Twenty years on, even the groups who emerged after New Pop’s glory days, choking on ABC and Culture Club’s white funk dust, seem great. Hateful at the time, but now, with no brainy pretty boys in the charts, these groups with their self-penned, self-played music and literate pseudo-intellectual lyrics sound like avant-garde geniuses compared to today’s karaoke clothes horses. China Crisis were Liverpool’s other synth-duo after OMD and they specialised in wistful ballads with gently experimental Byrne/Eno-lite ethno-rhythms. Leighton Buzzard’s Kajagoogoo were Duran also-rans reviled for their ridiculous garb, and yet their first hits?No 1 “Too Shy”, “Ooh To Be Ah” and the exquisite “Hang On Now”?offered an alternate pop universe triptych of effete miserablism to rival the virtually contemporaneous first three singles by The Smiths.

A belated but entirely welcome release for this live recording of the legendary concert at Le Bataclan in Paris, which in February ’72 briefly reunited the Velvet Underground trio four years after Lou Reed had acrimoniously engineered Cale’s reluctant departure from the astonishing early line-up.

Although Cale is a brilliant looming presence here on electric viola, his ‘solo’ turn?”Ghost Story” from Vintage Violence, the surreal clapalong “The Biggest, Loudest, Hairiest Group Of All”, which to my knowledge never troubled his repertoire again, and a version of “Empty Bottles”, a song originally written for Jennifer Warnes?is completely upstaged by sensational turns from Reed and Nico.

Lou takes the lead on covers of three songs from The Velvet Underground And Nico?a fantastically cool, slowed-down and slovenly “I’m Waiting For The Man”, and hair-raising takes on “The Black Angel’s Death Song” and “Heroin”. He also weighs in with “Berlin” and a brilliant “Wild Child” from his first solo album, released a few months later.

Against the odds, it’s Nico who steals the show with her five featured tracks. Introducing “I’ll Be Your Mirror”, she sounds utterly smacked-out, nervous and vulnerable. Listening to her belting out “No One Is There” and “Frozen Warnings” from the immortal The Marble Index, however, is like being blasted by something elemental. “Janitor Of Lunacy”, a posthumous lament for Brian Jones, meanwhile, is a reminder that Nico’s head must often have been a very frightening place to be. Essential listening, in an overworked phrase.

Like countless other ’50s teens, siblings Mike, Norma and Lal Waterson’s musical baptism embraced skiffle and trad jazz before, in their case, gravitating towards folk. Their unaccompanied style was nurtured in folk clubs around Hull, defying convention further by developing an exclusively Yorkshire repertoire.

Their vocal sound stood apart; they sang less in harmony than across parallel melodies, creating an energy as exciting as any rock’n’roll. This joyous noise was captured on a classic debut album, Frost & Fire, which sent shock waves through the folk scene of 1965. Traditional but with pop-like appeal, they were dubbed “the folk Beatles”.

CD 1 draws heavily on these early, influential years, including a dozen unreleased or out-of-print tracks. The bonus DVD, a black-and-white film made for BBC2 in 1966, is a perfect companion, conveying the group’s thrill of performance and obsession with researching and collecting traditional song.

In 1968, Lal and Mike concocted the genrebusting Bright Phoebus. With not one traditionally arranged song, it alienated the trad community. Its release in 1972 heralded The Watersons’ return after a six-year break, and they were soon joined by Martin Carthy, Norma’s husband.

They ploughed on for nigh on 20 years, mixing traditional and original songs, interspersing three albums with works in their own right from Carthy, Lal, Norma and Mike. Spanning these two decades, the strength of discs two and three is in highlighting the group’s club and festival appearances, with plenty of previously undocumented performances.

