GINUWINE: Pony

I'm just a bachelor! I'm looking for a partner!" exclaims Ginuwine at the beginning of "Pony" and in light of the subsequent Judge Dread level of subtlety of his modest proposals to his hoped-for Other, it seems unlikely that he will find his partner soon. But all the sensuality that his naively relentless double entendres lack ("Someone who knows how to ride without ever falling off" and later he even refers to "every single portion" as though she were a bag of chips), not to mention all of the genuine cheekiness to which he aspires, is encompassed in this startling early Timbaland production; I more than most have been guilty of undervaluing him in recent years but "Pony," now twelve years old, jerked me out of my seat at the time since its beats suggested that Ginuwine and/or Timbaland were wading through a squelchy swamp in Matalan economy wading boots at the time; or else you can see the splashes of contrabass vocoder undertow as a continual, frustrated burp.

Ginuwine sings it fervently, though, and without explicit sauce; he is desperate and hungry, probably hasn't even worked out the basics yet ("my saddle's waiting"), but he means no harm; he won't get anywhere but the lovely, dreamy floating-in-space interlude (brief but meaningful) which comes after his attempted crescendo of "you'll be on my jockey team OHHHHHHH!!!" indicates: just tighten DOWN a little (it's oxymoron time!), relax, put away the Kleenex and he'll be fair for a game. Oddly touching in delivery but dynamically pregnant with apocalypse musically; and the, er, juices which flowed from its youthful arteries proved particularly, um, fruitful (that's enough Carlin; much more of this and we'll be getting complaints from Robert Plant - Ed.).

KING CRIMSON: Matte Kudasai

Another memory of that watery, chimerical early winter of 1981, and this one I've always paired in my mind with Foreigner's "Waiting For A Girl Like You," mainly because key Crimson members are involved in both and there is clear evidence of the direct and indirect spread of Frippertronics in each. I can't really recall why Fripp felt it necessary to revive the Crimson name but seven or eight years after the unsparing prairies of Starless and Red he was wise to refocus on the song as small intelligent mobile thing in itself.

"Matte Kudasai" - phonetically it's Japanese for "Please Wait" - seems to have been Adrian Belew's baby; he writes and sings the song, though Fripp takes the instrumental lead, his guitar delay rendering his testimony hand-free; the Fripp drift is slightly too pronounced and carries a distinct air of sinister in the intro but soon glides and cries over the gentle landscape which might be the missing link between Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac and Bill Frisell's Power Tools. A ballad in the line of "North Star," sung by Daryl Hall on Fripp's Exposure two years previously, Belew's lyric is a yearning haiku. Comparisons with Don McLean were made at the time in relation to Belew's vocals, though in reality - and with the benefit of jarring hindsight - they predict Rufus Wainwright, in both grain and subject matter, to a degree which goes slightly past uncanny. The pane in the window by which she's sitting, sleeping, mingling with the pain of the rain falling outside; "she waits in the air.../she sleeps in a chair/in her sad America."

More than that, though, we can easily also pair the performance off with another spectre of that November, "White Car In Germany" by the Associates, with its similarly guitar-less guitar lines and a similar craving sustenato to Billy's - "When was a night so long?" Belew sings for a very long time, "Long like the notes I'm sending?" She's waiting for a boy like him to come into her life. The two-way mirror must give way sooner or later.

NEW ORDER: Turn The Heater On

A humid evening which had no need of additional heating, at least not in that sense; a bedroom in the growing but no less warm darkness. Unquiet student nights, nearly out of the first year, just about nearly, and New Pop at its Cortesian/Cartesian peak. The Peel show which some numbed skulls at the time felt was already slipping out of touch, but always the magic, always the essence of everything that mattered, including New Pop, and a magic song from nowhere, although I knew that really it came from everywhere.

I’ve been concernedly cagey about talking on the subject(s) of Joy Division and New Order on any of my blogs since together (and how could anyone think of their story as separate?) they are my favourite pop group and provoke thoughts and emotions too private for even (or especially) this privacy-shredding world. The Associates, yes, double ice cream cones yes, and their tragedy was to play out the Joy Division/New Order story in reverse, but New Order were the best; after all, were they not directly (if inadvertently) the cause of New Pop in the first place?

They were on the ascendant with “Temptation” in the charts of the time (and what better time for the charts?) and the Peel session received the first of its numerous airings on Tuesday 1 June 1982. We already knew that they had forced themselves past the grief barrier with “Everything’s Gone Green” – and I don’t think there will ever be a better example of that phenomenon, the pop single – and not only managed to extricate themselves from the quiet horror of mourning but also invented something new in the process.

Their version of “Turn The Heater On” helped complete the transition (and another of that evening’s session tracks, “4-8-6,” is a prototype for the definitive conclusion and beginning of “Blue Monday”). The original version appears on Torch Of Freedom, one of the less locatable of Keith Hudson albums which was probably far easier to find in seventies Manchester than it is in 2008 anywhere (a French CD issue briefly appeared in the mid-nineties and you had to be fleet and foxy to get a copy) and clearly its sentiments of “gonna beat them all, gonna beat them all” carried rather severer resonance in Jamaica. In that setting Hudson ’s pleas to “hold me” and “squeeze me” bear a literal life-and-death subtext.

New Order moved the realm of the song very naturally from the political to the personal; their take on reggae is so instinctively right in its lightness of touch that their “Turn The Heater On” glides effortlessly into their world; you notice Barney’s melodica (inspired by Augustus Pablo, that remarkable musician who turned what is generally regarded as an instrument for schoolchildren into as eloquent a vehicle for expression as Davis’ trumpet or Rollins’ tenor) tooting its islet of lament in the distance but also the very familiar rain of that string synthesiser – it’s not until several listens that you shiver at the eventual recognition that this song has the same chord sequence as “Decades.” Sumner sings without vibrato or noticeable straining; his plea for reassurance and salvation is immediately palpable, his “For I feel so cold at night” immediately striking (in slow motion) the post-Curtis ice. Around this spiritual – there truly is no other word for it – guitars cuddle up to each other from across the channel, Hook knows exactly when to arch his bass and bend it back down again, Morris’ drumming miraculous and enough for three “normal” drummers, simultaneously providing that seamless dub undertow and a straighter 4/4 rock overtone, but even “rock” seems such an intrusive word to use in this world; the detritus of the old world clanks around the corners of what New Order perceive to be their new world. “Blue Monday” would see them drive out the secondary demons for good but this told me at the aptest of times that the vital key was still in their possession.

THE CUBAN BOYS: Theme For Prim & Proper

Almost at the other end of its decade, this number has begun to sound horribly relevant again. The Cuban Boys – who were they, really, or ever, and did it matter? Peel loved them and they came within a corporate ace of getting the century’s last number one with a knowledgeable novelty hit which predated and bettered Crazy Frog. And then they released one unsatisfactory album with the unsatisfactory title of Eastwood – unsatisfactory for De La Soul Is Dead-type sample copyright clearance reasons – and vanished into the first webspace they could find in which to poke their toes.

Perhaps because of their temporary EMI connection I had it in my mind that they were really the Pet Shop Boys – I thank the reader who voiced my unspoken suspicion that the PSBs were behind “Whispering Your Name” – and “Theme For Prim & Proper,” with its melancholically aggressive harmonic reminders of “Opportunities,” appeared to confirm this, albeit very briefly. It only appeared as a seven-inch, on yellowing vinyl, in a run of a thousand so you had to be quick to pick it up; it is absent from Eastwood and the version on their MySpace page is a revised one.

