Delaney & Bonnie & Friends - Motel Shot (1971)

It was the presence of Gram Parsons and Bruce Botnick (engineer/producer for Love, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield etc) on the credits that drew me to have a £2.99 punt on Motel Shot.

The Eric Clapton connection had previously put me off checking out Delaney & Bonnie, and I must confess that my prior knowledge of the duo largely consisted of the 1979 bust-up between Bonnie and Elvis Costello, when the nerdy English rocker made some incredibly offensive remarks about James Brown and Ray Charles, resulting in a slap across the chops from Ms Bramlett and being chucked against a wall by one of Stephen Stills's road crew.

Bonnie's career was on the slide by this point but she'd been feted by bigger stars than Costello in her day, with her former husband Delaney Bramlett a magnet for fellow musicians even if mainstream success largely eluded him.

Clapton was a particularly keen cheerleader for Delaney & Bonnie, insisting that they were better than his own band Blind Faith when the couple supported them on tour in 1969 and later joining them as a sideman on the road, as captured on the 1970 D&B live album On Tour With Eric Clapton.

Delaney co-wrote six of the songs on Clapton's self-titled debut solo album of the same year and also joined him in hanging around with George Harrison around the time All Things Must Pass was being recorded, apparently teaching the former Beatle how to play slide guitar.

Chumming up with Clapton came with a cost, though, when he pinched Delaney & Bonnie's backing band (keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon) for his own Derek & The Dominoes project. Still, they got off lightly compared to Harrison, who ended up losing his wife to Clapton.

Whitlock and Radle returned to the fold for Motel Shot, along with a host of famous friends keen to help out on an album recorded in one long night at Botnick's house in Los Angeles.

The deal was that you had to show up by 7pm when the door was locked and everyone got on with capturing whatever happened during the night.

Presumably Botnick had a pretty big living room because attendees included Buddy Miles, Joe Cocker, Jim Keltner, Dave Mason, Duane Allman, Eddie James, Leon Russell, Jay York, Sandy Konikoff, John Hartford, Kenny Gradney and Ben Benay, along with the previously mentioned Parsons, Whitlock and Radle.

Delaney's mother's Iva Bramlett was also present, which may have at least moderated everyone's behaviour and helped ensure 12 good takes were safely in the can come sunrise.

The thinking behind Motel Shot probably stemmed from the reputation Delaney & Bonnie had for being a better live act than they were in the studio. Their three previous studio albums had all sold in moderate amounts and they were considerably more respected by their peers than by the public at large.

Motel Shot is designed to reflect the kind of loose, joyful sessions musicians enjoy together after the show when the pressure is off and they just want to have fun together.

In Delaney & Bonnie's case that meant running through some old gospel numbers, mixing in some country and blues, and then sprinkling in a few originals just for good measure.

Admittedly half the fun here is trying to spot the famous guests - Cocker's croak on Talkin' About Jesus, Duane Allman's slide guitar on Sing My Way Home, Parsons drifting in the mix on Rock Of Ages - but Motel Shot definitely isn't about big stars stepping up to make guest appearances.

The decision not to record the album in a regular studio is also reflected in the choice of instruments, with Leon Russell playing a central role on piano, while acoustic guitars and tambourines are pretty much the only other instruments.

Bonnie later revealed that there weren't even any proper drums at the session, with Buddy Miles improvising with a large suitcase he found lying around while Cocker took to whacking the side of the piano. On Going Down The Road (Feeling Bad), Bonnie, Parsons and Allman provided percussion by slapping their thighs.

Side one is dominated by gospel, particularly the opening trio of Where The Soul Never Dies, Will The Circle Be Unbroken and Rock Of Ages, the first two of which sound like everyone in the room had been handed a tambourine and a Salvation Army instruction booklet. The vibe is rough, simple and soulful with everyone obviously giving it their all.

Long Road Ahead was written by Delaney with Carl Radle, but the testifying tone and mass vocals on the chorus fit in perfectly with what's come before.

Faded Love changes the mood by beautifully transforming Bob Willis's country lament into a soulful piano ballad with a stunning vocal from Delaney. But he doesn't keep everyone waiting on the sidelines for long, and the full-on gospel call and response of Talkin' About Jesus, which lasts nearly seven minutes, soon has the aisles rocking.

