The Concretes’ sophomore effort blends fizzy girl-pop with Mazzy Star’s stoned drawl, topped off with a swooning horn section and all liberally sprinkled with magic dust. “Say Something New” sets the template:slightly woozy melodies held together with gaffer tape, Victoria Bergsman’s voice sounding like she’s just woken up. “New Friend” has its chorus filched from U2’s “One” but is no worse for that, with Ulrik Karlsson’s closing trumpet solo a perfect counterpoint to Lisa Milberg’s minimalist drumming. “Seems Fine”?the most uptempo number on the record?sounds like Dexys recording for the Sarah label. “Diana Ross” is an adorable tribute to the Motown queen complete with “Love Hangover” references, while “Lovin’ Kind” is possessed of a tipsy, off-kilter beauty. The best thing to come out of Sweden for a while?apart from porn.

When Seattle’s legendary ’60s noiseniks The Sonics refused to reform for a local garage-band fest in June 2000, Minus 5’s Scott McCaughey made the next best thing: an all-star tribute band. Roping in three-quarters of Mudhoney, along with Monkeywrench’s Tom Price and Girl Trouble’s Bill Henderson, The New Strychnines went down a firestorm. Now comes the album: 16 prime slices of Sonics brawn (“The Witch”,”Boss Hoss”, “Psycho” et al) delivered with suitably murderous aplomb. A blast maybe but, better still, track down the real thing: Big Beat’s magnificent Psycho-Sonic reissue.

In August 1995, I travelled to LA to interview Brian Wilson. After 1988’s Brian Wilson and its unreleased 1990 follow-up Sweet Insanity, both collaborations with the Machiavellian therapist Eugene Landy, Wilson had been quiet for much of the decade. Now, though, he was comparatively healthy, newly remarried and tentatively promoting two new LPs: a turn as guest vocalist on Van Dyke Parks’voluptuous, nostalgic Orange Crate Art; and I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, a tasteful revisiting of some Beach Boys highlights, steered by Don and David Was.

As the trip progressed, however, it became apparent that Wilson’s most exciting current project lay elsewhere. A visit to the offices of musician, producer and label exec Andy Paley revealed that the two men had been working on a batch of material that sounded like Wilson’s best work in years. Unlike their ’80s-tainted collaborations on Brian Wilson, the new songs referenced early-’60s rock’n’roll, Pet Sounds-era balladry and the slightly unnerving infantilism of The Beach Boys Love You. Wilson’s relationship with the Boys, he claimed, had finally been terminated. This was the music which inspired him now.

After the interview, Wilson’s manager David Leaf advised that his client was subject to dramatic changes of mind. And within months he had one?rejoining, for a brief and abortive session, his old band. It was not until 1998, though, that a solo album emerged. Imagination featured none of the Paley material and, thanks to producer/co-writer Joe Thomas, was cursed with a cloying, synthetic sound which did the handful of decent new songs few favours.

Brian Wilson’s recording career appeared to have ended. In its place, over the past three years, he has reinvented himself as an unlikely road warrior, constantly touring with his Wondermints-centred band and meticulously recreating Pet Sounds and Smile for awe-struck crowds. New songs, though, have been scarce. In rare interviews, Wilson has complained of writer’s block, and most of the unreleased tracks played at his gigs?”Soul Searchin'”, “Desert Drive”?have dated from those mid-’90s Paley sessions.

The appearance of a brand new album, then, comes as a surprise. Here are 13 previously unreleased Wilson originals in a Peter Blake sleeve, produced by Wilson, artfully played by his touring band, arranged with deliberate references to ’60s-era Beach Boys and punctuated by lavish a cappella harmonies that hark back to Smile’s divine “Our Prayer”.

The track listing, however, will seem strangely familiar to Wilson scholars with useful bootleg collections. Gettin’In Over My Head may feature all new recordings, but only five songs are authentically new. Four come from the 1995 Paley sessions, three originally figured on Sweet Insanity, and one?”City Blues”?reportedly dates from the early ’80s.

As such, the album often feels like a re-upholstered compendium of solo Brian. Consequently, there are some tremendous songs here, especially the title track co-written with Paley, which recaptures the lush, tremulous romance of Pet Sounds (“I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times”, perhaps), right down to the bass saxophone and harmonica trim.