Yet it seems to me their masterpiece; essentially a series of cut-ups of dialogue from the 1960 film School for Scoundrels, an adaptation from Stephen Potter’s Oneupmanship series of books - an extended parody which came dangerously close to celebrating that which it intended to debunk – set to bubbling and climactically key changing electropop, it contrasts the spent politesse of Ian Carmichael’s stock innocent patsy (his “I say, I’m terribly sorry” is the record’s leitmotif) with Terry-Thomas’ equally stock cad (how many different flavours of vile can make up the withering damnation of a term that is “hard cheese”?) and sundry voices off (“Lovely day, Henry!”). It sounds, frankly, like the Cameron and Johnson club in postgraduate conference, all sinisterly centred by Alastair Sim (as Potter)’s doomy pronouncements of the meaning and purpose of oneupmanship (“somewhere, somehow…he has become less than you”). Interspersed are a dirty sod’s “he-LLO!” (probably Terry-Thomas again) and a cry of “All his dirty rotten tricks!” from what sounds like Charles Hawtrey, but the record’s climax comes in its serial closing key ascensions where Carmichael howls “Don’t just stand there, Mr Potter, do something!” as he realises that the real shit is coming to the boil. Substitute “Mr Brown” for “Mr Potter” and we can invoke that most dated of clichés, the one about this track being recorded last week.

THE DISTRACTIONS: Time Goes By So Slow

1979 again, and Manchester again, and Factory Records again (not that I’ve noticeably done anything on BiA yet to justify all those “again”s) but I was listening to an old Cherry Red compilation over the weekend, a Double Play Cassette, no less – Seeds 1: Pop on one side, Seeds 2: Art on the other – or to be more precise I was concentrating on side one. Despite the recent anniversarial interest in C86 the fifteen songs and artists on this length of tape still seem to represent currents in British pop which haven’t been properly explored or assessed (and much could be said of the more “adventurous” acts which populate the Art side, but that’s for another day and not necessarily an imminent one) – OK, most will recognise the June Brides and the Pastels but do many, or any, people still recall, warmly or otherwise, the likes of Vital Disorders, Big Table or even Girls At Our Best! (who even scored a minor hit album)? And what, if anything, is to be said or made of this tentative explosion of slacking youth, all of whose protagonists are now steadily hovering around the 50 mark?

I quickly noted how the female-led groups (including an atypical Television Personalities track) have generally proved the most durable and interesting, and how the Wild Flowers (semi-Goth types) spelled doom; the loathsome late eighties migraine-inducing treble-only drum sounds and so forth. But “Time Goes By So Slow” continues to stand alone. The five Distractions remain difficult to pin down; the single suggests a multiplicity of future options – the anxious rush of their rhythms suggests an OMD had they pursued the guitar rather than synth route – but above that “Time…” is one of the great post-breakup pop songs.

Singer Mike Finney, sounding like a less twinkly, more rough-hewn Roddy Frame, walks the streets and wonders why she left, why her laughter still remains; like Del Shannon, he busily mourns within his self-contained/self-destructive world, and like “Runaway” it’s raining (“It falls like tears/Of wasted years”). There is a slight beacon of hope in the song’s opening ascending rainbow of guitars and synth (bearing a slight relation to that other 1979 pop song as model of knowingly self-destructive world, Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now,” before diverting onto a different B road altogether) but the monologue, though addressed to the singer’s departed, is strictly internal and internalised.

In the second verse Finney manages to invent Jarvis Cocker, and his Manchester might even have been Cocker’s Sheffield if he’d had the chance; he puts her statue up in Albert Square “but Albert just won’t do/I don’t need him but you!” He pledges to drive past on a Saturday but can’t avoid the truth that “Just like my own/Your face has turned to stone.” It’s unclear whether she’s gone for good or actually departed this world, and the ambiguous interspace between the two is where the song finds its greying oxygen – as Finney wonders why she had to go with slowly increasing anger, some mocking “la la la”s enter behind, or beneath, him.

Then everything drops out except the drums and bass (and shortly thereafter, synchronised synth), representing the void in which he now finds himself; guitar returns for a brief unison, then a solo of sorts, but the despondency doesn’t diminish when Finney returns for the final refrain and we are finally left with a question mark of a synth chord and a bass slowly ascending to…heaven? They went on to release one album, 1980’s perfect Nobody’s Perfect on Island Records, which has yet to resurface on CD. But many still consider them the overlooked jewel in Factory’s crown, and “Time Goes By So Slow” remains one of the most singular of all singles.

JOHN OTWAY: Bunsen Burner

America has Jonathan Richman; we got John Otway. A successful thirty-year career as an unsuccessful singer/songwriter; he's to be envied. He bounced out of Aylesbury and onto the top of his guitar speaker (which he promptly fell off) while bashing out "Cor Baby That's Really Free" with erstwhile partner Wild Willy Barrett and sneaked into the Top 30 (produced by Pete Townshend) as 1977 jerked to its end. And that was it as far as "hits" were concerned; he did masochistic electropunk ("Headbutts," 1981), pained five-and-a-half minute ballads backed by a 100-piece orchestra ("Geneve," 1978), undercut Tom Jones twice in the nineties with individualistic covers of "Delilah" and "Green Green Grass Of Home" and even nearly got a second Top 40 hit with "DK 50/80" - in collaboration with two-drummer Oxford punk band Ken Liversausage - which sounds like Julian Cope being run backwards through sand dunes in Dunwich.

But nothing hit as such, until he decided in 2002 that he'd quite like a second proper hit to mark his 50th birthday. How his fanbase put this into action is well documented in his Greatest Hits compilation of the same year (which characteristically has subsequently gone out of print) but it's worth noting that the notion of marrying his chemistry lesson as sexual metaphor poem "Bunsen Burner" to the tune and beat of "Disco Inferno" originated with one Barry Upton, formerly a member of a later edition of the Brotherhood of Man and later producer of Steps and also Otway's occasional keyboard player. It was maybe the most welcome and applauded of all British singles chart hypes and it got him back into the charts - all the way to number nine, some 18 places better than "Really Free" had managed - and back onto TOTP in time for his half century.

"Bunsen Burner" is utterly charming and easily one of the most good humoured of all British hit singles. "I'm an ALCHEMIST baby!" he groans excitedly in his Home Counties Gone West voice at the beginning and proceeds to do every chemistry double metaphor in the book (although the poem was originally written to help his daughter with her chemistry lessons at school) - "check out what's in the test tube baby," "feel the heat of the naked flame" etc. In the middle eight there's an exciting conjunction of electronic white noise and "BURNIIIIIIIIING!" female backing vocals and his increasingly febrile intonation of the hook "Science tells us love is just a chemical reaction in the brain" is delivered in tones of John Noakes eagerness. "I know what I'm doing, I am a chemist," he grins just before the record is curtailed by an explosion of covalent bonding. When's the third coming?

BARRY ANDREWS: Win A Night Out With A Well Known Paranoiac

It's easy to forget what a creepy, crypto-apocalyptic time 1980 was in Britain - the beer breath whispers, the conspiracies, the slumbering rightward lurch - indeed it's almost as easy to forget as the same factors occurring in Britain in 2008 (and probably every year in between - see Iain Sinclair's London Orbital for the post-nuclear, stick-throwing shutdown) - but this song captures the butterfly-knife stomach feeling of that age more effectively than most. Andrews was XTC's Eno (and it's therefore apt that he should have turned up on Eno's recent Another Day On Earth); he left the group at an early stage, worked on Robert Fripp's Exposure (and was a member of Fripp's shortlived League of Gentlemen group) and eventually co-founded Shriekback. "Win A Night Out..." was the B-side of his solitary solo single (and presumably the sales figures precluded progression to a full album). The A-side "Rossmore Road" is a curious, quavery tribute to a dull rat run street the wrong side of Marylebone, down which the 139 (from West Hampstead to Waterloo) bus now runs; a "dolls' house shop" (i.e. DHSS office) at the junction with Lissom Grove, sundry Belisha beacons and traffic lights, public buildings, quasi-threatening references to Regent's Park, Baker Street and Balcombe Street, with the anti-matter refrain of "All humming now."

