most celebrated track, but Birdland is the first moment of true transcendence – a spellbinding ghost story of jarring Burroughs weirdness paired with mournful piano from the late Richard Sohl and Lenny Kaye’s perfectly judged improvised guitar it keeps the eyes brimming for nine odd minutes. There is still nothing like it.

In light of the exulted position currently retro-occupied by Big Star, it’s hard to imagine a time when any other group on the Ardent Records roster might have been considered the band most likely to. But when Feel Alright became a medium-sized radio hit across the U.S. in 1972, Cargoe certainly looked like the next-big-thing that producer Terry Manning and label boss John Fry desperately needed to boost Ardent’s ailing fortunes. Sadly, the same financial and distribution problems which thwarted Big Star’s initial shot at success also put paid to their Tulsa-formed label mates, but while the former have become oft-cited legends since their demise, Cargoe have slipped into an almost complete obscurity. Their self-titled debut album, still only available on CD as a horrendously expensive Japanese import, is a gorgeous slice of late ’60s/early ’70s country-tinged rock. Often lumped into Big Star’s early-powerpop basket, in reality Cargoe’s sound was much closer to the rock/soul of Delaney and Bonnie or the country strut of The Allman Brothers, replete with exquisite four-part harmonies and musicianship, in particular Tommy Richards’ magical lead guitar and Bill Phillips’ artful keyboards. All four members of the band contributed songs, ranging from the triumphant pop/rock of Feel Alright and Scenes, to the slow and wistful I Love You Anyway, or the funky bounce of Things We Dream Today and Time. To this day Terry Manning mentions this album as one of his favourite musical projects; we look forward to a time when people can hear this neglected Ardent gem without having their credit cards spontaneously combust.

There has always been something of Brontë’s Heathcliff in Nick Cave, a tightly wound intensity always teetering on the edge of unhinged. Even his prettiest ballads sound like they’d be best heard echoing dolefully across a barren moor. While evidence of Cave’s turbulent disposition are scattered throughout his discography, it’s never better expressed than on Your Funeral… My Trial. Recorded in Berlin under the yoke of heroin, Cave’s fourth Bad Seeds record is the darkest nightmare in a career filled with dark nightmares.

This record teems with Gothic melodrama, rendered with gusto. Jack’s Shadow, a bruising tale of violent self-destruction, claws at the listener with menacing guitar squalls and belly-rumble bass. Hard On For Love both amuses and appals with its sweaty-palmed exploration of aggressive, voyeuristic lust (“I am the fiend hid in her skirts / And it’s hot as hell in here”). And Scum is downright unpleasant, a virtual death threat of a song, a deluge of murderous intent towards a couple of very specific rock writers (including Cave’s sometime flatmate, MOJO’s lovely Mat Snow). But surrendering to base impulses is what Your Funeral… is all about, and it’s what makes it so scary, so magnetic, 22 years on.

Pylon once opened on an early ’80s U2 tour of America. But rather than seeing it as a way to increase their fanbase, bassist Michael Lachowski would later tell journalist Jason Gross, “We were all pissed off and no one wanted to do it.” That’s the spirit. On Gyrate, cut in just three days, you can hear this anti-success urge in action. Not that Pylon are devoid of tunes; emerging from the same Athens, Georgia scene as The B-52’s and R.E.M., their cryptic, metronomic indie-rock is anything but hostile, and there’s an enigmatic, almost anthemic pop appeal on such songs as Volume and Stop It. But there is something spinning and teetering about Gyrate that suggests the U2 fans might have got nauseous anyway, as voice Vanessa Briscoe Hay breathes and screams her coded lyrics while guitarist Randy Bewley (who didn’t know how to tune his instrument properly but knew what he liked) scrapes and trills, and Lachowski and drummer Curtis Crowe blend sparing basslines and nailed-to-the-floor beats. Second album Chomp followed in 1983, but fame was not forthcoming, and after breaking up the same year, they’ve reformed and split as the mood’s taken them ever since. Get last year’s DFA reissue Gyrate Plus for the original LP plus four bonus songs, including the still-confounding AA-side single, Cool/Dub.

Conversation here at MOJO recently turned to the treacherous field of contemporary blues-rock – a genre whose chief exponents regularly commit heinous crimes against music with their syrupy songs, redundant guitar solos and expensive haircuts. Thankfully, it wasn’t always like this. In the late ’60s, Duane and Gregg Allman – two brothers raised against the Florida’s sun’n’surf backdrop – embarked on a riotous, often tragic, journey from local jam-band favourites to ’70s southern-blues saviours. This recording of their weekend stint at Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in March 1971 remains the pinnacle of their chequered lifespan and, unlike so many live albums, encapsulates the essence of a band operating at their instinctive best. You may stare open-mouthed at the 10-minute-plus running time of You Don’t Love Me, In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed and Whipping Post, particularly when the original album only contains a total of seven tracks. This shouldn’t put you off. The tight, bristling interplay of guitarists Dickey Betts and Duane Allman should be enough to keep even the most hardened listeners interested and there’s always Jaimoe Johanson’s clattering percussion or Gregg Allman’s gospel burr and circling Hammond organ to satisfy the less six-string obsessed. Still, is it even worth beginning to mess with a band that call their drummer Butch Trucks? Like CCR’s Born On The Bayou, …At Fillmore East rolls along at the perfect pace, the cover shot of six road-worn crazies joking in front of their flight cases slowly coming to life each step of the way.

For all the crimes of the ’80s, artists at least had the chance to stick around until they became interesting, and were given enough cash to construct a proper folly. Japan began as rum NY Dolls pasticheurs before catching a bad case of the Bowies, their brief moment of teen idoldom coinciding curiously with their ascension to full-on art band status, as 1982’s aptly disembodied Ghosts top-scored with a #5 in the UK singles chart. Meanwhile, Beckenham art-poove David Alan Batt (aka Sylvian) appeared to become more glacially pretentious with every release and, once solo, seemed grimly determined to use every colour in the box: exquisitely torn between pop and the other on debut Brilliant Trees (1984), somewhat tediously post-Eno on Alchemy: An Index Of Possibilities and Gone To Earth (same again, but a double, with extra Fripp).

Secrets Of The Beehive was his slight return to songwriting, creepingly consumed by an existential gloom that – for all the earlier posing – feels authentically felt, and beautifully focused on a bijou palette of instruments, with David Torn and Phil Palmer providing swoon-inducing guitar filigree and Riyuchi Sakamoto making synthesisers sound organic – like wood or water – or supernatural, like wispy choirs of dryads (semi-legendary Amazon reviewer Jason Parkes thinks Radiohead were listening; I suspect he’s right). Sylvian’s resonant, mahogany baritone can hardly have suited any material so well, whether “waiting for the agony to stop” on the dizzyingly sad Let The Happiness In or grappling with the feckless nature of his muse (I reckon) amid the almost upbeat strum of Orpheus. Beyond the confirmed impression of a record that’s well up there at the acme of mid-’80s art-jazz-pop (see also Thomas Dolby, Talk Talk etc) there’s something else. This is music teetering on the edge of the world, stoically on terms with the horrors on either side of the abyss. For that reason, Secrets Of The Beehive is always a rare hug at a dark time. Nice going there, Mr Batt...

Poet-eccentric David Berman did himself few favours when he invited Pavement’s Steve Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich to aid him on his 1994 LP debut. Although the trio’s collaborations pre-date the latter’s rise to indie prominence (they were classmates at the University Of Virginia; Slanted & Enchanted was named after a Berman cartoon), it was hard not to see Starlite Walker as a Pavement side project, and its off-the-peg sound seemed to swamp Berman’s individuality. And yet, like a man doing the same thing twice and hoping for a different result, Berman welcomed the Pavement pair back to early sessions for The Natural Bridge, sessions later scrapped as the Virginian groped towards something more uniquely “him”.

The unlikely heroes of Berman’s breakthrough turned out to be Peyton Pinkerton and Matt Hunter of Massachusetts band New Radiant Storm King, whose spacy, delicately strange alterna-country environments give Berman a roomier canvas. Berman responds with greater clarity and confidence, his conversationally related, endlessly droll reflections more funny-peculiar than ever. “The Latin teacher always smelled like piss,” he recalls. “We saw B.B. King on General Hospital,” he declares*. “Our record just went aluminum,” he snickers, not inaptly, on the brilliant Dallas. The future held tough times for Berman; in 2003, he would attempt suicide with a cocktail (it’s always a “cocktail”) of crack, alcohol and Xanax, and though currently back on a track of sorts he is arguably yet to better The Natural Bridge. Meanwhile, New Radiant Storm King soldier on, with a new record, Drinking In The Moonlight, due in October.

* I used to think this was stroke of surreal or deranged genius, but subsequent research (ie. I Googled it, yesterday) suggests that Berman may have been telling the truth. Which is, in a weird way (since it makes BB King being on General Hospital no less surreal, or deranged), a disappointment.

Hopped up on futurity and new technology, but still in thrall to making songs with lyrics, the early 1980s were a golden age of synth pop. And few practitioners took to their task with as much perverse glee as Zurich’s Yello. Dieter Meier (voice) and Boris Blank (sounds) looked like carefully tailored playboy spivs, and their luxurious sound and philosophy showed a refreshing indifference to Anglophone rock moves. So it is on 1985’s Stella. Within are non-linear monologues of romantic masochism, mostly sung by the urbane, gravel-voiced Meier to the sound of exotic proto-house with sparingly used rock guitar and much synth-generated hauteur. It was a commercial success – the rubbery, nervy Oh Yeah was memorably seen on the movie *Ferris Bueller’s Day off – but they also found time for instrumental enigma (Stalakdrama) and on Domingo, an out-to-lunch Balearic flashpoint of religious hysteria; “We are God!” declares Meier, who always wears a cravat and lives on a ranch in Argentina “‘Cause only we can create the idea of His existence/ In our holy brains!” Got that? Later Yello would achieve motorsports TV-programming ubiquity with their 1988 number seven hit The Race, and are still the coolest group to ever come out of Switzerland.

We weren’t really turning up to see Billy Childish’s Thee Headcoats at the St Johns Tavern in London’s Archway in the ’90s. The 200 of so crowd at the down at heel, wallpaper peeling, sweaty pub were there to glimpse the glorious Thee Headcoatees – The Primettes to Childish’s Primes if you want – four women – Holly Golightly, Bongo Debbie, Kyra LaRubia and Ludella Black – who backed by Childish on guitar, bassist Johnny ‘Tub’ Johnson and drummer Bruce Brand, begged, screamed, hollered, and smouldered their way through a rollicking set of R&B, garage, blues and early Beatles and Kinks covers. Their 1991 LP *Girlsville, the basis of their live set, melded sumptuous girlgroup harmony with raucous, ramshackle Pebbles styled garage punk and dollops of self depreciating humour. The Downliners Sect Don Craine provided sleevenotes, the quartet appeared decked in deerstalkers and hunting tweeds on the front cover artwork, the back helpfully advised on how to make your own “dashing deerstalker in tartan and velvet”. Standouts include the frantic Meet Jacqueline and ferocious Wild Man, two slabs of raw DIY punk. Elsewhere they rewrite Them’s Gloria as the kittenish, seductive purring, Melvin, turn The Beatles’ Run For Your Life into a finger wagging admonishment and pay tribute to The Kinks on their rave-up rendition of First Plane Home.

An indie hit, it set the blueprint for their further releases including 1992’s Have Love Will Travel, 1994’s Bozstik Haze and 1997’s Punk Girls. The music didn’t progress, the style and attitude remained the same, but *that was the point. Sadly though when Thee Headcoats disbanded and Childish formed The Buff Medways, so too Thee Headcoatees bereft of backing band, went their separate ways. Holly Golightly, remains the most visual today, concentrating on a solo career, she’s also turned up on records by White Stripes and Rocket From The Crypt and currently records with the Broke-Offs.

When The Byrds’ exiled genius Gene Clark arrived at Jerry Moss’ A&M label in 1968 he was an exhausted asylum seeker, world-heavy from a succession of ill-fated group projects and a passion for the booze that had led him off life’s highways into its adjacent ditches and dead-ends. One fellow traveller was Doug Dillard,
a hard-living banjo virtuoso who had inducted Clark into his all night hooch and country-jam sessions. It was out of this mix of booze, pills and bluegrass that The Fantastic Expedition… emerged. The cover might suggest the stoned outing of a pair of camp bikers but, unlike its sister album, the Byrds’ uptight and mannered Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, Expedition possesses an organic warmth, and a sadness that taps into the rich seam of US country, from The Louvin Brothers whisky preachin’ to Hank Williams’ lonesome roadside laments. But in the enigmatic mysticism of Gene Clark’s lyrics and the down-tuned melancholy of his delivery, there is something yet more profound, an eerie lyricism that depicts the singer as an outcast changeling, trudging a broadway of “neon brambles”, forever caught between confusion and euphoria, hedonism and enlightenment, journey and arrival, ploughing onward into the folk heartbreak of ages past.

As he emerged from the ashes of Liverpudlian garage-rockers The Stairs, Edgar Jones – the band’s bass-bashing, blues-hollering singer (far right in Stairs pic) – became embroiled in live work for the likes of Paul Weller and Johnny Marr, before enlisting future members of The Stands and The Zutons to kickstart short-lived outfit The Big Kids. After years of near misses and record label woe, his moment of genius finally arrived in the form of Soothing Music For Stray Cats – a homegrown collection of smouldering doo-wop, jazzy instrumentals and growling R&B cool. Recorded in his bedroom on a trusty eight-track, Jones’ reverence for the crackling reel-to-reel sounds of vintage New Orleans 78s is all-encompassing, making his solo debut sound confidently authentic. But to praise Soothing Music… for its sonic proficiency alone would be foolish. Jones is a deft tunesmith and, amid all that heavy retro production, sits a series of whip-smart songs. More Than You’ve Ever Had and Tenderly are ’50s R&B hits reawakened for the 21st Century, while Freedom sounds like an unearthed outtake from the sessions for Sly Stone And The Family Stone’s Fresh. Similar levels of harmonic ambition and instrumental invention have made all of his subsequent releases worthy of lengthy investigation, but SMFSC is still his Everest.

“I’d stopped drinking and I didn’t give a fuck anymore,” states ‘Wreckless’ Eric Goulden, recalling the recording of the first Len Bright Combo album. Goulden’s heavy drinking had characterised most of his adult life. Following the release of The Whole Wide World 45 in the summer of ’77, the then-23 year-old embarked on the Stiff’s Live Stiffs tour alongside the likes of Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. The tour, coupled with his subsequent inability to replicate his initial success, served only to exacerbate his insecurity, driving him further to drink. At odds with the ’80s, he relocated to Kent, aware that the Medway Towns had spawned their own ‘60s-inspired garage scene. Recruiting Russ Wilkins (bass) and Bruce Brand (drums) – both Billy Childish acolytes and ex-members of The Pop Rivits and The Milkshakes - Goulden cranked out this debut LBC outing in the less-than-salubrious confines of Upchurch Village Hall. The result is akin to Joe Meek recording The Kinks. In a cave.

Acerbic opening track You’re Gonna Screw My Head Off ends with a wall of juddering reverb, setting the lo-fi tone for the seven tracks that follow. Goulden’s wry, lyrical humour and kitchen-sink pop nous combine to glorious effect with the Wilkins/Brand sense of crash-bang-wallop dynamism, powering a set that rails against consumerism (Selina Through The Windscreen), Yuppie-dom (Young, Upwardly Mobile… And Stupid) and drudgery of modern life (The Golden Hour Of Harry Secombe). While the infectious Something Must’ve Nailed Us Together was accorded Single Of The Week in the NME in February 1986 and received the healthy patronage of Andy Kershaw at Radio 1, the album itself went on to sell “less than 2000 copies”. Something of a pyrrhic victory; nevertheless, The Len Bright Combo allowed Eric Goulden to reconcile himself with his pop star past. Twenty-two years on, he’s re-signed to Stiff and remains eternally Wreckless.

By June 1937, when this second Decca session took place, country music's first family were playing together but not staying together, since one-time gospel baritone A.P. Carter and his harmonising, autoharp-twangling wife were estranged and the latter was soon to end up with A.P.'s cousin, the inaptly-named Coy. You wouldn't know it from the moralistic tone of the set (characterised by an imperious Hold Fast To The Right and Never Let The Devil Get The Upper Hand Of You) as deep-voiced, unsentimental Sara and feisty, guitar-picking sister-in-law Maybelle ennumerate the wiles of Satan while their protagonists drown, fall under trains and otherwise expire in a Nick-Cave-goes-Appalachian grand guignol. Maybe not your first Carter purchase, since the tunes recorded for Victor between 1928 and 1935 (Wabash Cannonball et al) are marginally superior, but this – and its more romance-orientated predecessor volume – shouldn't be far off.

Sunday picnics, family Christmases, bank holidays in coastal resorts; when we British reach for happiness it can sometimes be the bleakest thing in the world. Reeling from the Dave Fridmann-produced, excess melancholy of their dystopic 2002 epic Hate, The Delgados’ made an allegedly “positive” album – pop hooks, sweet melodies, vocal harmonies. Don’t you believe it. Like a cookie full of arsenic, Universal Audio’s indie sweetness conceals a dark, deathly heart. On such plaintive, minor chord beauties as Come Undone, Sink Or Swim and The City Consumes Us Emma Pollock and Alun Woodward’s blackly poetic lyrics weave miasmic worlds of front room crack-up and doubt, modern voices of angst whispering the internal dialogues of madness under cyclical rhythms of piano and guitar, drum stomp and keyboard stutter. The greatest of their five albums? Hard to say really; years later, the thing’s still burrowing its way into my soul.

With this refreshing instalment of laugh-out-loud lyrical strangeness, Edan (pronounced Ee-don) Portnoy began a generic controversy in hip hop circles. Is he "indie rap", "geek rap" or - most bizarrely, "backpacker rap"? Certainly Primitive Plus boasts lo-fi, DIY beats and a barmy rapping style built on a massive vocabulary, old school rap references and a satirical funny bone. Like Rakim if he'd been on Ninja Tune, or a more self-aware Eminem crossed with a more consistent Kool Keith (Ultra '88 is a hilarious Ultramagnetic MCs pastiche), Edan berates net nerds and "thug MCs" and favours bathos ("Silver surfer on the cerebellum / MCs rhyme at the zoo and when they're wack the parrots tell 'em") over quick-change, weed-warped rock, jazz and classical samples. One for the lapsed hip-hop fan turned off by the endlessly interchangeable waves of bling and crunk and no interest in rappers called Lil’ anything.

