I received an interesting message yesterday from SAm, responding to my preview of the forthcoming Elliott Smith album. "It bothers me a little bit to read, here and elsewhere, Elliott's 'strummed melodies' described as 'simple'," he writes. "Elliott was a good lyricist, a very good guitar player, and decent singer, but what makes him totally unique and superior to virtually all of his contemporaries is the melodic songwriting, the ingenuity and originality of the chord progressions. The formal problem that pop songs present is that they must be a)short b) instantly familiar and c) unfamiliar. It's an exercise in expectations ingeniously subverted and then met. "Go and play his songs on the guitar, or try to. I guarantee you will find in almost every one a sophisticated and basically amazing sequence of chords within the overall, conventional melodic structure - ie the difference between a good song and a boring one. It takes a certain kind of musical IQ to come up with that, something I've never detected in, say, Keith Richards, or the guy who writes the songs in Modest Mouse. OK, rant over." I've never played a guitar, or any instrument in fact, so I can't personally test out SAm's theory. It does strike me, though, as touching on a couple of fairly prickly subjects. One is about why Elliott Smith's music is so effective and, frequently, affecting. On the surface, he was a fairly conventional singer-songwriter, indebted - like so many others - to The Beatles, with a vague folkiness that comes to the fore on the solo acoustic songs on "New Moon". A casual listener might skip through a few of his albums and conclude his songs were even fairly samey. And certainly, Smith worked in a pretty narrow range. If we disregard the emotional impact of his words and voice for a moment, perhaps it is the "sophisticated and basically amazing sequence of chords within the overall, conventional melodic structure" that made his songs so powerful. Which brings us to the second slightly disturbing thought which SAm's email provoked. If a song is successful because of a technical melodic complexity which can only be identified by someone who tries to play it, does that mean that so much music journalism is based on hunches? Is Brian May right, and should I try and write my own songs before I've earned the right to criticise those of other people? I think the answer to that one is 'no', but of course I would say that. The overall impression that a record makes is more important and more interesting to read about, I reckon, than a musicological exposition. Part of the charm of Elliott Smith's songs is that they appear simple, that they create an illusion of direct, spontaneous emotional communication even though real craftsmanship underpins it. But maybe occasionally a look at the melodic nuts and bolts can give us an insight into what makes a song work? I'm going on a bit now. But anyway, we have one more report coming up from South By Southwest to come (tomorrow, hopefully). Other things to look forward to on Wild Mercury Sound soon: Mark E Smith and Mouse On Mars' stomping collaboration, Von Sudenfed; the garage glam of The 1990s; the medieval electronica of Colleen; the fantastic Marnie Stern; and, hopefully, previews of Bjork and The White Stripes. Just don't ask me to analyse their compositional skills. . .

On Monday night, I went to the launch of the 2007 Reading Festival – or the Carling Weekend: Reading And Leeds Festivals, as the dual event is now called – which, as you’ll probably know is headlined this year by The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Smashing Pumpkins and Razorlight, with Arcade Fire, Kings Of Leon and Nine Inch Nails featuring prominently among the supporting line-up. I’ve lost count of the number of August Bank Holidays I’ve spent at Reading, most of them memorable, some of them not. But on Monday – it may have been the free drink – I was moved to ponder somewhat on the origins of the event as the National Jazz And Blues Festival, which I went to in 1968, the year it was held at Kempton Park Racecourse in Sunbury-on-Thames. The festival then was a rather more sedate affair than it would become and was split on Saturday and Sunday into afternoon and evening sessions, with the Saturday afternoon devoted to the best of British jazz and the Sunday afternoon to folk. There was one evening session on the Friday, headlined by The Herd, who were bottled, I seem to remember, by a bunch of rockers who’d come to see Jerry Lee Lewis tearing the house down in spectacular fashion. This year, tickets are a probably reasonable £145 for the weekend. In 1968, the afternoon sessions were 10 shillings each – 50 pence, in today’s coinage – and 15 shillings for the evening shows. Weekend tickets (for the Saturday and Sunday) were 35 shillings, and a season ticket for all three days cost £2 and five shillings. The line-up, over the weekend? Saturday evening featured Deep Purple, Joe Cocker, Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Nice, Jeff Beck with Rod Stewart (mercilessly heckled, as I recall, by some rowdy discontents), Ten Years After and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. Arthur’s big hit was, of course, “Fire”, during which the self-styled “god of hell-fire” would take to dancing around the stage wearing a helmet of fire, which was at the time some spectacle. Sunday night’s bill included Jethro Tull, who pretty much stole the show, Chicken Shack, John Mayall, Spencer Davis and Traffic. I have especially fond memories of the Sunday afternoon ‘folk’ session, hosted by Al Stewart, highlights of which were the young Fairport Convention and The Incredible String Band, who I remember playing a glorious version of “Log Cabin Home In The Sky” – yeah, I know – as the sun set behind them. There was a particularly loud cheer when they introduced Leaf, their dog – a crowd favourite I see several times more on stage with them, notably at Birmingham Town Hall, when he curled up at Robin Williamson’s feet and went to sleep during the admittedly longwinded but wholly beguiling “A Very Cellular Song”.