Side two heads off in a bluesy direction, with a great cover of Robert Johnson's Come On In My Kitchen and a so-so take on Chuck Willis's Don't Deceive Me (Please Don't Go), which sadly loses the barrelhouse piano and Bonnie sings in a husky voice that sounds a little Janis Joplin lite rather than her best Deep South soul tones.

From this point, Russell takes a deserved break after sterling work on the piano and Delaney's experiences hanging around with Harrison come to the fore. Never Ending Song Of Love is crammed with acoustic guitars and massed vocals not a million miles away from the Beatles' All You Need Is Love or Harrison's My Sweet Lord. The result was Delaney & Bonnie's biggest hit single in the US.

Sing My Way Home is equally laidback and joyful with slide guitar from Allman adding nicely to the atmosphere. Going Down The Road (Feeling Bad) brings back Russell on piano, along with the gospel feel, so it ends up sounding considerably more upbeat than the song title might suggest.

Closing song Lonesome And A Long Way From Home was written by Bonnie and Russell but had already appeared on Clapton's solo album of the previous year. They reclaim it as their own in a laidback, soulful manner with beautiful fiddle from John Hartford.

The album ends with the words 'Y'all come back soon' and the closing of a door as Botnick concludes a fine night's work.

Delaney & Bonnie were riding on a high at this point, with the Carpenters also enjoying massive global success in the same year with the Delaney-penned Superstar (which Sonic Youth later also covered on a rather splendid red vinyl single). However, it didn't last long. Motel Shot failed to sell, Russell and Jim Keltner left to join Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour and then Delaney & Bonnie's marriage foundered, leading to a split in 1972.

Both went on to experience problems with drink and unsurprisingly, considering the heartfelt gospel aspects to Motel Shot, both went on to become born-again Christians. Delaney died in 2008 but Bonnie is still going strong, which ensures Elvis Costello continues to mind his manners if nothing else.

Dukes Of Stratosphear - 25 O'Clock EP (1985)

For what was essentially XTC paying tribute to the songs of their youth wrapped up in a conceptual joke, the 25 O'Clock EP proved surprisingly popular, outselling their previous two official albums and even providing a key piece of The Stone Roses's musical DNA.

25 O'Clock was released on April 1, 1985 and briefly sparked a debate in the music weeklies before it was confirmed that the Dukes were actually XTC in psychedelic disguise.

The band are listed on the back of the cover as Sir John Johns, The Red Curtain, Lord Cornelius Plum and, best of all,  E.I.E.I. Owen, who in reality were Andy Partridge, Colin Moulding, Dave Gregory and his brother Ian.

The decision to record an EP inspired by the Sixties bands they'd loved as teenagers came after Partridge and John Leckie had been fired from the job of producing Mary Margaret O'Hara's debut album on religious grounds - Partridge because he was an athiest and Leckie because he was a follower of the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (a free love advocate fond of Rolls Royces who was later accused by a former aide of being addicted to valium and nitrous oxide).

XTC had quit touring in 1982 due to Partridge's own withdrawal after many years of using valium had lead to stage fright-related panic attacks, with the band becoming purely a studio entity.

Turning psychedelic after quitting touring obviously has a fairly famous precedent and who better to guide them through this colourful career detour than Leckie, who had started out as a tape operator at Abbey Road Studios and worked on John Lennon's early solo stuff.

Virgin took some convincing to back this particular ruse but eventually stumped up five grand - in the end they got a thousand back almost immediately due to the band romping through the recording of six tracks in a fortnight in a deconsecrated church in Hereford, finishing in time for Christmas in 1984.

Partridge provided the album cover art that was heavily indebted to Cream's Disraeli Gears with a dash of Richard Hamilton's pop art thrown in for good measure.

The songs inside are just as Day-Glo and tongue in cheek as the cover, paying tribute to English psychedelia topped off with a little Nuggets era garage rock and bubblegum pop. The EP is less than 27 minutes long but there's easily an album's worth of ideas crammed into the grooves.

It starts with the sound of clocks ticking and chiming, a nod to Pink Floyd's Time, before the title track rolls in on Moulding's bouncing bassline and Dave Gregory's vintage keyboards. Partridge's lyrics about seizing control of a magical hour in which he can make the girl love him sounds like it was stolen straight from one of those 1950s Mysterious Tales comicbooks.

