Randy California - Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds (1972)

If ever I bought a record on looks alone, it was Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds, a surprisingly smart £2.99 investment from Sifters in Burnage.

Randy stands guitar in hand on the front, wearing the regulation 1972 'righteously stoned hippie rock star' look to a tee and about to clamber into an incredibly rickety looking helicopter with the rest of his power trio. Lord knows where they're going to fit the drums.

The cartoonish font just adds to the impression that Randy isn't taking this opening salvo in his solo career away from Spirit terribly seriously. A quick scan of the track listing on the back reveals not one but two Beatles covers, along with further covers of songs by Sweathog, James Brown and Paul Simon, plus just three originals. 

Three factors seem to be in play here. Firstly, despite having already recorded four albums with Spirit, Randy was still only 21 at this stage, so a little youthful goofiness is to be expected.

Secondly, Spirit's fourth LP, 1970's Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, had taken six months to record, but initially failed to find much of an audience, with the public slightly baffled by a jazzy, experimental concept album about ecology and spiritual rebirth. It's considered deeply influential nowadays but it didn't produce a hit until 1973 and sales only reached gold record status in 1976.

The album's lack of early success had pulled the band apart, with Randy quitting to go solo in July 1971 and seemingly ready to get back to playing some old school rock'n'roll.

Thirdly, he'd been hit hard by the death in September 1970 of his friend and kindred spirit Jimi Hendrix. The two of them had been in a band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, for a short but intense period in 1966. Due to their being another Randy in the band (drummer Randy Palmer - now why would you want to change a name like that?), Hendrix had rechristened them California and Texas respectively to avoid confusion.

After three months of playing up to five sets a night, many of them at legendary Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the band split when Chas Chandler persuaded Hendrix to try his luck in England, with Randy unable to come along due to only being 15 at the time.

Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds makes no overt mention of Hendrix but his spirit lurks in the tumbling grooves of the songs, while one-time Experience bassist Noel Redding appears in rather more corporeal form on three songs, albeit under the unfortunate pseudonym of Clit McTorius.

The album opens with Downer, with a stomping groove laid down by Redding and drummer Leslie Sampson (credited as 'Henry Manchovitz') while Randy plays funky hard rock and sings about 'Been on a downer too long' in the vein of Hendrix's Manic Depression or Purple Haze.

Devil is another Randy original, this time with his new touring bandmates, drummer Tim McGovern and bassist Charlie Bundy, and particularly fine with its rolling groove and psychedelic guitars. They worked up this album jamming in bars in Topanga Canyon and Devil sounds perfectly of its time and place.

I Don't Want You is a cover of James Brown's I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door, I'll Get It Myself) with clipped, urgent funk replaced with a fuzzy guitars that work a lot better than you'd expect.

Day Tripper also gets a patchouli oil-scented Californian rock'n'roll makeover that works largely thanks to Randy's guitar and vocals that manage to simultaneously sound more uptempo and laidback than the original.

A quick romp through Mother and Child Reunion strips out the reggae inflections, with the lyric about 'that strange and mournful day' seeming more fitting to Randy's thoughts about Hendrix's passing than the original tribute to Paul Simon's pet dog.

Side two starts with an elongated rhythm-heavy jam through Sweathog's Things Yet To Come, featuring Redding on bass again plus two drummers. Two unnamed female singers provide most of the vocals with Randy's contributions sounding like they were recorded through a telephone, and it goes on to reach a fine climax after he starts to cut loose with his guitar just shy of the seven minute mark.

Rain bizarrely starts as a tripped out country hoedown before changing direction and giving the Beatles' original a scuzzy guitar workover with more fuzzed-up laidback vocals and a host of psychedelic studio tricks stirred into the pot over nearly nine kaleidoscopic minutes.

Kapt. Kopter signs off with Rainbow, another fine original that captures the Topanga vibe with it's backwards guitar and hippy vibe love song lyrics tainted with paranoia. Randy's father-in-law and Spirit bandmate Ed Cassidy appears under the moniker Cass Strange-Drums, which hints at the Spirit reunion that was to follow.