Duke’s memories of 1969’s I’m A Loser, her greatest solo achievement, were, as she described them to me in 1974, pretty unsatisfying and she didn’t have a good word to say for producer Swamp Dogg. But what fantastic performances they conjured together. The second side of I’m A Loser, tracks seven to 12 here, unfold like the grittiest of kitchen sink drama as Duke sings of adultery and divorce, desolate loss and arid desertion, and in the grainy Play For Today that is I Don’t Care Anymore, descent into prostitution. “I came into the city from the Deep South when the mills shut down” she narrates from her hotel room, “I married a man who treated me like he bought me by the pound.” You will not hear soul storytelling as good – sweaty love, desperate jealousy, urgent passion, betrayal and resignation. Even better, 2005’s Kent reissue couples ...Loser with Duke’s other Swamp Dogg collaboration, 1970’s A Legend In Her Own Time, Duke’s strong, expressive voice again doing full justice to yet more gripping material. But the legend was short-lived – the financial collapse of I’m A Loser’s original label Canyon didn’t help – and Duke made as many bad choices in her solo career as her characters did in the songs. A tragic case of life imitating album title.

Schooled at the Kingston talent contests of the late ’60s, by the early ’70s Earl George Lawrence was but one of thousands of small-time Jamaican vocalists attempting to make it big in an industry rife with piracy, double-cross and ill-fortune. However, in 1970, Lawrence found himself in the right place at the right time, recording with producer Glen Lee at his Charles Street studio, a few doors down from Lee Perry’s record shop. Perry checked out the soulful singer and suggested they could work together. Their first effort came in 1974 with a tentative, somewhat saccharine cover of William Bell’s To Be A Lover previously reggaefied by Perry with Chenley Duffus in 1972. However, when they next convened in 1976 Perry was ensconced in the laboratorial surrounds of his Black Ark Studio creating a dense, subterranean potation of sound where reverb, beat and boom serve to simultaneously soothe, hypnotize and spook. Perry worked for over a year with Lawrence - rechristening him George Faith due to his patience – and created a heavy, sweet molasses of phased and echoing trip-grooves, all smudged drums and rippling electronics. Onto these he smeared George’s pleading, pure soul covers of In The Midnight Hour, YaYa and Turn Back The Hands Of Time, phased, sliced, dubbed into ghostly echoes and cries. The final result is distinctly other-worldly, suggesting the broken-hearted pleas of a spurned lover cutting through the stoned fug of his partner’s delayed indifference. Tragically the duo never worked together again. Blaming “demons” and his treatment at the hands of Island Records Perry burnt down the Black Ark in 1980 and George Faith faded back into the small time, eventually succumbing to cancer in 2003. Such knowledge now lends an extra sadness to the eerie whisper and spectral fade of this reggae heartbreaker.

Perhaps my favourite moment of the whole post-rock caper – just nudging aside Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die and Don Caballero’s American Don – I was recently urged to disinter Camoufleur by Field Music/School Of Language’s David Brewis, who was spot on in his analysis of its peerless charms. “Of that whole Chicago school,” he reflected, “It‘s the one record that makes me cry.”

Well said, that man. For while Gastr Del Sol were “Chicago School” incarnate (“members” Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs are assisted here by a sort of post-rock seminary including Tortoise head John McEntire) and revelled in blurring the boundaries between avant-jazz and conservatoire minimalism, this was their first fully-realised stab at something beautifully, recognisably pop. Although, after 1995’s The Harp Factory On Lake Street (a piece for chamber orchestra, plus piano and voice) and an imagined film score – Upgrade & Afterlife – that featured “sound artist” and Velvets/Faust collaborator Tony Conrad – perhaps that’s a relative term.

Winningly, Camoufleur mixes early Eno with Pet Sounds and unexpected instrumentation (Defunkt-style flugelhorn flurries and steel band on The Seasons Reverse) to weave an autumnal ambience. Black Horse begins like picaresque incidental music for a Jacques Tati film and ends as a Philip Glass acoustic guitar étude. Mouth Canyon is The Blue Nile via American Music Club – a tear-jerking combo enhanced by Grubbs’s naive, whispered vocal; “Sensuous detail meet sensuous detail,” he sighs – not a bad description of Gastr Del Sol at all.

Yet, criminally, Camoufleur was their last record together. Grubbs’ subsequent solo albums have included the gorgeous Rickets & Scurvy (2002) whilst O’Rourke went on to record a brace of landmark solo records (Eureka in ’99, Insignificance in ’01) before collaborating with Wilco and Sonic Youth, arguably revolutionising the sound of the former, and consulting (here comes the curveball) on School Of Rock. But if they’ve made nothing quite so stunning as Camoufleur – full of beauty and, simultaneously, the crushing realisation of beauty’s transience – that’s no slight. Hardly anyone has.

I stumbled across Evie Sands a few years ago while wading through videos on YouTube. The link to the title track of her 1970 debut LP was sandwiched between The Carpenters’ Superstar and Bonnie Tyler’s Faster Than The Speed Of Night. I wasn’t looking for either, but I must salute both for lighting the path to this exuberant album of country-soul anthems. Chip Taylor has called Sands “the hard luck girl of the late ‘60s”. The catalogue of legal wranglings, label disputes and near misses that coloured her early endeavours provide ample support for Taylor’s statement, but the songs contained on Any Way That You Want Me paint a very different picture indeed. Huge choruses, swathes of orchestral warmth and a life-affirming spirit fill the big-hearted '60s soul ballads (I’ll Never Be Alone Again, But You Know I Love You), while the stripped-bare, paisley grooves of One Fine Summer Morning and Until It’s Time For You To Go are all eloquently led by Sands’ super-strength, crystalline holler. Even the moments of longing and frustration are couched in those ‘60s analogue sonics that feel so inclusive and welcoming. The top-notch session players unashamed drive towards a chart-bothering, pop sound might well have something to do with it. The fact that the record still manages to hold onto its soul credentials is a testament to the careful production skills of Taylor and Al Gorgoni and, most importantly, to the vocal prowess of the woman Dusty Springfield often dubbed her "favourite female singer".

From April 5, 1964, yet more evidence of the special Deutsche-Amerikanische Freundschaft that gave us The Monks and Malcolm Mooney-era Can. Since 1958, Louisiana rock and roller Jerry Lee had been in the outer darkness in the UK and America for his hillbilly marriage practices, but if he was back to playing the saloon bars, he was in no mood to moderate his uniquely forceful performance style, especially not for this notoriously frenzy-friendly venue. Because apart from a get-your-breath-back, lonesome saunter through Hank Williams’ Your Cheatin’ Heart and a bluesy breakdown during Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On, Live At The Star-Club, Hamburg is an astonishingly powerful rock’n’roll document. With UK hitmakers-to-be The Nashville Teens press-ganged into backing him, Jerry Lee stomps, hollers, jumps on the piano (probably) and plays at what sound like ferociously pilled-up speeds - see how, during the super-filthy High School Confidential, drummer Roger Groom hangs for grim death, forced to play like a cavemen by the sheer velocity of his singer, who responds to the no-doubt helpless gawping of his band by pouring on the heat even more. Of course, Jerry pretends this is all par for the course and maintains an almost debonair mien as he roars and showboats on the piano while gangs of adoring West German teds chant his name and swing bike chains. “It feels good!” he salivates on Great Balls Of Fire; 44 years on, it surely does.

Waits's first album for nearly seven years was recorded for Epitaph - incongruously, the home of Offspring and Rancid - and put to tape in a converted chicken shed in Sebastopol, Northern California. It came complete with the whiff of myth that accompanies every Waits release and, surprisingly perhaps, reversed his trend towards ever filthier soundscapes and more sinister, impermeable poetry. So, the "clank, boom and steam" of 1992's mortality-obsessed Bone Machine and the satanic polka of 1993's Teuton operetta, The Black Rider, are on hold here, and the warmth and humour of Mule Variations' songs are allowed to shine through their lo-fi blues skeletons. It's varied fare, the mood swinging beautifully between the charmingly cranky and clattering (the opening Big In Japan, complete with "man kicking shit out of wardrobe" percussion effect) and the lusciously sentimental. Lead Belly is a touchstone; but so is Waits's own Rain Dogs. Picture In A Frame is arguably his most knee-crumblingly blatant love song since that record's Blind Love, while Get Behind The Mule's fugitive travelogue and What's He Building?'s nosey-neighbour monologue recall Gun Street Girl and 9th & Hennepin respectively. It's full of fantastic conceits (why shouldn't communion wafers be tastier?) and typically fine one-liners ("she's a diamond that wants to stay coal"), but Waits can still move even better than he amuses. Georgia Lee, a contemporary murder ballad and the true story of a local latchkey child's demise, sees Waits soften his pitchfork-tracheotomy voice to tackle the tender and hymnal refrain: "Why wasn't God watching?/Why wasn't God listening?/Why wasn't God there?". When he does, it's as if the colourful-yet-gimmicky dramatis personae of Waits's supposed '80s peak - all those brilliantly sketched dwarves, gamblers, matelots and dipso rascals - fall away, and something simpler and truer and more lovely is once again revealed. Tom Waits gave up being Bruce Springsteen to be Captain Beefheart, with all the commercial costs that implies. God knows who he is now, but no-one sings the word "pistol" quite like him.

“I still had this vision of pop music as a giant celebration of fucked-upness.” So recalled Julian Cope of the time he recorded his second solo LP Fried, in his ace biography Head On/ Repossessed. He was certainly poised for such a statement at the time; holed up in his hometown Tamworth and getting over the LSD-marinated demise of his pop career with The Teardrop Explodes, he’d spend his days listening to Skip Spence and Nick Drake albums, thinking of ways to contain the evil he felt sure was within him. But if Fried is an exorcism, it’s one of considerable rock prowess as well as beauty and splendour, with a satisfying sinister undertow. Careering opener Reynard The Fox and Sunspots provide the guitar grind, but it’s the more starry-eyed, awareness-heightened songs that take root in the mind. A golden halo, for example, surrounds Laughing Boy, where young guitarist Donald Ross Skinner’s jazzy playing and the oboe of Kate St John mimic heat haze, as Cope looks down onto a verdant landscape from above and murmurs, choirboy style, “No, don’t cast me out of here…” (it’s an atmosphere revisited on Search Party). Elsewhere you get a swipe at former manager Bill Drummond, a séance gone awry, and in Me Singing, a Vegetable Man-like questioning of whether the singer is there at all. Cope intended it to be a huge-selling cult-classic – eh? – but even though it wasn’t the former, by 1986 he was back in the charts, and all set for the singular flightpath that today sees him as the twenty-first century William Blake. His own verdict on Fried? “It was as free as I could ever be.”

In 1975, director and writer Jim Szalapski set himself a task: to recast American country music in a landmark documentary. Released in 1981, the film showcased a new generation of country musicians: soulful, dirt-under-their-fingernails country outlaws like Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, David Allen Coe and a 21-year-old unknown called Steve Earle, artists who were set to challenge Nashville’s hegemony of high-hair and rhinestone schmaltz. All relative newcomers (an offer from Willie Nelson to take part was rejected on the grounds that he was too famous), they sang their own songs at Szalapski’s insistence, a notable exception being Steve Young, Rodney Crowell, Guy Clark and Steve Earle’s heartfelt jam on Hank Williams' I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. Omitted from the film, it’s the first of three songs from a large, raucous Christmas Eve session (in every sense) at Guy Clark’s family home. Other highlights include Larry Jon Wilson’s Ohoopee River Bottomland, his sourmash baritone purposefully capturing the morning after the night before (Szalapski wanted it “deep and rusty with unuse”). But everything here feels unique, bespoke, special – and the DVD (released in 2006) retains the warm glow of history-in-the-making.

Ok, their minds were obviously on other things but did the collective superbrain of JohnPaulGeorgeandRingo really imagine that the keen palates of the late '60s pop audience - tutored in the ways of wonder by the Fabs themselves - would be sated by Mary Hopkin, this fellah, and a copy of The Black Dyke Mills Band’s Thingumybob The other iron in Apple’s distinctly weedy debut roster was an even more unlikely proposition, the former lead singer with little-known Liverpool R&B outfit The Undertakers. Brought into the Fabs fold by Brian Epstein’s management group, Lomax was a special case rock orphan, adopted by George Harrison following Epstein’s suicide and gifted Harrison’s recent Rishikesh composition, Sour Milk Sea. Based on the Vishvasara Tantra (translated by Harrison as “if you're in the shit, don't go around moaning about it”), SMS was a stomping white soul workout with Lomax’s impassioned vocals beefed up by Eric Clapton on lacerating lead, Macca on heavy bass, Ringo bashing the hell out of the drums and Harrison and Lomax adding dirty rhythm riffs. It’s one of the great singles of ’68, and when Lomax reaches for further Beatles heights, particularly on the mean-eyed Come Together groove of the title track and The Eagle Laughs At You (George and Ringo transforming Lomax’s Lady Madonna steal into a garage Stax stomp) the album is a joy. Even the lesser tracks are ably supported by the cream of LA session thugs (Hal Blaine, Leon Russell, Larry Knechtel, Joe Osborn) but no-one was listening. Lomax’s single debut was passed over in favour of same-day Apple releases Hey Jude (natch!) and Mary Hopkin’s Those Were The Days (what?) and the album went the same way. Forgotten in the wake of Allen Klein's shake-up of Apple, Lomax briefly joined the semi-legendary Heavy Jelly before relocating to Woodstock, recording with Rick Danko and Levon Helm. He currently lives in California.

Afterlife could not be better named, since Wildgoose – a former indie starlet with ’90s fraggle strivers Various Vegetables – seemed like a man who’d gone to a better place. His 2003 debut Lovely White Teeth was a freakish Wish You Weren’t Here from Brian Wilson’s sandpit, fragmentary and wriggling with mentalism. By contrast, Afterlife rocks with good vibes, coherent tunes and a winning commitment to the intrinsic value of rock’n’roll (“making love and rock music – we’ll be so happy!”), making a fine companion for those already sold on, say, Kelley Stoltz. There’s a languid, Dean Ween groan to Wildgoose’s voice, a hint of danger in the past (in Oh Ted an abusive father is electrocuted in the bath) and a compellingly gung-ho, last-chance-saloon feel to the whole caper, but if Wildgoose can wring such varied, Technicolor thrills from an 8-track, there’s no telling what his blown mind would make of a proper studio and a simpatico band. Watch this space.

In the early ’70s, Bay Area player, scenester and mythmaker William Pulliam recorded sparingly and in a slinky, relaxed, honeydripping funk style which was a vocal dead ringer for the Reverend Al Green. Unearthed and spruced up, the nine tracks here make his Darondo alter-ego a welcome rediscovery. You’ll likely spin through these emotions – first, it’s a spoof (possibly by Prince, how come he didn’t come up with Legs, a paean to pegs’n’pins?, and True); second, it’s an absolute affront to Al. But you’ll almost certainly end up fascinated, and will play Let My People Go as much as …Gets Next To You. In addition to the various shades of Green, there are whiffs of Marvin Gaye (title track) and Sly Stone, but Al is the model, and Darondo’s expert reconstructions of the Rev’s pitch, tone and phrasing are sincerely flattering. Local rumour has it that Pulliam was a pimp. He certainly became a local cable TV star in the ’80s, hosting Darondo's Penthouse After Dark, Doze Comedy Videos, and the children's program Tapper The Rabbit, then lit out for Fiji before returning to teach physical therapy and achieve “unearthed” status thanks in part to DJ Gilles Peterson’s Digs America compilation. It’s a eccentric story reflected in this round-up of spunky, colourful funk.

Listen to the eerie empty dancehall atmospherics that underscore Flashlight Seasons’ uncannily beguiling opening track, Tunnels, and you’ll understand why Warp Records have been so keen to reissue this, the second album of Nick Talbot’s haunted, fog-gripped ballads. Wrapped in the moss and cobwebs of early Aphex reverb and MBV amp decay, these are finger-picked folk call-outs that weave that uncanny Warp sound ethos into the ominous patterns of 21st century folk. Drawing on such various reference points as Low, Bert Jansch, Trembling Blue Stars and those early ‘90s drone-folk pioneers (and fellow Bristolians), Flying Saucer Attack, Talbot sings like some spectre-possessed Paul Simon. And while Talbot’s youth occasionally results in government-issue indie melancholy, at their best, his songs have the feel of a modern-day MR James penning existential distress calls for dispossessed post-club ghouls, lone walkers and urban romantics. A warning to the curious.

Ground-breaking records rarely retain their shock value; after all, that ground can never be re-broken. So what is it about Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth? Despite the post-punk tics (Phil Moxham’s “funk” bass, brother Stuart’s sour, clipped guitar) and the girlgroup echoes of Alison Statton’s thin, dear-diary vocals, it’s a record without genre, arguably outstripping The Slits in its disdain for rock structures or Wire in the way the songs appear to exhaust their ideas then stop dead, perfectly sated. The absence of drums creates portentous spaces, a lo-fi organ adds unexpected beauty. Meanwhile, the songs do the alienation thing without a nano-gramme of melodrama. As the title track has it: “If you think the world is / A clutter of existence / Falling through the air / With minimal resistance / You could be right, how would I know?” Genius only enhanced by Domino’s 3-CD reissue: 11 quid for the lot, with The Final Day single, the instrumental Testcard EP, the Salad Days outtakes ’n’ demos album and Peel Sessions mini thrown in. For once quite literally, cheap at twice the price.

As the new Brett Anderson album recently hoved into view, conversation in the office turned to the fey former Suede man’s early endeavours. “Suede just aren’t a band whose records you dig out and play,” our Consultant Ed rashly declared, laying down a gauntlet that just begged to be picked up. One restorative listen to Suede’s second album and we had to agree that the forgotten player in Britpop’s annus mirabilis has aged remarkably well. In fact, at a suitably loud volume, it bristles with energy and class. Guitarist Bernard Butler turns potentially flat arpeggios into grand, circling centrepieces and straight solos into unhinged mini-dramas (see The Asphalt World), drawing on a potent brew of menace and melody that runs riot through this strange masked ball of sepia-toned pop. The huge, melancholic anthems – We Are The Pigs, Heroine and The Power – still sound beautifully bleak, with Anderson’s aching, thoroughly British holler giving all those apocalyptic lyrics a tarty, playful edge. For this writer, The Wild Ones remains Suede’s finest moment on record. Curiously, it’s not a song packed with Butler’s meanest thrashes or Anderson’s most soaring vocals, yet, with their partnership close to ruin, both still manage to take the song to a celestial peak neither has managed to reach since. Dig out and play with pride.