Bike Ride To The Moon comes over like Syd Barrett-era Floyd covering Tomorrow's My White Bicycle and features the mighty couplet: 'Now I shan't be pedalling any higher/ As the sharp Sputnick has given me a cosmic flat tyre'.

My Love Explodes brings to mind The Yardbirds and Cream indulging in a double entrende fest before building to a garage-punk climax with Partridge at his shouty finest. No wonder a Woody Allen soundalike asks 'Why would you write such a degenerate type song like that?' during the fadeout.

Side two starts with Moulding's only songwriting contribution, What In The World??, with its backwards swirls of sound and helium trumpets. Suggesting a future where acid is free and women fight the wars, Moulding suddenly sounds like an elderly major harrumphing in the Daily Telegraph letters page when he sings: 'Do you remember when this life was in perspective/ And the grown-ups were respected/ They'd give up their seat on the bus/ Open your door with no fuss'.

Your Gold Dress is built on what Partridge describes as 'the stupidest riff in the history of riffs', borrowing a piano line from The Rolling Stones' She's a Rainbow along the way and somehow ends up a far greater sum than just a few borrowed parts.

Saving their Beatles tribute until the end, Mole From The Ministry (check out this great video) could sit comfortably in Magical Mystery Tour without sounding out of place for my money.

If these attempts to describe 25 O'Clock make it sound dangerously like a Rutles-style comedy pastiche, then fear not. It may be full of nods and winks to heroes past but everything song is strong enough to stand shoulder to shoulder to its influences, which is no mean feat.

25 O'Clock sold more than XTC's two previous albums, Big Express and Mummer, rejuvenating the band's fortunes and leading to their excellent Skylarking LP recorded with Todd Rungren.

It also provided a key inspiration for The Stone Roses on their debut album, which Leckie produced. Ian Brown recently acknowledged the debt, albeit a little reluctantly, in The Observer - but then the Roses have long struggled to appreciate what was brilliant about their own LP, with Brown thinking it not dance enough and John Squire believing it not rock enough - which probably underlines just what a great producer Leckie is.

But the Roses were all paisley-loving psychedelicists back then, whether they care to recall it that way or not. Perhaps the old adage about 'if you can remember it then weren't really there' should be applied here. The Dukes/Leckie influence is probably most blatant on the reversed groove of Don't Stop and the ringing phone that ushers in the extended code to I Am The Resurrection.

A full Dukes album, Psonic Psunspot, arrived in 1987, again with Leckie in the chair, and while the songwriting remained strong, it never quite hits the heights of 25 O'Clock.

Finally, Mary Margaret O'Hara's debut (and to date only) LP, Miss America, eventually emerged in 1988, after a five-year gestation, but that's a whole other story...

Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs - Flatt and Scruggs With The Foggy Mountain Boys (1960)

Listening to Flatt and Scruggs With The Foggy Mountain Boys, it strikes me that banjo players don't get the credit they deserve as the original 'shredders'.

Metal guitarists like Yngwie Malmsteen and Dave Mustaine drove the whole concept to absurdly overblown squealing extremes back in the 1980s but the bluegrass boys still got there first. And they were snappier dressers.

The lineage was acknowledged in the 1986 film Crossroads when Ralph Macchio went head to head with Steve Vai in a guitar battle inspired by Dueling Banjos (as played by Eric Weissberg and Steve Mandell on the Deliverance soundtrack and itself an interpretation of Arthur Smith's 1955 instrumental Feudin' Banjos).

Earl Scruggs couldn't belong to a more different era than 1980s metal but he still built his reputation on being the fastest picker in the business.

He first rose to promience when he left North Carolina to play for Bill Monroe's band back in December 1945, providing a key ingredient to the nascent bluegrass sound that Monroe built around fast-paced songs and instrumental virtuosity. Scruggs's three-finger style was fast, fluid and inventive, drawing inspiration from blues, jazz and country, and raised the benchmark for every banjo player in the game.

Having performed on bluegrass classics such as My Rose of Old Kentucky, Wicked Path of Sin, Blue Grass Breakdown and Blue Moon of Kentucky (covered by Elvis on the B-side of his debut single in 1954), in 1948 Scruggs decided to head out on his own in partnership with another of Monroe's sidemen, guitarist/singer Lester Flatt.

