'The world's only networked vinyl-only radio show'

The tagline may have been rubbish but that was the only thing I didn't enjoy about Peter Paphides' excellent Vinyl Revival radio show on 6 Music last week.

Well, I did wince a bit when the press release pointed out that his record collection is worth a million quid, but that was probably pure jealousy on my part.

Paphides was a genial if slightly tentative host and had rounded up some excellent guests to help him ruminate on the joys of their shared obsession. Paul Weller was very much in Modfather mode, having brought along some of his crackly vinyl favourites, including Little Richard's Slippin' And Slidin' and Emmit Long's Call Me.

'Vinyl is addictive, it's like a drug addiction,' noted Laura Marling at one point to general murmurs of agreement. Her vinyl selections were equally astute, including Smog's I Feel Like The Mother Of The World and Lee & Nancy's Some Velvet Morning.

The second hour involved a trip to Norman Cook's house to have a rummage through his collection, resulting an entertainingly eclectic selection of tunes including 10CC's Rubber Bullets, Just Brothers' Sliced Tomatoes (which he remixed into his The Rockafeller Skank in 1998), Monochrome Set's He’s Frank and the excellent Patrick Cowley remix of Donna Summer's I Feel Love.

Plenty of passion, a little trainspottery knowledge and a few rueful confessions about the geeky pleasures of collecting records made the whole show very entertaining. 6 Music have commissioned another one-off show and hopefully there'll be enough interest to earn it a regular weekly slot.

Presumably Paphides is saving his old pal Bob Stanley for show No.2, with the duo recently undertaking a vinyl-buying trip round the country together, as chronicled in the Guardian recently.

Neil Young & The Stray Gators - Time Fades Away (1973)

Time Fades Away is probably the most famous album never to have appeared on CD, with more than 10,000 people having signed an online petition calling for a reissue and Uncut magazine recently voting it No.1 in their list of the 100 most neglected LPs. Not bad for a raggedy live album featuring 8 previously unreleased songs that lasts barely more than half an hour.

Time Fades Away was released in October 1973 and is the first in the infamous 'ditch trilogy' of albums Young recorded in the wake of his rise to global success with the mellow sounds of his After The Goldrush and Harvest LPs - and particularly the massively popular 1972 single Heart of  Gold.

The smooth harmonies and gentle acoustic sounds of the West Coast were on the rise and would make huge stars of The Eagles, James Taylor, Doobie Brothers and Jackson Browne among others. Young could have been king of that particular soft rock hill but decided, not for the first or last time, that he didn't care to go where the wind was blowing. As he put it in the Decade liner notes: 'Heart of Gold put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch.'

The result was a remarkable trio of albums (also comprising Tonight's The Night and On The Beach) that seemed to reflect not only Young's troubled mood but also that of a nation suffering a nasty hangover after the death of the Sixties dream, locked in a futile war in Vietnam and increasingly at war with itself. It's the souring of hippie idealism into hedonism and a lack of direction that Robert Greenfield portrayed so well in his 1974 book A Journey Through America With The Rolling Stones. Or as Hunter S Thompson put it in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (first published in 1972): 'We were riding on the crest of a beautiful wave. Now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.'

Having agreed to his biggest tour to date - 65 dates in just 90 days - supposedly to promote Harvest, Young decided to get his old Crazy Horse sparring partner Danny Whitten involved again and move back in the direction of 1969's Anybody Knows This Is Nowhere. However, Whitten was a strung-out wreck when he turned up at Young's ranch for rehearsals in late 1972 and was eventually sent home a few weeks later with $50 in his pocket.

He was found dead later that day after overdosing on valium and alcohol, a miserable end to such a promising talent. Young was hit hard by the news, telling a friend: 'Every musician has one guy on the planet that he can play with better than anyone else. You only get one guy; my guy was Danny Whitten.' Young was still talking about him onstage the last time he played in Manchester in 2008.

Tour preparations took an even worse turn after Young agreed to pay respected session drummer Kevin Buttrey $100,000 to do the tour and the rest of the band found out. Keyboard player (and respected producer) Jack Nitzsche had a drunken confrontation with Young about it, with the singer angrily agreeing to pay everyone the same amount.

