A provocative musical advent calendar... Like the indie equivalent of the Queen’s Speech, beamed in from Brooklyn rather than Buck House, Sufjan Stevens’ seasonal message-in-music has become something of an institution. Silver And Gold is a companion to his 2006 Yuletide box-set Songs For Christmas Vols. 1-5, and collates the five Christmas EPs Stevens released annually between December 2006 and December 2010. In total there are 58 songs, ample indication that this project is much more than an extended joke. Stevens is a Christian who believes “we’ve made Christmas our bitch”, and this music, though frequently playful and dusted in silliness, ultimately has a serious, sincere purpose in attempting to divine meaning from the blizzard of confusing and contradictory signifiers – religion, consumerism, pop culture, family, magic, tawdry reality – which make it such a disorientating time of year. The intent is mirrored in the scope of the material, which encompasses secular 20th-century standards, ancient seasonal hymns, classical pieces and bespoke originals. Featured composers include John Dowland, Robert Burns, Janáček, Jerry Hermann, Joy Division, Bach and Sammy Cahn; collaborators include members of The National and Arcade Fire. There’s some latitude in the song selections – I’m not sure how Prince’s “Alphabet St” qualifies, but I’m glad it does – and times when Stevens’ seems to bend the concept towards a more general purpose. “Behold! The Birth Of Man, The Face Of Glory” and “Even The Earth Will Perish And The Universe Give Way” are not only archetypal Stevens song titles, but either could hold their own on Seven Swans or Illinois. As he ping-pongs between childlike wonder, solemn contemplation, comedy, devotion, pastiche, mysticism and plain nonsense we gain insights into both Stevens’ core creative concerns and his artistic evolution over the past few years. The earliest EP, “Gloria”, is the most folky and straightforwardly beautiful, featuring a handful of terrific collaborations with Aaron and Bryce Dessner from The National. The lilting “Carol Of St Benjamin The Bearded One” rather movingly recalls “the way he brushed his beard against the cedar tree”, while anyone who has ever wondered what constitutes a “Lumberjack Christmas” will find their answer. The second EP, “I Am Santa’s Helper”, deliberately goes to extremes, alternating between sacred classical works (including a glorious reading of 17th century German hymn “Ah Holy Jesus”) and increasingly skittish, deconstructed versions of the classics of the genre. Fancy hearing “Jingle Bells” restyled as a Pixies demo with a kids chorus? Or “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” featuring a drunken oompah band apparently playing underwater? Or “Hark The Herald Angels Sing” set to a backing track which appears to involve “Heroin” and “Baba O’Riley” colliding in the snow? Look no further. The later EPs, meanwhile, point towards the more experimental machine music of Stevens’ last album proper, 2010’s The Age Of Adz: “Good King Wenceslas” and “Do You Hear What I Hear?” celebrate Christmas Kanye style, all blippy electronics, crunched beats and vocoder-treated vocals. Woven amongst all this is a generous number of Stevens’ originals, not always notable but lovingly rendered. “Ding-A-Ring-A-Ling-A-Ring” (“Baby Jesus is a king-a-ling-a-ling-a-ling”) is a brilliantly sloppy T. Rex pastiche and the squelchy synth motif in “Angels We Have Heard On High” jauntily doffs its Santa hat to Macca’s “Wonderful Christmastime”, but there is poignancy, too, in “Christmas In The Room” – “it’s just the two of us this year” – and the bleached bad vibes of “Happy Karma Christmas”. The entire affair concludes, epically, with “Christmas Unicorn”, a kind of cosmic manifesto disguised as a children’s song which incorporates “Love Will Tear Us Apart” into its climax. Well, why not. Something for every conceivable Christmas, in other words, but even ignoring the tinsel trim Silver And Gold is another persuasive testament to Stevens’ multi-faceted talents. Inspired, frustrating, wayward, indulgent, funny, heartfelt and eclectic, taken in one sitting it’s far too much, like gorging on the most excessive turkey dinner with all the trimmings. In smaller doses, however, it’s more like a musical advent calendar, almost every song offering a fresh and sometimes provocative window on a well-worn theme. Graeme Thomson

The two sides of Scott-Heron - his early work collected in all its trailblazing glory... When Gil Scott-Heron walked into a small New York studio in Summer 1970, he was an author, not a performer. The gangly 21-year-old had already published a novel and a book of poetry, and had to be persuaded to record a spoken-word album by his new record label Bob Thiele, the man who had overseen the making of Gil’s favourite record, A Love Supreme by John Coltrane. But, as he looked at the few people perched on folding chairs, invited into the studio to make the recording feel live, the prodigy launched into a poem that would change his life. The poem took the form of a list of things that Heron hated; banal icons of white culture and loathed political figures that dominated American television in the 1970’s. By the time Heron had finished reciting “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”, he