PLUMMET AIRLINES: Silver Shirt

An end coming before a beginning. A hoarse 1976 voice which may yet count as the most exhausted voice in pop; beginning on his own ("Well I never realised that you came down all the way from Mars in your shining ships") - but this is a solemn trudge of a song towards a preordained end ("You can look into my eyes and really see the pain"). The music trundles with a nearly obtuse dignity before the voices unify in their own imminent disintegration - "The light is fading - we're all waiting - goodbye rock and roll." A generation ahead of Suede, it still sounds slightly ahead of them: "It's own-up time," cries the harrowing croak of singer Harry Stephenson, "We can't pretend there's too many eyes to see." A curious mirror image of that other misfit of a Stiff single from the same period (and there were so many misfits in their catalogue, that being the central point), "One Chord Wonders" by the Adverts; as a group in some gold-forsaken pub on the wrongest and coldest night of the week, they are struggling to justify both themselves and the ultimate value of music. "Silver Shirt" is less hesitatingly cynical about any notion of a future as "American Pie," though then again: "We can't invent no false laments for those against the grain."

It is as dignified as 1976 pub rock could get, but Stephenson's voice wavers and protests as threateningly as Joe Strummer's - his wave-crushing sob of "Oh, oh!" at 1.29 - his clinging extensions of the words "time" and "care" (as in "And if you really care/Someday we might get there" - so they do admit to a future).

Then Stephenson hisses "stay quiet;" the music suddenly vanishes as voices alone carry the notion of the light fading and then reluctantly fades in again, only to trample away into a steadily longer and sorrier distance, knowing that for some who choose to engage in and communicate with music, there doesn't always come a peak. Plummet Airlines were from Nottingham and this was their quietest of white flags waved against the oncoming deluge of 1976, some of which, including the Damned and Costello, was being recorded around them, in the same studio; they could never subscribe to punk and knew that their retreat was also to prove their one moment...but the belief, and above all Stephenson's disconcerting discordance, makes one wonder just how many masks a John the Baptist could assume.

CAT POWER: Woman Left Lonely

There seems to be developing a feeling that Cat Power isn't what she was, as though she weren't permitted to be anyone else, or worse, getting too big for her externally fitted boots. One particularly idiotic reviewer of her recent performance at the Shepherd's Bush Empire commented, after musing on the destructive capacities of depression, that: "in stamping out the weak parts of herself, (Chan) Marshall has also destroyed everything that was aching and haunting and beautiful in her voice." In other words, stay in the station we've allotted for you, lady; you're not allowed to get happy or confident and betray our self-pleasing fantasy of nihilism. The comment engenders even more depression in the constant reader when one realises that it was written by a woman.

Properly attentive listening to Jukebox tells a different, more obviously bifurcated story. This is her second interpretative album which balances hard-won new confidence with perhaps as much dread and emptiness as she has thus far expressed on record. It was recorded as live, in real time with a working band, and the ripples of aorta and pulsations of hairs and veins are immediately discernible in Gregg Foreman's throbbing, delayed reaction keyboards, Judah Bauer's guitar which can track as closely as the keenest of timber wolves (see Marshall's necessarily more tragic reading of Hank Williams' "Ramblin' (Wo)Man" with its no going back subtext) and cry as imposingly as any hurricane-inducing cloud (his vast Doric arches of sustenato on "Lost Someone") and Jim White's always elegant and relevant drums. Her downcasting of "New York, New York" induces thoughts not of hope, but of the arms held out, ready to strangle Ray Charles upon his return to Georgia; yet her luxuriously hissed "Don't Explain" threatens with cushions of steel.

Elsewhere, though, she sounds now capable of happiness; her cheerfully defiant version of Dylan's "I Believe In You" (I hope that in the future she essays Mark Hollis' "I Believe In You") segues into her own "Song For Bobby," one of the tenderest songs she has ever performed and one of the finest descriptions of the progression from childhood fan to peer admiration to actual, palpable love I've heard in music for some time, with admirably patient accompaniment. Although her upgrade of her own "Metal Heart" tries a little too hard to underline that which, in its original Moon Pix version, required no underlining, "Silver Stallion" is suitably sensuous and "Aretha Play One For Me" leaves the door slightly ajar to let in tomorrow.

However, she is often beyond despondency as the record reaches its close; the closing duo of Joni's "Blue" and Cave's "Breathless" is nearly too painful to digest with the former's post-Wyatt deathly slow two-chord organ seesaw oscillation (with organ eventually weeping into piano) and the latter nearly whispering its tears into the canyon of irreversible decline - those post-Julie Driscoll bends, those (deceptively) post-Beth Gibbons hoarse confidence inlets in her voice are always more effective the quieter the music gets.

My pick, though, is her "Woman Left Lonely," penned by Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham and best known in Janis Joplin's reading; rather than excoriate herself with yells and hollers, she spells out her desertion simply, plainly and (yet) invitingly, and is aided by the unsullying and steadfast accompaniment, including Oldham himself on the Hammond and deadpan vocal harmonies, gently pushing her expression(ism) onwards but leaving the listener with the feeling that once again she'll get through this; there is gentleness to balance the sudden forthright thrust, and finally Chan Marshall gets close enough to the mirror to see her own face, cautiously smiling back.

BILLY FURY: Run To My Loving Arms

This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Billy Fury’s passing; a quarter of a century since his prematurely weary heart finally gave out, barely into his forties and on the verge of what might have been an exceptionally remarkable comeback. The danger of over-romanticising is already abundantly clear, but what has remained markedly less clear is the fact that Fury is the most important singer in the history of post-war British pop music – and if I were to extend the field to include pre-war singers, Al Bowlly might be his only rival.

The reasons for this are fairly simple to outline; Fury was a singer with the rare ability to convey both sides of his personality at the same time – he could be simultaneously exuberant and threatening, at one space reassuring and alienating, and whichever side of him was dominant, the other side never quite crept out of vision – and even though he was always at the service of whatever song he was given to sing, he is never either comfortably mainstream or extravagantly out of bounds; he never lets you forget that you are listening to and watching him, however many pullover masks he has to don.

As far as rock and roll is concerned, Fury was also the first British rocker really to mean it; while Larry Parnes’ self-assembled gallery of shy, distracted teenagers is finally not that far removed in theory or practice from Simon Cowell’s ring-road-mastery, Fury immediately penetrated beyond dreams of cheerful gayness. His debut single was self-penned - an extreme rarity in fifties Britpop – and all of his package tour colleagues, from Vince Eager to Jimmy Tarbuck, were taken aback by the mere presence of a guitar, let alone his writing of songs on it. There was the early Cliff, of course, but he was quick to exchange hip swivels for Lionel Bart singalongs as soon as his chart positions diminished, and his permanence is more the result of astute reading of the demographic weather; he has changed slowly and imperceptively but always decisively and is sufficiently astute to lob out the odd curveball – a “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” a “Some People,” a “What Car?” – in order to demonstrate that he’s still in the loop.

And the rock and roll, finally, never left Fury; The Sound Of Fury deserves its reputation as the first recognisable British rock album, and even when charting with tremulous, hugely orchestrated ballads later in the sixties he was still cutting sensuous, elongated readings of things like Jimmy Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me To Do?” – which brings me to Fury’s decisive X factor; he was the first British pop singer in the rock and roll era to introduce sex into our bloodstream. Listen to his highly sated sighs of ecstasy punctuating the wide open spaces of 1960’s “Wondrous Place” or, most sublimely, the irreducible and unwriteable plea-turning-to-growl on 1963’s “Like I’ve Never Been Gone,” whence he turns the “you” of his anxious “guilty for loving you” into a multisyllabic but wordless descent from humility to seduction. Was any other British singer of the period capable of such emotional or spiritual/carnal shifts – the preppy politesse of sundry Bobbys subverted into real blood and fluid? It’s little wonder that the Silver Beatles rushed to apply for the job of Fury’s backing band (though finally declined after Fury’s insistence that they get rid of duff bass player Stuart Sutcliffe) and that others included the nascent Blue Flames (with another Parnes protégé, Georgie Fame, on keyboards) and the Tornados.