Backed up along the way by various Foggy Mountain Boys with such fine names as Jack Shook, Curly Seckler, Jody Rainwater, Chuddy Wise and Everett Lilly, they spent the next 21 years spreading the bluegrass gospel, becoming the first country act to have their own syndicated TV show after flour company Martha White Mills started sponsoring them in 1953.

They survived some thin times in the late 1950s when rock'n'roll was on the rise but kept enough of a loyal following to keep going, with the Flatt and Scruggs with the Foggy Mountain Boys album first released on Harmony in 1960 to pull together recordings dated between 1951 and 1957 that had previously been released on singles before the LP started to take off as a popular format.

Side one alternates between three swingin' instrumentals and two slower country tunes with Flatt singing. Opener Randy Lynn Rag is particularly good, playing off Scruggs' skills, including some great string bending, against Paul Warren's fiddle while Flatt is on fine sweet-voiced form with On My Mind and Before I Met You. Scruggs introduces an impish swagger to Foggy Mountain Special, which also gives Curly Seckler are rare chance to show off his mandolin skills.

Flatt and Scruggs continue to take turns in the limelight on side two, starting with the former's lovelorn lament on Turn Those Brown Eyes On Me.

The dextrous picking of Earl's Breakdown is followed by the oldest track on the album, a beautifully gentle cover of the Carter Family song Jimmie Brown, The Newsboy with Scruggs switching to acoustic guitar.

I Won't Be Hanging Round and Don't Let Your Deal Go Down take the pace back up to finish off the album on a high and it's over in just under half an hour.

Flatt and Scruggs were preaching to the converted at this point but all that changed in 1962 when they wrote The Ballad of Jed Clampett, theme tune to The Beverly Hillbillies TV show, on which they also appeared six times.

Six years later, Warren Beatty used their song Foggy Mountain Breakdown to soundtrack the chase scene in Bonnie and Clyde, opening them up to a whole new generation via the countercultural crowd.

Before long Bob Dylan came calling and Columbia pushed for the duo to record an album of his tunes. That proved a step too far for Flatt, who was in his mid-50s at this stage and 10 years old than Scruggs. The duo finally split in late 1969.

Scruggs took the opportunity to work with several of the new groups, many of which were exploring America's musical heritage in the wake of Dylan and The Band's new direction.

Check out this great footage of Scruggs getting it together with The Byrds in the country. He may still be dressed in a shirt and tie but the loud orange hue certainly seems to be a nod to the times.

It's interesting watching him join in on You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, slowing his playing down to half his normal speed - you can see why he had no fear about running with the new crowd.

Earl Scruggs is 86 now and still with us, even if those incredible picking fingers aren't quite as nimble as they once were. With a musical history that dates from the early days of bluegrass, through rock'n'roll, at least two folk revivals and the Sixties counterculture, here's a man with a few tales to tell.

Grinderman - Grinderman 2 (2010)

It's no coincidence that Warren Ellis's promotion through the ranks of the Bad Seeds has dovetailed with the Indian summer that Nick Cave's long career is now enjoying.

In Ellis, Cave has finally met his match when it comes to a breadth of ambition and ferocity of workrate. In the past six years alone, they have collaborated on two Bad Seeds LPs (one a double), two Grinderman LPs, five film soundtracks, two theatre scores and toured in a full Bad Seeds line-up, a piano-based Mini Seeds quartet and as Grinderman.

Just when most rockers are settling into a middle-aged semi-retirement (Cave is 53, Ellis is 45), these two are working like men possessed. Perhaps that's the nature of addictive personalities for you.

Cave also currently seems fascinated by how quickly he can complete projects. Having spent five years labouring over his first novel, 1989's The Ass Saw The Angel, he dashed off the second, last year's The Death Of Bunny Monroe, in just six weeks during downtime while on tour, having cannibalised the ideas from a screenplay he'd written for John Hillcoat.

Grinderman seems to be another symptom of this, with all their songs written through jamming, rather than the traditional Bad Seeds format of Cave working long and hard on his ideas in his office before presenting them to the band to be fleshed out.