had unwittingly changed his life. He would no longer be seen as a writer, but a singer, voice of musical black radicalism, doomed junkie… and the man who invented rap. This three-disc reissue of everything Heron and his pianist partner Brian Jackson recorded on Thiele’s Flying Dutchman label would probably not exist if Heron hadn’t bid farewell to that world in May 2011. But for listeners who only know Heron through his final 2010 album I’m New Here, The Revolution Begins… will be a revelation. Not just because it features some great music and poetry, much of which still sounds acutely relevant. But because the man who slowly killed himself with drugs, spent two lengthy periods in prison, and never quite came to terms with his chaotic childhood, prodigious intellect and hatred of white power, is as present and defined and agonized here, in his early twenties, as he is on I’m New Here. Listen to “The Vulture”, or “Who’ll Pay Reparations On My Soul?”, or “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” and you can only come to the chilling conclusion that Gil Scott-Heron knew exactly where he was headed. Ace’s Dean Rudland has applied some neat ingenuity to the box set’s running order. Heron’s Flying Dutchman catalogue comprised three albums: the largely spoken-word debut Small Talk At 125th And Lenox, featuring Last Poets-influenced percussion backing; the full band debut Pieces Of A Man, a key text in the development of jazz-funk featuring Jackson’s subtle keyboards, the familiar, funked-up version of “The Revolution…”, and an extraordinary pick-up band including drummer Bernard ‘Pretty’ Purdie, bassist Ron Carter and flautist Hubert Laws; and the less admired Free Will, which featured one vinyl side of “Pieces…”-style song and one of “Small Talk…”-style poetry. Rudland resists the temptation to just run the albums together, and instead puts the songs onto disc one and the stark beat poetry on disc two. This works perfectly because the moods of Heron’s two early styles are so diametrically opposed. While disc one’s flute and keyboard-led smugglings of modal jazz motifs into pop and soul melodies are Sunday morning mellow, Heron’s radical politics and bracing anger are left undiluted on disc two, which, as it travels from the persuasive satire of “The Revolution…” and “Whitey On The Moon” to the disturbing misogyny and homophobia of “Enough”, “Wiggy” and “The Subject Was Faggots”, forms the core of Heron’s life, work and internalised rage. Like many black radicals of the era, the young Heron was no liberal, and the chasm between his more and less enlightened selves suggests a fractured psyche that proved difficult to live with. Disc three is given up to an ‘alternate’ version of the Free Will album comprised of outtakes, including a radically different, more chaotic version of the title track, while the big attraction for Heron completists is “Artificialness”, a failed but interesting attempt to satirise Vietnam by way of domestic violence recorded with Purdie’s band Pretty Purdie And The Playboys. But while disc one contains a handful of conscious jazz-funk anthems that formed a ready template for acid jazz and its right-on offshoots, its disc two that pins you to your seat with its savage wit and occasionally brutal nastiness. Gil Scott-Heron was always withering about rap when asked if he had, indeed, invented it. But the linguistic mastery, rhythmic reportage and liberal-baiting fury of his early slam poems remain guilty as charged. Just another cross the man had to bear. Garry Mulholland Q&A BRIAN JACKSON Do you still listen to the early records you and Gil made on Flying Dutchman? I do. I feel those records are some of our best work, if not our best performances. We were finding ourselves. Do you recall your first encounter with Gil? Sure! It was at Lincoln University, Pennsylvania in 1969. We ran into each other by accident through a mutual friend, Victor Brown. Victor was performing in a talent show and Gil sang the song that he had written for Victor – it was called “Where Can A Man Find Peace?” – and that pretty much did it for me. His lyrics were unbelievable. We heard what each other were doing and knew we’d be more effective together. Was Lincoln a hotbed of radicalism? Ha! No. I think that’s what fuelled us. The apathy and lack of consciousness we encountered there galvanized us. Did you feel, at the time, that music could effect political change? I was just naïve enough to think that it actually could. But we weren’t interested in inciting people to riot. Some of that early material may sound incendiary, but compared to what people were actually experiencing and feeling inside, it wasn’t. Were you still in touch with Gil when he died? Yes, though not as much as I would have liked to have been. To be honest, I was not shocked. What shocked me more was that he was able to live for so long under the condition he was in. I said goodbye to him long before he actually left the Earth. In some ways I was relieved for him. He was in a lot of pain. Are you still playing? I’ve just done a show at the London Jazz Festival as part of Jazz Funk Legends, a band I’ve put together with Lonnie Liston Smith and Mark Adams, who was Roy Ayers’ music director for many years. We’ll be coming back to Europe next Spring. INTERVIEW: GARRY MULHOLLAND Pic credit © Chuck Stewart