Randy would make more explicit tributes to Hendrix in the future, particularly the 1982 mini album All Along The Watch Tower, but few people have kept his spirit alive better than Kapt. Kopter.

The Bug - London Zoo (2008)

When riots and looting broke out around the country last week, I found myself drawn back to London Zoo, the claustrophic, tense, angry and flat-out brilliant ragga/dancehall/dub album by The Bug from three years ago.

There's much debate going on at the moment about the causes of what happened - police brutality, a loss of morality, alienated young people, a lack of role models, violent computer games, consumerist greed, a general fin de siècle malaise and even BlackBerry messaging have all been batted about by various parties. 

Events certainly appeared fluid and by the time teenagers were pulling overpriced jeans out a broken window of Diesel in Manchester, it was hard to detect any obvious link to the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham that had sparked the original violence.

But does the country really descend into mass rioting just because people think getting some stuff for free and chatting about it on social networks is a bit of a lark? And does it really only take a bit of Churchillian rhetoric, a few late-night court sessions and ditching a load of health and safety regulations to see the problem off?

London Zoo emerged in 2008 just as the financial crisis was peaking (well, let's hope so...), and I was staring down the barrel of losing a job I enjoyed and had been in for nearly ten years. The simmering tension and frustration, not to mention the gloriously deep, dirty bass, struck a chord.

The P45 duly arrived and London Zoo was slipped away on the shelves, too much of a reminder of bad times. It was only the arrival of the Arab Spring last Christmas that led me to finally dig it out again, when the angry crowds and petrol burning on heavily armed vehicles still seemed a long distance away.

Perhaps the idea of people rising up to finally overthrow oppressive regimes helped to detoxify the album in my mind, but I found myself actually enjoying it even if the vibe is still distinctly heavy.

Now I've found myself returning to it in the wake of what has just happened closer to home. After three nights of watching TV footage of London aflame in a manner seemingly better suited to the age of Samuel Pepys, it's hard to escape the yearning for some kind of answers. In truth, I'm not sure if I'm listening to London Zoo in search of truth or simply because the post-apocalyptic feel seems to suit.

London Zoo is Kevin Martin's third album under his Bug alias, having previously worked a wide range of interesting but demanding projects on the more extreme edges of recorded music, including industrial jazzcore (God), slurred blackly psychedelic hip-hop (Techno Animal) and illbient (compiler of the Macro Dub Infection albums).

Drawing on his love of Jamaican music, Martin collaborates with MCs he cheerfully admits mostly hadn't heard of him before they worked with him. It's the quality of his productions that win them over (and a reputation for actually paying), and that suits him fine.

Martin freely admits that for him "part of the attraction of dancehall has always been the sex and violence", and makes a very valid point that white artists such as Nick Cave can use extreme violence is their work and rarely get criticised for it, but you never get the feeling he's trying to be shocking on London Zoo. There isn't a lot of sex either, though there's plenty to shake your booty too.

Opening track Angry features Tippa Irie and is most lyrically eloquent tune on the album, with the Brixton MC spitting out everything that incenses about the world, from the the ozone to the abandonment of New Orleans, over an almost military beat.

Ricky Ranking turns up next on Murder We, the first of his three fine contributions, and a bleak vision of Babylon, where the streets are "flowing blood red". He slows things down to plead that we "remember my children, like I remember your children", but this vision of a community slowly melting down into molten rage seems a particularly pertinent one.

The consciousness side of things goes out of the window on Skeng (meaning knife or gun), which finds Killa P and Flowdan in pure raggamuffin bad boy mode. 'Shot you in the face/Make you send for the nurse/Doctor can't fix you/Send for the hearse' they growl over a minimal throbbing bass, with tongue very discretely stuck in cheek.

Ricky Ranking returns to team up with Aya on Too Much Pain, a haunted swirl of parched percussion and horror film dramatics. 'Top tune, Kevin!' Ricky blurts out at one point in a welcome moment of levity.

