So Mark E Smith is a DJ, right? He's booked the club for the night, therefore it stands to reason he can play the records. But then this German guy turns up and says he's the DJ, says he's Sven Vath. Whatever should Mark do? Simple: "I flooded the club," he says proudly. That'll show them. This is the compelling scenario of "Flooded", track three of the debut album by Von Sudenfed. Von Sudenfed are a new group consisting of Smith, plus Andi Toma and Jan St Werner from the marvellous German electronica mavericks Mouse On Mars. You have to admire Toma and St Werner's nerve. Smith, after all, is not historically one for harmonious collaboration, tending to favour dictatorship over teamwork. Their last couple of Mouse On Mars albums have been slight disappointments, too, after the mid '90s highs of "Niun Niggung" and "Idiology". In spite of being eclectic leftfield auteurs, it's seemed as if they've been struggling to make a kind of pop music, and not quite getting there. Bizarrely, they've achieved that by recruiting Smith, of all people. "The Rhinohead", for instance, is a glorious technopop stomper, a supercharged update of the sort of hobnailed-boot dancefloor strangeness that The Fall were making towards the end of their period on the Fontana label. It might be a trick of all the processing on his voice, but Toma and St Werner have generally made Smith sound livelier than he has done in years. I mean, much as I like the last few Fall albums, I don't find myself returning to them very often. "Tromatic Reflexxions" (sorry, that's the album title), for all the trademark Mouse On Mars squelch is so much cleaner and tighter - no muttering longueurs here, it's just hits most of the way. And with all the murk cleared away, you can hear Smith's majestic rants. "I cannot boil the chicken," he's saying on the lunatic Delta blues of "Chicken Yiamas". By the end and "Dearest Friends", a highlife-gone-Hawaiian reverie, he sounds positively beatific. And of course, there's my obligatory LCD Soundsystem comparison. What could be better than a Mark E Smith impersonator declaiming over pounding dance music? Mark E Smith declaiming over pounding dance music, of course.

I was recently moved to reminisce about the night Lou Reed invited me to dinner after a show at the Hammersmith Odeon, an occasion that famously ended up in chaos when he was annoyed by something David Bowie said to him that sparked off quite a lively assault, Lou smacking Bowie somewhat savagely around the head. What David actually said to Lou to spark off the assault has long-since been the subject of much speculation. Just before it all went off, the pair took a circuit of the restaurant in Knightsbridge where we were eating, toasting each other and their renewed friendship. Whatever David said that ignited Lou’s fury, he made the mistake of repeating within minutes, thus provoking another flurry of slaps and punches and Lou’s dramatic departure – frogmarched out in the grip of his own minders, probably for his own good as much as Bowie’s or anyone else’s. My thanks to Chuck Hammer, who had played that evening with Lou at Hammersmith, and has replied to my post with the following email, which takes the story on a little further: ‘As a guitarist in the Lou Reed band at that time, I was actually sitting next to both David and Lou at dinner when this exchange took pace, I can tell you exactly what transpired verbally. ‘Lou had been discussing details regarding his upcoming new album- as yet un-recorded. Lou asked David if he would be interested in producing the record and David replied yes - but only upon the condition that Lou would stop drinking and clean up his act. And upon that reply, the aforementioned chaos ensued. ‘It should be noted that this verbal bantering also continued into the night back at the hotel -With Bowie in the hallway demanding that Reed "come out and fight like a man" Eventually it all quieted down as Lou never reappeared to continue the fight, and was most likely already fast asleep.’ Boys keep swinging, indeed

In between all the meetings and extraneous stuff today (oh, and kicking myself for missing the Leonard Cohen lig that Allan blogs about here), I've belatedly got round to hearing Gallows. Gallows, if you haven't come across them, are a five-piece from Watford who look like they've been used as doodle pads at a tattooists' convention. For the past couple of months or so, they've also been the subject of a fairly unseemly scramble, thanks to an album they put out last autumn called "Orchestra Of Wolves". Today, it transpires they've signed to Warners in the UK and Epitaph in the States, after being one of the feted buzz bands of South By Southwest. God knows how this happened, to be honest. Not because Gallows are crap - far from it. It's just weird that a band as relentlessly hardcore as this should have excited the mainstream music business. "Orchestra Of Wolves" reminds me quite a lot of something like Drive Like Jehu, something far from the pogo-friendly type of US punk that usually gets assimilated. I guess there are some affinities with At The Drive-In, but even they had to become a prog-rock band (The Mars Volta) to really make it. Don't get me wrong - it's a great record, and I'm genuinely excited that a band of such thrashing menace should be getting the NME kids in a froth. But I was having a conversation about Gallows with someone in the office this morning, and it struck me that there must be so many bands like this in the States - bands who've little need of mainstream approval, and who are so immersed in their scene that, frankly, I've never heard of most of them. One I have heard of are called Fucked Up and they're tremendous, every bit the belligerent equal of Gallows. What we concluded, anyway, was that the rise of Gallows is a sign of how small the UK music scene actually is: a band can be making notionally uncompromising, traditionally uncommercial music to an underground elite, but they can still be found fairly easily by mainstream band-spotters. It's both an indictment of the UK's shallow talent pool, and a reassuring sign that however lily-livered and narrow-minded we might perceive major labels to be, they're not just looking for the next Mika or whatever. Then, of course, the guy I was talking to kept going on about how Gallows made him want to jump about and smash things up, and maybe that's the secret. See what you think - give Gallows' Myspace page a go, and drop me a line.

