Seems my blog has been hijacked over the weekend by Steve Sutherland, who's clearly having the time of his life out at Coachella. Here's his second report, involving The Arcade Fire, Kings Of Leon, the mighty Roky Erickson and a few random Hollywood A-listers. God, it sounds great. . . So here’s another reason why Coachella is the best festival in the world. I’m taking a load off on one of the black leatherette sofas they have backstage in the VIP/Band area… no, it’s not the sofas, though imagine luxury like that at Glastonbury… anyway, I’m taking a load off when this very short, very dumpy dude with thinning hair barely disguised by a baseball cap and really thick glasses plonks himself down next to me and starts rabbiting on about how awesome Arcade Fire were. By the way, dude’s Danny Devito. So I say to Danny, I’d like a chinwag me old China but LCD Soundsystem are about to come on… or words to that effect and I stumble out front to be confronted by Flea shamelessly fretwanking on the main stage. But let’s park that for a minute and bring you up to scratch with some stats and the hot topic among the Brit contingent. Stats first: This is the first three-day Coachella. All the rest have been two. About 60,000 good people are flocking to frazzle on the lush lawns of the Empire Polo Ground. It’s hotter today than yesterday. So that’s hotter than 102! The hot topic? On yesterday’s evidence, can Arctic Monkeys pull off their coming Glasto headliner? For what it’s worth, I say yeah. The crowd will carry it, will sing every word, will lift the band into a state near communal grace. Talking of which, Arcade Fire. How do they do it? How can they be this special when they’re so goddamn special all the time? As the sun sinks, they burst on with ‘Keep The Car Running’ and never look back. Beach balls bounce around the crowd and the Fire bring down the ecstasy with old ‘Funeral’ friends like all the ‘Neighbourhood’s punctuated by more sombre fare from ‘Neon Bible’ like ‘Black Mirror’. Can’t really pick out highlights. It’s just all going on, Win descending into the crowd as mayhem reigns. They wind up with ‘Rebellion (Lies)’, ‘Wake Up’ and ‘No Cars Go’. I don’t need to waffle on do I? You know it was truly emotional. Arcade Fire Aha, at last a very good reason to hate Kings Of Leon. In the past I’ve always considered them pretty much the perfect band just shy of that killer song. Well, now the bastards have it in the shape of ‘On Call’ from the newie ‘Because Of The Times’. While the crowd around me suddenly transform into, like, this scene straight out of Haight Ashbury circa 1967 with gamine supermodel angels gyrating in a trance to the band’s every ebb and flow, the crowd picks up bare-chested Caleb’s macho holler “Be there!” and thunders it back like the Kings are, I dunno, U2 or something. So that’s it now. Every band in the world can wake up every morning and think: “Fuck, why aren’t we the Kings Of Leon”? They’ve got the lot… so cool, not an ugly amongst them, every gal in the place just falling over herself to rake her claws down their backs. Like I said, bastards! Kings Of Leon This is the best set I’ve ever seen them play, the new stuff bringing the beef alongside old faves ‘Molly Chambers’ and ‘California Waiting’. So cool, too, the way the newly-shaven Nathan blows bubblegum as he drums. They ain’t the Southern Strokes no mo’. Talking of which, whatever happened to…? Fab’s here, off his tits. Wastes his time these days drumming for Har Mar. Albert’s got his own thing going, Julian guests on the new QOTSA album… Is the game all up? Maybe they need five years in the wilderness, just so Paul Tollett can drag them back together for Coachella 2012 and remind us all how much we miss them. By the way, Queens hired a plane to advertise their newie. It flew over the crowd as Arcade Fire played. Wait till you hear the first track. Wow! Pure Led Zep circa ‘Houses Of The Holy’. After the Fire, Red Hot Chili Peppers are shocking. Dull, dull, dull. A show that manages to be simultaneously showy in all the wrong ways and utterly pedestrian. They could have phoned this performance in it ‘s so unspontaneous. Which makes you wonder, if they can’t get it up for an