Future Sound Of London - Dead Cities (1996)

Rumours that Amorphous Androgynous have been collaborating with Noel Gallagher on his debut album have been circulating for a while, which sparked the decision to revisit the remarkable run of albums and epic singles they released as Future Sound Of London, particularly between 1993 and 1996.

There were 3 FSOL albums in that fertile spell, all of them doubles, but I'm drawn to the last of those, Dead Cities, which contains some strange, haunting and flat-out brilliant music, along with hints as to why the band would be abandoned in favour of other projects.

Pressure for more commercial releases would herald the end of their relationship with Virgin while a desire to work with real instruments would lead to a change in direction away from a futuristic electronic sound towards a more backwards-looking approach that would ultimately result in hooking up with dyed in the wool classicist Gallagher.

Brian Dougans and Gaz Cobain have previously worked with Gallagher when asked to remix the 2009 Oasis single, Falling Down, transforming the four-minute original into a five-part monster lasting over 22 minutes, even stripping out Noel's original vocal in favour of Alisha Sufi, one-time singer with obscure 1970s hippy act Magic Carpet.

Noel and FSOL/AA share a love of the 1960s/early 1970s and past lives in Manchester, where Gallagher grew up, and Dougans and Cobain were students in the mid-1980s, during which time they started out their musical career releasing techno tracks under various names and DJing on the local Kiss radio station.

Following FSOL's 1991 debut LP, Accelerator, which including the clubbing classic Papua New Guinea, the duo signed to Virgin, with the first fruits of this partnership released under the new moniker of Amorphous Androgynous, with a move in a more ambient direction on 1993's Tales Of Ephidrina.

If Virgin were feeling a little confused about what exactly had they signed then they were about to get a whole lot more discombobulated. Before the year was out Dougans and Cobain finally delivered an FSOL single, Cascade. It came in six parts and was over 36 minutes long.

At least the Orb had set a precedent on this one, having released the 39-minute Blue Room single in June 1992 and even managed to land a hit with it, including a bizarre Top Of The Pops appearance during which they played chess.

Cascade still had some recognisable dance beats, even if the overall mood was of a strangely "euphoric melancholia" (Cobain's description) that seemed vaguely indebted to Vangelis's Bladerunner soundtrack.

However, the beats would continue to fade out of the the picture and mood and textures grow ever stronger when the Lifeforms double album arrived in spring 1994. FSOL had lost all interest in the dance floor by this point and were created rich, dense musical landscapes best suited to headphone listening. Songs constantly evolved, often piling on more and more layers, so you found yourself navigating weird, unpredictable paths, with the whole thing mixed into a seamless whole. Some tracks were still rhythm based but others were pure abstract electronica and yet the whole thing hung together beautifully.

The inventiveness seemed endless to the extent that one track could be expanded out in multiple thrilling directions, the possibilities appearing almost limitless. The title track, which featured a wordless vocal from the Cocteau Twins' Elizabeth Fraser, was also released a single, this time in seven parts stretched over nearly 39 minutes.

Without the traditional rock frontman front and centre, FSOL's music seemed to push the listener's imagination to the heart of the music instead, richly rewarding close listening.

The band's experimentation also stretched out into computer-generated videos and the concept of playing live without ever leaving the studio, arranging a tour of cities around the world that would be played on a local radio station via ISDN line, with each providing a unique snapshot of what the band were up to.

The limited edition ISDN album appeared in late 1994, mixing together 75 minutes of these tracks from various performances, all of them new, with the band now moving in a darker, slightly tougher direction. Robert Fripp appeared from a Radio One session with the band and film samples peppered the tracks, including snippets from Repo Man, Predator, Aliens and Escape From New York.

1995 was relatively quiet apart from the re-release of  ISDN with three different tracks and an expanded double vinyl version featuring 16 tracks that combined the best of the two CD versions. In fact the band were busy experimenting in the studio, with a vast wealth of material from this period included on a series of six FSOL Archive albums later released by the band, along with a series of three Environments LPs focusing on the band's more ambient side (of which, Environments 2 is as good as anything in their back catalogue).

Another epic single arrived in autumn 1996 with My Kingdom, coming in five parts and just over half an hour long. Sampling Ennio Morricone's Once Upon A Time In America soundtrack and Mary Hopkin's vocal from Vangelis's Rachel's Song, it unfurled slowly to reveal a lush landscape that misleadingly suggested a return to calmer waters.

That idea soon evaporated when the Wipeout 2097 soundtrack was released featuring two FSOL tracks, Herd Killing and We Have Explosive, which both sampled sledgehammer Run DMC beats. Big beat was on the rise at this stage, with The Chemical Brothers having made a major impact with the previous year's Exit Planet Dust album and The Prodigy releasing Firestarter in the spring, so FSOL's Wipeout contributions (another track, Landmass, appeared in the game but not on the soundtrack) sounded weirdly contemporary from a band that had spent so long drifting in their own perculiar orbit.