But "Win A Night Out" is extraordinary. Across a fractured quasi-jazz background (both Fripp and Patti Palladin seem to have been involved, amongst many others) Andrews' craven narrowed wideboy Cockney narrative runs down the hinge of the rusted spine of real Britain; he meets up with her in a country pub ("where the landlord sports moustaches, just like Jimmy Edwards, and the crisps and pickled onions on the bar are numberless as the stars at night") but his reverie is interrupted by "two neckless men in blazers and cravats" who inform them, in about 200 words, that this is not the place for them (general summing up: you are inferior, bend your head "and furthermore, you worm, there is mud on your plimsolls"). He tries to convince them of his Cuban Royal Family ancestry but they intone "in this life, it's either U or non-U and if I were you I'd make myself BLOODY SCARCE!" Just as they are on the verge of duffing him up he swings into the damaged Dixieland of the song's chorus.

The next verse finds them in "an Iberian eatery in the West End." His stifled scream of "we could have so much fun" suggests imminent electric chair status. He talks about wanting to discuss Communism and chart positions but ends up telling a dodgy joke in a very loud voice; the child at the next table cries and her dad promises her that her crypto-Fascist Uncle Roger is on his way to "make quite sure he doesn't upset any little girls...little GIRLS?...any more..." and again it's back to the chorus.

Even the Sunday morning bed is no refuge; they are intruded upon by her mum and dad, who have been secretly taping their doings ("he's looking DAAAAAAAAAAANGEROUSLY pale!"), and moreover her mum is wielding an Army surplus bush knife ("All," observes Andrews soberly, "is not too groovy"). Then his partner starts laughing at him as her mum is about to "get stuck in...just below the navel." As the music hurtles dangerously towards freeform chaos it suddenly recedes..."I wake up...and yeah...it was all a dream."

But he has woken up to something worse. "I'm really in a hospital bed...there is a smell of formaldehyde in the air..." Swastika-clad doctors fiddling with the brain of a sheep, and then he realises with obliterating dread that "I can't feel me legs! And the shape of the bed isn't my shape at all! And I wanna cry out but I can only bleat!" Which takes us into the final chorus and fadeout; a jolly romp (as with so much in this period, definitely post-Dury) about the unutterable. Its six minutes and 19 seconds seriously scared me at the time and still sound uncomfortably contemporary.

THE BOB CORT SKIFFLE GROUP: Six Five Special

My wife has suggested an unlikely but I think viable comparison point for skiffle; the frantic but near weightless rhythm, the rhetorical/ritual repetition of phrases and gestures until fascination hypnotically takes precedence over meaning – it’s the unacknowledged grandparent of House music! In that context, Cort’s original recording of “Six-Five Special” – as opposed to the tidied up version by Don Lang and his Frantic Five used as the theme tune for the similarly named BBC “pop” show – is the D-Mob/”We Call It Acieed” of its day; a transcription of essentially American gestures (though with common British roots; New Pop in the case of House, Scottish folk and dance music in the case of skiffle) into contemporary British terminologies and tropes.

This didn’t always work as well as skiffle’s practitioners might have hoped; hear, for instance, Cort’s recasting of Chuck Berry’s “School Day” in an effort to make it into a tea chest manifesto (“Hail, hail, skiffle and roll!” doesn’t quite carry the same resonance). But his “Six Five Special” works because of assured control of the song and style’s motors; the Home Counties “over the points” leitmotif in a Britain where travel, regardless of distance or destination, was considered nonpareil exoticism (and still was three decades later; see It’s Immaterial’s “Driving Away From Home” with its melancholy refrain of “Thirty miles or more.” Thirty miles? Gentlemen, Edwin Starr WALKED 25 of them!). Cort, meanwhile, is bursting with purple wax darts of expectation; he needs her to get to the station, and everything and everyone is working to speed its flow, including Cort himself, with his teeteringly near-sensual “wah wah”s (echoed by strident whistleblowing lead guitar George van Eps block chords), his capturing and chewing of the word “bright” and his astonishing growl of “HARRRRRRRD!!” as the brakes come down (we sense EXACTLY what he means).

The ritual story is that the make do and mend/air raid shelter worthiness of skiffle was eventually leapfrogged by the feral fuckability of rock ‘n’ roll, though in reality both happily co-existed in the charts until young Cliff and the Parnes stable decided to increase the post-Elvis stakes for a Britain no longer reliant on ration books and pressingly preserved lines of string. And, in truth, whatever one’s perspective on the Colyer/Donegan chicken/egg story, Lonnie (with the inescapable aid of his nominal engineer but actual producer Joe Meek) was able to push it forward into a quasi-surreal future; put his “Gamblin’ Man” or “Cumberland Gap” (both number ones in 1957) next to the affable growls of Wally Whyton and the Vipers and it’s clear that, as good as the latter are, the former constitute something beyond “good” (though the lineages are still profuse; the lonesome, isolated wail of Nancy Whiskey amidst the goods trains of Chas McDevitt’s Skiffle Group predate the lonesome diva wails which would characterise post-House dance and rave). Still, “Six Five Special” represents a decisive and rather merry turning down of the coin with “pay for the war” inscribed on both sides.

THE BUG: Freak Freak

An idle early summer Saturday afternoon in London ; time to join some more dots and try to make a greater sense of the totality. For some reason I find myself in Walthamstow and want to get back West without the increasingly dreary grind of going through “London” itself, however long it takes, but then I’m in no hurry. The 34 bus, going all the way to Barnet Church, from affable insolvency to uncaring prosperity; a timetable which optimistically gives an optimal journey time of 40 minutes. I settle in at the front, top deck, like the gawky tourist I suspect I still am after 23 years in this city, and we’re off.

Up Hoe Street, towards hard-trying suburban lanes which look better in the yellowing light; eventually proceeding towards the Crooked Billet roundabout (and the day’s bookends turn out to be Crooked; several hours later, on another bus, streaking through the paceless gates of North Finchley, I pass a small, shaded and possibly shady crescent named Crooked Usage); the options are for Chingford or Edmonton, and the bus takes the North Circular westward – the parallel mirror to the A40 entrails coming in from the other side but always greyer, wider, somehow less real. When you come into London from the West the flat emptiness can be accounted for by the RAF base at Northolt (but it’s all deceit; slope off at Greenford or Perivale, turn a seldom ventured corner and suddenly glimpse the city spread out beneath you like a rusty mat), but from the Eastern side the featurelessness is the feature itself. On this cut of the motorway we are bisected by two huge reservoirs, but you’d never know it from looking; instead, a forlorn mega-Sainsbury’s with no apparent means of reaching there by motor or foot; assorted, isolated tower blocks daubed in hopelessly hopeful primary coloured dots – is there such a thing as Tottenham at the other incline of this valley?

In the far distance, mere specks of the city; when you come out of Walthamstow Central bus station Canary Wharf blinks in your lap on the near horizon, but out here any notion of “ London ” is mere theory. There are glimpses of the NatWest Tower/Gherkin charged congestion; too far to touch, but it’s hardly as though this is a refuge. Where do they come from, these isolated citizens at unlikely bus stops along the motorway, with no evident cluster of habitation?

Further onwards there is slender proof of a “city”; the Angel Edmonton junction, with its unappealing parades of service shops and its traffic lights which allow one car through every six minutes. Attempts at greenness as we near the North Middlesex Hospital , but this ghost is quickly given up and back into the white, horizon-free expanse. We skirt the top (or bottom?) end of Green Lanes and so far I have seen nothing to disprove the notion that this is a Sunday rather than a Saturday. To my right, unseen, Southgate , never quite engaging with my vision or conscience; and it is with some surprise that the bus abruptly arrives at Arnos Grove with its famous Art Deco Piccadilly Line station. Both Art Deco and the Piccadilly Line I kneejerkingly associate with the West, and I feel as though I’ve crossed a boundary, but there’s little in Arnos Grove to suggest opulence (and in any case the bigger, bolder Art Deco stopoff at Park Royal is far worthier of idolatry); a scant process of shops for an age which hasn’t quite been told that shops are no longer needed. Next to the tube station, a markedly enlarged car park, maybe for daytrippers wanting to take its picture (but Southgate station itself! Or Hanger Lane , even though it’s on the Central Line and you have to cross 27 different roads to reach there!).