"What's wrong with the world/ Has the world gone mad?" wonders Warrior Queen on Insane over another precision-tooled groove before Flowdan returns with a scattergun toast about the coming Jah War.

The dark heart of London Zoo arrives with Fuckaz, a remarkable surge of disgust and anger over a migraine throb of sub-bass. Frequent Kode9 collaborator and dubstep scene stalwart Spaceape gets out some serious bile for nearly four minutes before asking several times: "How did we get here/ And where do we go now?". Spaceape and Martin seem to be inviting us to ponder this point as the song slowly ebbs to a close.

Poet/lyricist Roger Robinson, who also appeared on second Bug album Pressure, turns up on You & Me to take the temperature a notch or two. His light, dreamy delivery and Kevin's whispering, drifting production suddenly take you to a very different place. This would prove a step-off point for Martin's next move with the duo collaborating over a whole album as King Midas Sound in a more downtempo dubstep style.

Freak Freak is a dry, echoey and ominous instrumental, the sound of the underpass, glass crunching underfoot and your fingers tightening around the keys in your pocket.

Flowdan returns for Warning, another blast of inner city dread that dubs out midway through into slow decaying tones before firing back in with a martial beat and a flurry of patois.

Warrior Queen returns for the excellent Poison Dart, her voice somewhere between singing and toasting over yet more speaker-battering bass. The Skream remix seems better known but Martin's original version still does it for me.

Ricky Ranking is back for final track Judgement, showcasing his sweet singing tones between gruff voiced toasts. He concludes with "We are living in serious times/ I guess it's coming like a judgement sign/ The people have killing on their mind", so perhaps we should have considered ourselves warned.

London Zoo came out on Ninja Tune, who did a beautiful job of it, splitting the album into three 12-inches to do full justice to all that awesome bass and packaging it in a gatefold sleeve featuring artwork by Fefe Talavera. Even dystopia comes with design flair nowadays.

Louvin Brothers - Tragic Songs Of Life (1956)

The story of the Louvin Brothers is so strung out between good and evil, joy and terror, harmony and strife that it feels like the work of one of those southern gothic writers, from Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner to Cormac McCarthy.

The brothers, born Ira and Charlie Loudermilk, were certainly children of the Deep South, having been born in 1924 and 1927 respectively and grown up in the Baptist religion in the Appalachian mountains of Alabama, a time and place touched by hardship and where Jesus and the Devil seemed to walk side by side.

The 2004 BBC documentary In Search Of The Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which featured alt.country singer Jim White as its narrator, explored an American South seemingly little changed, with its junkyards, churches, bars and overfilled prisons. As White also points out, this is a place where 'stories was everything and everything was stories'.

Ira and Charlie embraced all the contradictions of their background, both in their music and their lives. Ira, the elder brother, played mandolin, sang in high sweet tenor, wrote most of the songs and was frustrated that he'd never persued his dream of becoming a preacher (he'd have been a charasmatic one too, based on his spoken word section in the title track to Satan Is Real). He was also a mean drunk, whose third wife shot him six times after he tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. When they toured with Elvis, Ira attacked him calling his music 'n****r trash'.

Not even surviving being shot cured Ira's ways and his behaviour caused the brothers to go their separate ways in 1963 (their last single was called Why Must You Throw Dirt In My Face). Ira died alongside his fourth wife in a car crash two years later - both he and the driver of the other car were drunk.

In contrast, Charlie played guitar, sang in a lower register and lived a long and seemingly contented life before dying at the age of 83 in January this year. He left behind a widow, Betty, after 61 years of marriage.

The brothers started out singing gospel, soon adopted the stage name of the Louvin Brothers and increasingly began to draw on the influence of other brother-based close harmony country acts, notably the Blue Sky Boys, the Monroe brothers and the Delmore Brothers. But so closely entwined were their vocals, Ira usually singing higher but both brothers modulating their voices with great skill, that their songs can still raise the hairs on the back of your neck today.

