In these heady days of New Rave and such, it was heartening to be reminded this morning of the last time British bands tried to pull off that trick. "Warming Up The Brain Farm: The Best Of The Lo-Fidelity All Stars" turned up in the post. And amazingly, ten years on, it sounds great. The Lo-Fis, if you missed them first time, were a bunch of faintly shady gents who sloped out of the big beat scene with a kind of malign, acid-tinged brand of indie-dance. It was easy to be a sceptic about them, not least because they were fronted by a chronically paranoid man called Dave who adopted a moody street poet persona and went by the name of The Wrekked Train. We didn't call them New Rave back then, of course. Someone at NME came up with the idea of summoning up a scene around them and the often hilarious Campag Velocet. Skunk Rock, we called it. The indie nation, however, were far too busy listening to Travis and the Stereophonics at the time, probably. History, I would have guessed, couldn't have been kind to them. But as I write, "Blisters On My Brain" is playing, a propulsive disco rant that samples the Breeders' "Cannonball" and is fantastic. Next up is "Battleflag", their intense hijacking of an old Pigeonhed track, which I remember being obsessed with back in the day, and which I suspect I'm going to be hammering for the next week or two. The late '90s was a weird time for music, I seem to remember, because while there were just as many good records as ever, most of them were very hard to write about for the music weeklies. The Lo-Fis were a gift to us, because they had massive self-conscious attitude, very daft names and music that fused the current dance scene with rock'n'roll classicism in a very seductive way. As a result, plenty of people were very keen to dismiss them as hyped chancers. The Wrekked Train skulked off just as they were edging towards popularity, leaving his bandmates to soldier on and do implausibly well in America without him. They made another album, which I don't remember as being much good. When I get to the tracks from it on this comp, maybe that'll prove to be a revelation too. But how nice to discover that something which seemed so ephemeral, a daft fad, has aged so well. Have a good weekend, everyone; I know I promised a bunch of previews this week (notably Robert Wyatt) that I haven't got round to writing. Next week, trust me, I'll do my best. The Super Furry Animals album is meant to be on its way, too.

Another Thursday morning just behind the Tate Modern, but today we are riding our goblin ship guided by a mermaid. Yes, the new issue of Uncut has arrived and the free CD is on our fancy new stereo. It's called "Fill Your Head With Prog", and it's just about good enough to convince you that punk was nothing more than a minor local disturbance. In 1978, surely, the only place to be was the Deeply Vale Festival with a flagon of Owsley's Peculier, watching Steve Hillage play "Hurdy Gurdy Man" for the best part of a month? I exaggerate of course, but only a bit. Allan has put together a terrific CD, I think (and I'm not just saying that because I work for him, I promise), which forces us to rethink our prejudices about prog. This is unambiguously progressive music, but it's not much like the turgid pomp of people like ELP either. Instead, a lot of the stuff collected here has a fluency, humanity and invention which is really appealing. I'm particularly taken with The Way We Live and Tractor, two manifestations of the same Rochdale collective who push the British psychedelic aesthetic into a place which is at once gnarly and graceful. Some stuff here I know already, but is terrific to here again. Aphrodite's Child's "The Four Horsemen", in which Vangelis and Demis Roussos rampantly invent The Verve. Wigwam I wrote about here, and I posted something about White Noise a while back, too. We just discovered, incidentally, that all the panting sex noises on the White Noise album were genuine, covertly recorded by David Vorhaus whenever he got someone into his bed. Charming. Best of all, the one track I find unlistenable - by the utterly wretched Van Der Graaf Generator - is right at the end, so I never even have to bother skipping it. I know this all reads a bit like magazine hype, but please give it a listen and, if Sham 69 still sound preferable to you, tell me what a pitiful hippy I am. One more thing today. An excellent new track by Sufjan Stevens has appeared online here. Unless you've heard a few of the rockier tracks on "A Sun Came", you'd never guess this was Stevens, since it forsakes chamber pop for a cranky garage rock that's reminiscent of Pavement circa "Wowee Zowee". I like it.