After Arnos Grove, however, the land turns greener and more obviously opulent; through the dim beams of New Southgate and we’re out in the sticks now right enough, the large, gobbling drives of Whetstone, Peter Sellers’ old stamping ground, N20 but a fading feeling of Londonness and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll get back home for the evening. But once you get to the shops of Whetstone’s whitened High Road you realise that the systematic desolation becomes increasingly subtler (as opposed to the derelict shutters which now constitute the majority of the non-tourist, Mornington Crescent end of Camden High Street); vacant or closing shops, a Waitrose which looks transposed from 1971 Blantyre, a huge and open but largely empty grocer’s called DEMOS across the way, a couple of interesting looking charity shops (but interesting enough to come all this way again?).

The roads start to tend towards the vertical and swift turning, is there a London out there at all? We are now heightening up towards High Barnet, Hertfordshire, the borough of Enfield, and the traffic slows up; a herd of red shirts gives it away – it’s local football passage (but in July? Out of season?). The crowd is affable but disinterested. The bus crawls patiently up the incline (and incline’s the word; this is where all those GOLF SALE banners will go to retire once Westminster Council’s outlawed them, banished them from the metropolis, just as the Boris-loving suburban burghers of these parts have banished socialism, fearful of that winking anti-jewel sitting in the middle of their rim called a city) and as we approach the Clochemerle walkabouts of Barnet town centre it’s time to call a halt and get back. Shops shut but pubs doing brisk business.

I don’t quite know (yet) what, if anything, I learned from this “day out” (nor from the journey back, which took me through the rich emptiness of Finchley and Hendon via the beaming apocalypse of Brent Cross to the foreboding bustle of Willesden and Harlesden, and even then onward, onward, a surprisingly long way onward – I didn’t recall my journeys home from the Mean Fiddler back in the 1989 or 1992 day being quite as long as this – until I returned to a London that I recognised) but folded together there was – well, not quite the hint of imminent ends, not really the smell of fear (but then it was the daytime, early evening, in the summer, and sunny) but the old story of continuing, affable and irreversible decline, a system on its diplomatically dying fall. Naturally, taking the same journey at, say, two in the morning would have presented a considerably harsher story, but the question “ London – what is it for?” was more prominent than any of the yawningly stretching skies I encountered.

A soundtrack to all this? Given the schoolgirls furiously freestyling to some ragga mp3 shoutouts on the 326 coming back from High Barnet towards Brent Cross (Lady Saw, I think) I’d say that London Zoo is in 2008 London just about unimproveable. I approached the record, as yet unheard, with some cynicism; yes, Kevin Martin, a mover and chancer who’s been around as long as (or longer than) I have, ageing anti-Lothario trying to hitch a chase on the outsourcing dubstep ambulance, yes, stock Wire rave review, yes, tell me something I don’t know already, yes, life is shit but it’s not ALL shit, is this noise noisome enough to annoy?

All of which preconceptions shatter to bits the instant Tippa Irie storms in over Cristal-clear military two-step beats on “Angry,” ranting with splendid spleen and in perfect time against the collapsing world, or at least the world collapsing in on his people – allegations of suicide bombing, the determined drowning of post-Katrina New Orleans, Tippa’s even more determined double-time toasting, the dead tone which hovers in the middleground all the way through – and it sounds like pop (I am not terribly sure that London Zoo IS pop but at least it acknowledges its presence), direct, dichromatic and dichotomy-free.

London Zoo is best approached as a series of Weegee (reprocessed by Marc Atkins) snapshots of the city at its various points of potential explosion; Ellroy paced, brisk, abrupt sentences, communiques from border posts, all incensed and/or confused. Flowdan from Roll Deep reports from not far from where my bus journey started, his Johnny Cash baritone solemnly spelling out all possible syllables of doom (the “nurse, hearse, black” mantras which climax “Skeng”), and from the South, Ricky Ranking, associate of Roots Manuva (whose Run Come Save Me is an equally stark and eloquent portrait of a declining 21st century London, seeking release via elliptical, quasi-surrealist leaps), who is cast as the Voice of Reason (even as SW9 and SW2 crumble like outdated Wagon Wheels around him); he is given the final word in the long, ominously luxurious unfolding finale of “Judgement,” the warning of the madness, the vampires (Bram Stoker, Procter & Gamble, Purfleet, the Dartford Crossing, the chemical genesis of the M25, the ultimate escape from urbanisation, literally a “sub” option). There is Voodoo Queen, exceptional in a way in which only someone who can remember ’81-2 first hand could be; her “Insane” is like the Slits doing Gnarls Barkley – is she going crazy or is it just the world going mad? Eventually her voice constructs a self-diaspora and divides in two, again coming, or stumbling, together with a laughing, misworded and mistimed (and therefore infinitely superior) reading of “Mad World.”

Even the relief is for the most part superficial; on “You & Me” Roger Robinson, deceptively light of tone, plays the part of the High Barnet High Tory, interested only in protecting himself and his, even as the river sweeps the streets away into their own watery burial as the electric currents of the musical backing switch on and off with slowly increasing franticity. And, where targets need to be struck, Superape (so much more impressive and to the point here than he was on his Burial cameo, or on his own debut album) unleashes the furiously articulate “Fuckaz” wherein he bloodily damns all patronising phonies as well as the oppressors, correctly seeing in both parties the aim to deter him and his people from bettering and improving their status in life. His intensity is unmissable, his venom justified and incendiary – though the track’s most unsettling moment comes after he’s ended his diatribe and is answered by a choir of unholy, stuttering ghosts as the rhythm keeps stopping and stealthily restarting; and note his constant reiterations of "Believe me!" and "Trust me!" with the roar of "LOOK AT THE STATE OF YOUR OWN HOME!!"

But “Freak Freak” is Martin on his own, the album’s only instrumental and the perfect accompaniment to the carapace of expansive vacancy I viewed on Saturday, moving in and out of consciousness, touching upon glitch, dub and ambient with equal skill and purpose and perhaps this represents Martin’s real coming into the light as an artist; given a contextual purpose for his anger, his sense of space has finally come into play – the radicalism is still vibrant but now we see discernible causes and even (in “Judgement”) potential solutions. It’s perhaps telling that while working on this record Martin was effectively living in his studio – rents were too high (the stage being prepared for a London where eventually no one will be allowed to live except celebrities, international tax dodgers and hedge fund managers, if we’re talking Crooked Usage) and the project had to live and breathe, even if more easily than he could – but with London Zoo there is the feeling, which I haven’t noticed on any of his previous records (whatever their other virtues – Techno-Animal’s “Dead Man’s Curve” is in its post-DJ Scud 2001 way one of the singles of the decade), that this is both something that he had to say and that he has given deep thought to how he wants to say it. Perhaps we have both had to come a long way, in our own ways, in recent years, but the expression of a crushingly oppressed culture (even if it took a white man to bring it all together – Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, never forget) is comparable to that demonstrated on something like Archie Shepp’s “Portrait Of Robert Thompson” – the freeplay howls “WHY?” and the historical context (“Portrait Of A Kiss,” Sousa marches, Tippa Irie) suggests “because.”

THE BROTHERS JOHNSON: Strawberry Letter 23

Another 1977 which I’m not sure has still been properly understood; another hot summer, NME front covers about punk but also about Zen and sunglasses, my dad yelling at me to get the hell out into the street and the sunshine - in both situations, you learn to keep yourself to yourself – wandering circuitously around the village as though it were the world, searching in vain for familiar faces from school, realising they were absent, off into their own, or their families’, world, unresolvable crushes. Dreams of hearing a kiss from a lover…was this really 1977?

Was it really 1977 (that knowing chuckle of “is it cool? Is it cool?”), with the carousel gliding from channel to channel, fading out, and then…harpsichords and words which sounded ten years old but also an endless spaciousness of rhythm, bass, drums and guitar all playing distant triple ping pong on the planet Venus, and then a Rundgren “Hello, my love” with references to red magic satin, west purple shower bells and tea in the garden – but, as in “Flowers In The Rain” by the Move, the real rain is endless. Not that this lover cares; orange birds, green-clad river cousins, blue flowers and cherry clouds, and always the music you’ll never be able to hear on an iPod; the world as it thrives and breathes despite everything we throw at it.