Despite being sometimes misinterpreted as a novelty act nowadays, largely thanks to the frequent appearance of their 1959 LP Satan Is Real in those collections of amusing album covers that float around the internet, the Louvins Brothers' influence runs deep, touching the music of artists ranging from The Byrds to Elvis Costello to The Handsome Family to The Everly Brothers to The Lemonheads to Johnny Cash over the years.

Tragic Songs Of Life was their second album (their first for Capitol) and a step away from gospel towards more secular songs, ranging from hokey but heartfelt dustbowl sentimentalism to lurid murder ballads.

Opener Kentucky is the perfect showcase for those incredible harmonies, with Paul Yandell adding some delicate flourishes on guitar and the tone wistful rather than anything darker. 

A cover of A.P. Carter's I'll Be All Smiles Tonight captures the forced happiness of a discarded lover attending the wedding of their former beau and side one settles down to its theme of thwarted love. 

Let Her Go, God Bless Her ups the pace but keeps wrongfooting you with a lyric that starts out musing about a sweetheart's hair in church, before planning a night of carousing if the right horse comes in at the races and then suddenly dropping in the verse 'Sometimes I live in the country/ Sometimes I live in the town/ But sometimes I take up the notion/ To jump in the river and drown', all sung in a confusingly upbeat manner.

What Is Home Without Love is another traditional song, this time about a rich man who marries a woman who only wants him for his wealth. Walking past a humble cottage one day, he spots a husband, wife and baby happily embracing together and is reduced to tears. Corny, of course, but those beautiful heartfelt harmonies somehow manage to transcend cynicism.

Anyway, if you thought that sounded cornball just wait until you hear A Tiny Broken Heart, the brothers' first songwriting credit on the album and a schmaltzy tale of a 7-year-old who discovers that his young sweetheart on the neighbouring farm has to move away because of the family's money troubles. He begs his father to sell his Christmas presents so he can give her family the money. It's like a particularly tragic episode of Little House on the Prairie, so it's just a relief to get to the end of the song without anyone going blind or dying in a threshing machine.

Side one finishes on a high - or rather a wonderful low - with In The Pines, another traditional tune and one that the Louvins probably heard from Bill Monroe. A dark and chilly song, the harmonies on the yodelling sections after the chorus are stunning, giving their interpretation a haunting quality without overcooking it. It also draws a direct if unlikely line between the Louvins and Nirvana, who covered the song on their Unplugged album in the Where Did You Sleep Last Night incarnation made famous by Lead Belly.

Side two starts with Alabama, another declaration of devotion to the south and the only other original Louvins composition on the album. Probably the most joyful song on Tragic Songs Of Life, it gives no hint of the remarkable run of murder, suicide, depression and betrayal that is to follow.

Katie Dear is a Blue Sky Boys song based around the melodrama of two young lovers who kill themselves with a golden dagger not because they are told by her parents that they can't marry but rather that they are too afraid to ask them.

My Brother's Will crams a remarkable amount of tragedy into three minutes, starting with the death of the protagonist's brother from a stray hunter's bullet when out walking in the country. Promising to marry the dying brother's sweetheart, we then discover that this the same woman who broke his heart years ago. It then turns out that Sally has also betrayed the now dead brother by marrying someone else. It's like a soap opera in stetsons.

Things turn really dark on Knoxville Girl, another traditional song that has roots going back to medieval England (when it was known as Wessex Girl). Willie takes a walk with his girl during which he beats her death with a stick for some unspecified transgression before dragging her body around by the hair and dumping it in a river. The violence is so unflinching (when she begs for mercy, he simply beats her more) that it brings to mind Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, which had come out 4 years earlier.

Take The News To Mother is a tale of a terrified soldier preparing to die on the battlefields of France, and sounds rather plaintive and sweet after Knoxville Girl.

Mary Of The Wild Moor is another traditional tale that had made its way over from England, being passed on by mouth from generation to generation, telling of another family tragedy as a father fails to hear his daughter crying at his door over the wind only to discover her child clasped in the dead woman's arms in the morning. If that wasn't all gloomy enough, the father soon dies of shock, the child isn't far behind and no one ever lives in the house again as it turns into a collapsing monument to poor Mary.

