Wonder stuff

I’ve just got home from the Dome and the Led Zeppelin gig, so hopefully you’ll forgive me for the fact that my thoughts aren’t quite as neatly organised as usual. First off, I have to point out that, at the risk of sounding smug, they were fucking great.

There is a man in a flat cap standing in the middle of the stage, looking pensively at some large twigs while his bandmates work up ten minutes of bleary musique concrete. Eventually he picks up a bass and the six of them lumber into a passage of magisterial, martial psych. It mutates into waterlogged beatnik blues, then a kind of splenetic krautpunk. One of the guitarists, incidentally, now has a cardboard box on his head. There’s a mannequin’s head on top of the box. After a while, he conscientiously ties a scarf round its neck.

The stories, of course, are pretty familiar by now. In 1974, tensions within the Faces were, as they say, running high, Rod Stewart’s increasing solo success causing much friction apparently. The situation doubtless exacerbated by the band’s predilection for “relentless, boozy madness”, as Ronnie Wood described it in UNCUT last year. Anyway, so what does Ronnie do? He gathers together some of his famous pals, records his own album and goes out on tour as The First Barbarians.

Sometime last week, we had some kind of half-assed straw poll in the office about our best gigs of 2007. You can probably guess a lot of the stuff that came up: The White Stripes, The Hold Steady, Arctic Monkeys, Dylan, Wilco, Lou Reed’s "Berlin". Good gigs. I held off submitting any suggestions, though, not least because I suspected I’d see my favourite gig of the year on Friday night.

Jimi Hendrix: Not Necessarily Stoned. . .But Beautiful A few of us from the office went last night to the launch of the Jimi Hendrix Live At Monterey DVD and CD at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square, a swanky former nightclub now used for corporate events. I was last there for a party that followed IPC’s annual editorial awards, an event made especially memorable by a spectacular fall down a particularly steep flight of stairs, after which things become very vague, my memory of subsequent events – getting home, things like that – almost wholly non-existent.

A pretty tendentious post appeared on the blog last night from someone who styles themselves Sad Indeed. "After seeing the live performance download MSNBC Today show 10/24, not only is Robert Plant coming off as sad as hell - a lifetime of dedication to the mermaid has broke his heart - but Krauss and Plant had NO chemistry and were out of synchronicity," Sad Indeed spiels.

New label, new city: enter the Freewheelin' Steve Earle

With everyone tooled up on cider, rum and whatever else they've got stuffed in their pockets, the mood at End of the Road was little short of ebullient this evening: not that you'd know it from Midlake's set on the Garden stage.

Nice to see on the responses to my comeback blog that a few of you are sharing the love for the Ethiopiques comps. The Yegelle Tezeta and Girma Beyene tracks mentioned by Citizensound and Tunetourist aren’t on the "Very Best Of Ethiopiques" set, but thanks for the recommendations for Volumes 8 and 9.

Californian indie four-piece embrace the pop mainstream