More on Joe Strummer and The 101’ers Following my somewhat nostalgic post about calling in at the Elgin and being reminded of many great nights there watching Joe Strummer and The 101’ers in their short-lived scruffy pomp, I’ve received the following email from reader Peter Cabret. “Over the last few minutes,” Pete writes, “ I've been reading with interest your blog and memories of seeing The 101'ers at The Elgin. Now, I am 21 so they are years before my time but over the last 5 or 6 months I have been developing a website about The 101'ers. The Elgin page may be of particular interest to you: http://www.101ers.co.uk/theelgin.htm In addition the new Joe Strummer film by Julien Temple "The Future is Unwritten" will, I believe, include footage of The 101'ers playing at The Elgin. Thanks for your time. Cheers Pete” I’ve just spent a very happy half hour on Pete’s site and it’s well worth a look. As well as the basics of a band history and discography, there are fascinating ‘biographies’ of the London venues The 101’ers regularly played – The Elgin, of course, but also The Nashville Rooms, where on two occasions they were supported by The Sex Pistols, The Red Cow, Hope And Anchor, Windsor Castle, The Telegraph on Brixton Hill and The Charlie Pigdog Club, which was a room above The Chippenham pub where I first saw them in February 1975. There are also some great eye-witness accounts from fans recalling the gigs they saw, including a post from former Pink Fairies’ roadie, Joly, who remembers seeing them at ‘some hippie festival’, as he puts it, possibly Windsor or Stonehenge. I wonder if he is thinking of the Watchfield Festival in ’76. This was a chaotic affair, held on a deserted airfield some miles outside Swindon. I remember sitting in a tour bus getting high with Hawkwind when this white van came bouncing across the field, its battered flanks emblazoned with the legend: “The 101’ers – Rhythm & Blues Orchestra”. Joe and the band had turned up on the off-chance they could be added to the bill, but I can’t actually remember them playing. In fact, I can’t remember ANYONE playing, which is what sometimes happened when you hung with the Hawklords. What I do remember is the rain that started falling late in the afternoon, a torrential downpour that accompanied me on the long walk back to Swindon that night, a grim journey still guaranteed to give me nightmares. Anyway, not for the first time, I digress. Thanks to Pete for getting in touch. If anyone else has memories they’d like to share of seeing The 101’ers, you know how to get in touch.

I'm not sure what kind of symmetry this represents, but Richard Swift's new album begins with the sound of tapdancing and nears a close with him crooning, rather sweetly, "I wish I were dead most of the time." "Dressed Up For The Letdown" is Swift's third album, and is a concept album of sorts. It's about a singer-songwriter - let's call him Richard Swift - who struggles for years without success, cursing the ignorance of the labels who refuse to sign him. There's a whole heap of irony here, not least because "Dressed Up For The Letdown" is being released in the UK on Polydor and Swift is now poised for, I hope, a reasonable amount of success. He's one of those prolific types who has such a backlog of songs that each release is a snapshot of a state of mind that he grew out of three or four years ago. So "Dressed Up" presents Swift as fatally resigned to obscurity, while hype-monkeys like me jump around him and call him the new Rufus Wainwright, or the new Harry Nilsson, or maybe a bit of a Laurel Canyon Sufjan Stevens. He's great, clearly. We first came across him at Uncut a couple of years ago, when the fine Indiana label, Secretly Canadian, put out his first two albums, "The Novelist" and "Walking Without Effort". Both had been out before, though I suspect no-one besides Swift's immediate family and the Secretly Canadian A&R actually heard them. Like "Dressed Up", they showed Swift's gift for imbuing contemporary singer-songwriting with a kind of faded, Tin Pan Alley charm. There's a lot of gramophone crackle, and a sort of audio sepiatint that's reminiscent of Van Dyke Parks circa "Song Cycle". A different Americana, I suppose. And it's terrific. Swift has enough charm and skill so that, even at his most maudlin, he sounds playful. He can also put together a neat and direct pop song: check out the video for "Kisses For The Misses" at his Myspace. Now he's got all the suffering out of the way, there's a lot more in his songwriting file like this one. I'm off to Domino Records in a minute to hear the Arctic Monkeys album, by the way. I'll try and report back tomorrow.