I recently wrote in Uncut about seeing Pink Floyd in March 1969 at a place called The Kee Club in Bridgend, a small town about half way to Cardiff from where I grew up in the even smaller town of Port Talbot. The Kee was known to us amusingly as “the Welsh Fillmore” – the original Fillmores a place to us of distant wonder, while the Kee was a tiny room with possibly the smallest stage in the world. Still, it hosted over a period of a couple of years some of the most memorable so-called ‘underground’ stars of the era – including the Floyd, Roy Harper, Pete Brown’s Battered Ornaments, the original Yes, The Nice, Third Ear Band and Edgar Broughton. My original column on the club provoked some excited correspondence with Uncut readers – including a former school friend I haven’t seen in 40 years, who wrote to me from Queensland, where he is now a lecturer in media studies – including the following note that’s just reached me from a Pat Morrey, who has memories as vivid as mine of some wondrous nights in the unlikely vicinity of Bridgend. Here’s what Pat has to say: Allan, Oh my God, The Kee Club in Bridgend 1967. Nobody I know remembers the place except you! My friend and I regularly hitchhiked from Cardiff to see all the amazing bands you mentioned. I missed the Pink Floyd, but I do remember The Nice, with Keith Emerson clad in his famous fringed jacket, trying to squeeze his massive Hammond organ into the place!! Yes, it was only the size of someone’s front room, but they somehow managed to attract great bands. I still live in Cardiff and still enjoy going to gigs but the Millennium Stadium just doesn’t compare to the intimacy of smaller venues. A big thanks for rekindling so many good memories. I’ve been going around with a smile on my face all day!!! Not forgetting Sofia Gardens back in 1967 - Hendrix , Pink Floyd and, good old Andy Fairweather Low. What a night that was!!!!! Thanks once again. Pat Pat’s letter got me to thinking that we all have a Kee Club or somewhere not unlike it lurking in our pasts, a small town venue that helped shape our musical enthusiasms, where we maybe first saw the bands we would come to love enduringly. If you have affectionate memories you’d like to share with us of a venue that means as much to you as The Kee Club evidently does for me and Pat, write to me here. I’m sure we’d all love to hear from you!

Should we believe the rumours tonight, this is the last gig Comets Of Fire will ever play in the UK. If that's true, they've found an enterprising way to make us remember, by searing an echo of the gig on onto our eardrums forever. That's the way it feels this morning, anyway. The Comets have been a mild obsession of mine for a few years now, so much so that I rather creatively cooked up an entire new psychedelic scene to hang round them in a piece for Uncut last year. A very good CD came out of it - the "Comets, Ghosts And Sunburned Hands" sampler. But fervid hordes of longhaired noiseniks did not, it's fair to say, invade the mainstream as a result. Who gives a toss about that, when the music is so good? Last night at the Scala, the Comets were on particularly tempestuous form though, to be honest, I've seen them better. I hate to sound like a lightweight, but they were just a bit too tempestuous here, with Noel Von Harmonson's FX and the distortion cranked up so loud that it smothered out pretty much everything else. And God, it was loud. Almost painfully loud. The support act was Part Chimp, something of a neglected national treasure, who play a kind of protean sludge rock so crude that it makes early Sabbath sound like the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Part Chimp are also, though, among the loudest bands in Britain. So we were well prepared. Or we thought we were. For a while, though, I could barely hear what the Comets were playing, with their old Hawkwind-gone-hardcore material turned up so loud that you could only just make out Utrillo Kushner's flailing drums and, occasionally, Ethan Miller's hoarse wail. The story seems to be that Miller is folding Comets to concentrate on this other excellent band, the Creedence-freakout outfit Howlin' Rain. At times, tonight, as Comets fly a little too far out of control, it seems a wise decision. After a while, though, it starts to make a bit more sense. I'm not sure whether someone sorted the mix out, or my ears just adjusted to the brutal environment. Suddenly, I could actually hear the guitars, and all that reverberant noise became more anchored. The turbulent blues-rock of "Avatar" moved a little more into focus, and I remembered how much I love this band. And how much, today, I'm suffering for them. On the subject of music that's too loud, by the way (I feel faintly ashamed banging on about this), there's a great piece in the new issue of Uncut by David Cavanagh, who uncovers a lethal trend of mastering CDs at unfeasible volume, losing much of the tonal range and dynamic in the process. It sounds a bit techie, but it's a fascinating read. Have a look and, as ever, let me know what you think.