Another guest blogger today, as I put my feet up, listen to an excellent Terry Riley reissue and hand over Wild Mercury Sound to April Long. Like Luke, who did my work for me yesterday, April spent last week at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas. And like Luke, she completely let Uncut down by missing Psychedelic Horseshit. Oh well, here's her fine report: "Within minutes of arrival in Austin I'm already hearing stories. Someone saw Wayne Coyne, dressed in a dirty white suit, holding court in front of a gaggle of teenagers and a film camera on a street corner, someone else sat next to David Byrne on a crowded flight from NYC (he was in coach, right next to the toilet). Beth Ditto was spotted in the Omni hotel’s glass elevator with an inebriated friend slung casually over her shoulder, Johnny Borrell and Kirsten Dunst are (at Stubb’s — no, wait, they’re at Emo’s. Didn’t someone just say they saw them at Red Eye Fly?) everywhere. And the shows, like the faces, are nearly impossible to track — Andrew WK does a secret karaoke-style performance on a bridge somewhere in the middle of the night, Iggy Pop kicks out the jams at a surprise gig in a parking lot, and there are about 50 unofficial parties going on at any given time. It’s mayhem. So, you pick your own highlights. Here are mine: I catch Albert Hammond Jr twice — once on purpose at the Blender Bar on Thursday night, once, a day later, by accident, when I walk into a party just as he’s going onstage — and he’s fantastic, much more feral and kinetic and danceable than his album would suggest. He and his band play with frenzied deliberation and shape-throwing flair, clearly having become as serious a pursuit for him as The Strokes. On both nights, he’s dressed entirely in white, save for a short black vest, electric-shock hair flying, and resembles no one so much as Billy Squire (who, of course, scored a hit with a song called “The Stroke”) circa 1981. I also see The Comas twice, and entirely intentionally. A Brooklyn-by-way-of-North-Carolina quintet, they’ve never had an album released in the UK, although their upcoming first album for Vagrant, "Spells", will finally remedy that. Their last record, 2005’s "Conductor" (on NC-based indie Yep Roc), is a fuzzed-out masterpiece, and the new songs sound fantastic, too(particularly “Come My Sunshine,” which will probably be the first single), with a lot more Pixies-esque interplay between twitchily charismatic frontman Andy Herod and bass player Nicole Gehweiler. LA-based (and marvelously named) Ferraby Lionheart plays the (terribly named) Buffalo Billiards on Friday night — I’ve been wanting to see him ever since I first heard his delicate, lovely, spellbinding self-titled EP a few months ago. He doesn’t disappoint, although he’s shy and eschews even the most furtive glance at his audience in favour of hiding beneath a hat, he sings like a broken-hearted angel. A little bit Rufus Wainwright, a little bit Elliott Smith. Amy Winehouse blows the roof off at La Zona Rosa on Saturday night — it’s her largest show of the several she plays, and like everything she does it’s probably also simultaneously both the classiest (the besuited back-up singers, the brass section) and the trashiest (her awkward dirty-dancing moves) show of SXSW. With her mountainous black hair, tattoos, and disconcertingly low-riding jeans, she looks like Ronnie Spector in a women’s prison, and as she belts out her songs and knocks back cocktails, the crowd whoop and holler and goad her on — which is surprising and rather wonderful as there are clearly a lot more Texan locals in the room than there are members of the press, and they love her. Bloc Party play under a starry sky at outdoor venue Stubb’s, also on Saturday, and they’re so much more compelling than they were last year when they played the old album on the same stage, that I change my plans to cut out early to go catch the Horrors, and stay. The following night, The Good The Bad And The Queen are there, only the stars (at least celestial) aren’t. It’s cold, but again, the crowd appears to spellbound to leave. It’s a strange spectacle — Damon Albarn in his top hat looking like a slightly mad vaudevillian, and Paul Simonon breaking out the old Clash moves, slinging his bass around like a machine gun."