Only 40 minutes of old BBC footage but still an exhilarating glimpse of Blondie live in '79, as their commercial peak kicked in. Filmed at Glasgow's Apollo Theatre, it climaxes with a bagpipe quartet screeching through "SundayGirl". It's the band's raw energy, and La Harry's endearingly awkward presence, which radiate through "Atomic", "Union City Blue" et al. Novices should then graduate to the Eat To The Beat-era videos: a pinnacle for punk and pop.

Brian Wilson THE ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, LONDON Thursday February 26, 2004 In June 1967, the beatles released Sgt Pepper, just a few weeks after Brian Wilson scrapped the music he and Van Dyke Parks had recorded for Smile. And so began one of the great "what ifs?" in rock history. It's incredible. Throughout 1966 and early '67, the world, including The Beatles, anxiously waited to see how Wilson was going to top Pet Sounds. Thirty-seven years later, the world?including Paul McCartney, looking about as excited tonight as he must have been when, carrot in hand, he joined Wilson and Parks for their fabled journey across America from Plymouth Rock to Diamond Head?is still waiting. That's either an indictment of today's scene and its lack of mythic trailblazers, or testament to Wilson's enduring ability to generate feverish conjecture. We can only guess what impact Smile would have had, although bootlegs of rock's most famous unreleased LP comprise tantalising fragments of those doomed yet thrillingly ambitious sessions. But we now know what it would sound like played live because that's what Wilson and his supporting cast, including The Wondermints, a substitute Carl Wilson called Jeffrey Foskett, and the Stockholm Strings And Horns, offer at the RFH:a full version of the album that never was, with arrangements courtesy of Parks, whose dense, elliptical lyrics and epic visions helped shape the concept in the first place. The Smile ensemble might not be gracing the next edition of Guy Peellaert's Rock Dreams, but they do have uncannily lovely voices, and their ability to keep pace with the dramatic shifts in Wilson's intricate melodies is phenomenal. "Heroes And Villains" is astonishingly faithful to the adaptation of the song that appeared on Smile surrogate Smiley Smile and is easily the most complex piece of music your reporter has ever heard performed on a stage in the name of rock'n'roll. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The concert opens when the curtain is raised to reveal Wilson, the confused yet charismatic focus, perched on a stool, cosseted by his singers, all of them shooting the breeze like it's a Beach Boys Iuau. Now, some reviewers found this a bit cute. They changed their minds when they launched into breathtaking a cappella versions of "Surfer Girl", "In My Room", "Please Let Me Wonder", "All Summer Long", even "Good Timin'", a late Wilson classic from 1979. Our damaged hero, the hippest of the first-generation rock legends because he went furthest out there in pursuit of his dreams, is in better voice than anyone dared hope. He hides behind a keyboard for full-band renditions of "Time To Get Alone," "God Only Knows", "Darlin'", "Sloop John B", "California Girls" and "Marcella". After the interval comes Smile, the music that precipitated Wilson's mental decline. Has his teenage symphony to God survived three decades of speculation and psychodrama? Yes. It's magnificent. Futuristic collage pop. Mosaic for a new society. The order was always going to invite controversy, but there's no arguing with a sequence that starts with "Our Prayer" and continues with "Heroes And Villains", "Do You Like Worms", "Barnyard", "The Old Master Painter"/"You Are My Sunshine","Cabinessence", "Wonderful", "Child Is Father Of The Man", "Surf's Up","Vegetables"/"I'm In Great Shape", "Wind Chimes" and "Mrs O'Leary's Cow", the track that killed Smile, for which everyone dons firemen's helmets. It ends with "Good Vibrations", the Wilson-Parks version, not the smash hit with Mike Love's words. And that's it. Forty minutes of startling invention and standing ovations. Finally, a medley including "Barbara Ann" and "Surfin' USA"that emphasises how much ground Wilson covered between those comic anthems and the Cosmic Americana of Smile. Uncut's Roy Carr, another living legend, is so moved he puts tonight in the all-time superleague alongside peak-era gigs by the Stones, The Who and Springsteen. Throw in Kraftwerk and Joy Division and he might be right.

