I tell you, things aren't quite the same...

Sitting in front of the computer on Sunday night, aimlessly clicking around on social media, notification came via Rolling Stone of the death of Lou Reed. Reaction was predominantly shock, and a refusal to accept the news, as it was then unconfirmed by other news agencies or sources close to Reed himself. This duly arrived within an hour or so, and my Twitter feed was converted into a streaming eulogy in tribute to a true original the like of which we are unlikely to see again.




Adrian or I borrowed a Velvets LP from the library, I can't remember which one, it might have been White Light White Heat. It was very much a gateway album to noisier territory than the prog and classic rock and NWOBHM stuff we were at that time obsessed with. From the Velvets you went into the Stooges, the MC5, Bowie, all the US pre-punk and CBGB acts, and then home to more contemporary stuff like JAMC, Smiths and Primal Scream. Adrian embraced all this earlier than me; I took a detour via the Doors and spent a year or so listening almost exclusively to old blues records before starting to buy up the Velvets and enjoying lyrics about scoring drugs, incomprehensible S&M type encounters, and strung out love songs like Pale Blue Eyes.

Ady reckons that after a while he had listened so exhaustively to the Velvet Underground that he had absorbed them into his bloodstream, his DNA, and there was no need to actually play the records again...Of course, what happens when an artist dies, everyone starts listening to the old stuff again - on Sunday night I played Sister Ray twice in a row, and thrilled at the relentless repetitious noise, at the same time recognising again how many bands took that template and ran with it for decades afterwards.

My favourite Lou Reed record is a toss up between the third Velvets album and the collaboration with John Cale in tribute to Andy Warhol, Songs For Drella. Listening to Transformer this evening, it sounds like a pop album rather than a decadent paean to subversive sex, heroin, and horsing around with David Bowie.  

Sweet Jane is another favourite, I just love the way he sings 'suitcase in my heeeeand'.

His delivery (I hesitate to use the word 'singing') is great on this track, it lifts a simply chorded song into something really exciting and special:

Bless The Weather

I'm still not sure how it happened but yesterday morning I was able to download, via Google Play, the new John Martyn box set, The Island Years - for £1.27. That's 259 tracks across 17 CDs, something of a bargain. I noticed a couple of tweets suggesting that Play.com, Google Play and a couple of other download retailers were offering the box set, which is on Amazon at over £150, for less than the price of a pint. 

I assumed that it was one of those periodic listing errors by the website which would prove to be null and void in the event, but no, all tracks duly arrived and I'm now listening to Bless The Weather, one of many John Martyn albums I've never heard. I've previously stuck to what I assumed was pretty safe territory with him - Solid Air, One World, and Live At Leeds, that's it. 



By the time I got to see John Martyn live, it was 2007 and he'd had his legs amputated and cut a slightly befuddled figure, clearly seeking direction from bandmates about set list etc, but when he sat and played he was mesmerising. Here's a link to the first part of the BBC documentary from a few years ago, which was interesting enough but gave little clue about the real person. 

And we dance to the music, and we dance

At a book signing last year I asked James Fearnley if as a writer in The Pogues he felt intimidated by Shane MacGowan. His memoir Here Comes Everyone is a vivid retelling of life with the Pogues and their bibulous singer and principal songwriter. Whether Phil Chevron felt a similar burden from comparison with MacGowan I don't know, but after recording Thousands Are Sailing I hope he felt the equal of his more celebrated bandmate.

Seeing the Pogues live half a dozen times in the last 25 years, 'Thousands' was always special, even when it was MacGowan, lyric sheet in hand, who was slurring the lyrics if Chevron was too ill to appear. A yearning tribute to the Irish diaspora and their new lives in America, the song is moving but unsentimental, especially when MacGowan was extemporising the lyrics: 'In Brendan Behan's footsteps, I spewed up and down the street'.

So I'm sad to hear of Phil Chevron's death today, and I'm playing If I Should Fall From Grace With God, remembering the gigs and the beery Brixton chorus, Thousands Are Sailing:

Talking With The Taxman About Hookworms

I spent a happy hour, on and off, listening to a Radio 4 podcast this morning. The series looks at classic albums and the artists who made them, usually from a distance of 15 - 20 years. 

I bought Talking With The Taxman About Poetry when it came out, from a shop in Newark long gone, called Inner Sleeve. It was a few weeks before I left for university and I was - still am - a big fan of Bragg. So listening to the man reminisce about the circumstances, political and personal, around the recording of this album was delightful to me. 

I felt the emotional intensity of Levi Stubbs Tears in a way which I don't remember when I first heard it. For me it was always the relationship songs which hit hardest with Bragg, which isn't to overlook the likes of To Have And To Have Not or Between The Wars. The Saturday Boy, The Warmest Room, and Greetings To The New Brunette are all terrific pop songs from an artist often brushed over as a one-note political balladeer.

So I'm at home with a cup of tea - listening to the album for the first time right through for years, and fretting again about whether it's worth scouring the new releases pages of the heritage rock mags and the social media feeds of all manner of record labels, blogs, review sites in search of a release half as diverting as the aforementioned Bragg album, or Hatful Of Hollow, or Maxinequaye, or Bandwagonesque or any number of other records which now seem very long in the tooth but which repay any number of repeated listens. I am sceptical that the latest neo-psych CD currently being drooled over online will be played more than once or twice. Trust me, I've had a desultory flick through Fuzz, by Fuzz, and it was very underwhelming.

Can it be anything else? Coming as it does many decades after those unsurpassable early Sabbath albums, as well as all the other cooler than cool touchstones that the bloggers like to froth about - Blue Cheer, in this instance. If you can only talk about a record in reference to other records, well, that's a bit of a dead end isn't it? It's hard not to sound churlish here; I've spent a good part of this year listening to the kind of psych rock which is currently, and briefly, one assumes, in vogue - the undisputed highlight being the Hookworms album. At least they impart a fresh intensity to the genre, they are not stoned noodlers, there are no side-long jams or recycled fuzzy riffs disinterred from the early 1970s (although I detect a fondness for Hawkwind, which the band denies). Instead they lock into a ferocious punch and groove on the album opener Away/Towards - genuinely, I think the best album opening track I've heard for years - yet they have a lightness and imagination sufficient to carry off slower numbers like In Our Time.

Answering my own question, yes there are new albums being released which are absorbing, exciting and rewarding, the Hookworms debut 'Pearl Mystic' being an example. My problem is sifting them out from other far more mediocre fare which receives breathless plaudits from reviewers who are either still in short trousers or who have difficulty distinguishing between music which is genuinely diverting and that which is serviceable but pedestrian.

Here's Leeds' finest filmed in their studio:

if charlie parker was a gunslinger,there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats: Ray Harryhausen dies at 92

if charlie parker was a gunslinger,there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats: Ray Harryhausen dies at 92: Stop motion master Ray Harryhausen stares down one of his creations. I think I speak for all the Gunslingers when I say there goes a big ...