Lal and Mike ceased touring in 1991 but, as they bowed out, the second generation was entering the family business, Mike and Lal’s daughters, Rachel and Maria, having already been inducted. But it’s Waterson: Carthy (Martin and Norma with daughter Eliza) who have become the true flag-bearers, while albums by Norma and Eliza have won Mercury nominations. The Waterson family has surely never been more productive, as the final disc illustrates. Even Mike was enticed back into the Blue Murder offshoot. On a sadder note, Lal died in 1998, but not before creating another great work, the agelessly enigmatic Once In A Blue Moon recorded, appropriately, with her son Oliver.

Rib-stickin’ rock and roll they call it, and they right. Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard formed in 1970 as a trio and have never really changed their low-down boogie ways. Though best known for a latterday fame that turned songs like “Legs” and “Pearl Necklace” into risqu

Connoisseurs of the Amerindie era of 1982-1986 may recall this fine Rochester, NY quartet. Had they dwelt on the other coast, AG would have been part of LA’s Paisley Underground (on the live Bless Their Pointed Little Heads they even cover Dream Syndicate’s “Tell Me When It’s Over”). Instead they were out on their own, all naive folk-rock selfbelief, thrusting Peter Hookish bass and Beth Brown’s earnest post-punk vox. If the weedy-sounding Green House is fundamentally a polite and unassuming album, Bless Their Pointed Little Heads comes closer to the band’s R.E.M.-meets-Jefferson Airplane spirit.

Imagine if the Doors, The Byrds or Love had, long after their late ’60s heyday, reconvened to record a quartet of brilliant albums, the first a double LP of classic, even epic, proportions issued just months before punk broke. This is what happened when LA band Spirit returned as though from the dead to release Spirit Of ’76, Son Of Spirit, Farther Along and Future Games in rapid succession, between 1975 and 1977, to the astonishment of their small but fanatical following.

Such a feverish late burst of creativity was surprising not just because of the quality of the work but because the group’s focal point, a young singer and guitarist called Randy Craig Wolfe dubbed Randy California by Jimi Hendrix in 1965, was missing presumed out of action for good.

Spirit’s first three albums, Spirit (1968, including “Taurus”, an influence on Zep’s “Stairway To Heaven”, and the rhythmically idiosyncratic “Fresh Garbage”, sampled in 2003 by Pink), The Family That Plays Together Stays Together (also 1968, featuring the band’s sole US Top 30 hit, “I Got A Line On You”), and Clear (1969), were an effective blend of rock, jazz, folk, pop and psychedelia. But by 1970’s Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus?co-produced by Neil Young man David Briggs and the Spirit LP that most frequently makes the Greatest Albums honours lists?band relations had reached an all-time low and they fell apart.

Over the next few years, news would filter back to the UK about their mercurial leader, barely 20 when Spirit split. In 1971, he was thrown from a horse and fractured his skull, forcing a spell in hospital. The following year saw a solo venture, Kapt. Kopter And The (Fabulous) Twirly Birds, with charismatic bald Spirit drummer Ed Cassidy (actually California’s stepfather) back on board and one Clit McTorius aka Noel Redding on bass. Titles such as “Downer”, “Devil” and “I Don’t Want Nobody” hint at the atmosphere of despondency and dementia in which it was recorded.

California and Cassidy then began piecing together fragments of music and dialogue for the ill-fated Journey Through Potatoland project, Spirit’s very own Smile, but it was rejected by Columbia for being too political and uncommercial. A gruelling tour of the UK in ’73 saw out hero in a fragile state, appearing onstage at some dates in nothing but black boots and matching jockstrap. After a severe bout of depression and cocaine overindulgence, California suffered a breakdown.

He tried to commit suicide by throwing himself off Chelsea Bridge into the River Thames, only to be pulled, struggling, from the icy water.

Exhausted and destitute, he spent 1974 recuperating at his mother’s home in Molokai, Hawaii, working as a gardener and washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant. It was during this period of convalescence that he acquired a guitar and started writing again, with Spirit once more in mind.