Fury was quick to rise above his contemporaries, and the baffling absence of any number one singles in his chart record (though his energisation of “Halfway To Paradise” topped the NME lists) suggests a silent rebuke for not fully playing the game, for not indulging in cuddly hiccups like Adam Faith (whose chirpy run of hits always seemed to me like a test run for the more fulfilling careers of actor and City financier, not to mention an important training ground for his arranger John Barry) or fitting all sizes like Cliff effortlessly managed. Fury seemed too real for this all-round circus of wannabe family entertainment (though conversely this was also the age when getting married could kill your career stone dead, as happened with Marty Wilde – the attendant irony of his family helping to make him one of the least expected architects of New Pop a generation later need scarcely be underlined). The strangely familiar quiff and gold lamé jacket he sports in the film Play It Cool of course spell 1982 in retrospect – hello, Martin Fry – but also induces no small regret that Fury didn’t have a greater say over where his career was going; unhappy appearances in panto and TV variety shows confirmed a world which simply was not his, and certainly (to paraphrase the late Richard Cook) if Fury had been twenty years younger and starting up in the age of New Pop he would have been a figure equivalent to a Fry or a Weller or an O’Dowd, an icon of his own making (to think of what he might have accomplished with, say, Trevor Horn had he survived longer is heartbreaking to contemplate).

That having been said, he became a sturdily noble but quietly subversive balladeer, and his inescapable reality and appeal saw him well through the Beat Boom; he was still racking up hits as late as 1966 and still experimenting – his single “Don’t Let A Little Pride (Stand In Your Way)” from that year remarkably finds him absorbing ska and bluebeat. But finally the times overtook him; he switched from Decca to EMI to release an extraordinary sequence of singles, many of which absorbed psychedelia, and it remains a matter of regret that these have still not been satisfactorily compiled.

None of them made the charts, however, and his health was also beginning to suffer; several childhood attacks of rheumatic fever had rendered his heart extremely vulnerable and he was certainly more than aware of his potentially limited lifespan. This made his unexpected re-emergence as the fictitious Stormy Tempest (though many say based on real-life Merseybeat foot soldier Rory Storm) in 1973’s film That’ll Be The Day all the more astonishing; he does not appear for long, but every appearance is like a butterfly exploding into a colossus – he is so unquestionably real that he nearly embarrasses the rest of the film into exposure as a fancy dress party (and it is a superb film with fine and truthful performances by everyone from David Essex to ex-Rory Storm and the Hurricanes sideman Ringo Starr).

The opportunity for him to prosper again was very clearly marked. But he didn’t, or couldn’t, follow it through; there were further heart scares and surgery and he eventually settled for a quiet life in the country, breeding horses and sheep and becoming active on the conservation front. However, in 1981 there came the real chance of a musical comeback; Stuart Colman, producer and mastermind behind the belated success of Shakin’ Stevens, persuaded him back into the studio, and in 1982 his name began to reappear in the lower regions of the charts. He did a few well-received concerts, participated in the Channel 4 nostalgia series Unforgettable (again with such natural power, even in diminished health) – but it finally proved too much and suddenly he was gone, the same age as Elvis.

“Run To My Loving Arms” was one of the melodramatic ballads in which Fury tended to specialise towards the end of his initial chart run; it comes from 1965 and wasn’t an especially big hit, but for its time it still sounds remarkably contemporary, with Ivor Raymonde’s expansive arrangement easily joining the dots with Dusty and the Walkers. What distinguished Fury as a ballad singer was a kind of not-quite-ruined dignity; in songs like “I’m Lost Without You” (“You’re My World” in negative, down to the repeated bassoon figure) he does not seek to impress his immense internal grief upon the listener but merely sings of it, as best he can, without melismatic fireworks. He is down but never ever quite out, and thus able to assert the slightly desperate reassurance of “Run To My Loving Arms” – slightly desperate because he elides over phrases like “filled with tears” as though his own eyes are raining, and yet he is singing of his wish to shield and comfort his would-be Other. Somehow he manages it – Frankie Laine is not often cited as a comparison but Fury certainly deploys some of Laine’s tendencies here; the rolling-verging-on-shrill vibrato in the choruses, again the Victor Mature-type tower of strength liable to be knocked over by the littlest of fingers. And Fury inhabits the song as though determined to prove that he is for real – the extended question mark pause of high unison violins which follows “They’ll take you in and make things right” (as if to enquire “are you really strong enough to see this through?”). But Fury finally rides his steed of hope; note how in the final chorus the tympani and drums double up as he approaches her more and more closely, how the bass suddenly brightens into octave-leaping bounds, and – finally and purely – his final “arms” which come down in four stages as he bends to embrace her, such that the abrupt mid-song ending does not feel like losing one’s toehold astride the Grand Canyon (unlike, for example, Kenny Carter’s “Showdown”) but more like a happy ending, a consolidation, a bridge built. It was one of the few happy endings he was to receive. But who would now be big and small enough to want to be Billy Fury?

THE LIONHEART BROTHERS: 50 Souls And A Discobowl

This year’s Norwegian saviours of pop begin “50 Souls And A Discobowl” at the point where most other groups would end it, with unending drum crescendos and a purply speedy rush of what sounds like the collected middle eights of Stephen Sondheim jammed into a pocket-friendly pack of TicTac mints, careering like the happiest of kids up and down the semitone scale. Sounding nothing like anything that would be played in a 2008 disco – and all the better for it – Lionheart frontman Marcus Porsgren sings slowly and dazedly about his brightening vision of communal dancing, adding kisses of vibraharp and shakers along the way, chewing his mouth in politely rabid expectation – “And glamorous clllll-othes” he sings like Sufjan trying to smuggle into Johnnie Ray – before reasonably rampaging into the circuitously ecstatic chorus: “We meet, we integrate/We gaze, point out my mate/We feel, we love and hate/We kiss, we separate/We heal, we re-relate.” The “point out my mate” is the key interjection here, of course, paradise grounded in relatable social norms even when the norm is to be as abnormal as possible and/or permitted. After a long-ish instrumental break, featuring brass, flute and violin unisons, Porsgren returns with one Signe Stranger on theremin-like harmonies, and again there’s the rush to, or away from, the door; claustrophobically celebratory, like the Go! Team trapped in the lift with the Flaming Lips, Robin Sohrabi-Shiraz’s four-part horn arrangement discreet enough to sound like a jabbed Bontempi keyboard. Were that not enough, the melancholy euphoria is then augmented by cyclical figures from Nils Thore Rǿseth’s violin, followed by Sigrid Lien’s viola, which twirl into themselves, above the reliably steady Farfisa organ, to present a spectacle of Rachel Unthank and her mates integrating with Stereolab. All climax, all push, all anxiety – and all refereed immaculately by drummer Peter Rudolfsen – “50 Souls” reminds me a little of those immediate post-New Pop Brit indie singles (think Cook Da Books and similar, or maybe even “Palm Of My Hand”-period Pale Fountains) ecstatic on a low budget and restores an unexpected microstar of flavour to this openly promising year.

EMILY HAINES AND THE SOFT SKELETON: Sprig

For this embrace I have to cross the bridged streets, rusting plentitudes in a middleground too marshy for orchardism, sun glinting against binned shipyards and bruised steel, since the little library which a miracle allowed to stay open, alone in its sunset redbrick threateningly close to intrusive eyes, since that was when I first experienced the escalator and wondered what the view would look like when I reached the top – Cologne Cathedral? A mirror? A used UK copy, creamily brown sleeve, three albums shifted into two spaces and not yet boxed or photographed? I listened to it and even the light straying onto the bedroom piano looked different and I thought this was the sauce of saints.

For this agreement there was that Paul, and now there is a book of his work, or the most digestibly florid of it, entitled Secret Carnival Workers. London lurkers cannot yet expect to find it but in Toronto it’s easier to buy than yoghurt. Pages Bookshop and I searched for the best mirror and there it was, a fifties Paul H on the cover subdividing himself, and eventually I realised when I got back home that he was standing in Piccadilly Circus, Eros’ non-intrusive eyes just behind him, but Bovril, Schweppes and 1958 pre-swing Britain (? – I won’t remove the sticker) all recasted to promise 1988 its long-held dues.

