About ten years ago, I had a series of conversations with some people preparing a new edition of Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Music. Their aim, it seemed, was to take the 84 tracks originally compiled from Smith’s collection of 78s, and subject them to a vigorous digital clean-up. How much better would these songs sound, was their reasoning, if all the grit and static was removed, leaving the performances unsullied and sharp?

Would songs like Charley Patton’s “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” really sound better without their ancient blanket of fuzz, though? Wasn’t part of the charm of these recordings, memorably classified by Greil Marcus as relics of “the old, weird America”, that they actually sounded both old and weird? Perhaps this is a reason why the reupholstered Anthology was never released. The patina of age is easy and tempting to fetishise, and sometimes it can be used for dubious ends, not least when African-American musicians are patronised for the superficially “primitive” aura of their recordings. But crackle can make the simple act of listening to a song feel like a historical adventure. CDs and MP3s suddenly seem more tactile, less sterile. A frisson of rawness and unmediated authenticity is invested in even the most cynical of commercial endeavours.

This, one suspects, is something Neil Young understands very well. In last month’s Uncut, he described the crackle-saturated A Letter Home as “an historic art project”: a collection of songs, by contemporaries like Dylan, Willie Nelson, Bruce Springsteen and Tim Hardin, performed and cut in a 1947 Voice-O-Graph recording booth. The booth is owned by Jack White, no stranger himself to conceptual art projects that take inspiration and mischief from our ideas about authenticity, about how we can tamper with, remake and at the same time still respect musical history.

A Letter Home, though, is also part of a larger, all-encompassing project: Neil Young’s ongoing attempt to memorialise and catalogue his own past through a patchwork of new songs, covers, films, autobiographies and upgraded reissues. Sometimes it can all feel like ornery sport, a way for Young to avoid releasing the historical artefact that his fans actually want – the ‘70s motherlode of Archives Volume Two.

This latest delaying tactic is very much in the marginalia of Neil Young’s discography, tossed-off by design. The suspicion remains that music, old or new, is not his greatest priority at the moment, falling some way behind the more pressing business of biofuel cars, science fiction novels and, of course, revolutionary new audio players (the key moment in Young’s last Uncut interview came when he cut short a discussion of music and barked, “More Pono questions!”).

Nevertheless, this sequel of sorts to Americana is an endearing little document, made more interesting by Young’s decision to render a predominantly ‘60s playlist in a way that would’ve been anachronistically low-fi in the 1940s. “Recorded live to one-track, mono, the album has an inherent warm, primitive feel of a vintage Folkways recording,” the press release trumpets, and the unsteady sonics turn out to complement Young’s wavering voice rather well. Young’s schtick is to use the Voice-O-Graph like a time machine, mapping wild trajectories between eras and dimensions, so that each side of the vinyl edition begins with a hokey “letter home” to his mother in the afterlife, much like the sentimental vinyl missives that were the usual two-minute product of Voice-O-Graph machines. “I’ll be there eventually. Not for a while, though – I still really have a lot of work to do here,” he notes, pointedly.

For the most part, the songs Young chooses are strong enough to withstand the rudimentary treatments. Bert Jansch’s “Needle Of Death”, transparent inspiration for “Ambulance Blues”, is as a consequence the ideal song to use in an exercise about how folk songs are curated and reinvented over time. Wedged into a studio the size of a telephone box with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, the tight focus gives an edge to “Girl From The North Country”, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Early Morning Rain” and “Crazy”. For Side Two, though, the team at Third Man in Nashville dragged a piano over to the Voice-O-Graph, leaving the booth’s door open. And while “Reason To Believe” comes out as odd, poignant honky-tonk, Willie Nelson’s “On The Road Again” and the Everlys’ “I Wonder If I Care As Much” are rickety, front parlour-style singalongs, with Jack White on piano and distant harmonies.