Because he’s with his Other, he’s empathically free, as the curtains of the song slowly draw even more open to reveal the drift of the glide, over the sea (even then I was dubious that I’d find salvation in my home village); he has this letter scented with strawberries (“Strawberry letter 22” to which letter 23 is a euphorically pink reply), and after every fancied colour imagery of 1967 has decorated his path he abandons the need for words altogether, the harpsichord tinkling the main melody and deep but lush “oooooooohhhhhhh”s speakers of kite drifting happily around the lover’s mauve field with a sudden burst of floridity as guitar erupts from the sea in a kettle of idealised ecstasy, echoing its external rotation into and of itself before drums signal a return to the placidly plaid dream.

As the song itself advises, playgrounds will laugh, and no doubt they would have done if I’d tried to explain this unforeseen magic in any “realistic” consideration of 1977’s music – you learn to keep such things to yourself – and Quincy ’s expert deployment of echo and space was a path he’d been patiently pursuing for at least the previous fifteen years. Only later, in a different century and nearing the end of a different life, did I hear the original on Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information, recorded in 1971; an extraordinary bedroom tape of an indie-soul-God knows what fusion album which would long since have been worshipped had it been early Beck or Ariel Pink (and without the advantage of subsequent technology), and its procedurals are different (beyond rudimentary drum machines – but then, 1971!) but its aims the same. And now I’m able to talk about the magic and the associated pattern. I no longer need to keep anything to myself.

SUPERCHUNK: Skip Steps 1 & 3

A boom and a curtain of swooping blades unveil this example of a strain of indie guitar rock that seems to have become lost to pop follow-up. No Pocky For Kitty was Superchunk's second album, and the North Carolina four dipped back into contented obscurity after briefly being a music press future in the very early nineties, but "Skip Steps 1 & 3" has a three-dimensional attack to its brushes - together with its similarly sliding vocals - which fix it in the firm, immediate post-Daydream Nation "tradition." Albini recorded it, but production "credits" on the sleeve were given to bassist Laura Ballance, who "sat in the right chair" albeit with "eyes closed."

With its increasingly frantic, popping cries of "Why don't you move?" and climactic refrain of "you've been sucking wind so long," the song is an impassioned cry to action and decision - remember that this just about preceded Nevermind and everything that allowed and condemned - from bop-boggling Mac McCaughan tearing at the cocktails of if only and yes but. "Well it's your free time in the back of your skull," he observes, "and that's fine for now, but what comes after?" The propulsion is pop but the threat or promise of immolating noise is always in the middleground, even though it is forever on poise and never forces itself forward. The overall feeling is not one of frustration but of overdue joy, and Sloan, among others, took up some of this slack from thereonin.

GEORGE JONES: These Days (I Barely Get By)

If Deep Soul is a state of mind then it can be found anywhere and in anyone, even though some are better at articulating it than others. Like sportsmen, the best - or at least, the most "soulful" - of singers frequently turn out to be those who don't appear to be trying or sweating as hard as others; it's the old faithful of matches or races being won by those who try less, or seem to need the victory less.

Listening to George Jones it's hard to pinpoint exactly where his magic occurs, although it is obviously present. He never seems to do much except sing in what is more or less his normal, used-for-speaking voice. There are no vibratos, no acrobatic grandstanding, and yet, through its slow, painful patience, his voice punctumises you dead centre.

"These Days" is a tacit case in point. Recorded towards the end of 1974, two weeks before Christmas Day and two days before he walked out on Tammy "for good," it presents us with a picture of Jones seemingly willing his own premature and ruinous end. It is, essentially, the same old same old, except that his woes methodically stack up like an especially shaky house of bamboo cards. And he of course has his unobtrusive techniques for communicating this to us; the extended "aching" in the first line illustrates both his early frustration and the hint of Lear-esque descent to come. The last thing he feels like doing is working, but he'll give it a try, even if he has to thumb all the way - his car's in the shop, but by the glassy stress he puts on the word "shop" the implication is that it's there to stay because he can't afford to pay the labour costs. No clearcut city like London or Toronto, this, with its convenient buses and tubes.

The music is standard Sherrill-issue C&W waltz grief; a choir of angels even materialises at the start of the second verse in expectation as Jones experiences further microhumiliations - he has to walk all the way home from work and it rains all the way. So sodden with self-pity is he that he doesn't even realise that he's answered his own question: "My wife left and didn't say why," he says, before immediately noting "She laid all our bills on the desk in the hall."

The sorrow grows more constant and gruelling. He puts his last two dollars on his favourite horse; it loses by a nose and he cries, but puts all the crying weight through the word "nose." Then his boss comes and talks to him; we fear a fiery firing, but he's as mournful as George and suggests that "come winter we'll all be laid off."

It is at this point that he collapses, weeping on high on the extended "wanna" of "I wanna give up, lay down and die." He makes it clear that his wife's departure is the main source of his pain, but at the end turns to the fourth wall and proclaims in a curious Sandringham Palace-via-Nashville tone that "oh, these days, one barely gets by," fully aware that he has worked hard at building one's own crucifix.

MONCHY Y ALEXANDRA: Hoja En Blanco

On Saturday I found a CD I thought I'd never see again. As usual, I stumbled across it without especially looking for it - I was literally down on my knees to assess the contents of the dusty bottom shelves of the shop - I blinked curiously at the spine, wondering where I might have seen it before, and when I pulled it out it took me a little while to work out what it was, whereupon I uttered a silent gasp.

You see, this compilation, prepared and released by Latin House DJ/lawyer John Armstrong in 1999, I had bought back then following an astonishing DJ mix set which Armstrong performed on the John Peel s how. The idea of Revolucion was to illustrate the wide array of styles then coming to roost under the general roof of Latin House, from its origins to its future. It was and is one of the most immensely danceable of all albums, but then, as you know, things happened in 2001 and I didn't want to dance anymore and couldn't envisage ever dancing again, so I let it go. Inevitably it drifted out of print (probably was out of print by 2001) and so it became a ghost for the next seven years; something I recalled with increasing vagueness but there was also a subtly increasing urge to have and hear it again. I've no idea whether this copy I've now found is the exact same copy I sold to the exact same branch of MVE back then, but the important thing (and something that you do not get from Amazon or ebay or the chainstores) was the serendipity of finding it again now, at a time when I most assuredly am dancing again, as if it were too waiting for my ghosts to subside and settle into history.

It still sounds remarkable and hugely danceable. I note the general tone of local pride - vital when you consider the decades/centuries of shit that the Puerto Ricans havev had to go through - in things like "Todo Puerto Rico" by the Bad Boy Orchestra (the same writer/producer responsible for 2 In A Room, who also appear on the compilation, a very long way from "Wiggle It"). Nuevo merengue band Fulanito are explosively brilliant, Public Enemy with accordions; their "Guallando" fulfills fhe fantasy of where the electro-merengue track on Duck Rock might have led.

But "Hoja En Blanco" by seemingly squeaky clean Santa Domingo boy/girl duo Monchy y Alexandra remains its most remarkable track. In his sleevenote Armstrong refers to the song as a harbinger of "bachata house" - bachata being a form of Latin song structured somewhere between bolero and blues - "a completely new style that's my tip for Latin's cutting edge this summer." The poignancy of hindsight.

