A while back, someone at Uncut pointed out to me that one of the words I overused when writing about music was “feral”. He was right, too: I’d got into a habit of using the term whenever the psychedelia and crypto-primitive folk jams that I listen to so much got a little wilder and smellier, became a bit more instinctual, or at least convincingly pretended to be instinctual.
There are times when I receive a reissue of a record that I've never heard of, and begin to wonder whether some massive and elaborate hoax is being perpetrated. I had that feeling about 45 minutes ago, when I put on "Iron Curtain Innocence" by Bobb Trimble for the first time.
It's been a night of being proved wrong, for me at least, at Latitude. As I'm walking across the site, I can hear The Good, The Bad And The Queen, and they sound really good. I'd previously pegged them as a rather self-conscious trip into psychogeography and musicianly fandom for Damon Albarn. But here the overworked fug clears and the elegaic true quality of the songs - and those Simonon basslines, of course - comes to the fore.