It’s a lot of fun, but the prevailing air is one of reflection, and an understanding that – from the 18-year-old Elvis Presley recording “My Happiness” for his mother in a similar machine, to Young’s tremulous take on Springsteen’s “My Hometown” here – cheap novelties can have unexpected emotional valency. Like Tonight’s The Night and many other Neil Young albums, A Letter Home illustrates that vagaries of sound quality can sometimes enhance the drama of a record, and rarely undermine the potency of a good song. How strange, then, that it arrives at a time when so much of Young’s energy is concentrated on promoting Pono. While hyping the ultimate in studio-quality audio players, what else could such a seasoned contrarian do but release the most eloquent argument against their usefulness?

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

I was reminiscing with an old friend over the weekend about The Specials, his favourite band. Our chat brought us to the great 1979 2-Tone Tour that featured The Specials, supported by Madness and The Selecter, a snapshot of which now duly follows.

__________

October, 1979.

There are 43 alarm calls booked for this morning and – woe, pitiful woe! – they’ve started going off already, one of them heading this way.

The shrill exclamatory shrieks of the alarms is usually followed by weary grumbling moans and the thud of people rolling out of beds in rooms all along this wing of Swindon’s Crest Motel, where the cast of the 2-Tone Tour are beginning now to assemble in the lobby, pale-faced and hungover. The motel staff in startling contrast are, meanwhile, crisp and morning-bright, with gleaming toothpaste smiles and the brisk efficient manner of people with things to do.

Specials’ singer Terry Hall is here to see off his girlfriend, who’s going home to Coventry. And here comes The Specials’ unlikely mastermind, Jerry Dammers, lumbering into view, an awkward shambling figure in a shabby raincoat. He manages a smile, briefly. Woody, the young drummer with Madness, who looks about, I don’t know, 12 or something, lights his first fag of the day and immediately starts coughing like a Kentucky miner, stricken with Black Lung or something similarly serious.

“My body’s had enough of me,” he splutters, doubling up in a fit of coughing and hacking away so violently I wouldn’t be surprised to see his eyebrows fly across the room, followed possibly by his teeth. He finds a chair and collapses into it, his face drained of colour.

We’re only three days into the tour and some of the people in the lobby around me, which has taken on the look of a field hospital in a 19th century war, look like they won’t see the end of it.

Of course, it was all very different just a few short days ago when on a gloriously sunny autumn afternoon I’d arrived at The Roundhouse, up there in Chalk Farm, where The Specials, Madness and The Selecter had spent the previous week rehearsing for the 40 date tour ahead of them. When I get to there, The Roundhouse is as they say buzzing, the place noisy with chat and laughter. The coach that’s been hired to take us all to Brighton for the tour’s opening night is already an hour late, which means before we’ve even started we’re behind schedule. No one seems to care.

The three bands are strung out across the Roundhouse bar. The Selecter and Specials mingle, wander and joke. Madness are quaffing light and bitters, being noisy. They look like a gang of spotty kids waiting to be taken on a day trip to the seaside, yelping and impatient.

A friend of mine named Kellogs who works for Stiff as a tour manger is standing at the bar, watching them. When Stiff signed Madness, they were put in his paternal care. He’s just finished a fortnight on the road with the rascals, and they’ve nearly brought him to his knees.

“They make me feel so old,” he says wearily. “They just don’t stop. Up till four every morning, boozing. Look at them. . .”

We look at them. Down the hatch go another seven pints.

“They’re fucking loving it,” says Kellogs. “They’re on top of the fucking world. A hit single, on the telly, on the road away from mum, drinking, smoking – all yobbos together. They’re having the time of their lives.”

“Annuver 300 pints of light and bitter,” cry Madness in unison as the coach finally pulls up outside The Roundhouse.

There are 40 of us on the bus and Madness inevitably are making most of the noise – shouting, swearing, clambering over the backs of seats, drinking, making ridiculous faces at the crowds on Oxford Street. Woody is especially boisterous, swigging from a half bottle of Scotch, one hefty slug after another, red-faced and increasingly wild-eyed.