adoring crowd like this – easily the biggest for any single band Coachella has ever assembled before the main stage - when can they get it up? ‘Californication’ is obviously greeted like the Festival theme song but really that’s happening over in the Sahara Tent where Lindsay Lohan’s joined the merry throng to yell along to the mighty LCD Soundsystem’s ‘North American Scum’. LCD are awesome and just about have it over the hyperactive !!! and Hot Chip who raised the roof earlier in the day at the Mojave Tent with an astonishing ‘Over And Over’. Best bit of what’s been a truly brilliant day? Easy. Roky Erickson & The Explosives in the Gobi Tent. I mean, really, I had no idea just how amazing this man was. I’d read all the stuff about how great Texan psychedelic punk pioneers13th Floor Elevators were back in the daze and how Roky gobbled acid or something till they locked him away and did the Cuckoo’s Nest electrode brain-frying thing to him so I guess I was expecting a reanimated corpse. What we got though, was this perpetually chewing, grinning werewolf, maggot pale and howling that he’d discovered the doorway to Hades as an awesomely screwed-down-tight band brought the brimstone to the Elevators’ ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’, a ‘Starry Eyes’ that would not have disgraced Neil Young, a terrifying ‘Don’t Shake Me Lucifer’ and barroom howl-at-the mooners ‘Red Temple Prayer’ (C’mon, how often do you get to scream along to song about working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog?) and ‘Cold Night For Alligators’. Roky Erikson The Gobi was transformed into a scene from the Titty Twister as Roky took crackling lead guitar for ‘The Beast Is Coming’. Man, it was like Tom Fogerty singing the Book Of Revelations while Buddy Guy flayed the strings. Grown men wept. I shit you not. One of those gigs that makes you glad you lived to see it. The tent wasn’t that full and there were a number of disciples with their phones aloft so I’d check Youtube if you’d don’t believe me. So anyway, I bump into some good friends who are staying at a hotel reasonably nearby and at the next table to theirs at breakfast were Melanie Griffith and Linda Carter having a natter. That’s Coachella for you - Wonderwoman, and Roky all in one day. Beyond surreal or what? Check in tomorrow and I’ll endeavour to have a butcher’s at Happy Mondays sans Bez who’s too naughty to get a visa, the reformed Rage Against The Machine, Willie Nelson, Lily Allen, CSS, Klaxons and all their loved-up crew. Steve Sutherland

Hi, I’m Steve Sutherland and I’ve gatecrashed John's Blog because I’m out in California covering the Coachella Music & Arts Festival for Uncut.Coachella is just over two hours’ drive inland from LA and the Festival, now in its eighth year, has become a favourite with Brit music fans for four good reasons. 1. Its location on the lush green fields of the Empire Polo Fields (one of Prince Charlie’s favourites to gallop around, apparently) in the shadow of the mountains is the best place to hold a Festival on earth. 2. It never, ever rains. Today, for example, the temperature was 102. 3. Coachella is an indie rather than “rock” festival, and favours Brit acts. 4. It’s the daddy festival for “Nowstalgia”, ace promoter Paul Tollett famously getting the Iggy & The Stooges, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Jane’s Addiction, Bauhaus, Gang Of Four and, most spectacularly of all, The Pixies, to reunite for previous occasions. Today’s magic turn is the return, after eight years, of The Jesus And Mary Chain. OK, so no-one was actually on their knees begging for the Chain to come back from oblivion, but you know what? They were mostly awesome. Playing on the main Stage just as dusk was falling, they’d hammered through (w)hol(l)y brutal versions of the dark, divine trinity of ‘Never Understand’, ‘Head On’ and ‘Far Gone & Out’ before anyone could catch their breath. They then eased into a cool ‘Sidewalking’ and, yeah, it was like they’d never been away. You didn’t even have to close your eyes to get the full whack, like you did when the creaky old Stooges played here a few years back. A cadaverous Jim still stalks the stage with the intensity