I won’t be seeing Dylan on his UK tour until Sunday at Wembley Arena, so I asked Damien Love to be a guest blogger and review the show for us. Damien is a veteran Uncut contributor, the author of a great biography of Robert Mitchum and a longstanding Dylan fan. Here’s his report from the Glasgow SECC, every word of which makes me wish I’d been there. Bob Dylan & His Band Glasgow, SECC April 11 2007 Back in 1991, as what we now call Gulf War I raged far away, Bob Dylan stood onstage at Glasgow’s SECC and unexpectedly pulled what must rank as one of the most shambolic concerts of his (or anyone’s) career out of the fire with a howling, electric “Masters of War.” Sixteen years on, playing with the sustained, growing focus and energy that has marked his concerts since the turn of the millennium, every other song seems a highlight. The concerts couldn’t be more different - but he stops the room in its tracks again by returning to another song he wrote about war in 1963. Before that, though, the first big news about Dylan’s first UK show since 2005 is that he’s playing guitar again, for the first time since 2002. Stepping out in a black suit with white piping on the trousers and a flat, wide-brimmed hat, he looks like he was dressed in a happy collaboration between Zorro and Miami Steve, and as his five-man band careen into a rollicking “Cat’s in the Well,” he’s throwing shapes with his Stratocaster to fit the look. We get four songs with the guitar, including a blues-reverie of “Just Like Tomb Thumb’s Blues” and a newly reworked “It’s Alright, Ma,” words falling like precise little dagger-jabs, hounded by Donnie Herron’s dark, *Desire*-esque violin wails. Dylan switches back to keyboards for “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” the first of six *Modern Times* numbers, and a revelation. Never one of the big songs on the recent album, it comes alive in a new way. Dylan absolutely whips the thing till it buzzes and stings. His voice is stronger and more elastic than it has been in years – far stronger than the album take of this song. As further demonstrated by a coruscating “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ”, he seems energised by the new material. He’s playful enough to build a small pantomime inside “Spirit on the Water,” bending the line *“You think I’m over the hill,” * into a question, pausing for the inevitable audience scream: *“Nooooooooooooooooooo!”* But there’s no joking on “Ain’t Talking,” a scintillating, urgent reading that finds a dark, arcane and spine-chilling groove within the song, the floor of the SECC turned into a kind of haunted disco. If Dylan was throwing shapes before, he’s positively vamping now, jerking, jiggling, twisting, grinding and humping around his keyboard as if he was plugged into it the way Jane Fonda was to the orgasmatronic organ in *Barbarella*. Actually, that might explain some of his more eccentric playing. Dylan has ditched the warm piano sound of his 2004 shows for a weird, high-pitched organ reminiscent of ‘60s garage bands and fairground carousels. When it works, as on an intensely beautifully reworked “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” it lends a floating, dream-like cast; at other times he’s plainly noodling around playing an entirely different song from anyone else onstage. That, though, is part of what keeps Dylan’s shows so vital. While the Stones, bless ‘em, whip through sets like a machine, with Dylan the rough, bleeding edges and moments of confusion and uncertainty are still allowed. Unbelievably, the biggest stumble comes on the song he must have played more than any other, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which takes an age to coalesce into any recognisable shape. It’s followed an apt visual metaphor during the encore, as Dylan’s ominous eye-logo banner fails to unfurl properly, and hangs above the stage as a weird, scrunchy rag – possibly the closest he will ever get to a Spinal Tap moment. We end with the sucker punch of “Thunder on the Mountain” and the traditional knock-out, “All Along the Watchtower.” But what will linger in the audience’s minds is that moment in the dead centre of the