Listening to John Mellencamp’s ‘back to the roots’ album makes you realise what a loss it is that Ry Cooder no longer makes these kind of records. The blues numbers by the likes of Son House and Robert Johnson are dull enough. But there’s a spectacular version of Lucinda Williams’ “Lafayette”, a stirring “John The Revelator” and a nice take on Woody Guthrie’s “Johnny Hart”. Mellencamp even covers “Teardrops Will Fall”, an early Cooder favourite. But if you really want to hear folk-blues played with rock’n’roll attitude then go back to Boomer’s Story or Into The Purple Valley.

This is the second album from Frenchmen Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau, and the follow-up to 2001’s self-titled debut is an intriguing creature. The pair are clearly influenced by the warped guitar and heady neo-psychedelia of My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, but also nod towards the infantronica of Scotland’s Boards Of Canada on this fizzy collection of waves and drones. Individually their songs are impressive?”Birds” and “Unrecorded” sound like The Russian Futurists getting tearful, while the uptempo “0078h” is unbearably exciting?but after a while the gooey crescendos and relentless sentimentality bring on chronic e-motion sickness, confirming that you can indeed have too much of a good thing.

Daryl Hall is capable of mutant soul genius. Look no further than 1980’s Sacred Songs callaboration with Robert Fripp (see Take 74, p135) and Hall & Oates’ Todd Rundgren-produced 1974 weirdscape War Babies for proof. But that penchant for oddness is disappointingly absent from the overproduced and uninspired white soul of Can’t Stop Dreaming. The voice is flawless, but there’s little here to do it justice. “Never Let Me Go” just about transcends dated production with a stratospheric Hall vocal, and “Holding Out For Love” gives him a decent winding melody to negotiate. But the airtight arrangements prove insurmountable, and the re-recording of “She’s Gone” is completely outclassed by the original. Hopefully the rumours concerning Todd Rundgren’s involvement in the next Hall & Oates album are true.

Ten years since breaking up the band, the prolific Black is slap in the middle of a post-Pixies purple patch. Coinciding with the return of ex-Pere Ubu man Eric Drew Feldman and Joey Santiago, 2001’s Dog In The Sand was the kick-start, compounded by the double shot of last year’s Devil’s Workshop and Black Letter Days. With Feldman and Santiago still around?this time bolstered by Van Dyke Parks, co-producer Stan Ridgway and The Pale Boys?he’s just as impressive. Be it country-rockin’ with Death (“Horrible Day”), doling out desert blues (“New House Of The Pope”) or frantically resurrecting Mott The Hoople (“Jaina Blues”), ol’ Frank hasn’t had this much twisted fun since 1994’s Teenager Of The Year.

Bowie remains the greatest living rock artist, even if what he does isn’t rock so much as swing, think a bit, then swing again. Heathen really was a return to form?even objective people thought so. Reunited with Tony Visconti for the first time since Scary Monsters, he threw aside his well-intended but increasingly flailing attempts at ‘relevant’ sonic shifts and stepped back into himself. He’s much more dignified when he’s irrelevant, unique, alien. Heathen was alternately broody and buoyant, imaginative without being esoteric, and filled with fine songs. Wisely, Bowie’s stayed with Visconti-and with the same band-for his 26th LP, written and recorded quickly this year in New York. And while it’s very much a rock album?”a bit thrusty” is his own description?it kicks in a very ‘now’ way (this ain’t Tin Machine). Over its stomping drums and squalling guitars he drapes lovely, left-handed songs, rich with unexpected angles, daring detours and words which muse over mortality yet emerge seeming upbeat. Reality is lyrically mournful; musically euphoric. It’s pop, frisky pop, but with plenty of couplets about how everything falls away.

