Sorry for the spoiler in the title, but Yo La Tengo’s temporary reinvention as a bunch of garage rockers from New London, Connecticut is pretty easy to unpick. The press release suggests that the fragrantly-named “Fuckbook” is the Condo Fucks’ sixth album (the previous five all appear to have been given Matador catalogue numbers). So far, so meticulous. The subterfuge collapses, however, when they list the personnel. Ira Kaplan becomes Kid Condo, which is efficiently mysterious. But Georgia Hubley is renamed Georgia Condo, and James McNew appears to have taken a somewhat idiosyncratic approach to the scam by using the pseudonym of, well, James McNew. It’s a Yo La Tengo record, then, but one that’s not much like the more reflective collections of recent years. Instead of a follow-up to “Straight Outta Connecticut” or “Condo Fucks City Rockers”, “Fuckbook”’s direct antecedent is the 1990 Yo La covers set, “Fakebook”. Where “Fakebook” was, if memory serves, genteel and mainly acoustic, however, “Fuckbook” is an enterprisingly tossed-off, scuzzy set. Yo La have been playing shows where they take requests for any song annually for years, and “Fuckbook” seems to capture the rowdy, haphazard spontaneity of those sets. The material touches on familiar obsessions of these rock scholars: there’s plenty of Britbeat from The Kinks and The Troggs; The Flaming Groovies (“Dog Meat”); some US proto-punk from Electric Eels and Richard Hell and so on; the obligatory early Beach Boys nod (“Shut Down” and “Shut Down Part Two” actually, much in the tradition of “Little Honda”). The sound, though, is wildly distorted and cranked up. The rawness of it all, the rehearsal space fidelity, the crackly intimacy of Kaplan’s voice, the biscuit tin rattle of Hubley’s drums and so on is so pronounced, it makes much of “Nuggets” sound polished. One of Yo La Tengo’s many charms has always been aclattery vivaciousness, but here they seem aligned more closely to a labelmate like Jay Reatard or something from the Goner label – super-snotty lo-fi. Much fun, anyhow, not least when they rip all the glam out of Slade’s “Gudbuy T’Jane”. Most of all, it shows that a vast knowledge of rock history can sometimes be best expressed with love and energy, rather than with a forensic idea of respect. Also, they’re called Condo Fucks!

Something of an adventure getting into work today, and I appear to be alone at Uncut for the moment. Helping me on the yomp through the snow, however, were a couple of quietly magical records on Time-Lag that I’ve got hold of recently. One is by Joshua Burkett, who I mentioned a few weeks ago in a blog about the new Six Organs Of Admittance comp. Burkett appears to be a pet cause of Ben Chasny and his friends: I first came across him on a CD compiled for Ethan Miller (from Comets On Fire and Howlin Rain), then again on a mixtape from Chasny. Thanks to Ben Chasny’s shuttle diplomacy, Joshua sent me a care package recently with a bunch of his excellent and precious records, some of them home-cooked CD-Rs. Although “Gold Cosmos” is, by a squeak, the best, the most recent and most attainable seems to be “Where’s My Hat?”; 14 tracks of lovely music from that hotbed of free folk, New England. Listening to “Where’s My Hat?”, it’s not hard to spot the affinities with Six Organs. But if anything, Burkett’s music is more frail and unmediated. The sound is cloaked in field hiss, and his ungated fingerpicking often slips and stumbles. There are clear ties with the whole Tower Recordings scene that I think he was a part of in the 1990s, and the way his playing and singing seems more influenced by, say, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham rather than the Takoma school makes this a blood relative of the first two albums by another Tower Recordings alumnus, PG Six. Talking of that, isn’t it strange how there’s such a fertile new tradition of American Primitive guitar players, but nothing much in the shape of a British Primitive movement (apart from James Blackshaw and Rick Tomlinson, off the top of my head, though they often seem closer in style to the American strand rather than the British one)? I think I heard somewhere over the weekend that Jim Moray was up for a bunch of awards at the Radio 2 Folk thing tonight, and while it’s hardly a fair and even comparison to draw, it seems a shame that America is thronging with all these people artfully reimagining tradition, while Britain seems dubiously blessed with naff modernisers, for want of a better word, like him and Seth Lakeman. But anyway, Joshua Burkett is great, and so is Ilyas Ahmed, judging by “The Vertigo Of Dawn”. Again, this is pretty underground stuff, but from the Cthulthan call to prayer that begins “Golden Universe”, Ahmed’s mystical strain is denser than Burkett’s spare études, with a brackish psychedelic depth that puts him closer in sound to Hush Arbors and Six Organs. There’s a sense I have at the moment of being on the threshold of more and more exciting music coming out of this secret world, with a new Sun Araw album due this week and plenty more interesting-looking things on the Not Not Fun label. While I remember, Ilyas Ahmed is also on a CD that comes with the newish edition of the nice Yeti mag/book, which also features Sun City Girls, Eat Skull, Times New Viking, Devendra’s Megapuss and some stuff like Crystal Stilts. Check it out, and enjoy the snow.

