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I guess it’s still fairly early in the morning, but I’m struggling right now to think of many players around at the moment who are as slippery and compelling as Will Oldham. He’s had, by his standards, a relatively quiet year. But the other day, a new mini-album turned up unexpectedly, a few days after it had actually arrived in the shops. Like a big American urban star or Radiohead, clearly Oldham has abandoned the niceties of advance releases for hacks. Which is fair enough, if a bit frustrating.

There is a man in a flat cap standing in the middle of the stage, looking pensively at some large twigs while his bandmates work up ten minutes of bleary musique concrete. Eventually he picks up a bass and the six of them lumber into a passage of magisterial, martial psych. It mutates into waterlogged beatnik blues, then a kind of splenetic krautpunk. One of the guitarists, incidentally, now has a cardboard box on his head. There’s a mannequin’s head on top of the box. After a while, he conscientiously ties a scarf round its neck.

It must have been an unusually quiet day, because we are not usually out and about when we should be working, nose to grindstone, shackled to the pleasurable daily graft of putting together Uncut.

It must have been an unusually quiet day, because we are not usually out and about when we should be working, nose to grindstone, shackled to the pleasurable daily graft of putting together Uncut.

The Assasination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford opens this week

Rare candour from a musician in a press release today. This is Stephin Merritt talking about the Magnetic Fields album, “Distortion”. The goal, he says, was “to sound more like Jesus And Mary Chain than Jesus And Mary Chain.”

The stories, of course, are pretty familiar by now. In 1974, tensions within the Faces were, as they say, running high, Rod Stewart’s increasing solo success causing much friction apparently. The situation doubtless exacerbated by the band’s predilection for “relentless, boozy madness”, as Ronnie Wood described it in UNCUT last year. Anyway, so what does Ronnie do? He gathers together some of his famous pals, records his own album and goes out on tour as The First Barbarians.

Some thought-provoking responses to my No Music Day blog yesterday; scroll down to the bottom of my waffle and have a look. I particularly like Nigel's idea of Total Music Day, where we concentrate utterly on records without any distractions. Though realistically - as he acknowledges - that'd be as tough to pull off as No Music Day.

I had a big plan this morning to try and observe Bill Drummond's No Music Day for as long as we could stick it out. But I got here a bit late and Rufus Wainwright doing his Judy Garland turn was already on the stereo.

Quite a curious, though vaguely welcome, phenomenon in London at the moment, where a few American garage and artpunk bands appear to have been adopted by the sort of fashion scene who normally favour pseudo-transgressive electro over gnarly old rock'n'roll. The belated deification of Les Savy Fav is probably the most obvious manifestation of all this. But the sudden prominence of a sloppy-as-hell garage band from Atlanta is definitely another.