Given that my last three blogs have been on Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin, I guess something resembling my tenuous underground credibility might be a bit compromised this week. A good time, then, to flag up some terrific music I’ve been enjoying these past few days that doesn’t have quite the same profile as Dylan et al. I’ve written plenty about Hiss Golden Messenger for a good while now (There are loads of things in the archives, but this one is as good an entry point as any), and last week Michael Taylor assembled a pretty great band to play at the Hopscotch Festival in Raleigh, North Carolina, down the road from his home in Durham. Rather brilliantly, www.nyctaper.com has posted the whole gig (and many others from what looks like an amazing festival) on their website: you can stream or download the Hiss set here. It begins, as you’ll hear, quietly but magnificently with “Brother, Do You Know the Road?”, a gospellish call-and-response between the frontman and his bandmates that slowly thickens up into a particularly rich and transporting take on American roots music, the sort of thing that Taylor has been finessing through his past few records (“Poor Moon”, the most recent, is probably my favourite). What’s new here is that (unlike UK shows, which have been more or less solo), Taylor managed to corral a kind of all-star band for Hopscotch, featuring his longtime accomplice Scott Hirsch, plus a couple of Megafaun, the great guitarist William Tyler, (Lambchop, Silver Jews, and of late some really nice solo records), and Nathan Bowles, from Pelt, and the Black Twig Pickers, on banjo. It’s great. Serendipitously, another arrival this week has been Bowles’ debut solo album, “A Bottle, A Buckeye”. This one steers closer to the ornery, old-time vibes of the Black Twigs rather than the outer limits drones of Pelt, being as it is a solo banjo record. But like his old bandmate and sparring partner Jack Rose, Bowles evidently sees no clear dividing lines between roots music and more exploratory jams. As a consequence, “A Bottle, A Buckeye” hits some beautiful and transcendental points beyond the reach of most porch sessions (either real or aspirational). Of late, one of my colleagues here, John Robinson, has been stretching his Takoma interests away from John Fahey and so on, towards the radical banjo men on that scene like George Stavis and Billy Faier. This Nathan Bowles album sits squarely and proudly in that tradition: again, really good stuff. As is, finally, The Baird Sisters’ “Until You Find Your Green”. Until the vinyl album arrived the other week from the Grapefruit label, I must confess I didn’t know this duo existed, in spite of a keen interest in Meg Baird,’s work alone and as part of the psychedelic Espers,. These spare duets with her sister Laura are naturally closer in tone to those solo records like “Dear Companion”, but the acoustic guitar/banjo/flute/cello manoeuvres are given more space to stretch out here, so that the likes of the title track have that rambling, brackish allure of the best Espers songs, unplugged. Birds chatter in the distance, lines between English and American folk traditions are artfully blurred, Meg Baird sings as wonderfully as ever, and I’m increasingly of the opinion that this is the best thing she’s been involved with since “Espers 2”. Can’t recommend this one enough, and I’d advise anyone interested to move fast on what looks like a very limited release: have a look at www.thebairdsisters.com to hear samples and find out how to get hold of it. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey Baird Sisters photo: Allen Crawford

Given today's news about the Led Zeppelin DVD, it occurred to me that this might be worth putting online: my review of the 2007 show... It is ten to nine in the O2 Arena. The man in front of me in Block 111, Row S is jabbing agitatedly at his Blackberry. “Jimmy Page is about to walk onstage,” I can read over his shoulder, “I cannot think about insurance right now.” Who, right now, can think of anything else? We’ve been carried here to the old Millennium Dome on a tidal wave of hyperbole that – even in these reunion-saturated times – feels pretty much unprecedented. The number of people who applied for tickets, the papers tell us, is somewhere between one million and the population of the entire planet. I am sat roughly between Greg Dyke and Marilyn Manson, surrounded by many American music business types who look like they did powerful and sinister things in the 1970s. My colleagues have spotted the Gallaghers, U2, Paul McCartney, David Gilmour, Dave Grohl, Richard Ashcroft, Mick Jagger, the Arctic Monkeys, Bob Geldof, Kevin Shields, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Pink, Jeff Beck, Brian May and Roger Taylor, Nile Rodgers, Benicio Del Toro, Gene Simmons, someone who might have been Martin O’Neill, and Joe Elliott out of Def Leppard. Foreigner, plus children’s choir, have just finished “I Wanna Know What Love Is”. It’s all tremendously exciting. Before Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones started talking to every publication extant about this show in vague, tantalising terms, before the show was even officially announced, Plant told Uncut’s editor, “There’ll be one show, and that’ll be it. We need to do one last great show. Because we’ve done some shows, and