Steve English, who’s providing one-man security for the tour, is sitting across the aisle from him. Steve, who’s worked as a bodyguard for, among others, Marvin Gaye, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and boxer John Conteh and is built like a Sherman tank, looks at Woody grappling with the deleterious effects of the whiskey and laughs, the sound he makes like a drain being sucked clear by complicated mechanical equipment.

“Silly little fucker,” he says of Woody. “If he carries on like that for the next six weeks, we’ll have to carry him off this fucking tour in fucking casket.”

The coach is outside Brighton Top rank now, where dozens of skinheads are waiting for Madness, led by Prince Nutty, whose mug beams also from the centre of the inner sleeve of One Step Beyond, Madness’ debut album. Prince Nutty is surrounded by a gang of fearsome-looking cronies.

“Remember me?” one of them asks Suggs. “I danced on stage wiv yer at the Rock Garden. Remember?”

“Yeah, ‘course I remember you,” says Suggs, who clearly doesn’t, pushing his way into the Top Rank, where we find a place to talk and are joined by a rather wobbly Woody. Kellogs had told me earlier that when Madness played Brighton Polytechnic recently on a brief warm-op tour for the current trek, a mob of British Movement supporters had turned up at the gig, threatening trouble.

“They didn’t do nuthin’, though,” Woody says. “They just stood around in the bar talking very loudly about Adolf Hitler.”

In Oldham, Kellogs had also said, a security check on the audience as they arrived at the gig led to the confiscation of a number of weapons – knives, even a home-made mace among them. There’d been a riot in Huddersfield, the group’s van trashed and a film crew terrorised. Suggs is sensitive on the subject of the band’s skinhead fans, but abhors the BM and the idea that Madness are a focal point for their politics.

“There’s no way we’re political,” he argues. “We’re certainly not fucking fascists. If we were fascists, what would we be doing playing ska and bluebeat? If we’d wanted to talk about politics we’d have formed a debating society, not a fucking band.”

The Brighton show is sensational. By the time The Specials play “A Message To You, Rudi”, most of the audience appear to be on stage with them, and those that aren’t are dragging the ones who are back into the crowd so they can take their brief place in the spotlight.

The group fight their way off stage through this demented rabble but find the safe haven of their dressing room picketed by a group of angry feminists who’ve been incensed by some off-colour remarks by Terry Hall and the description of the Melody Maker journalist Vivien Goldman, who’d unenthusiastically reviewed their debut album, as “a stupid cow”.

They now berate the unapologetic Hall at rowdy length. Their ring-leader notices Dammers, standing behind Terry, a bemused witness to the women’s wrath.

“And what have you got to say for yourself?” she loudly demands.

Jerry looks at her, grins gummily.

“Would you like to come to a party with me?” he asks her, ducking the blow he knows is coming.

Photo credit: Clare Muller/PYMCA /REX

Damon Albarn is a man of many guises, and it seems he also has an outfit to match them all. In his role as Blur frontman, he consistently favoured Fred Perry tops and oxblood Doc Martens. As a member of Gorillaz, he even went as far as to adopt an entirely different persona – the spiky-haired animated singer 2D (real name: Stuart Tusspot). For The Good, The Bad And The Queen, he favoured a Two Tone-style dark suit and a low top hat, and for his reimagining of the life of Elizabethan mystic John Dee, he went as far as to grow a beard. Tonight, he arrives on stage wearing a simple suit and tie and a pair of desert boots.

This is Damon stripped bare, we must believe, as he embarks on a journey through his past on his solo debut, Everyday Robots (what happened to 2003’s Democrazy?). Though many of his songs have been laced with personal experiences, this is the first time Albarn has mined his past so candidly. Appropriately enough, he has chosen to debut Everyday Robots in venues that have significance to his own story. The previous night, Albarn played the Rivoli Ballroom in Brockley, just over a mile away from Goldsmith’s College where he met the other members of Blur. Tonight’s venue, the Great Hall at Queen Mary University, is not only close to Mile End Stadium, the site of Blur’s triumphant (if wet) gig during Britpop’s high summer, but, Albarn tells us from the stage, he was born in the nearby Royal London Hospital up the road at Whitechapel.

