David Bowie MEN ARENA, MANCHESTER Monday November 17, 2003 it's been a while. Twenty years, to be exact. The last time I saw Bowie?canary zoot-suited, tanned, tousled, booting a Zeppelin-sized inflata-globe from the stage of Milton Keynes Bowl?he was deep into the R&B jump-funk of the Serious Moonlight tour. Looking at him tonight, a foppishly boysome 56-year-old in muscle top, jeans and baseball boots, he hardly looks older. Trim and lean, bouncing and strutting, exuding cool like a casual sweat. Back in '83, I was infatuated. Bowie?to filch a John Peel idiom?was the reason I listened to music at all. Then it sort of got messy. Weird how time shifts perspective, though. In the light of recent, invariably brilliant albums Heathen and Reality, the intervening years?often dismissed as creative trough and self-indulgent tosh?now seem to make perfect sense. Tin Machine's white-noise nihilism was Bowie's way of razing everything to dust (Glass Bloody Spider to boot), a necessary levelling of ground to begin afresh. And while 2000's 'hours...' was generally lauded as The Great Bounce Back, the truth was the '90s had already seen Bowie's most challenging, edgy work since his heyday, beginning with The Buddha Of Suburbia, 1. Outside and Earthling. Like all things Bowie, people need time to catch up. Me included. Which brings us here: the opening date of the UK tour, during his first world trek in nearly 10 years. As confidence barometer, the simplicity of the set is a giveaway. Besides a couple of capsized silver twigs, like left-overs from a giant production of The Chronicles Of Narnia, it's just Dave and the band. And what a fucking band. Demon riffster Earl Slick and pianist Mike Garson both go way back to the early '70s, while drummer Sterling Campbell, guitarist Gerry Leonard (often out-licking Slick), keyboardist Cat Russell and bassist Gail Ann Dorsey are masterful moderns wedding Spiders tautness to the Sales brothers'sonic gristle. Bowie himself has admitted that the past has sometimes weighed heavy, but the inspired wonder of tonight's show lies in the scale-levelling parity of the latterday stuff. "Hallo Spaceboy" and an incredible "I'm Afraid Of Americans"are highlights: a blistering ball of molten noise, Bowie charging at it like a rabid rhino. And anyone out there still doubting his standing as one of the great voices in rock history should hear him croon and swoon through the beautiful "Sunday"(Slick's solo is startling) and goosefleshy "The Loneliest Guy". Unleashed live, newies "Never Get Old" and "New Killer Star" spit and swagger like the petulant pups they were always meant to be. Only the minimalist throb of "The Motel" falls a little flat. Elsewhere, the crowd go ape during the "Under Pressure"duet with a dulcet-tongued Dorsey, "The Man Who Sold The World"is prefaced with Bowie playfully baiting his past ("In 1846, England was at war when I put this song out"), "China Girl"proves itself the man's most underrated vocal triumph, and "Heroes"is just, well, unstoppable. For me, a spotlit Bowie pealing away at "Life On Mars"is a pure slice of heaven tumbling to earth, while the encore?an acoustic "Five Years", Molotov-cocktail-like "Suffragette City" and "Ziggy Stardust"?are enough to make me think I've been there. Among his peers, nobody else is out there on a limb like this, forever nuzzling at new frontiers, forever asking questions of himself, clearly revelling in a musical age others seem adrift in. Unlike the rest of his ilk, Bowie's far too loose-footed, too restless, to vindicate his existence by grounding himself in a rose-tinted past. Still the greatest rock'n'roll star on the planet. Glad I came around again.