of a dead-eyed assassin and William… well, OK, he looks a bit like Robert Smith in with a stocking pulled over his face but he still butchers that guitar. Jesus and Mary Chain About halfway through Jim asked: “Are you having fun?” The surprisingly massive crowd roared the traditional festival affirmative. “Well,” sneered Jim, “Let’s see what we can do about that.” It would have been the day’s best black comedy moment, but they topped it when paisley mini-skirted Hollywood screen goddess Scarlett Johansson, hidden under a trendy trilby, joined them for ‘Some Candy Talking’. What the fuck? Apparently William just called up her agent and she said yes. Simple as that. William’s now threatening to call up a new girl in every town on the rapidly expanding tour they’re planning. Last night, at a warm-up at the Glass House in Pomona, it was Annie Hardy of Giant Drag. They bowed out with a truly caustic ‘Reverence’. Really good to have them back. Oh, and Uncut’s picture researcher Phil King was on bass. Other Uncut favourites doing turns during the day were Bjork, who was accompanied for her headline set mostly plucked from her new album, ‘Volta’, by a big brass band and all-female choir, Interpol who took us into the night with their Joy Division thing, and shamanic homeboy hero Perry Farrell and his new band full of girls who look like supermodels, Satellite Party. They played to a smallish crowd on the main stage during the blistering heat in the late afternoon and didn’t really get too much going except an unsurprisingly well received version of Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Stop Don’t Go’. Arctic Monkeys also played the main stage and pulled a big-ish crowd of committed Brits and curious locals. The set was mostly the new stuff off ‘My Favourite Nightmare’ which confused the hell out the people around me who just didn’t know quite what to make of them. During the furious thrashy bits, several longhairs, tanned like gods, tried to head bang, only to be pulled up short when the verses kicked back in. Others resorted to air drumming. Weird. Don’t get me wrong, they went down OK but Alex Turner’s passive-aggressive stance of wry, detatched amusement, as if he’s viewing somebody else’s gig rather than participating in his own, made it hard for Arctic virgins to get involved. They did ‘Scummy Man’, ‘Fake Tales Of San Francisco’ and ‘I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor’ off the first album, and ‘Brianstorm’, ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’ and some more off the newie, Alex pissing himself when a girl he’d pointed out who’d hauled herself onto her boyfriend’s shoulders flashed her tits at the stage. The new stuff is great and all but, honestly, the tender sarcasm of the lyrics got a bit lost in translation, Alex stuck behind his guitar unable – reluctant maybe – to bring a theatrical life to the songs the way an un-encumbered Morrissey, Ian Brown or even Liam Gallagher can. “Thank you very much ladies and gentlemen,” Alex signed off like a Bingo caller addressing a hall full of pensioners. “It’s been a pleasure. Really, it has. We’ve enjoyed ourselves. Enjoy the rest of the evening. Be careful. Wrap up.” Arctic Monkeys The real drama was happening over in a packed to bursting Gobi Tent where that magnificent creation Amy Winehouse was greeted like a conquering queen and was proceeding mightily to re-import some soul back where it originally came from until one of many beakers of vodka kicked in and things started to get a bit screwy. Claiming nerves, she fluffed her intros, bemused the crowd by threatening to steal their bags when it got dark, rambled on between numbers, forgot what she was doing and saying a whole lot of the time, andc was only transported to a good place, it seemed, when the songs took her over. My, ‘Valerie’ was awesome but there’s something very wrong going on with Amy and someone had best take Alex Turner’s advice and take good care of her. Amy Winehouse Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you about The Good The Bad And The Queen, Arcade Fire, Kings Of Leon, LCD Soundsystem and Roky Erikson (really!) among others. One down, two to go. Where’s the Factor 50?