Herd Killing and Explosive actually sounded great within the context of the game but it was a surprise to find them included on Dead Cities, which came out two weeks after the Wipeout soundtrack. You have to suspect pressure from Virgin, even though Cobain talked at length in interviews at the time about the album having a concept borne from spending time in London: "We've always been kind of obsessed with this idea of things going into decline. It's kind of like we're always drawn to the splattered texture on the pavement or the building that's been knocked down, you know. So it's kind of that sort of stuff that's prompted 'Dead Cities' in a way, wandering round and taking that kind of photographic work."

Side one of Dead Cities has its pleasures but skip it and the remaining three sides make a lot more sense in terms of progression from Lifeforms and ISDN. The sound is still darker and more paranoid than before but the ever-evolving ambience is very much intact in contrast to the repetitive breakbeats of Herd Killing and Explosive at the start of the album.

Everyone In The World Is Doing Something Without Me takes another sample from Mary Hopkin's vocal from Vangelis's Rachel's Song and could easily serve as another, particularly desolate part of My Kingdom, which confusingly turns up next in yet another different form to the five parts on the single and with the previously central Vangelis sample only appearing briefly four minutes in.

Max is a beautifully wistful wisp of a song featuring Max Richter on piano and side two ends with Antique Toy, full of fidgity beats, spooky drones and occasional bursts of sub-bass that evolve into whispered voices and electronic buzzes.

Side three starts with the slow drones of Quagmire before it all gets in a bit jazzy, sounding like Herbie Hancock's Headhunters jamming with Prince and Squarepusher. Birds sounds and watery noises occasionally appear and it's all spectacularly strange. About six minutes in, it transforms into In A State Of Permanent Abyss with cut-up splashes of soft, sweet piano sourced from Richter sounding like something off Fridge's wonderful Happiness album (which came out five years later). Glass then gets a bit of a groove on, with a sax sample thrown in, before drifting into a collage of found sounds.

Side four starts with the rolling, shimmering keyboards and bird noise of Yage. Drums and wobbly bass slowly emerge and it turns a bit Ennio Morriconi-esque, complete with Moroccan flute and, according to the liner notes, 'some weird Greek instrument that no one remembers the name of except the Greeks who live in Greece'.

Vit Drowning is sleepy trip-hop with wordless female vocals drifting through it before seagulls herald the brief piano and acoustic guitar reverie of Through Your Gills I Breathe. First Death In The Family is a stately requiem featuring rolling thunder, milk bottle blowing and a cheap wooden organ, managing to be melancholy and quirky at the same time. Finally comes a brief thrash version of Dead Cities recorded with Snuff's Simon Wells to bring things to a suitably baffling conclusion.

Whatever the truth about label interference, Dead Cities marked the end of FSOL's remarkable run of form and the conclusion of their relationship with Virgin. ISDN gigs continued into 1997 but Dougans and Cobain soon switched their attention back to Amorphous Androgynous, reinventing the name as a totally unironic hippy band straight out of the late 60s/ early 70s but with cutting-edge production values. Aptly enough, they also abandoned city living (giving them something else in common with Noel Gallagher), with Dougans setting up home in a former church in Somerset apparently located at the intersection of nine leylines and Cobain spending a lot of time in France.

Cobain had some kind of crisis shortly after Dead Cities, with the official (and quite possibly true) reason given as mercury poisoning due to his fillings. He's always been a very intense personality, and back then he was prone to using interviews to scattergun his frustration over a series of issues, including himself. He's a little more mellow nowadays, though no less loquacious. In contrast, Dougans rarely says anything at all - check out their 2010 Mojo Award acceptance speech for the perfect example of this odd couple in action.

We shall have to wait to see what becomes of any potential Gallagher collaboration but with Dougans and Cobain you can at least be pretty confident the results won't be dull, which is more than you can say for Beady Eye.

EXTRA: Gallagher has now confirmed an 18-track collaboration with Amorphous Androgynous is to be released next year, once the label-pleasing dad-rock album is out of the way first.

Gallagher said of the AA album: "It's really fucking far out man. It's the furthest out I've ever been. Some of it's krautrock, some of it's soul, some of it's funk - and that's just the first song." All of which sounds promising.

In typically contrary form, Dougans and Cobain are now recording new music as Future Sound Of London for the first time in well over a decade just when their Amorphous Androgynous moniker gets a massive publicity boost. Roll on 2012, then.

Sun Araw - Heavy Deeds (2009)

Buying albums simply because I like the look of the cover doesn't seem to happen so much nowadays but Heavy Deeds had me fumbling for my wallet the minute I caught sight of the picture of a young Stevie Wonder beaming out superimposed over a mysterious crowd shot.

