A busy and deeply professional couple of days listening to a backlog of CDs, MP3s, secure streams, dodgy downloads and so on, which involved us having another go at the Coldplay album. Apparently there's some sort of embargo on revealing opinions about "Viva La Vida". One question that occurred to me, however: when was the last time Brian Eno produced a really interesting album? I'm struggling to think of one here, but if you have any suggestions, let me know.
I got an email from someone the other day about a new band helmed by Richard Fearless, the sometime leader of Death In Vegas. Of Black Acid, they said, “Half of it sounds like a Japanese sixth form band doing Mary Chain covers. Half of it sounds like Bobby Gillespie telling you about records he likes while trying to play them. The first song is ten minutes of backwards noise.”
I'm just playing an old record by the great folk/psych/raga guitarist Peter Walker, who has recently returned to action after nearly 40 years of, as far as I can tell from a quick circuit round the internet, practising flamenco guitar. Amazingly, Walker - one of the few survivors of John Fahey's generation of American primitives, and the man who provided musical accompaniment to Timothy Leary's early experiments - is playing just down the road from me in Dalston, North-East London tonight.
It’s quite a good time for new bands at the moment in our corner of the world, what with Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes riding a mild wave of critical acclaim in the wake of South By Southwest and so on. To that list we can add White Denim, another hit at SXSW that I’ve already written about here a while back.