Still waiting for that Phil Collins fan to post a defence of his hero. But in the meantime, Paul Holmes has joined in bashing "Tory Frog Prince Collins". "One half-decent Genesis tune, some so-so work on a John Martyn record and a clutch of Sunny D Motown rip-offs doth not a canon make," he writes. Fair point. Thanks also to Chads, who responded to our talk of Bill Fay the other day by mentioning Simon Finn, another neglected, quasi-mystic British singer-songwriter from the early '70s who, like Fay, was redicovered by Current 93's David Tibet. I must dig out his "Pass The Distance" album, which I haven't played in ages, though I seem to remember some of it being a bit quirky for my taste. Chads also mentions Alexander Tucker, an excellent Folk/drone guitarist who I've forgotten to mention here before (and whose old hardcore band, Unhome, I used to see a lot, too). He came to mind last night, too, when I was watching Voice Of The Seven Woods play. I blogged about VOT7W's forthcoming album here, though I got some stuff wrong: he's a solo artist from Manchester, rather than a band from London. Sorry about that. The gig was very good, anyway. He's called Richard Tomlinson, and he plays solo guitar - often in the vein of John Fahey - but occasionally uses a bunch of delays to knit up a thicker sound similar to how Alex Tucker works. Like Six Organs Of Admittance, there's also a nice disparity between the brackish, devotional music and Tomlinson's droll, self-deprecating banter. Good show. Tomlinson was supporting Espers, who were great too, actually. My friend Aidan referred to one track as "Venus In Folk", but they seem to be playing down the VU drones a little tonight, which makes them resemble Fairport Convention - the Fairports of "Autopsy" and "Genesis Hall", especially - even more. Meg Baird sang beautifully, and I must write something about her forthcoming solo album soon. But I spent most of the night watching the gangling electric guitarist Greg Weeks, who played tiny and delicate noises with a lot of sustain and rock'n'roll drama. He reminded me a lot of one of my favourite guitarists, Michio Kurihara, who I mentioned here. Kurihara is coming to the UK soon with Ghost, which should be amazing, but I was most reminded of a show I saw years ago when he played with Damon & Naomi (who never get the credit they deserve for pioneering a lot of the current acid-folk stuff). Still, lovely gig. A couple more things. First,Vegetable Friends emailed me with a petition to try and get "Piper At The Gates Of Dawn" reissued in mono, as it was originally designed to be heard. I must admit that I don't have the ears to make out these distinctions, but you can sign up here if you're interested. Secondly, the new White Stripes single, "Icky Thump" leaked onto the internet yesterday, in all its thumping, fidgety, multi-faceted glory. I'm not sure about the ethics of linking to dodgy MP3s, but it's easy to find. And if you missed my album preview, it's here. Enjoy. . .

Thanks for your latest bunch of messages, especially the people who said kind things about my David Ackles blog the other day. Good to see more love for Bill Fay, too: we were playing his first album the other day. "Everyone should love David Ackles - just like everyone shoud love Bill Fay," writes Baptiste. "It takes time for writers like them to get some kind of public acknowledgement. I mean: why? Is Bill Fay's "Be Not So Fearful" such a difficult song? Is "Down River" a 30 minutes white noise jam? As regular readers will have spotted, I'm certainly not averse to 30-minute noise jams (anyone checked out that Vibracathedral Orchestra record yet, by the way?), but good point. Apologies to R Chapman, who took offence at my "cheap shots" at Elton John and Phil Collins. "Maybe when you get a little older smugness won't seem so enticing," he continues. Well, I'm not sure disliking those musicians counts as smugness, exactly. Maybe you could write back and tell us why we should treat Phil, especially, with a bit more respect? One other brief bit of housekeeping. Amusing as messages like this one about Bjork are - "LEAK IT OR I'LL PUNCH YOUR MOTHER IN THE NECK!" - I really can't help out with this sort of query (more than my job's worth yada yada, you know the drill). Nice to see Bjork has some of the most aggressive fans on the internet, though. Anyway, new records. Hopefully, many of you will have heard the Arctic Monkeys album by now. Having heard it plenty now, I'm sticking with most of the hyperbole I came up with after my first listen though, I must admit, it doesn't sound quite as leftfield as I made it out to be. The most interesting mainstream British rock record in ages, though, I'm sure. Also out this week is "The Reminder" by Feist, which I've been pretty slack at not blogging about up 'til now. Very nice record, this. Feist