Reunited band rides a wave of serendipity in a surprising, deeply satisfying return... The stars aligned for Graham Parker in early 2011, when he impetuously reformed The Rumour 31 years after they’d last played as a unit. Shortly thereafter, he was contacted by filmmaker Judd Apatow, a longtime fan of Parker’s music, who asked the artist to act and perform in the movie he was working on, This Is 40, setting up a dramatically increased profile for the reunion. Not only that, but the recording sessions provided a dramatic climax for the Gramaglia Brothers’ feature-length documentary Don’t Ask Me Questions, a recounting of Parker’s career. And all this nearly 20 years after Parker, having been dropped from his last major label deal, reinvented himself as a DIY artist, still “searching for that fool’s gold”, his signature pissed-off snarl and cynical attitude reassuringly intact. When he first emerged in 1976, Parker updated and recontextualized the ’50s archetype of the English Angry Young Man at the perfect moment – the dawn of the punk revolution. Together with the newly formed Rumour – keyboard player Bob Andrews and guitarist Brinsley Schwartz, both formerly of the group that bore the latter’s name, ex-Ducks Deluxe guitarist Martin Belmont and the young rhythm section of bassist Andrew Bodnar and drummer Steve Goulding – Parker immediately secured his place in the vanguard of the new movement. Heat Treatment, the band’s debut album – produced by Nick Lowe, another Brinsleys alumnus – formed a bridge between pub rock and punk rock, as Parker kicked open the door for fellow angry young man Elvis Costello, who’d show up in ’77. Though G.P. And The Rumour never rose above cult status, the band’s four ’70s albums, topped off by 1979’s certified classic Squeezing Out Sparks, are as hard-hitting and eloquent as any series of LPs issued during that vital half-decade. The group recorded just one more LP, 1980’s The Up Escalator, before disbanding, whereupon Parker began his extended second act, frequently working with ex-Rumour members along the way. So how does this seminal ’70s band translate to the Internet Age? Quite naturally, it turns out. Tackling Parker’s material with immediacy and masterful finesse, the reunited players show no signs of rust – and this despite the fact that Schwartz has spent recent years working as a luthier at Chandler’s in London, while Belmont has been employed as a librarian in Yorkshire. Parker and his mates forcefully reclaim their turf with the fittingly vitriolic opener “Snake Oil Capital Of The World”, as Parker nicks the intro of Howlin’ Wind’s “Don’t Ask Me Questions” – a cosmic coincidence considering that he wrote these songs with no clue he’d be recording them with The Rumour. What’s immediately apparent is that this veteran has continued to evolve as a singer, no longer reliant on the primal howl that characterized him early on. On the following pair of midtempo cruisers, “Long Emotional Ride” and “Stop Cryin’ About The Rain”, both album highlights, the band’s economical playing leaves Parker plenty of space to explore the nuances of the song and the shadings his earthily elegant mature voice. This sort of knowing interaction animates the entire album, which has a refreshingly spontaneous feel, the result of their cutting the dozen songs live, including Parker’s vocals. Parker isn’t the only one who shines on this labour of love, as the band casually but emphatically occupies its sweet spot. Schwartz shows throughout that he’s one of rock’s most underrated song-serving guitarists. Witness his appropriately sinuous line through “Snake Oil Capital Of The World”, or his central riff on the title track, slurred notes burnishing an arching, evocative arpeggio as timeless as the song’s premise. Andrews is consistently effective in his supporting role, his Garth Hudson-like organ vamps enclosing the other instruments like a down comforter. And the Dylanesque “Coathangers”, the album’s most aggressive track, is distinguished by a taut, tasty ensemble performance, all six bandmembers clearly reveling in the fact that they’re waking up the echoes. When Parker sings in “Long Emotional Ride”, “Maybe I’m just getting old or something/But Something broke down my resistance/And opened the door”, the lines come across with the force of an epiphany. This prescient statement undoubtedly took on further resonance for Parker and his band as serendipity afforded them a welcome chance to once again squeeze out sparks together – though the enduring effect is one of warmly glowing embers. Bud Scoppa Q&A Graham Parker How did the reunion come about? Very simple, really. It just popped into my mind that Steve and Andrew would be really something as the rhythm section on my next record. I emailed both of them, and Steve said, “Why not get Martin, Bob and Brinsley as well? That would be a proper band… Kidding!” I stopped thinking then and started emailing people – because if you think about these things, you won’t do it. The next day, I was like, “What have I done?” You already had the songs written? Yeah. My first thought was, “What do these songs have to do with The Rumour?” But I never wrote any of those records for the band; I just wrote the songs. When did Judd Apatow get hold of you? No more than two weeks later. He said part of the movie would be about an indie label, and I would be the kind of artist this label would sign. I said, “Guess what? I’ve just reformed The Rumour.” He flew us all out to LA to do a two-day shoot. You can’t make this stuff up. We were onstage together for the first time in 31 years in this fabulous theatre with a film crew and excellent lunches – that was the best part. Brinsley was amazed that anyone would want to hear us. Did Apatow have any direct involvement with the album? He got this award-winning designer to do the cover, and the guy made this crazy cover that looks like gay Christian rock! When I saw it, I thought, “Oh my God, that is terrifying.” INTERVIEW: BUD SCOPPA