Back on the mainland, he immersed himself in the study of Urantia, a 2000-page treatise with religious overtones dating back to 1935 based on the utterances of Jack Bond, a Cleveland barber who would go into a trance and speak, as California explained, “in an alien voice formation”. Jack Bond, played by one Burt Schonberg, makes quasi-mystical pronouncements throughout Spirit Of ’76.

Together with the runic sleeve typography, this can make Spirit Of ’76 seem portentous. Truth is, it’s the most fun you can have with your headphones on. Finally left to his own devices after years of battling for supremacy in Spirit Mk I with the likes of Jay Ferguson, a reinvigorated California produced this collage of rock hymns, wah-wah freak-outs, distorted speech, Star Trek bleeps and other random FX at Tampa’s Studio 70 in Miami. Many of the voices and instruments on the record were treated using sustain, reverb, echo or delay, giving it a hallucinatory shimmer, a warp factor.

If it feels like a dream or trip, it was rooted in reality. For California, Spirit Of ’76 was a way out of his private hell. It marked his spiritual awakening. And it was, as he said, “about the betrayal of American values” in the run-up to the nation’s 200th birthday (the LP was subtitled “A Bicentennial Memorial Album”). While his contemporaries were mired in nihilism or narcissistic self-reflection, California, along with Todd Rundgren (for Urantia, read Utopia), was one of the last counterculture musicians concerned with the death of ’67 ideals and the country he loved. “An all-American acid patriot,” as NME called him. It’s testament to California’s genius that Spirit Of ’76 isn’t the sound of mental collapse (like Skip Spence’s Oar), but an intellectually sophisticated transcending of personal turmoil that serves as a state of the nation address.

California surveyed the landscape and found a people in need of reassurance. A humanist with a sense of humour, with Spirit Of ’76 he provided the disillusioned Woodstock kids out there in the Diaspora with sci-fi sonics, new anthems and cover versions from their youth as succour. “Come gather round people, wherever you roam,” he sings on the opening medley of “America The Beautiful”/”The Times They Are A Changing”, which includes the first of six ’60s sacred texts reinterpreted here?with a radical empathy absent from, say, Bowie’s Pin Ups. Here, the original’s revolutionary optimism, via California’s astral folk guitar and light, airy voice, becomes altogether more wistful.

All the covers?”Hey Joe”, even Keith Richards’ “Happy”?have an elegiac quality. On the diaphanous “Like A Rolling Stone”, Dylan’s accusatory vitriol, on contact with California’s soothing, ego-less vocal, is sublimated as nine minutes of miasmic compassion. The happy-clappy album-closing take on “Star Spangled Banner”, on the other hand, is so mocking it’s almost more inflammatory than Hendrix’s own, and subverts the album concept at a stroke. Mischievous boy. Spirit Of ’76 embraces blissful lunar lounge muzak (“Feeling In Time”, “Guide Me”), cosmic country (“Joker On The Run”), Hendrixian thunder (“Veruska”), hard rock that dissolves in the ear (“Victim Of Society”, “Sunrise”) and white gospel prayers (“What Do I Have?”, “When?”) so intimate you can hear California breathe as his fingers scrape the strings. Throughout, the trio of Barry Keene on bass, Cassidy on drums and California on everything else offer virtuosic performances and solo with jazzy fluidity. Meanwhile, there’s Jack Bond’s stentorian electro-babble, the recurring “Tampa Jam” theme and the various sound-bursts (a rocket ship whoosh here or ping-pong match there) phasing from left to right speaker to entertain you.

When Spirit performed at The Rainbow in 1978 and California parted the crowds during “Hey Joe”, it was like a visitation from some ancient hippie god. And yet he’d only just turned 27?younger than The Police, bottom of the bill that night. At the height of punk, pace Rundgren, California was the only space cadet worthy of worship. He was still only 45 when he drowned in 1997, saving his son caught in a riptide off the coast of Hawaii. Notwithstanding the excellence of his next three albums, Spirit Of ’76, a record of visionary wonder, is California’s memorial.