What I’ve been playing most recently has been Neon Bible, the second album from The Arcade Fire, the follow-up to Funeral and possibly one of the most keenly-anticipated albums of the year, for which great things are predicted and will probably happen. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofDTk7j8_WE

I worry, occasionally, that this blog has started to give the impression we spend our days at Uncut listening to nothing but serious, respectable artists with a good decade or two of critical acclaim under their belts. Of course, we do listen to Cave, and Bowie, and Neil Young, and Cat Power, and a hell of a lot of Grateful Dead at the moment. You might not believe this, but Allan even digs out a dusty Dylan CD from time to time. But a big favourite these past couple of weeks has been "The Radiant Mirror", a giant cosmic freak-out by the duo of Chris Corsano and Mick Flower. Those who keep an eye on the psychedelic underground scene documented on Uncut's "Comets, Ghosts And Sunburned Hands" comp from last December may have come across Corsano before. He's a hyperactive, intuitive drummer who emerged from the sprawling Sunburned Hand Of The Man collective, and has played on a lot of free jazz, folk and psych stuff with the likes of Thurston Moore and Six Organs Of Admittance. Mick Flower, meanwhile, is a member of the shadowy Vibracathedral Orchestra, who come from Leeds and who make wild, levitating drones in the style of Sunburned, Jackie-O-Motherfucker. That kind of thing. I first saw them years ago supporting Steve Malkmus and didn't know what hit me. Anyway, "The Radiant Mirror" (on a little French label called Textile) is their first album together, and it's a monster. Three vast tracks ("Earth", "Wind" and "Fire") featuring Corsano clambering spiritedly over his kit and Flower cranking up a shahi baaja - which, the press-release informs me, is a "Japanese electric dulcimer/autoharp". One one level, it's a pretty free racket, fuzzed-out and heavily improvised with heavy echoes of '60s jazz radicals like Sonny Sharrock. But at the same time, there's something about this one that makes it accessible to a bigger audience than pure improv fans. It's a quality, maybe, that's inherent in the shahi-baaja's temple drone being played with such aggression, while Corsano's clatter is always dynamic rather than meandering. Basically, "The Radiant Mirror" is kind of meditative, but totally rocks.

Looking for facts in Nick Cave lyrics is a bit of a dumb game. If you were to take everything he's said at face value, he'd have been dead long ago: hanged for murder, perhaps, at some point in the 19th Century. Nevertheless, a bit of this new song, "Love Bomb", really rings true. Cave is talking, I think, about the struggle for inspiration. He wants to make a noisy record that sounds debauched, irresponsible and unhinged, but he's not really debauched and irresponsible any more. What does he write about? The answer, it seems, is Radio 4. "Love Bomb" is a great clanging freak-out, and Cave sounds vigorously mad on it. But he's singing, "I’ve been listening to Woman's Hour, I've been listening to Gardeners’ Question Time." Cave is a seasoned connoisseur of the perverse, for sure, but it seems even he can't bring himself to listen to You & Yours. Anyway, this is one of the things that makes Cave's new project, Grinderman, so enjoyable. Grinderman is essentially an excuse for Cave and three more Bad Seeds - Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn Casey - to grow beards, dump the stately dignity of recent albums and make a nasty old garage band racket. They sound like they're having a fantastic time on these buzzing, unpleasant blues grooves, wired back into the Australian punk scene of the late '70s and early '80s, returning to The Stooges for malign inspiration - only with a fuzzed -out electric bouzouki to the fore. But Cave is too self-aware an operator to pretend to be a delinquent junkie these days. To a greater degree than Iggy on the Stooges' comeback, he knows that what was once adolescent misanthropy is now likely to come across as the ravings of a grumpy old man. So, cleverly, he revels in the role: driven to distraction by women, the exigencies of the modern world, and the dearth of good comedies on Radio 4 in the early evening. Oh, and bad men who drink "panther piss", obviously. Enjoy at Grinderman's Myspace.