Deluxe treatment for one of punk’s most rough-and-ready albums... The Damned are a group often praised faintly: sold as having being close to greatness, without ever being great themselves. They were, you understand, the first group to release a punk single. They supported the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club in July 1976, appeared at the 100 Club Punk Festival in September and briefly on the Anarchy Tour, the largely-cancelled series of engagements that the Pistols and Heartbreakers attempted to embark upon, after the “Bill Grundy” incident in December of that year. Strong credentials all, but without an album statement perceived as “iconic”, the harder their case is argued, the more they appear, unjustly, to be nearly men. Rather than, as this four disc set abundantly shows, the riff-tastic, custard-covered, ribald, real deal. The Damned, it’s true, did write and release “New Rose”, the first punk single (which arrived in October 1976, some five weeks in advance of “Anarchy In The UK”), but if they won that particular battle, they were never going to win the longer war for the possession of punk’s intellectual and historical real estate. Theirs was not music as conduit for intellectual ideas, a vaulting horse for détournement. Rather than its thinkers, The Damned represented punk’s doers, a band whose almost comical lack of promise as individuals in civilian life (a toilet cleaner; an unemployed drummer with a skin infection) was imaginatively repurposed within the movement. Here, renamed and re-employed as a fantastic rhythm section (bass player Captain Sensible; drummer Rat Scabies), they proved to be little short of explosive. Theirs, with the above-par croon of David Vanian, were just the combustible talents to give form and flight to the songs of guitarist Brian James, a refugee from a Belgium-dwelling free festival band called Bastard. Recorded quickly for independent label Stiff, the band’s debut album doesn’t sound like considered art statement, more a seizing of the initiative, of the moment. Assisted in their quest by Stiff’s in-house producer Nick Lowe (“They called me Grandad,” Lowe remembers on the Radio 1 documentary that makes up disc 4 here. “I must have been…26.”), the group’s songs evolved from the murky, vaguely melodic demos you can hear elsewhere on this set, to things of immense dynamic power. It was the brutality with which they executed something like “Stab Your Back” more than with any particularly seditious content within it that The Damned’s punk credentials lay. Their moment, seized emphatically then, is memorialized well here 35 years on. The Peel session format (“Are we really 65 in the charts!?”) well-suited the band’s good-humoured detonation, as did Radio 1’s In Concert programme (both disc 2), even as their performance at the 100 Club in July (disc 3) indicates something of the froideur the cliquey punk scene could offer them. Rather than hailed for their breakneck 12 song set (as yet lacking “Neat Neat Neat”), the Damned are instead received by a Pistols crowd as if they had just unveiled a memorial plaque to Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It was rock ‘n’ roll, first and foremost, in which The Damned specialized. Hearing the band’s covers of The Beatles’ “Help” (fast) or the Stooges’ “1970” (retitled “I Feel Alright” and not slow either), you know this was a band more focused on a strong musical statement than an ideological one. The Damned’s punk was born out of a love of the MC5, )Nuggets-era garage rock and of hard-swinging Ladbroke Groove – it had as much in common with the Pink Fairies and Motorhead as it did with The Clash. It’s hard to imagine that was a way to make friends in Year Zero, however good the songs were. And 35 years on, they still are. While some supporting features from the original album (“Fish”; “Born To Kill”) are slight, they show the mileage that could be traveled by a band with sufficient internal momentum. “Neat Neat Neat” and “New Rose”, and the one minute “Stab Your Back” however, remain play like a peculiarly English kind of pulp fiction, awash with girls, guns and the city at night. It’s an escapist thrill that should be seen as helping to round out punk’s character rather than failing to conform to a set of principles – that anyway were often retrospectively applied. Anger is an energy, of course. But energy is an energy too. EXTRAS (7/10): Disc of BBC broadcasts, Peel sessions. Live at 100 Club disc. Hour long 2006 Radio 1 doc ostensibly about “New Rose”. John Robinson