The Cuckoo Club is a swish, luxuriously upholstered private members bar and restaurant, just off Regent Street, where everything that isn’t leather, velvet, silk or glass is gleaming stainless steel, or something that looks like it. This early Monday evening, it’s packed – ostensibly for a showcase performance by the Honolulu-born singer and pianist, Anjani, here to promote her new Sony album, Blue Alert. What most of us are here for, if we’re honest, is, however, a glimpse of Anjani’s what I suppose you’d call ‘mentor’ – Leonard Cohen, who co-wrote and produced the album. More cynical souls than myself doubted he’d be here – but that’s him, at a small table about five feet from where I’m sitting, sipping a glass of beer and mouthing the words as Anjani essays a supremely tasteful version of “Blue Alert” and almost audibly purring with approval for what she’s doing. Cohen had made a brief speech earlier, to introduce the singer and her backing trio – handpicked jazz veterans, as perfectly groomed as their surroundings. As was Cohen, of course, a handsome 73 now, with close cropped silver hair and a slight stoop, but wholly elegant, like some Democratic elder from the American heartland, a senator or congressman with an impeccable record on all the important liberal issues. There is much mischief about him, too, an eternal liveliness that age has evidently not impaired. “This ritual is very new to me,” he says dryly of the showcase. “I enquired of someone what the audience would be like. ‘Indistry people,’ he said. I immediately thought of the cast of Night Of The Living Dead, shuffling towards the stage with something on their minds other than an appreciation of music.” Anjani, nervous but composed, plays a selection of well-received songs from the new album, thanks Leonard effusively at every opportunity, and is clearly heartfelt in her appreciation, Anjani dreamy-eyed as she gazes swoonsomely at Cohen when he joins her for a touching duet on “Never Got To Love You”, and later on something very tender called “Whither Thou Goest”, after which they go, Cohen giving a little Zen bow to the boys in the band before making an impeccably dignified exit. An entirely unexpected start to the week, then.

It's odd, but the two albums I've played most in the past week both remind me a bit of LCD Soundsystem. This might be because I've played the LCD album more than anything else this year. But 1990s and Von Sudenfed both have strange affinities with James Murphy, I'm convinced. I'll get to Von Sudenfed later in the week, all being well. For now, I've just put on "Cookies" by 1990s again. On the surface, it sounds precious little like LCD. It is nothing like a disco record, for a start. Instead, 1990s are a battle-scarred indie-pop band from Glasgow who play a kind of skinny, rubber-spined garage glam. Two-thirds of them used to be in a bunch of faintly malign cuties called The Yummy Fur, who also featured Alex Kapranos before he formed Franz Ferdinand. Listening to "Cookies", it's easy to imagine 1990s hearing Franz's impeccably calculated pop and thinking, "We'll have a piece of that." Much of this debut seems located at the birth of New York punk, perhaps in transit between Max's and CBGB, maybe with the Dolls and Lou along for the ride. "Arcade Precinct" even struts along like a very louche and sly Scottish cousin of "Walk On The Wild Side". Luckily, 1990s have some great tunes, all cranky riffs and wobbly harmonies, crisply produced by Bernard Butler (how much better would the Libertines' albums have been if he'd produced them, incidentally?). They are also amusingly self-aware, as you'd hope of men who've been flogging around the indie circuit for so long. "Chelsea Hotel didn't ring my bell, I'd rather be in Pollockshields," notes singer Jackie McKeown, wisely (Apropos nothing, I heard this guy on the bus the other day talking on his phone about a forthcoming trip to New York. He wasn't going to make the mistake of staying at the Chelsea again, he said, he wanted to go to that place where Tony Soprano takes his girlfriend instead. Classy). It's McKeown's droll take on being a rock singer of a certain experience, aligned to those vague New York analogies, that remind me of LCD Soundsystem, I guess. He talks about drugs with this weirdly exuberant irony: "I'm going into the forest now, 'cos my pills should be taking effect soon," he hams on "Enjoying Myself". "Why don't you try taking drugs again, you were never funnier than you were back then," begins "Weed", before McKeown confesses to being scared of the telephone - "and I haven't even got one". Best of all, he alludes to the necessity of making this massively entertaining record on "Cult Status". Again like Murphy, there's a deadly hipster sense of his own ridiculousness: "Cult status keeps me alive," he yelps. "Cult status keeps me fucking your wife." Fun - try it: 1990s Myspace.