He first explored this way of working in the run-up to the 2004’s Abattoir Blues/ Lyre of Orpheus, gathering the nucleus of the Bad Seeds in a small studio in Paris to thrash out some ideas as part of the songwriting process before finishing them off on his own.

The departure of Blixa Bargeld from the band following 2003's underwhelming Nocturama LP may have prompted this move in an attempt to shake things up - the result was an outstanding double album to mark the start of Cave and Ellis's hot streak together.

With Grinderman, Cave seems to be trying to cut out the subsequent redrafting as much as possible and present the ideas in the rawest possible state, with most of Grinderman 2 actually managing to sound even more off the cuff than its predecessor.

What you sometimes lose in terms of the rich frame of reference in his lyrics is traded off for the sheer energy of the band thrashing about on the edge of uncertainty.

The first Grinderman LP drew heavily on the blues (the title track/band name is indebted to Memphis Slim's Grinder Man Blues) while firing it with a rough-hewn punky spirit - but Grinderman 2 finds them turning towards a greasy, blackened psychedelia.

Much has been made of Cave picking up the guitar for the first time at the age of 50 but Ellis is primarily a violinist whose guitar skills are hardly going to earn him a job running finishing classes at the Jimmy Page School of Rock.

The two of them like to combine simple overdriven rhythms with smearing great slabs of groaning and wheezing noise over the songs, some of it coaxed out of an electric mandolin, which looks like a miniature guitar and flips all the usual cock-rock posturing on its head very nicely when played live, and some from Cave on primative-sounding keyboards. Drummer Jim Sclavunos and bassist Martyn Casey provide a solid basis, including backing vocals.

Considering the back to basics ideology, the nine songs on Grinderman 2 are surprisingly wide ranging, from the bluesy howlers Mickey Mouse And The Goodbye Man and Kitchenette to the whispered minimalism of What I Know to the strange Latino groove of When My Baby Comes, with Ellis's mournful violin suddenly turning malevolent four minutes in when the whole song rises up like a vast winged creature, elbowing Cave to the sidelines in the process.

Worm Tamer returns to the midlife crisis comedy of the band's debut album, building up to the classic pay-off: 'My baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster/ Two great big humps and then I'm gone'.

Working on all those film soundtracks seems to have an impact, with opener Mickey Mouse... and Evil both coming across like the plots to old noir movies as sinister forces move in on desperate people on the run.

Heathen Child features appearances by the Wolfman, Marilyn Monroe and the Adominable Snowman, and comes with the wonderfully daft video from The Proposition/ The Road director Hillcoat (Warning: contains scenes of Jim Sclavunos's naked backside). Palaces Of Montezuma, which finds Cave back on piano and includes a carefully crafted lyric that leaves you feeling like a Bad Seeds song somehow wandered on to the wrong album, also memorably mentions a 'A custard coloured superdream of Ali McGraw and Steve McQueen' just to keep the cinematic theme going.

The vinyl version of Grinderman 2 comes with a 16-page booklet featuring lyrics (never a good thing in my book but that's for another day) and amusing graphical interpretations of the songs by Ilinca Hopfner, plus a poster of the band standing in Roman uniforms looking bored and a CD version of the album that great for the car.

Grinderman 2 is a blast from start to finish, though it's good to know we can expect a Bad Seeds album next, with all the attendant craft that involves. Cave is one of the best lyric writers out there but you have to wonder if he's in danger of spreading himself a little thin.

When the band start singing 'We are the soul survivors' on Bellringer Blues it's hard to escape the feeling that you expect a bit more than the kind of cliches Primal Scream specialise in nowadays.

But then the first person to recognise the need for a change of direction is probably Cave, so who knows what will come next.

In the meantime, the band certainly seem to be enjoying playing the songs live, with Cave still throwing himself about onstage in Manchester recently, managing to take out part of Sclavunos's drum kit three songs in, playing keyboards with his feet and even launching himself into the crowd at one point - not bad for a man who had celebrated his 53rd birthday seven days earlier.

Reggae cover art

Hats off to Lars Hasvoll Bakke over at Crestock.com for his entertaining ramble through nearly 50 years of Jamaican LP cover art. Stretching across ska, rocksteady, ska and dancehall, there's much to delight, amuse and confuse in 42 Reggae Album Cover Designs: The Art & Culture of Jamaica.

Treasure Isle Dub (197?)

