REVERB

In front of a packed audience at Mr Musichead Gallery on Sunset and accompanied by Tree Adams on guitar, who assembled a superb band especially for the night to help capture the essence of Tom Waits’ iconic early songs. Other featured performers included Joy Gregory (in her Rickie Lee Jones red dress) as a most wonderful narrator on ‘Christmas Card from a Hooker’.

Alex Harvey, author of Song Noir: Tom Waits and the Spirit of Los Angeles, recently held a launch party and reading at Let It Roll records Kentish Town Rd, London (27th July), where a great time was had by all (some images from Let It Roll, above). You can catch Alex on the remainder of his book tour …

I have been thinking about time recently. Rock'n'roll and time and how integral the feeling of things accelerating were to how people must have experienced the music and its ability to constantly replenish itself, often working through formulaic patterns or variations on a theme …

Julien Temple, the earliest chronicler of the Sex Pistols, has described the first time he encountered them as being akin to witnessing an alien visitation: four figures, silhouetted against the light, making a racket of a noise inside a darkened warehouse that was located amid the ruins of London’s docklands …

In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Joel and Ethan Coen’s film set in the Deep South of Depression-era America, a story that could have been an extended take on Charley Patton’s ‘High Water Everywhere’, Ulysses Everett McGill (played by George Clooney) is, like his ancient and mythical counterpart in Homer’s Odyssey, a man of cunning …

It sounds like the name of an unassuming clerical officer from Stevenage, or some other provincial outpost on these islands. Stanley Booth. But, it's a name that anyone interested in writing that is concerned with music and musicians as its subjects - rock'n'roll, R'n'B, blues - should know. But, you know, I don't think Stanley is well known at all. So, why is he not as revered as Greil Marcus or Nick Kent? Um, I don't know ...

These ghosts have voices that come in the form of lament, of pleading and praying, apology and anger. They are strange and unfamiliar, foreign. They are not, in other words, the soothing, comforting, joyous, or even protesting, sing-a-long voices of popular music; but voices that carry a different kind of weight. They crack the surface of the present to release the air and spirits of another reality.

D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1966) – which I write about in my forthcoming book, Rock-N-Roll Plays Itself (to be published in early 2022) – might have once been seen simply as a film about a popular singer on tour told through the medium of a new kind of fly-on-the-wall kind of documentary film.

This short-ish film - 66 mins long - presented by the late and very affable Art Wood (d. 2006), brother of Ron, is recommended, especially for those interested in the early sixties London R&B scene that gave us the Stones.

The Day the Music Burned — Hallucinating Woodstock at 50 — Catching up with the Woodstock nun — Designing a new 50th anniversary Woodstock recordings boxset — Michael Chiaken inside Dylan's archive — ghoulish escapades with the Cramps in the cellars of New York’s Bowery

Back in 2010, the Blur film No Distance Left to Run played out a repeat of the lessons that time and fame had thrown up for the Beatles some forty years earlier: namely that rock bands whose origins begin with some abstract idea of ‘making it’, gradually become derailed by the demands of adulthood. It’s a young person’s game.

Obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny — a list of car crash songs in case you are interested — Cameron Crowe's script for Almost Famous aka 'Untitled' — David Dalton’s rumination on the Sex Pistols, punkgeist, rock theology and Sid

Donald Cammell was hailed by some as a genius, but aside from Performance (dir. Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg), he only made another two films. This BBC documentary traces Cammell’s career from his early years as a portrait painter in 1960s London to his final days in Hollywood.