The Flying Teapot, You and Angel’s Egg LPs are here in all their brainmashed glory should you want them, but the examples of Allen’s output immediately before and after Gong, which bookend the trilogy, give a much better account of his legacy. The scratchy riff that kicks off CD 1 echoes a lineage that runs from Trout Mask Replica to Pere Ubu and Gang Of Four, while the tracks from his Byg albums, stripped of the glissandi gloop and excruciating VC3 synthesisers, reveal a similarly punky outlook waiting to happen?which it did in 1979 when, according to the illiterate sleeve notes, Allen ended up playing some New York club called GBGB’s. Presumably Micks in Kansas City was closed.

When Robin Scott reached Number 2 in April 1979 as M with “Pop Muzik”, that out-of-nowhere novelty flash glimpse of the synth-pop barrage to come in the early ’80s, he actually had a 10-year recording career behind him. On Life Class, which comes in a horrid computer-generated fold-out sleeve produced by fine artist Scott himself, you get a whole CD of M’s proto-robopop (“Moonlight And Muzak”, “Official Secrets”, “Moderne Man”). On the second CD are a further 20 tracks from his odd pre-chartlife, when this pop Zelig peddled everything from Dylanesque rambles (“The Sailor”) to skits (“Shithouse Johnny”) to glam (“Mister Pop Star”) and even reggae (“Cowboys And Indians”), marking him out as a superior Jonathan King or inferior 10cc-style pasticheur.

Donald Fagenson (Don Was) and David Weiss (David Was), two nice Jewish boys from the Detroit suburb of Oak Park, were the Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of the early ’80s, making acerbic commentaries on Reagan-era geopolitics over superbly produced and polished, futuristic punk-funk.

Detroit being the Motor City and the home of Motown and the MC5, Was (Not Was) incorporated equal parts R&B and rock, with soul vocals from Sweet Pea Atkinson and angular guitar courtesy of Wayne Kramer of the ‘5. “Wheel Me Out”, all seven minutes and three seconds of it, is the neutron blast of samples and savagery that single-handedly made Ze, now reactivated, the world’s hippest label in the summer of 1981, when every white guitar band worth loving wanted to be Chic or George Clinton.

“Fuck Art Let’s Dance” was Ze’s manifesto, but from the nuclear orange sky of the sleeve to the zany experiments of the original alchemical brothers on “Oh, Mr Friction!”, “It’s An Attack!” and “The Sky’s Ablaze”, Out Come The Freaks is blazingly intelligent nightclub music?not a contradiction in terms.

Wholesome, Dylan-loving folkies reassessed over four CDs Every bit as manufactured as any modern pop band, Peter, Paul & Mary were svengali manager Albert Grossman’s attempt to capitalise on the success of The Kingston Trio, late-’50s progenitors of neatly-pressed folk music, whose 1958 chart-topper “Tom Dooley” kickstarted the folk revival.

Cannily realising the potential of an equivalent folk trio featuring a sexy blonde, Grossman assembled solo folkie Peter Yarrow, stand-up comic Paul Stookey and off-Broadway actress Mary Travers, and was rewarded with instant success. Less threatening than pinko Pete Seeger and better-turned-out than most of their troubadour contemporaries, they became the definitive face of folk music, with early PP&M staples like “Lemon Tree”, “500 Miles”, and “Where Have All The Flowers Gone?” becoming the standard repertoire of the ’60s folk boom. Their major breakthrough came with children’s song “Puff The Magic Dragon”?lent added cachet through spurious rumours (probably started by Grossman) that it was a drug song?and Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind”, both of which reached No 2 in the US singles chart.

