As a general rule, music doesn’t have that much of a nostalgic function for me. Without sounding too bloodless, I’m only interested in a record if it sounds good to me right now; the fact that it might have soundtracked various epiphanies/crises/whatevers in my life is, by and large, irrelevant. If I were ever to end up, God forbid, on some “Desert Island Discs” thing, I’d maybe choose something from “On The Beach” (a review of Neil's first Manchester show is over at the Reviews Blog, incidentally), even though I might have actually spent 1974 listening to Mud. I’m not ashamed of my musical past, I just don’t like those records any more. I’d like to think that this fairly ruthless and unsentimental approach has kept me going as a critic for so long, but occasionally I hear something which reminds me of the past before even I can start calculating whether it’s stood the test of time. This has happened a couple of times in the last week or so, thanks to the arrival of a couple of early ‘90s reissues. Sebadoh’s “Bubble And Scrape” and the Lemonheads’ “It’s A Shame About Ray” were critical records to me, both personally and professionally, as I was just starting my career at NME. Last week, of course, I mentioned in a blog about Carl Wilson’s excellent book, “Let’s Talk About Love”, that I had a general aversion to personal narrative taking a prominent part in record reviews. So I’ll stop the moist-eyed, long-haired reminiscing and get to my point: how reassuring it is to discover that these two albums still sound wonderful today. They do, though, sound slightly different from how I remember them. “It’s A Shame About Ray” remains a zippy, exhilarating hybrid of punk, powerpop, country, indie and a little grunge, but its lyrical punch seems greater now. Listened to a certain way, Evan Dando’s perfectly constructed little songs contain masses of foreshadowing, plenty of hints that Dando was far from the dippy lightweight he was often portrayed as. It’s not just the dazed Juliana Hatfield duet, “My Drug Buddy”, it’s all that talk of being a “ship without a rudder” and being – if only it had been true – “tired of getting high”. The deluxe version augments the original album with that accursed version of “Mrs Robinson” but, more interestingly, a bunch of solo demos which reveal these bright, sparky songs to have been originally much darker and more introverted in tone. Still a great record, either way. As is Sebadoh’s “Bubble And Scrape”, happily. Hindsight doesn’t make this one any darker in tone – how could it, when Lou Barlow had laid out the details of his personal life with such unexpurgated zeal on “Soul And Fire”, “Two Years Two Days”, “Happily Divided” and so on? What is a surprise, though, is that this album – once memorialised as quintessentially indie and lo-fi – now sounds so chunky and satisfying, a relatively orthodox rock classic. Perhaps it’s the generally spindly, fey tone of so much American college indie over the past few years, but the substantive fuzz of these rueful, frequently harrowing ballads gives them musical as well as emotional heft. The virtue of “lo-fi”, or whatever, is that the production of albums like “Bubble And Scrape” doesn’t date like bigger budget endeavours. So these fantastic songs still sound crisp and direct, but classicist now, too. Even Eric Gaffney’s wayward, nervy skronk-outs sound less disruptive. Maybe it’s the sheer weight of leftfield music I’ve listened to in the intervening 15 years, but, far from jarring and atonal, they seem relatively melodic to me now. And they make sense in the volatile, impressionistic and ultimately still moving sprawl of “Bubble And Scrape” (now up to 32 tracks, with added tape hiss, demos and so on). Like “It’s A Shame About Ray”, this one’s worth holding on to for posterity.

I have to admit to a certain amount of anxiety tonight. It’s not just the weather, which is, of course, rotten, the wind howling like it’s fit to tear chunks from rooftops from miles around. Nor is it the small matter of my beloved Liverpool’s tricky Champions League fixture at Inter Milan, made all the more potentially hazardous by Rafa’s selection of Martin Skrtel at centre-back. The last time I saw him, he was hopelessly fluffing his way through an FA Cup tie against Havant & Waterlooville, playing for all the world like someone who’d popped into Anfield to deliver half-time oranges, only to be mistaken for a ‘real’ footballer, handed a shirt and told “Here, put this on and get out there”. Perhaps it’s more to do with the fact that, last time Neil Young played the Apollo here, it was 2003’s Greendale tour. Allan has already filled you in on the brain-sapping details of punters being forced to endure an entire album of utterly forgettable songs in grim procession, in the vain hope he might play something good later. So I’ll leave it there. But these things live in the memory. So far, reports of these latest shows have been excellent, seeming to indicate a Neil Young revitalised, refocused and eager to rock out with abandon. As it turns out, I don’t have much to grumble about after all, omens or not. He saunters on for the acoustic set first, baggy-suited and surrounded by a phalanx of guitars. Someone has hoisted up a huge ‘N’ stage left, just in case we’re not sure. Bathed in a curious kind of fireside glow, he settles into “From Hank To Hendrix”, before the captivating “Ambulance Blues”. As you probably know by now, it’s become the surprise staple of this tour, and it really is wonderful. A great, urgent, labyrinthine thing, it feels like Young is crawling somewhere within it, unsure of where he’s going to take it at any given moment. In an odd way too, it seems to set a certain mood for this