Wilson’s voice is stronger and steadier than on the original demos, so he can carry off a whimsical fantasia like “Saturday Morning In The City” with confidence, or sound uncharacteristically gutsy on the fine “Desert Drive”.

A couple of the Sweet Insanity remakes?”Make A Wish” and “Rainbow Eyes”?are a little odd, chiefly because Wilson’s cracked, chatty songwriting style of the time (Eugene Landy, interestingly, doesn’t get co-songwriting credits) sits awkwardly with the chamber arrangements. “Don’t Let Her Know She’s An Angel”, though, is lovely: a classically shy ballad that benefits from the grandeur bestowed upon it.

Other songs are more problematic. After a wonderful a cappella start, “How Could We Still Be Dancin'” finds Elton John taking charge for a cousin of “Crocodile Rock”, with Wilson a marginalised figure. “City Blues” is similarly compromised, blighted by a guitar line from Eric Clapton that sounds crude and belligerent in Wilson’s spectral company. Wilson’s unearthly grasp of melody and harmony doesn’t bend easily to the requirements of more linear talents.

“A Friend Like You”, a spectacularly mawkish duet with Paul McCartney, is an unlikely exception. Designed as a chummy variant on “Ebony & Ivory”, it’s redeemed by an exceptionally pretty Wilson tune which even McCartney at his most unctuous cannot ruin. The jaunty “You’ve Touched Me”is great, too, exactly relocating the point in the mid-’60s (circa the Today album and, strikingly, “Little Saint Nick”) when his songwriting began to blossom. Finally, there’s “The Waltz”, a baroque and ribald piece of high school hokum written with Van Dyke Parks, who understands better than most that Wilson, even at 61, is more convincing as a juvenile lead than a sentimental veteran.

These are undeniably fine songs, and there’s a sense that, finally, Wilson has been allowed to judiciously reference his past rather than try to modernise that tender, intricate and unique sound. Whether many people want to hear new songs from Wilson, however good they may be, is another matter entirely. Gettin’ In Over My Head is a valuable addition to his catalogue: the most consistent and sympathetically constructed solo album he’s made. But I suspect its primary role will be to act as a kind of overture for the belated release of Smile, as proof that Wilson, Parks and this wonderful band currently function effectively in the studio as well as on stage. When everyone knows you’ve virtually completed the motherlode of pop, even the best comeback albums can feel a little like short change.

Irascible, outspoken and prodigiously talented, Martin is the original ‘rebel rouser’ of bluegrass. Yet he remains puzzlingly under-celebrated. Released to coincide with George Goehl’s fascinating film documentary about Martin (The King Of Bluegrass), Don’t Cry To Me is a storming collection of live classics spanning 1954-2001, 10 of which are previously unreleased. Still gigging at 77, he’s considered by many to be the greatest lead singer/guitarist that Bill Monroe ever had (and undoubtedly the finest bluegrasser never to become member of the Grand Ole Opry) as well as a progressive musical pioneer.

Born in Sneedville, Tennessee, Martin collared Monroe backstage at the Opry in 1949, burst into a rendition of the murder ballad “Poor Ellen Smith” (an incredible 1965 version is included here) and landed the gig with the latter’s Bluegrass Boys right there. Together with Monroe for five years, Martin’s bullish fretwork injected an urgency that sharpened the band like an arrowhead, whilst his astonishing tenor?complementing Monroe’s lead?helped initiate the archetypal “High Lonesome Sound”. By the time he’d formed The Sunny Mountain Boys and signed to Decca, his radical style was well defined?impeccable harmonies, demanding musicianship (Martin only accepted the best from himself, and the same went for his sometimes exasperated charges) and the unheard-of use of snare drums.

These songs crackle with typical Martin static: abrasive, dextrous, wholehearted, but never indulgent. As a vocalist, he’s in the same bracket as his old friend and collaborator Ralph Stanley?a hint of fatalism, tough delivery. Cold comfort for the soul. The later recordings (“Free Born Man”, “Brakeman’s Blues”) are almost miraculous in their power and range. Frailty?even approaching the age of 80?was never in the Martin handbook. Sadly, he was recently diagnosed with bladder cancer and is currently recovering from chemotherapy. We wish him well. The legacy is immense.