The scene was now set for a disastrous tour. Young was paying all his musicians well so he compensated by treating them all badly. Even the fans were getting on his nerves with their demands for the mellow folkie sound he'd grown tired of.

Tequila became Young's drink of choice and the band flew around the States in an old  Electra prop-jet amusing themselves with a huge hookah hash pipe somehow constructed out of an aquarium pump. Bassist Tim Drummond described it as 'like putting your mouth over the exhaust pipe of a car'.

The opening acoustic section of the shows (first solo and then with the band) were well received but the electric section was more troublesome, the fans baffled by the rickety and raw sound, and deeply ambivalent new songs.

Young quickly decided Buttrey was the source of his problems and ragged on him mercilessly until the drummer left the tour two thirds of the way through to be replaced by Johnny Barbata. Then Young's voice started to give out and he called in David Crosby and Graham Nash to help out on the final few dates.

The tour finally limped to a close in April 1973 and the sane response would have been to put the money in the bank and the experience behind him. Instead, Young decided to release a live album documenting the mayhem in all its murky glory.

What's so gripping about Time Fades Away is just how heartfelt it is. Young recalls his father, Scott, telling him, 'As a writer, the one thing you have to do is lay yourself bare', and it's a dictum he certainly lives up to here.

Listen to one of the full gig bootlegs floating around from the tour (there's a good one from Norfolk, Virginia linked on www.guitars101.com that features Buttrey on drums) and you'll hear plenty of the tunes from Goldrush and Harvest that the fans were after, but it's the new songs that Young uses for the album. The set list evolved during the tour, with great songs such as Lookout Joe and New Mama for some reason excluded from Time Fades Away only to pop up in studio versions on Tonight's The Night.

The most famous of songs on Time Fades Away is probably Don't Be Denied, which Young told his biographer Jimmy McDonough that he wrote the day after he heard that Whitten had died. A meditiation on life's frustrations that starts with his parents splitting up and getting beaten up at his new school, before moving on to dreams coming true and his distrust of the music business, it's sloppy and raw (because that's how life is) while still sounding defiant and focused. The riff perfectly reflects this, being slow and drawn out yet tense and pained at the same time. One of his finest songs, it could easily have sounded self-pitying but in fact sounds anything but - Young is determined to battle on and is clearly hurt that the 'friend of mine' did not.

The title track,Yonder Stands The Sinner, L.A. and Last Dance are also all full band electric numbers featuring a staggering swampy rock sound that Young would hone to a woozy perfection during the Tonight's The Night sessions later in 1973, with three solo numbers completing the set.

The album kicks off with the title track, and the words 'Fourteen junkies too weak to work/ One sells diamonds for what they're worth/ Down on Pain Street/ Disappointment lurks', immediately making it apparent that something weird is going down here. The lyrics here are vague, the meaning deliberately ambiguous, but the vibe is clearly dark. Nitzsche's barrelhouse piano playing and Keith's slide guitar and incredibly sloppy backing vocals flesh things out beautifully.

Journey Through The Past is a solo piano tune that from his 1971 tour (the only song on the album not to come from the Stray Gators tour), but it fits the mood perfectly, with Young singing about love like a man clinging to a liferaft.

Yonder Stands The Sinner is the most cryptic song on the album, with what's sounds like Crosby introducing it as 'kind of experimental', and Young really straining his voice at times. This must have sounded like a chaotic disaster to many fans at the time, particularly the booze-sodden lyrics about hiding 'behind the nearest tree', but it hints at addiction ('he calls my name/ without a sound') and depression among the goofing about.

L.A. is nearly as ramshackle, with Young singing about the 'uptight/ city in the smog' before asking 'don't you wish that you could live here too?' The fact that hippie baby boomer poster boys Crosby and Nash are singing backing vocals just adds to the sly humour of the song.

Love In Mind is another solo piano song, with Young baffled by the times he finds himself living in, just hoping that love will save him. It's a theme he returns to again with The Bridge, though when he sings about 'The bridge was falling down' he sounds like he's trying to patch up the troubled relationship with his second wife, actress Carrie Snodgrass (they split up in 1975).