“New Killer Star” begins; a riff, a pulse, a yelp in the voice as he nails it: “Oh my nuclear baby/Oh my idiot trance/All my idiot questions/Let’s face the music and dance…” He’s racing from or towards something, with a hint of Ballard’s Crash. “Never Get Old” plays with his past personae; chunky funk, it ends like a spooky fairground ride. “There’s never gonna be enough money, there’s never gonna be enough drugs, and I’m never ever gonna get old.” The album’s littered with both quips and sighs about time passing. There are two covers, Jonathan Richman’s “Pablo

Picasso” (in the manner of the Pixies) and George Harrison’s “Try Some, Buy Some” (in the manner of Ronnie Spector, giving it the big yodel). “The Loneliest Guy” eases the tempo, quivers in like early Roxy, has a narrator denying his loneliness despite giveaway phrases like “pictures on my hard drive”.

“Looking For Water”?”I can’t live in this cage, can’t eat this candy”?thuds in again with braggadocio, but there’s a sort of a cappella moment which recalls those blissful Young Americans peaks, and the lines: “I lost God in a New York minute/I don’t know about you, but my heart’s not in it”. “Days” is a bit plinky-plonk, but both “She’ll Drive The Big Car” and “Fall Dog Bombs The Moon” are schizo, ferocious but fractured, the former like “The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan” rewritten by Iggy, the latter a scratching, twisting, martial “Heroes”. Both should enter the all-time Bowie pantheon, given that’s a pretty huge building.

The title track is heavy, pounding?perhaps, like “Hallo Spaceboy”, too much so?and cranium-piercing. “Now my death is just a sad song” begs reference to his Brel days, and, “I’ve been right and I’ve been wrong/Now I’m back where I started from” contradicts the pierrot who’d never done good things or bad things. Any lingering scepticism is sucked away by the startling, jazzy snake that is “Bring Me The Disco King”, which he’s been tampering with for a decade.

Nearly eight minutes long, it’s like Sinatra or Scott Walker tilting at Brubeck’s “Take Five”, Mike Garson on avant-piano, many-limbed percussion; our man reminiscing about “killing time in the ’70s… rivers of perfumed limbs, good time girls” before fearing invisibility and our ultimate “dance through the fire”. Ah, it was a very good year. It’s a very, very good sexy-angst album. For real.

Maffia’s infectious, good-humoured smash about sexily dancing your week’s cares away, “All Over”, was the first real good news for So Solid Crew since their debut, They Don’t Know, two years ago. First Lady bypasses the Crew’s paranoid tendencies, and the largely undeserved witch hunt that has subsequently justified them, but also rarely matches “All Over”‘s cheeky spirit. Instead, the So Solid production team has kept just the right side of slush in chasing the garage-inflected R’n’B dollar. Maffia’s lyrical angles on south London single motherhood, murder and romantic strife are heartfelt, meanwhile, if disappointingly superficial. A lightweight but likeable beginning.

After a stint as frontman with renowned Scottish art-punk heroes Josef K, Paul Haig went on to release a batch of solo albums, many of them fusing state-of-the-art ’80s electropop with elements of ’60s spy themes and French film scores in a way that predated today’s obsession with “imaginary soundtracks”. Haig’s latest addition to this long-time-coming series (Volume 1 appeared in 1991, Volume 2 in 2000) mixes up electronic dance and filmic sci-fi themes with an unswerving emphasis on melody. If these new cuts resemble what he was doing 20 years ago, that’s only because the contemporary scene is finally catching up with him.

There is something about the female psyche that enables women to make the best music of their careers in their 50s in a way that their male counterparts find almost impossible. Because male artists tend to swagger their rampant way through their 20s and 30s, the onset of middle age comes as a confidence-shattering shock from which few recover.

Even Dylan suffered from it, although he pulled through magisterially and is still making memorable music in his 60s. Robert Plant, once the priapic king of cock rock has surprisingly and cleverly found a way of dealing with it. So, too, has Jackson Browne. Neil Young continues to show intermittent flashes of genius. But the experience of his old cohorts Crosby, Stills and Nash is more typical of the inability of male rockers to grow old if not gracefully then at least creatively. Not a decent record between them in more than 20 years.