Last year’s Hey Harmony cemented Thomas Hansen’s reputation, but the ex-postman and Norwegian Third Division footballer has dismissed it as the work of a man who’d “lost himself somewhere on the road, together with alcohol and marijuana.” On this fourth opus, he’s wrested control from the demons and emerges bolder, though perhaps less darkly alluring. The finest moments remain wondrous, though: “Silence Break Your Heart”‘s spookily ethereal undertow; the strained vocal kink of “Waltzing Around Insane”. Somewhere between Elliott Smith, Mark Kozelek and early Neil Young.

Trouble has a habit of providing an overture to the release of Wilco albums. In 2002, you’ll recall, Wilco’s former label Reprise rejected Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as too uncommercial and sold the masters to the band for $50,000, who then streamed them on their website, signed a new deal with Nonesuch (like Reprise, a Warners subsidiary) and found themselves in the US Top 20. Once perceived as the quintessential alt.country act, Jeff Tweedy and Wilco emerged from the fracas as rueful, empowered popularisers of the avant-garde, after a fashion.

This time, A Ghost Is Born, Wilco’s fifth album, has been briefly delayed thanks to Tweedy putting himself into rehab to treat an addiction to painkillers. For years, it’s transpired, he has been poleaxed by migraine headaches, and their effects reportedly disrupted the recording sessions for A Ghost Is Born. His dependency, official channels suggest, stems from attempts to control this debilitating condition.

It’s tempting to scour the album for evidence of Tweedy’s problems. As ever, his lyrics are more allusive than direct, and the resigned timbre of his voice continues to evoke despondency when the words suggest something quite different. “I’ve been puking,” he notes during “Company In My Back”, while “Wishful Thinking” asks, “Is any song worth singing if it doesn’t help?” Can the music of Wilco?rich, inventive, diverse, volatile?be a palliative to Tweedy’s pain? Is his increasing love of drone, which culminates in the vast minimalist hum of “Less Than You Think”, a way of musically transcribing the engulfing presence of a headache?

These are questions that, currently, remain the business of Tweedy and his doctors. In the meantime, a gentler study of this marvellous record initially suggests it’s a lot more easy-going than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The backdrop of static and laptop interference that made YHF at once warm and alien has gone?though that album’s inspired mixer, Jim O’Rourke, has been promoted to co-producer. The electronic texturing to A Ghost Is Born is comparatively discreet, leaving the band more space to manoeuvre. It’s an organic, intuitive record on which Wilco sound wonderfully free of constraints.

Part of this is down to the absence of Jay Bennett, Tweedy’s co-songwriter, who left acrimoniously towards the end of the recording of YHF. The departure of the relatively conservative Bennett, you’d imagine, would allow Tweedy to navigate a course further into leftfield American music. It’s a surprise, then, to discover that Wilco’s first post-Bennett album begins in straightforward fashion. “At Least That’s What You Said” is a pensive ballad in which Tweedy and pianist Mikael Jorgensen quietly circle each other. After two minutes, however, Tweedy launches into an exhilarating guitar solo. For a minute or two, it broadly follows the Neil Young template?weighty, sloppy, lashed with feedback. But as it progresses, Tweedy starts taking more risks, unleashing pointillist skrees of noise, recreating the radio friction of YHF by manually attacking his guitar. It’s thrilling to hear and sounds enormously liberating, too.

“I felt a lot freer,” Tweedy said before he entered rehab. “I was actually inhibited about my playing for many years, so I think there was some effort to let it all hang out.” The results are spectacular. A Ghost Is Born takes a fairly orthodox rock set-up and applies a new expressive flourish. “I’m A Wheel” might revisit the Stones fetish Tweedy showed on 1996’s Being There, but the jutting riffs are oddly punctuated, diverting the song’s energies into cunning new directions.

The guitar heroics reach their peak early, on the third track; “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”, the best thing Tweedy has ever done. Jorgensen, bassist John Stirratt and drummer Glenn Kotche establish a pulsing motorik rhythm clearly derived from Neu!, only for Tweedy to assail it with increasingly deranged guitar solos. Again and again he sprays notes everywhere, as reminiscent of Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan and free jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock as Neil Young, before reconfiguring them into an exultant refrain. This goes on, fearlessly, for over 10 minutes.