Hardly a barrel of laughs so far, Time Fades Away still manages to end on a particularly down note with Last Dance. According to Young's biographer Jimmy McDonough, a studio version of this song was recorded before the tour that sounded like a call to arms to escape the dreariness of working man's 9 to 5 ('Wake up! It's Monday morning/ No time left to say goodbye') in favour of 'You can live your own life/ Making it happen/ Working on your own time/ Laid back and laughing'. But Last Dance seems to have served as a barometer of the mood of the band and the 8-minute version here suggests that salvation is simply an illusion, undercutting those optimistic words with 'Oh no/ Oh no'.

It all gets a bit surreal 7 minutes in when Young, after playing a fine solo, works himself into a frenzy, croaking the word 'no' 59 times while Crosby and Nash bizarrely attempt to cheerlead the crowd into singing along. It feels wonderfully raw and real and under-rehearsed. The fact that everyone involved was an excellent musician certainly helps, whatever the troubled circumstances.

Young has given various reasons for not releasing Time Fades Away on CD over the years, from technical problems with the recordings to admitting he finds it painful to listen to. Whatever the truth, it's well worth digging out a vinyl copy. The fantastic cover and massive handwritten lyric sheet inside just adds to the twisted, drunken romance of the whole thing. Strange times indeed.

Record Store Day - a few thoughts

Having started this blog 12 months ago by writing about an LP I bought as part of Record Store Day, it seems a little perverse to now admit that I didn't go along this year.

Record Store Day is, of course, a wonderful thing, celebrating an unique culture and encouraging people to make the effort to head off to their local independent record shop. Last year I would have ended that sentence with 'while they still can' but with the number of UK indie record shops having actually increased by 12 in the last year after more than a decade of precipitous decline, a corner has hopefully been turned.

Anyway, I was off to London at 8am to see Man City beat their Traffordian neighbours at Wembley, so I had to sit this one out.

With nearly all of the exclusive product sold by the 180 UK shops involved coming in vinyl form, it was disappointing to miss out but a couple of things have been nagging at me.

First of all, there's the product. Dozens of exclusive, limited-edition items sounds great in principle but dig through the actual list and quite a bit of it felt a little underwhelming.

There's an avalanche of alternative takes, live versions, straight-up reissues (occasionally in new packaging) and remixes, many of them on 7-inch singles - all pretty essential if you're an obsessed fan of a band (and we've all been there) but otherwise fairly missable. No doubt the Radiohead outtakes 12-inch sold out in moments but the 2 tracks still weren't good enough to get on what was already a patchy album.

I'd certainly be interested to find out how popular the individually numbered 500-strong vinyl run of Gorillaz' The Fall album was at over £20 a pop when it was available as a free download at Christmas.

Needless to say, there was still plenty of things I wanted to buy - singles by Red Krayola and Moon Duo, the Dave Depper Ram Project LP, Lone Pigeon's 28 Secret Tracks, most of the Ace/Vanguard reissues and Earth's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light for a start.

But then comes the issue of whether you'll actually get your hands on the stuff you want. Last year I headed off to Vibes Records in Bury (now sadly defunct - Vibes that is, not Bury) and picked up the Flaming Lips' Dark Side of the Moon before driving into Manchester hoping to get hold of a couple of limited edition singles only to find over 200 people waiting outside the door of Piccadilly Records, some of them since the early hours of the morning.

Then there's the problem with so much of the really popular stuff ending up on eBay by lunchtime. It's got to be a little heartbreaking as the struggling owner of a record shop to sell the Radiohead Supercollider 12-inch at £6-7 on the day and then watch it go for ten times that on eBay (Buy Now price on eBay at time of writing £66.99 + postage! A total of 39 for sale, just shy of 2% of every copy made). The temptation to keep a couple back and eBay them yourself must be considerable.