Arguably, such rich personal resonances add an additional level of detail to what is, for a performer as charismatic Albarn, a conspicuously low-key show. Albarn has always been good at songs that privilege a kind of minor chord melancholia, and tonight he weaves together songs from throughout his illustrious catalogue that share that sensibility. In many respects, Everyday Robots feels closest musically to The Good, The Bad And The Queen project: the sound is spacious, dubby and the tone wistful (Blur’s “Death Of A Party” is another reference). By assembling these songs from his different bands together in one set, it’s possible to discern recurring patterns and themes in Albarn’s best music. Many of these songs take place towards the end of the day – “twilight”, “sunset”, “Friday night”. The Everyday Robots themselves are “in the process of going home”, evening beckons. Elsewhere, weather can be a concern – “there’s a low in the high forties” – while often water is involved: “Up the Thames to find a taxi rank” or “A ship across the Estuary”, “Oily Water”, “Hollow Ponds” and “Heavy Seas”. It is appropriate, perhaps, that the actual weather conditions outside Queen Mary University are suitably grey and drizzly.

To help bring all this to life are Albarn’s newest musical cohorts, the Heavy Seas, who comprise four other members, and a string quartet. Albarn is keen to make clear that this is a group effort, rather than Albarn plus a backing band; an endearingly self-effacing sentiment, but it’s still Albarn’s name alone on the ticket rather. That said, while these musicians may not carry the impressive musical weight of Blur, the ex-Clash or Afrobeat legends he worked with in The Good, The Bad And The Queen or many of the storied guests on Gorillaz, they are nonetheless more than capable of carrying the night. As sharply dressed as Albarn, they are relaxed, sympathetic players. It is possible to lose yourself watching bassist Seye, string-bean thin in his faintly oversized suit and hat, as he sways, crouches, or bounces round the stage. But then, you’d miss watching the equally animated drummer Pauli Stanley-McKenzie, who plays much of the set standing up, leaning over his kit, and swaying from side to side in time to the rhythm. Both Stanley-McKenzie and guitarist Jeff Wootton featured in Gorillaz, while keyboard player Mike Smith is a long standing live collaborator of Albarn’s in all his various guises. Albarn presides over the proceedings, alternating between standing at the microphone or sitting at the piano; occasionally, he straps on a guitar.

Although the set is subdued, that’s not to say it’s not without fiery moments. “Kids With Guns” builds into a messy, noisy climax, “Kingdom Of Doom” morphs into what sounds like a ferocious take on “London Calling”, while “Beetlebum” b-side “All Your Life” rekindles the demented hurdy gurdy spirit of Blur at their most forceful and the appearance of Kano for a swaggering version of “Clint Eastwood” raises the temperature considerably. Even “Mr Tembo” – a song I must confess I can’t bear on the album – works well live, augmented by a choir, and successfully recast as a clapalong for the audience.

There are some unscripted digressions, too. Albarn (and Smith) have a recurring conversation with a friend in the audience called Nelson (who might be Nelson de Freitas, who provided the ‘spoken voice’ for 2D). Elsewhere, when Albarn starts talking about the involvement of Brian Eno on Everyday Robots’ track “You And Me”, the audience pick up a football-style chant of “Eno! Eno!” which Albarn ends up joining in. But, perhaps inevitably, the night’s stand out moments are simple, mesmerising versions of “Out Of Time” and “This Is A Low” performed by Albarn at the piano. Having seen Albarn live for well over 20 years now in his various guises, there’s something deeply satisfying about watching him present songs from all aspects of his career together in one set. Let’s hope there’s more to come like this.

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

Damon Albarn played:

Lonely Press Play

All Your Life

Encore:

Clint Eastwood

This Is A Low

Photo credit: Nicky J. Sims/Redferns