Closer to the ambience of Brian Eno or Neu! than the psych-rock of 1987’s The Perfect Prescription, Spacemen 3’s third album is a veritable cornucopia of aural delights. Refining their “minimalism as maximalism” sonic manifesto, Peter Kember and Jason Pierce build up songs from simple drone-like motifs into swirling, hypnotic swathes of otherworldly sound. At times beautifully fragile - the broken, almost childlike prayer of So Hot could easily have been birthed in Brian Wilson’s acid-fried sandpit circa 1967 – yet also capable of producing nauseating levels of white noise – see Suicide’s 11-minute exploration in feedback – Playing With Fire is never anything less than mesmerising. Shimmering church organs blend with cascading guitars, synths shudder and pulsate like passing alien motherships, while the part-sung/part-whispered vocal are strung-out mantras, repeating a triune preoccupation with God, love and drugs. Lots of drugs.

Although marking the end of the band as a functioning unit (1991’s Recurring was a glued-together affair, where the estranged pair worked separately), Playing With Fire would provide rich fertilizer for a posthumous slew of shoe-gazers, post-rockers and ambient electro-nerds, and a working template for most of the records Pierce went on to make with Spiritualized. Nevertheless, two decades on it still sounds as fresh, exhilarating and downright out there as anything that’s followed in its frazzled wake. To the moon, Alice!

When BB King landed in Tokyo in March 1971, the Blues legend was riding high on a well-deserved surge in popular acclaim and commercial success. The Thrill Is Gone had become King’s highest-ever charting single the previous year, and as he hit the Sankei Hall stage with his touring band, Live In Cook County Jail was starting a lucrative climb into the US album charts. To avoid harming sales of the latter disc perhaps, his record company decided to release the Tokyo dates only in Japan, leaving America to wait another 28 years. By then of course the LP had become a highly sought-after collectible, and for good reason – the recording captures King and his band in phenomenal form. In contrast to …Cook County Jail’s brevity, Live In Japan offers more than seventy minutes of diverse yet consistently outstanding material. Classics such as Sweet Sixteen, The Thrill Is Gone and How Blue Can You Get? are delivered with tremendous passion and clout, while a rare live version of Hummingbird simply takes off on a barrage of ringing notes from Lucille and a fanfare of horns. King’s vocals are magnificent throughout, particularly on Eyesight To The Blind, where he ranges from a bawled holler to a tremulous, breathless gasp with astonishing ease. Several long instrumentals, such as Japanese Boogie and Jamming At Sankei Hall, offer an invaluable snapshot of King’s live improvisational skills, as well as some magical solos from trumpet player John Browning, pianist Ron Levy and King’s long-time drummer Sonny Freeman. While not as widely celebrated as some of his other concert albums, Live In Japan is both an artful and thorough testament to the multi-faceted genius of one of music’s true living legends.

On clocking Martin Craft’s designer suit on the sleeve of this disc, one might guess that he trades in arch, glossy pop. He looks like a member of The Feeling, or even worse, Menswear. This impression, however, is misleading, as the music on this album is woody, scuffed and warm. Hearing the melancholic tone of these songs, you would never guess that Martin hails from sunny Australia, with his gentle vocal delivery being more Canterbury than Canberra. You will hear wafts of Nick Drake, Elliott Smith and Gruff Rhys on this lovely album. Clear and close miked, Craft’s voice tumbles over thrummed guitars and sparse percussion. The more uptempo numbers here are loping but propulsive, sounding like a more disciplined Beta Band with sharper pop sensibilities. The standout track is the shabbily, soaringly anthemic Love Knows How To Fight, which is so bittersweetly perfect that it should soundtrack the feelgood finale of a John Hughes film. Criminally ignored while more lightweight troubadors hog the limelight, Silver And Fire is an overlooked gem.

In 1968, having released two superb albums of mellowed proto-powerpop with San Francisco hippie-supremos Moby Grape, Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence, propelled by the super-strength Owsley LSD then pouring from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury intersection, took an axe to drummer Don Stevenson’s door. He would spend the next six months as a patient at New York’s Bellevue Hospital under the watchful eye of the doctors who would soon diagnose him as a paranoid schizophrenic. The 12 eerie evocations of chaos and confusion that make up his 1969 solo masterwork were born during the 22-year-old’s stay at the facility. Combining the ramblings of a man on the brink of mental collapse with some real moments of flippancy and laughter, Oar is a genuinely strange record. Unsurprisingly, the journey from Little Hands’ Grape-esque guitar grooves to Grey/Afro’s terrifying nine minutes of mantric drone, isn’t an easy one. Even when Spence builds his songs around a familiar sound (primarily minimalist country-folk) unsettling oddities and ominous modulations creep in. Spence recorded the album in Nashville and played every instrument himself. He would spend the rest of his life dogged by psychological problems that would force him, for a time, to live as a homeless alcoholic on the streets of California, but at least he left Oar – more than most of us sane, functional people will ever manage. Just take a look at the tousled-haired, half-smiling figure gazing out from the record sleeve and tell me you don’t want to peer inside.

My distrust of the blues has already been chronicled at length here and now, after much rumination, I feel I’ve unearthed the source of this deep-rooted prejudice. I bought said album back in 1982; 15 years old and keen to comprehend the revered cornerstones of the British rock ‘canon’. I didn’t get it, and I still don’t. It sounded like a bunch of smug bores lazily riffing through standards with nothing of the passion, fire or chaos I’d foolishly hoped for. ‘Librarian music’, as one of my friends put it. So if I stayed away too long from the blues, I stayed away longer from the British blues revival. Reading the liner notes to this Blue Horizon comp of tracks by ’60s Thames Valley sensation Tony ‘Duster’ Bennett it’s obvious that here was a musician too scruffy for the revival purists. Criticised for being nervous, edgy and excitable, Bennett and his 1952 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top now sound wild, rough, passionate, and sometimes too fast for his own time-keeping. On tracks like Worried Mind, Got A Tongue In Your Head and Jumping At Shadows he captures that thumpingly magical four-track brutalism that Billy Childish and Jack White consider the Holy Grail of authentic rock, all with a twist of Joe Strummer in the vocal. His later, gentler stuff sounds like Pete Molinari, or Graham Coxon. After splitting with Blue Horizon he wound up (like Terry Reid and Donovan) in the interminable red tape of Mickie Most’s RAK label. On March 26 1976 he died in a car crash, after falling asleep at the wheel while on his way home from a gig with Memphis Slim. Eric Clapton is 62.

Reach into the 2002 folder of your mind, and try and remember a bootleg single that mixed Paperback Writer with crude electric beats and noise, and a loudhailer voice saying “Teenage Daughter!” The non-Fabs bit of this Richard X-produced bootmash was The Fat Truckers, and Teenage Daughter (the song) is the lead track on their one LP. This album is further proof of Sheffield as home of British techno – think The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, the Warp label – but in this instance, it’s of the coin-operated meter variety, with John Shuttleworth as custodian of the 10 pees. This album is a distorted, queasy affair, synthetic in nature, that’s motivated by seedy glamour and smirky comments on the rubbish things in life (see Superbike’s excited paean to Kowasaki motorbikes), with an accompanying interest in fallible technology (I Love Computers nostalgically recalls the joys of the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64). Other vividly realised songs include the nervy Anorexic Robot, which sees the vocalist putting on a Phil Oakey voice to tell a recalcitrant machine “You’ll have to be shut down… Error! Error!”, and survivalist loner psychodrama Lock And Load. Despite three singles, however, world domination was not forthcoming, and the band ceased to be in 2004. But while ex-members Ben Rymer went onto form the Gucci Soundsystem and Ross Orton worked with ex-Pulp man Steve Mackey on MIA’s album Arular, the Fat Truckers’ grubby magic lives on.

The Dixie Hummingbirds, a consistent force in gospel music since the late 1930s, are probably best known to the MOJO audience as the gospel group who sang on Paul Simon’s There Goes Rhymin’ Simon in 1973 and featured on the album’s hit track Loves Me Like A Rock. It’s apt that the Hummingbirds should have given Simon’s music a fresh lick, because by then they had been refreshing gospel itself for decades thanks to the inspiration of Ira Tucker Sr (right), who joined them in 1938 when barely in his mid-teens. The Hummingbirds toured the South until they moved to Philadelphia in 1942, and in 1952 they found a long-term recording home with the Peacock label. Their style had been on the move too, evolving from a basic blues-folk delivery that Pops Staples might have appreciated to a smooth-harmonising jubilee quartet format before Tucker broke free and – I was about to say all hell broke loose but that’s obviously not appropriate – the walls of gospel tradition came a-tumbling down. An increasingly wilder, more urgent and roaring lead vocal style evolved, and although Tucker’s wasn‘t the only distinctive lead voice in the group – first Paul Owens and then James Walker were excellent foils for his exuberant improvisations – his was the guiding hand. This CD is an easily digestible best of the group, and of Tucker and Walker’s writing. The rhythm always swings like crazy behind lead vocals that tear it up, be it on Christian Automobile (car journey as metaphor for travel on rocky road of life) or Tucker’s The Final Edition (Bible as ultimate newspaper) or Let’s Go Out To The Programs (group has fun imitating other gospel acts – Five Blind Boys Of Alabama, Pilgrim Travelers etc).

“Cars are an inevitability, but the bicycle is what we need. It’s an invention of genius,” the Buffs’ shamelessly anti-modernist leader Billy Childish told MOJO in 2003. Eighteen months on and Childish renewed his call for a return to the days of the two-wheeler by naming this fourth Buffs album after his mother’s old 1950s cycling club. Indeed, the stomping title track – released as a single – found itself accompanied by a charming olde worlde video (shot on Super 8 film, of course) featuring Ma Childish riding through Whitstable. If reinventing the wheel has never been Childish’s bag, Medway Wheelers is nevertheless one of his most progressive and satisfying sets to date in a career that spans close to 30 years and over 50 long-players. Alongside three-chord nuggets like The Man I Am and the instrumental frenzy of Dustbin Mod, you get the Kinks-like put down of I’m Glad I’m Not Like David Wise, the art-school-bashing, Who-inspired Private View and the piano-kissed romanticism of The Poets Dream. Overall, it makes for a clattering, caustic and wonderfully human triumph. With the former Thee Headcoats leader having disbanded the Buffs and now fronting his new band, The Musicians Of The British Empire, Medway Wheelers – along with its chilling predecessor 1914 – is as a good a place to start for anyone seeking to discover just why Childish has inspired everyone from Kurt Cobain to Blur and Beck.

Of all the suicides in rock, Steven Jesse Bernstein’s might be the grisliest; on October 22 1991, the street junkie/performance poet who’d opened for the likes of Nirvana and Soundgarden stabbed himself in the throat three times. Associates were, it’s said, shocked but not surprised. Listen to powerful emotional purgative Prison and odds are you won’t be, either. Inside are gravelly, rapid monologues of degeneracy, doom and filth, recounted with a certain grisly relish by a writer who called himself a spokesman for society’s “expendable people”, but whose words can make anyone, however well-adjusted, feel like they’re in a coffin being covered with soil (gulp at This Clouded Heart, which commands, “You feel that everything you do is pornography!” I do?). Musically it’s a junkyard mélange of metal and hip hop that was mostly pieced together by Pigeonhed’s Steve Fisk after Bernstein did himself in, though the two, jazz-in-hell parts of No No Man were completed beforehand and cast a warped noir shadow on the rest. And despite everything, our man does have a sense of humour; on the metallic hip hopper Party Balloon, for example, he nerdishly observes, “I don’t like parties… but they’re fun I guess.”

I bought this CD in a now-dead independent record shop in Eastbourne in 1993, along with a copy of Urge Overkill’s Saturation. Both were selling for £3.99 and, before I parted with my money, the weary chap behind the counter felt the need to pipe up. “They’re £3.99 for a reason you know,” he cautioned. “They’re not Nirvana!” He can’t have been the only one who, in the early ’90s quest for yet more grunge, espied the Sub Pop label and stumbled upon the strange investment that was Pigeonhed’s 1993 debut. You could have hazarded a guess at what the producer of Nirvana’s Blew EP (Steve Fisk) could do with Satchel/Brad vocalist Shawn Smith but how many would have arrived at distorted post-soul minimalism, driven by ailing keyboards, hissing echo and Smith’s eerie Prince-on-Placidyl vocals? Listen to it now and you can hear fragments of Jeff Buckley’s Grace (especially in their ethereal cover of, yes, Amazing Grace) and a complete premonition of Portishead’s bad trip club groove, a year before Dummy emerged out of Bristol. Their next album, 1997’s The Full Sentence got the press and garnered a hit with The Lo Fidelity All Stars remix of Battleflag but this is the album that has lasted, still sounding weird, old, wrong and yards ahead of whatever exciting new soul talent is being foisted upon us this week.

Named after a classic track by New Orleans piano king, Professor Longhair, Big Chief were always a knowing bunch. As the prime-movers behind legendary hometown fanzine Motorbooty, the Detroit outfit - who featured ex-Necros vocalist Barry Henssler, former Laughing Hyenas drummer Mike Danner, artist/guitarist Mark Dancey (the illustrator behind Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger sleeve), bassist Matt O’Brien, and guitarist Phil Durr (now a member of Krautrockers Giant Brain) - enjoyed celebrating the excesses of rock culture. A prime example of their skewed humour was Motorbooty’s lengthy feature on The Stooges Wax Museum – an entirely fictitious establishment which subsequently attracted a stream of frustrated would-be visitors.

Likewise, Mack Avenue Skull Game is a soundtrack to a fictitious blaxploitation movie. A feral blend of hard rock and prime funk, it reflects the two musical scenes that made Detroit famous. While on previous releases the five-piece had managed to throw in the odd Westbound funk lick into their post-Stooges-cum-Sabbath stomp, here they properly stretched out, expanding their band to include the considerable talents of local blues diva Thornetta Davis, and delivered an album that rippled with soul sensibilities without ever resorting to cod funk-metal. Highlights included the searing Eddie Hazel-inspired romp of One Born Every Minute, the squelchy rock thump of Sonica, the Dennis Coffey wah-wah tribute of Cut To The Chase, and the ambient funk of If I Had A Nickel For Every Dime, all of which are augmented by the Beastie-punk of Cop Kisser and the electric Miles freak-out of He Needs To Be Dead/Ten Easy Pieces. A hugely ambitious work, Mack Avenue Skull Game is a genuine Sub Pop curio. You just wish Big Chief had gone on to make the movie to accompany it.

Posing in an abattoir, surrounded by his hairy, wild-eyed bandmates and wearing a T-shirt featuring serial killer Ed Gein, the sleeve to Thomas Arthur Doyle’s second album for Sub Pop promised more of the tongue-in-cheek redneck brutality found on their 1989 debut God’s Balls, or the bare knuckle pummeling of Albini-produced EP Salt Lick. 8-Way Santa’s original artwork – a grinning ’70s couple, mid-grope – was pulled when the female half spotted herself in a record shop. Which is a shame because it definitely represented the album more accurately. Despite their grizzly appearance, here Tad’s inherent humour and sense of melody are to the fore. Like I imagine the couple in the junkshop photo, 8-Way Santa is playful, with a glint in its eye but still digging heavy metal. Stumblin’ Man is Metallica with a sense of humour, speed metal guitars giving way to a sludgy, Sabbath breakdown while its subject hobbles bleeding and broken: “Stumblin’ man ain’t got no style. He ain’t had none in quite a while,” Tad deadpans. And occasionally his trademark vocal growls even break into song - Delinquent has a chorus, with harmonies (!) while 3-D Witch Hunt could be Dinosaur Jr in its heartfelt, overdriven pop and guitars that jangle more than grind. But in a very real sense the band deemed “Too ugly for MTV” would always be heavy, too heavy for mainstream tastes it turned out. But their place in the history of Sub Pop and the hearts of the, erm, older grunge fan, is assured.

I thought Garden State, the off-beat indie rom-com, was a turgid piece of rambling twaddle. However, amid all the half-baked soul searching, two tracks from The Shins’ Sub Pop debut provided a welcome break from the endless “who am I?” platitudes. The Albuquerque quartet had reached the SP stable in 2000, quickly recording this bittersweet, 30-minute collection of golden guitar-pop ditties. It’s easy to view Oh, Inverted World as a mere warm-up for the bravura shimmers of 2003’s Chutes Too Narrow and last year’s Wincing The Night Away, but this record’s minimal instrumentation spotlights the central, most beguiling tenet of the band’s sound. James Mercer’s voice, a clear-cut holler that gives the lonely-street strum of New Slang a Ray Davies warmth, ensures what could be misconstrued as an album of throwaway indie-pop is anything but. His is a singular voice, often muddying The Shins’ crystalline waters with such visceral epithets as, “Shut out, pimpled and angry / I quietly tied all my guts into knots”. Seven years on, with a shedload of record sales in the bank, The Shins’ tenure at Sub Pop is coming to an end, but their part in the second decade of the label’s history was key.

