In the second week of May, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings drove from Los Angeles to Nashvillle. The journey took 31 hours, and Welch filmed a small portion of it on her iPhone. The clip is framed by an open car window, and outside you can see the flooded Mississippi stretching away from the edge of the road to the horizon: a new inland sea for the beleaguered American South.
The breakthrough fourth album, reissued with a trove of demos...In 1986, REM’s elevation to umpty-million-selling ubiquity, dominant influence and stadium marquees appeared other than inevitable. The Georgia quartet had released, in breakneck succession, two critically adored albums (1983’s Murmur, 1984’s Reckoning) and a third (1985’s Fables Of The Reconstruction) which was a much more expansive but nonetheless nervy and flawed record.
When Bob Dylan dances onstage - and he does seem to dance, after a fashion - at 9.15, it is easier than usual to draw battlelines in the crowd. Mostly, they have been at this Feis festival in Finsbury Park (very much a pack-em-in and get-em-pissed throwback to the pre-boutique era) all day, have had a selection of rain, mud, corporate beverages and Cranberries thrown at them, and in some cases are probably expecting The Saw Doctors to headline the main stage.