night, when Dylan pulled out one of his oldest, perhaps least-known songs. A spooked martial shuffle, a plucked banjo ringing out like the sound of very desolation, it’s “John Brown,” a blunt, plain sing-song about a boy who went off to war straight and tall in his uniform, and how his mother was proud – until he came home and she met him off the train to find “his face was all shot up and his hand was all blown off and he wore a metal brace around his waist.” Fresh from seeing the latest flag-draped coffins on the evening news, the 10,000 souls of the audience seem mesmerised, hanging on every simple word, feeling years and wars blur together and hold hands, realising it’s the same canny joker up there today who was singing about this back then. The effect is truly uncanny. Eerie, even. It’s nothing to do with “protest songs” or “the voice of a generation,” but something older and stranger – the stuff he’s been dealing in all night, and all his life. It’s impossible now to think of anyone else who can conjure it up. DAMIEN LOVE SET LIST 1. Cat's In The Well 2. It Ain't Me, Babe 3. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues 4. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) 5. The Levee's Gonna Break 6. When The Deal Goes Down 7. Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine) 8. John Brown 9. Rollin' And Tumblin' 10. A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall 11.Spirit On The Water 12.Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again 13. Ain't Talkin' 14. Summer Days 15. Like A Rolling Stone 16. Thunder On The Mountain 17. All Along The Watchtower

The opening weekend takings in America for Tarantino's new film, Grindhouse, were, frankly, a disaster of Krakatoa-eque proportions. It only took a measly $11 million – less than half the sum forecast by the film’s studio, the Weinstein Company. Grindhouse is a double feature, the first movie – a zombie horror, Planet Terror – is directed by Sin City’s Robert Rodriquez, while Tarantino helms the slasher film, Death Proof. The idea is to replicate the low-budget movies of the Sixties and Seventies beloved of the directors. Cheap and sleazy action, horror, kung-fu, soft-porn, cannibal and blaxsploitation flicks with titles like Asylum Of Blood, Jailbait Babysitter and (a personal favourite, this) Cat In The Brain. In comparison to Kill Bill Vol 1 and 2, which opened at $22 and $25 million respectively, Grindhouse’s disappointing performance has twisted US commentators, and the Weinstein Co, into knots over-analysing it’s failure. Weinstein are blaming the film’s running time. It’s over three hours long, which drastically reduces the number of showings in cinemas. In an attempt to salvage something from the debacle, Weinstein are planning to cut the movie in half and re-release them as two separate movies. This seems the likely way we’ll get to see it in the UK, if it opens as scheduled on June 1. Really, the fault lies with Tarantino – but the buck stops with producer Harvey Weinstein, whose often ruthless and brutal treatment of many a movie earned him the nickname Harvey Scissorhands. Weinstein has been known to terrorise directors in the past, but seems reluctant to take Tarantino to task for what is, after all, an act of extravagant self-indulgence, even by Tarantino's Olympic standards. Who in their right mind really gives a damn about an obscure movie genre like grindhouse – apart, that is, from Tarantino? Tarantino has been Harvey’s golden goose since Reservoir Dogs broke the director in 1991. They have one of those “special relationships” you hear about a lot these days, predicated around the critical and commercial kudos QT has enjoyed, but seems to be increasingly mercurial. It’s now pretty clear that Tarantino needs to be taken in hand. He’s made two brilliant movies in Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but Jackie Brown was tedious beyond repair. And let’s not even talk about Four Rooms. But his obsession with the geekier aspects of pop-culture, while initially charming and amusing, appears to be wearing thin. So what do you think? Are you looking forward to Grindhouse, or has Tarantino blown it?