“I would give anything to make it with you one more time,” sounds not unlike an Eagles lyric, and Joe Pernice’s delivery – all numb detachment and occasional raised eyebrow – is a handsome relative of Don Henley’s phlegmier croon. But the song is called Grudge **** (their asterisks), and therein lies the difference: Scud Mountain Boys majored in parlaying The Eagles’ implied ennui into full-on jaundice. In other respects, this quiet, slender, pedal steel-embroidered Pioneer Valley quartet defied comparison, even with alterna-cowpoke contemporaries like Lambchop and Wilco, who rattled past them on the ’90s alt.country bandwagon, leaving SMB to stew in their defiantly unalloyed slowness (only the Johnny Cash-like Cigarette Sandwich quickens the step) and among the grim, stymied lives they sang of (Massachusetts’ first words are “They pulled her from a ditch Somewhere down on 95… Found a needle and a pipe / she had hidden by her side”). But that makes SMB sound a bore, and they weren’t, with irresistible chord changes, a welcoming rehearsal-room intimacy, and great songs like the swooping and slyly metaphor-laden Knievel (“I’ve got a bone in need of breaking”). In 1997, Pernice carried all that good stuff over into his Pernice Brothers incarnation, with sprightlier Beatles/Byrds beat pop replacing booze-spangled C&W as his stylistic canon. But this is where it all began…

Hailing from Vancouver via Sub Pop’s cute annexe, where the similarly ungrungey Velocity Girl also hung out, Zumpano overcame the encumbrance of being named after a bandleading drummer to be better than the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation and Ginger Baker’s Airforce combined. Flighty, tactile, light of touch, with an interest in pianos, The Zombies and Burt Bacharach and boasting a hail-fellow-well-met sort of singer in Carl Newman, Goin’ Through Changes improved on their Look What The Rookie Did debut (best thing: a Jim Webb cover) to dally with peak-period Todd Rundgren harmony (witness The Only Reason Under The Sun) and weave a seriously delightful record. Their tragedy? Ben Folds Five had already annexed the sunny geek-pop Sudetenland and set up camp. Still, as with Jellyfish before them, the Zumpano diaspora disseminated the spores of sophisticated pop, as Newman proved his worth in New Pornographers and AC Newman guises and Zumpano branched out with the typically winsome and earnest Sparrow. Now he “fronts” a band called Attics & Cellars – a spicily imaginative line-up of two violins, cello and Jason’s piano. But you only have to take one look at Goin’ Through Changes’ inner sleeve shot (Zumpano ravished, fists lifted to the sky) to recognise a fellow soul, solid-sent by the ecstasies of pop.

Reunited for the first time in 15 years to play at the Grammys in February, the experience was such that The Time are following that appearance with a season in Las Vegas starting this very week. Which, oddly, sent me back not to that band’s brisk and breezy Minneapolitan funk, but to the distinctive oeuvre created by its two most fêted members, songwriters and producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Somewhat outside the customary sweep of MOJO, their warm, clean-sounding collisions of soul, dance and pop created a sound that held sway for a considerable time in the ’80s, hitting a commercial peak with the only good records Janet Jackson and Alexander O’Neal ever made. However, the Jam & Lewis productions that opened the door were two albums by the S.O.S. Band, an Atlanta outfit on the small Tabu label whose career was stuttering after three LPs. On The Rise, with outstanding 1983 singles Just Be Good To Me (the dance hit) and Tell Me If You Still Care (the ballad hit), is strong, but 1984’s Just The Way You Like It is even more impressive, especially for the sonic cohesion of its (old-style) first side. Few albums risk starting with a ballad, but Jam & Lewis did precisely that with No One’s Gonna Love You Like I Do. Weekend Girl and the title track completed one of the smoothest soul sides of the ’80s. But the sheer distinctiveness of a soon-to-be very pervasive Jam-Lewis sound carried the seeds of the S.O.S. Band’s downfall. Lead singer Mary Davis quit after one more album, her solo career never took off, and with no identifiable vocal or production focus the group foundered too, providing an object lesson in the pros and cons of the producer-as-sonic-auteur.

The cover tells the Cheap Trick story. Singer Robin Zander and bassist Tom Petersson look like they’ve just surfaced after a night at the Playboy Mansion, with drummer Bun E Carlos the cab driver waiting to take them home, and guitarist Rick Nielson the asylum inmate on day release who starts licking the cab’s windscreen the moment they pull up at a traffic light. These strange men of Rockford, Illinois, were always misfits: too metal for punk, too punk for metal. Cheap Trick did big choruses and guitar solos - like touring partners such as Kiss or Ted Nugent - but everything they did was somehow twisted, odder, even a bit English; the result of Nielsen’s obsession with The Beatles and The Who. Being a greatest hits set with added screaming, Cheap Trick’s At Budokan live album has always overshadowed their studio output. Yet this debut (produced by Aerosmith’s guy Jack Douglas) showcases them just as well. It’s all here: Zander’s shameless Lennon impersonation (Taxman, Mr Thief), Nielsen’s garage riffing (Cry Cry), hooligan power-pop (He’s A Whore) and plenty of lyrical bad stuff (sexual predators on Daddy Should Have Stayed In High School, serial killers on The Ballad Of TV Violence). Out of time and yet weirdly timeless.

They were clearly simpler days 28 years ago, when you could threaten reality itself by your singer sporting the biggest wedge haircut ever and having someone showing slides while the band played. But The Human League, who defied orthodoxy by using only synthetic instruments, can still jar the senses in ways that say, Boomtown Rats pianist Johnny Fingers’ pyjamas cannot. Usually regarded as less strictly electronic and cold-sounding than their first, also-fab album Reproduction, the fact is that Travelogue still sits at the JG Ballard end of synth pop, with visions of the future that are ambivalent to say the least. For example: the nightmarish Twilight Zone-esque opener The Black Hit Of Space envisages a vinyl record so dull it turns into a black hole, that goes to Number 1 and then “into minus figures” and which freezes singer Phil Oakey in time (“get James Burke on the case” he advises with a delivery so sonorous you can’t help but take him seriously). W.X.J.L Tonight, meanwhile sees Oakey as the last DJ on earth, broadcasting to no-one. You also get a surprisingly heartfelt cover of an advertising jingle for Gordon’s Gin and, on the CD reissue at least, a stunningly wrong glam-electro take on Gary Glitter’s Rock And Roll Part Two. After Travelogue the group would split into the planet-conquering League of Don’t You Want Me and Heaven 17, but this is more than just a sparser, cheaper blueprint for Dare! Certainly, you can hear murmurings of the band’s later incarnation, but aren’t things generally more interesting when in the process of becoming? The future never sounded like this afterwards, or since.

The dizzying success of I Should Coco typecast Supergrass as bouncy Britpoppers, but anyone expecting a further instalment of Student Union jukebox fodder would have to brace themselves, because In It For The Money would unveil Supergrass the thinkers, the musos and the studio nerds, ready to indulge an experimental bent and a wealth of musical ideas. Here we also see the birth of Gaz Coombes, Guitar Hero: head-down and riffing on Richard III (a song whose Theremin howl and bad day griping is far uglier than anything on their good-natured debut); wheeling like Pete Townshend through the excitable Sun Hits The Sky, which breaks down and fades out into a mantra, as if to usher in side two and Going Out (a retooled version of an earlier single). Pegged their ‘psychedelic’ album at the time, In It For The Money follows a variety of muses with admirable disregard for any particular tradition. These days plenty of young bands have access to the wealth of music history and think nothing of bumping a deep soul boogie up next to an exploding punk chorus the way Supergrass do here on Cheapskate. Or to finish an album with a human beatbox looped over a twisted lyrical nod to Syd Barrett (Sometimes I Make You Sad). But in 1997 Supergrass didn’t have itunes, just inquiring minds and a truly maverick approach to pop music.

When The Bonzo Dog Band went their separate ways in 1972 co-frontman Vivian Stanshall was enticed to Warner Bros, who believed they could harness the crackpot mastermind behind that deranged band’s most outré excursions. Warners had to wait two years before Stanshall’s keen brain could cut through the booze-sodden axminster of his own self-doubt and finally craft an album’s worth of lyrics. Recorded at The Manor, Trident and Apple Studios with ex-Bonzos Neil Innes and ‘Bubs’ White and the top Traffic line-up of Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, Ric Grech, Gaspar Lawal and Rebop Kwaku Baah, MOUA was finally delivered to Warners in April 1974. It was not the album they were looking for. Opening track Afoju Ti Ole Riran (Dead Eyes), trucks in like some fuzzed Afro-funk supercurse against the record label itself, with Stanshall grimly intoning “Tomorrow’s children will be sold/and unwittingly enrolled/In the night-soil of your selfishness”. And so it continues, subaqeous grooves and breakbeats submarine ‘neath oily waves of whisky, fag tar and fear-sweat, as Stanshall dives and surfaces, like some arseholed Ahab, strapped to the white whale of his own hubris. Yelp, Bellow, Rasp Etc is a leering, befuddled blues riff, damp with the fleck-spittle of wailing defeat while Bout Of Sobriety is a crapulous boogie-woogie interspersed with foul gargling and burped leers. It is an album without peer, features three odes to Stanshall’s penis (Sample lyric: “Gotta strap him to me leg to go shopping”) and ends with the terrifying Strange Tongues, a Victorian mandrake plucked from suburban Sunday, that ends with Stanshall screeeeeching “I’ve finished the back dear/now I’ll make a start on the front!”; Munch’s Skrik relocated to a freshly mowed front lawn in Walthamstow. Interested? Your options are limited. Warners only pressed five thousand copies. In retaliation Stanshall destroyed one of their boardrooms, and secreted a bag of bluebottle maggots behind the radiator of the label president. Until they forgive him and reissue the thing you’ll have to make do with illegal downloads. Go here to sign the petition for Warner Bros to release it on CD and here to read Stanshall’s widow Ki Longfellow’s detailed breakdown of the album’s, erm, breakdown.

There’s never really been a British Steely Dan, despite the ’80s brainstorming of Prefab Sprout and Thomas Dolby. Perhaps we’ve lacked the right type of musicians – jazz-trained but pop smart – or maybe the inclination to produce something so simultaneously sweet yet sour. Sunderland’s Field Music (step forward, brothers Peter and David Brewis, plus keyboard maestro Andrew Moore) share a deceptive surface serenity with the Dan, a similarly restless musical imagination, and – if the wry, stinging guitar break in opening track Give It Lose It Take It is anything to go by, a familiarity with the oeuvre of Jeff “Skunk” Baxter.

Since this 2007 opus the brothers have branched out, making excellent records as the David-led School Of Language and Peter-centric The Week That Was, but they may yet struggle to top this 31-minute barrage of constantly surprising music, a brilliantly paced song-cycle interlaced with the brothers’ dry, enigmatic takes on the modern complaint (“leisure is useless when you find nothing is easy”). Give It Lose It Take it dares to face off Genesis keyboards with Steve Reich marimbas. Sit Tight is a Sparks-indebted nano-opera with the whitest human beatboxing you’ll ever hear, while Working To Work’s syncopated piano-and-guitar duel turn a meditation on the pointlessness of everything into the record’s jauntiest ditty. It’s thrillingly sophisticated, but never jarring, overly pungent or mad-for-the-sake-of-it: pop music, in other words, that’s clever enough to ensure that you’re never too far away from a snatch of transfiguring melody or liquid vocal deliciousness, and almost neurotically loath to outstay its welcome.

With gun-toting Clint Eastwood staring quizzically out from the sleeve, this LP was often seen in carboot sales and Oxfam shops in the 1980s. It certainly offered something of a contrast to the nearby Geoff Love and Max Bygraves LPs and copies of The Henry Root Letters, sending the unwitting listener into a savage, operatic arena of dust, blood and granite-faced nemesis. Composed by Morricone during his mid-’60s purple patch working with director Sergio Leone, A Fistful Of Dollars is the more sombre of the two, while For A Few Dollars More really gets you Golgotha-bound, accompanied by doomed strings, acoustic guitars and trumpets. Suitably for a film about avarice and revenge with the epically evil, weed-smoking killer El Indio at its centre, highlights include stand off theme La Resa Dei Conti, whose bass twangs were borrowed by New Order for Blue Monday and which terrifies with a choir of the damned and the mother of all satanic church organs, while the eerie Osservatori Osservati would sound at home on one of Scott Walker’s recent albums. Sadly, you can’t get it for 20p anymore, but they’re still well worth having. Particularly the 2003 RCA ‘onefer’ reissue of For A Few Dollars More, which delivers eight pieces of nameless dread in just 17 minutes.

Is it possible to pay tribute to the Cocteau Twins without using the word “ethereal”? It’s certainly tricky. Their grand, baroque constructions inspire the kind of enthusiasm that makes rapturous, adjective-ridden prose a constant temptation. Treasure, the band’s third LP, saw the Twins perfect the signature sound they pioneered on 1983’s Head Over Heels after the departure of bassist Will Heggie removed the lumbering, Hook-esque bass lines that weighed down the claustrophobic debut Garlands. Front and centre is Fraser’s superhuman voice. With no lyrics to impede her, she’s free to shoot out into the cosmos, gymnastically veering between reedy, childlike rhyme to breathy sigh and, beyond, into deep Gaelic chant. Meanwhile, guitarist Robin Guthrie and bassist Simon Raymonde conjure melodic waterfalls that would set the standard for emotive post-punkers through the ’80s and early ’90s. Forget Adam Ant and his foppish ilk; this is the kind of new romanticism that stood the test of time.

Eleanor Rigby, Love The One You’re With, Bridge Over Troubled Water: Franklin was reaching out to beardy white hippies at this landmark show and the result was a permanent deracination of her appeal, a timely fillip after tough times for Franklin, on the crest of a slough after her divorce from husband/manager Ted White in late 1969. Meanwhile King Curtis (destined to live only five more months) and his Kingpins whomp it up, giving Dr Feelgood an unprecedented, randy vigour, and Ray Charles steps up to honour Franklin’s gospel roots on Spirit In The Dark. Rhino’s 23-track revamp offers the best from Franklin’s three-night stand but Aretha’s genius remains encapsulated in Respect, the original 9-tracker’s opener. A hair-raising vocal, beautiful and terrifying at the same time, it’s twice as meaningful a demand for esteem and empathy in front of this integrated audience at a time when much of the nation was still divided. Righteous and divine in equal measure.

Following an ultra-hip ’60s spent in Parisian theatres, singing comic chansons with Georges Brassens and performing her free verse plays with Jacques Higelin and Algerian musician Areski Belkacem, the 29-year-old Brigitte Fontaine cut, this, her debut solo album. With a title that translates as “Brigitte Fontaine is insane”, and a cover that has the singer peering from of a question mark cut into a grotesque Bosch landscape, Brigitte Fontaine est… undoubtedly bonkers, mixing arrangements from Gainsbourg collaborator Jean-Claude Vannier with frantic African drums, screeching jungle birds and lush Spanish guitar, all in the service of Fontaine’s own mordant ruminations plucked from the dank verges on the long miserable road to madness and death. It’s how Françoise Hardy might have sounded if she’d taken the brown acid, or Piaf if she’d stuck around long enough to work with late ’60s Gainsbourg. It’s also Fontaine’s most conventional album. After this she cut an eerily beautiful flute’n’percussion jazz poetry workout with The Art Ensemble Of Chicago (1971’s Comme À La Radio) and a handful of albums with Areski that can best be described as electronic Afro-Balkan chamber folk. Possibly. Now championed by the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Stereolab and Sonic Youth and she is still recording and, thankfully, remains completely insane.

Relations within Pink Floyd hit a new low after 1977's Animals album, with a megalomaniacal Roger Waters ever more infuriatingly dismissive of his bandmates’ contributions. Yet David Gilmour's first solo album contradicts Waters's complaint that the guitarist never wrote any songs. Gilmour composed the lion's share of this (with one song a collaboration with Roy Harper and another written by Ken Baker of Gilmour's protégé folk-rockers Unicorn), and the pervading vibe seems to be "Dave, man, you can do this", with old Cambridge pals, Willie Wilson and Rick Wills playing drums and bass, and Gilmour's then-wife Ginger taking photos for the inner sleeve. There's No Way Out Of Here is the star turn; a curiously sleepy yet potent number with Gilmour delivering his posh-stoner vocals over a chorus of female backing singers, including Floyd's touring partner Carlena Williams. If, at times, the songs feel slight, there's always the guitar to fall back on, and Gilmour guitars to his heart's content on Cry From The Streets and It's Deafinitely. This, then, is Pink Floyd for people that like the solo in Comfortably Numb (an early version of which was cut for this album) but can live without Waters's existential angst. "I can't breathe anymore," declares Gilmour ominously on a song of the same title. That said, another track, Mihalis, was named after his new yacht, moored in the harbour near to a recently purchased villa on Lindos, so life clearly wasn't all bad.

“You’ll begin to wonder if the points of all the ancients myths/ Are solemnly directed straight at you,” declaims Peter Hammill on the 23-minute A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers. Don’t laugh - listen to Van der Graaf Generator’s bad trip album enough, and you might end up agreeing that doom has sought you out, personally. Made up of just three very long songs, this is a by-turns resigned and possessed 40 minutes, employing the soft-then-alarming punk-prog model with demonic organ sounds, hard drum breaks and someone playing a sax they’ve plugged into the mains, all jackbooting up and down while Hammill writhes in primal torment (for a measure of the band’s chemistry, see the somewhat sinister inner sleeve image). Throughout, it refuses to let up – see how Man-Erg’s majestic rock switches on the electrodes with Hammill sneering “How can I be free?” (Johnny Rotten and Howard Devoto were definitely listening), or the building malaria music of A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers gives way to Hammill wondering if God exists to melancholy piano. Incredibly, the LP was Number 1 in Italy for 12 weeks. But they received no royalties and split up the following year, only to rise again with 1975’s Godbluff.

Raised in New Orleans on Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt and schooled in the Boston and Cambridge coffee shops of the ’60s, Chris Smither stands outside of the mass of late ’60s white boys questing for American authenticity. On his early recordings for Kevin Eggers’ Tomato label he possesses a sweetly reassuring vocal rumble (David Ackles without all that oompah vaudeville) and a hanging-back Cajun approach to harmony weirdly redolent of the despondent coming-down harmonies of Big Star. Recorded in Albert Grossman’s new Bearsville Studio in Woodstock in 1970 Don’t It Drag On is a heartbreakingly carefree work, possessing a dangerously trippy air of seductive melancholia, caught half way between long summer holidays and a lifetime of homelessness.