Tragic Songs Of Life certainly lives up to its title but Ira and Charlie's rich, pure voices still retain their power 55 years later. Pretty much everything they recorded in their 8-year recording career together is worth listening to and this is no exception, raising the bar for harmony singing that the Everly Brothers or Simon & Garfunkel more than matched in terms of financial success with but rarely bettered when it came to pure drama.

How much is a new vinyl record actually worth?

Vinyl sales in the US enjoyed an incredible 41% increase in the first six months of this year, so why does the industry seem so confused about how much to charge for it?

The standard price for Neil Young's newly released live album, A Treasure, is £34.99. OK, it's double vinyl but the CD version costs less than a third of that price. Meanwhile, fellow heritage act Brian Eno's new Drums Between The Bells double LP costs a relatively meagre £12.99, which is a 30% mark-up on the CD version, rather than 350%.

Bon Iver's high praised new album will cost you £13.99 on vinyl but the equally lauded Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues is priced at £19.99. The Beastie Boys' Hot Sauce Committee Pt.2 comes in at £17.99, which presumably gives you enough change for your busfare home - exactly the same at Tyler The Creator's Goblin, except that's a double LP.

TV On The Radio's Nine Types Of Light is a budget-friendly £7.99 but Josh T Pearson's Last Of The Country Gentlemen is an eye-watering £25.99, so clearly chivalry doesn't come cheap nowadays.

There's no logic to the pricing on reissues either - fancy a 180g re-press of Nothing's Shocking by Jane's Addiction? That'll be £28.99, please (which rather belies the album title, in my opinion). If that's a little steep, then most of the White Stripes back catalogue is available at £7.99 (first two albums) or £9.99 (Elephant, Icky Thump). But just to add to the confusion, White Blood Cells will set you back £29.99.

My copy of Sonic Youth's Master=Dik EP from 1987 has 'Pay no more than £2.15' stamped on it but a 180g re-press of Sister or Bad Moon Rising will nowadays set you back a rather less fan-friendly £34.99.

Then there are the second-hand record shop staples where we'll apparently be willing to fork out a small fortune for a pristine re-press - try the Grateful Dead's Shakedown Street at £30.99, otherwise easily available in used condition for under a tenner (I saw one priced at £3.99 only last week). On the other hand, The Fall's New Real Fall LP has been reissued at £9.99 when original versions having been selling second hand for at least double that on the rare occasions when they've come up on eBay.

Some labels seem to be getting smart to the idea that if you still want people to buy your product rather than downloading it for free, then selling a smartly priced aesthetically pleasing vinyl version with a card inside giving you an access code for the MP3s is a smart way to go.

Other companies seem to have the view that vinyl is bought by middle-aged blokes trying to recapture their youth, so you can charge a premium - which is exactly the sort of short-term thinking that has got the industry in such a mess in the first place. At £25.99 for Black Lips' Arabia Mountain, I'd want a insert promising they'd come round and perform the whole thing in my lounge.

Five years ago, the idea that vinyl could be an important element in keeping the record industry afloat would have seemed laughable but perhaps those latest sales figures will kick start a few boardroom discussions.

Plank! - Pig Sick Remix/ Self Harm 7" single (2011)

Despite the lack of vocals, Plank! aren't named after the Eric Sykes silent movie, but rather German producer Conny Plank, who manned the desk during many of krautrock's finest moments.

A key influence on Brian Eno in the 1970s, he's also the man who turned down the job of producing U2's Joshua Tree on the basis of 'I cannot work with that singer', which is surely reason enough to name a band after him.

It's early days for Manchester trio Plank! but you have to suspect the great man would approve if he were still with us. Bassist Edward Troup and drummer Jonathan Winbolt-Lewis supply the motorik pulse over which Dave Rowe plays guitar and keyboards, combining the two very effectively when they play live.