For this enlightenment I needed a book of Paul’s, a book with Paul in and through and because of it, and it’s all to be found; the Albert and Evan sleevenotes, selected Escalators and Tropics, beat the Beat fifties writings, lists of concerts and musicians he’d seen and breathed, poems, poems and then the later work, on scraps of paper, on never-defunct computer discs, and all the while the waiting brought him to Toronto, so snappy saviour-desirists can dig that finding THE Paul book in the pages of Toronto of a worshipful Sunday late morning was like all of me meeting the missing me.

For this preservation there is Emily, and the daughter has to carry on, extend (but conclude? Where is that “INCONCLUSIVE”?) the work that was left, and this poem, this “Sprig,” written (I’m guessing you’re guessing I’ll guess) very near the end, about what seems to be approaching an end – “FALLING ASLEEP FOR A FIFTH TIME/EARLY IN A MORNING AND AWAKING IN TERROR/AT HOW LONG” – Emily keeps the morning but takes out other hints of temporality (her version features no doctor unable to explain the dilemma but then as the poem makes eye-specific “NEVER TO BE USED/WAS ONE WORD: INCONCLUSIVE”…

For this salvation there is no INCONCLUSIVE in Emily’s “Sprig” because there was a conclusion, like Derek B’s endgame, even if the unabated stream of D Bailey releases suggests that it actually doesn’t ever end, but Emily will never use it; there will be no MAKING OF LIFE A FORGED PAINTING because then LIFE’S BIG MAGNET would fail to TUG like oxygen or boats) all the better to preserve the life.

For this consecration Emily’s words smile, rather than STARE, back at us – the music is Wyatt melancholy, piano darting in cimbalomic tangos with slow burner cymbals guitar weighing down the anchor in the still extant port of arrival – SO QUIET THEY COULD HEAR/EACH OTHER’S THOUGHTS (well, what’s there but water?), the yellow aquataxis which Eno would have wanted to give to Fennesz as a christening present and the repeated blessing of AND LISTENERS LIKE YOU which Emily sings like a kiss of orange decent because they TUG in favour of LIFE’S BIG MAGNET with the accordion zipping up the security.

For this purpose AND LISTENERS LIKE US it represents the blessing of all blessings because Emily’s dad helped form me and then there were losses and gains and then losses and losses and her “Sprig” marks the top step of the escalator, the one which was never quite built, and then Toronto and P Haines and Emily H, well did they point me in the direction in which I had to go, and I never met that Paul and he never knew about me and I don’t suppose they ever will but just in Google case their words and music helped recover my life and, like Dundee (Trepassers) William, he won’t ever know but you made a difference to me and us and that’s where your escalating story has taken me, free and to our good home, on this day, my birthday - halfway up the piano.

PATSY ANN NOBLE: I Did Nothing Wrong

She came from Australia, and as the actress Trisha Noble eventually returned there, via the States, but in the mid-sixties tried her luck as a pop singer in Britain without notable success; "I Did Nothing Wrong" suggests we may have missed out. She appeared in an episode of Danger Man set entirely on an abandoned oil rig, rigged up as a pirate radio station, and her "He Who Rides A Tiger" - which, pace Wikipedia, was not a hit - and "I Did Nothing Wrong," recorded and released in 1964, carries the lurid and rather disturbing hyperreality which tended to arise from McGoohan's sundry worlds.

The model is anxious Cilla Black, but the backing is unusually sharp and more than a little hostile; the organ pierces, the drums slash crisply across the already damaged canvas. If Cilla had been permitted to record "Love Of The Loved" with the proto-punk backing band she had in the Cavern this is how that may have sounded. Noble plays the part of a girl who has apparently been caught out, and is at rather too anxious pains to deny any symptoms of infidelity - "We only took a walk/And all we did was talk"; "He only came to me/For friendly sympathy - but note how her voice shudders on that "came" like an imaginary knife being held at her throat.

She tries to overturn all indicators of denial by sheer pleading force - "How could I hold you now.../If I had held another boy last night?" - but becomes slightly over-defensive when she asserts that "You know I love you so/And [you are] smart enough to know/In whose arms I belong" as though trying to salvage whatever she can from the veracity, or otherwise, of her tale; the implication being is that she's done something more, and thus the emphasis of the title becomes heavier with every breath, as does the avalanche of Hammond and Selmer behind her, until she pierces a scream of "Believe me baby!" and four terrible hammer blows of "no" - she is close to collapse on the third - before the song grinds to its baleful and disturbing end. It is exactly the sort of pastiche pop song which would have played in the Village; too primary coloured to be genuine, too hysterical to be palpable, the scream of static when pillows are pushed against the speakers to try to muffle them, even if you imagine that Number 6 would have been driven to far greater distraction by non-stop Doonican and Bachelors. An intensity only approached in sixties non-charting Brit girl pop by Tammy St John, and a record in which, perhaps not ironically, she has to struggle to retain nobility. An astonishing listen, but I'm more than glad that the world has moved on since then.

GUYS N' DOLLS: There's A Whole Lot Of Loving

The parallel development of co-ed vocal harmony groups in Britain and America deserves close analysis (a less than subtle hint to publishing house editors there); whereas America reared the challenging, questing likes of the Fifth Dimension, the Free Design, the Mamas and the Papas and Rotary Connection, we have had Seekers both original and New, both editions of the Brotherhood of Man, Bucks Fizz, S Club, Steps, Hear'say and Liberty X - all making a point of being wholesome and unthreatening; so much so that Bucks Fizz didn't even comprehend the radicalism their writers and producers were imposing on them. Perhaps it's the difference between a tradition based in folk clubs and gospel choirs (and/or jazz singing/scatting) and our own tradition of never-closing, all-round family-pleasing showbusiness. Then there are the place-them-whence-you-will oddities like the multinational Family Dogg.

Guys N' Dolls were, historically, the exact midpoint between the New Seekers and the Dooleys - six-strong, three boys and three girls, dressed as you would expect any 1975 British MoR act featuring Bruce Forsyth's eldest daughter to dress - and "There's A Whole Lot Of Loving" was their moment, reaching number two that spring behind the Rollers' "Bye Bye Baby." The opening looming crescendi of harps and crepuscules of creeping/creepy low strings suggests several eighties adventures to come, while the voices slowly emerge from the fog, offering love and maybe hope. There is the very strong hint of 1967 togetherness about this "whole lot of loving" and the song dips as heavily into faux-Americana as any pop hit since "Let's Go To San Francisco" - corners of Kentucky, Californian Redwoods, Hoover Dam dynamos and 49er miners (see that internal rhyme schemata there?) which were doubtless in Pete Sinfield's mind when he undermined it all in "The Land Of Make Believe" ("all the corn in Carolina - never!/Never EVER!") - before settling into a typical talent show-winning anthem of its time with luxuriously cosy harmonies, a Roger Cook-esque lead vocal (a deracinated Blue Mink also spring to mind here) and two key changes handled with far less ostentation than Oasis' "All Around The World."

(The spectre of the Mike Sammes Singers also comes to mind, and anyone treating that as a negative are summarily summoned to listen to their recent Music For Biscuits compilation on Trunk Records, composed of TV and trade advertising jingles with the occasional mysterious film soundtrack snatch - their "Dulux Super 3," commissioned to promote a new line of house paint, is constructed with such musical and lyrical ingenuity and genuine love [how many permutations of famous trios can they squeeze in? Amazingly, most of them] should put today's mealy-mouthed archive raiding to shame; and this is just one of a host of tapes about to be consigned to the bin and history after Sammes' death until Jonny Trunk nobly stepped in and saved the lot. Craig Douglas' 1968 Fairy Snow washing powder commercial is almost enough to make one forgive him for beating Sam Cooke to number one in our charts with "Only Sixteen")

The record was so persuasive that many overlooked or forgave the fact that Guys N' Dolls themselves do not sing on the record (though certainly sang the song live, and perfectly, on TV at the time); the song was composed by the British team of Chris Arnold, David Martin and Geoff Morrow - themselves briefly pop stars a few years previously as the bubblegum group Butterscotch - whose most profitable composition has turned out to be "Can't Smile Without You," recorded shortly thereafter by Barry Manilow, and it is Martin himself who sings the male lead, though familiar voices such as Tony Burrowes and Clare Torry back him up in the choruses; the band was later recruited and assembled via advertisements). But there is such stupidly glad hope in the record that it is forgivable. And buried deep within the ranks of Guys N' Dolls were two less than glossy faces - those of David Van Day and Thereza Bazar, who a few years later would act as glad midwives to the birth of New Pop. Thus the premonition of that lexicon of an intro; if you had put a bet on the likelihood of British pop being changed by two members of Guys N' Dolls and Tina Charles' bass player, you'd probably be able to live off the interest on your winnings by now.