is part of the extended Broken Social Scene family, and an associate of the mighty Peaches and Canadian hip-hop goon Gonzalez. The latter contributes quite a lot to "The Reminder" but, happily, you'd never guess. I know people often perceive "classy" to be pejorative, but I really can't think of a better way to describe this lovely album: an elegant and discreet updating of a singer-songwriter tradition that you could probably trace back to Carole King. Ballads like "Honey Honey" and "How My Heart Believes" (featuring Eirik Glambek Boe, the useful one from Kings Of Convenience) are brilliantly executed. But she also has a nice line in, well, mature nightclub music, maybe: the mildly sassy strut of "My Moon My Man" and, best of all, an ecstatic reworking of Nina Simone's "Sea Lion Woman" that I can roughly describe as electro-surf-Afrobeat. Well, I say "roughly", but I probably mean "inaccurately". The whole album seems to be playing at Feist's Myspace, so let me know if I'm making any sense. . .

Call me speculative, but I don’t think John will be writing about Nick Lowe’s new album, At My Age, on his Wild Mercury Sound blog. It doesn’t, for a start, resemble the battle for Stalingrad reaching a furious climax, like the more deafening parts of the latest Queens Of The Stone Age record he’s been frightening me out of my wits with over the last week or so. I think therefore I might be permitted a few passing words on a particularly fine album without trespassing on John’s turf. As regular readers of Uncut may know from about a dozen separate Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before back page features, I was frequently in Nick’s company at a time when he was quite the man of the moment as one of the prime movers behind Stiff, where he was what you’d call house producer for a while. He also handled production duties on what remain Elvis Costello’s best albums, made some terrific solo albums and with Dave Edmunds fronted Rockpile, one of the greatest rock’n’roll bands ever. A disinclination perhaps to work any harder than he had to, a suspicion of inflated rock star egos that led to him turning down a lot of production work he simply wouldn’t have enjoyed, a curious modesty about his own talents as a producer, songwriter and performer have all contributed over the years to his status as a cultish figure in English rock, much-loved but not as widely-known as he might have been if his ambition had been as great as his humour, charm and way with an anecdote. I guess, also, that the unexpected windfall of a cheque for a million dollars that landed on his door mat when his great song “(What’s So Funny) ‘Bout Peace, Love And Understanding?” was featured on the soundtrack to the Whitney Houston flick The Bodyguard allowed him the opportunity to put his feet up and not to have to worry unduly about paying the milkman. Anyway, to the point. Anyone who’s followed Nick’s career these last 35 years or so will surely love At My Age. Back in the day, as per the exploits I’ve documented in various Stop Me columns, Nick was often a riot. He’s inevitably calmed down over the years, especially with the recent responsibilities of late fatherhood, and there is a grainy ruefulness to several of the new songs here that are evidence of a thoughtful maturity. At My Age isn’t exactly an essay in the kind of bleak mortal reflection Dylan brought to Time Out Of Mind – Nick remains a tad too sparky and tongue-in-cheek for any inclination towards the morbid or darkly self-obsessed. But where once he could be cheerfully off-hand about love’s particular travails on songs like “Undereath My Shirt, My Heart Hurts” or “Time Wounds All Heels”, he’s here often in relatively sombre mood, especially on the “The Club”, “Love’s Got A Lot To Answer For” and “Not Too Long Ago”. Musically, At My Age is what I suppose fits the description of stately country, with a little twanging rockabilly, embellished beautifully with soulful horns. It’s mellow, I suppose, rather than raucous – but by no means merely comfy or complacent. The misogynist rancour of “I Trained Her To Love Me” is particularly spikey and comes frankly as a bit of a shock. Best of all is a song called “Long Limbed Girl”, in which Nick finds an old pcture of his younger self with the woman who back then he loved and clearly lost and about whom he is now given to wonder – where she might be, who she might be with, how she has fared, what she’s been through, whether she is happy now wherever she is? It’s a beautifully touching song with a wonderfully delicate touch, two minutes of unassuming brilliance, typical in its brevity of the album as a whole, the entirety of At My Age’s 12 songs clocking in at 33 minutes at a time you could grow a beard listening to most modern CDs. At My Age is out on the appropriately named Proper Records. Go fetch.