I was exchanging emails with one of Uncut's American writers the other day who had just finished a piece for a US mag about The View. He was pretty unimpressed by their record, and went on to have a go at the latest batch of British bands being pushed hard in the States as the next big thing. All of them, he thought, were overhyped and underachieving, with the exception of the Arctic Monkeys. Did I agree, he wondered? Well, of course I did, though I was fairly self-conscious about it. Seeing as I never much liked Oasis, even, it's hard for me to get the point of most of these bands. I often think I'm unreasonably prejudiced against mainstream British indie groups, but they seem so blandly aspirational, pushy and posturing and humdrum, really. Anyway, I was thinking about this at the Astoria last night, right after the Arctic Monkeys finished playing. The set lasted just over an hour, and the atmosphere in the crowd was bullish, celebratory, a lot of blokes all hoarse and emotional spilling beer over their mates. It was great, too, and it occurred to me: how weird that I like one of these British 'Bands Of The People'; how weird that I've just shared one of those geezerly epiphanies that I normally find so alienating. There are a few explanations for this, I think. One is that the Arctic Monkeys aren't just an exceptional band, but the sort of exceptional band in whom you can find what you want. We chat to a guy stood next to us who's there with his 16-year-old son, and who loves them because he hears The Jam in Alex Turner's songs, who is going to see The Beat tonight and can place the Monkeys into a tradition of British mod and ska. These aren't really my touchstones, though I can see his point. What I choose to hear when I listen to these songs is The Smiths and Queens Of The Stone Age, jittery post-punk and the lyrical rhythms of hip-hop. I bump into Mark Beaumont from NME afterwards, and he tells me that I secretly like the Monkeys because those abrasive guitars have the ring of The Wedding Present about them. I haven't played my Wedding Present records in maybe 15 years, but I fear he may have a point. I like, too, the fact that, unlike all the cheeky social documentarists who've come up in their wake, the Arctic Monkeys' ambitions lie in stretching their music. They are congenitally incapable of being a foursquare indie band, because Matt Helders is congenitally incapable of playing a foursquare indie beat. His drumming is all limber funk and desperate metal fills. It's muscular and relentless and it propels these excellent songs - especially new songs like "Balaclava" and "Teddy Picker" - into complicated and exciting places. And finally, I like Alex Turner a lot, especially the gauche, passive-aggressive nonchalance he has about him, so different from the blustery arrogance of supposed contemporaries like the guy from Kasabian. The new songs are mostly better than the old ones, but it's significant that tonight the Arctic Monkeys don't bother playing the strongest one of all, "Fluorescent Adolescent". We'll have to play this one for the rest of our careers, is the subtext, so we might as well get out of playing it now while we still can.

Thanks for all your feedback on the White Stripes blog I posted yesterday. If it's any consolation, I want to hear "Icky Thump" again, too, but it's under lock and key at the record company HQ and, sadly, I don't have the time to go over to Ladbroke Grove and get it played to me daily. In response to Lil's question - if the title track does turn out to be the first single, that would make sense. It's much more typical of the album than "You Don't Know What Love Is", and its sheer sonic clout would be more of an uncompromising statement to return with. My hunch is that Jack White doesn't worry too much about whether his first single will be "radio-friendly". The first single is for proving to the fans he still has an edge, the second single is the one that can be the drivetime anthem or whatever. That seems the logical plot. Anyway, today's record choice is a bit more obscure. A couple of weeks ago, a colleague emailed me about a folk CD he was compiling. He was looking for recommendations of new English stuff loosely connected with that genre and, knowing that I was up to my neck in the whole acid/free/wyrd-folk scene, thought I might be able to point him in the direction of some cool stuff. Well, I tried, but it was really hard - especially when I realised he needed English artists, thus disqualifying Alasdair Roberts, for a start. A lot of the UK "nu-folk" (and how I hate that nu prefix) seems like ersatz MOR or indie to me, really bland and uninteresting. Seth Lakeman and Jim Moray have nothing in common with the music I love; the properly psychedelic American stuff like Six Organs Of Admittance which, as Michael here constantly teases me, I always refer to as "feral" in things like this. Eventually, I came up with the name of James Blackshaw, a terrific raga-ish, John Fahey-ish guitarist from London whose "O True Believers" album was one of my favourites of last year. But then, about a week ago, a debut album turned up by another London (I think) collective called Voice Of The Seven Woods and it is, I'm pleased to say, fantastic. It has the woody mystique which I love in this music, and a real eclectic spirit which manages to draw lines between Davey Graham-ish fingerpicking and Turkish psychedelia, between Nick Drake confessionals (and on the rare occasions when the anonymous frontman steps up to the mic like "Silver Morning Branches", he really catches Drake's spaciness and dislocation, not like the usual MOR singer-songwriters who are compared with him) and Led Zep, between folk and motorik. The Turkish influence, most prominent on "The Fire In My Head", is particularly interesting, because there's been a slew of reissues in the past year or two that have made the late '60s Anatolian psych scene the hipster equivalent of Tropicalia a year or two back; I can vigorously recommend the Turkish edition of the "Love, Peace & Poetry" compilation series on Shadoks. I suspect this might become a recurring reference point in the next few months: there's a hint of it on the forthcoming Dungen album, which I'll write about soon; and Super Furry Animals have been claiming that their forthcoming album will have a Turkish vibe, too. We shall see. In the meantime, check out Voice Of The Seven Woods' Myspace. That gig on April 24 in San Francisco with Howlin' Rain and Citay should be awesome, and I'll try and make the London show with Espers, for sure.