they’ve been crap.” By the time you read this, Led Zeppelin might have announced an epic world tour for 2008, making Plant’s words sound like the manoeuvring of an artist with an exceptional solo album to flog. But if this Ahmet Ertegun tribute show turns out to be the solitary reunion, I suspect even a proud and fastidious man like Plant might be contented. He begins brilliantly, with a pointed “Good Times Bad Times” and much stuff about days of youth, doing things the best he can and, of course, “No matter how I try, I find my way to do the same old jam.” Unlike many of his contemporaries, Plant has found a way of combining rock heroics with a dignified gravity. When he swings his microphone stand, he looks like a Shakespearean king wielding a broadsword, not a 59-year-old acting out a pantomime of his youth. Jimmy Page, though, is not initially so impressive. The razored attack, the brute delicacy of his playing seems to have been lost on “Good Times Bad Times” and the song which follows it, “Ramble On”, and I’m reminded of his sloppy performances on various ‘90s projects. If Plant has long been reluctant to capitalise on the Zeppelin legacy, Page’s attachment to it has sometimes looked rather needy, and there’s a curious irony that he might prove to be a weak link next to the neat, intuitive John Paul Jones and stoical Jason Bonham. But these are not, historically, men with much of a tolerance for imperfection. And when “Black Dog” lifts off, we can belatedly see and hear the real health of Led Zeppelin in 2007. The sound quality radically improves – as if the enraged ghost of Peter Grant has made his presence felt at the mixing desk - and Page’s rutting, evil riffs now have the clarity to match their intensity. “Black Dog” is an object lesson in how to make something magisterial out of the basest desires. And this is also the way Zeppelin tackle “In My Time Of Dying”, “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”, “Since I’ve Been Loving You” and “Dazed And Confused”, the slow blues which wire them into a continuum stretching deep into rock’s prehistory. Plant is deferential in introducing these tunes, mentioning Blind Willie Johnson and claiming they first heard “Nobody’s Fault. . .” “in a church in Mississippi about 1932”. But for Page, this is the music which he can handle best, that he can transform from the heartsong of the disenfranchised into the conqueror’s battle hymn. At times, even Plant seems impressed, bent towards him indulgently during one wrenching solo in “Since I’ve Been Loving You”. They smile plenty, too, and the pleasure these intimidating men take in their own music – and, amazingly, each other’s company – is striking. Just outside the auditorium, meanwhile, Marilyn Manson, his girlfriend Evan Rachel Wood, and their minder appear to be having a mild contretemps about who is going to the bar. In the toilets, a burly Canadian is demanding that Harvey Goldsmith should have included catheters as part of the ticket deal, and conducting an impromptu vox pop with his fellow urinators. They have come from New York, Switzerland and Stamford Hill, and mainly seem to be friends of friends of Jason Bonham. Bonham, I’m told later, is nervous – no wonder, when it feels like everyone he’s ever met has turned up to the show. He does fine, though, as does John Paul Jones; discreet, urbane, a revelation when he gets behind the keyboards. “Kashmir” has a martial grandeur you might expect, but an airing for the prickly, manic funk of “Trampled Under Foot”, with Jones in overdrive, is unexpected and thrilling. It’s on songs like this, alongside “The Song Remains The Same”, a ravishing “No Quarter” and a densely psychedelic “Misty Mountain Hop”, that Page’s enduring skill comes to the fore. He can dust down the doubleneck guitar for “Stairway To Heaven” (performed with staunch ardour by Plant), saw away viscerally with the e-bow during “Dazed And Confused”. But it’s the opulent complexity of Zeppelin in their imperial phase which is the biggest challenge, and Page acquits himself admirably. By the encores of “Whole Lotta Love” – and what a strange song that remains, with its wildly avant-garde breakdown – and “Rock’n’Roll”, Page no longer looks regal. The dark lord of legend has been replaced by a ruffled, sweating, radiantly happy man in his early sixties, the surprisingly human face of this monstrous music. Plant and Jones are nearby, and the weird tensions that must have surfaced during the protracted rehearsal period – the singer alludes at one point to the “thousands of emotions” they’ve experienced over the past month or two – seem to have evaporated. Would those animosities resurface again during an extended tour? Wouldn’t Plant rather be sharing a stage with Alison Krauss, even though he clearly still has the lungs and the bravado to sing rock’n’roll and bring the sky down? These, I guess, are the hypotheticals taxing the minds of millions of people across the world who are following the gig via news reports on www.uncut.co.uk and our sister site, nme.com. For me, though, it’s pretty easy to be smug and unconcerned about what the future holds. I have, after all, just seen Led Zeppelin: not the slapdash, warring clan of previous reunions, but a band who, implausibly, sound once again like the greatest rock band in the world. Like many artists of their age – Dylan, Neil, even