Luther Ingram’s best-known hit, the Southern soul cheatin’ classic (If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want To Be Right, appears early on this second KoKo singles collection, but the rest of the album has no trouble maintaining the quality, most obviously because the album he recorded just before the label closed for business in 1978 was one of his best ever. Born in Tennessee 1937 and raised in Illinois, Ingram sang with a family gospel group and a teen doo-wop act (The Gardenias, produced by Ike Turner) in the ’50s, was a peripatetic soul man until he met Johnny Baylor (essentially a thug who wanted to be a record biz wheeler and dealer) in the middle of the ’60s. Baylor’s good deed was to make Ingram the focus of his Ko Ko label between 1966 and 1978. Volume 1 covered the period to ’71, the evergreen If Loving You... landed in ’72, but it’s the four tracks that finish off Volume 2 that will surprise you. They’re taken from 1978’s Do You Love Somebody, never reissued on CD as far as I know but which I still return to on vinyl. As the ’70s progressed many Southern soul stars were silenced by disco‘s overwhelming blast, but Ingram actually got better thanks to the merest adjustments of lyric tone (more overtly romantic) and melody (a touch sweeter). The title track of that 1978 album is an infectious mix of polite yearning and desperate lust, while How I Miss You Baby again shows how expertly Ingram pictured the man left lonely and Ko Ko swansong Get To Me has a Hallmark card lyric made palatable by a deliriously happy melody, positive arrangement and Ingram’s vibrant voicings. Earlier, I’ll Be Your Shelter had taken Ingram back to his gospel roots, while These Are The Things drew another raw, accurate picture of that poor fella living alone.

Jaz Coleman has spent a large part of the last decade scoring classical works commissioned by such august bodies as The Royal Opera House and collaborating with the likes of ill-coiffeured violinist Nigel Kennedy. Back in harness as Killing Joke’s frontman – alongside guitarist Geordie, new boy drummer Ben Calvert and bass player Paul Raven – Coleman’s apocalyptic fervour burns as bright as ever on this dense, heavy set which was quite literally recorded in a dank basement in the Czech Republic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s overflowing with the unholy, proto-metal qualities that characterise the band’s groundbreaking early work, such as What’s This For?, and the later Pandemonium. Three tracks into the nine you arrive at Invocation – a widescreen affair pitting lush orchestration against pernicious pounding. It’s as close to a diabolical Bond theme as you’re likely to get, and points the way forward for a band that, nearly 30 years on, have failed to understand the meaning of the word compromise. Sadly, the death of bassist Raven from a heart attack 18 months after the release of this album has placed a question mark over the band’s future studio endeavours. While Killing Joke are due to tour with their reformed first line-up later this year (with Youth back on bass), Hosannas remains a fitting swansong for a much-missed individual.

With Steely Dan on hold for most of the ’80s and ’90s, workshy Donald Fagen and Walter Becker managed just three solo albums between them. Fagen's debut, 1982’s The Nightfly, was an open love letter to the music he’d heard as a teenager growing up in ’50s America. Kamakiriad arrived after a protracted spell of writer's block, and was a muddled concept album in which Fagen's narrator travelled towards the Millennium in a dream car (the Kamakirii), negotiating the perils of middle age along the way... Keep up, please. In contrary Steely Dan style, Walter Becker produced it, co-wrote one track (the sublime Snowbound) and even played bass guitar, so no wonder Kamakiriad feels warmly familiar. Trans-Island Skyway and Tomorrow's Girls embody the spirit: summery al fresco jazz meets nightclub cool. Fagen jousts with the female backing singers like a rheumy, white Ray Charles on Countermoon; plays the reflective male divorcee in a cocktail jazz bar during On The Dunes, and delivers the best song Steely Dan never recorded (Snowbound again). Kamakiriad made it to Number 10 in the Billboard charts, an achievement in the year of Garth Brooks and Bat Out Of Hell II, and was critic and man's-man author Tony Parsons' tip for The Greatest Thing I've Heard All Year in MOJO. Too quickly forgotten after Fagen and Becker revived the Dan brand for 2000's Two Against Nature, it's actually better than anything the pair have done since.

In the nicest possible way, Massachusetts's power-poppers Fountains Of Wayne have been making the same album over and over since 1996. Yet what they lack in musical experimentation they make up for in their ability to maintain - beautifully. This, their third, is as diverse and as good as it gets. Core members/guitarists Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger had put the band on hold after 1999's second album Utopia Parkway. Schlesinger went off and wrote songs for the musical comedy Josie And The Pussycats; Collingwood fronted a group called The Gay Potatoes. The band reconvened for Welcome Interstate Managers: 16 artful, glorious songs that seem to back into each other leaving no room to pause and take stock. There's the pin-sharp rock of Bright Future In Sales and Little Red Light (tracks that comfortably whip such would-be competitors from the time as Blink-182), Hey Julie, a Simon & Garfunkel soundalike that could have soundtracked a romantic interlude in Dawson's Creek, and the hit single Stacy's Mom, a self-confessed homage to The Cars, sold with a promo video that distracted viewers from the Fountains' terminal geekiness by casting the soon to be ex-Mrs Rod Stewart, Rachel Hunter, in the titular role. The greatest testament to the band's intrinsically knowing way with a melody comes with Fire Island, a tale of hormone-addled adolescents planning to "drink all the alcohol" and "get naked in the pool" while their parents enjoy a weekend away. Somehow, you forget that the men voicing the hopes and dreams of these beer-drinking, skinny-dipping teens are, in real life, all the wrong side of thirty. Fountains Of Wayne make it sound and seem so easy.

MOJO’s Deputy Editor claims that he could never again feel quite so enthusiastic about Stereolab once he’d heard the first Neu! album, and I must admit to similar feelings about Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs incarnation the moment I was introduced to Van Dyke Parks’ astonishing debut. The spectral vaudeville, the distant ’30s/’40s mic effect, the skeins of warped folk and country – it was here first by 30 years, and though there’s no saw-playing credited in the Song Cycle sleevenote, it sure sounds like there’s a saw. More startlingly still, given the sophistication of the musical synthesis and instrumental co-ordination, this was the work of a 22-year-old, albeit one who’d already done time in Brian Wilson’s Smile sandbox, hooked Frank Sinatra up with the career-reviving Somethin’ Stupid and pulled strings for Harper’s Bizarre, on his way to landmark production jobs with Randy Newman and The Beau Brummels. In fact it’s a song by the former, the wry slice of muso life that is Vine Street, that kicks off Song Cycle’s hyper-dense, wonky-grinned clatter, setting a theme of sorts – all roads lead to LA and its scene, already retreating to “hillside manors on the banks of toxicity.” Parks is no singer, but the wobble-box he’s put through prompts a Proustian rush of old-timey nostalgia, while the staggering music – embracing tubas’n’timps mini-symphony Palm Desert, the tipsy harpfest of The All Golden, and peaking with the gleeful, detail-stuffed maximalism of Donovan’s Colours – pioneers the post-hippy synthesis of freaky and folksy that would become a staple through 1968, 1969 and beyond. Visionary music, then, with one eye on the rear-view – the best sort, basically.

Of all the phrases that might pop into your head when thinking about American hardcore punk, “mainstream appeal” almost certainly wouldn’t be one of them. After all, the curious blend of metal guitars, brutal rhythms and ultra-serious social commentary was never made for more than the loyal few. There are a handful, however, who risk the wrath of shaven-headed straight-edgers the world over by stepping onto a broader stage. Take Walter Schreifels. Having helped define the New York hardcore sound and the youth crew movement playing for the likes of Gorilla Biscuits, Youth Of Today and Quicksand, Schreifels greeted the 21st century with a new band (made up of his old buddies from the New York scene) and a welcome change of pace.

Rival Schools’ United By Fate is a milestone in modern heavy rock; wild punk abandon tempered by rock solid discipline and musicianship. Album opener Travel By Telephone might start with chaotic distortion and Schreifels’ bestial cries, but it soon crystallises into a pin-sharp chorus, punctuated by Dinosaur Jr-esque laserstreak guitar solos. From Used For Glue’s unapologetically pogo-friendly riff to the escape fantasies of The Switch, the tracks are bound together by a youthful vitality that belies the band’s veteran status. Rival Schools may have only given us one album, but it’s the real deal – sunny and stormy, fuzzy and sharp, short and sweet.

Like the humpback whale, whose sonar-baffling song they are often said to emulate, Sigur Rós have been on a prolonged, mysterious migration. In 1999, their remarkable second album, Áegetis Byrjun, broke them on the world stage and proceeded to sell over half a million copies – unusual for a collection of keening reverbathons sung in an invented language. Almost immediately, the foursome threatened to consign themselves to the deep, as touring sapped their will and they made heavy work of the follow-up. Sluggish, mournful and untitled (it’s generally referred to as “()” or “brackets”, after the sleeve art), when the album finally emerged in 2002 it sounded like the work of self-regarding glummoes, beaten down by the reality of rock’n’roll success. Three years, one electronica-flavoured score for choreographer Merce Cunningham (the remorselessly downbeat Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do) and a strict tour moratorium later, Takk... was a change up, not only from “()” but, more impressively, from Ágaetis Byrjun. On one level it’s more of a pop record than either, full of whistle-test melodies (marvel as Hoppípolla’s piano riff lays waste to Coldplay; worry slightly as Saeglópur reminds you of Mark Cohn’s Walking In Memphis). On another it is their most intense and powerful work to date, delivering dizzying lumps of joy via the elvish ululation of Jón Pór Birgisson and the looming thunder of his sculpted guitar bursts – played, à la Jimmy Page or The Creation’s Eddie Philips, with a violin bow. Confounding those whose lingering impression of the band is of whimsical pixies vending New Age wallpaper, Takk… (“thank you” in Icelandic) misses few opportunities to deliver a mighty, crashing release of soul-wringing noise to resolve its complex, tension-building miniaturism. The sensation of waking in a vast Northern forest, perhaps from a dream involving Moomintrolls and Arvo Pärt, and having the Northern Lights injected directly into the frontal lobe can surely have nothing on Takk… Thankyou? No, thank you.

The Coral must love the studio. In the bygone age of their freak-beat heroes (Beefheart, Love, early Floyd) five albums in five years may have warranted a "what kept you?”, but with many of today’s bands extending the gap between records to three or four years, Hoylake’s finest are a speeding bullet train of sonic sustenance. Bowling out of Liverpool’s Zanzibar Club a few years ahead of their spooky, kooky, chart-bothering label mates The Zutons, The Coral arrived armed to the teeth with an album of surreal sea shanty rants (Skeleton Key, Spanish Main), vintage ‘60s pop (Dreaming Of You, Waiting For The Heartaches) and a potent dose of brooding psychedelia (Simon Diamond, Goodbye). This heady mix still propels the band to this day – as do the honeyed, rasping vocals of the hugely underrated James Skelly. Super-strength melodies, blitzed by off-beat arrangements, powered by youthful abandon and shadowed by a vertiginous wall of pop heritage, it’s modern British music at its most magical. Album number six is probably already in the can, but The Coral’s debut remains their most enchanting work to date.

When they first started back in communist Yugoslavia in 1980, Laibach’s first performance was banned by the authorities for its “misuse” of military and political symbols. Were the spooks of the UDBA still around, it’s a charge they’d no doubt level at 2006’s Volk. Therein, 13 national anthems, including those of America, Russia, China, Britain, France, Japan, Israel, Palestine and the Vatican City are re-cast as frigid techno-pop with their modified words given sinister expression by vocalists Milan Fras (gruff) and Boris Benko (woeful and operatic). As is often the case with Laibach, their music is a maze of conflicting meanings and serious jokes, making for a disquieting listening experience, akin to the world suddenly declaring war on itself before your eyes on Newsnight. Students of history should pay attention to the revanchist threat of China and Russia, while America comes over sounding mad and doomed and dear old Blighty gets a Derek Jameson-baiting God Save The Queen that sneers “So you still believe you’re running the world?” How to restore sanity? With the closer, a scratchy, faux-First World War marching band field recording of the anthem of the NSK - the NSK being Laibach’s virtual state without borders – that features a Steven Hawking robo-voice quoting Winston Churchill. Their most recent album, naturally, was a “Laibachian” interpretation of Bach’s The Art Of The Fugue.

Since The Replacements clattered to a halt around 1991, Westerberg’s solo output has been characterised by an almost wilful diversity, suggesting a personal desire to explore different musical directions rather than simply mimic the seminal sounds of his former band. While his releases since then have had their individual merits, most of them have generally lacked that essential ingredient which typifies Westerberg’s strongest work: fiery, heart-on-sleeve passion. Yet Stereo/Mono encapsulates everything he is renowned for – sensitive acoustic ballads, wild electric rockers, and lyrics that would have Oscar Wilde biting his quill in envy. The Stereo disc is the quieter, more sombre of the two, with tracks such as the unintentionally brief Dirt To Mud, the wry Only Lie Worth Telling and Got You Down, a song about relationship violence, highlighting Westerberg’s obsession with the intricacies of the heart. The dourly nostalgic We May Be The Ones is classic Westerberg, while Call That Gone? is a cynical Tom Petty-styled ode to messy break ups. This sets the tone for the raucous Mono, attributed to Westerberg’s occasional alias/side-project Grandpaboy. As Westerberg himself admits, Mono’s songs may be rough and raw, but the joy and vitality with which they are played more than makes up for any lack of subtlety in the arrangements or production. Highlights include the sardonic Let’s Not Belong Together, the magnificent kiss-off that is Silent Film Star, and the bluesy stomp of Kickin’ The Stall. On the gorgeous closing track AAA, Westerberg sings “I ain’t got anything, to say to anyone, anymore” – an interesting line coming from a man still heralded by many as one of the best lyricists of the past 30 years. On the evidence of Stereo/Mono, he still seems to have quite a few things worth saying.

There is a myth that The Shaggs aborted numerous takes during the recording session for this album, claiming they had made mistakes. The sound engineer was totally bemused. Within seconds of listening, you can sympathise with him. Throughout, both guitars are off key and out of sync whilst the drums sound like they are from completely different songs. For such reasons, it can be hard trying to persuade people that this album isn’t just an elaborate joke. The poorly lit cover shot of The Shaggs, with identical haircuts in their homemade paisley clothes, proves repellent enough for many. Especially if they know nothing of the remarkable story of the three Wiggin sisters (Dorothy, Betty and Helen) from a small town in New England and their maniacally supportive father, Austin, who bought them instruments and paid for their studio time. 1000 copies were pressed and only 100 were released in 1969, but Zappa still discovered it and proclaimed the group “better than the Beatles”.

Conventionally talentless and without any kind of musical barometer, The Shaggs played free of the atmospheric pressure created by a decade of groundbreaking music. As Dorothy sings about lost pets (My Pal Foot-Foot), respecting your parents (Who Are Parents) and her transistor radio (My Companion), the guitar parts warp western scales and Helen locates the off beats that exist in a forgotten corner of the subconscious. They all collide in the spirit of adventure and complement each other in blissful ignorance. It’s innocent, unfettered creativity masquerading as an incoherent mess.

Interviewed in Q magazine, Kate Bush once described The Dreaming as “my ‘she's-gone-mad’ album”. Self produced by the then 24-year-old, this was experimental stuff: filled with abstract rhythms, Fairlight sampler (the vogue studio toy of the era) and Bush wailing like a Bedlam inmate. A commercial disappointment at the time, The Dreaming has become the fan's fan's Kate Bush album, but it rewards the brave listener. The non-hit singles Sat In Your Lap and Suspended In Gaffa are strafed with melody but almost comically out of step with the early-'80s innocence of Thursday night Top Of The Pops. Both are matched, though, by the likes of Houdini, All The Love and Night Of The Swallow: songs rich in spooked atmospheres and lyrics about poltergeists, escapologists, Aborigines... Heard now, The Dreaming marks the end of airy, fairy, tree-hugging Kate Bush and the beginning of her next phase, as the studio alchemist behind the chart-topping The Hounds Of Love. Unlike anything else in 1982 or, indeed, any year before or since. Utterly unique.

Buying a record on the basis of the cover alone is a gamble, but in this age of ‘stream before you buy’ downloads, it remains an exhilarating leap into the unknown. I first saw the sleeve artwork of Electric Music For The Mind And Body appear during the BBC’s mid-’90s rock series Dancing In The Street. I knew then, even before I’d heard the tremulous, lysergic R&B contained within, it was an album I had to own. An intriguing, telescopic view of the liquid light show happenings at the Avalon Ballroom, the sleeve design remains a classic period image. Like fellow San Francisco psych-pioneers The Charlatans, Country Joe McDonald and his guitar-playing partner Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton began as a coffeehouse jug band duo who, caught up in the radical politics of the Berkeley campus and propelled by top-grade Owsley LSD, would go on to create this early totem of psychedelic revelry. At the heart of Electric Music… lies the 7-minute Section 43 – a hazy instrumental led by the kaleidoscopic stylings of organist David Cohen. With its needling guitar breaks and misshapen rhythms, it is a sound that seems to stream directly through the grey Bay Area fog, a strange, gaping black hole hovering between the carnival blues of Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine and Flying High and the echo chamber-hypnosis of Bass Strings and Grace (the latter a paean to Jefferson Airplane’s Ms Slick). Two years after this album paved the way for a clutch of Haight-Ashbury classics and a slew of piss-poor imitations, the band would be presented to audiences across the world via the Woodstock movie and their performance of anti-Vietnam rant, I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag, but in 2008 Electric Music… still stands up as their most potent work. Fantastic cover too.

For a country proud of its insurrectionist past, it is remarkable that France’s musical conservatism has manifested itself for the last 50 years in the bellowing form of Johnny Hallyday – a man that remains Gallic rock’s bloated totem. An avowed antidote to the latter, spiky Parisian agitators Métal Urbain emerged in 1976 armed with a drum machine, synthesisers, tightly welded guitars and a futuristic manifesto. “An influence on our thinking was Oscar Wilde, who belonged to the anti-naturalistic movement. We tried to apply his ideas to our music,” explained synth manipulator Eric Débris. The result was a sound - inspired by the Fripp/Eno/Bowie axis - that sits somewhere between the stripped down rock’n’roll romanticism of Suicide and the dysfunctional vocal blurtings of The Fall (the latter courtesy of the Gallic guttural pronouncements of eccentric frontman Clode Panik).

MU’s refusenik attitude chimed perfectly with punk’s emergence, the band opening for the Pistols in Paris in September ’76 before travelling to London to play The Roxy. While in the UK, the band recorded their now legendary Paris Maquis/Clé De Contact single with Tony Platt, their second 45 famously issued as the first ever release on the fledgling Rough Trade label in December 1977. Subsequent singles like Hystérie Connective and Atlantis saw them build on their ranting debut Panik and its troglodyte-styled flipside Lady Coca Cola, but while MU found fans abroad (including John Peel for whom they recorded a session and, later, the likes of SPK, Big Black, The Young Gods and the Mary Chain who cited them as influences), in their homeland they remained largely unloved. Disillusioned, they split in December 1978. In an open letter to the press the 21-year-old Clode Panik spat: “And in 25 years you’ll look for ‘the new future of rock’n’roll’ and you’ll bemoan the fact that no one loved Métal Urbain, a band that marked the start of something else… You are institutions, ancestors, relics. For me rock’n’roll no longer exists. But hate is constructive…” Thirty years on, he appears to have been proved right.