Two and a half minutes into "Icky Thump", something happens which is so perfect, you almost suspect the White Stripes' press officer magically orchestrated it. We are sat in the boardroom at XL, listening to "Icky Thump" being played to us at generous volume. The title track comes first, and it sounds terrific. The Stripes have reminded me of Led Zeppelin plenty of times before, but I don't think they've ever sounded quite this big. "Physical Graffiti" comes to mind, but there's also this weird North African riff being played on a synth, and an organ solo which is pure Jon Lord. Meg White is hitting the drums with immense weight, while Jack continues to deconstruct rock structures as he goes along - stuttering when you expect him to charge, messing with the levels. The thing is, it eventually occurs to us that the levels are being messed with a bit more than White had planned. In fact, "Icky Thump" is so powerful, it appears to have blown XL's fancy stereo. We take the CD out, and the speakers are still crackling. A few minutes later, we start again in another office, and first impressions prove correct. "Icky Thump" is yet another great White Stripes album, and one which amps them up in a new and grandiose way. If "Get Behind Me Satan" was predicated on piano, marimba and White's experiments with pop, "Icky Thump" is all about electric guitar and giant drums. In one way, it's a return to the elemental first recordings of the band: songs like "Bone Broke" and "Little Cream Soda" recall "Cannon" and "Astro", if memory serves, punctuated with those shrieking, high-frequency solos. The sound, though, is much heavier and fuller, at the same time. Again, I keep writing Led Zeppelin in my notes, even when the sound becomes folkier - as on the astonishing "300mph Torrential Outpour Blues", where the meticulous layered guitars are strikingly close to a full band sound. During "Rag And Bone" (ostensibly Steptoe & Son re-enacted by Jack and Meg), I start suspecting my critical line may be a bit narrow, when the riff reminds me of Them's "Baby Please Don't Go" - played, of course, by Jimmy Page. On one listen, "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do As You're Told)" sounds like the hit: a sort of Beatles/Southern Rock hybrid that would have fitted nicely onto the soundtrack of, sigh, Dazed And Confused. The next step on from "Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground", perhaps. The strangest two tracks are "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn" and "St Andrew (This Battle Is In The Air)". The former begins like, yes I know, "Gallows Pole" before the bagpipes turn up and the Scottish imagery gets denser and wilder. Eventually, it shifts into "St Andrew", a heated expansion of the musical and lyrical themes with a spoken word vocal by Meg. Describing it all makes it sound like whimsy - and their ongoing obsession with perceived British eccentricities can be seen in the cover shot of the pair in full Pearly Queen regalia, too. But these songs are intense rather than throwaway. The prevailing atmosphere of "Icky Thump" means that even the playfulness is delivered in a forceful frenzy. Mexico figures, too. One of the redheaded women who stalk these songs is a "redhead senorita" (in "Icky Thump" itself), while "Conquest" (a Corky Robbins song popularised by Patty Page, apparently) is basically metal mariachi, with Jack going to head to head with trumpeter Regulo Aldama. I haven't had much time to pull the lyrics apart yet, but there doesn't seem to quite as much playing with the brother/sister/family business. The notable exception is "I'm Slowly Turning Into You", inspired by a Michel Gondry video treatment that has Jack gradually morphing into Meg. It's a full-blooded love song (about Karen Elson, we could crudely assume?), but the complexity of the concept - and of Meg sharing the muttered chorus with Jack - means that their relationship remains the object of much sport from this most devious and compelling of bands. "Little Cream Soda" seems to be about the loss of innocence - another recurring theme, but one which gathers bigger apocalyptic resonances with every album. The weakest track on that solitary listen seemed to be "Catch Hell Blues", a slide guitar workout that's technically brilliant but not immediately memorable. Really, though, I'm pretty sure they've done it again - given classic rock one more vicious and inventive twist. When I get to hear it another time, I'll let you know.