BRITISH SEA POWER: We Close Our Eyes

Is the shoegazing revival now officially on? First, In Rainbows - it can't be denied - then the Magnetic Fields' highly entertaining, if thoroughly misanthropic, Distortion, and now Do You Like Rock Music?, the third album by Lake District refugees British Sea Power, all pointing back to various parts of the early nineties. But all point to different futures, and BSP are by far the most surprising of these pointers.

Not many writers have yet been able to manage to articulate exactly how and why this is such an extraordinary album - though most have expressed surprise that it should be BSP pushing this particular envelope - but to these ears the central reason for its success is abundantly visible; most of the record was made in Montreal, under the watchful eye of Godspeed!'s producer Howard Bilerman, and with contributions from some of the Black Emperor faithful, and in intent and delivery Do You Like Rock Music? stands as a fundamentally Canadian record. The inevitable Arcade comparisons have been made, of course, though with the exception of the opening, escalating chant of the opening "All In It" their influence is more pronounced sociologically; the loosening up, the letting go, the feeling of community, pervades this record as it didn't quite manage to puncture their previous two. And in tracks like "Lights Out For Darker Skies" the band rocks and vocalises in a manner very reminiscent of Sloan.

The overall feeling, though, is one of deferred apocalypse; "Hey Lucifer" brilliantly defies death with the aid of the old Scottish World Cup "Easy, Easy" chant and the Syd-like swoon of singer Scott Wilkinson's slide down the song's title. At the other extreme, "Open The Door" is a humble-sounding and patient hymn of offered redemption ("Are you gonna live or die?") which implies the Zombies meeting Kitchens of Distinction. The album's clear dramatic peak is "Atom" which begins with a beautifully troubled, ethereal float through self-doubt before steadily escalating to a climax of screaming chaos, over which Wilkinson chides "What's wrong with you lad?" There are so many touches of deft Quebecois tenderness and balance; witness for instance the lovely crouching down of a sigh which bridges the two halves of "Canvey Island," the tacitly stellar pause for thought.

Nonetheless I still don't think that, even with the Canadian input, Do You Like Rock Music? would have carried its full magic without the crucial presence of Bark Psychosis' Graham Sutton on mixing duties - they remain among the most undervalued musical acts of their decade (listen to Hex, if you can find a copy, and lament how little of Britpop chased up its implications) and, if 2004's phenomenal but scarcely noticed ///Codename: Dustsucker is anything to go by, of this decade too. Sutton seems to make the music float and converge from unexpected angles; as Martin Hannett did with the Mondays' Bummed, he seems to extract the music from the ground and guide it towards the universe. Everything is fluid, aqueous and untethered; thus a song such as "Waving Flags" is how Coldplay should have ended up sounding - harking back to Slowdive and the Cocteaus (and also, lest we forget, to those other noble and ignored stalwarts of this particular decade, Clearlake) but never settling into blandly brown terrain; naturally instead of forcibly graceful.

"We Close Our Eyes" is the big setpiece which closes the album and is about as far away from the Go West song as life is from death. In its gloriously unrepentant length - over eight minutes - we hear GYBE! fusing with Bark Psychosis; intermittent dots of comet-promising blips, switchboard improv static, those seemingly hand-free guitars, all gradually coalescing together to meet the returning chant of "All in it, all in it, all in it and we close our eyes" until it reaches a euphorically raging coda which celebrates and advances the music others would have been wise to take from their nineties starting point; it is the meeting point between the communal anger of "Moya" and the galactic torrents of "All Different Things" and still beyond the end of achievement range of most of BSP's supposed British peers. As with My Bloody Valentine and Talk Talk before them, they have sneaked to the front while everyone was looking elsewhere and run away with something approaching the future. Shoegazing turns into stargazing.

GETATCHEW MEKURYA: Shellele

The parallel worlds of music history are perhaps endless. I'm very grateful for the appearance of the Very Best Of Ethiopiques 2CD package since I've long been looking for an excuse to dip into this most tantalising of archives - at 23 volumes and counting, it's rather a costly and time-consuming exercise (so much for there being "nothing happening" in music) to absorb all of the compilations individually so this primer is more than handy.

Mekurya strikes me as the most instantly significant of the artists collected here; "Shellele" carries a recording date of 1972, but it could just as well be 1956, or for that matter 1906 - the saxophonist, who is apt to dress in full military battlegear when performing, bases his playing on the century-old tradition of ululatory war cries known as Shellele; loud, acerbic, incantatory and very individualistic. Thus does "Shellele" the tune come across to these Western ears like sixties Gato Barbieri jamming with Johnny and the Hurricanes; that throaty rasp which instinctively sparks off an awkward mixture of awe and fear set against deadpan organ and rhythm. The fifties of Raymond Scott and Sun Ra as well as Joe Meek may well spring to mind but Mekurya is swift to demolish any cosy lounge notions by spitting out rapid lines of rough pointillism; surely a direct influence on Pharaoh Sanders but more obviously prophetic of Evan Parker with the slap of tongue against reed, the furtive scramble of a line. Like Mingus, he always threatens to break into scarifying total freedom but never quite does. But the groove is ominously hypnotic, stealthily threatening; another joining of unlikely aesthetic dots, and clearly Volume 14 - the volume devoted to a more thorough examination of the music of this particular Negus - is the place to start the in-depth listening.

SPOON: Don't Make Me A Target

More delvin' into Belbin - see what I did there? (See me - Ed.) - with Spoon, who along with Of Montreal, the National and Momus are the most reliable of promo/CD senders; every so often another of their albums reaches me, and with the notable and predictable exception of Momus, every one of them gets neatly filed away and scarcely listened to, though I never deem them atrocious enough to warrant binning (really, readers, take it from me: there are brighter and better things to do with one's life than struggle into town with a pile of promos to get a fiver back for the lot of them from MVE). Spoon are clearly creative and inventive and yet I can't find a convenient place in my world for them, nor have I sufficient will to create a new place for them, but neither can I let them go and I will need to investigate further.

In the meantime, "Don't Make Me A Target" comes from last year's highly rated Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga and with its sleeve-bearing heart of protest - "nuclear dicks with dialect drawls" - is a most heartening presumed anti-Bush tirade which uses its bitemporal procession ingeniously; staccato guitars in the "Cold As Ice"/"No One Knows" fashion meets up with Britt Daniel's prematurely weary but admirably vituperative half-tempo vocal ("He smells like the inside of closets upstairs/The kind where nobody goes"). As his anxiety and gradual ire intensify with the repeated title the music steps up a semi-subtle gear, the piano becoming more prominent and a noise guitar eventually battering its way into the right channel, mixed up with AMM-style bandwidth radio interference. This eventually subsides and we are left with a medium-sized musical question mark. Obviously I need to know more. Now where did I put that box?

THE FIERY FURNACES: Ex-Guru

I've been drawn back to the Fiery Furnaces because of David Byrne's forthcoming interpretation of this song, which in the manner of Kirsty MacColl's "A New England" adds a juicy extra verse about said ex-guru throwing his record collection in the bin. The Friedburgers had slowly drifted out of my consciousness since Gallowbirds Bark - potentially great pop minds losing themselves in well-meaning but ineptly-assembled indulgences - but Widow City is a smart collection, even if wearing its richness on its hidden pop sleeve and even if, as a duo, they cannot equal the unknowing boldness of, say, Pavement at their peak; the truly golden wonder of discovering their own readymade world as they struggle to master their instruments (on "Here" you can hear that last quarter rattling around Malkmus' soul).