Anyway, let's be honest here, I'm just not used to queuing in record shops - any other day of the year you can go in, peruse at your leisure, listen to a couple of things on the provided turntables and ask the helpful staff any questions, all without waiting your turn to get near the racks or suffering the sharp elbows of fellow browsers. Record shops are usually like libraries with a great soundtrack, rather than a visit to Stockport market.

I guess my point here is that RSD is a great idea, a wonderful way to give struggling independents a financial boost and some welcome publicity, but I'm not quite as sorry to sit this one out as I expected. You'll catch me in a record shop on plenty of other weekends, after all. Besides which, I still managed to buy a copy of the Earth LP on green vinyl online from Norman Records a few days after, so I appear to be blessed all round at the moment.

Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band - Gorilla (1967)

Vivian Stanshall would have been 68 this week if he was still with us, so let's salute the great man by digging out the Bonzos' debut LP and reveling in all its gloriously silly and surprisingly influential absurdity.

Gorilla probably isn't their best album (I'd call it a dead heat between The Donut In Granny's Greenhouse and Tadpoles for that particular accolade), but it's a great snapshot of their curious roots, sending up while also celebrating their obvious love of trad jazz, music hall and vaudeville.

Despite being a comedy band with anachronistic musical tastes, the Bonzos' influence has cropped up in all manner of strange places over the intervening years, from Jarvis Cocker's stage moves to The Fast Show's Jazz Club to Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells to Iggy Pop's New Values LP.

The Bonzos' most obvious debtors remain the Monty Python crew, with Michael Palin, Eric Idle and Terry Jones working with them on the TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set, where the band's love of satire and surrealism blended perfectly into the mix during the show's 18-month run, which ended just prior to the Flying Circus opening its doors in October 1969..

But their original big break came courtesy of the Beatles, who invited the Bonzos to perform Death Cab For Cutie in the Magical Mystery Tour, which was broadcast by the BBC on Boxing Day 1967. It's well worth watching the Bonzos' cameo again - and not just to see where Jarvis Cocker got most of his moves from. At least he acknowledged the point by including Stanshall in the video for Do You Remember The First Time.

It's no coincidence that both the Bonzos and Ivor Cutler appeared in the film, with their love of absurdity, non-sequiturs, word play and surrealism highly appealing to the Beatles as a lighter British take on the kind of more literary experimentalism of people like Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

This humour even seemed to leak into the following year's White Album on tracks such as Bungalow Bill, Piggies, Rocky Raccoon, Why Don't We Do It In The Road, Everybody's Got Something To Hide and Savoy Truffle.

If the Bonzos' influence on the Beatles is up for debate, the reverse is less so, with 2 of Neil Innes' tracks on Gorilla - Equestrian Statue and Piggy Bank Love - sounding heavily indebted to the Fabs, particularly Paul McCartney. Both are satirical looks at small town life, not a million miles away from Eleanor Rigby or She's Leaving Home, but with humour replacing the pathos.

Innes' love of the Beatles (and perhaps his limitations as an excellent musical imitator rather than an innovator) would lead to McCartney producing their one major hit, I'm The Urban Spaceman, and ultimately to The Rutles.

However, Stanshall's tastes were rather more quixotic. Death Cab For Cutie is an Elvis pastiche set to sleazy rockabilly whle Look Out, There's A Monster Coming riffs on calypso while taking a rather prescient look at the plastic surgery culture we're awash with nowadays. They performed the song blacked up on Do Not Adjust Your Set, which may have been lampooning the Black and White Minstrel Show or may just be a horribly dated idea of humour. It's interesting that Innes seems to have refused to join in.

Big Shot is a jokey take on film noir, with horn players Rodney Slater and Roger Ruskin Spear indulging in a blast of hard bop reminiscent of Duke Ellington's Anatomy of a Murder soundtrack. Stanshall's artful way with words just about overcomes the silliness of it, though the way the protagonist lusts over Hotsie's "enormous boobs" clearly hit a chord with a young Kenny Everitt.

Jollity Farm is an old 1920s music hall number that gets a run out and Mickey's Son and Daughter (a chirpy ditty about Mickey Mouse) would have been equally at home on kids TV - you can see where the Beatles of When I'm 64 and Yellow Submarine would have found common ground here.