Back to work after the long Easter weekend, and we're being lulled into action by the debut album from Original Silence. Original Silence are ostensibly The Good, The Bad & The Queen for men of a certain age who went to All Tomorrow's Parties and never came back. Their ranks include Mats Gustafsson - a great, spluttery, avant saxophonist from The Thing - one of The Ex, Jim O'Rourke (who claimed he'd quit music a while back, with Sinatra-esque implausibility) and, perhaps inevitably, Thurston Moore. "The First Original Silence" is not quite as obliteratingly noisy as you might imagine, though it's still pretty wild. It's a bit like half a dozen men in a record shop having an intense argument about "Funhouse", and chiefly about how better that record would have been if Steve Mackay had stood at the front rather than Iggy Pop. Or, as Phil in the office just put it, it sounds like someone strangling Sooty. The best thing about Original Silence, though, like so many Thurston Moore projects, is the rampant and infectious sense of joy that making a racket can bring. It's a spirit that flows through so many releases on his Ecstatic Peace imprint, which currently seems to be hoovering up great tracts of the American underground. He's just signed up Sunburned Hand Of The Man for an album, "Z", which is pretty good free jamming, but which never quite finds the lumbering funk of their best albums (track down "Jaybird" if you can). Moore's also put out an album by an avant-garde bagpipe player called David Watson which I haven't got my head round yet, and a brilliant new Wooden Wand album which I'll write more about in a few days. I made some notes about Ecstatic Peace here in one of my very first blog entries. And without turning this into one of those awful self-referential blogs that constantly doubles back on itself, there are a couple of things I've been playing a lot since I first wrote about them. The Lavender Diamond album due next month on Rough Trade is, I think, a little classic of folk-pop (blogged about here). My wife refers to it as "folk Abba", which I think is spot-on. And since I wrote this, the whole Lightning Dust album has turned up, and is great, too; if you've heard the Black Mountain album and wanted Amber Webber to make "Heart Of Snow" last for 35 minutes, this one's for you.

Hot and slow in the Uncut office this afternoon, so I've put on the new album by Earth, which precisely fits the mood. Dylan Carlson's Earth, you may remember, were the Kurt Cobain affiliates who occupied the most extreme wing of grunge. Their records through the early and mid '90s largely sounded like Black Sabbath slowed down to an excruciating trudge. Gonzoid heavy, but kind of avant-garde, too. Carlson is an unlikely revolutionary. But Earth's influence on leftfield metal has been profound these past few years, all the more unlikely since their records felt so extreme as to be an evolutionary dead end. I guess Sunn 0))) are their most obvious disciples, so it's fitting that Greg Anderson from that band turns up on the new Earth album, "Hibernaculum". In the past few years, Earth's music hasn't got much faster, but it has mellowed, after a fashion. "Hibernaculum" largely consists of new versions of old songs, reinvented in the style of their last excellent album, "Hex; Or Printing In The Infernal Method". Today, we're going to call that style Spaghetti Doom, a sort of desert rock distinguished by great reverberant twangs, like Dick Dale at 16rpm. It's similar, too, to those bands out of LA like Savage Republic and their successors Scenic, and the widescreen, Morricone end of post-rock, Godspeed!You Black Emperor. Heady stuff, as you might imagine, at once meditative and menacing. I remember reading about how Queens Of The Stone Age (whose new one I should hear in the next week or so) used to have generator parties in the desert when they were kids: this, I think, would be the perfect music for the end of those parties, for watching the stars in a stupor. Or, of course, for getting through sticky afternoons in London offices. . .