A few nice things arrived in the Uncut office today. One was a big compilation of Finnish psychedelic music from the late '60s and early '70s, which I can't wait to investigate properly. The second was another lavish raid on the Elektra catalogue, this time a 2CD set called "There Is A River" which collects the first three albums (plus outtakes) of David Ackles. Ackles was a solemn, theatrical and often brilliant singer-songwriter whose story involves Elton John, Bernie Taupin and a frankly heinous lack of success. I first came across him in the early '90s, when the three Elektra albums were briefly reissued. I became obsessed with the first one, in particular, and wrote a piece about it for Uncut in 2004, which I've fairly lazily pasted below. Since I wrote this piece, I've finally got hold of his last album, "Five And Dime", which is better than its sketchy reputation suggests. Anyway, here we go. . . August 25, 1970 was an auspicious day – a grim one, some would say – in the history of singer-songwriters. At LA's Troubadour Club, a gauche British pianist yet to release a record outside of his homeland made his US debut. Don Henley, Quincy Jones, Leon Russell and California’s music biz elite were present at this ceremonial unveiling of Elton John, an event which prompted LA Times critic Robert Hilburn to predict: "He’s going to be one of rock's biggest and most important stars." Elton John fans, perhaps justifiably, see the gig as a rock landmark. For some of us, though, it has a pathos that undermines such grandstanding: on August 25, 1970, the music industry anointed the wrong man as king. John, it should be noted, was not alone on a bill to commemorate the Troubadour's 20th birthday. Beside him stood David Ackles, a cerebral, emotionally resonant, doomy singer-songwriter from Rock Island, Illinois. Ackles had been a child actor, a teenage jailbird, a student of the West Saxon language at Edinburgh University and a private detective, and by 1970 he had also released two albums on the flourishing Elektra imprint. He would release only two more in the early '70s, then disappear into a life of teaching, scriptwriting and low-key musical theatre before dying of cancer in 1999. Elton John at least had the good grace to acknowledge the unfairness of it all. "Some people don’t get hyped enough," he said in 1971, "people like David Ackles, who could well be hyped as much as I've been. But once you're successful, they're going to try to get as much hype going as possible." And once you're unsuccessful, they're not going to bother. Ackles, as it happens, found himself the subject of low-level hype in 1972, when his third album, "American Gothic" (overproduced by Elton John's songwriting partner Bernie Taupin) caused a minor fluster among British rock critics. It remains Ackles' best-known album, a song cycle which observed his homeland from exile in Buckinghamshire, and did so with a pomp and orchestral thickness that managed to recall both Bertolt Brecht and Aaron Copland. By comparison, Ackles' self-titled debut from 1968 is way off the radar, even allowing for the periodic waves of interest in his singer-songwriter contemporaries. It's a studiously mournful record, but also one which presents a series of characters who try and contain their sense of desolation. On it, this thoughtful baritone bridges the gap between the two distinct songwriting postures of the time: to the left, the folk-oriented romantics like Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen and, especially, Fred Neil; to the right, the more theatrical craftsmen represented by Scott Walker, Jimmy Webb, Randy Newman and, later, Harry Nilsson. Ackles had initially come to Elektra as a non-performing songwriter, thanks to old college friend David Anderle (a record label "house hippie" and Smile-era confidante of Brian Wilson) hearing a tune of his called "Blue Ribbons". According to a 1994 interview with Ackles, "Blue Ribbons" was originally written for Cher. But, as with the other material Ackles wrote, Elektra boss Jac Holzman failed to sell it to any of his other artists. Eventually, Ackles was allowed to record