the Stones – there’s an urgency here, as if the immortals have finally become aware of their own mortality. Disregarding the money for a moment, the need for these brilliant musicians to tidy up their stories for posterity, to remind the world of their greatness, suddenly seems very pressing. Tonight, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and, especially, Robert Plant can sleep easy in the knowledge that they’ve done just that. For the time being, at least, Led Zeppelin’s legend has the happy ending it always deserved. “Good Times Bad Times” “Ramble On” “Black Dog” “In My Time Of Dying” “For Your Life” “Trampled Under Foot” “Nobody’s Fault But Mine” “No Quarter” “Since I've Been Loving You” “Dazed And Confused” “Stairway To Heaven” “The Song Remains The Same” “Misty Mountain Hop” “Kashmir” * “Whole Lotta Love” * “Rock And Roll”

God knows we’ve probably written enough about “Tempest” by now (not least these two terrific pieces by my colleagues Allan Jones and John Robinson). Nevertheless, part of Bob Dylan’s enduring appeal is his capacity for provocation: the sense that he tacitly encourages people to at least try and unpick his records, fathom his mysteries. Our almost certain failure is part of the game, for him as well as for us. “Tempest” already has a cult of exegesis surrounding it, fed by documents like Scott Warmuth’s brilliant “Tempest Commonplace”, that digs up antecedents in Juvenal and “Escape From Fort Bravo” among many other places. Uncharacteristically, Dylan has affected to bite back at this kind of research, and the implications of plagiarism that come along with it. In what looks like a notable Rolling Stone interview, he passionately defends the art of influence, finally deciding of his critics, “All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell… I'm working within my art form. It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.” Listening to “Tempest”, I can’t help wishing that one element Dylan would stop borrowing is the tradition of misogyny and objectification that is a recurring detail in a good few of these songs. Perhaps some of the more critical reviewers of the album could have examined this, rather than predicating their pieces on the apparent wrongheadedness of other reviewers, whose enthusiasm evidently doesn’t have the required ironic distance from the record. One thing that keeps fascinating me about “Tempest”, though, and maybe hasn’t been written about so much, is the way it actually sounds. Among relatively recent pieces on Dylan, a particular favourite is the review of “Modern Times” by Robert Forster, especially this passage: “Dylan is arrangement-shy and always has been. A typical Dylan-produced song, in the studio or on stage, consists of all the musicians starting together, playing together and finishing when Dylan gives them the nod. No one sits out. No one comes in just for a chorus. It's all pretty flat, and that's fine when the songs are top-notch and we listen to Bob sing. But as soon as they slip - as they surprisingly do on much of this album - you realise that someone else is needed to push Dylan on his material and the way it might sound.” “Tempest” starts in a way which gives lie to this idea, with the jinking Hot Club intro to “Duquesne Whistle”, filtered in as if from a valve radio in another part of the house. When the song kicks in, though, it initiates a series of songs whose locomotive doggedness is so striking, so militarily drilled as to be positively weird. George Receli’s drumming is the key sound, beside Dylan’s voice, the engine that keeps these long songs on the rails. Around him, though, the band are frequently so locked into position that I keep listening on headphones to see if I can divine loops, rather than the single-take verité that we perhaps naively assume of Dylan. On the thrilling “Narrow Way”, in particular, it sounds as if some pretty assiduous editing and mixing (by Scott Litt, one assumes) has been done to enhance its mechanistic thrust: the cycling riff is distorted, dirty, but there’s never much in the way of sound leakage at the end of each honk. Three times over the seven-odd minutes of the song, there’s a break, as if Dylan is turning to his band and beckoning one of them to step forward and take a solo. Three times, though, they all stay resolutely in the ranks, with that nail-scrape violin line in focus, leaving these strange caesuras in the song. Would I like it if the band cut loose a bit more, affected a comparable derangement on “Narrow Way” to, say, one of the songs it echoes, like “Highway 61 Revisited”, say? I guess so, but there’s also an argument that what Dylan is doing here is more inventive; reorganising the signifiers of the bar band into something mantric, insistent, marginally robotic. What the discipline of the backing does, of course, is push Dylan’s voice and lyrics even further into the spotlight. He doesn’t fare quite as well on the more flowing, melodic numbers like “Roll On John” and “Pay In Blood” (the latter really could do with a bit more abandon from the band: if it recalls the Stones, it’s a peculiarly emasculated Stones). On the best “Tempest” songs, though, the rigorous arrangements provide a kind of theatre set for Dylan. Fishing for notions of authenticity is a mug’s game on most Dylan records, more so than usual here. Instead, it’s