Jazz, Delicious Hot, Disgusting Cold is part mocking/part affectionate nod to the Bonzos' origins as a trad jazz band on the college circuit and Cool Brittannia is a swinging take on the Swinging Sixties, lasting less than a minute but still long enough to launch a flotilla of Tony Blair-era hyperbolic headlines.

Side 2 starts with The Intro And The Outro, with Stanshall's mock-posh tones introducing the band before spiralling into ever more unlikely guests ('looking very relaxed on vibes, Adolf Hitler.... nice!'). The Fast Show gang were obviously taking note and the idea also led to Stanshall getting the master of ceremonies role on Tubular Bells.

Music For The Head Ballet is a harpsichord instrumental that came with its own choreographed 'dance' moves and I'm Bored finds Stanshall swimming against the Summer Of Love vibes with a gloriously cynical take on self-indulgent ennui. Iggy Pop's 1979 song of the same name echoed the ideas with a garage rock facelift to similarly fine effect.

Throw into a handfull of brief sketches, including a cacophanous take on The Sound Of Music, and the result is 35 minutes of ludicrous fun. A little more of Innes' fine songwriting might have tipped the balance slightly away from a comedy album towards something with a little more mainstream appeal, but Gorilla has proved surprisingly durable nevertheless.

Seefeel - Seefeel (2011)

Such was my enthusiasm for Seefeel's 1993 debut LP, Quique, that I once spent five minutes of interview time trying to convince Noel Gallagher of its worth.

After listening to me rabbit on about how rather than the usual chords, solos or verse/chorus, the guitars were all sampled, phased and generally smothered in effects while being smeared around an ambient techno undercarriage and seasoned with a sprinkling of dub, Noel asked: 'So they're a shoegaze band?' He then tried to convince me of the charms of Grant Lee Buffalo's Fuzzy album - I don't think either of us came away convinced.

Noel's reaction was far from unusual at the time and Seefeel's response to such negative pigeonholing (the rapturous enthusiasm that greeted Slowdive's early EP's in 1991 was a world away by 1994, with grunge and Britpop now in the ascendancy) was to abandon uber-indie imprint Too Pure to shack up with Warp and ingest a large amount of new label-mates Aphex Twin and Autechre's mangled electronica.

Their original USP of those molten motorik guitars got rather shoved to one side and their two subsequent LPs were far darker, more fractured affairs, lacking the blissful dreamy throb of Quique.

By the time I got to interview Seefeel when they supported Spiritualized in Manchester in late 1994, their was already a hint of tension in the air between the band. Guitarist/primary songwriter Mark Clifford did most of the talking while singer Sarah Peacock, bassist Daren Seymour and drummer Justin Fletcher sat on the other side of the room. It was all very civilized and Clifford was careful to parcel out praise to all corners but the joy seemed to be ebbing away.

Seefeel stopped touring after 1995's Succour LP and wound down altogether shortly after 1996's Ch-Vox, with Clifford heading off on his own as Disjecta and launching his Polyfusia label, while the rest of the band released a trio of albums as Scala.

Quique may not have sold many copies (in 2004, Clifford claimed total sales were around the 17,000 mark, approx 1,500 per year since its release) but it made a lasting impression with those who did hear it, even being used as a birthing soundtrack and a teaching aid for autistic children. A 2-CD reissue in 2007 drew glowing reviews and the band agreed to play a one-off gig to mark Warp's 20th anniversary, sparking the decision to record together again.

Last year's Faults EP has now been followed by a full album, with Peacock and Clifford drafting in former Boredoms drummer Iida Kazuhisa and bassist Shigeru Ishihara, previously known for making Game Boy-sampling hardcore gabba as DJ Scotch Egg and a sure sign that the band have no plans to head off in a more mainstream direction.

Having made the decision to move away from guitar-based music after Quique due to their dislike of the shoegaze label, Clifford has now thankfully returned to what made them stand out in the first place. Not that Seefeel sounds like Quique 2, far from it in fact. Those Aphex Twin and Autechre influences now feel fully absorbed into the band's sound, taking Clifford's guitar and Ishihara's bass in ever more bizarre and twisted directions. Perhaps the technology has just caught up with what Clifford wanted to do back in 1995.