I’ve just finished a longish review of this new Bill Callahan album, “Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle”, for the next issue of Uncut, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much here; save some adjectives, maybe, for the magazine. It is, though, one of the best records Callahan has made in what’s now a reasonably long, generally underestimated career. “Sometimes I Wish. . .” is, in fact, Callahan’s 13th album by my reckoning, including of course those that came out as Smog or (Smog). Like one of his obvious antecedents Leonard Cohen, Callahan has a voice – a reverberant baritone that ambles along by the side of a melody rather than actually sings it – that he grows into with age. Where once he sounded preternaturally ancient, now he sounds healthily matured and weathered. Experience becomes him. And as a consequence, it’s a lot easier to see Callahan as ruefully mellow these days rather than miserable, as he’s often been erroneously stereotyped (for one thing, he’s blatantly sung in – often misanthropic – character for most of his career). On “Sometimes I Wish. . .” he really achieves some kind of state of grace, contemplating loss, faith, love, the usual stuff (though horses and rivers aren’t as prominent as usual in the lyrics) and a lot of birds. What works brilliantly here, too, is how the simple, linear tunes are embellished by orchestrations from another Austin resident, Brian Beattie. Beattie subtly factors in violins, cellos and French horns, providing a rich soundbed that never detracts from Callahan’s own performance as the album’s centre of gravity. Earlier this week, he answered a bunch of my questions about the record by email (I’ll run the whole Q&A on here nearer the time), and compared this album’s predecessor, “Woke On A Whaleheart” to a ‘70s singer-songwriter, Jimmy Webb-type thing because of the variety of styles he attempted there. Strangely, though, I’d been thinking about Webb myself in relation to “Sometimes I Wish. . .”, because there’s something about the empathetic lushness of these arrangements – “Jim Cain”, “Too Many Birds”, “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” especially – that make me think of him. Callahan is never as theatrical as Webb, of course, and the backing is correspondingly measured. But the overall feel is somehow similar. Those looking for Callahan’s old viciousness might be struggling here, apart from the odd hiss and snarl on the exceptional motorik of “My Friend”. While “Whaleheart” was conspicuously jolly in parts, in stark contrast to some of the earlier records like “Rain On Lens”, say, the general mood here is reflective. He still has a capacity for good jokes, though, notably “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” – the title comes from the narrator reading back “the perfect song” he wrote in the middle of a dream. Callahan sings an entire verse of this, all entirely incomprehensible. Weirdly, though, it’s also one of the most profound and moving, as well as funny, songs I’ve heard in a while.

This morning's sad news of John Martyn's death reminded me of a particularly colourful encounter I had with him, back in what they call the day, which I wrote about in my regular Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before column in Uncut in July 2004 and re-print below. Adios, John. John Martyn Leeds: February, 1975 A day of mayhem starts pleasantly with lunch at the Savoy with Billy Swan, who’s had a hit recently with a great record called “I Can Help”. Over generous portions from the most expensive menu I’ve ever seen, washed down with a couple of bottles of wine that each cost more than I earn for a week’s toil for what used to be Melody Maker, Billy tells me fantastic stories about growing up with rock’n’roll in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where he used to see Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich in local beer joints. By the time we get to coffee and brandies, Billy’s on an hilarious roll. He finishes with a flourish: a story about Phil Spector driving Billy, Kris Kristofferson and Carly Simon up to his Hollywood mansion and playing them rough mixes of John Lennon’s Imagine, which Spector had just produced. “I couldn’t believe it,” Billy says with a smile I can still remember. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” There’s still some brandy left in the bottle when I have to leave. I’m due in Leeds later today to interview John Martyn, who’s meant to be recording a live album that night at a show he’s playing at the university. We get to Leeds around seven in the evening, and drive onto the university campus, where someone helpful in a very short skirt shows us to Martyn’s dressing room. I knock on the door, provoking a great bellowing from inside. I push the door open and walk into the smallest dressing room I’ve ever seen, before or since. Martyn’s slumped in a corner, looking like he’s been drinking since the dawn of time, or slightly earlier. “Who the fuck are you?” he wants to know, bubbles of spit in the corner of his mouth. “I’m from Melody Maker,” is all I manage to say before the breath is knocked