I spent two weeks travelling across the north coast of Jamaica in the summer of 1992, from Montego Bay to Negril and then back east to Buff Bay before heading down to Kingston on the south coast.

Dancehall was the sound of the nation back then, with Shabba Ranks the king of the hill and Buju Banton the young prince, with the reggae, rocksteady and dub that I loved seen as old hat that belonged to another generation. I did get to see Bunny Wailer and Black Uhuru play under the stars on a hill outside Montego Bay as part of Reggae Sunsplash one night, though the moths the size of bats were a little distracting.

Once I got to Kingston, I bought a stack of reggae and dub albums (I think it was from Randy's on North Parade) and lugged them all the way back to England via Freeport and Miami.

I wasn't sure which one to pick out to write about but I've gone for Treasure Isle Dub due to the cryptic sleeve that took a bit of investigation. Apart from the title of the album, the only name mentioned anywhere is in the address for 'Coxon's Music City', which is actually a mispelling of Coxsone's Music City, which would hardly have pleased Clement Seymour 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd, the legendary label owner/producer behind Studio One.

Not that Treasure Isle Dub is actually a Coxsone production - he just re-released the album and the budget clearly didn't stretch any further than a two-colour sleeve featuring the title, track listing, Coxsone's studio address and a pencil drawing of a treasure chest.

He even seems to have subsidised the whole enterprise by putting an advert for Air Jamaica in one corner on the back.

Talking of which, has Guy Hands heard about this idea? Dulux's pastel range sponsors Coldplay - he's missed a trick on that one.

Anyway, it turns out Treasure Isle Dub is a collection of rerubs of rocksteady tunes released on Duke Reid's Treasure Isle label mainly in 1966-69.

Just before his death in early 1975, Reid sold the back catalogue to Sonia Pottinger, herself a respected producer who worked with the likes of the Ethiopians, Culture, U Roy, Big Youth and Toots & The Maytals.

Pottinger handed over the tapes over to Reid's nephew Errol Brown (not the lockless Hot Chocolate frontman), who conjured up three dub albums - Treasure Dub volumes one and two, and Pleasure Dub, which has been re-released recently by Pressure Sounds.

Exactly when these albums first came out is hard to discover - my guess is 1975/76, though it could have been as late as 1979, when Brown left Treasure Isle to work for Bob Marley's Tuff Gong.

Assuming it was 1975, dub was still in its infancy back then and Brown's style is pretty straightforward, stripping the songs back and letting a few heavily reverbed vocal snippets float to the surface, while occasionally filtering guitars or drums through the echo chamber.

You race through 12 tracks in half an hour, only two of them breaking the 3-minute mark, and the mood is joyful throughout - Brown keeps you skanking all the way, rather than getting lost in a fug of studio trickery.

Considering it's a compilation (see track listing with original tunes below), it sits together very well, racing past in a blur (not something you can usually say about dub), making it tough to pick stand-out tracks. However, De Pauper A Dub is a particularly fine opener, taking Dobby Dobson's Loving Pauper to higher ground by accentuating the loping groove underpining the original while the vocal bubbles in and out of the mix.

Arabian Dub (here with a picture of the original 1970s LP cover), a rerub of John Holt's Ali Baba, is full of wet, splashing drums, cryptic vocal shards bouncing around the speakers and a great organ/guitar groove.

Dub I Love sees Alton Ellis's original vocal on Baby I Love You granted a little more respect, before being suddenly sent ricocheting around the mix, resulting in a tune that makes you want to dance around with your hands in the air.

I must confess that part of the charm of Treasure Isle Dub is the snap, crackle and pop that accompanies every track. Look close at the vinyl and it's peppered with tiny dimples and there's a curious crease in the run-out groove on side B.

It never jumps but there's quite a bit of surface noise coming off it. Had I bought it in the UK I'd probably have taken it back and asked for a new one, but having carried it halfway around the world it just adds to the charm - a fine reminder of a memorable trip.

Looking at the subsequent reissues of Treasure Isle Dub, it's interesting to see there's still confusion about who the album should be credited to, as well as the year it came out, with some (such as mine), carrying no artist name at all, some giving the honours to Errol Brown and others to The Supersonics.