The embryonic ambience that ran through Quique still lurks but is counterbalanced by endless variety of grittier, distorted, decaying sounds that have been wrung out these most conventional of rock instruments. Slow squalls of feedback and distortion unfurl like strange flowers, but the sometimes harsh noises never actually descend into ugliness, anger or frustration. The band still sound strangely dreamy, seemingly intent on seeing how far they can push this sound without it collapsing into unpleasantness.

Faults (revived from last year's EP), Rip-Run and Making all sound like tracks that were recorded for Quique and have spent the last 18 years stuck in an airing cupboard, slowly warping from the heat. Where songs would ebb and flow they now seem to swim in and out of focus, smeared with abstract blobs of sound.

Peacock has moved further forward in the mix than at any time during their original incarnation, even if you can rarely make out any words. When she distinctly sings the phrase 'Is everything clear?' on Airless you have to suspect her tongue is stuck firmly in her cheek. She also sounds more like Slowdive's Rachel Goswell than ever before, a comparison they'd have run a mile from back in 1994 but not such an issue nowadays.

Dead Guitars probably sets out the Seefeel 2011 agenda most clearly, with Clifford and Ishihara coercing their instruments into all manner of feedback, distortion, sighs, screechs and whispers, all set to Kazuhisa's plodding beat (much of his playing on the album is so minimalist it manages to make Mo Tucker sound like Lars Ulrich) and Peacock's drifting vocal, which never actually coheres into lyrics but still sweetens the pot considerably.

The longer tunes are peppered with 4 shorter song sketches that help to vary the mood. Album opener O-on One and companion pieces Step Up/Step Down are Clifford solo efforts, blowing up drifting clouds of feedback and echo-drenched sweetness. Gzaug starts out with strange itchy little sounds scurrying about, before drifting into Enoesque ambience.

The album closes with 3 long songs that grow ever more spaced out, giving the impression of slowly decaying into silence. Airless circles round on itself, Peacock's vocal failing to make anything clearer with each repetition, before Aug30 disconcerts with its mix of slow ambient washes and feedback squeals. Closer Sway takes a trip to the echo chamber, as Clifford's swerving guitar zigzags through Peacock's hazy sighs and Ishihara's distorted bass throb. Those itchy little sounds from Gzaug return before it slowly descends into a crackling buzz, sounding like those guitars have finally died after all.

This feels like the album Seefeel should have made after Quique. It may have taken 18 years to get there but it's well worth the wait.

Ashra - New Age Of Earth (1976)

Manuel Gottsching was the closest krautrock had to a guitar hero (the concept was considered a bit too old hat, a bit too American) but possibly his finest album is virtually all synthesiser based.

New Age Of Earth was his eighth official LP, recorded in the spring/summer of 1976 when he was still only 23, and showcases a man bathed in deep contentment - rarely has music sounded more peaceful, more blissful than this.

Having formed Ash Ra Tempel in 1970 as a teenage prodigy with Klaus Schulze and Hartmut Enke, Gottsching spent much of the early Seventies creating fearless krautrock epics, including their fabulously OTT self-titled 1971 debut LP and 1973's collaboration with Timothy Leary (Seven Up).

Ashra started out as a solo project after Ash Ra Tempel fizzled out as a group, with 1974's Inventions For Electric Guitar released under his own name inbetween.

Gottsching decided to follow up the epic guitar trance-outs of Inventions... by switching his focus to keyboards, completely abandoning the kosmiche wildness of his ART days for a more measured melodic approach.

New Age For Earth may be a terrible album title (naming LPs was never his strong point) but this is an underrated ambient masterpiece that deserves to sit alongside Cluster's Zuckerzeit, Popol Vuh's In Den Garten Pharaos and Eno, Roedelius and Moebius's After The Heat.

The Peter Baumann-era Tangerine Dream had become a major influence at this point, but with a warmer sound to replace the grandiosity (sometimes slipping into emotional sterility) that permeates some of Edgar Froese's work.