But "Ex-Guru" is a terrific snap of post-psychedelic/arsequake pop; Eleanor takes the vocal, a winsomely hopeful tale of airport seminars, nephew's seaplanes in the Bahamas and thwarted obsession, over deceptively straightforward 1979 electro squelches, blossoming out into mellotron moodiness on the chorus ("She means nothing to me now," sung in precisely the manner intended to provoke extreme doubt). The second verse gets more virulently vibrant; she burns her clothes with eucalyptus juice, rips out the floor and paints all the platforms puce (the best use of the word "puce" in pop, without question), all the while trying to persuade her listener, with increasing desperation, that she's OK and will cope. The song suddenly detours into grinding Sub Pop guitar growls and biscuit tin beatboxes before a stately 1967 flute and harpsichord delicately rephrase the melody in time for the final chorus. With the sneaking wink of a question - "Does she kick up a thunderstorm when she thinks of my betrayal?" - Eleanor wanders off, lets it lie, tries another flavourful jam jar. Hopefully the scope of flavours is limitless.

ELVIS PRESLEY: Stranger In My Own Home Town

There is a terrifying sense of urgency about Presley's '69 Memphis sessions; his bark and bite are not signs of a spirit fierily renewed after ten full years of vertical cryogenic freezing, but the last desperate glare of a fading lightbulb, the last chance he's going to get to express his own self before it is fully subsumed in the service of showbusiness and the awkwardness of opulent existing. If "Long Black Limousine" now seems more than ever a frightening premonition of his own passing - and his screams are those of fear overriding rage - then his reading of the Percy Mayfield R&B reliable is his last and biggest fuck you to whoever didn't deserve fucking. His stance, from his off-mike hums and grunts emerging from the rhythm and orchestral masses at the beginning, is one of supreme defiance, an extended middle finger of a pelvis towards the kids on Sunset Strip who pushed past him into the topless bar and had no idea who or why he was. He's ridden back into town; its citizens either do not recognise him or choose to turn their eyes, if not their minds, away by lack of virtue of their self-imposed shame. If Mayfield "came home with good intentions/About five or six years ago" he could, and did, sing the buried reasons for his lack of acceptance - murder, or worse? - but with Elvis it's clear he's metaphorising about an all-round family entertainment hell which kept him from participating in any meaningful game (could a place for him ever have been imagined in anyone's 1967?). But despite the lack of welcome from his erstwhile peers, he snarls and winks "Oh but you can't keep a good man down" - he's not quite dead yet.

The performance overruns its natural end by double the time; you can sense the band preparing to wind down after Presley's "final" chorus two-and-a-half minutes in, but no, he won't, or can't, let it go; he drawls a beat behind the beat, he attacks each new repetition with reinforced dynamism until eventually he goes somewhere beyond words, now mere markers to guide us towards his comparatively naked emotion. Reggie Young dips in with that Joe South-patented lead guitar-as-sitar effect, but the most insistent respondent is drummer Gene Chrisman, who is a revelation throughout the entire record; he hammers, prods, nudges Presley insistently, turning up the intensity radar until everything - horns, strings, backing choirs - seems wholly improvised. It finally fades out at 4:39 but Elvis still won't let it lie; as the track disappears we hear his terrifying roar of "PLAY ON PLAY ON PLAY ON!" as though the band is his oxygen mask, as though he'll drop down lifeless if the song ever ends. The glory of that fade is that we can imagine it hasn't actually ended, nearly forty years on.

REPARATA: Shoes

The bouzouki doesn't feature much in seventies pop except when it has to (e.g. some of Demis Roussos' hits, Barry Ryan's "Red Man" or one-offs like Iannis Markopoulos' theme tune to the BBC drama series Who Pays The Ferryman?); the main exception is Barry Blue who used the device successfully, if briefly, on "Dancin' On A Saturday Night" and, less sanely (no bad thing), on "Hot Shot." I can't find any parallel for "Shoes," however; it floated inexplicably into the lower regions of both UK and US charts towards the end of 1975. Prior to that Reparata was known as the frontwoman of Brooklyn's Reparata and the Delrons, one of the most underestimated of sixties girl groups; over here they had just the one hit with the Kenny Young-penned "Captain Of Your Ship," top 20 in 1968 and a clear antecedent to Noosha Fox with its extended bar-leaping sighs and nautical double entendres. In America their best was #60 in 1964 with "Whenever A Teenager Cries." They ran the expected girl group evolutionary gamut with great aesthetic, if not commercial, success; 1966's Jeff Barry-penned "I'm Nobody's Baby Now" is one of the best of all counterfeit Spector records and 1968's extraordinary "Saturday Didn't Happen," which Suzi Quatro has rightly pinpointed as where the Shangri-Las might have gone had they lasted long enough to tackle psychedelia.

But "Shoes" is something else; electro-klezmer? My Big Pre-ZE Records Greek Wedding? Not quite Eurodance (in the 1975 "Una Paloma Blanca"/"El Bimbo" sense) but not quite shaking off psychedelia while at the same time partly anticipating gay disco, Reparata sings of Johnny and Louise, getting married, seeing Papa smile, avoiding maternal abuse by remembering the bride's shoes and so forth; it is possibly the last pop record to use the term "gay" in its original sense ("Everything's so grand and gay/We can frolic all day"), and yet despite the surface bonhomie the music's thrust is slightly threatening and more than slightly unreal, particularly in the middle section when the beat cuts out to let through an ethereal cloud of dishevelled angel choirs - not quite Kander and Ebb, only nearly Jobriath - while Reparata's voice strolls as serenely as Carole Bayer Sager's though cannot dispel the feeling that something isn't quite right with the scenario. As indeed it turned out not to be; a fellow Delron had by then become one of Barry Manilow's backing singers and put it about that she was the "real Reparata"; the ensuing legal battle, which dragged on for some years, ensured that Reparata herself could not promote "Shoes" and thus the single wasn't as big as it might have been. Still, its strangeness is a direct precedent of things like Cristina's "Is That All There Is?" without ever being as explicit. The glasses remain poised in the air, never to be smashed.

ELECTRONIC: Forbidden City

There has rarely been a more assertive start to any Joy Division or New Order record than the "There's not a hope" with which Bernard Sumner commences "Forbidden City." In light of their increasingly rock(ist) exploits as the nineties wore on the consensus on Electronic is currently undecided, although both Sumner and Marr have treated it exactly how it was intended; as light (or heavy) relief from their primary day jobs. Admittedly I do miss Neil Tennant's regular input in their early days; "Getting Away With It" would have been the perfect 1989 Christmas number one since it effortlessly sums up much of what was indispensable from its parent decade with the input of three of its most crucial musicians (five if you count the two Lexicon Of Love refugees, drummer David Palmer and arranger Anne Dudley; the latter's closing string coda smartly bookends Lexicon's prelude).

Nevertheless, post-1992 Electronic does have its merits, and "Forbidden City" is pre-eminent amongst that list; it sounds like their most hopeful song yet harbours one of their least hopeful lyrics. Certainly Sumner's voice has scarcely sounded more actively enraged; the song concerns itself with a particularly messy break-up, and not necessarily one involving romantic partners, snipes being fired bilaterally ("I wish I'd been around when you started this," "You're in a trance/And I'm not so fond of you"). The song eventually arrives at a resigned conclusion: "And it's too late to wash my hands/We're caught in a trap set for a man."