“I’ve been in the rock and roll business all my life,” mused British guitar hero Bert Weedon once, “And I’ve never even seen a marijuana.” Clearly, he hadn’t hung out with Cypress Hill, the Latino rap crew who always consumed their greens. But despite containing tracks called Hits From The Bong, I Wanna Get High and Insane In The Brain, Black Sunday is no mere stoner goof-off. From its Deadhead skull-and-bones sleeve eeriness down, this was hip-hop bent out of shape in psychedelic ways. Produced by New Yorker DJ Muggs in the halcyon days of sampling whatever you felt like, it mined beats and noise from the likes of Black Sabbath, James Brown and Dusty Springfield, all cut and pasted into a raw, subterranean fug of tough, locomotive beats, looped basslines and grating sirens. For all the threats of beyond-casual violence – see the charming A To The K or Hand On The Glock for gratuitous, THC’d up gunplay - nasal rappers B Real and Sen Dog are too much like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers to truly harsh the mellow. Amazingly, it debuted at Number 1 on the US charts and went double platinum. The band continue to this day, having along the way experimented with rock, reggae and, on 1996’s Homerpalooza, Homer Simpson. Now, exhale.

Like Will Oldham antimatter, Hem’s songwriter Dan Messe employs traditional American pastoral influences in songs so humble and pretty they must surely be Disney-approved. His lyrics, sung by the honey-voiced Sally Ellyson (Karen Carpenter innocent, as luxuriant as Alison Krauss) have a grace and clarity that belies the often sombre subject matter. When I Was Drinking is an abstinent lament for a lover cast out with old vices, gently picked out in chiming pedal steel, piano and wheezing harmonium. Even when the arrangements are swelled by a small orchestra they’re unobtrusively employed with Elllyson’s voice always to the fore. The heartsore Stupid Mouth Shut is a case in point: violin, viola, cello, clarinet, flute and oboe don’t detract from lyrical lucidity of an opening line like “The sidewalk bends where your house ends/like the neighbourhood is on its knees”. Enough to make Bonnie Prince Billy swoon.

World domination was a slow process for Bruce Springsteen. When it started to happen with 1975’s Born To Run, a legal tussle with his ex-manager kept him out of the recording studio for the next two years. Springsteen's frustration fed into the new songs he was stockpiling. Darkness... was not the follow-up fans or record company expected, missing a hit single and failing to achieve a similar sales trajectory. Long-time Springsteen watchers have always been aware of its heavy charms, but this is also a Bruce album for those turned off by the James Dean Springsteen of Born To Run or the Sylvester Stallone Springsteen of Born In The USA. Sombre reflection and unbridled ferocity are the order of the day, as the troubles in Springsteen's life infiltrated the characters in his songs. Badlands and The Promised Land are the big, cathartic rockers separating tales of teenage lust in Candy's Room, the headbanging prodigal-son anthem Adam Raised A Cain and Racing In The Street, a downbeat ode to reckless driving. In the UK, punk waged its war of attrition, but these sour, street-tough songs also mirrored the questioning mood of the times. Lawbreakers everywhere should seek out a bootleg from 1978 recorded at New Jersey's Capitol Theatre in which The E-Street Band come close to spontaneous combustion while ripping into some of the songs here.

You’re familiar with the term “melody”, I’m sure. Well, having gotten acquainted with that concept, prepare for the Ultra-Melody™, as typified by Vancouver indie collective The New Pornographers. In the world of the Ultra-Melody™, it is unacceptable for guitars simply to soar. They must launch into the stratosphere. And why settle for a lone voice when the entire band can bellow the words to the rafters in perfect harmony? For that matter, why limit yourself to a simple four-piece when you can invite all your pals to join in? Songwriter and head honcho A.C. Newman (formerly of influential Sub Poppers Zumpano) always took inspiration from such melody masters as Bacharach, Wilson and the Zombies, and with Twin Cinema, he put all the lessons he learned into practice.

The result is an album that bristles with anthemic abandon and nod-along immediacy. Impeccably arranged pop mixes perfectly with the childlike grace of Newman’s lyrics. From the frenetic rhythm of Use It to the irresistible cruisin’ chorus of Sing Me Spanish Techno, this is a bag of gems that requires no polishing. Crucially, though, with off-key ballads Bones Of An Idol and These Are The Fables (both with lead vocals by alt.country queen Neko Case), Newman shows he has the songwriting chops to take his foot off the gas and give listeners pause for thought. And allow them to catch their breath.

2002 would be the year rock’n’roll came riding back into town – the year The Stokes’ Is This It and The White Stripes’ White Blood Cells washed away all that nu-metal silliness and the dingy moan of Embrace and their ilk. However, Jack White’s living room in 1999 was another time, another place. Having made few waves with their debut album and with a certain John Gillis still occupying himself as lead guitarist of Detroit group The Go, The White Stripes were still a hobby band when, at the request of his ‘Big Sister’ Meg, they set about recording De Stijl on an 8-track analogue tape-recorder. Everything that we now know and love about the White Stripes tumbled out. Jumble Jumble has Jack desperately preaching to us, not of impending apocalypse but of the perils of an unclean house, while his guitar spits and snarls like a rabid animal; meanwhile, Meg hits the drums like an excited kid watching a classmate doing something he shouldn’t. Upright sentiment (Sister Do You Know My Name?) and weird humour (You’re Pretty Good Looking) mix, while the Son House cover, Death Letter, shakes the Mississippi delta, with a dash of punk and a new genre is born (or, at the least, popularised). Not only was the content of their songs a breath of fresh air, but the religious fervour with which they were proclaimed and played created a world in which we could believe, regardless of their contrived sartorial code and their ‘brother, sister, husband, wife’ shenanigans. We would never hear the band so intimately again – they didn’t expect anyone to be listening. Luckily we were and have been ever since.

Curious to think that Mark Pritchard, who with Tom Middleton made up Global Communication, was also behind Shaft’s 1993 rave novelty Roobarb & Custard. Or maybe there’s poetic justice in the association; after all, the spine-drained raver on a comedown needed sounds to take the edge off the horrorscape, and when The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds seemed a bit too full on, there was always 76:14. Even 14 years on, the ten tracks – titled, like the album, for how long they go on for – provide a soothing balm. Somewhere between a futurist film score, the distant booming of a spacecraft’s engines or an abstract jazz combo playing on Lando’s cloud city in The Empire Strikes Back, here were rich and beauteous swathes of almost beat-less ambient noise reminiscent of Eno and Tangerine Dream, punctuated by an international array of sampled voices and ticking clocks, all suggestive of planetary harmony and shared values (you could get away with that kind of thing then). Rumour has it the founders of the Big Chill were inspired to start throwing their parties because of this album, but don’t let that put you off.

Escaping from the heavy scene they’d encountered in riot-torn Paris in late ’68, ex-Soft Machine émigré Daevid Allen and his partner Gilli Smyth fled to Deya, Mallorca. There, the duo’s musical and ideological stance coalesced further, manifesting itself on this debut that, while originally intended for release under their dual names, is now regarded as Gong’s debut outing. The original vinyl album was split between Early Morning (side one) and Late Night (side two), reflecting the diverse mood music that characterises this whimsical, blissful and gloriously stoned album. Signed to the radical BYG label and counting the likes of Don Cherry and Sun Ra as labelmates, Allen and Smyth – aided by fellow future Gong cohort Didier Malherbe on flute and soprano sax, as well as a selection of earthy jazzers – unleashed a complex and sprawling 10 tracks that mixed surreal lyricism with post-Softs freak-adelia. Moreover, tracks like Rational Anthem, Five & Twenty Schoolgirls and Gong Song reflected Allen’s wildly esoteric influences ranging from The Yardbirds to Charlie Mingus via William Burroughs, George Formby and Syd Barrett. Close to 40 years on, Allen, now a sprightly 70 years young, and Smyth have continued to make music that draws on the roots laid down here, travelling fearlessly beyond the margins of genre and, in some cases, time itself. Indeed, as if to emphasise the point, Gong’s next stop is Massive Attack’s Meltdown on June 14 at London’s Royal Festival Hall where they’ll share a bill with dub pirate Adrian Sherwood.

With an exhibition currently running at the Victoria & Albert Museum of the incendiary frocks that (ahem) ignited the bloody civil rights struggle, it’s time to examine the stuff that really changed the world – the music that put Diana Ross, Mary Wilson and Florence Ballard on nationally syndicated American TV shows, raising the profile and self-esteem of young African-American entertainers at a stroke. This album has The Supremes’ breakthrough pop hits as they, and Motown in general, formed a more durable bulwark against The Beatles-led British Invasion than did any Beach Boy or Byrd. And what a breakthrough it was. A Breathtaking Guy (Billboard Number 75) and Run, Run, Run (93) seemed to indicate an act remaining on the fringes of Berry Gordy’s label, but between those minor hits the rampaging When The Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes (23) suggested otherwise. And so it transpired, as the title track, Baby Love and Come See About Me all sped to Number 1 between June and October 1964.

Side one of the old vinyl release dripped with Holland-Dozier-Holland hits plus Smokey Robinson’s Long Gone Lover, while side two is scarcely less captivating, as the Motown sound quickly distils. But there are echoes of a more traditional girl group sound, while the H-D-H songs and production do not yet focus entirely on Ross to the exclusion of Mary, Flo and all the replacement Flos to follow. At this time, Motown also set in motion the nefarious practice of whacking out albums at a preposterous rate, ostensibly to broaden the group’s appeal. Hence this LP’s August ’64 release was followed in sharp succession by A Little Bit Of Liverpool, Sings Country, Western & Pop, We Remember Sam Cooke, At The Copa and Merry Christmas, all by the end of 1965, none evincing anything which could be mistaken for due care and attention. In that time, only More Hits was a peach. The strategy smacked of (a) making hay while the sun shone, and (b) getting the girls into supper clubs pronto. And, bearing in mind the ugly reality of touring in the ’60s, who, really, can blame them?

More like the bare-bones acoustic folk he recorded for K Records (see 1994’s scratchy One Foot In The Grave) than Odelay’s post-modern scramble, Beck’s fifth album was originally intended for US indie Bong Load, for whom perhaps it was more suited. But following the whiff of success Geffen decided to release it themselves in 1998, with the proviso that it wasn’t intended as a follow-up to Odelay (that honour was reserved for patchy funk of Midnite Vultures). Mutations was just, you know, for kids. Whatever. Produced by the decidedly non-indie Nigel Godrich, this is a rich, spooky roots record that showcases the folk singer in Beck, the hushed-voiced, poetry reading hipster who can make a chorus of “la-la, la, la’s” (Lazy Flies) sound as plausible as the arch, urbanite brat of Devil’s Haircut. Unlike his lo-fi recordings, though, Mutations is immaculately constructed and deceptively rich in detail, a hint of psychedelia permeating throughout. Nobody’s Fault But My Own is a shame-faced confessional blues, subtly psyched-out with sitar and tabla under haunting strings, while the expressive Tropicalia is Beck’s lovingly-constructed tribute to the musical manifesto of ’60s Brazil. Mutations may not be the groundbreaking Beck album but it’s aged better than the rest combined. If I’m not happily listening to it in another ten years’ time, I’ll be surprised.

After their mammoth double album debut, Stephen Stills’ all-star grouping of West Coast luminaries and session hotshots should have spent the rest of the ’70s as multi-million selling superstars. The Eagles should have met their match. But with already inflated egos now propelled by an endless supply of top grade chemicals and offers of better paid work flying in from elsewhere (not to mention the damage done by Stills’ notorious 72-hour marathon jam sessions), Manassas’s exit was swift. A parting gift was quickly constructed in the form of this lost 10-track collection of electrifying country-blues, rock’n’soul boogie and bluegrass swing, and while Down The Road is often dismissed as the lowly, bastard cousin of its satisfyingly cohesive predecessor, a proper listen and some critical distance proves that couldn’t be further from the truth. For a start, the playing remains masterful throughout. Al Perkins’ banjo on Do You Remember The Americans and Stills’ guitar grooves during Rollin’ My Stone and Lies are highlights, but as one of their country’s finest collection of musicians, Manassas managed to deliver all of this quintessentially American music at their rhythmic, technical and instinctive best.

You can’t pigeonhole Meat Puppets’ sound because each album is a self-contained evolutionary stage. Their self-titled debut is a bunch of sloppily played hardcore with barking drunkard vocals. Follow-up Meat Puppets II is deep-fried, acid-washed honky-tonk, spawning the songs that everyone knows nearly ten years before Kurt Cobain broadcast them to the world during Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged session. After that giddy trip, Up On The Sun is their sparkling hangover in the shade. It’s much poppier for a start; Curt Kirkwood’s voice is horizontally monotone but the music retains II’s country bounce through Derrick Bostrom’s metronomic drums and the Kirkwood brothers’ frenetic guitar-bass interplay. Lyrically, it’s as warped as you’d hope, with songs about animals living in people’s heads (Animal Kingdom), making love to open windows (Creator) and a man with a bucket for a head (Buckethead). Breakneck but never slapdash, it marks the inception of a funky tightness that permeates all the band’s subsequent recordings. And yet, this was the last time they were so unabashedly weird or – dare we say? – so truly unique.

When Bernard Sumner produced Happy Mondays’ single Freaky Dancin’ in 1986, he remarked upon the band’s six ordinary Salford Joes eating a fag-ash sprinkled Chinese takeaway they’d found in a bin. It’s stories like this, not to mention some of the group’s fondness for powerful chemicals, that gave the band the estate-oik frisson that’s sometimes detracted from the true splendour of their music. Thrilling and sordid, Bummed is their brain-scrambling best; it’s funk with the funk extracted, and it oozes out like sap while a unique self-taught guitarist scratches and scrapes as Ryder smirks and foghorns his psycho-logorrhoea like a Lancastrian Captain Beefheart. It’s a claustrophobic world of schizophrenia, intoxication and grimy sex, but however queasily self-evident songs called Fat Lady Wrestlers, Performance and Brain Dead seem, it’s more than just car thieves off their nuts, as when Mad Cyril samples Edward Fox from the film Performance declaring, “I need a bohemian atmosphere” (with perfect druggie logic, Brain Dead’s intro of “You’re rendering that scaffolding dangerous!” is off Gimme Shelter, another film with Mick Jagger in it). As for the album’s oppressive sound, rumour has it that Martin Hannett, the former Joy Division studio visionary whose bad habits were leading him to his own Golgotha of smack and Guinness, was too out of it to properly produce, and instead pushed all the mixing desk faders up to ten with his commodious ale-gut. But Bummed remains double double good. Just beware of the possibly not-safe-for-work inner sleeve image, which succeeded in offending Genesis P Orridge.

When Island Records released Lewis Taylor’s eponymous LP in 1996, the singer and multi-instrumentalist was already a music biz veteran. He had paid dues as a guitarist with the Edgar Broughton Band, and released two albums of trippy psychedelia as Sheriff Jack. The critics lapped up his first album, and likened him to Marvin Gaye, which was fair enough when you heard the soaring, intricately arranged vocals and soulful material. Lewis ploughed a soul/R&B/funk furrow over several further albums, but the public resolutely refused to take the bait, and after a decade he threw in the towel. The Lost Album was recorded in the late ’90s, but only saw release in 2005. No doubt the record company were dumbfounded, because this collection seems like the work of a totally different artist to the soul man of Lewis Taylor. Taylor had decided to turn his hand to creamy, sunkissed AOR pop, evoking Hall & Oates, Shuggie Otis and Todd Rundgren. Stacks of warm harmonies sit snugly atop bright acoustic guitars and sparkling keyboards. The production is open and rich, and Let’s Hope That Nobody Finds Us, the big ballad, is a marvel – so good that one day Brian Wilson might cover it and forget he didn’t write it himself. All of Lewis’s albums are good, and if you look carefully you may see them, languishing forlornly in bargain bins and charity shops. Track them down, spread the word, and force Mr Taylor out of retirement now!

But for the grace of God, The Hold Steady’s Craig Finn might be working in a record shop in his hometown of Minneapolis. It’s not hard to imagine him: bitter, overqualified, black jeans, smoking out the back, silently loathing the customers. Instead, he fronts one of the greatest rock’n’roll bands in the world right now, an exhilarating live act whose third album from 2007 was a perfect distillation of the classic American bar band grit and punk rock brio seen on 2005’s ambitious Separation Sunday, their severely lapsed Catholic concept album. Exultant piano ushers in opener Stuck Between Stations, setting the tone with its poignant invoking of Jack Karouac’s gloomy narrator: “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together”. Those same kids get wasted at the school dance (Massive Nights), win on a horse and get wasted some more (Chips Ahoy!), cry about Jesus (First Night) and engage in brief, ill-advised snogging after overdosing at a festival (Chillout Tent). Its seedy, hormone-raddled stuff and the female characters are infuriatingly negative. But Finn’s verbose narratives are impressive in their honesty. His gift for tapping into the perpetual adolescence that’s the lifeblood of all pop music makes these songs timeless, and the tunes are irresistible. You can’t ask for more. But you’re getting it anyway. New album out next month!

Born William Edward John on 15 November 1937 in Cullendale, Arkansas, raised in Detroit and raised on gospel, Little Willie John was just 14 when he sang with Count Basie. Turning down an offer to tour with Dizzy Gillespie, John cut sides for the Prize and Rama labels, before signing with King Records at age 18. Between 1955 and 1957 his work for King pushed the late-’50s R&B template as far as it would go, his powerful yet sweet gospel-style tenor adding a plaintive high style to the gutbucket genre. John’s sides were hits and found fans in Sam Cooke, James Brown and Al Green. But due to his diminutive height (5’4”) and a taste for Mother Goldstein concord grape wine, John had a fierce temper that failed to dissipate once fame hit. He was a short guy with money making it bit at the music theatres. He started carrying a knife and a gun. But the music carried on getting better. This second release in Ace Records’ John trilogy is the missing link between ’50s R&B and ’60s soul, where tracks like the heartbreakingly beautiful Let Nobody Love You and his beautiful rendition of Conley and Robinson’s Cottage For Sale stand as some of the best examples of soul singing on record, in which all John’s pride, lust, braggadocio and groove is imbued with a profound sense of removed sadness that goes so much deeper than the insecurity of a little guy who wants to be tall. In 1964 John stabbed and killed a man following a show in Seattle. He was sent to Washington State Prison and died there, four years later. The official verdict was heart attack. Some say pneumonia. Others say he was murdered. In 1968 fellow King recording artist James Brown released a tribute album, Thinking of Little Willie John And A Few Nice Things. It breaks your heart.