It still sounds like nothing else ever, and yet like a lot of things thrown together in an Argos blender. It begins with huge, gory rave raspberries and beats as a maniacal voice yells out "grossio millennio - check it out!" Fuzzed Eno synth wobbles mixes with Nigerian hi-life guitar with the swift addition of an arsenal of live Latin percussion (always Latin House's vital heartbeat); the same maniacal voice yells in a halfway house between Rachid Taha and Joe Strummer and then the most elegant and graceful of bachata ballads (but still with the propulsive beat) makes its entry, the guitar/rhythm relations now closer to Cuba. The song plays fairly straight until the beats begin to gather gradual intensity again and suddenly (on the hinge of "hasta la LU-na!") we are back in 2 Unlimited on steroids territory, pinball whizzes, screams (especially the one at 2:29-2:30). Vintage avant-rave anti-chords ricochet at 1000 bpm while a frantic Abbott and Costello rap exchange skids into being, streaking across a nailbed of staccato consonants. Finally it's back to the central song, again sung and performed beautifully, before the rave coda adds a gasometer blink of a full stop. I'd love to think what might have happened if this had topped global charts rather than "Macarena" - but these 15 tracks are among the most vital you can listen and dance to in this age, a decade on...a lifetime on...and it's time, thankfully, to dance again.

IAN DURY AND THE BLOCKHEADS: Dance Of The Screamers

The song was written from the point of view of a man stricken by polio, of course, but here was the point where Dury's characteristic sympathy for the societal underdog turned to revengeful rage. There was still "Spasticus Autisticus" to come a couple of years later, of course, but "Screamers" possesses a calm terror which threw any notion of amiability out of the window. 1979's Do It Yourself, despite its multiple wallpaper design covers, was a nocturnal, inward-looking and inwardly bleeding record, the precise opposite of its contemporaneous single "Reasons To Be Cheerful Part 3" (which doesn't appear on the album at all), and "Dance Of The Screamers" was an anti-anthem in which Dury finally loses his patience and stands for his constituency, everyone in "the last place in the queue," the ugly, the small, the useless ("they haven't got the where-with-al" he hisses syllable by syllable), the metaphors for unattainable "normality" ("We went and missed the ending," "We never quite caught the bus"), the stripping down of pretence ("It's hard to be a hero...when you've had your helmet cracked"). Throughout Dury dots his rueful venom with a string of ironic endearments - "angel," "sailor," "handsome," "sweetie" - which he knows will never be reciprocated; those excluded from society and by extension life, those with no desire to fly high, those cursed from birth ("Some of us are born like this, while others got it by the yard") to a third class of the third class existence ("Some of us get nervous...when you look us in the eye," "We're ever so pathetic...we know quite well that we try too hard") and reasons why some of us need to write in order to communicate what has to be communicated, or provide a key to open the door and get past the barrier.

The music plays out like quasi-sterile jazz-funk (with Chaz Jankel, sterility could never be an issue) within the club while outside, right at the back of the queue, Dury unleashes horrifying but perfectly pitched and timed screams ("Cold Turkey"/"The Boiler" level) and Davey Payne's alto takes over for the howl of howls, screaming, honking, slurring, gurgling like the weirdo the bouncers will never let in, or the world for that matter, trying to communicate, breaking his back and his lungs in an attempt to prove his case, but the music drives and sparkles on regardless. "Screamers" is not a model for encouragement; it rubs the listener's face in the undodgeable dirt of facts as they are faced - but it is a roaring, atonal plea for love, or at the very least understanding. The inbetweenies, as Dury describes on the album's best known song, locked out of the palace as Thatcher swept in, determined to sort out and keep out all of the unsorted, or unsortable. But Dury, as all of us must, triumphs by virtue of his art as means of expression. Given half a chance.

ORNETTE COLEMAN: Beauty Is A Rare Thing

I’ve been bombarded with emails (OK, I had one email) asking me why I haven’t “done” Pacific Ocean Blue yet and the simple answer is that I’m not sure I’m qualified to write about it; as magnificent as it is (and the extra tracks, including all the surviving material, complete and incomplete, from the Bambu sessions, make it even more magnificent than the humble, Walkman-friendly cassette reissue I bought out of Virgin in 1992 and luckily kept – younger readers may wish to consult their grandparents for full explanation of what a “Walkman” was), I feel that proper understanding of its spaces, its long, measured (or immeasurable) silences, its sudden Neptunian eruptions, can only really be gained by full immersion in its Californianess; i.e. you have to have lived in California to appreciate its sense of isolation, benign or otherwise, breathed the same atoms (or versions of them), appreciate the vastness. I think this may be one for my (Californian) wife to tackle.

Likewise, although the four members of Ornette’s 1961 quartet all arrived from different places, they were all more or less raised in Los Angeles , and “Beauty Is A Rare Thing” is a glassy pearl of sparkling hugeness which I think could only have been conceived in L.A. With Coleman’s music, but especially with his ballads, you have to think of his songs – and true songs they all are – as gently unwinding stories rather than squared-off declarations of schematic intent. Perhaps this more than anything was what warned off all the jazz boys back in that particular day; barlines occurring as naturally and unforcedly as commas or semi-colons might appear in a long, meditative piece of literature. So the top line melody of “Beauty” is a declaration – although there are no words as such, Coleman’s pauses while playing the tune suggest that, like Lester Young, he’s working very hard to remember the lyrics – which takes as long to state as nature and life require. Behind – no, around – him, Haden and Blackwell stay on bowed bass and (mostly) tuned tom toms throughout the performance, their waves quietly but intently lapping at the feet of Coleman’s soul.

There is a climactic squeak from the alto, but as this returns at reasonably regular intervals throughout Coleman’s subsequent solo we can delineate this as an aural comma or barline, punctuation to help determine the part of the exposition that we have reached. Cherry nudges in like rusty marmalade; picking up immediately on Blackwell’s New Orleans subdivisions he seems on the verge of turning the performance into calypso (and as Kevin LeGendre’s sleevenote to the CD reissue of This Is Our Music attests, I’m not the only one who spots prototype rude boy in those shades Cherry’s wearing on the cover) but catches himself and drifts between warm extended tones and quick but not frantic flurries of notes. Periodically he and Coleman lock blessings of horns and squeal, fulfilled, towards the sun.

Then Coleman re-enters, methodically unpicking and expanding the central song; Haden’s continuo suddenly responds with an impromptu, upwardly scuttling figure and he becomes more active, Blackwell always alternating between solemn tom tom circularities and gauze mists of cymbals. The music absorbs, contracts and expands with a solitary sense of community, priceless, exotic, tender, stroking, endless, green, turquoise and then aquatic blue and they combine for a sated sigh of an ending and it is, as simply as anyone could phrase or frame it, love.

DARREN STYLES: Skydiving

Happy Hardcore, the people's music that never really went away, much as other people would have liked it to; first Scooter get a number one album, then Darren Styles' double CD package Skydiving goes straight into the top five and stays there. Formerly half of the duo Breeze and Styles - much played on Peel's show, lest any of us forget, and a few of their greatest hits are dusted down here, most noticeably the magical "You're Shining" lent immense extra poignancy by Lisa Abbott's cracked, straining voice - he has proved very astute; as with Jumping All Over The World, Skydiving is a double, one CD "hardcore" and the second "commercial," and 2008 pop is unlikely to get perkier.

As I say, the music has both survived and thrived despite blanket ignorance on the part of radio and TV, the true soundtrack of the British working class, the thrust you hear leaking out of every headphone on a council estate bus, music by and for The People; it would seem that, just as the Beatles are unlikely to vanish as a talisman for some demographics, equal numbers (and in 2008 Britain it's very likely to be equal) have never forgotten rave and what it once promised and what it can yet promise, to the splendidly great inconvenience of those who would presume to run our affairs.

The remarkable thing about Skydiving is that its Stylistic division appears both schizophrenic and entirely symbiotic; several tunes appear in different versions or mixes on both CDs and each version complements the other as naturally as the two versions of "Hey Hey, My My" which bracket Rust Never Sleeps. Listen to the "commercial" "Save Me" for instance and you might wish to shake yourself from the dream of a lost Howard Jones album, only much, much better; Styles seeks not to proclaim his changing of your world but sings in a pinched, enthusiastic, vibrato-free high voice, direct and truthful. Much of the "commercial" CD pitches itself in a late eighties recreation scenario far more securely than hamfisted revivalists like Neon Neon; again, the lightness is crucial to help see the light.