the songs himself, with Anderle and Russ Miller producing and a backing band of LA scenesters who’d later become Rhinoceros, including guitarist Doug Hastings (who'd briefly replaced Neil Young in Buffalo Springfield). On paper, it was an incongruous set-up: a bunch of acid rockers colluding with the solemn, literate, occasionally rather churchy Ackles. But the tension only adds to the atmosphere of "David Ackles". On the opening track, "The Road To Cairo" (covered by Julie Driscoll and Brian Auger as their follow-up to "This Wheel's On Fire"), they’re given a little leeway, with Hastings (or possibly Danny Weis, the other guitarist at the sessions) punctuating the swirling organ blues with the odd flare and a brittle closing solo. Anderle remembers that the band didn't actually play with Ackles on the album, overdubbing their parts once his vocals and piano lines were finished, which probably explains the space and respect given him, the thrilling illusion of an aesthete holding the berserkers at bay. Ackles, meanwhile, assumes the role of a returning prodigal, all trepidation and regret. His tale of wild living and concomitant horror of hometown routine (there's a Cairo in the state of Georgia, as well as in Egypt) must have resonated with many listeners in the late '60s, but there's no reason to see anything of Ackles in the character. Above all, he was a dramatist, a man who organised and deployed emotions in his songs like a skilled theatre director: the vagrant anthem of "Laissez-Faire" could pass as an excerpt from "The Threepenny Opera". Interviewers habitually noted his easygoing charm and how it clashed with the stormcloud-courting melancholic he seemed to be in song. On 1969's "Subway To The Country", his storytelling became more controversial: "Candy Man" tells of an embittered army veteran who disseminates porn among children. But on David Ackles, the most extreme portrait is "His Name Is Andrew", a breathtakingly bleak tale of a depressive who works in a canning factory, loses his Christian faith and chooses "to wait alone for this life to end". With Michael Fonfara's sepulchral organ again prominent, and Ackles' stern enunciation, it's a fabulous precursor of John Cale's solo work. Better still are a clutch of upsettingly stoic love songs, exemplified by "Down River". Here, Ackles' narrator meets his old girlfriend and gently chides her for not staying in touch, before heroically saying of her new man, "He's a good man Rosie/You hold him tight as you can." Phil Collins chose it as one of his Desert Island Discs, but don't let that detract from it being one of the most heartbreaking songs in the canon. Just as his band always seem to be restrained, Ackles' performance is predicated on the anguish he tries – almost, but not quite successfully – to bottle up. David Ackles is full of manly grief, discreet suffering, remorseful vignettes, faintly existential loners who've been away too long for tantalisingly unspecified reasons. Even "Blue Ribbons", mainly sung from a female perspective, has that same air of noble fatalism. "The world is full of lovers/ Loving hate and only loving others of their kind," he opines, magnificently. How this kind of romantic pessimism struggled to find an audience at the death of the '60s, just as psychedelia was dissolving into a more pensive, solipsistic music scene, remains one of rock's more frustrating mysteries. Ackles himself was never really sure. But, true to his enduring protagonists, he appeared to take failure pragmatically. "I’m not bitter about a thing that's happened to me," he told Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine in 1994. "I would hate for people to think I’m over here getting all twisted up about what happened 20 years ago. All that feels like another life, lived by someone else." A couple of footnotes. First, "Subway To The Country" sounds much better than I remember today. Second, Allan has just realised that he used to know Michael Fonfara, Ackle's keyboardist, when he was Lou Reed's musical director. Strange that I compared "My Name Is Andrew" to Cale, while Fonfara went on to work/be harangued by Reed.