out of me when some fucking oaf blindsides me, smashing me into a wall before trying to hang me from a coat hook. “If you’re Chris Welch, I’m going to fucking kill you,” I am now being told. Turns out the bearded balding maniac I’m staring in the eye is virtuoso bassist Danny Thompson, now playing with Martyn after years with folk supergroup Pentangle. Danny’s about to introduce his fist to my face when Martyn gets unsteadily to his feet and punches the bass player in the region of his kidneys. This makes Danny grunt, but doesn’t put him down. “Let him the fuck go,” Martyn tells Thompson gruffly. “He’s not the one you want.” Danny lets me go and retreats to the other side of the small unpleasant room, which I now realise is stocked with so much booze it looks like an off-license store room or a bootlegger’s lock-up. “Sorry about that,” Martyn says then. “He thought you were someone else.” I can hear Thompson sort of growling, and decide on the spot that if the belligerent fucker comes at me again I’m going to stick a finger in one of his eyes – I’m not fussed which one – and we’ll see where we go from there. Martyn then claps me somewhat thunderously on the shoulder, offers me a drink, which I accept, no point holding grudges, and knock back quickly before accepting another one. I remind Martyn that I’m here to do an interview with him. He seems to have a problem processing this when the dressing room door flies open and this sort of scruffy fucking troll staggers in, swigging vigorously from a bottle of crème de menthe. This is former Free guitarist Paul Kossoff, who will apparently be playing tonight with Martyn, Thompson and drummer John Stevens. “Who’s this c***?” Kossoff asks Martyn, pointing at me. “He’s from Melody Maker,” Martyn tells Kossoff. “But he’s not Chris Welch.” Kossoff looks at Martyn like he’s being spoken to in a language he doesn’t understand and heads back out the door. I’m still trying to get Martyn to sit down and talk when about 15 minutes later, the dwarf-like Kossoff returns, bleeding from the nose and lip and wailing like the recently bereaved. “Fuck’s going on now?” Martyn ask, which provokes a tale of considerable woe, Kossoff now telling us he’s been set upon by homicidal students from whose clutches he has been lucky to escape with his life. Martyn’s on his feet in a flash, Danny Thompson, too. The bassist snaps an arm off a chair, brandishing it like a club. Martyn’s got a bottle he might break over someone’s head. “Show us these fuckers,” Martyn tells Kossoff, who leads us out of the building, into the student’s union bar. “That’s the one!” Kossoff now shouts, finger accusingly aimed at a skinny little twat, holding his girlfriend’s hand like she’s about to run off and looking at us fearfully as we approach like he thinks he’s about to be kidnapped by a death squad and driven off to a dank room in a remote location where terrible things will happen to him. “He’s the one that hit me,” Kossoff fairly shrieks. Martyn, moments ago ready for havoc, pauses now. “He’s not a fucking GANG,” he says of the trembling student. “What’s going on?” Turns out Kossoff’s drunkenly groped this bloke’s girlfriend and the bloke’s given Kossoff a shove that’s sent the guitarist tumbling down some steps. All talk of a gang attack is pathetic bollocks. “You c***,” Martyn shouts at Kossoff, smacking him extremely hard in the face. The short-arsed former guitar hero is further surprised when Danny Thompson fetches him what I’m delighted to describe as a pretty painful thwack to the side of the head with the arm of the chair he’d snapped off in the dressing room. This makes Kossoff cry like a girl, at which point Martyn and Thompson stalk off, laughing like people who are mad. The next thing you know, these people are all on stage and for an hour and more the music they play is incredible – but, hell, you can hear that for yourselves on Live At Leeds, the ‘official bootleg’ album that Martyn first makes available only by mail order before Island finally release it properly. Back in the band’s dressing room, after the show, I’m sitting with Martyn, finally getting around to the interview, when Paul Kossoff walks up to Martyn and breaks a beer bottle over his head, glass shattering everywhere. “Everybody OUT,” Martyn screams, grabbing Kossoff in what looks like a near-fatal head-lock. “I’m going to give this c*** the kicking he’s been asking for.” The room clears pretty sharpish at this point, and several of us stand in the corridor listening to Martyn and Kossoff go at it like rutting elks, the most alarming sounds of destruction and violent combat coming from the other side of the door - a symphony of bone-cracking, head-banging, furniture-breaking, glass-shattering detonations. This goes on for a while, then Martyn opens the door, blood all over the front of his shirt, holding Kossoff like laundry, which he then drops to the floor and kicks. “Shall we finish that fucking interview now?” Martyn asks me, and minutes later he was waxing lyrical about the influence of Davy Graham on his music, as if this sort of thing happens every night when he’s on tour. Which it probably does. Allan Jones