They appear to know their krautrock onions, with traces of La Dusseldorf, Faust, Neu! and Manuel Gottsching all swirling around in their sound. Despite having only released an EP and single to date, they already seem to be evolving, with the Pig Sick remix on this rather lovely orange vinyl single (limited edition of 400 in a joint venture between Akoustik Anarky and Static Caravan) introducing a crunchy electronica that sees them edging into math-rock territory.

Flip it over and Self Harm has a proggier edge, like ELP feeling the funk or Van Der Graaf Generator (another Manchester band!) at their sunniest. There's even a video stolen from Ken Russell's Altered States. They clearly have a taste for this kind of vintage body horror, having previously used David Cronenberg's Stereo for their video for 2009's La Luna.

Plank! also carry a definite patchouli-scented hint of prog when they play live, with Rowe demonstrating some impressive chops at times and a saxophonist joining them for two songs of their set at the Manchester International Festival last week. 

Interestingly, Rowe chose a Guns N' Roses Use Your Illusion T-shirt as stage attire that night - and not one of those diamante-clad ironic ones that you'd see David Beckham or Peaches Geldof wearing but a faded from being worn since 1991 type. Perhaps this was just a sly wind-up to the fashionistas but you could just as easily see Plank! heading off in a Muse-ish stadium rock direction as a more interesting Mogwai-style course.

An album is currently being recorded (working title: Gourmet Chillier), so it'll be interesting to see where they end up. Right now, the possibilities seem vast.

Jon Spencer Blues Explosion - Now I Got Worry (1996)

For a man who just loves to rock'n'roll, Jon Spencer has been the target for a lot of hate in his time.

Slagged for having for an Ivy League college education, for lacking emotional depth and, strangest of all, for a 'racist' appropriation of the blues for his own nefarious ends, Spencer has had it in the ear before from all quarters.

The racism accusations are hard to fathom from a UK perspective, a bit like Claire Balding mentioning a 'Mexican wave' in the crowd when interviewing a US tennis star during Wimbledon last week to the response of a slightly shocked laugh and an explanation that 'that's not a PC term back home'. Balding sounded as baffled as most of her audience must have felt.

Accusations by a couple of white critics against Spencer that the Blues Explosion (also comprising second guitarist Judah Bauer and drummer Russell Simins) were a 'blackface parody' guilty of disrespecting black music didn't make much sense on this side of the pond either. After all, this is a band who have collaborated with the likes of Chuck D, Solomon Burke, Rufus Thomas, Andre Williams, RL Burnside, Bernie Worrell, Steve Jordan and Martina Topley-Bird over the years, which hardly suggests active Klan membership.

Perhaps it stems from Spencer's cartoonish presence both on record and on stage. Having started out in chaotic arty New York punk outfit Pussy Galore, who were big on attitude but low on songwriting ability, Spencer found his feet as a performer when he developed the persona of a speedfreak hillbilly loverman, stealing visually from Elvis's 1969 Comeback Special and sounding like a delirious amalgamation of every vocalist emerging out of Sun Studio circa 1954.

He's not interested in venerating the blues, rock'n'roll and rockabilly, but rather keeping alive the wild, ribald side of it that brought us the likes of Bessie Smith's Kitchen Man, Little Richard's Tutti Frutti, Lucille Bogan's Shave 'Em Dry or Chuck Berry's My Ding-A-Ling. Rock'n'roll is meant to be a little edgy after all, isn't it?

The Cramps had paved the way for this kind of punk-edged revivalism, with the likes of Jeffrey Lee Pierce and the Blasters following after, with Nick Cave giving it a swing more recently with Grinderman, but Spencer seemed to find himself in the firing line for daring to boil everything down to a frenetic blur of sawn-off shotgun riffs and verbal tics. On Orange, the 1994 LP that preceded Now I Got Worry, the band repeatedly shout 'Blues Explosion!' in nearly every song and Spencer sounds tongue-tied half the time, chewing on the microphone and blurting out lyrics like he's suffering from some kind of rock'n'roll Tourette's syndrome.

Whether you buy into this delirium or not is probably the key to whether you're going to dig JSBX, and plenty of people do not.