The divergence and convergence are best demonstrated by the two versions of the title track. The "commercial" "Skydiving" is fairly straightforward post-eighties pop of the quality to which the likes of McFly aspire, bouncing, bounteous and always with the hint of the rave lurking behind its aquamarine corridors of life, as well as the lyrics; most of Styles' lyrics repeatedly hark back (and forward) to the credos of rave, lots of skies and heavens ("I feel like I'm drifting through the sky/Through the heavens I can hear your voice"). But, and again crucially, Styles' outlook is always optimistic and filled with renewed awe; "Skydiving" is far from the only track where he emphasises the liberation of "feeling alive"; "Take me to a place where I can dream/So we can climb up above the clouds and feel/So free" - we are on very familiar territory here.

But also: "And as we fall I'll take your hand." On the "hardcore" versions the anticipatory beats are radiantly itching to go and the song kicks into fulsome, hands up, klaxons at the ready, stadium Happy Hardcore wherein Styles sounds even freer - the great axial lurch of his warped synth bass as he steps up the power is akin to the thumb of God pressing the remote control of eternity - and it's simple to understand why this represents freedom, rather than escapism, in the turgid, pitiless Britain of these times; here's a way out, here's a laugh and a smiley face in defiance of grey compromise, here's some of the finest pop music of current times. Like New Pop, no one can truly kill this floating but rock solid spirit.

SUPERSISTER: Dona Nobis Pacem

Strange, or not, how I've recently been veering back to the curvatures of Canterbury Rock, the coils of organ awaiting encasement in fuzz bass with flyswatter drumming and the occasional winsome vocal. It all seems agreeably perpendicular and light with the continued (if seldom fulfilled; tension band wiring was the glue that held Canterbury Rock together) promise of explosions. Supersister were Canterbury Rock as viewed through a North Sea telescope; they were from the Hague, teenagers or thereabouts (but mostly, or totally, child prodigies, particularly keyboard man Robert-Jan Stips), and their non-Kentness created an airvent of new inspiration down which new breaths of retrospective influence could flow, not that they've been revived as such until very recently.

Present From Nancy, their debut album, is from 1970, and a remarkable 47 minutes' worth of homework; it essentially takes its lead from Wyatt-led song form Soft Machine, yet although there are "songs," they are liable to swerve into fuzzier, extended waters, hence "Memories Are New," a generation ahead of Stereolab, begins by swooning over spent tropes ("Forever try to live in the past" as bassist/singer Rob Van Eck sighs) before driving into 11/8 cataclysms, Stips thrashing his organ as much like a guitar as he can get away with, always stepping halfway over the tonality brink, or fussing at one wah-wah note until it curls up into a soup, balanced out by the contemplative flute of the late Sacha Van Geest, until finally organ and flute unite for a slow ice lake dance of Lytton Strachey damaged elegance. They tried singles as well; the first, "She Was Naked," essentially is the album in precis (with the calamitously brilliant line "Reveal philosophies like instant pudding"), cantering from moody musing to near-freeform detonations (and it still nearly made the Dutch top ten).

But "Dona Nobis Pacem" is perhaps the record's simplest track as well as its deepest. A semi-solemn Gregorian procedural (also bearing hints of Beaver and Krause's Gandharva in places), it steps along in ominously beautiful manner, a pacing four-note bass line providing the margin for flute and keyboards to breathe in, and out, and slower, and more regularly; a huge hug of grace to conclude the album's scattering adventures, and then, after seven or eight minutes, the tempo gradually quickens and the pitch systematically heightens as though the musicians are negotiating their way across the narrowest of drawbridges to reach a pinched, nearly airless apex. As the journey converges Stips abruptly (but logically) converts into a bouncy Blackpool Tower Ballroom/Organist Entertains melody (fooled you! Or have we?) but then persists with his extended, terminal, deep, key-ambiguous sustenato; after one final, minute scatter for seeds, a giant, stereophonic gong crash wakes us all up. Custard pie as salvation?

THE FOUR SEASONS: Look Up, Look Down

Like SMiLE, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette was the sound of a band bursting its skin; the difference being that where Brian and Van Dyke sought to burst the Beach Boys from the outside, the Four Seasons were keen to break out of what they perceived to be a teenbeat straitjacket. One difference, anyway; another important one being that, with sometime folkie Jake Holmes as the Parks to Bob Gaudio's Wilson, there was no dildo-requesting Mike Love to query procedure - all of the Four Seasons, and especially Frankie Valli, were up for the adventure.

Does it stand up? Even with the Jersey Boys-sparked interest revival I'm not sure there's yet much room for GILG to stand; currently only available as half of a rather expensive twofer (the other half being their 1966 Working My Way Back To You set), it needs proper resuscitation (as does its undervalued 1975 bookend Who Loves You? which despite three top ten singles, one of which was their only UK number one, remains out of print) and I think I may have heard "Soul Of A Woman" creeping out of an obscure nocturnal radio dial at the turn of the nineties; certainly something about this album haunted me then and continues to do so, even now that I've finally found a stand-alone CD copy (complete with minute, Jodrell Bank Grade A telescope-required-to-read reproduction of the original foldout newspaper sleeve format).

It was out of place when it came out and it still hasn't found a new place; it was released on the last day of 1968 and did as well as could be expected (i.e. completely flopped) for even then the attempted avant-garding of MoR was fighting a losing battle - Scott slowly withdrawing into himself, Jimmy Webb gamely carrying on with Richard Harris but doing rather better with Glen Campbell, the Ryan twins huge in Europe but hardly likely to fill Serious Stadia since this was of course the fork in the road; either go down the Zep road of LOUD AND HEAVY or the bedsit acoustic singer/songwriter path - even though it stands up as well as, say, the Fifth Dimension's contemporaneous The Magic Garden (another extended Webb concept) or anything by the Association (but even they were beginning to slip off the charts by the end of '68). Furthermore, it eventually turned out to be just half the story, since the chronicles of Watertown, complete with cross-lyrical references, were continued on Sinatra's Watertown album, also written and produced by Gaudio and Holmes.

The Sinatra reference sums it up; Watertown, a place which the aesthetic boom, if not surface prosperity, has passed by. Here are all the lumbered souls who would have understood "Let The Heartaches Begin" in an instant, never fashionable, striving, or is that struggling, to keep afloat, keep whatever they can of themselves before it all collapses; meanwhile, on their tinted semicircular mirror floating out upon the world, they see change and blood and it confuses them; the album's bookend setpieces, "American Crucifixion Resurrection" and "Soul Of A Woman," look alternately outward and inward, the former commencing with sombrely brash orchestrations and the chant of "the King is dead, long live the (Martin Luther) King," the latter moving from courtly baroque to "Beggin'" teen swerve via Song Cycle hanging question marks ("and so you give yourself to him...forever...") before, as a precedent to the Beach Boys' "When Girls Get Together," ushering in the symbolic mortality, the life now merging with Charles Callelo's high, quiet Unanswered Question strings...it begins with Barack and ends with Hillary?

Sometimes it strives a little too mechanically - the title track with its "Hey Jude" extended outro and anticipated battery of backwards drums, guitars etc., for instance - but it works most warmly when it aims at the microscope of everyday minutiae; the ice cream melt of tears that is "Saturday's Father" and especially "Look Up, Look Down," simultaneously the album's most conventional and radical track - sprites of memory hovering greyly around the dying home as Valli's lead, as tender and dread-filled as it has ever been, sings with calm franticity about the living death that the song's central relationship has become; she smiles at his kiss, but in truth she's gone - he's betrayed her, and he knows it, and the pull of the sliver of grievous guilt will summon the cobwebs before any rainbows have a chance to grow. Which is how a lot of people felt about things generally as 1968 solidified into 1969. At least, that's what I'm told.

