As Bob Dylan, garbed in another of the natty Pimp-My-Confederate-General ensembles that have served as his working clothes these past few years, steps onto the stage of the Playhouse on Sunday into a jolting “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”, there is the small matter of him having just this afternoon officially clocked up his first Number One album in the UK for almost 40 years with Together Through Life.
The last time I was on a boat on the Thames, The Sex Pistols were playing “Pretty Vacant” as we sailed downriver past the Houses Of Parliament. It was Jubilee Day, 1977, and the cruiser we were on had just been surrounded by police launches, their searchlights raking the upper deck of our craft, dozens of their baton-wielding colleagues lined up in sinister ranks on Westminster Pier, waiting for us to dock so they could storm aboard and crack heads, which they eventually did with painful abandon.
I suppose this is a bit rich coming from someone who gets most of their music for free, but a gentle reminder that tomorrow seems to be Record Store Day across Britain and the US, at the very least.
In one of the best scenes in The Wrestler, Mickey Rourke's Randy and Marisa Tomei's Cassidy are propping up a bar, discussing the generally woeful state of modern music. They concur that Guns N' Roses, Motley Crue and Def Leppard set the bar astronomically high back in the day and, grumpy spoilsport that he was, "that Cobain pussy" pretty much ruined it all. The Nineties "sucked". And the Eighties? "Man, best shit ever!"
Pretty weird mix this week, as I look down this list, not all of it fantastic. If I can break the usual protocols here, though, the Johnny Cash remix is really awful, and I speak as a Snoop Dogg fan. Given that “I Walk The Line” looked like the most interesting thing on the Cash remix album that turned up the other day, I suspect we might have found the worst record of 2009 already – though I must confess I don’t have the moral courage to check and make sure.
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.