It’s not, though, the longest song on A Ghost Is Born. That honour lies with “Less Than You Think”, another sketchy ballad that dissolves into a 15-minute harmonious drone (inspired, Stirratt confirms, by minimalist composer Terry Riley). More than ever, Wilco are disdainful here of a conventional canon to draw from. In the world of A Ghost Is Born, Sharrock and Riley are just as accessible as The Band: Jorgensen, originally recruited as an electronic manipulator, favours an ambling, soulful piano technique that’s hugely informed by Richard Manuel.

Increasingly, too, Tweedy has a knack of allying his sonic innovations to his lyrical concerns. So, on YHF, the theme was communication breakdown, whether it be garbled, encoded radio signals used as texturing, or lyrics which described long-distance misunderstandings. On A Ghost Is Born, he remains a great writer of songs (“Muzzle Of Bees”, especially) which portray love as fundamentally constant, but assailed by ambiguities, very human glitches. And in common with the album’s questing, untethered sound, Tweedy continually sings of escape and liberation. Or, at least, of an invigorating struggle to be free. You could ascribe this to the departure from Reprise or Bennett’s absence, but more likely it’s a general relief that success has excused Wilco the pressure to compromise. “It’s good to be alone!” he exclaims on “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”, and it’s tough to resist his enthusiasm for this passionate, unmediated, adventurous but always profoundly human music.

By the end, in the ramshackle singalong of “The Late Greats”, Tweedy claims, “The best songs will never get sung/The best life never leaves your lungs.” The finest music, he implies, is that which comes and goes in an instant, that is so elusive and impulsive it can never be properly captured. For A Ghost Is Born feels like a band learning to be spontaneous and unencumbered, and coming up with their most engaging album yet. The best songs might never be quite voiced but, on this form, Wilco are getting closer and closer to their essence.

There’s a lot to be said for the charisma of premature death. And the manner of his particular dying?turning blue on a motel floor at the age of 26, his heart fatally faltering, ice cubes being stuffed up his ass in a pathetic attempt to bring him back from the brink after one binge too many?booked Gram Parsons an automatic place of honour in a rock’n’roll Valhalla already overcrowded with dead young heroes, Jimi, Janis, Brian Jones, Jim Morrison, Otis Redding, Sam Cooke and more already among its spectral population.

And then, of course, there is the bonfire they made of his body, the macabre drunken ritual of his Joshua Tree cremation, his friend and roadie, Phil Kaufman, fulfilling a pact he made with Gram at the funeral of former Byrds guitarist Clarence White. Which was basically that if either checked out while the other was still living, the one still standing would take the other, now dead, and burn the corpse out there in the Mojave desert?where Gram had dropped LSD, partied, died. Kaufman may have thought he was merely honouring a boozy promise. He was actually creating a legend.

If Gram’s early exit ensured a notorious immortality, it has also to some extent unintentionally overshadowed the music he left behind, which is his true legacy. People who’ve never heard him, however, may wonder whether the myth looms larger than the music, about whose merit they may be somewhat suspicious. After all, an image has grown since his death of Gram as something of a playboy, a rich southern kid living off a substantial trust fund who was more interested in narcotic debauchery and reckless living than the nurturing of a sublime talent. In the circumstances, can his music really be as good as his fans say it is?

The answer, provided emphatically by this handsome two-disc compilation, is a deafening fucking yes.

On his way to the grave, Gram produced some of the most moving music ever made. He was a true visionary, inspired from an early age by something he called “Cosmic American Music”?a heady mix of rock’n’roll, gospel, southern soul, R&B and, most unfashionably at the time, country. Astonishingly, the year The Beatles released Sgt Pepper and the Velvets and Jimi Hendrix released their mind-blowing debuts, Gram was rediscovering Hank Williams, Buck Owens, George Jones and Merle Haggard with The International Submarine Band, who in 1967 recorded their debut, Safe At Home, arguably the first “country rock” album.

Sacred Hearts & Fallen Angels takes the ISB as its starting point (there’s nothing here from The Shilos, Parsons’ previous band, which unfortunately means no “Zah’s Blues”) and follows a chronological narrative arc, with the occasional rarity strongly bolstered by representative cuts from the groundbreaking albums he went on to make with The Byrds and The Flying Burrito Bros, the live album he recorded with his touring band, The Fallen Angels, and the two immaculate solo albums he made with Emmylou Harris as his vocal partner?which according to Elvis Costello’s sleevenotes for the 1982 compilation Gram Parsons “featured some of the finest duet singing ever put on record”.