Everyone has an in-emergency-break-glass bunch of records they reach for when a rare sunny day hoves into view, and Fantasma is one of mine. It exists for those moments you want to be splurge-gunned with big flobs of joy by a crazy man who thinks he’s Brian Wilson, Beck and Matthew Herbert combined, but better, because he is Keigo Oyamada and you are not. Juxtaposing hip DIY hip hop against sublimely distorted garage guitar rock in exciting time signatures, while funny sample fragments, UHF radio interference and imaginary cartoon theme tunes provide baffling punctuation, Fantasma remains a record with as gloriously short an attention span as Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, A True Star and pretensions to Pet Sounds’s breadth. It starts – showing bravery and wit – with manipulated mouth music and someone whistling the first bar of Beethoven’s 5th. Then there’s the pure sunshine pop-chord beauty of New Music Machine and a My Bloody Valentiney song about a glass figurine that looks like The Clash’s Mick Jones. But just when a conventional pop agenda begins to coalesce, a sun-drenched, Pizzicato 5-remix-Sebadoh-with huge drums kind of tune throws a spanner in and a junglist-does-Haydn-on-stylophone vignette finishes the job. Cornelius followed this brainfritzing opus with the beauty and restraint of 2002’s Point, which confused everyone even more, and he’s now perhaps best remembered – if remembered at all – for a Lucozade ad that featured the spurting adrenaline surge of Fantasma’s Count Five Or Six. Come back, Cornelius – the summer is yours if you want it.

It’s August 1975 and Cleveland’s noise-hungry heavies Rocket From The Tombs are about to play the final show of their excruciatingly short existence. In the fourteen months preceding their unwitting farewell at the Viking Saloon, the band went from a simple MC5 covers outfit to a brigade of proto-punk crusaders who, like their Detroit counterparts, would continue to channel the blasting, overdriven wall of chaos and abandon that would prove so influential in the years to come. RFTT made a nasty, mean sound. Although with titles such as Final Solution, Never Gonna Kill Myself Again, Frustration, Sonic Reducer and Search & Destroy, what else would you expect? The barrage does occasionally relent. Amphetamine is a rolling Velvets-esque drone-ballad and the super-charged r&b of Seventeen is more Pretty Things than Ramones, but it remains the full-tilt thrash of Cheetah Chrome’s guitar, Johnny Blitz’s drums and Crocus Behemoth’s vocals that defines RFTT’s deafening sound.

In some ways, the late '60s and early '70s were a lean time for McKinley Morganfield. As the decade wore on and interest in the original bluesmen began to wane, Chess tried all manner of sonic twists to get Waters back onto the charts, such as the incongruous overdubbing on Brass And The Blues (1966), and the messy psychedelic excursions of Electric Mud (1968). Muddy never lost sight of where his true strengths lay, though, and neither did his fans. Live (At Mr. Kelly’s) is an invaluable snapshot of Waters doing what he does best: playing down-home blues with a gritty urban sound, before an adoring Chicago audience. While not as celebrated as his classic ’50s combos, Waters still fronted a formidably talented band (here’s something roughly contemporary). Blow Wind Blow and the bouncing instrumental Mudcat feature some superb juke-joint piano from Pinetop Perkins, while both Paul Oscher and James Cotton light up the evening with their howling, growling harps. Muddy himself sounds more potent and energised than ever, his sweet slides masterfully complemented by Pee Wee Madison and Sammy Lawhorn on guitar. By the end of his raucous and sweaty version of Long Distance Call, it’s patently obvious that the Muddy on Live… was miles from being either an anachronism or a spent force, a fact proven by his exceptional albums with Johnny Winter a few years later. Until his untimely death in 1983, Muddy Waters would show us time and again that he was a stone with a lot more rolling to do.

When MOJO sat down to interview The Fall’s Mark E. Smith last week, Salford’s post-punk hero cited today’s Disc Of The Day as his current listening favourite. As an unwavering advocate of Bo Diddley and his chattering rhythms, it’s easy to see why Smith has been enjoying the sounds of Oklahoma-born Wanda Jackson. She began recording for Decca in 1954 at the age of 17, releasing a clutch of singles with country stalwart Hank Thompson. This 30-track collection covers her late-’50s/early-’60s heyday at Capitol and captures the rowdy, raven-haired rocker in all her boisterous glory. Just like some of her first touring partners – she regularly appeared on the same bill as Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis – Jackson played and sang with a dangerous, raunchy abandon – see the spirited Hard-Headed Woman and the viperous Mean Mean Man for particularly sassy deliveries. A sporadically commercial return to her strict country roots would take her into the ’70s, but these songs represent the original riot girl at her swinging peak.

Manuel Göttsching's Ashra outings have been unfairly overlooked. Perhaps he was used to it, with his previous Ash Ra Tempel incarnation having helped put the burgeoning Krautrock scene on the map without winning the plaudits scored by Can, Neu! and Amon Düül. And when Göttsching ditched most of his musical partners and concentrated on electronic-based music in the latter part of the ’70s he again found himself in the right movement only to find him playing second fiddle to Jean Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, Vangelis and Tangerine Dream. And yet, New Age Of Earth – with its warm sounds and sweeping strings – stands its ground against Oxygene et al. Opener Sunrain’s synth strains melt seamlessly with riffing organ and melodic arpeggios. Ocean Of Tenderness is just that - powered on by a submarinally low bass it envelops the listener like a warm bath. It's not until 22-minute closer Nightdust that Göttsching straps on his guitar and recalls the original Tempel – though so sparing is he with the rock riffage that an amazing tension is maintained throughout the piece.

Göttsching wouldn't repeat these ambient antics on any subsequent albums. He allowed his guitarplay freer rein but couldn't get the balance as right as he did here. New Age may be a much-maligned term these days but back in '76 it was just that – an attempt to make a wholly new music that gave birth to groundbreaking albums. New Age Of Earth may perhaps not get the recognition but very few of Göttsching’s contemporaries could better this effort.

Herman Parker Jr. was born at the heart of the blues in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932. He died tragically young, from a brain tumour in 1971. In between, he produced some of the most soulful blues of the ’50s and ’60s. Mentored by Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf and talent-spotted by Ike Turner, Parker started out as Little Junior who, with The Blue Flames cut the riotous Feelin’ Good and the eerie Mystery Train for Sun Records. Parker’s downhome late-’50s sides for Duke brought him success but when he moved away from hard blues he lost his audience. As a result, most scholars tend to write off Parker’s later, more soulful sound. This is a shame as his final recordings contain some of the most warm-heated sunshine soul of the period. Cratediggers rate this album (alt. titled Outside Man in its Capitol incarnation) because of Sonny Lester’s clear production, and in-the-pocket groove from Jimmy McGriff’s soul-jazz combo and Parker’s three Beatles tracks – Taxman, Tomorrow Never Knows and Lady Madonna – where the singer’s good-hearted character cuts through the clichés, even going so far as to blanche at the meanness of George Harrison’s lyrics on Taxman (“Oh, this is awful!”). Also worth tracking down is Parker’s glorious cover of Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away from the same period; an epic spoken-word reworking of the Willie Nelson country classic that deserves to sit alongside such other soul overhauls of white radio standards as Isaac Hayes’ By The Time I Get To Phoenix and Bobby Womack’s cover of The Carpenters’ Close To You.

From time to time MOJO has a staff “do”. An occasional break from looking at photos of Jerry Dammers’ hats and searching for Gong live albums online to relax, drink and play records. Urge Overkill’s blistering 1993 album is a party perennial. Pogo-ing power pop like Positive Bleeding (straight off the back of SRC’s Up All Night - a Deputy Ed special) or nearly-hit Sister Havana sound fantastic on scratched orange vinyl cranked through speakers far too large for a pub back room. But Urge had their sights set firmly on big time glamour, not sticky carpets and drunken old lags. Led by guitarist and self-anointed “costume mistress” Nash Kato (responsible for their gold lame jumpsuits - the neckline forming the ‘U’, the ‘O’ cut out around the naval) this was the trio’s major label debut and it had no business not being a huge hit. Produced by experienced crossover hit makers The Butcher Brothers, every track is a winner from Tequila Sundae’s stadium-sized distorto riffing to Back On Me’s quietly strummed regret.

Sadly, Urge were somewhat previous in adopting the celebrity lifestyle (Keith Cameron of this parish remembers being driven around Chicago by the band in convertible with a cocktail cabinet in the back). Sales of Saturation were disappointing and although Tarantino’s use of their cover of Girl You’ll Be A Woman Soon in Pulp Fiction the following year gained them the exposure they craved, the band took too long to follow it up with 2005’s patchy Exit The Dragon. Amid rumours of drug craziness and in-house fighting they disbanded (a brief, fluffed reunion not withstanding). If it all happened again today it’s hard to imagine them failing. The hooks, the hair, the audacious use of branding. Does anyone else still have their UO medallion?

The sleeve photo of More Specials was taken in a Travelodge in Leamington Spa. Inside the original vinyl LP was a free poster from the same photoshoot, but while this was crisp and sharp, the sleeve looks like it’s been made deliberately washed out and blurred - was this an indication of how much the group, exhausted by intensive pan-global touring and then expected to record their second album, was fraying? And there was more evidence of turmoil when you listened to it. With Enjoy Yourself and Hey Little Rich Girl, there’s still boots-on skanking on offer, but leader Jerry Dammers had introduced a queasy, paranoid variant of cod-exotic muzak to the mix. Using the pre-set rhythms on his Yamaha home organ, the results achieved a sublime kind of madness; hear the jump cuts between alcoholic horrorshow Stereotype (the Red Army do the bossa nova with a mariachi band), the obscenely jaunty, doorbell-ringing Pearl’s Café and the spy flick anguish of International Jet Set, and it’s clear that however inscrutable his methods, Chairman Jerry knew what he was doing. You can discern a theme of sorts – to the background noise of failed affairs, there is no escape from your imperfect life – but while it seemed they were threatening to end it all, The Specials would last another nine months, ending on the astonishing high of Ghost Town in 1981.

In 1972, Robert Wyatt was living in Venice while friends of his made the film Don’t Look Now. He wrote some songs, completed them after a spine-severing four-storey fall wiped out 1973 – and released them as Rock Bottom on the day he married Alfreda Benge (still his wife, the heavens be praised). These are quiet, precarious songs, made brittle by Wyatt’s strange, clogged falsetto and touched by experimental jazz, Spanish and Near Eastern influences. A piano feels its way, a cranky viola and hot-tempered trumpet interject, enhancing an ambience that is half-lovestruck and half-terrified (and partly narrated by hermetic Scots poet Ivor Cutler). Rock Bottom scores over Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (the more self-consciously surrealistic and conventionally jazz-structured follow-up) in the way Wyatt seems to be inventing the whole idea of music as he goes along. Forced by his paraplegia to quit the drums and turn his broken back on rock’n’roll, that’s almost exactly what he was doing.

“Jazz is the teacher, funk is the preacher!” proclaims James ‘Blood’ Ulmer on his MySpace page. At the age of 66, the guitarist has straddled both camps – first in the ‘60s when, after cutting his teeth in his father’s gospel band, he played with organist John Patton before moving to New York in ’71 to play with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, Larry Young and, most significantly, Ornette Coleman. Striking out on his own in ’77, he released three independent albums before signing to CBS in ’81 where he recorded the thunderous triumvirate of Free Lancing, Black Rock and Odyssey. Of the trio, Black Rock is the most satisfying, a unique blend of free jazz, deep soul and latter day funk-punk that saw Ulmer share stages with everyone from PiL to Coleman. Ulmer’s fiery invective is exemplified by Black Rock’s uproarious title track (think: Band Of Gypsies, The Stooges’ LA Blues and Sonny Sharrock’s playing on Miles’s Jack Johnson), but as a player he is too tasteful to rely merely on bombast. For all the Hendrix-styled guitar avalanche of Open House, the rich soul of Family Affair and the reflective Love Has Two Faces provide counterpoints that showcase Ulmer’s discipline and melodic sensibilities. In recent years, Ulmer has returned to his blues roots in the company of Vernon Reid, one of his staunchest disciples, but Black Rock remains his most sulphurous outing. Criminally, along with Odyssey and Free Lancing, it has yet to be fully reissued on CD other than in a limited Japanese run.

There is an argument to be made that the mercurial Davy Graham has never truly been captured on record. Rather, what has been preserved is merely a slight impression of the man and his playing. Certainly those that crouched at his feet at Les Cousins, Soho’s cellar-based folk Mecca, have claimed that, as the ’60s dawned, Graham’s performances were nothing short of mesmeric. For those of us who missed out on the intoxicating pleasure of seeing him way back then, this groundbreaking 1964 set is the closest we’re likely to come and it remains an arresting, dextrous display. While at times Graham’s well-mannered vocal inflexions can appear a little too Anglican (most specifically on blues covers like Rock Me Baby), his guitar playing has lost none of the intoxicating Eastern quality that so seduced everyone from Bert Jansch to Roy Harper and Jimmy Page. The opening figure of Leavin’ Blues provides proof of that as does the instrumental Maajan (A Taste Of Tangier) which draws on the man’s nomadic excursions. If Folk, Blues And Beyond remains a key work in the career of arguably the most influential British acoustic guitarist of all time, even more significant is his 3/4 EP, released in 1962 – all five tracks from which are included on this CD reissue. Among them is Anji (then titled Angi), the track that introduced the Graham’s DADGAD tuning to his many admirers. Put simply, this tuning eschewed the traditional EADGBE in favour of the aforementioned heavier, Moroccan-influenced string-tightening, opening to a more textured, mystical approach to acoustic music. Anji itself would be covered by Jansch almost immediately, while Jimmy Page would adapt Graham’s She Moved Through The Fair – itself a reworking of a traditional song – into his own instrumental White Summer, first with The Yardbirds and then with Led Zeppelin. Indeed, the addition of these tracks here serves to underline Graham’s remarkable power and impact, adding to the absorbing, eye-opening experience that is Folk, Blues And Beyond.

Martin Carthy’s reputation as the facilitator/cheerleader of the English folk revival sometimes outweighs that of his records. Paul Simon and Bob Dylan both saw him in the early ’60s and went away changed (Bob Dylan’s Dream, from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan is a straight steal from Carthy’s arrangement of Lord Franklin), but there’s more to him than some kind of Britfolk Zelig/Baptist. His debut album’s most transfiguring performance – an exquisite Scarborough Fair – encapsulates his ability to harmonise tradition with innovation (his guitar part alone could reduce Roy Keane to tears), a kind of instinctive taste that’s served him well through later stints in Steeleye Span and more outré fusions like Brass Monkey. The big-booted voice can alarm those who prefer their folk ethereal, but it’s the very earthiness of it that anchors MacColl/Seeger’s Springhill Mine Disaster and fills it with such tangible sorrow and terror. Carthy once told me exactly how and why he loved Dylan’s Blind Willie McTell (“It’s about corruptibility”), showing all the forensic qualities that have made him such an outstanding scholar and interpreter of songs. But in the end it’s his empathy – miraculously bestowed upon dying miners and magician’s apprentice alike – that keeps you coming back to Martin Carthy.

The current poster boy of the folk scene, Seth Lakeman first found recognition in the band Equation, formed in the late ’90s with Cara Dillon, Kathryn Roberts and his brothers Sam and Sean. Released three years after their breakup in 2001, Lakeman’s second solo effort Kitty Jay was the surprise, and some would say token, folk inclusion on the following year’s Mercury Prize shortlist. It was 2006’s Freedom Fields, however, which would provide crossover potential and mainstream success. Drawing again on Devonian legend, it told of stricken ships and sly temptresses, lovers slain by poachers and sweethearts lost to the civil war. Recorded for just a few hundred pounds in his brother’s kitchen, its traditional themes nevertheless came wrapped in a radio-friendly version of folk simplicity. Highlights are the minor hits The White Hare and Lady Of The Sea whilst in King and Country, the story of his own grandfather’s experience of war, Lakeman produced his best work to date. With the release of his follow-up, Poor Man’s Heaven, due in June, Seth Lakeman leads the charge of folk into the mainstream.

A revival needs a revivalist, a preacherman to bring the scattered faithful rallying to a flag. For the burgeoning nu-folk vanguard, Devendra Banhart was that man – a natural enthusiast with charm, ebullience and an infectious preference for letting it all hang out. With restricting cool codes in the bin, out came the freakish folk-rock reference points – Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, Tyrannosaurus Rex – and attendant tricksterish childperson philosophy, all colourfully encapsulated on this tour-de-force of ingenu fingerpicking and bold, lysergic lyricism. Beards gently hold him, wombs feature heavily, Banhart might take his teeth out “and show them a real good time” – it’s kooky in an ooky kind of way, like the trip’s on the cusp of turning bad and within the Sunshine Superman there lurks an inner Skip Spence, all greying lips and extra fingers growing. And yet The Body Breaks’ West Coasty pop-folk pointed a prescient way out of the underground’s wyrdwood, a route he may yet tread in earnest (although 2007’s Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon suggested he’d decided to neither shit nor get off the pot). Wherever he goes next, it will be hard to match Rejoicing...’s air of creative glee, or the rush of optimistic bliss – epitomised by his duet with Vashti Bunyan on the title track – that accompanies Banhart at his best. As the man says, rather winningly: “We’ve known we’ve had a choice; we chose ‘rejoice’…”

Some material on Come Write Me Down, a collection of 1951-1963 folk club recordings by the famous singing Copper family of Sussex, contrast oddly with what the rock canon finds important – few groups of the amplified era letting it happen with songs about General Wolfe, jolly ploughmen or steam powered threshing machines. The incongruities don’t end there; these a capella harmonies involve no showing off, the pub-singing performers (that’s Bob Copper, his father Jim, his uncle John and cousin Ron) preferring an ego-free approach that sees them disappearing, almost, into their timeless stories of work, the seasons, and the meaning of dignity and contentment. Highlights include Ron’s The Honest Labourer, Bob and Ron’s When Spring Comes In, Jim’s Thousands Or More and Bob and Ron’s Spencer The Rover, whose errant rambler is reminded of what’s important by simple bread and water. You don’t need a Masters degree in folk to enjoy it, or even to know the miraculous circumstances of this singing style’s survival through the efforts and memories of one family (the songs were written down by Jim Copper and Bob’s grandfather ‘Brasser’, since you ask, and the Coppers are STILL at it). In 2002 your writer was fortunate enough to meet the late Bob Copper in the 500-year old Black Horse pub in Rottingdean. He was a man who seemed tangibly delighted that these songs are still sung. Just watch out, they might make your heart burst.