They continued to cover songs by Dylan?whom Grossman quickly added to his artist roster?but were rapidly deposed by him as reigning folk monarch, and struggled to keep pace with his mercurial talent as he welded folk to rock. They tried to modernise and keep pace with the rapidly-changing scene, but songs such as “I Dig Rock’n’Roll Music” with its impressions of The Beatles and The Mamas & The Papas, and lyrics like “The message may not move me/Or mean a great deal to me/But, hey, it feels so groovy to say/I dig rock’n’roll music”, seemed crass and insincere, alienating old folkie diehards and failing to persuade the young rock vanguard of their hipness. Thereafter, they always seemed old and staid, an impression confirmed when they had their only No 1 hit in 1969 with John Denver’s “Leaving On A Jet Plane”. This four-CD set charts their rise, fall, dissolution and several subsequent reunions in rather over-enthusiastic detail.

The graveyard…, dating from 1979, consists partly of four-track recordings made at the Graveyard Studio, partly of live material from an Electric Ballroom gig. Hence the title?although it also hints at ACR’s mix of gothic Mancunian with the rhythms of the dancefloor.

“Du The Du”, the opener, encapsulates ACR’s inversion of dance’s mores?it’s a take on The Ohio Players’ “Doing The Do”, with Martin Moscrop’s choppy funk guitars sounding like some gruelling industrial threshing process, Simon Topping’s Gregorian vocal style providing a grim counterpoint to Donald Johnson’s exuberant funky drumming, and Jeremy Kerr’s twangy, outsized bass. Tracks like this and “All Night Party”, their debut single, set a course for post-punk which would be followed by New Order and Talking Heads.

ACR themselves undertook a journey which would lead them unabashedly to jazz-funk, but this is the band at their rawest, offering early drafts of “Flight” as well as rockier, pugnacious tracks like “Faceless” and “Crippled Child” which remind of Joy Division but also Pere Ubu in their use of abstract analogue synth. “The Thin Boys”, meanwhile, caustically invokes a zombie-like army of pale young men in overcoats advancing uncertainly into the ’80s.

The live material exposes the frailties of Topping’s vocals too often for comfort, but when he and Moscrop unleash the horns, funk’s signifier for phat joy, they make them sound as ominous as the Last Trump, the disco whistles like those of guards organising a round-up. This reissue is another reminder of one of the most mordant, and vital, groups of the last 25 years.

As electronica reaches a point of super-saturation, there’s an increasingly widespread mood of nostalgia for the na

Daft, from 1987, combines the band’s ’83 debut EP, Into Battle With The Art Of Noise, and their 1984 debut album, (Who’s Afraid Of?) The Art Of Noise. Making it the ultimate anthology of wanton jazz and cut’n’ pastiche pop, church organs and car engines, hits masquerading as neo-Situationist musique concr

A curio indeed. The sleevenotes alone could be fleshed out into a screenplay?there’s a great cast of ’70s oddballs and dilettantes (Lewis Furey! Brian “Pinball” Protheroe!) who flit through the script. Aided by Mike D’Abo’s empathetic production and the late Duncan Browne’s nimble guitar, Twinkle’s poor-little-posh-girl tones are suited to the more sensitive songs and carry particular resonance on the title track and the moving “Soldier”. On the downside, tracks like “Bowden House” and “Ladyfriend” fall somewhere between the twee musings of Lynsey De Paul and the breathy vamp-pop of Noosha Fox. Overall, though, this is well worth resurrecting.

It’s a myth, perpetuated in the accompanying press release here, that Tommy was the first rock opera. That honour, doubtful or otherwise, probably belongs to The Pretty Things’ 1968 album SF Sorrow, while The Kinks’ Ray Davies wrote and released Arthur, originally intended as a soundtrack for an abandoned BBC TV special. In the era of Hair and Lloyd-Webber, meanwhile, which had used rock to apply a transfusion to stage musicals, the idea seemed even less far-fetched. Tommy it was, however, which not only transformed the fortunes of The Who on its 1969 release but also helped transform rock’s sense of its own scope.