Marr's guitar lines are bold and blue though dip for the ineffable melancholy of the B flat-C-D "chorus" - and the anticipated sadness is cleverly built up by withholding the chorus until after the second verse; the first leads you to the edge before bouncing back with deliberate frustration into the second, delaying its release. Then Marr's guitar peals out fortissimo McGuinn lead notes for the third verse ("There is a wind that blows in the Northern sky") though again Sumner defers any implication of joy by a barely suppressed feeling of resentment at Manchester, or Tony Wilson, or other such adored points of reference: "If I had the sense/I'd leave here tomorrow"). With every chorus the bass (also played by Marr) arches up an ominous octave and back under "caught in a trap." Then the intensity becomes even harder to touch without burning; Marr's guitar break is more of an elongated feedback howl than a solo. Thereafter Sumner returns to double the anticipatory pace of the song ("Would you lie to me?"); again there is a misleading build-up before he repeats the sequence and then sinking back into elegant despair with the final round of choruses. Behind him Marr's guitars subtly but naturally expand and sigh into full post-Cocteaus lamenting and provide a natural and logical (and restrained) beauty to Sumner's grief (echoed by his own, slightly bitonal responses of "Would you lie to me?"); the elegance quietly bolstered by Karl Bartos' slowly modulating synths, the suppressed brutality underlined by the final and (again) delayed drum sign-off from Black Grape's Jed Lynch. Structurally a perfectly imperfect pop/rock song, its patient build-up was largely lost on all bar the loyal, and it stopped at number 14 on our 1996 charts, but it remains one of Sumner and Marr's most secret triumphs.

DION: Born To Be With You

Although the orchestra which surrounded Dion and Spector in 1975 was as large as ever - and with nine guitarists, two bassists and three drummers inter alia it was arguably larger than it had been a decade previously - their "Born To Be With You" sounds anything but opulent. It is as though a blind had been turned upwards and the light of day finally permitted to shine its attempted lustre upon the Wall. Released as an uncut single ahead of the album, running for over six minutes, Sean Rowley recalls in his sleevenote to the CD reissue of Born To Be With You his awestruck fourteen-year-old self, listening to the late Roger Scott's Capital Radio drivetime show, home from school, ear glued to transistor, with Scott playing the track twice consecutively and warning the listener that "this record will change your life." Up in Glasgow, we had to make do with Radio Clyde (though its evening programming was infinitely more adventurous and varied than you'd expect) and so I had to rely on an NME rave review to persuade my dad to buy the single, released on the shortlived Phil Spector International imprint; the album hardly appeared in the shops and I didn't hear it or even come across a copy until many years later. The single was not a hit on either side of the Atlantic and has yet to be noticeably revived on oldies radio.

Everyone who has heard it agrees that it should have been a massive hit, but it may be that its intrinsic elements militated against anything approaching success, not to mention the British climate of the time; the singles chart of 1975 was so qualitatively lopsided that even Springsteen's "Born To Run" (and both Bruce and Miami Steve dropped into the Born To Be With You sessions to watch their idols at work) failed to penetrate our Top 50 filled with workaday novelties, folk singers turned comedians, glutinous MoR and AoR, inexplicable reissues and pallid post-glam teenpop (it was an exceptional year for black [and black influenced] dance music and reggae, but again that was only partially reflected in the year's lists).

Then again, Dave Edmunds' more vigorous, uptempo Spectorish take on the same song had gone top ten in Britain two years previously, and it is likely that the Dion/Spector "Born To Be With You" sports its cloak of greatness in anticipation of its expected failure. Bobby Gillespie has likened the record's aura to a New Orleans funeral but the great, elephantine push and pull of the mass of players, determinedly weighing the song downwards, makes it seem far older; I think of the horses struggling to pull Queen Victoria's coffin at the turn of the last century.

And yet, Dion manages, indeed does his superhuman best, to shine above this sepulchral procession; the ensemble is clumsier than Spector would have allowed in '65 but also more human - witness Frank Capp accidentally dropping a cymbal a third of the way through the long instrumental intro amidst the crawling cathedral of slide guitars as Jew's harps, sludge containers of drums. Nino Tempo was given the tenor sax obbligatos and he too rises above the seeming mourning in a valiant attempt to escalate and magnify renewed or revealed light.

Meanwhile, Dion himself remains utterly noble, easily leaping towards confidently capturing high notes and holding them, scatting against Nino's runs, sounding as pure as any 1956 mother could have wanted "rock 'n' roll" to have sounded, even sacred - his seemingly throwaway "Sleep eternally" is the key to the record; it is almost as though he is twirling the baton reluctantly at the head of the cortege, manfully resisting the urge to pull a bugle out of his concealed jacket pocket and go into "Oh, Didn't He Ramble?" And yet the song is one of consecrated confirmation of love, faith and devotion, and Dion lends it all the worship it deserves, and more besides, as strings scrub in the same not-quite-distinct middleground. Eventually he attains catharsis, and his final "uh!" seems like a confirmed vow as he cheerfully trades fours with Nino towards the slowest of fades. The record comes across as the missing link between Bing Crosby and Gorecki; to be worshipped and prayed towards, if not to be bought and beatified at home.

TINARIWEN: Ahimana (Oh My Soul)

I think of the Brotherhood of Breath; spirits improvising their stories through life, forced by violence into a cornered sort of exile, even if that corner is a fairly vast northerly corner of the Mali desert. And once again I think of the ethos of Toronto; Tinariwen is a group of indeterminate size according to the needs of any given song, with four guitarists who can make four guitars sound as light as anything this side of Ornette's Prime Time and that side of Broken Social Scene, and others who filter in and out, but never away.

I caught up with the Aman Iman (Water Is Life) album over Christmas and it strikes me as one of 2007's most deeply sensual albums; superb for headphone listening - and let us remember not just Zeppelin but the Saqqara Dogs and Blind Idiot Gods of the mid-eighties world who were already feeling the effect of the North African traffic - but far too pulsatile to fit into any background (it has some of the year's sexiest, as well as deepest, bass playing). Songs which are cyclical but never back into a cul-de-sac since with every revolution their fabric is slightly but crucially different; a delicacy to its rhythmic complexity which does not fade into white bread. A parallel world of blues, maybe, but then there was the Grateful Dead as well...

On David's compilation he selected the serpentine prowl of "Assouf" but I've gone for "Ahimana" as it is for me the album's most enticing and revelatory track; improvised on the spot with some of its words made up and others stretching back centuries, its guitar thrust is a compelling roundabout of cumulative stimulation. It begins with some rueful reflections on leaving Libya behind before consolidating into a call and response dialogue between man and woman (though sung by only one "lead" singer - how diminishing it is even to consider such concepts in this brightly blue context) which culminates in the "woman"'s voice complaining, or simply reflecting, on how her father is "interested in cows and female camels." A desert estampie, a lowdown yet elevated wandering Toureg rave-up; sliding like a perky red balloon up the trouser leg of provocation, and decidedly undiluted - a dance, a summary and another route towards a certain tomorrow.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND: Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa

Today's entry marks the first in an occasional series in which I'll be going through the 21 tracks on the 2007 best of CD very kindly sent to me over Xmas by friend and fellow obsessive music blogger David Belbin. As you can see from his sleevenotes, this is an especially fine and deft selection and in at least two high profile cases solves the "one decent track on an otherwise duff album" dilemma. But I must start with NYC indie band Vampire Weekend, which by common critical consent are the first notable new act of 2008. "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" may well turn out to be Gen X's own "Common People" since its subject matter is a similarly sardonic viewpoint on the Rich Girl who Doesn't Quite Get It, although the post-Roxy amphetamine rush of Cocker's vocal and Chris Thomas' production is here replaced by amiable post-Graceland guitar lines and slightly out of step drumming - instead of explicit condemnation, Vampire Weekend's observations are more bemused than anything else (the transition from "As a young girl/Louis Vuitton" to "As a sophomore/With reggaeton" is especially telling); the singer wants to get closer to her - the squealed "MADE!" in the phrase "is your bed made?" and the obscured verb which may be either "fuck" or "talk" in the line "Do you wanna ? like I know I do?" Yet an important spiritual barrier remains, as evidenced by their protestation of "But this feels so unnatural - Peter Gabriel too (definitely not Peter Gabriel 2, by far the most avant-garde of any of his solo albums)!" and the more politicised observation of the perhaps rhetorical question "Can you stay up to see the dawn in the colours of Benetton?" Thereafter there is a slow drop-out with some bewitching wordless vocal whoops over hymnal organ - not that far removed from "Apples And Oranges" - before a final tail-wagging uptownship jive takes the song out. In fact it's the perfect soundtrack for quietly sunny Sunday mornings in South Kensington, and there's an album due at the end of the month. Of course the Canadian likes of Apostle Of Hustle and Islands have been advancing upon this template for some time now, so it's nice to see that the influence is finally crossing the border. "Is your sweater ON???!!!???" should mark the premature but welcome beginning of 2008's summer.