Seeing them play live certainly helps. When JSBX appeared on The Word back in 1994, presenter Marc Lamarr was sufficiently moved to declare them "the best live band I've ever seen". They were nothing short of superb when I saw them touring Now I Got Worry in late 1996 with support from RL Burnside, the veteran Mississippi bluesman who had collaborated with the band on his fabulously raw A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey album (captured in a single day off from recording Now I Got Worry).

Burnside's swampy electric blues, featuring Bauer on harmonica, set the scene nicely for a set of brilliantly focused ferocity. The diversions into hip-hop, rap and dub that added extra colour to Orange, Now I Got Worry and the Experimental Remixes EP that had come inbetween were largely shorn away to focus on a brilliantly streamlined charge through their finest rockabilly punk blues moments, while Spencer indulged in his wildest Elvis on PCP stage antics while occasionally dishing out some serious theramin abuse.

When Spencer claims the band burn through more energy in a show than most people do in a whole working week, he's telling the truth.

Bands with this kind of stage presence often fall flat in the studio but Now I Got Worry beautifully captures that energy, right from Spencer's screaming intro to Skunk, through the minute-long hardcore blast of Identify to the swinging, fidgity Wail, where the declaration 'I'm already feeling messed up' sounds strangely celebratory. 'Weird' Al Yankovic directed the video.

The pace drops briefly for a cover of Dub Narcotic's Fuck Shit Up that sounds like early Beck with its gloopy keyboard sounds and cut-and paste treatment of Bauer's vocals.

2 Kindsa Love rides in on a cruise missile of a riff that somehow manages to find another level of bludgeoning brilliance before briefly taking a reverb-heavy swaggering detour, then heading back to that battering ram riff. If the White Stripes had recorded 2 Kindsa Love you have to imagine it would regular appear on those pointless top 100 greatest songs ever lists.

Love All Of Me combines rockabilly chicken scratch guitar with slide guitar, harmonica and a pounding rhythm section. Rufus Thomas turns up for Chicken Dog, which is frankly a match made in heaven. Rufus chuckles his way through the intro, lets the band hammer out their righteous thing, then sings a couple of typically absurd choruses before everyone joins in a funky finale of animal noises.

The pace finally relents a little on Rocketship, an R&B stomper with Spencer in a romantic mood, that brings a near perfect side one to an end.

Side two finds them still in the mood on Dynamite Lover, before the band cranks up the pressure again on Hot Shot, Simins' relentlessly pounding drums pushing Spencer to ever greater heights of wailing frustration.

Can't Stop features some great barrelhouse piano from Beastie Boys collaborator Money Mark, with Spencer declaring: "This is the part of the record where I ask you to put your hand in the air... and kiss my ass, because your girlfriend still loves me." Thom Yorke should take note.

Firefly Child is a churning rocker with Spencer in crooning mood over some great Money Mark keyboards before the whole thing builds very nicely to a climax with Justin Berry on sax.

Spencer digs out his moonshine-crazy Elvis impression again for Eyeballin' with some nice slide guitar from Bauer before a disco stomp briefly butts in. R.L. Got Soul is a funky blues number that doffs its cap to RL Burnside with Bauer breaking out one of his finest ever solos.

Get Over Here is a crazed two-minute stomp before the album finally collapses to an exhausted conclusion with Guilty, a warped, sticky, stumbling oddity, complete with breaking glass, slow doo-wop backing vocals and guitar interventions that sound like an overheating cement mixer.

JSBX never quite managed this level of intensity and great songwriting in the studio again, but Now I Got Worry stands as testament to the genius of a much underrated band.

They followed it up in 1997 with a fine live album, which they called Controversial Negro, partly as a two-fingered salute to their critics and partly as a tribute to Public Enemy's Burn Hollywood Burn, during which an uptight white voice asks Flavor Flav: "We're considering you for a part in our new production, how do you feel about playing a controversial negro?"

Spencer hasn't had much more to say on the subject - after all, why waste your time on fools when there's fun to be had?

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.