For Costello, Parsons?especially on songs as “mysterious, almost philosophical” as the Burritos’ “Sin City” and later solo recordings like “Return Of The Grievous Angel”, “$1000 Wedding” and “In My Hour Of Darkness”?was the legitimate heir to Hank Williams, a view often endorsed by his friend Keith Richards, with whom he enjoyed such a close relationship during the making of Exile On Main St, an album partially shaped by his influence.

Gram’s back catalogue, so brilliantly reflected here, consists of?what??only six complete albums, and a couple of collections of outtakes and rehearsal tapes. But when those albums include masterpieces like The Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, the Burritos’ immortal The Gilded Palace Of Sin, and the solo GP and Grievous Angel, you begin to realise the extent to which this fated young man changed the face of American music. None of these records sold during Gram’s lifetime, but their influence has been widespread. Thirty years after his death, the music he made has lost none of its magic?these honky tonk laments, country death songs and heartbreaking ballads remain uniquely unforgettable, forever haunting, eternally beautiful.

It’s justice of a kind. Almost 25 years after its initial release, The Gun Club’s debut album?all but ignored in America at the time and reaching only a cult audience in Britain and Europe?is vivified by the success of those very bands whose music it helped inspire. The White Stripes, Soledad Brothers, The Von Bondies et al acknowledge their debt to Son House, Robert Johnson and Howlin’Wolf, but it’s this LA quartet’s inspired welding of punk to blues, country and rockabilly that really showed them the way.

Released in 1981, Fire Of Love was recorded in just two days, with guitarist Ward Dotson replacing Kid Congo Powers, who’d recently been poached by The Cramps (although he rejoined the band three years later). Notoriously volatile singer-songwriter and guitarist Jeffrey Lee Pierce (who died of a brain haemorrhage in 1996) was a big fan of both Marty Robbins and Ornette Coleman, which helps explain his band’s thrillingly mutant sound.

Fire Of Love is their finest work, a dark and dangerous stew of roughly hammered blues, gothic country, souped-up rockabilly and jazzy punk. Its sleazy, disaffected cool has a parallel in Lou Reed’s Transformer, an impression underlined by the fact that Pierce often sounds uncannily like Reed. Opening track “Sex Beat” sets out The Gun Club’s stall both thematically (“We can fuck forever, but you will never get my soul”) and sonically, suggesting a possessed Bo Diddley hanging out on LA’s punk scene. References to “Creole boys lying dead” (in “Jack On Fire”) and “looking for niggers down in the dark” (on “For The Love Of Ivy”, co-written with Kid Congo) raise questions about Pierce’s politics, but the part-Mexican singer is very likely adopting a redneck persona to make his point. Robert Johnson’s “Preaching The Blues” is reinvented as a slide guitar-strafed hoodoo, set at full gallop and steered by Pierce’s wail, but “Fire Spirit” shifts into British R&B territory, and co-producer Tito Larriva’s violin work lends “Promise Me” a noirish, B-movie quality. Fire Of Love prefigures the sounds of the young garage-blues gunslingers by a good quarter-century. It’s never sounded better.

In their current incarnation as a Krautrock-influenced psychedelic drum circle, Osaka’s Boredoms are one of the planet’s most transcendent live bands. Originally, though, they were one of the most splenetic, as these three reissues from the their labyrinthine catalogue prove. Onanie Bomb (1986), their Western debut, is a hilarious endurance test involving gibbering hardcore, no-wave skronk and?unusual for the avant-garde?an extended burping sequence. By 1992’s fine Pop Tatari, Yamatsuka Eye and his charges are incorporating funk into the exuberant, increasingly musicianly chaos. Chocolate Synthesizer (1994) is, if anything, better still, with elements of the trance-riffing that would come to the fore on 1998’s Super

The original Charlatans pretty much mapped out the psychedelic ballroom scene with their 1965 residency in Virginia City, Nevada, but never capitalised on their innovation, left behind in the dust of the Deads and Airplanes they inspired. Dan Hicks quit and original members Mike Ferguson and George Hunter had been ousted by the time of this flat effort. The version of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues” is limp and indifferent, and the band’s trad staple “Alabama Bound” is way better on Ace’s ’96 comp The Amazing Charlatans.

