Maruga Booker turned up at Woodstock in 1970 as Tim Hardin’s bongo player. But at some point during the weekend, he wandered into a temporary ashram and came out converted by the Swami Satchidananda.
My favourite single track of 2009 thus far, as I mentioned in last week’s Boredoms “Super Roots 10” blog, is the Lindstrøm mix of that band’s “Ant 10”. Good news, then, that the Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas’ new album turned up a few days later.
Perhaps as a response to the American psych-folk scene, over the past few years there’ve been a handful of British bands who’ve sought to channel the late-‘60s/early-‘70s folk-rock scene. Most of them, unfortunately, have been more or less worthy but misfiring. Trembling Bells, though, are a big exception.
Hopefully, you’ve been following our updating playlist on the brand new Uncut Twitter. It seems to be working now so that, when I post a new blog, it automatically puts a link on Twitter. Quite handy, perhaps.
A few weeks ago, I received an email from America that mostly consisted of an encomium from Michael Gira on the subject of his newest signing to Young God, James Blackshaw. I’m more of an admirer than a fan of Gira’s music, and not all of the music on his label has worked for me; Akron/Family, for instance, after countless attempts remain mystifyingly unappealing.
That’s DOOM in capitals, by the way, as the necessarily didactic press release is keen to inform us. Before he was DOOM, though, he was merely MF DOOM, or Viktor Vaughn, or Zev Love X or, briefly and memorably, a three-headed alien dinosaur called King Geedorah.
A nice surprise, last week, when Julian Cope sent over his new double vinyl album, “Kiss My Sweet Apocalypse”. A surprise, because I thought I might have been blackballed after struggling with some of the attitudes that came to the surface on last year’s musically excellent “Black Sheep”.
When I went off on my annual start-of-year rant about hotly-tipped new bands in January (and Lord, I’ve been forced to rethink my opinions about Florence And The Machine after seeing her shocking performance with Glasvegas at the NME Awards), I mentioned that, in the midst of so much electropop, “Maybe even Peaches might get a bit more love as the result of all this, which would be great.”
Not quite as long a playlist as usual this week, chiefly because Number Nine here – The Grateful Dead live at “Winterland 1973” – is a box set of nine CDs, and we played the first three, comprising the entire set from November 9, straight through yesterday. November 10 and 11 to come in the next couple of days, if my colleagues will let me get away with it, then there’s a 3CD set from around the time of “Terrapin Station” to have a go at, too.