New York. Summer 1960. With her guitar in hand, the young Joan Baez escapes the sweltering city heat and enters the penthouse ballroom of the Manhattan Towers Hotel. Over the course of the next four days she will record 19 songs. Weavers’ guitarist Fred Hellerman (far right) will accompany her on six cuts, but it is Baez’s chiming finger-picking and octave-traversing soprano that fill each track with the elegance, purity and power that would soon cement her folk icon status. Baez delivers her versions of songs by The Carter Family and Josh White with a clarity and confidence that belies her 19 years. It would be her take on such lilting ballads as All My Trials, Silver Dagger and Mary Hamilton that would inspire legions of coffeehouse-dwelling beatniks throughout the decade ahead. The clarion calls of Joan Baez even managed to cross the Atlantic, where a teenager from the North East of England, one Eric Victor Burdon, heard the Staten Island-born songstress singing trad-anthem House Of The Rising Sun. Like so many others, the future Animal heard something defiant and magical in her voice. Her march into the ‘60s started here.

Before its reissue on Sanctuary in 2003, Solomon’s Seal was the forgotten Pentangle album. The band’s swan-song, recorded as the folk quintet were splintering, reviews at the time dismissed it as a lacklustre final bow and subsequent assessments tended to concur. But how many actually heard it? The initial vinyl pressing was limited and the tapes were thought lost for years, eventually turning up among a pile of boxes propping up John Renbourn’s harmonium. That it re-emerged in 2003, in the midst of new folk revival, was entirely fitting, as here was a Pentangle album that dispensed with the progressive genre-fiddling of earlier albums in favour of a midnight-clear sound that chimed perfectly with the sounds of Will Oldham, PG Six and the like. A mix of quietly spooked standards and road-weary originals, it’s a forlorn album, certainly; Jacqui McShee’s vocals on The Cherry Tree Carol and Willy O’ Winsbury are heavy with an ancient across-the-ages sadness while tracks like Danny and Bert’s composition No Love Is Sorrow reveal the melancholy, yet still-warm alchemy at the heart of this truly unique outfit.

Just when TV’s great explainer of Mother Earth and all her creatures, David Attenborough, was attempting to give reptiles a better name with a BBC series earlier this year, along came Al Wilson’s The Snake. Produced in 1968 by Soul City label-boss Johnny Rivers, the track was re-released a couple of months ago on this, its original album. The Snake put the cold-blooded slitherer back into its ‘original sin’ skin as the bad guy of Genesis 3, made the more plausible by Wilson’s wry, confiding manner (not unlike Oscar Brown Jr on this track) and his dark, rich vocal tone. The rest of the album offers wider evidence of that sophisticated singing style, from an expansive version of Fred Neil’s title track to a wistful and contemplative reading of Jim Webb’s Do What You Gotta Do. His take on This Guy’s In Love With You easily matches the hit version, but hey, Herb Alpert never did much more than speak in tune. Al Wilson went on to even greater commercial success in the early ’70s with Show And Tell, a US Number 1, and La La Peace Song, which brought him to the UK. But after 1979’s Count The Days he was mostly restricted to working the clubs and cabaret in the USA. Until, that is, a Liverpool firm who manufacture a drink called Lambrini – Pub Landlord Al Murray might call it “something fruit-based for the ladies”, well that’s what it looks like – helped Wilson’s brand of ’60s smooth soul get one more round in.

By 1973, piano-whiz Nicky Hopkins had played on some of British rock’s greatest recordings. You can hear his wickedly instinctive playing on such towering classics as The Beatles’ Revolution, The Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon and The Who’s Anyway Anyhow Anywhere, not to mention umpteen tracks by Jeff Beck, Donovan and, most notably, The Rolling Stones – he’s all over Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street. By all accounts a very insular, meditative character – he could often be found reading a comic in between takes – Hopkins’ ice cool personality colours The Tin Man...’s most potent moments. The Todd Rundgren-esque Waiting For The Band and the whimsical The Dreamer perfectly suit his humble, measured vocals, both songs purposefully led by his nimble-fingered piano work. As the most sought-after session player of the previous decade, it’s unsurprising that, with the tables turned, Hopkins managed to enlist the help of some of his most talented employers. So witness key contributions from Mick Taylor, Bobby Keys, Klaus Voorman, Chris Spedding, Jerry Williams and the little-known George O’Hara (aka George Harrison). Some of the best bands in the world wanted Nicky Hopkins to play on their records. Look no further than today’s Disc Of The Day for another in a long line of reasons why.

Forever Changes purists look away now. The line-up that Arthur Lee put together in 1968 after disbanding the original band in a fit of pique when their orchestral masterpiece failed to sell in the US, are not an inferior version of Love. And so productive were the new band’s studio sessions for 1969’s Four Sail (Love’s final album for Elektra) that they also gleaned the double LP Out There, released by new label Blue Thumb just three months later. Doggone’s canine subject matter and epic drum solo may have dated, but the romantic Willow Willow is ravishing, while the closing Gather ‘Round features an Arthur lyric as unfathomable and deceptively beautiful as Andmoreagain’s one about the snot caked against his pants. The live set from 1970 shows the new line-up tackle all five albums with aplomb (an achingly tragic Signed DC especially). Clearly at home to the smog and dissolute London vibe, Love stayed in the UK to record the uncharacteristically good-natured False Start, featuring a certain Jimi Hendrix on explosive opener The Everlasting First. But the good vibes were short lived and Love broke up a few weeks after False Start came out. Shame!

For Steve Mason, there was ruin and bafflement before and after his one long-player as King Biscuit Time. Before, because his previous group The Beta Band had abandoned their brave cosmic experimentation due to debt and being skint, and split in 2004. Then, just as Black Gold was ready for release, Mason cancelled a tour, said he was resigning from music and disappeared. Listen to the psychedelic, techno-rustic sounds of Black Gold though, and you can excuse such potty behaviour. With surface restraint but much activity beneath, it’s a mesmeric, Beta Band-esque blend of beats clapped out on woodblocks, electronic noise, guitars and dub melodica, with half-spoken, half-sung lyrics that continually wonder where love and companionship have gone. The black dog is constantly gnawing - “How do you find your heart when you feel no love?” wonders Kwangchow, disconnectedly, while the Stone Roses-y All Over You’s chorus of “loneliness… sadness… joyless… lifeless” self-diagnoses depression. But still it glows with uncanny inner light. Mason tells his narratives of quasi-mystic heightened awareness – he variously touches on the universe, the speed of light and standing at the hand of God – as if they’re in danger of being lost (“I feel that if I slip and fall then you’ll forget about all these things,” goes Paperhead, a song that curiously echoes Gerry Rafferty’s hit tune Baker Street). Incidentally, Mason’s retirement wasn’t to last, and he’s now fit and working again making twisty, Hot Chip-leaning electro as Black Affair.

There is a reason the 'Philosopher Of Soul' replaced Sam Cooke when that genius left the Soul Stirrers for chart-topping secular success. Taylor's voice, long-honed by his church choir and gospel-group days, could easily melt butter and female hearts from across a crowded dance floor, as his first gem of an LP for Stax clearly shows. While it only produced a couple of medium-sized hits (the infectious Just The One (I've Been Looking For), and the sad cuckold's tale I Had A Dream), the rest of the album holds a bevy of delights. As expected, the Stax house band of Booker T & The MG’s are magnificent, adding power and sultry grace to tracks like Ain't That Loving You (For More Reasons Than One) and the gritty Where Can A Man Go From Here. Unlikely cover versions of Merle Travis' 16 Tons and Herbie Hancock's Watermelon Man, as well as the Arlen and Mercer standard Blues In The Night, are given the full Stax treatment and come out as rollicking, masterful slices of ’60s soul. There are also some gorgeous Isaac Hayes and David Porter originals, in particular the rousing Toe Hold, and the deliciously seductive Little Bluebird. While greater success would come later, with his Stax R&B hit Who's Making Love? and the 1976 multi-Platinum smash Disco Lady, Wanted... boasts an exuberance and earthy sensuality that will appeal to all Soul and Blues lovers.

A raggedy, throwback indie shambles in the shiny dawn of Britpop, Animals That Swim were the wrong band at the wrong time; they even had a heartbreaking song about a bitter, Elvis-era rock failure (Roy) that implied they had already foreseen and embraced their fate. Nothing else about this Outer London 5-piece suggested pretensions or expectations, certainly not the shruggy strums and melancholy trumpets of Workshy, while drummer/writer Hank Starrs’ half-spoken shaggy-dog songs would divine the magical in the everyday – turning streetside car windshield debris into the pieces of a chandelier – only to realise it wasn’t magical at all, just the same old shit, usually once the booze wore off (typical anticlimax: “well she died, of course”). Starrs’ actorly conviction makes every damn second believable and there are moments – the materialisation of alkies’ messiah King Beer in the song of that name or the technicolour chorus of Madame Yevonde – when melody bursts through the half-drawn curtains of Starrs’ world and the real and unreal dance with abandon. Starrs (real surname: Barker) now makes films, including a 2006 doc about Third Man director Carol Reed – fitting work for a born storyteller – but he’s not forgotten. Last year, Art Brut had him lay down a vintage monologue on their 2007 single, Direct Hit.

Rolling Stone dubbed Burn “a disappointing effort” on its release in early ’74. In the wake of the four stratospheric, genre-defining albums that preceded it (In Rock, Fireball, Machine Head, Who Do We Think We Are?), it’s easy to see why. Burn, of course, doesn’t contain a Speed King, Highway Star or Black Night. Furthermore, the departure of leather-lunged frontman Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover (respectively replaced by then-unknown ex-boutique attendant from Redcar, David Coverdale, and ex-Trapeze leader Glenn Hughes) appeared to herald the beginning of the end for Purple. Thirty four years on, however, Burn appears both brave and influential - not least of all due to the newcomers’ decision to inject a heavy duty dose of funk into Purple’s initial hard rock sound. Stevie Wonder fanatic Hughes is the major influence in that respect, sharing soulful-and-soaring co-vocals with the youthful Coverdale on Lay Down Stay Down, the furiously percussive You Fool No One, and the gloriously riff-heavy title track. Then comes Mistreated – Purple’s first bona fide power ballad. Penned by mercurial guitarist Ritchie Blackmore and Coverdale, both would resurrect the track as they launched their post-Purple careers in Rainbow and Whitesnake respectively, acknowledging the track’s crowd-pleasing, lighters-aloft appeal. This incarnation of the band would last for one more album (the patchy Stormbringer), and while Burn is unlikely to be rehabilitated by those seeking to add a veneer of hipster cool to ‘70s hard rock, it is quite possibly Purple’s last truly great album.

Having spent over a decade at the top of the British rock tree, Pete Townshend and Ronnie Lane entered Olympic Studios at the tail end of 1976 in a funny old place. The Who had just completed what would prove their final tour with Keith Moon, while Ronnie Lane’s agrarian ensemble Slim Chance had disbanded and a botched reunion with the Small Faces had left him in significant financial trouble. Still, there’s nothing quite like 15 years of friendship and a series of great songs to plant one’s feet firmly back on the ground – even if you have had a few. Despite tales of the pair’s drunken bickering and the inclusion of only one co-written track, Rough Mix exudes a good-time feel. With Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts and John Entwistle in attendance, Townshend’s straight down-the-line rock efforts – My Baby Gives It Away; Keep Me Turning – are marked by an unabashed pleasure in the playing. Lane, meanwhile, is on characteristically ramshackle form, with the resonator guitars and accordions pushed out front for Annie and April Fool – two of his best bucolic ballads. Tragically, he would be diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis as the sessions came to a close, but open the sleeve inlay and take look at the two people sitting on the tree stump and you’ll see only good cheer and grinning friends.

A Liverpool-Newcastle-Dorset trio with pop pasts in Rory Storm & The Hurricanes and The Tornados, The Peddlers spent the ’60s making ace, acceptable-to-grandma LPs of what they called “pop-art-jazz” – weirdly arranged showbiz cover versions with big-voiced organist Roy Phillips yodelling fruitily as crack drummer Trevor Morais and bassist Tab Martin kept swinging. Guests on the TV shows of Les Dawson and Roger Whittaker, the band’s records were formerly carboot sale staples, except for one - Suite London. With songs written by Phillips and strings provided by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, this collection themed around a day in London was a startling departure. The jaunty trio jazz they were hitherto known for is still here in places, but for the most part this lovelorn, mysterious song cycle, with songs linked by fractured instrumentals like In Juxtaposition, is a feast of cryptic introspection and velvet despair. This existentialism-at-the-Batley-Variety-Club is particularly manifest in the two parts of A Year And A Day; in the first Phillip sits alone with his Fender Rhodes piano, soulfully counting down the moments to his own death, while the second, subtitled (Metamorphosis), ups the weirdness ante with the kind of modern classical atonality later heard on Scott Walker’s Climate Of Hunter LP in 1984. Suitably, this was the last Peddlers album made by the original line-up.

Proving that his vision reaches far beyond the restrained, intimate folk we’ve come to expect from an Iron & Wine album, Sam Beam’s third full-length recording brings to bear the experimental bent first glimpsed on the 2005 EP, Woman King. No longer an insular singer-songwriter, Beam’s palette (and band) has expanded to embrace tablas, sitar, slide guitar, pedal steel (courtesy of Lambchop’s Paul Neihaus - a clue to his inspiration?) Afro-pop’s hypnotic, rolling guitars and even dub reggae’s shimmering distortion on the discomforting title track. Beam’s velvet voice draws the listener into his opaque, southern gothic tales where jealous sisters sing on his grave, and a wife’s finger never wanted a ring. As we like to say around these parts, it’s brave and interesting, but also quite brilliant. Apparently he’s now working on a prog rock opera with Tim Rutili from Califone. On this evidence, that’s something to look forward to.

Glen Campbell is perhaps the best-known interpreter of the songs of Jimmy Webb, but this Webb-produced album has Art essaying some very fine versions of nuggets from the Webb songbook. Where Campbell is manly, square jawed and brooding, Art is light, keening and pure. His version of You Might As Well Smile (called Shine It On Me here) is good enough to stand toe to toe with Glen’s, which is saying something indeed, and his take on Crying In My Sleep is exemplary. Sure, Art doesn’t have the grittiest voice in the world, but the airy clarity of his tone suits the twisting beauty of Webb’s songs perfectly on this album. The Chieftans conjure up misty Celtic beauty on She Moves Through The Fair, and on Wonderful World Paul Simon and James Taylor provide a bed of yummy harmonies for Art to glide over. Scared off by Art’s overused black waistcoat/white shirt combo, the receding afro, or memories of Bright Eyes? You needn’t be. This is a magnificent LP, where you will find some of the most exquisite and timeless versions of some of the most beautiful songs ever written.

Like the life-long friend who’s invited home in a mood of high celebration, only to grope your other half and vomit into the plant pot, Primal Scream have an uncanny knack of arsing things up at exactly the point where you love them most. So, after inviting in My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields and proper drummer Darrin Mooney into the fold and giving vent to the manic insect squall of digital-black brain-noise that was 2000’s XTRMNTR, the never-consistent Scream followed up with the double merely-OK of 2002’s Evil Heat and 2006’s sonic soul yawn, Riot City Blues. However, sandwiched in-between those two chronic misfires was this live wonder. If the Scream have always sat oddly between the weedy and world-shattering, with Bobby Gillespie’s undernourished exhortations always in need of a vitamin shot and a leg-up, then Live In Japan could be hailed as the band’s quintessential recording. Sonically, the mix is locked in a mysterious midpoint between the sonic overload of Iggy’s remastered Raw Power and the annoying tin buzz of a mosquito trapped in a bread bin, while Boaby’s scrawny soul ministrations are ’roided up to something approaching iron giant scale thanks to the brute deep-space mach-wave exoskeleton of Shields, Mani, Mooney et al. It’s fast, sweaty, driving, deep and relentless and, fittingly, the band kinda run out of steam about two-thirds of the way in, finally cross the finishing line like little Dorando Pietri: cough, splutter, wheeze. How very Scream, but how very wonderful.

The title refers to an experiment Evan Dando was asked to perform for a Second Grade “science” project: fill a bath, select three objects, observe which sank and which didn’t. Dando chose a toy racing car, a piece of cloth and a button. They all sank. Always prepared to let the tiny detail tell the big story, it’s a very Dando metaphor. Spells in rehab had dominated his life since the 1993 release of Come On Feel The Lemonheads and car button cloth is full of pointers to his period of submersion, from the confessional frenzy of Something Missing to the superficially blithe, deeply morbid Hospital, full of “green, green leaves falling from the trees”. Lending succour are a mean band driven brutishly by Dinosaur drummer Murph, and co-songwriters including Epic Soundtracks, Smudge’s Tom Morgan and ex-Vaseline Eugene Kelly – co-composer of If I Could Talk I’d Tell You, a winsome ditty based on Dando’s Zoloft-deadened rehab routine. The group make an alcoholic racket, perfunctorily engineered and perfectly suited to the irascible, self-dissatisfied mood set by Dando, and while there is throwaway material here, it’s overwhelmed by the whole: as magnetically honest a display of mental spring-cleaning as you could wish for.

It’s finally happened. This month a new Robert Pollard album arrived before I’d had a chance to listen to the last one. For GBV fans, keeping up with Pollard’s output has always been something of an endurance test. Even the dedicated struggled to contend with at least 21 GBV albums between 1986 and 2004, plus countless solo albums, side projects, pseudonyms and collaborations. And since the band broke up Pollard’s pace has hardly faltered. But when it all gets