better to celebrate the drama and artifice which he can bring to his vivid narratives – and “Tin Angel”, “Scarlet Town”, “Tempest”, especially, are some of his best in years (I’ll refrain from the perilous game of saying precisely how many years, at this point). Here, too, is evidence of what a formidable, if admittedly unorthodox, instrument Dylan’s voice has become. On the talking blues of “Long And Wasted Years”, his performance is remarkable: a pointedly melodramatic one, certainly, but one which uses the grain and resonance of that voice to its full potential, and rides the tune with a rare and flamboyant melodic intuition. In comparison, “Tempest” itself is calmer, more hypnotic. One reviewer I saw drew an analogy with The Pogues, which struck a chord – that shantyish lateral movement, as the narrative moves forward, for a start. More specifically, though, it reminds me of “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, and those other big story songs by Eric Bogle. Not a man to be trusted, or believed much, perhaps, but Dylan still knows how to spin a yarn, and how to frame it in a sympathetic and unusual way. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

Anyway, with the release of Bob Dylan’s Tempest looming, I was thinking the other morning about a time when albums just, you know, came out. What seemed to happen was pretty straightforward. There’d be a story in Melody Maker announcing a new album by one of your favourite bands that usually gave the record a title, track listing and release date. The week the album came out, there’d be a review, maybe an interview and perhaps a full-page ad somewhere in MM, often with tour dates attached. On the day the album came out, you went to your local record shop – in my case, Derek’s in Water Street in Port Talbot – and you bought it. How simple it all seemed. Of course, when I actually started working for Melody Maker in 1974, I found there was a bit more to it, although not much more usually than a launch party. This was basically an excuse for the band, their mates and assorted journalists to have a bit of a piss-up and could hardly be described as an integral part of a carefully-plotted promotional campaign, unless you were Led Zeppelin and the party was a debauched affair in Chislehurst Caves involving naked nuns and the like, in which case the event would get a bit of a write-up in the red tops. As the 70s went on, album launch parties like everything else in the music business became increasingly lavish, this still being a time when record companies had more money than they knew how to spend. There were parties in caves, as mentioned, and what a hoot I remember that being, and boats for a while were very popular, with the inevitable fallings overboard (the best boat party was much later, in 1985, when The Pogues took over HMS Belfast for the launch of Rum, Sodomy And The Lash and a Melody Maker sub-editor, very drunk, toppled off one of the top decks into the Thames, bouncing off a gang-plank on his way into the water, a fall he was fortunate to survive). There were some good publicity stunts back then, too, around album releases. When Ian Dury’s Do It Yourself came out, Stiff sent a bunch of hooligans led by future Clash consigliere Kosmo Vinyl around to the Melody Maker office, which overnight they covered completely in the same patterned wallpaper featured on the album sleeve. The MM was housed in those days in a prefabricated hut in a back street near Waterloo Station and when I turned up for work the morning after Kosmo’s crew had been hard at it with rollers, buckets of paste and ample reams of wallpaper, the entire building was covered, the roof included. It looked like an art installation. Hilariously, I thought, we had to work in semi-darkness until the windows were scraped clear, and wallpaper was still being stripped from the roof and sides of the office a week later, to the teeth-gnashing fury of MM editor Richard Williams, who failed completely to see the funny side of it all. Stiff were also involved around the same time as the wallpapering incident in the launch of their entire recorded catalogue in Portugal. They’d signed a licensing deal with Lisbon-based Nova Records, who were so thrilled to get their hands on Stiff’s repertoire they lashed out on a huge party, hiring a boat to sail 300 guests around Lisbon harbour. Stiff were asked to send over a suitable representative or two and the best they could come up with was Wreckless Eric, an officious little man in bellbottoms called Andy Murray and me. Of course, Wreckless got hopelessly bladdered at the party, which ended badly when he head-butted the bass player from a local punk band who had tried to nick his beer, kicked the bass player’s intervening mate in the bollocks and then got hit over the head by someone wielding a bottle. Hell’s teeth, those were the days! Since that primitive time, of course, album releases have become increasingly overwrought affairs, involving elaborate coordination, multi-media synchronicity, feeds and streams on iTunes, Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms and more planning than a military invasion. I wouldn’t be surprised if less time was spent on the plans for D-Day than the release of the last couple of U2 albums. Even Bob Dylan is caught up these days in album launch marketing malarkey. This week’s