Emmylou Harris And Spyboy CARLING APOLLO, LONDON Sunday November 16, 2003 Emmylou's wearing a body-hugging black dress, high heels and radiati ng style, class and smouldering sensuality. The opening "Here I Am" sets the scene aptly enough, a stirring statement of intent, identity and purpose. She steers into the song's measured flow, moving through its steady current and singing of a mystical river and a promise never broken. The steadfast vow is not made lightly; Emmylou's 35-year career has usurped the rulebook. Her graceful presence and awe-inspiring voice immediately invite words like shimmering and translucent. But if one quality underpins the work of this silver-haired Goddess, Mother Superior of country rock, righteous rhythm guitar player and vocal stylist from harmony heaven, it is loyalty. The loyalty is to her best instincts, to the music that guides her, to her mentors?from Dolly Parton to Willie Nelson, from Gram Parsons to Bob Dylan?and to the muse that she cannot refuse to follow. The willowy lass, who set out on the endless highway with the wayward GP as her guide, may have been expected to fade after Gram's sad demise. But Ms Harris was always built of stronger stuff. On record, the astonishing transformation that came with 1995's Wrecking Ball has eased up. A peerless interpreter of others' songs, Emmylou is in her own right a respectable but hardly sensational songwriter. The stilted worthiness of this year's Stumble into Grace grates when measured against her natural talents. "You have to put a record out every few years or they take away your performing license," she jokes at one point. And it's live that her greatness radiates most forcefully. The baseball-capped Buddy Miller tears several shades of tenderness and terror out of his guitar and the agile and eruptive Spyboy awaken new depths of turmoil and spiritual ache in her and in the songs. If her post-Gram-era Hot Band provided a jaw-dropping master class for '70s country rock, Spyboy's turbulent, fevered New Orleans-inflected swamp funk is something else again. "Respectfully" dedicated to George Bush, "Time In Babylon" becomes a swirl of barely contained invective and icy dread. The pulsating wonder of "Where Will I Be" is a mission statement of deliverance and her enraptured delivery insures "Strong Hands" (the song inspired by Johnny Cash and June Carter) stands as a hymn to the miracle of enduring love. And so it goes, when Emmylou is onstage you are seldom a breath away from the wondrous. "Boulder To Birmingham", "Wheels" and "Hickory Wind" leave you drooling and humbled. Even after a puzzlingly misjudged final encore of "Imagine", the inclination is to find a bunch of roses and lay it at her feet. The problem, of course, is finding one big enough to do her justice.

Friday November 14, 2003 In contemporary Americana, Brett and Rennie Sparks stand out as dissident pioneers. You can imagine the two of them at the back of a wagon train heading west: drunken fatalists, spotting ghosts and deer and ridiculing manifest destiny. For where others retrace well-trodden paths and humdrum traditions, The Handsome Family go offroad to hunt down phantoms, to update forgotten myths and ancient black jokes. "Do you love me enough to put my head on a stick in your bedroom?"Rennie Sparks asks an adoring fan as she arrives onstage. "That's the kind of love I'm looking for." Later, she will explain how, if swans had hands, they would steal children, and speculate on the best way to dispose of George W Bush. Death by a thousand cuts seems a good plan until she reasons, "I'm afraid killing him will only make him stronger." It's odd how this wry supernaturalist so effortlessly steals the show. Brett Sparks may be The Handsome Family's nominal frontman, a stentorian crooner and nifty musician who delights in subverting the old-time atmosphere with a few processed beats from his laptop, or a sputtering art-rock guitar solo. But it's his wife's lyrics that make the band exceptional, informed as they are by that rarest thing, and original application of the gothic. She's compelling stage presence, too, cradling her autoharp like a sickly infant, favouring the odd, dissolute plink rather than anything approaching virtuosity. At times, Rennie's character and lyrics overshadow the music so completely that you wonder whether her talents would be better deployed as a novelist or, even better, as a witchy storyteller. Her ramblings between songs are sometimes better than the songs themselves, and you can only hope that the tale of a charity shop in Milton Keynes supporting "The reanimation of dead bodies", or the one about a perilous Christmas on absinthe are kept for posterity somehow. But then this eldritch, stiff music offers up a tune as good as "Weightless Again" or "24-Hour Store"and Brett Sparks, with his uncannily loud voice and grand melodic ways, reveals himself to be the perfect conduit for his wife's musings on metaphysics, her picturesque depressions, her hallucinogenic nature studies. His earthiness acts as a counterweight to Rennie's kookier extremes, and it's his booming resonance that give her yarns like "When That Helicopter Comes"their biblical sense of authority. The Handsomes understand that America, past and present, is a huge, strange and often incomprehensible country. And that the people, animals and spirits who inhabit it are stranger and more incomprehensible still?not least, of course, Brett and Rennie themselves.