I mean, the sheer cheek of it. There had been enough of an internet buzz about Sun Araw, aka Cameron Stallones, for me to know that Heavy Deeds had nothing to do with Little Stevie in his Motown heyday. Putting George Clinton on the front might have better hinted at the hypnotic psychedelic sludgefests within (Fundadelic's self-titled 1970 debut album is an obvious reference point), but Wonder's presence just seems to be pure mischief-making.

Perhaps the point is that Stallones, who is also responsible for all the artwork, is locating the inspiration for Heavy Deeds clearly in that late 1960s/ early 1970s period where rock still thought it could change the world, where spiritual exploration with a guitar or keyboard in your hand wasn't yet seen as cheesy and deluded.

Stallones may be filtering through a lot of 40 year old influences on Heavy Deeds and working on his own in the studio but he's far from a lone traveller on this particular sonic trip, with the psychedelic drone experiments of Neon Indian and his Not Not Fun label-mates Pocahunted floating in a similar stratosphere.

What makes Heavy Deeds stand out is how beautifully constructed it is. On first listen, it's easy to assume a bunch of stoners have simply cooked up some sloppy, dazed jams one hot night but the more you peer into the murk, the more you find it all fits together remarkably well.

It's curious that Stallones chose to record Heavy Deeds on his own, despite the vibe being very much communal. Music usually gets made by those oddball bands that come across more like a gang bordering on religious cult - Funkadelic fit the bill again, along with Sunburned Hand Of The Man or The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

The easy assumption is that Heavy Deeds is inspired by pharmaceutical exploration but Stallones is the child of academic parents who met his wife while they were both studying at an Evangelical Christian college. As a lapsed believer, his music seems to take on the search for transcendance.

I've no idea if Stallones is a straight edger but he reminds me of Wayne Coyne, a man who makes what often gets described as making 'druggy' music without actually taking any drugs to do it. Of course, Coyne has plenty of (hazy) memories to inspire him but the point is that may be, whisper it, the best way to make psychedelic music is to do it when you're actually sober.

In interview, Stallones comes over as a strange combination of part rigorous artist, part stoner dude. One minute he'll talking about the influence on his music of film-makers such as Tarkovsky, Altman and Greenaway, or 1960s free jazz (the band name is a riff on Sun Ra), the next saying things like: "At the center of most of my songs there is an object that has been retrieved. The song then takes a walk around that object and attempts to scope all 360 degrees." Like, whoa.

Sobriety certainly isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you put the needle on to side one of Heavy Deeds and the molasses thick wucka-wucka wah-wah of Stallones' guitar starts to ooze out of your speakers. Seemingly disparate elements slowly unfurl in a very Sunburned Hand Of The Man fashion before it starts to coalesce a minute in when the warped, murky, multi-tracked vocals begin to chant "It's all right/ Baby, it's all right".

The sonics are thick and sticky, like it was recorded on cheap equipment in a basement late on a hot summer night. The plodding drums are so muffled that they sound like they're coming through the wall. Imagine the most hazy parts of Exile On Main Street, say I Just Want To See His Face, then make it sound 50% more swampy and you're getting the picture.

The incantatory vibe feels like it's slowly winding down until a six-note organ riff emerges six minutes in and it starts to build again. Luminescent keyboard drones cluster and Stallones insistence that it's "all right" suddenly makes perfect sense. When it finally runs out of steam just short of the ten minute mark, you actually feel like you've been cut short.
Hustle & Bustle starts on a slow peal of guitar and drifting clouds of shimmering keyboards, Stallones' smothered vocals declaiming something no doubt mystical and righteous before he decides to wig out with an echo-drenched Eddie Hazel guitar solo.

The Message introduces acoustic guitars and more glimmering organ sounds, with Stallones insisting that "I'll fly my way home: - in the context of the four other songs feels like a skinny sliver of a song at just under five minutes long.

Side two starts with more drifting organ sounds mixed with the sound of breaking glass on Get Low. As much as Stallones likes to expand on his music in interviews, he's a fervent minimalist when it comes to his lyrics, repeatedly insisting "Fly away" as the song slowly ebbs away into an ambient twinkle before bursting into warped and greasy bass-heavy funk groove.

All Night Long sounds like exactly the kind of jam that could live up to its name, an organ solo drifting over a low-slung bass groove as those scuzzy vocals chant the title over and over again. A sloppy funk guitar solo drifts in and out of the haze and those shimmering, droning keyboards slowly build up a head of steam over 12 unhurried minutes.

It's not surprising that Stallones revisited this epic psych-trance sound again for last year's On Patrol LP, stretching out over a double album that's nearly twice as long as Heavy Deeds. But at 41 minutes, this is the one that I find myself coming back to, largely because he managed to create such a concise distillation of a sprawling, hypnotic sound. Stallones has described Heavy Deeds as "a point of total ascension" - or as Stevie would put it, this is music of the mind.

'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.