Mark Lanegan Band ISLINGTON ACADEMY, LONDON Wednesday September 1, 2004 YOU COULD BE forgiven for fearing the worst. As 10 tracks from his best solo album Eubblegum and its immediate predecessors are rumbled through, Mark Lanegan stands stock still, as if dosed with melancholy, or nodding off. Black eyebrows glower over slitted eyes, giving no clue as to his thoughts. "One Hundred Days" sums up the mood, volume and speed rising in slow motion as the otherwise unmoving crowd start to nod to its mesmeric, morphine-like visions, until a cymbal crash jerks us suddenly awake. Given the dangerous excesses of Lanegan's old band, Screaming Trees, and his recent stint singing with the un-abstemious Queens of The Stone Age, it's no wonder rumours of an ambulance being called backstage gleefully sweep the crowd. This is music played in quicksand, and seemingly with little participation from the Mark Lanegan Band's most noted member. Even when he screams in "One-Way Street", he stays withdrawn, still and unknowable, a black hole on stage. By the duet "Come To Me" ? with the heavily tattooed Shelly Brown as PJ Harvey's stand-in, part of a band of seeming hippie and biker hard-cases? we've pretty much forgotten about rocking, as the music crawls to where Lanegan's heartbeat must be. "Resurrection Song", then, couldn't be better named. It signals the late arrival of the vibrant, bohemian romanticism that sets Lanegan apart from his grunge and stoner contemporaries, the lust for life that follows his more meditative, wandering moments. Guitars squall in a shrieking tempest that doesn't shift him, the whole band instead bending into it. "Driving Death Valley Blues" next, and he's finally awake, neck cords tensing as his great, gravelly voice roars, "I don't wanna go cold turkey no more", the words emphatic now, like a sickness being shrugged off. "Tell it to Jerry Lee," he snarls on "I'll Take Care Of You", and The Killer would know more than most about this instinctive surge. On "Like Little Willie John", Lanegan's rasp dwarfs everything, his band visibly relieved as they grind into place around him. "Skeletal History" is a hard-edged punk stomp, controlled distortion dirtying its rhythm, while "Methamphetamine Blues" ends with Lanegan growling, a cappella, "I don't wanna leave this heaven so soon," the music, not the speed, surely now the meaning in his mind. He walks jerkily back for an encore, in which "Message" roughly approximates pop music, then "Sleep With Me" shakes and rolls as his cigarette burns down. "Jesus Christ," he exclaims, before finishing with "Fix", yet another song toying with addiction and excess, and played as slow, deep dance music?trance as it might be imagined in an opium den or the desert, grunge-funk that sees the band stretch out impressively, as Lanegan leaves. Whether his earlier languor was a brilliantly paced, playful ruse or true stupor, the effect has been to make the gig an organic psychodrama rare in rock now, Lanegan's mood, music and life ? sometimes self-destructive, but always questing for transcendent experience ? impossible to separate. The real thing.

Ed Harcourt LOCK 17, LONDON Tuesday August 17, 2004 There's a scorched, soulful Tom Waits rasp in Ed Harcourt's voice tonight, possibly as a result of being a late-night soldier of rock on tour, but more probably because he's become a talent to rival rather than aspire to his heroes. If, a year ago, he was still too honestly temperamental, mucking about and making self-deprecating, very English remarks between songs to release tension, now he's infinitely more focused, channelling his Tigger-ish energies into exquisite renditions of his darkly optimistic songs. Old favourites are mixed in with tracks from the new opus Strangers here, and a packed house, in which somehow every single individual appears to be his long-lost best friend (he's a sociable type), is raucously supportive. With due cause: all agree this may be his best gig yet. The encore, of The Lovin' Spoonful's "Darling Be Home Soon", has grown men weeping and weeping men growing. As Harcourt switches between keyboards, guitars and multiple mics, musicians emerge from the wings on a horses-for-courses basis, and it works wonderfully, lifting or layering the mood as required. Album producer Jari Haapalainen plays percussion, while members of the Magic Numbers offer vocals. Gita Langley's subtle violin adorns the quieter ballads and trumpeter Jerry Atkins causes my first words to him to be, "Sir, you are a demigod". Harcourt half-hits like "Misguided", "Undertaker Strut" and "Apple Of My Eye" raise the temperature; debuting dreamscapes like "The Trapdoor" and "The Music Box" muster the melancholy. Ed apologises for playing new stuff, then correctly retracts the apology. After "This One's For You" and the blissful "Black Dress", he beams, "That's a love song." The comedic monologues still make cameo appearances: among the most memorable are "Michael McDonald: now there's a man with a beard you can trust", and "Pipe down ? that'd be funny at a football match, but not here." The occasional Austin Powers yell of "Yeah, baby!" follows any particularly pleasing executions of intricacy and intimacy. Strangers, though, is the work of a serious, oddly un-British gift, and it's almost startling to be reminded, via "Born In The '70s", that he's a "young whippersnapper". The absence of "Metaphorically Yours" has your intoxicated reviewer unfairly whingeing afterwards, but it's a euphoric concert, which sees a once-promising artist arrive as a unique voice and vessel for greatness. That the van gets broken into later and half the gear nicked is a crying shame, but you can't have everything.

Blanche come here haunted by associations? chiefly leader Dan Miller's with fellow Detroiter Jack White. The pair shared several bands before Jack's vault to fame, and moonlighting Blanchers made up half his Loretta Lynn-backing Detroit supergroup The Do-Whaters. Blanche also supported The White Stripes last year, and bunked with them on this UK trip. But Dan's dryly gothic, beauty-and-the-freak double-act with wife Tracee in their country-based band more strongly recalls The Handsome Family's Brett and Rennie Sparks?a comparison they're not shamed by. There's room for more than one alt.country Addams Family, after all, and Dan and Tracee have their own creepy style. He has lank, side-parted hair and the haunted, bony look of a 1930s farm hand, or a western grotesque. If he is John Carradine, she is Nancy Sinatra, his most unlikely lover, alabaster pretty with a red bouffant, Tudor barmaid dress and sugary voice. The music they make is the weirdly in-bred country-punk such a coupling suggests. "I don't deserve a grave," Dan begins on "So Long Cruel World" to the usual passive response from the capital's Americana crowd. The sly infidelity duet "Do You Trust Me?", with Tracee tossing coquettish protestations over her shoulder to her enflamed husband, enlivens matters. But the real test of Blanche's mettle comes with their take on the strange traditions of their country, which the likes of the Handsomes turn into such dream-like, blood-dark parables. "Garbage Picker", "Crucifix" and "Superstition" all visit such terrain, capped by the plea of "This Town" for "singers who still believe" to save a faithless, Dogville-like den. The trouble is, Blanche don't sing like believers but actors, the gods and devils in America's bones only words to them. Tracee's polite promise to "fuck you until you die" on The Gun Club's "Jack On Fire" stirs a deeper response in the crowd. And when, on "Someday", banjoist Patch Boyle?who looks like a seedy salesman, a shifty hanger-on ready to do the others in?swings from the ceiling while preaching hellfire, like a demonic Norman Wisdom, resistance falls apart. More stage-show than soul, but sly fun.