ALY and A.J.: Bullseye

Looks like it's time to invoke Larkin's Law again; the sisters Michalka may be a foolish pair in many ways - teaching evolutionary theory in schools is, according to them, "disrespectful," which makes one wonder whether teaching English in schools is, according to me, "discontinued." So it's wise to concentrate on their music. "Potential Breakup Song" presumably doesn't need any further introduction from me since most should now be familiar with its seamless mix of Del Shannon, Roy Vedas and Girls Aloud, its ingenious tripartite Autotune hooks ("Iplayedalong Iplayedalong Iplayedalong"), the fourth wall nod of needing just the one breakup song for their album and the exuberant dagger of a chorus: "YOU'RE NOT LI-VIIIIIN'!" The Insomniatic album veers a little too obediently towards Lavigneland in places but at its best - "Like Whoa," "Flattery" - it leaves Girls Aloud standing in their present tangle.

"Bullseye," though, is my favourite track; a creditable crunch of a post-rock rocker which grinds with the elegance of Elastica - note the triple-deck turn-on compliment of "You didn't ask me for my number/Wait...you didn't ask me for my number?/...'cos you've already got my number!" - and stands proudly astride its huge magnet of a chorus, even stretching out a passing pinkie to the Go-Gos in its middle eight. Since there are only two girls singing, or at any rate chanting, there isn't the unison dilemma which dogs even the better parts of Tangled Up; they have a common purpose and are easily discernible, Autotuned or not. Bubblegum of thrusting distinction with just the hint of an inverse sting: "Naturally you seem to just get me/So obviously you're pretty smart/Heheheheh...."

RADIOHEAD: All I Need

I don’t quite know what to do with, or about, Radiohead right now; for me they are still too tied up with Oxford and all that my Oxford history entails, all the way from the time when they were called On A Friday, were regularly third on the indie night bill at the Jericho Tavern and hadn’t quite worked out whether they wanted to be U2 or Dinosaur Jr or Then Jerico, right up to the open-air South Park performance which Laura was too ill to attend (and therefore I didn’t go either). I would also venture that the best way to understand Radiohead’s music would be if you had been living in Oxford throughout the nineties and very early noughties; there is so much about them that is intrinsically Oxford (or Abingdon, or Cumnor Hill, or Botley) that it’s hard for me to reset my critical faculties for them; instinctively I still think of the sudden, backwards retreat of a fade to “Spinning Plates” which in that last summer felt like Oxford and Laura and life vanishing into irretrievable nothingness (the reverse of “Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road”), but then there were also the ignored omens of OK Computer (that is, ignored by me until it was too late) and the silvering autumn delineated by Kid A; I thought its freeform contraflows slightly timid in comparison with, say, Primal Scream’s Xtrmntr and wished that Thom Yorke had the chutzpah to come out with something as goofily absurd as “Bomb The Pentagon” (why do I get the immediate picture of Bobby Gillespie being made by his mum to stand in the corner wearing a dunce cap on 10/11? “Aw maw, gies a break”…).

Still, most of Kid A and about half of Amnesiac have endured, and Hail To The Thief is maybe this decade’s most marooned album (i.e. everyone knows it’s good and hugely underrated, but where to place it?). At this point I have to applaud Radiohead for the staunch impersonation of back to basics, honest just-like-you-and-me blokes which they have recently been purveying, both online and in print; they currently teeter on the Stunning Return To Form tightrope but that is not entirely their doing. From its downloaded status onwards, In Rainbows has been heavily sold as their Return To Rock with Clear Singing of Comprehensible Songs (as though no one with a soul would have missed “Everything In Its Right Place” or “You And Whose Army?”).

It is an alluring proposition but one inevitably doomed and masked. As Coldplay demonstrated when they stepped into the Kid A breach seven years ago, Radiohead’s floating voters of an outside/mainstream audience were perfectly content with cheerily cuddly platitudes – “I will fix you,” “Give me real, don’t give me fake” – delivered in Chris Martin’s geography teacher falsetto-as-vulnerability/compassion default setting and didn’t much care for adventures into abstract electronica with free jazz attached and words which savagely magnified the smouldering rage at the centre of “Bring down the Government” in “No Surprises.” Despite protestations that Yorke filtered all of this into his own solo record The Eraser, In Rainbows is neither a comfortable nor comforting listen, and is unlikely to return them to the crossroads of crossover; it took just 50,000 sales for the album to enter the chart at number one this week.

Much of this milieu is referred to in the album’s lyrics: “You used to be alright – what’s happened?” or “You’ve gone off the rails” could be extracted from messageboard postings by Coldplay turncoats, and the subject(s) of “A pale imitation with the edges sawn off” can I think easily be guessed. And despite the general feeling conveyed that this is a brighter and more hopeful Radiohead – the CD is not enclosed in a mock library book or street map this time, but in a workaday package more usually found in the kind of junk mail encouraging the recipient to consolidate their Christmas-inspired debts). In Rainbows nearly swallows itself up in its ideations of death, though the grisly scenario at the end of “Weird Fishes/Arpeggio” is rescued by the last minute “I hit the bottom and escape.” They wouldn’t necessarily have done that on Hail To The Thief. “Nude” is a classically structured 6/8 rock ballad which culminates with Yorke crooning “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking.” “Bodysnatchers” is U2 filtered through a partially opaque prism; it “rocks” but try to touch it and you’ll be incinerated - Yorke even invokes Lydon with his hysterical screech of “I have no idea what you are talking about!”. “Reckoner” (wherein the words "in rainbows" appear) is stealthy rock whose balance is purposely offset by the too-crisp, too-close auxiliary percussion happening in the left channel and the Massive Attack strings which hover into view at song’s end. “Faust ARP” reimagines Lennon’s “Julia” as an unreachable nightmare.

And yet there remains hope, more hope than has been contained in the previous four Radiohead records; the brisk “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” takes its standard Friday night social scenario by the scruff of its neck and finds Yorke imploring both boy and girl to seize the moment and each other; his “Come and let it out” betters Oasis’ “Go Let It Out” by virtue of having a definable “it.” The closing “Videotape” revisits the farewell-for-now-dear-listener moonscape of “Motion Picture Soundtrack”; the tape may be slightly frayed (the shuddering blur obfuscating the first “Red, blue, green”) but Yorke finally turns to face his listener with infinitely more genuine guidance than a squadron of Coldplays could ever muster, despite or because of the looming presence of Mephistopheles beneath (or within him); his extremely slow delivery of the album’s payoff/raison d’etre, “No matter what happens now you shouldn’t be afraid because I know today has been the most perfect day I have ever seen” is very moving indeed and doesn’t suggest a collapse into hell.

Turning to “All I Need,” however, which is the album’s clear masterpiece, I wonder whether Radiohead don’t owe a goodly part of their regeneration to Canada; the sherbert rush of the latter stages of “Bodysnatchers” aren’t that far removed from Broken Social Scene, and I cannot imagine “All I Need” without the precedent of Arcade Fire, the Barack Obamas of 21st century rock whose subtle generosity is now seeping through all necessary musical quarters – how much more satisfying than the standard pseudo-trick of stamping one’s feet and yelling. Like Arcade Fire, “All I Need” owes a good deal to a certain perspective of Springsteen, most notably in the “Streets Of Philadelphia” drum pattern which empowers it. But OMD is markedly present, too; the dreamlike distortion of the synth bassline, and Godrich tweaks his knobs and slides with enough deviance to bring Red Mecca-era Cabaret Voltaire into the picture too. Meanwhile, Yorke croons of the missed chances, the pleading outsider, which he chooses to represent and stand for – the “animal trapped in your hot car,” the “days that you choose to ignore,” finally, and simply, “just an insect trying to get out of the night,” or not so simply if you consider the double-edged threat/embrace of “I only stick with you because there are no others.”