acoustic half. He hardly utters a word to the crowd, seems a little tetchy. He plays “Sad Movies”, another rarity finally dusted down for this tour, then stands up and does that slow bumbling about that I’ve been reading about, like an ageing college lecturer who’s forgotten where his glasses are. Mild performance art maybe, but it does all seem pretty unnecessary and painfully self-conscious. “A Man Needs A Maid”, at piano and synth, is just beautiful, little shivers of notes shooting into the air. Then comes tonight’s first surprise: “Stringman”, originally written in 1976, but unreleased until Unplugged in the early ‘90s. A lovely, almost meditative rendition at piano, it’s followed by “Try”, a sunny piano rag from the "Homegrown" sessions that’s also been stretching its limbs on these dates. In between “Harvest” and “Love In Mind”, Neil dispenses with a stray heckler, but it’s all starting to feel a little grumpy. Digging out the banjo, he ignores the calls for “Old King” and almost attacks “Mellow In Mind”, plucking hard at the strings, suddenly animated, keening for the high notes. It’s a sinewy, unexpectedly powerful version that gives you a jolt. The timeworn classics are brought out to finish, with “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” getting the biggest roar of the night so far. Interval over (during which time I’ve squeezed past a bunch of people from Emmerdale, spotted the bald dome of TV chef Simon Rimmer and overheard Mani talking to someone about working with Bjorn from Peter, Bjorn & John) and it’s a wholly different Neil. With Rick Rosas on bass, Ben Keith on rhythm guitar and Ralph Molina on drums, he tears into “Mr Soul” like it’s an itch he’s been desperate to address all evening. Springing up and down, bouncing from foot to foot, screwing his face up into the mic, he’s now clearly having fun. Silhouetted against the glaring crimson lights of the now-familiar “junk-shop-memory” stage set, “Dirty Old Man” looks, and sounds, brilliantly hellish, full of the impish glee of old men who know they should really be doing something more sedentary on a weekday night. Much has been made of “No Hidden Path” this tour, and rightly so. It’s an immense, spectacular thing. But for pure rock’n’roll dementia, head-buckling riffs and roaring solos, “Spirit Road” is its equal tonight. Huddling up to Keith and Rosas, riding the exchange like a tempestuous bull, Young is cutting loose. “Down By The River” is colossal too, Young turning his back, hunkering down and rocking so wildly you fear he’s going to topple into Molina’s lap. It’s a huge ball of knotted noise. At one point during a similarly frenzied “Hey Hey My My”, it sounds like it could easily smash the place to pieces. Brief respite arrives with Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me”, prefaced with Young’s introduction: “When I was 20, I wrote another melody for this. It wasn’t a good idea, I should have left it alone.” Needless to say, the song, with Keith on organ, Anthony Crawford at the piano and Young wheezing into harmonica, sounds just gorgeous. Then comes “Winterlong”, first aired on 1977 retrospective "Decade", and dedicated to his late friend Danny Whitten. It stands alone in this electric set as a rolling, graceful country song, albeit with a kick. “Powderfinger” is extraordinary too. After “No Hidden Path” and much audience wailing, the band return for “Roll Another Number”, which, after all that, sounds like a gentle rubdown. Is this Young, on the other side of 60, giving us all his last hurrah? Reminding us, on the back of "Living With War" and "Chrome Dreams II", that "Are You Passionate?" and "Greendale" didn’t signal the beginning of a long slow fade into mediocrity? Or is Neil just doing what the hell Neil wants and having fun in the process? My guess is the latter. Oh, and by the way, Skrtel did alright tonight. We won 1-0. ROB HUGHES ACOUSTIC SET From Hank To Hendrix Ambulance Blues Sad Movies A Man Needs A Maid Stringman Try Harvest Love In Mind Mellow My Mind Love Art Blues Don’t Let It Bring You Down Helpless The Needle And The Damage Done Heart Of Gold ELECTRIC SET Mr Soul Dirty Old Man Spirit Road Down By The River Hey Hey, My My Too Far Gone Oh, Lonesome Me Winterlong Powderfinger No Hidden Path Roll Another Number (For The Road) ROB HUGHES

It’s been something like four months since I first mentioned the debut album by Bon Iver, and since then, there have been few records I’ve played as much. In Uncut’s world, I suspect “For Emma, Forever Ago” may turn out to be one of the most significant albums released in the UK in 2008. I certainly hope so, anyway. As far as I can work out, “For Emma” has actually been released twice in the States already, on two different labels. Over here, though, it’s not officially out – on 4AD – until May. At first, you’ll probably be reminded of those very early Iron & Wine records, the way you can hear the creak and scrape of the acoustic guitar, and the sounds of the room in which it was recorded. Soon, though, the guitar on the opening track, “Flume”, is overwhelmed by a peculiar kind of rootsy ambience, the vocals are multitracked and downy, and the effect is at once downhome and transcendent. This is the work, chiefly, of one man, Justin Vernon, shut away in a hunting cabin in North West Wisconsin over December 2006 and January 2007, possibly “with the wild wolves around you,” as he sings in “The Wolves (Act I And II)”. Vernon only has his own multitracked voice for company, it seems, and the intense intimacy of “For Emma” can be unnerving; as if we’re listening to a man hearing a host of voices in his own head. The thing is, while Vernon sometimes sounds agonised – particularly on “Skinny Love” – his voices most often configure themselves into a sort of celestial choir. There’s an odd, dislocated hint of soul and gospel to many of these songs, and when that’s delivered with such an ethereal glow, I’m reminded – like many other critics, in fairness – of Vernon’s new labelmates, TV On The Radio. I can’t recall offhand, though, an album which has balanced so well that discreet, processed trickery (the digital flutter on “Blindsided” reminds me of Fennesz, faintly) and the sort of singer-songwriter activity habitually described as naked, honest and so on (I am restraining myself from making my weekly rant about the fallacy of authenticity here, but you get the picture). As I write this morning, I’m listening on headphones, which strikes me as the best way to take in “For Emma”, and paying attention to individual songs for maybe the first time: it’s one of those albums which flows so organically, so satisfyingly, and with a stealthy swiftness, that I always deal with it as a whole. So, I can now say that “The Wolves” and “Creature Fear” most strikingly supplement the acoustic guitar and rapturous voices formula: the former has drums which sound like fireworks in the distance; the latter features the measured appearance of an electric guitar, a bass, some austerely fierce drums, and whistling (all provided by Vernon). Apparently “Flume” features drums and vocals by someone called Christy Smith, as I read the sleeve credits, which I should listen to again. Now, there’s the title track, which reminds me, very vaguely, of Lambchop playing a New Orleans parade: a subtle march, augmented by a trumpet and a trombone. Like everything here, it’s astonishingly lovely. Let me know what you think of this one, if you can track it down.

We were chatting the other day in the office about music documentaries, on the back of a forthcoming doc celebrating Arthur Lee and Love. The consensus we reached was that, often, music docs seem not to utilize the same language as other documentaries, or even movies, do; the results often frustrating affairs, often borderline inept in their rather simplistic "point and shoot" technique. Which brings me, in a rather windy way, to Bruce Weber’s 1988 doc on Chet Baker, Let’s Get Lost, that’s due a theatrical re-release in the UK in June, and a DVD release shortly after. Weber is an American photographer whose work you might have spotted in Rolling Stone or GQ, or more likely you’ll know him for his black and white ad campaigns during the 1980s for Calvin Klein. A huge fan of Baker, Weber filmed him towards the end of his life, in and around Santa Monica, intercutting this interview with archive footage of Baker at his peak in the 1950s, and charting his decline into heroin addiction. “He was bad, he was trouble, he was beautiful,” observes one of his many ex-wives early in the film. Certainly, any romantic myth that exists around Baker has its origins in the extraordinary black and white photographs and footage from the time. He was a beautiful, sensual-looking man, radiating Gatsby-cool, always surrounded by “beautiful cars, beautiful girls.” Which makes the state he’s in when Weber films him all the more heartbreaking. Sunken cheeks, paper-thin skin and missing his front teeth (they were smashed out when a drug deal went bad), he has the haunted look of a man in terminal decline, the kind of figure you’d expect to see propping up a Tijuana bar in a Peckinpah movie. I can’t profess to be an expert of Baker, so excuse me if I don’t get too far down the musicology route here. Baker was as indigenous to jazz as the Beach Boys later were to rock’n’roll, both products of the sun and the beaches of California and the West Coast. “A lot of people were obsessed with Chet,” says one old friend; during the Fifties, most American icons seemed to be sportsmen, but Baker – presumably because he was white and good looking at a time when segregation was still the norm – broke through. Robert Wagner played Baker, or at least an analogue of him called Chad Bixby, in All The Fine Young Cannibals in 1960; Baker himself was due to star, but had got busted for drugs and gone to Europe. Apart from Baker, there’s plenty of contributions in Weber’s film from his exes (he was married three times, and had two other significant partners besides). There’s his third wife, Carol, an English actress who has also raised three of Chet’s children; she’s remarkably dignified and courteous when discussing her presumably fraught relationship down the years with Baker, who’s unsurprisingly described as “a careless father”. In contrast to Carol, there’s Ruth Young, a rather low-rent Liza Minelli type, the cold, beautiful blood of Hollywood running through her veins, and Diana Vavra, who seems to have spent most of her adult life running after Baker, trying to look after him. All of them still love Baker, and they all seem to concur he was, at worst, a con man, a junkie who’d cut out on you without a second thought. What’s incredible is that Weber manages to coax some performances out of Baker during the film. The soundtrack, incidentally, is available on Amazon and I spent most of the weekend listening to it, pausing only for The Archers omnibus yesterday morning. Anyway, it’s all that kind of smoky, noctural jazz you associate with Baker, beautiful blue moods. Despite being wracked by years as a junkie, and finding it increasingly difficult to get gigs, Baker seems to still be in full possession of his formidable talents, particularly his soft, plaintive voice. I guess what I've been saying here for the last 600 words is that when music documentaries work, they can be pretty exceptional. And this, certainly, is among the exceptional ones.