Opener Sunrain is Gottsching's first foray into the proto-electronic trance sound that he would later fully explore on 1984's E2-E4. By far the liveliest track on the album, undulating synth lines weave mesmerically to create a lush sonic landscape reminiscent of early Orbital.

Listening to Ocean Of Tenderness feels like slipping into a hot bath at the end of a long day, massaging your temporal lobes to perfection. After a long intro of bubbling and drifting synths, a gentle but insistent guitar rhythm slips quietly into the scene to propel you along. When a Hawaiin guitar drifts in around the eight-minute mark you may find your toes starting to tingle with pleasure.

Deep Distance is more playful, again built around the gentle but insistent pull of a simple guitar motif, with dreamy melodies drifting in and out over the top.

Gottsching's interest in Tangerine Dream is most blatant on closing track Nightdust, a beautiful 21-minute drift through space that meanders like TD at their most light-hearted, featuring no recognisable guitar at all until the final three minutes.

Originally released as an Ash Ra Tempel LP on short-lived French label Isadora in late 1976, New Age Of Earth was soon picked up by Virgin Records and re-released under the Ashra moniker the following year. With punk now flavour of the month, it's not surprising that the LP didn't get the attention it deserved in the UK.

Gottsching's time with Virgin was also to prove an unhappy experience. Three further Ashra albums followed of diminishing quality, with the German announcing his decision to retire from the record business following 1980's Belle Alliance, preferring to focus on providing music for fashion industry events and producing other bands.

He'd had trouble with record companies before after he'd attended Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and Gille Lettman's infamous 1973 acid party recording sessions, where musicians were offered drugs in exchange for recording tracks.

The sessions were then edited down and released in a series of five Cosmic Jokers album during 1974, with the musicians photos appearing on the album covers despite none of them being approached for permission. Gottsching only found out about this when he heard one of the LPs playing in a record shop and asked the bemused staff behind the counter what they were listening to.

Thankfully he relented and returned from his self-imposed exile in 1984 to release E2-E4 (three years after he recorded it) but his distaste for the industry meant he failed to fully capitalise on the massive influence this remarkable LP had on the more ambient end of the techno scene. Steve Hillage seemed to gratefully step in to take the spot of scene elder stateman with his System Seven project but the position should rightfully have been Gottsching's.

Not that the man himself seems to be complaining. His album releases have been few and far between since his 1970s heyday but Gottsching continues to play live sporadically when an offer intrigues him. Listening to New Age Of Earth, he sounds like a man too busy enjoying life to waste it on regrets.

The Young Gods - Play Kurt Weill (1991)

A post-industrial rock band draw on folk, heavy metal and classical music - much of it bacon sliced through an early sampler - while covering the songs of innovative socialist composer Kurt Weill in German and English. I guess 'Play Kurt Weill' was never going to be The Young Gods' breakthrough record.

Coming from Switzerland, it probably all made perfect sense to the band themselves. Their homeland has a long history of folk and classical music, and when they started out in 1985 metal bands such as Krokus, Celtic Frost and Hellhammer represented the country's most recent musical exports.

Taking a more new wave-orientated approach, The Young Gods rejected guitars in favour of the sampler and just as Switzerland has no unifying language, with French, German and Italian all commonly spoken, they decided to mix it up when it came to their lyrics.

Despite being associated with the post-industrial genre best known for coruscating, brutal sounds welded to fierce rhythms, and having lifted their name from a song on the Swans' charmingly titled Raping A Slave EP, The Young Gods thankfully infused their music with a sly sense of humour - as highlighted by the cover of Gary Glitter's Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again (retitled Did You Miss Me) from their 1987 debut album.

Play Kurt Weill was the band's third album, which appeared two years after they had performed the songs on stage at a tribute concert held in Switzerland.

The belated decision to record them seems to have resulted from original keyboardist Cesare Pizzi's decision to quit the band in favour of a job in IT in the wake of second album L'Eau Rouge. Given the richly ferocious weirdness of the band Pizzi had created with gravelly vocalist Franz Treichler, this unlikely career switch must rate up their with James Williamson abandoning Iggy Pop to design computer chips.

When Pizzi quit in 1989 he was replaced by the band's sound engineer, Alain Monod, but having created much of the band's sound to date, songwriting seemingly ground to a halt.

Play Kurt Weill is a stop-gap album in truth while the band work out how to write songs together and sounds like the end of the Pizzi era rather than the beginning of a new one. On the MySpace site for the Ludan Dross alias he occasionally performs under, Pizzi claims he was 'present' on the first three Young Gods albums, though he had been out of the band for two years by the time Plays... was released.

Presumably Pizzi was heavily involved in arranging the songs for the original concert but the only mention he gets on the album itself is in the 'Thanks to' section on the inner sleeve, where he appears 18th on a list of 19 people. It seems safe to say he and Treichler weren't on the friendliest of terms at that stage.

Whatever the troubled genesis of the album, it's a surprisingly strong piece of work. The band clearly respect Weill (pictured left), whose Threepenny Opera with Bertolt Brecht had caused a major stir across Europe in 1928 with its songs about thieves, prostitutes, corrupt policemen, killers and beggars.

However, that doesn't stop them from taking a hammer to the melody and meter of the songs, conjuring up their own arrangements that restore the darkness to the likes of Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife) and Swing Low, which have been covered a thousand times in a swinging jazz fashion, losing much of the true meaning along the way.

Side one begins with a run of three songs from The Threepenny Opera, starting with Prologue which Weill and Brecht had themselves adapted from John Gay's 1728 work, The Beggar's Opera, and Treichler barks out through a megaphone over ominous drones and samples of crowds booing and cheering.

Salomon Song starts with a fairground organ and Treichler rolling his Rs as he sings in German about the prostitute Jenny's rejection of mankind's lust for glory before the chorus bounces in full of cavernous bass and swirling orchestral samples.

Macker Messer chops up hard rock samples into strange shapes before charging into the chorus on the back of a double bass drum kick. You couldn't further from Louie Armstrong's take on the song - this shark really is baring his teeth.

Speak Low, which comes from Weill's time on Broadway, is mutated into towering twisted techno, Treichler switching to English to deliver the lyric with real pathos. The moment when he moans 'Tomorrow is near/ tomorrow is here/ always too soon' before a massive landslide of sound overwhelms you both reinvents the song and cuts it back to its original core at the same time.

Side two starts with Alabama Song, best known by many from The Doors' cover on their debut album. Jim Morrison made it sound like a night on the town in search of whiskey and women but The Young Gods take it to a darker place, filled with addiction and desperation rather than fun.

The music is transformed into a strange, sickly oompah waltz and when Treichler growls 'Show me the way to the next little girl' as a roll of thunder looms through the speakers you want to alert the authorities immediately. The chorus eventually arrives nearly two and a half minutes in as Treichler howls at the Alabama Moon about blotting about his pain with drink and women.

Seerauber Jenny marks a return to The Threepenny Opera and German lyrics, with the disillusioned heroine dreaming of a warship sailing into harbour to obliterate all her oppressors. The band pull out all the stops for this one, starting with another strange oompah waltz that disintegrates into explosions before military drums, a plucked bass, a spidery violin and mournful horns soundtrack the destruction.

Overture is an unexpectedly laidback instrumental, with sitar and tablas entwining with slow drones to leave the listener slightly non-plussed but pleased nontheless.

Finally, September Song maintains the mellow mood with Treichler capturing the loss and regret beautifully. Following in the footsteps of Bing Crosby and Lou Reed, among many others, isn't easy but the autumnal vibe rounds off the album nicely.

Needless to say, Plays Kurt Weill didn't sell by the bucketload and The Young Gods moved in a more commercial direction for their next LP, 1992's TV Sky, which smoothed off some of their more interesting edges but won them a US audience.

The band are still going today, having experimented with orchestras, ambient and even acoustic guitars along the way, but The Young Gods Play Kurt Weill remains an underappreciated gem in their back catalogue. By the way, is it just me or does Kurt Weill really look like Roy 'Chubby' Brown?