Pauper A Dub (Dobby Dobson - Loving Pauper, 1967)
Construction Dub Style (John Holt & Slim Smith - Let’s Build Our Dreams, 1971)
Dub So True (Ken Parker - True True True, 1967)
Arabian Dub (John Holt - Ali Baba, 1969)
Dub I Love (Alton Ellis - Baby I Love You, 1967)
Willow Tree Dub (Alton Ellis - Willow Tree, 1968)
Touch-A-Dub (Phyllis Dillon - Don’t Touch Me Tomato, 1968)
This Yah Dub (The Sensations - Those Guys, 1968)
Everybody Dubbing (The Melodians - Everybody Brawlin, 1969)
Moody Dub (The Techniques - I’m In The Mood For Love, 1968)
Dub On Little Girl (The Melodians - Come On Little Girl, 1966)
You I’ll Dub (The Techniques - It’s You I Love, 1968)

Fever Ray - Fever Ray (2009)

News that Let Me In, a US remake of the 2008 film Let The Right One In, is actually pretty good and not as dismal as expected led me to dig out Fever Ray, Karin Dreijer Andersson's 2009 solo album.

I saw the original film not long after getting the album and they've become intertwined in my mind - they're both Swedish, spooky and located inside wintry domestic settings. 

There's also a mutual interest in swimming pools, featuring in the videos for Andersson's When I Grow Up and If I Had A Heart and providing the setting for Eli's limb-tossing rescue of Oskar from his tormentors in the film. 

Andersson even vaguely looks like an amalgamation of the two, with Oskar's straggly blond hair and Eli's mysterious, dark, rather gothic air. Seeing Fever Ray play live last year, she sang the first two songs with what seemed to be a giant insect mask on her head and subsequently spent the rest of the gig standing in the gloom near the back of the stage while lampshades flickered around her.

Andersson also likes to use pitch-shifting effects on her voice, a trick she carries over from The Knife, the band she fronts with her brother, Olof Dreijer. 

She uses it to particularly good effect on album opener If I Had A Heart, with her voice sounding husky and alien as she sings the opening lines 'This will never end because I want more/Give me more, give me more, give me more' over a slowly throbbing electro backing in a manner that brings to mind Eli's ageless thirst.

The film is set on a run-down concrete Swedish housing estate covered in frozen snow and it's a scene easily conjured up by Concrete Walls, with its slow, slurred chorus of 'I live between concrete walls/ In my arms she was so warm'.

The final two songs, Keep The Streets Empty For Me and Coconut, both sound big, echoey and deserted, ideal for soundtracking a walk through slow, windless snowfall under street lights. The effect is a little reminiscent of Gier Jenssen's 1994 Biosphere LP, Patashnik, which he recorded in northern Norway on the edge of the Arctic Circle.

Not that Fever Ray is all so spooky or distant, with Andersson's ability to alchemise her surroundings into something magical sounding also stretching to the most mundane of everyday occurances.

On When I Grow Up she somehow goes from singing about the escapism of 'I want to be a forester/ Run through the moss on high heels' to the remarkable verse of 'I'm very good with plants/ When my friends are away/ They let me keep the soil moist', and somehow takes you with her - you smile rather than smirk.

Seven finds her singing about riding around on her bike and talking to an old friend about love and dishwasher tablets. But my particular favourite is 'A new colour on the globe/ It goes from white to red/ A little voice in my head goes oh oh oh', which will ring a bell with any new parent whose brief moments of respite on the sofa have been shattered by a wail from the baby monitor.

Fever Ray was largely recorded at home very early in the morning while Andersson was bringing up her two children, and lack of sleep is a theme that crops up several times.

On Triangle Walks, she mischievously sings 'Eats us out of house and home/ Keeping us awake, keeping us awake', but it's not the kids she's complaining about, it's the birds who feed on the berries outside her window.

Despite the demands of being a mother and the drain of not sleeping, Andersson seems determined to keep her creativity alive, which is why Fever Ray ultimately feels like an uplifting listen. I'm Not Done is a will to power, a refusal to give up what she loves. 

Perhaps she felt a little like Eli at the end of Right One..., hidden away inside a trunk but tapping out 'kiss' in morse code confident that Oskar is still listening. We're fortunate that she stuck with it because Fever Ray is a fine album that feels all the more appropriate now winter's drawing closer.