The last time I was on a boat on the Thames, The Sex Pistols were playing “Pretty Vacant” as we sailed downriver past the Houses Of Parliament. It was Jubilee Day, 1977, and the cruiser we were on had just been surrounded by police launches, their searchlights raking the upper deck of our craft, dozens of their baton-wielding colleagues lined up in sinister ranks on Westminster Pier, waiting for us to dock so they could storm aboard and crack heads, which they eventually did with painful abandon.
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“I’m pretty nervous tonight,” Nancy Wallace confesses to a packed Borderline. “I can see the whites of your eyes,” she tells the people in front of her, all of them staring in her direction, rapt as ecstatics, transported, hanging on her every word.
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We now know that the new Bob Dylan album, which unexpectedly will be with us on April 27, is called Together Through Life. We know also that it was written and recorded quickly.
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The first thing I heard this morning when I got into the office was the news that Lux Interior of The Cramps had died. As a tip of the hat in fond farewell, here's another entry from my regular Stop Me. . . column, from 1980, when The Cramps supported The Police on the Italian leg of their first world tour.
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This morning's sad news of John Martyn's death reminded me of a particularly colourful encounter I had with him, back in what they call the day, which I wrote about in my regular Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before column in Uncut in July 2004 and re-print below.
Adios, John.
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Leonard Cohen comes on stage at a veritable trot, almost skipping, more sprightly by a distance than you would expect of a man in his mid-seventies. The crowd, who have clearly come to adore him, reward his athleticism with a standing ovation. It’s the first of many tonight, although the others that follow are for performances of songs from his majestic back catalogue that are played to something we’d have to call perfection.
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They should have just started a 35-date European tour as guests of The Hold Steady, who pulled all their shows earlier this week due to the hospitalisation of guitarist Tad Kubler. Instead, Philadelphia’s War On Drugs find themselves stranded in London, where they were probably considering busking as an alternative to starving on the capital’s streets before being added at the last minute to tonight’s Club Uncut bill at the Borderline.
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This was in a way like returning to the scene of the crime, or something like it.
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Trying to cover the entirety of Neil Young’s tempestuous 40 year career in a documentary film lasting not much more than 60 minutes is a bit like trying to pour the Atlantic into a bucket, an impossible task, however noble the intentions.
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I’m chatting to Kurt Wagner, who I’ve just bumped into at the back of The Borderline and because I haven’t seen him for years, I’m gabbing away and don’t realise that I’ve actually interrupted him on his way to the stage for his headlining appearance at another great Club Uncut night.
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