Robert Plant and Alison Krauss London Wembley Arena Thursday, May 22 2008 “Good evening” says Robert Plant, flinging back a mane of tangled hair from his face, early on in tonight’s extraordinary show. “And welcome to. . .” he goes on, and pauses. “Well, I don’t know what it is,” he says then with a smile that before it’s finished turns into a grin, and a big one at that, visible evidence of a man clearly enjoying what he’s doing, even if he can’t put a name to it. “But you’re welcome to it,” he adds, “whatever it is.” I’m sure there are a lot of people who remain more than somewhat baffled by what Plant is currently up to – Jimmy Page, you imagine, principal among them – and can’t for the life of them understand why the singer would turn his back on what may have been a last opportunity for a reformed Led Zeppelin to sweep all before them, the world once more in thrall to their rampaging glory, the band making millions in the process. For these people, Plant’s decision to defer a full-scale Zeppelin reunion tour in favour of taking on the road Raising Sand, the album of “dark, sexy Americana” he recorded in Nashville with bluegrass singer and fiddle player Alison Krauss, may seem wilfully perverse, the album and accompanying dates an indulgence of sorts, a superstar somehow slumming it, the whole thing, in their opinion, a self-flattering vanity project, Plant doing it for reasons they find unfathomable and therefore questionable, as if Raising Sand was no more than a preening vanity project, recorded on a superstar’s indulgent whim. This is a point of view, of course, that dramatically underestimates the depth of Plant’s feelings towards the beautiful and eerie music he has created with Krauss and producer T Bone Burnett on Raising Sand, the way it has revitalised him, filled him with new energies and ambitions that have allowed him at last, after years of sometimes inconclusive solo meanderings, to step out of the shadows of Zeppelin’s ominously looming legacy, the past that is forever calling out to him and by which I’d hazard he feels nothing but confined, reined-in. Watching him at Wembley, you could clearly see a man who has discovered, however belatedly, a musical universe in which he feels uniquely, if unexpectedly, at home – and you sense that what he’s doing now, which for him involves the charting of entirely new musical territories, is wholly more gratifying than, at 60, parading the stages of the world’s biggest venues as the rock god of yore, which you suspect is a role he no longer feels comfortable playing, in a circus in which he wants no more to perform, private planes, vast entourages and knee-bowing attendants not a part at all of his current reality. With Plant and Krauss waiting in opposite wings, T Bone Burnett, dressed in a preacher’s long black coat, as if he’s on his way to a pulpit to deliver a sermon of apocalyptic content, leads out the superlative band he’s pit together. He’s joined by drummer Jay Bellerose, double bassist Denis Crouch, multi-instrumentalist Stuart Duncan, with Nashville guitar legend Buddy Miller, who I saw last as a member of Emmylou Harris’ touring band, replacing Marc Ribot, who played on Raising Sand. The band in place, and locking quickly into the shimmering reverb groove of “Rich Woman”, Plant and Krauss make their entrance to huge cheers, standing shoulder to shoulder at separate microphones, the astonishing vocal chemistry they have discovered between them at once in evidence. There is an ease and grace to their work, an unforced natural playfulness that gives way when appropriate to a sombre gravity. The band, meanwhile, are simply sublime - their nearest sonic equivalent Dylan’s current touring band of virtuoso road warriors, whose collective excellence they serially rival. I suspect for some, the music that follows over the next couple of hours, will have seemed rather too sedate. But the choreographed formality of the show’s presentation is cleverly judged, and its unhurried elegant stateliness, what they play often assumes a wonderful grandeur, at times seems positively regal. Highlights from the Raising Sand album are many – including Krauss’s sublime reading of Gene Clark’s “Through The Morning, Through The Night”, Plant’s powerfully mesmerising “Please Read The Letter”, a riveting “Fortune Teller” and a tender, heartbreaking “Killing The Blues”. There are versions, as you will have heard, of three Zeppelin songs – a banjo-led “Black Dog”, which is brilliantly transformed, the original’s rampant carnality replaced by something more subtly insidious and sexy, a dramatically executed “Battle Of Evermore”, with Krauss invoking the ghost of Sandy Denny, and, even better, a stunning reworking of “When The Levee Breaks”, which now echoes the similar dramatic eschatology of Dylan’s “High Water”. Best of all, though, is the version of the uncompromisingly bleak “Nothing” – introduced by Plant as a “profound piece of pain by Townes Van Zandt”. When I interviewed him last year, just before raising Sand came out, Plant explained that originally he didn’t get this song, couldn’t make sense of it, its meaning elusive to him. A series of explanatory e-mails from T Bone helped him ‘get inside’ the song, as he put it, and now he inhabits it totally, gives authentic voice to its poetic desolation, Krauss’s fiddle and the torrential guitars of Burnett and Miller providing devastating back-up. When it’s over, and a chilling hush settles, Plant stands centre stage, head for a moment bowed. He lifts it then, and stares out at the cheering crowd, allows himself just the flicker of a vindicated smile, a man in a place he wants to be rather than the place others wish he was, which is somewhere you suspect he will want to linger a while longer, this musical journey just beginning.