Behind him, the music steadily builds up its might, first allowing in huge Trevor Horn vibraharps, and finally, as the song reaches its natural outcome, Phil Selway’s drums dramatically crash into the “middle of your picture” and mighty block piano chords chime something approaching release, closely followed by synths melting into strings. “S’all wrong!” cries Yorke. “S’alright!” reassures Yorke, and the latter is how he ends it, with a glorious major sixth chord – it’s alright because you were patient and open-minded enough to continue trying to penetrate the Rochester core, so with In Rainbows, and Radiohead in general, there’s no option save for me to keep on working, to take those ripples on a hitherto blank shore and use them to create brighter rainbows.

BARRY MANILOW: Could It Be Magic

Following the predictable but agreeable strains of Aly’s fiddle and Phil’s accordion on BBC1 Scotland’s Hogmanay Show, a timeworn ritual marred only by a hoarse Marti Pellow slaughtering some hapless auld folk song, and with a view to avoiding the Soul, Passion and Honesty of Jools Holland’s Mid-November Hootenanny – despite its supposedly stellar cast list, Ruby Turner seemed to be belching away every time I flicked over to BBC2 – I turned over for reassurance, or refuge, to the Take That O2 Arena concert, broadcast on Scottish TV about half an hour after it took place. My mum loves the jigs and reels of Messrs Bain and Cunningham but loved Take That even more, and I could see her point. It set me thinking just how great an album an imagined combination of Beautiful World and Rudebox might have been – in the White Album sense – with Gary’s staunch reliability counterbalancing Robbie’s rambles. Occupying a midspace pitched between the Pet Shop Boys at Wembley ’91, Close Encounters and Torvill And Dean’s Holiday On Ice, the performance proved that Take That had learned from New Pop in terms of presentation if not quite in terms of music. The deployment of Cee-Lo Green – in the Lulu role on “Relight My Fire” (into which he interspersed a snatch of “Crazy”) and as general wise seer and handyman elsewhere – was certainly a coup though I hope that Green doesn’t get cul-de-sacked into having to find even more novel and exhausting ways of singing that one song on tap, since his Cee-Lo Green…Is The Soul Machine has slowly increased in attraction over the last few years and may well end up one of this decade’s key albums.

The keystone, though, was “Could It Be Magic,” which Take That now interpret in the original Manilow arrangement. Taken in tandem with the subtle lyric change in “Never Forget” (now it’s “and we’re not so young”), the performance illustrated the strangely logical duality of youth and adult responses to pop; back in early 1993 they sped it up even faster than Donna Summer managed and delivered the song in a boisterous hi-NRG (moderate setting) manner. And of course, Robbie sang the original lead; one still can’t visualise him doing so now, and certainly not in this environment. So the band had to retrench and reconsider – and it came out as a performance of no small wonder.

Manilow’s original – released on album in 1975, a US hit single in 1976 and eventually a UK hit single in 1979 (in Britain, Manilow has always been viewed and adored as a live act and as an albums artist, in that order) – still strikes me as one of the last expressions of the 1967-8 move towards avant-balladry (Scott 3, Odessa, A Tramp Shining etc.); long and in its own boldly modest way experimental, which begins and ends the same but not in the same place. One can imagine “Could It Be Magic?” as the dream of the young Julliard student, brushing up on his Chopin at the library piano; the song is based on Chopin’s Prelude in C Minor (Op 28, No 20 to be exact), a piece very familiar to me in early 1979 since I had to learn it as part of my Grade V piano lessons. He drifts into abstractly suppressed pleas for inspiration (“Spirits move me”) but then with carefully gradated passion expresses his joy and wonder at the woman he loves and who seems to love him; I have no idea whether his “sweet Melissa” (diplomatically changed by Gary Barlow to “you’re my lifeline”) was fellow Arista recording artist Melissa Manchester, but he is clearly spellbound, tentatively making his way up the arching stairway of “Baby I love you” before strings echo his yearning request – “Come, come, come into my arms” – and underscore his bewildered but already bordering on ecstatic rhetorical question of “Could this be the magic at last?”

His tentativeness of delivery also excuses the occasional odd lyrical lapse – shouldn’t she be the “answer to all questions I can find” rather than the “answer to all answers,” and I’m not quite sure of the extra-astrological significance of the point where the stallions meet the sun; it all fits with the song’s emotional tenor, however, and note how the bass sighs as Manilow makes his key push towards enlightenment and union, answered by sliding cymbal and middleground choir – the procession is so natural sounding that I don’t at all mind the clear orchestra cues of his spoken “Come on!”s, since it continues to build up with true boldness until drums crash, hands clap en masse (the spectre of Spector isn’t far away: cf. Dion’s “Make The Woman Love Me,” recorded the same year) and Barry’s “COME!”s reveal their true meaning; poignant because the song never quite shifts out of the minor key, and therefore out of uncertainty. It climaxes with the repeated fanfares (they’ve come) of the French horns upon which Manilow’s voice disappears into the ether of oneness, leaving the post-“Hey Jude” arrangement to continue, possibly forever and putting me in mind of the pivotal role of the French horn as emotional catalyst in pop – think of, inter alia, First Class’ “Beach Baby,” Nancy Sinatra’s “You Only Live Twice” (the Hazlewood-produced version) and Billy Fury’s “In Thoughts Of You” – before that phantasm, that splendid chimera, also vanishes, leaving Barry alone again, at the piano, bringing the Prelude to a close with the huge question mark of his final two chords, i.e. will it happen, and if so is it magic? One 1979 Sunday afternoon, on the Top 40 countdown, it was followed by “The Staircase (Mystery)” by Siouxsie and the Banshees – another great single in one of our greatest years for singles – and nobody understood how or why I could be bewitched by both, or indeed either. But the song’s naïvely knowing greatness has endured, perhaps most greatly in the version sung by Sylvester and his keyboard player Eric Robinson on the Living Proof album, recorded live at the San Francisco Opera House at around the same time as half of a medley with Leon Russell’s “A Song For You” – the two turn it into a hymn of holy devotion, and their final, extended beyond all rational forms of breath, declaration of the “last” on “could this be the magic at last?” are like Isis and Osiris arising from their golden slumbers to the bluest air of transcendence and peace.

MOTT THE HOOPLE: Ballad Of Mott (March 26th 1972 Zurich)

"I changed my name in search of fame/To find the Midas touch."

The song sits oddly on an album which is generally upbeat musically, if more qualified lyrically - 1973's Mott - as Ian Hunter looks back, over gentle needlestick waves of acoustic guitar and unhurried ventilation shafts of rhythm, at a time when he nearly had to break up the band. As an allegorical anthem for thwarted ambition it is far more convincing and affecting than "American Pie," since it is the precise obverse of "All The Young Dudes" and also because it is a song whose composer brooks no regret, even as he addresses the fourth wall ("You know the band so well/Still I feel, somehow, we let you down"). He spits out polite contempt at the spectacle of the "rock 'n' roll circus," itemising the loss of "childlike dreams" and the pointlessness of being "just a rock 'n' roll star" at a point (March 1972) when stardom still seemed far from their grasp.

"We went off somewhere on the way/And now I see we have to pay"

Somewhere the singer knows, or thinks he knows, that he has taken a wrong turning, but it's the scorpion astride the frog once more; he'll sting, they'll both drown, but it's his nature: "Oh but if I had my time again/You all know just what I'd do," because as deflating and perhaps as wilfully suicidal as the spectacle and practice may seem, it mesmerises, and Hunter can't get the notion of the greater good out of his mind or his heart. He has to carry on, and clings to those final, extended, quivering "miiiiiiiind"s like tentacles of pure cord. Sometimes he's right, sometimes he just gets lost in routine disruptions - as Diary Of A Rock 'N' Roll Star quietly illustrates, there was a fiery resentment heating up beneath those shades of fading visions - so he won't erase the final vision, the concept of rock 'n' roll being more than its sum parts, something that can change worlds where other forms of showbiz, including politics, couldn't. Does he imply that he'd die for his vision to be preserved? Does purity of vision necessarily presuppose emotional constancy or the absence of internal conflicts? It's impossible to tell, but the purpose isn't, whatever its origins and whatever its eventual end; and so I think of this Ballad and the erstwhile President of the Mott the Hoople Fan Club and fellow alumnus of Lady Margaret Hall, who died over Christmas for the alleged sin of wanting twice as much.