Explosions In The Sky THE ICA, LONDON Monday February 16, 2004 The continued tendency towards post-rock, which in Explosions In The Sky's case means immense, instrumental, drifting guitarscapes, has brought in its wake its own peculiarities and difficulties. It's one thing to sit at home and let this music wash from eardrum to eardrum on your headphones, another to go along and see it physically performed, alongside presumably like-minded punters. Or maybe not so like-minded. For barely have Explosions set sail with the stately "Memorial" when it becomes clear that the room is divided. There are those who are filled with the sort of noisy agitation they feel licensed to exhibit at a rock venue, this being loud guitar music and all?and those who regard Explosions as aural cinema, and, this being cinema, feel entitled to "ssshhh!!" the handful of raucous, beer-soaked jabberers during the quieter passages. Surprisingly, it's the "ssshhh!!"-ers who carry the night, one of whom threatens actual violence towards a particularly squawky female ("Don't facking tell me to shat ap..."), until she slinks back to the bar. Also notable is a tendency towards beards. We're not, however, talking about wispy, well-kempt Bohemian chin shrubbery here. We're talking deliberately bushy, unapologetically misshapen, Will Oldham-type affairs which look like they haven't been grown so much as assembled by glueing thick, accumulated clumps of pubic hair to the face. One such bearded punter in particular encapsulates all of the raging contradictions in Post-Rock Man. A deep listener, he cannot help himself after each song, erupting like a geyser with the words, "Thank you very much!!" As for Explosions themselves, their keenness not to distract from the sound prompts them to dress as dully as four young men have ever dressed. Yet there is something visually arresting in the way they set about their work, even down to the absence of mic stands. Although the slower, receding passages of songs like "The Only Moment We Were Alone" stand up well and manage to retain their luminous grace even amid the murky background wash of a live venue, it's those moments when they yank up the tempo which are the best, unifying both the crowd and the principles of their music. So "Have You Passed Through This Night?" is really something to watch as Munaf Rayani and Mark T Smith bend almost double, wrenching huge, shrieking gobbets of cleansing noise from the recesses of their instruments. In the very best sense, it's as if they're scraping the bottom of rock's barrel, still delving for something fresh, electric, first-hand and alive in the genre. Thank you very much, indeed.

BUSH HALL, LONDON Monday March 1, 2004 Rouse closes the first of two nights here with a version of Neil Young's "For The Turnstiles" so intense and intimate that when he sings the line "though your confidence may be shattered" we all inwardly go "uh-oh",and when he adds "it doesn't matter" we all go "phew, what a relief". His crowd are rapt throughout, whooping at every intro like he's just won the Superbowl. They add the gospel responses on "Sparrows Over Birmingham" and hijack the "come and carry me away" refrain on "Rise". It's a memorable show, a glowing log fire on a frosty night, if not what you might've anticipated from the sunbaked 1972 album. That album saw Nashville's Rouse pitched as a blue-eyed soul boy, a man in thrall to period West Coast soft-rock. Reviewers compared it to Carole King or Steely Dan, knowing that to admit a (more accurate) fondness for Bread's "Guitar Man" or America's "Sister Golden Hair"would be tantamount to sporting a Magic FM car sticker. An album plump with mellow melodies, it boasted inner strength, daring you to embrace its laid-back sensuousness and soak up its, er, love vibrations. But though Rouse smartly begins by playing the LP in its entirety tonight, its perceived strong suit?its sound?is jettisoned. It's just Rouse and buddy Daniel with acoustic guitars, Daniel shifting to a small keyboard. It's "1972" unplugged. It's Gallagher & Lyle's "Breakaway". Which is simply fine. Two nu-folkies sitting on stools might not strike everyone as a must-see gig, but it's riveting. Rouse is in exquisite voice, the audience awed (do not cough!), and the guitars jingle like silvery rain. 1972 seduces 2004 with consummate ease, the standouts being the candid "Under Your Charms", the loping "Come Back" and the aforementioned "gospel" (his word) anthems. Then there's "Slaveship"?"Brimful Of Asha" for the over-45s. After that, with the on-stage pair visibly relaxing, it's pretty much request time. Among these: "Under Cold Blue Stars", "It's A Shame" and "Late Night Conversation". Rouse introduces the "Turnstiles" finale as "a country number", and finds this disproportionately funny, breaking into chuckles. "We've just come from Barcelona, where it snowed for the first time in 22 years," he announces. But everything about this is warm, molten gold, a long bath in the serenity of well-gauged bittersweet balladry. There's a depth, an awareness of Curtis Mayfield/Al Green spirituality which expresses itself through gentle vocal grace rather than any neon manifesto. You flow with it and, oh, what a sweet surrender.