release of Tempest was preceded by sneak previews, a pre-release video, an exclusive streaming of the entire album for a week on iTunes and on Monday, when the album finally came out, the opening in London, Los Angeles and New York of Bob Dylan ‘pop up stores’. Sony had found some empty premises in Beak Street here in Soho, had the place cleared out, whitewashed the walls, put up some shelves, installed a sales desk and some sofas, put up a few prints and filled the space with copies of the new album, a lot of back catalogue CDs and vinyl, limited edition screen prints, T-shirts and what a press release described as ‘high-end apparel’. The paint was still drying on the walls when the store opened on Monday at 11.00 am. Some people had camped overnight outside, apparently, and were joined for breakfast by dozens more, eager to at last get their hands on the new album. When I arrived just after the doors opened, there was a queue right along Beak Street, only a few people at a time being let into the store, but everyone in general good humour and eager to spend whatever money they had. It’s funny, but I don’t remember anything on this scale when, say, Down In The Groove came out, Dylan’s reputation at an all-time low in 1988 and the label almost embarrassed they were releasing it. How things have changed. Have a good week. Allan

OK I’m going to try and be relatively brief with this – or at least as brief as one can hope to be when dealing with the longest studio album that Neil Young’s ever made. I’ve written what I hope is an exhaustive review of “Psychedelic Pill” for the next issue of Uncut, and don’t really want to repeat myself too much. First up; it’s great, though I’m conscious of being someone with an enormously high tolerance of Neil Young’s self-indulgences, especially when he has the bedraggled might of Crazy Horse in tow. Trying to place “Psychedelic Pill”’s excellence into some canonical ranking doesn’t make a whole deal of sense to me, in much the same way as it feels a bit pointless trying to measure up “Tempest” against “Blonde On Blonde”. Young’s 35th studio set is best understood as the next chapter in what has been an eccentric and compelling last decade of music-making, with this time (unlike on “Americana”, blogged about here) a lot of extended jams to satisfy my favourite NY cravings. If you’ve seen the revealed data about “Psychedelic Pill”, you’ll know about how extended those jams are: two over 15 minutes, and one – the extraordinary opener “Driftin’ Back” – stretching out to nearly half an hour by itself. You’ll have seen the sleeve, too and, in conjunction with the title, wondered exactly how psychedelic this record might be. The simple answer is not a great deal more than, say, “Broken Arrow”, the Young album which it most superficially resembles (“Driftin’ Back”, if it has an obvious antecedent, is possibly related to that album’s “Slip Away”). There is a fleeting reference to the Grateful Dead in “Twisted Road”, and one version of the title track (which appears in two different mixes) is crudely phased throughout to give some rough psychedelic disorientation. It doesn’t really add much to the live version some of you may have heard in the past month or so; by some distance the weakest song here. The pill, really, is a metaphor for flashbacks. “Driftin’ Back”, in particular, is concerned with what may be the substance of Young’s forthcoming “Waging Heavy Peace”, and the writing of that autobiography. It begins with a brilliant trick – which I won’t spoil just yet – and soon locks into a languorous and beautiful series of solos, erratically punctuated by random Young pensées on the subjects of MP3s, hip-hop haircuts, Picasso wallpaper and so on. It’s not related to the “Horse Back” jam (more about that here), but it has that same deep-pile pleasure. If you believe, not unreasonably, that Young simply playing the shit out of an electric guitar is about as good as music gets, I think you’ll like it. The two other big ones, “Ramada Inn” and “Walk Like A Giant”, are more conventionally formed songs, and feel like new classics, too – as you may have divined from the live versions that have been kicking around, especially the Red Rocks bootleg (I wrote about that here). Again, they’re very similar to the live takes: the whistling refrain in “Walk Like A Giant” hasn’t been replaced by, say, a keyboard line, and there’s still a clanking feedback coda, even if it’s somewhat shorter than the Red Rocks version, at least. “She’s Always Dancing” is terrific, too, appearing to start mid-stream and having a “Like A Hurricane”-style lyricism to the playing as it rolls on for eight minutes or so. What else? “Twisted Road” is a band performance rather than the acoustic version that Young’s been playing live, and sounds better for it, while “Born In Ontario” (a little like “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, maybe), with its evocations of roots, family and the consolations of writing, works as a kind of conceptual heart of “Psychedelic Pill”. Much of Young’s latterday work has been preoccupied with organising and recontextualising his past, and this extraordinary record is part of that process; maybe even a culmination of it, viewed in tandem with the book. But I’ve already written more than I intended to… Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey