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?

Elvis Presley - Elvis' Christmas Album (1970)

Glitzy, ostentatious, overindulgent and thoroughly warped by the clammy hand of commercialism - Elvis and Christmas go together rather well.

Listening to Elvis inevitably comes with an unfortunate dash of irony - he's just been lampooned too many times for both his fashion excesses and singing style not to seem slightly cartoonish. But cut through all the hubris and the man still had a glorious voice. Tender, raucous, pleading, defiant, playful, devout - it's all there.

Elvis' Christmas Album originally came out in October 1957 and featured a religious and a secular side. Despite the controversy just a year earlier when the Ed Sullivan show would only broadcast pictures of Elvis from the waist up, his choice of traditional songs such as Silent Night and Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem caused scarcely a stir.

The same could not be said for his cover of White Christmas, however, which composer Irving Berlin lambasted as a 'profane parody', despite the fact that Elvis' version drew heavily on The Drifters' take on the song, which had come out three years ealier.

Berlin (a Russian Jew) rated White Christmas as one of his finest works, reportedly telling his secretary in 1940: "I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote." 

The public certainly agreed - Bing Crosby's version has now sold north of 50million copies, making it the most popular single of all time. Though a few of those may have been by people simply determined to stop Achy Breaky Heart from taking that particular accolade.

Elvis' Christmas Album was a solid seller at the time but it didn't get the cash registers jingling at full pace until 13 years after its originally release when RCA Camden put out a budget version that ditched the 4 gospel songs (Peace In The Valley, I Believe, Take My Hand Precious Lord and It's No Secret), added the 1966 single If Every Day Was Like Christmas and then padded out the running order with the 1970 B-side Mama Liked The Roses, a maudlin song about his dead mother than isn't in any way festive.

Despite the reduction from 12 to 10 songs and the rather slapdash way it was put together, the RCA Camden reissue proved massively popular, going on to sell 9million copies.

As well as finishing with the gloomy Mama Liked The Roses, the LP also starts with a cover of Ernest Tubbs' 1949 country hit, Blue Christmas. However, Elvis and the Jordanaires gave this tale of pining for a loved one at Christmas a few rock'n'roll embellishments that hint of good times just around the corner. If you want a gloriously maudlin version of Blue Christmas, head straight for Low's Christmas LP.

Silent Night is another song previously cover by Crosby, and Elvis gives it a beautifully devout reading, his voice at its most softly angelic.

Following the controversial take on White Christmas, Elvis decided the time had finally come to really rock out with Santa Claus Is Back In Town, one of two original numbers on the album. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had previously supplied him with Jailhouse Rock and Don't, as well as writing Hound Dog for Big Moma Thornton, apparently knocked the song together in minutes in the studio and Elvis rips through it gleefully, revelling in the sly innuendo lurking in the lyrics.

I'll Be Home For Christmas is yet another tune popularised by Crosby, particularly hitting a note with servicemen based overseas and their families. Twelve months after releasing his own version, Elvis was drafted into the army himself.

Side 2 starts with If Every Day Was Like Christmas, a towering slice of smaltz given a Phil Spector-style Wall Of Sound production job that betrays the fact that it was recorded nine years later than most of the other songs.

Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane) is a jaunty take on an old Gene Autry hit from 1947, Elvis again tipping his stetson to his old country heroes.

A respectful take on Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem is followed by a perky new number, Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me), written by Claude Demetrius and Aaron Schroeder, the latter of which also wrote It's Now Or Never, A Big Hunk O'Love and the theme tune to Scooby-Doo.

Despite Mama Liked The Roses providing a slightly odd finale, Elvis' Christmas Album still nags you into repeated plays. It's less than 25 minutes long but still manages to cover rock'n'roll, country, blues, traditional seasonal songs and some old-school crooning. Just like that tin of Quality Street you've got in for the holidays, it's hard not to keep dipping in. After all, if you accidently pick a Toffee Penny you can soon follow it with a Strawberry Cream to get rid of the taste.

Slade - Slade In Flame (1974)

Flame is one of those great moments in cinema that really shouldn't work but does, like Ben Kingsley's gangster turn in Sexy Beast or Tom Cruise as the bitter and neurotic author of 'Seduce and Destroy' in Magnolia.

Those hirsute purveyors of blunderbuss glam rock starring in a gritty kitchen sink drama in the tradition of Billy Liar, Taste Of Honey and Kes? If you haven't seen the film then it probably sounds like a particularly fanciful Reeves & Mortimer sketch.

But then it's easy to forget what big stars Slade were by the end of 1974. After a three-year run during which they had 12 Top 5 hit singles in succession, they were just about the biggest band in the country.

Their manager Chas Chandler (the former Animals bassist and Jimi Hendrix manager) decided making a film was the next step, after all it hadn't done The Beatles or Elvis any harm. Well, The Beatles anyway.

They must have known The Who were turning their 1969 rock opera Tommy into a film with Ken Russell at the helm, and perhaps they saw this as an opportunity to earn a little gravitas and stretch themselves.

Social realism probably didn't seem that odd a choice with the TV popularity of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? and the success of 1973's That'll Be The Day, in which David Essex had taken the chance to prove he was more than just a pop pretty boy by starring alongside Ringo Starr in the tale of an aspiring rock star.

The 1974 follow-up, Stardust, took a slightly more jaundiced view of fame, with Essex ending up a bloated, over the hill star wasting his life hanging around in a castle with Adam Faith.

To an extent Flame seems to amalgamate many of the ideas from both That'll Be The Day and Stardust with its tale of the fall and rise of a band, their dreams and friendships steadily ground down by the venal characters of the music business.

The band all make a decent fist of acting, particularly Noddy Holder (Stoker) and drummer Don Powell (Charlie), with guitarist Dave Hill (Barry) just appearing to play himself and bassist Jim Lea (Paul) tending to stick to the background.

The whole film also captures the incidental details of the early 1970s brilliantly - all battered, smoke-filled nightclubs, bad fringes, bushy facial hair and muddy fabrics.

The scenes shot outside in Sheffield are full of post-industrial decline, with dirty canals, pigeon lofts, closed factories and neglected terrace streets that make The Full Monty look like it was shot in Manhattan.

Despite some knockabout humour along the way, the film ends on a decidedly downbeat note as the the band split up unable to deal with the hassles any more.

Flame came out in February 1975, just a month before Tommy, and many of Slade's young fans were left pretty baffled, forcing the band to repeatedly assure crowds that they didn't actually hate each other during the subsequent tour.

The album Slade In Flame had come out four months earlier, with the gatefold inner sleeve providing a teaser for the film with a series of stills.

The band signalled their intention to experiment with opener How Does It Feel?, which starts as a piano ballad before the horns and guitars roll in, with a nice bit of flute playing thrown in for good measure. It's a good song but not really what most Slade fans were after at the time. When they released it as a single to mark the film opening, it only reached No.15, their worst chart placing for four years.

Not that Slade In Flame deviates too much from the template elsewhere. Horns feature on a few songs and there's a sax solo on Standin' On The Corner but the songs still stomp along and the choruses are still rousing.

Holder's voice really is a remarkable thing, both high pitched and gruff at the same time. He belts through the likes of Them Kinda Monkeys Can't Swing and OK Yesterday Was Yesterday leaving you wondering how he didn't blow his voicebox out.

So Far So Good brings to mind Oasis's Roll With It, with an mid-paced anthemic tune about taking success in your stride, and Far Far Away celebrates life on the road, managing to smuggle the lines 'I've had a a red light off the wrist/ Without even being kissed' onto the radio.

Considering the cynical trajectory of the plot, the band never sound melancholy or bitter. Them Monkeys... is about the snake-tongued double-dealers of the music business but seems to celebrate more than despise them, and This Girl starts by bemoaning a woman's untrustworthiness before Noddy comes to the lascivious conclusion that he should give her a call.

The public's perception of Slade nowadays is mainly coloured by Merry Christmas Everybody, which has been jamming seasonal jollity in our ears for the last 37 years, leaving the rest of their career deep in its shadow - including five other No.1s and a further ten Top 10 hits.

But you shouldn't underestimate the influence of Slade on Oasis, a fact partly acknowledged by their cover of Cum On Feel The Noize.

Another band inspired by the boys from the Black Country were Kiss, with Gene Simmons admitting: "The one we kept returning to was Slade. We liked the way they connected with the crowd, and the way they wrote anthems. We wanted that same energy, that same irresistible simplicity, but done US-style."

Despite their influence, it seems a strange twist of fate that most of Slade's career has now been largely forgotten due to a Christmas single. Still, the royalty cheque must ease the pain when it arrives in January.

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.

The Chambers Brothers - The Time Has Come (1967)

I first bought this on tape in 1992 for a solitary dollar in a record shop sale in Freeport in the Bahamas and listening to it now still brings back memories of driving an American car with the steering wheel on the left but the traffic on the right side of the road.

It's since become one of a select band of albums I own on tape, vinyl and CD (Blondie's Parallel Lines , J Geils Band's Bloodshot, REM's Fables Of The Reconstruction and Miles Davis's Sketches Of Spain are the others that come to mind).

Having only ever heard a five-minute edit of Time Has Come Today previously, I was expecting psychedelic soul but Time... proved more of a curate's egg, filled with traces of the band's long journey from the Mississippi gospel circuit to fashionable Haight-Ashbury.

The Chambers Brothers had already been going 13 years by 1967, having started out as a gospel group when George Chambers quit the army to join forces with his brothers, Willie, Lester and Joe.

By the early 1960s they'd adapted their style to suit folk-blues crowds, with Lester being taught to play harmonica by Sonny Terry along the way. In 1965, they played at the Newport Folk Festival, scene of Bob Dylan's ill-received electric conversion that had Pete Seeger searching for his axe.

Never the types to turn down a paying gig, the Chambers Brothers were also happy playing to R&B crowds pumping out the likes of Long Tall Sally and Bony Moronie.

This approach won them a deal with LA label Vault in 1965 and, a year later, drummer Brian Keenan joined on his return from three years of schooling in London where the psychedelic scene was getting underway. As a result, the band soon threw themselves into the burgeoning US scene, sharing stages with the likes of Iron Butterfly and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

A new deal with Columbia followed and they immediately got busy in the studio in late '66, including an early single version of Time Has Come Today with what sounds like a sitar in the intro.

1967 saw the band's full emergence as black hippies, with the added multi-racial dimension of having a white drummer, which went down a storm on California's countercultural scene.

By the end of the year, Columbia were finally ready to release The Time Has Come. It climaxes with the 11-minute psychedelic blow-out of Time Has Come Today - but before that come a nine-track dash through much of the band's past.

The harmonising between the four brothers remained the bedrock of the band and is brilliantly showcased in covers of two very different songs - Curtis Mayfield's Impressions hit People Get Ready and Bacharach & David's What The World Needs Now Is Love.

They blow up a storm on Lester's I Can't Stand It, a cover of Wilson Pickett's In The Midnight Hour and the particularly fine Uptown, written by Betty Mabry, who later became Betty Davis when she briefly married Miles in 1968 and subsequently released a trio of stunning albums that I want to write about on here in the near future.

George's Please Don't Leave Me is pure barbershop quartet soul and they drop the pace right down for So Tired and Lester's Romeo And Juliet. The recurrent use of a cowbell throughout the album even seems to obliquely tip a hat to their country origins in the Deep South.

Finally the album winds itself up to the full version of Joe and Willie's Time To Come Today, with its spectacular echo-drenched 'time tunnel' section that showcases what a great drummer Keenan was. Joe certainly appears to have noticed when he detours his guitar solo into a sly take on Little Drummer Boy.

When it comes to naming the epic acid rock songs of the 60s, Iron Butterfly's In Gadda Da Vida seems to have stolen Time Has Come Today's thunder, which is harsh. It may be six minutes longer but it came out six months later (18 months if you count the original single version).

Mind you, both bands ultimately suffered the same fate of opening a lot of doors but not being able to capitalise for long while others took their ideas to the bank. The Chambers Brothers suffered from the lack of main songwriter, despite all four brothers earning writing credits on the album and Keenan supplying the excellent B-side Love Me Like The Rain.

Sly & The Family Stone and The Temptations under Norman Whitfield's guidance quickly seized the moment, while the hits dried up for the Chambers Brothers and the band split in 1972.

Various reunions followed but Keenan ended up working as a carpenter before dying of a heart attack in 1985. There's no better way to mark 25 years since his death than by giving The Time Has Come a spin.

Flying Saucer Attack - Further (1995)

Buying an album purely on the strength of its cover seems like a notion from another age now everything is so easily accessible.

Back in the pre-internet twilight, taking a punt on something you'd vaguely heard of - did a friend recommend this? Did I read this name in the NME? Perhaps John Peel mentioned them in passing the other week? - wasn't such a strange idea, particularly if the artwork stood out.

Flying Saucer Attack's Further caught my eye in Piccadilly Records when it came out in 1995. Had someone tapped me on the shoulder and informed me that FSA were a pair of Bristolian shoegazers then I probably would have slipped it back in the racks and gone on my way.

Thankfully, there was no helpful voice to hand and I stood intrigued by the picture of what looks to be a long exposure of a milky moon shot through winter trees. The sun features on the back, sinking into the sea on a rocky beach as clouds roll overhead.

Flip open the gatefold sleeve and there's a becalmed light blue sea almost indistinguishable from the cloud covered sky above. It's reminiscent of the handful of strange, blank seascapes that LS Lowry painted, seemingly intent on proving himself the anti-JWM Turner.

The only writing on the whole thing, bar the spine, is the name of the band and album on the back cover in a deliberately unexciting helvetica font.

In the highly unlikely event that The Wire magazine ever asked me to contribute to their regular feature when people talk about their favourite album cover art then this is what I'd go for.

Not only because the artwork is intriguing, atmospheric and mysterious but also because it brilliantly captures the mood of what lies in the grooves within.

Whispered vocals and sheets of feedback courtesy of David Pearce and Rachel Brook saw them lumped in with the tailend of the shoegaze scene but in truth this was only part of the story. There's a blissful ambient swell to most of the songs that seems touched by Eno's best work and traces of a bucolic folkiness.

Pearce credited Popul Vuh as a major influence, particularly 1971's epic In den Garten Pharaos.

Krautrock and folk may be all the rage nowadays but back in 1995 the former was the preserve of prog fans and latter that of elderly real ale drinkers and earnest lefties.

Just to underline how out of step with the times they were, CD versions of FSA's stuff would carry the legend 'CDs destroy music'.

Which leaves you wondering why FSA haven't been rediscovered. Even shoegaze, so enthusiastically buried by the music press in the mid-1990s as grunge slouched into view, has enjoyed a revival as nu-gaze in the States and heavily influenced the likes of Ulrich Schnauss and Fennesz.

Mind you, FSA were really a post-rock outfit rather than shoegazers. The likes of Chapterhouse, Ride, Lush and Moose were all in love with classic 60/70s songwriting but just smothered it with a vast overdriven guitar sound inspired by the Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr.

Pearce's influences were rather more exotic, as their 1996 cover of Pentangle's Sally Free And Easy underlined.

A more conventionally fuzzed up cover of Suede's The Drowners on their 1993 self-titled debut album seemed to earn FSA the shoegaze tag that Further should have shaken off but somehow didn't.

There's little in the way of classic songwriting left here, just a huge oceanic swell of sound that builds to an almighty racket at times, particularly on the abrasive Here I Am or the steady build of For Silence.

Other songs are beautifully soothing, gentle lo-fi acoustic guitar lapping against slow guitar drones and echo-drenched dreamy vocals. In The Time Of Light, Come And Close My Eyes and She Is The Daylight all manage to combine pastoral and blissful sounds with the ambience of having been recorded in the cellar of a haunted house in the early hours. With the lights off.

Side one ends with Still Point, Brook's only vocal turn sounding even more distant and diffident than Pearce.

Side two is dominated by the 12-minute To The Shore, a curious krautrock-indebted confection that starts with the ominous bongs of a gong and features several songs sliced together, including excerts of the band playing live. The cover images and song titles may be firmly earth-bound but the sound here is purely cosmic/kosmiche.

After a burst of four albums in two years, FSA steadily ran out of steam, attempting to trade their psychedelic folkie wall of noise for a more rhythm based approach with only partial success.

Brook left to focus on her other band Movietone at the end of 1995 and Pearce steadily slipped out of view - but Further remains a fine legacy worth seeking out.

Shortly after Further came out, Pearce told an interviewer: "Records are your friends. You can look at the song you're hearing, it's physically there in the spirally groove." I salute you, sir, wherever you may be.