THE WEB: Like The Man Said

It's ripe for revival, you know - big brassy soulful bands, without having to go down the BS&T route. Personally I can't get enough of them and wish there were more of them now. The Web? Six jazzers from Bournemouth who certainly weren't slumming but somehow managed temporary stardom on the Continent - the Hollies and the Nice supported them - and had a sizeable following over here. Listening to the extraordinary strains of their second album, 1970's Theraphosa Blondi (it's the species of spider you see on the cover), is enough to make one wonder whether we really lost something substantial when we jettisoned the chops in '76; a group both fluent enough and imaginative enough to venture into early World Music waters ("Kilimanjaro" is what ELP might have sounded like had they paid more attention to Les Baxter) as well as the more familiar soul-jazz waters and even the occasional flicker at pop stardom - see the string-laden ballad "'Til I Come Home Again Once More," written by the young Gilbert O'Sullivan.

Bands with vibes, sax and double drums - you really are not going to get fluid (in ANY sense) with Elbow or the Zutons - we need more of them, and the Web demonstrated just how much need they could inspire. Their "Sunshine Of Your Love" is dazzled into difference by Tom Harris' rollercoaster Rollins sax work (and he's not bad on flute, either, if not quite Harold McNair in overblowing terms). The absence of a keyboardist, and the general back seat reticence of the guitars, means that there's much more space in which the musicians may breathe.

There is the feeling of Lighthouse (though this horn section is simply a multitracked Harris) about their faster work, and "Like The Man Said" shows them at their best, as well as showcasing the remarkable voice of black American lead singer John L Watson, then recently demobbed from the US Air Force. "Like The Man Said"'s intro comes on like a 1964 Gerry Anderson theme tune, squared guitars and determined drums, but Watson's bizarre and unstable cabaret croon is seriously disarming and disorientating. pulling out of the hat tricks and stances which the likes of Combustible Edison would discover a quarter of a century later, the drums slowing down emphatically to echo Watson's carefully delirious joy to "be...back...home again" before a ballad tempo ensues with muted flutes and bass clarinet, Watson sounding like a baffled Engelbert newly kidnapped by Joe Meek as he ponders his uncertain future, released from the pressure of a girl every night, number one hits and so forth (after this album he went solo and the trail goes cold), before the heat incenses again and the stage is cleared for Harris' tenor to soliloquise and interact with Dick Lee-Smith's bass and Ken Beveridge's kit drums, first in a buoyant if slightly stiff swing, then into tentative bebop, followed by moves into "Fables Of Faubus" territory, but just before Harris breaks free of structure the band reach a suitable climax and reassemble for the final verse and chorus, as well as a dizzying seesaw ride of a question mark finale which then canters straight into "Sunshine Of Your Love." More of this sort of thing in 2008 would be exceptionally welcome.

FAUST/NURSE WITH WOUND: Disconnected

The knowledge of connection, yet the feeling that you've been cocooned in a separate but not displeasing world; "Disconnected" is ideal Sunday morning Walkman (or, if you must - I don't have to - iPod) listening for wandering around Chelsea Harbour. Four slabs of Faust sound undergoing manipulation under Stapleton anaesthetic, and where, say, "Lass Mich" is a thirteen-minute spring of custard pie devant-rock (a Hendrix to the Monkees of the Stereolab/NWW collaboration "Simple Headphone Mind" - is it really a dozen years old? Or more? - as Stapleton dreams his own ideal radio station amidst the jangle and the throb), the title track hovers, not necessarily threateningly but unsettlingly enough to keep you on your guard through unfamiliar terrain; the broadswards of planted grass which stretch out towards the river, the ghosts of Apprentice never-will-bes proceeding through the various gated towers of residence, Battersea's new eulogy of St Mary beaming or scowling directly at me from across the water.

The melting of assertive neo-modernity against terraced streets from 1971 Blackpool; peaceful, red, talkative, communal. The lovely clash with elements which will never quite, or quietly, fit; the exceptionally reluctant mechanical arm which has to raise, grudgingly, in order for the bus to pass through the outskirts of Chelsea Harbour, a prematurely resigned village; secretaries with enterprising boyfriends lug shopping bags through the less than gloomy dawn. Steep-ish streets which lead to Lots Road or to...Lots Road (it divides in two halfway uphill, one half veering off to the right to crawl behind the World's End Estate like a snail's telescope, the other half, over a pacific canal, towards the familiar King's Road though in truth you could wander in this beige and green jungle for months; the Lots Road Power Station, Battersea's younger and smarter cousin, blinks warily as you turn the corner, brick red against ski-slip blue - a little further uproad, demolition/reconstruction work, as yet unspecified, and you can't be sure what's being knocked down and what's being built up...

There's no hum in the air (plenty of blue, though) but "Disconnected" supplies it with nosy ease; it starts off sounding like the end of "A Day In The Life" slowly regurgitating and regrouping its particles into a solid, if subdued, whole - some muttered utterances from Jean-Herve Peron about disconnection, mostly in German - and then Fennesz drone meets disqualified gable ends, disturbed ex-docklands, vaguely queasy but not quite acidic - synths give way to eternal fleet flows of hymnal organ, a drum track far off in the distance which may be a ticking ghost; and so it continues to ebb and crescent, though is in no hurry to reach a climax - a heartbreakingly semi-dissonant five-chord guitar motif (four connected, then a pause and a final full stop) floats in and out of its steely skies like an elusive kiss, now the sound fulsome and alive (where's that muted bugle coming from and does it even exist?), now transient and maybe also transparent beyond the realms of tactility; a depeopled wharf teeming with hidden life. Peron returns at the end for an observational bookend, and then and only then do the clanking shards of former industry take Christmas tree precedence, a heartbeat restored, a life renewed, and as I fade into roads King's and Fulham - and towards the long-undervisited Earl's Court, a place to which I'm habitually drawn when life looks set to start again - I once more realise that this city I've known and breathed for fully 23 years has tricked me, as always; and that I still don't really know it, but only for the purpose of the fun and joy we will have in learning, as we have to keep on doing.

INSPIRAL CARPETS WITH MARK E. SMITH: I Want You

The talk has all been about the disorientated ecstasy, the giddily weightless unreality which trickles through one's body and mind like microcurrents of non-static euphoria when one is in love and is loved back - the dizzy flotations of MBV, the symbiosis between fulfilled voice and relentless, unchanging machine cogs which powers "I Feel Love." And maybe this sneaks in too, even though I can already visualise Mark curling his Sykes nose in professed affront at the mere thought of his singing "love songs."

But this "I Want You" is about the urge, the rush and the secondary and tertiary urges which dazzle one into pursuance and acceptance. I never really shared a pop bunk with the Inspiral Carpets; I liked the slogans and the cows and the coolers and the washing powder briskness of their liveliness but their music rarely seemed to get elevated beyond the level of merely acceptable. Granted, "This Is How It Feels" was an important reminder that the "Mad" in Madchester could stand for worse things as well as better, but elsewhere it was largely efficient early 1966 beat group stuff, too easily what people thought the Teardrop Explodes sounded like (especially with Tom Hingley's more stentorian Julian Cope of a vocal style).

Yet "I Want You" is a pursuit of lasting ecstasy (that is, without a capital "E"), ribbing and speeding like no Inspirals song did before or afterwards; the broken barriers, the white knuckle ride, a chase perhaps a little too hard set to be comfortable ("The chance of defeat is not in my nature"), but the band is all fused into one rush tour steam train of activity; guitars and organs indistinguishable, drums skidding like toothbrushes on ice.

Over this we get the megaphoned punctum of Mark E Smith, finally getting a Top 20 hit and a TOTP appearance, crinkling his throat up, almost playing the part of an older and wiser Madchester veteran commenting like a grumpy dad or a renewed youth on what he's hearing and seeing, diving in or out of the song like a jagged angelfish, frequently crashing into Hingley's vocal and especially into the choruses, drawling icicle whimsy about rumours of illness circulating, "singing" or at least chanting along with the verses without recourse to adherence of bar lines, mumbling about "a course" and "of course," proclaiming his disgust at the supposedly sincere usury of the Dutch East India Company, reminding us whose side "we" should be on, at one point giggling, at the key point (viz. the end) barking "Shut up!" and it's more than enough to turn white knuckles into blackcurrants; a phenomenal classic of bipolar pop, the graceful collapse into the back garden of chaos, the Carpets' greatest moment, shouting and speeding into the best possible 1994.