Women, in case you hadn’t noticed, are different. Mostly, they don’t do swagger. They’re not allowed to strut, except on a catwalk. Instead, we patronise them and ask them to sing backing vocals and get them to record songs written by other people?usually men. That is when they’re not baking bread or raising kids.

So sometimes it can take years for their creativity to blossom. While playing this waiting game, they finesse their craft and nurture their art until the world is ready. Maturity becomes them. As Lucinda Williams recently remarked in these pages: “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to go on getting better. I’ve never understood people who make one or two great records when they start their careers and then that’s the end of it. Poets don’t even get to be respected until they’re into their 50s or 60s, and they’ve honed their craft.”

Williams was 45 when she made her craft-honed, career-defining album, the Grammy-winning Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, and 50 when she released this year’s World Without Tears?arguably an even better record. Emmylou Harris is another who has found that, far from creative life ending with the appearance of the first grey hairs, it can be a new dawn.

When Harris was 48, her renaissance began with 1995’s Wrecking Ball. Produced by Daniel Lanois, its sonic landscape was a paradigm shift away from anything we’d heard from her before, her wraith-like voice swathed in layers of shimmering, distinctly non-country sound. Yet the songs, however expertly chosen, were still all covers of compositions by the likes of Neil Young, Steve Earle and Bob Dylan.

By the time Harris released the follow-up, Red Dirt Girl, five years later, she was into her 50s. Lanois was gone, replaced in the producer’s chair by his prot

It’s easy to dismiss Suzanne Vega as a poor man’s Joni Mitchell. But songs such as “Luka” (about child abuse) and “Book Of Dreams” (about the plight of amputees) proved she was not only a highly literate songwriter but a storyteller who was brave enough to tackle the most awkward subjects. This best-of is an expanded version of the Tried And True compilation that first appeared five years ago, and comes with a bonus CD featuring six live tracks.

In 1980 Diana Ross, Motown and Chic all needed each other. With Rick James’ breakthrough still a year away, Motown were forced to hire their biggest competitors to provide Hitsville with some hits. In turn, Diana was the last of the original sequence of classic Chic albums, the real follow-up to Chic’s 1979 milestone Risqu

A unique figure in British pop, Nick Currie aka Momus (Greek God of mockery) has maintained an unflagging output in a kaleidoscope of styles that predates Beck’s celebration of junk culture. After a debut album on Cherry Red sub-label

A solo star who charted regularly in the ’60s with big production ballads, Pitney continued to record during the ’70s but without his former commercial success. Himself a songwriter, Pitney owed much of his achievement to his ear for a good song. The Bronze Sessions consists of the complete recordings for his not particularly brilliant album Pitney ’75 plus six bonus tracks he cut in 1990. With extensive sleevenotes by Rodney Collins, this reissue is squarely aimed at lifelong fans.

In many ways, Eric Goulden was the embodiment of punk’s DIY ethic: awkward, rough, fearlessly enthusiastic, occasionally inspired. By the time of his first Peel session in October ’77?backed by Ian Dury and fellow ex-Kilburn & The High Roader Davey Payne?he’d nailed signature tune “Whole Wide World” (featured on last month’s Uncut CD) and was gaining notoriety for drunken antics on the first Stiff tour. Disillusioned by the ’80s, he was fronting the Len Bright Combo for the Saturday Live show, before decamping to France and resurfacing (post-breakdown) as the Hitsville House Band for a Mark Radcliffe session in ’86. Last year’s “Joe Meek” (from the Jonathan Ross radio show) proved that, though he never did track down that girl from Tahiti, the pleasure and pain was in the journey.

The 6ths

HYACINTHS AND THISTLES

CIRCUS

There is no one else in pop like Stephin Merritt now, and 69 Love Songs is the monument that says so. Under the names The Magnetic Fields, Future Bible Heroes, The Gothic Archies and The 6ths, he has written hundreds of songs proving the artifice and wit of the pre-rock US pop machine, from Gershwin to Sondheim, still has a place in the modern world; and that it suits sounds from synthpop to shanties.

