Over the weekend, I watched the new BBC documentary series, Seven Ages Of Rock, which on Saturday night was dedicated to punk. A lot of it seemed inevitably familiar, but I perked up as I always do with the footage of The Sex Pistols' Jubilee boat trip, which I was on, standing about four feet in front of Johnny Rotten as a heaving crowd went hysterical and police launches surrounded us as the Pistols hammered out a defiant "Anarchy In The UK" as we cruised past the Houses Of Parliament. I'd just done a cover story on the Pistols and the release of "God Save The Queen" for what used to be Melody Maker, almost getting arrested in Ladbroke Grove with them on the way back from a photo-shoot. Evidently, this was enough to secure an invitation to the boat trip that followed on Monday, June 7, Jubilee Day itself. We left Charing Cross Pier in the early afternoon on a boat called The Queen Elizabeth, setting sail beneath brooding, overcast skies, a whipping wind coming off the Thames. There's a surly on-board mood, a ton of sulphate around, most of it being washed down by can after can of lager, a lot of people ripped off their tits before the boat reaches Greenwich, where we turn around and head back towards Chelsea Bridge. Tempers are fraying badly by now and there's an ugly scuffle, a photogrpaher getting kicked around the deck by someone we're told is Jah Wobble. We're heading towards Charing Cross and Parliament when the first police launches appear, coincidentally around the time the Pistols start playing - "Pretty Vacant" giving way to "No Fun" as we pull alongside Parliament. The police launches are circling us now, searchlights aimed at us, someone with a megaphone shouting at us, presumably ordering us back to the pier, where ranks of surly coppers are waiting, the thought of kicking punk ass an entertaining notion after a long day on Jubilee duty. Whoever's in charge boards the Queen Elizabeth when we dock at Charing Cross, and we're told that if we don't quit the boat immediately the police will remove us with as much force as they deem necessary. You can see truncheons being unbuckled, and things start getting ugly in a hurry, the police now thundering up the gangplanks, swarming into the crowd. Paul Cook is still hammering on his drums at this point, and Rotten is screaming "No fun! No fun!". The power's off, so you can't hear Steve Jones and Sid appears to have vanished. There'sd a lot of punching and kicking as we're herded on to the Embankment. Malcolm Mclraen goes down in front of me, and a couple of us scoop him up before the police close in on him. "You fucking fascist bastards!" he yells at them, and is promptly dragged behind a souvenir kiosk, beaten up and arrested, one of 11 people from the boat trip who end up that night in jail. Police vans roar around me as I stand on the Embankment, blood in the gutter and on the wall behind me, torn Jubilee bunting hanging from railings and lamposts, sirens in the distance, the sound of England screaming.

What seems like several months since I heard The White Stripes' "Icky Thump", I finally had a few more listens to it over the weekend. Reassuringly, my usual hysterical over-excitement seems to have been pretty justified. "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" remains my favourite track, which I've decided this morning is a striking fusion of "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Ziggy Stardust". Phil, who sits behind me in the office, tried to spoil it all be pointing out the song's similarity to "Centerfold" by the J Geils Band, but he can't hurt me. In fact, I guess that comparison only reinforces my hunch that this may be the song to really launch the Stripes into the American heartland. It's curious that a lot of early reviews of the record have concentrated on perceived difficulties and eccentricities (the mariachi metal of "Conquest", the crazed Scottish pair of "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" and "St Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)"), when what strikes me about plenty of "Icky Thump" is its bigness and accessibility. I think The White Stripes are one of those bands who prove that record labels and journalists can underestimate the listening public: if something unexpected happens on a record (a spluttery synth solo, say, or a swirl of bagpipe), does that automatically make it uncommercial? I don't think so, and I suspect Jack White - though he'd never admit that his music is either commercial or uncommercial - doesn't either. Anyway, a quick plug for our brothers and sisters at NME, who are giving away "Rag And Bone" (maybe the weakest song on the album, I'd say now, but still good) on a free seven-inch with this week's issue. Pretty nice. And while we're on the subject of business affairs, some interesting messages were posted here about the new issue of Uncut. I know this is going to sound trite, but we really are interested in the artists we write features about - I saw few better gigs last year than The Rolling Stones at Twickenham. For what it's worth, I'm glad that many of you seem to be able to see beyond the cover star and understand that our mag strives to cover the widest range of bands possible: from the artists Penelope calls "dinosaurs" but we call the biggest and most significant in rock history, to newcomers like, I dunno, Wooden Wand and forgotten heroes like some of those who figure on the "Fill Your Head With Prog". And of course it'd be churlish of me to deny that there are commercial practicalities involved, too: putting The Rolling Stones on the cover of Uncut will draw potentially thousands of new readers to the magazine, who - currently - may have a very different relationship to music and the mag compared with regular readers of this blog. If we can turn on more people to so much great music, is another Stones cover too much to bear? Thanks for the feedback, though - we are genuinely interested, I promise you. Shop talk over. One more thing: my grumbles about the Comets On Fire gig last week have been explained by the link that James posts here. I was actually stood behind the soundbooth and saw this happen, bizarrely.

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!