Townshend was chafing at the limitations of the four-minute song format as early as 1966, as the extended “A Quick One, While He’s Away”, on A Quick One, indicated. The Who Sell Out from 1967 concluded with “Rael”, a lengthy piece that prefigured Tommy’s themes. By this time, Townshend was bitter with the music industry, following the failure of “I Can See For Miles” to chart. He declared himself “anti-pop” and threw himself into the demos for Tommy, a last throw of the dice for a band who were mired in debt and in dire need of reinventing themselves. For The Who, Tommy represented a necessary graduation.

Over two discs, Tommy told the story of a young boy whose father returns from the war unexpectedly and shoots his wife’s lover. The infant Tommy witnesses this and is so traumatised, he’s struck deaf, dumb and blind. As his parents seek out a cure for the boy, he’s left to the mercies of Uncle Ernie, a paedophile, and the bullying of his cousin Kevin. Tommy becomes an unlikely hero when he shows he can play a mean pinball and then, just as his parents are considering having him institutionalised, he undergoes a miracle cure, then goes on to become a cult figure until his followers become disgruntled with him. He finally achieves reconciliation with himself and his family.

Tommy’s rise and fall from hero status perhaps speaks more about Townshend’s disgruntlement at The Who’s commercial decline than the phenomenon of celebrity itself. What it does convey in broad strokes, however, is a glumly anti-nostalgic sense of the furtive mundanity of British life in the mid-20th century?holiday camps, terrible secrets in the top drawer of the dresser, clandestine sadism. Set against that is an almost mystical yearning for truth, connection and beauty which is most resoundingly contained in the lingering refrain, delivered with cracked passion by Roger Daltrey, “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me”.

Tommy is also intriguing musically. Townshend’s ability to craft ringing, bending, lingering power chords is immediately evident in the opening, “Overture”. Keith Moon’s rumbling percussive style, as if his kit’s in perpetual danger of collapsing atop the band, keeps the pulse racing, and the hits, like “Pinball Wizard”, hit hard. Here’s where Townshend scores over the likes of Lloyd-Webber who, for worse and for worse, has dominated the popera scene before and since Tommy. Townshend, by contrast, retained a facility to set off sound grenades in the imagination. Only occasionally, as on “Sally Simpson”, do you sense that The Who are struggling to match long-winded narrative imperatives with short-winded rock thrills.

Tommy is often accused of being overblown but, if anything, it’s strangely underblown?this in an era when the likes of Hendrix and The Beatles were discovering the possibilities of the studio. It feels much of the time like an acoustic song cycle, and sounds as if it were recorded in a small, low-ceilinged room, with none of, say, “I Can See For Miles”‘ feeling of infinite space. This may have been due to a reluctance to smother the narrative in overdubs of which it could probably have done with one or two more, but it has its benefits also?intimacy, clarity and a claustrophobic sense of terrible predicament.

As well as enhanced sound, this new edition boasts numerous studio happy-snaps which speak of a more jovial atmosphere in the studio than has often been suspected. This is further borne out by the rough outtakes included on the bonus CD?sketch versions of the songs often tailing off with extended bits of banter between band members. By far the best of the extra tracks included here is the nagging, punkishly monotone “Trying To Get Through”, driven by the boyish self-pity and longing for epiphany at the heart of Tommy.

Strangely out of kilter with The Who’s musical history to either side of it. Tommy doesn’t quite realise its ambitions, though it achieves a lot on the way. Quadrophenia would be a more fleshed-out version of what is attempted here. Still, Tommy remains fascinating, not least for its exploration of the theme of child abuse, of which Townshend stated he was a victim?a preoccupation that recently came back to haunt him. Tommy’s also an undoubted milestone in rock’s growing self-confidence and maturity, the knock-on effects of which are far broader than the unfortunate Ben Elton abominations we’re now groaning under. And its best, recurring moments?the signal, hankering guitar motif borrowed from “Rael”, the thundering windmill riff of “Pinball Wizard”, the eyes-wide-open release of “I’m Free”?still blaze.