I’ve been blown away this week by the first album from a New York band called Endless Boogie. The name was vaguely familiar, and reading through the press release it transpires that the band played Slint’s All Tomorrow’s Parties a few years back. There are some earlier singles, I think, which Bubba helpfully linked to here. Anyway, reading on, it says here that frontman Paul Major is “one of the pre-eminent record collectors in the universe, and has supported himself as such for two decades now.” Fortunately, Major doesn’t bring a bloodless, scholarly approach to music with his band. Instead they, well, boogie. Endlessly. So “Focus Level” begins with “Smoking Figs In The Yard”, and a Herculean chug that reminds me of AC/DC, with the solid machine-riffing style of Malcolm rather than Angus Young in the ascendant. Major’s vocal style is a sort of inchoate southern splutter which has prompted one of two vague Kings Of Leon comparisons in the office: maybe this is what “Knocked Up” would’ve sounded like if it had been as good as it briefly promised to be – and if the Followills’ father had sung lead. A more apt comparison, though, might be to Captain Beefheart – or perhaps to John French, doing his fervid Beefheart impression on that weird Magic Band reunion tour a few years back. Like Beefheart, it’s clear that Endless Boogie’s music is rooted in the blues (the band name is lifted from a John Lee Hooker record), but their version is more streamlined than cranky. As befits the work of men who clearly have that encyclopaedic, meticulous knowledge of rock history, it’s easy to sit here and spot antecedents in their awesome, brooding jams. There’s plenty of early ZZ Top, as you might imagine, some Coloured Balls, maybe a tiny bit of Status Quo (they appear to be acquaintances – and record suppliers, possibly – of Stephen Malkmus, which explains a lot) and Canned Heat (“Jammin' With Top Dollar”, in particular, hits that mighty choogle, with a hefty measure of Norman Greenbaum and, as John Robinson has just noted, “Orgone Accumulator”, too). And there’s also a real sense that Endless Boogie have exploited the affinities between fiercely disciplined, linear southern jams and motorik. The road goes on forever, the scenery never changes that much. And neither do the jams. I had an idea for a band for a few years ago – not that I can play an instrument or anything, but it was a pretty abstract idea. I envisaged a band who’d play nothing but the main riff from “American Woman” by The Guess Who, non-stop for an hour. Endless Boogie sound like the sort of band who had a similar sort of idea, then realised they could do much better. Hence “Focus Level”; it’s 79 minutes long, and right now I never want it to end.