Originally issued in 1970 on the innovative Mushroom label, this uncategorisable minor classic defies expectations at every turn. If it sounds at times like a promising young singer-songwriter wilfully subjecting his material to an experimentalist makeover from burgeoning avant-garders David Toop and Paul Burwell, well that’s precisely what it is.

Toop’s frantically hammered dulcimer and Ornette Coleman-esque violin intro to “Very Close Friend” might lull you into thinking that you’re about to hear psych-folk’s very own Free Jazz or Ascension (which would be no bad thing.) Instead, the song simply drifts in and out again, a wispy fragment that leaves no trace. Next up, the rambling narcoleptic drawl of “The Courtyard” is just one of several tracks that evoke what a Steve Took-led Tyrannosaurus Rex might have sounded like. Again, no bad thing. Nothing, though, prepares you for the standout track, “Jerusalem”, which provides the missing evolutionary link between Barry McGuire’s “Eve Of Destruction” and Nick Cave in best biblical mode. This raw-nerved subway-prophet depiction of a drop-out Jesus?”who would still be crucified today”?descends into strangulated, anguished howls at the song’s climax. This startling, if incoherent d

First issued in 1999 (the same year as Sahm’s death), this updated Prime Of… augments the original’s 15 cuts with a further 26, beginning with 1964’s “Sugar Bee” and jumping off somewhere around the late ’70s. It’s a patch-up of sorts, but nevertheless reaffirms Sahm as a unique country/blues/Tex-Mex/soul filter, be it via anguished balladry (“Dallas Alice”), Bayou swing (“Beginning Of The End”), strutting two-step (“She’s About A Mover”) or frisky barrio (“Please Just Say So”). A fitting companion piece to last year’s near-definitive Sahm round-up, The Genuine Texas Groover.

As a teenager, Hinton was employed by Alabama’s Muscle Shoals studios to play guitar and write songs for such rising soul stars as Percy Sledge and Joe Tex. Subsequently, everyone from Dusty Springfield to UB40 recorded his songs. Hinton seemed destined for stardom, yet prolonged substance abuse and mental health problems found Eddie celebrated only as a cult figure before his death in 1995. The fabulous Dear Y’ All (2002) focused on Eddie’s demos of songs that would become soul classics. This CD mops up the rest-garage band demos, Muscle Shoals scribbles and three 1980 tracks as he attempted to relaunch himself. There are no new gems, but for aficionados of southern soul, this offers much joy.

Ramshackle peers of Suicide and Throbbing Gristle, Metal Boys’claim to fame is that, as previous incarnation Metal Urbain, they released the first single on Rough Trade, “Paris Maquis”, in 1978. Recorded on a shoestring in 1980 while the core duo of Eric Debris and Charlie H squatted in London, Tokio Airport is a viciously prescient mix of industrial rockabilly, pulsing minimal electronics and processed punk noise. Their fuzz-flange aesthetic would later be ransacked by The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Appended by nine unreleased tracks, including Debris’ startling dub-disco odyssey “Outer Space”, it’d make an excellent addition to any post-punk collection.

Evan Parker ought to be knighted for re-mastering and reissuing this, one of the great British orchestral jazz records. Utilising stalwart British jazzers alongside wildcard improvisers like saxophonist Parker, guitarist Derek Bailey and percussionist Tony Oxley, Wheeler brilliantly fuses gorgeously limpid melodies (“Ballad Two”) with free-form interludes. Great cliffs of brass echo Gil Evans, but note the subtle nod to electric Miles (those two electric pianos) and the inspired use of Norma Winstone’s voice as an instrument. The highlight is the 15-minute “The Good Doctor”, its wan lyricism simultaneously underlined and derailed by the explosive and still shocking climactic freak-out from Parker, Bailey and Oxley. Forget Matthew Herbert’s big band; this still sounds like the future.

In the autumn of 1969, two unknown English singer-songwriters released debut albums a month apart. One was by Nick Drake. The other was by Keith Christmas. Both were greeted with almost total indifference, although Christmas was considered the more likely to succeed and won tour support slots with The Who and King Crimson. Timeless & Strange compiles material from his first three albums and its release is welcome, for the original records now trade at around 50 quid apiece. With the benefit of hindsight, he has more in common with the less enduring Al Stewart than with Drake. He’d also clearly been listening to Tim Buckley in his baroque phase. His best songs possess an undeniable period charm, but that’s not the same as being timeless.