There is, of course, plenty that's wonderful about The Apprentice. Let's start with how a bunch of jumped-up estate agents, regional sales reps and “risk managers” stab each other in the back and bicker while displaying the level of intelligence usually associated with lesser Crustaceans. It’s the same reason you might watch Big Brother, so you can hoot cynically as the worst specimens that a few million years of evolution has to offer parade their tawdry, desperate dreams across the screen. The Apprentice is actually even funnier than Big Brother. Though both sets of contestants are generally motivated by the same thing – money, fame, success, greed – the Big Brother housemates are, by and large, of fairly limited aspirations. They don’t really have to do much but doss around by the pool and hope that by showing off the right amount of cleavage/character quirks/bitchiness they’ll find themselves catapulted into the limelight, or at the very least the right kind of Essex nightclub, the one frequented by Premiership footballers where the toilet seats are paved with gold. But the contestants on The Apprentice are hard-workers, driven by Gordon Gekko-like principals of corporate ruthlessness who get up early enough in the morning to press their pastel-coloured ties and blow-dry their hair. And what makes The Apprentice so howlingly funny is how self-delusional they are. They really believe they’ve got what it takes to “make it” in the cutthroat upper echelons of the business world. My favourite part of the show is when they balls up one of the tasks set at the start of each episode by Sir Alan Sugar, then turn on each other during the debriefing session in Sugar's board room like semi-rabid feral wolves to avoid being shouted at and/or sacked by Sir Alan. No one likes getting a bollocking, least of all from someone who displays the combined charm of the Mitchell brothers from EastEnders and Stalin, but it’s the way the would-be apprentices take their evisceration from Sugar with a polite “Thank you, Sir Alan,” before obsequiously departing the board room. Then, presumably, to be escorted to a small ante-chamber and stabbed to death with a poison-tipped shoe by Sir Alan’s own Rosa Klebb, Margaret Mountford. Anyway, last night’s programme was fantastic by any standards. The two teams – Alpha and Renaissance – were charged with devising a commercial for tissues. Team Alpha (why not Alpha Max? Surely that would have been more thrusting and aspirational..?) were headed up by the objectionable Alex, who looks like an also-ran from a Take That covers band and is a master at passive-aggressive, back-stabbing bastardy. He had in tow low-rent Essex boy Lee and Sloaney Lucinda, who complained about everything. Team Renaissance were led by Raef, an arrogant posho who was saddled with the equally posh through drippy Michael and self-serving Claire, who’s little more than the class bully. Team Alpha designed a tissue box that looked like a cheap cereal packet and shot an advert of concrete-clad crassness. Team Renaissance came up with a tasteful box design and hired Sian Lloyd to star in their commercial, which was remarkably tasteful and well-shot but made the fatal mistake of not really featuring the product at all. Needless to say, Team Alpha’s ad – the kind of thing you find running on daytime TV shows like Jeremy Kyle – won. And it won by dint of its absolute lack of skill, wit or imagination, but simply because the product was slapped on screen at every opportunity. There is, the conclusion runs, no room for art in business. What was fun was watching Raef and Michael throw themselves into the project. Raef, it transpires, has trod the boards in his time, while Michael ran a theatre group at university. This meant they could sit in the back a people carrier trying to out am-dram each other, Raef declaiming a windy speech, Michael singing one of Fagin’s songs from Oliver! in comedy-Jew voice. They got carried away with each other’s brilliance on the ad shoot, much back-slapping and self-congratulations, Michael declaring “You could be the next Fellini!” of Raef’s formidable skills behind the camera. Once in the boardroom, however, Michael proceeded to do for Raef pretty much what Brutus did to Caesar on, lo, those fateful ides of March. It was shameless, weasely and utterly vile. Brilliant! Alex, meanwhile, was pretty flat as a team leader, and really only won because Team Renaissance singularly failed to grasp that the point of a commercial is to sell a product. Also, why on earth did Raef get a TV weather forecaster to advertise tissues..? The mind, she boggles. So, Alex and Claire – who I loathe equally, by the way – lived to fight another day. Which is great, because it gives me reason to risk an aneurism hurling spit-flecked obscenities at my TV set next week. Who do you think, then, should win The Apprentice? And how long until the next series of Masterchef...?

“This is an old song,” says AA Bondy, introducing the next number in his opening set at the third Club UNCUT night at the Borderline. He’s not kidding, either. What I had presumed would be some lost early gem from his back catalogue turns out to be a dark and powerfully brooding version of Blind Willie Johnson’s apocalyptic “John The Revelator”, originally recorded in 1930, which is going back some. With his deft acoustic finger-picking, wheezing harmonica, tousled charisma and literate songs of warning and distress, Bondy himself also seems like a throwback to another age, a time of Greenwich Village folk singers, protest songs, packed clubs on Bleecker and McDougal Streets, and revolution in the air, as Dylan put it on “Tangled Up In Blue”. “Black Rain, Black Rain” is as forlorn as its title suggests, “Vice Rag” a blackly hilarious hymn to self-destructive inclinations, whose sentiments are echoed also on “Killed Myself When I Was Young”. Highlight of Bondy’s brief set, however, is, as he tartly describes it, “a song about coming from the Southern states of America that isn’t called, ‘Yes, I Can Read’.” It’s called, in fact, “The Night Comes Rolling In”, a song as fragile and evocative as Ryan Adams’ “Oh My Sweet Carolina”. If you want to hear more of Bondy’s songs, his American Hearts album, on Fat Possum, is definitely worth getting. Tonight was a perfect moment to finally catch Okkervil River, Will Sheff’s blisteringly good Austin six-piece, who won’t too often in the future be playing places as small as this, their career taking some kind of flight with the success in America of last year’s The Stage Names album. When they come back for more dates in November, they’ll be playing the Shepherd’s Bush Empire, but when Sheff stares out at the 200 or so people crammed in the tiny Borderline, I’m sure all he can see already is multitudes, the music Okkervil River are playing certainly big enough for the stadiums they may yet be headed for. Live, the band are louder, looser, rougher and even more dynamic than on The Stage Names, which itself was a musically thrilling progression from the more quilted textures of Black Sheep Boy, the 2005 album whose songs were partially based on the life of doomed singer-songwriter Tim Hardin. The latter album is briefly represented tonight, but it’s the wilder stuff from The Stage Names that sets the place on fire, Sheff delivering the delirious verbosity of his songs with an evangelical fervour, lankily reminiscent in his smart back suit of the young T-Bone Burnett wearing one of Ryan Adams’ less successful haircuts. The band, meanwhile, rage behind him with the unfettered aplomb of The Hold Steady, some numbers building to a panoramic sweep redolent of The Arcade Fire, without, I would hasten to add, that band’s occasional drift towards the pompously self-regarding. The Motown-inspired “A Hand To Take Hold Of The Scene” is thrillingly dispatched, Scott Brackett’s cornet to the fore on the song’s irresistible chorus. “Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe” builds like something vintage from the E Street Band’s repertoire, pounding drums at times the only support for Sheff’s vocal implorations, the band then blowing off the roof as they join in the increasingly unhinged instrumental fray, Sheff, both hands gripping his microphone, guitar slung over his shoulder, neck down, now reminiscent of a latter-day Joe Strummer. On the slower, beautiful “A Girl In Port”, Sheff does something I haven’t seen many performers do at the Borderline, which is reduce the place to respectful, awe-struck silence, even the yahoos at the bar for the moment mute. “Unless It’s Kicks” – featured recently on Uncut’s Ooh La La covermount – is unbelievably fierce, takes off like something rocket-fuelled, its trajectory a flaming arc, almost out-of-control, Sheff more than ever reminding me of Paul Dano as Eli Sunday in There Will Be Blood. Even better, the night’s ultimate highlight, in fact, is “John Allyn Smith Sails”, inspired like The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations”, by the suicidal American poet John Berryman, who in the song, as much as life, is an emasculated alcoholic, impatient for death. “I was breaking in a case of suds at the Brass Rail, a fall-down drunk with his tongue torn out and his balls removed,” Sheff sings, a broken man waiting for the end. “And I knew that my last lines were gone, while, stupidly, I lingered on. . .” The song’s climactic, roaring appropriation of The Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” is a stroke of grim genius and here assumes a desperately fearsome momentum, seems wholly disinclined to come to any sort of end, and so doesn’t for what seems some time, all of it unforgettable. A sensationally good night.