69 Love Songs was Merritt’s arrogantly unmissable declaration of what he and the love song could do. Like a blue whale inches from your face, it’s too big to take in all at once. There are just so many songs, flitting by so swiftly and in so many styles that, heard for the first time, it’s hard to be sure if they are even any good.

The confusion is deepened by the lyrics’ lightness, their desire to make you laugh. But keep listening and the variety, ludicrousness, vanity and despair of the loves Merritt delineates becomes moving. In a project where he effectively asks himself to operate all pop’s disused production lines at once, from Tin Pan Alley to Hitsville, it is also a record about a love of love songs, and how art and emotion merge when you write them. And then, he can be this piercingly direct: “I don’t know if you’re beautiful/Because I love you too much…”

Merritt also sustains interest by switching between his baritone and other voices. With another project, The 6ths, he doesn’t sing at all, instead offering his songs to interpreters including a movingly aged Odetta, a vulnerable Bob Mould, Sarah Cracknell and Gary Numan. Released only months after 69 Love Songs, Hyacinths And Thistles is more lushly musical, bathing Marc Almond in South Seas exotica and Clare Grogan in treated strings. Together, the albums are an imposing landmark.

So instant was Inner City’s commercial success in the late ’80s that leader Kevin Sanderson’s status as a techno innovator is sometimes underplayed. Tracks like “Good Life” and “Ain’t Nobody Better” are classic reminders of a time when this music was a light and mobile antidote to ’80s stodge. Unlike Juan Atkins and Derrick May, however, Inner City slipped a little too easily down Joe Public’s gullet. Once you get past the hits, there isn’t much more by way of substance here.

“Oh, I just don’t know where to begin,” Elvis Costello swooned in the opening line to his lusciously hummable 1979 hit “Accidents Will Happen”. Not strictly true. Elvis Costello has always known precisely where to begin. Knowing when to stop, that’s been another kettle of worms. His latest batch of reissues being a case in point. Each has been fattened up for market with a mind-bending welter of bonus tracks, so that Get Happy!!, a 20-track tour de force in the first place, now weighs in at 50 tracks (with Trust at 31 and Punch The Clock at 39, see right). As if that wasn’t enough, each is accompanied by 28 pages of sleevenotes composed by the Human Jukebox himself. As exhausting as they are exhaustive, as mesmerising as they are maddening, these new editions of his early-’80s work go some way towards explaining why Elvis Costello, pop’s most modern pantheist, was ultimately denied his place in the pantheon. Destined to be remembered more as pop’s Peter Greenaway (archly ironic, overstaged, cleverly contrived) than its Michael Powell (iconic, visionary, authentic).

Swing back to 1979 and Costello was riding high on the hog. He’d just released the masterly Armed Forces, his third near-perfect album on the bounce. Having racked up a pile of hits back home, he was now relentlessly touring the States, and looked poised to crack it big. Two years into his career and he was prematurely being talked up as the punk generation’s very own Bob Dylan/Van Morrison/Neil Young. Then came the “Ray Charles” moment in an Ohio bar. In his notes to this final version of Get Happy!!, Costello reflects at length on this ugly incident, “the consequences of which I suppose I’ll carry all my days.”

Costello is not alone in supposing that his racist outburst in that Columbus bar represented a crucial turning point in terms of how he was perceived as a serious artist. Routinely, it is written that he lost our collective trust at that decisive moment and would forever be denied the right to win it back, condemned to a life on the margins as a result. The truth is that, even as Armed Forces was confirming him as the pre-eminent songwriter of his time, our trust in him had begun to get testy long before he slandered Ray Charles in a drunken lapse of reason.

For two years, Costello had moved so fast it was impossible to get a fix on him. He was everywhere and there was so much of him, all of it contradictory. He was so far ahead of himself, it was asking a bit much for the rest of us to ever catch up. The words poured out of him, each song containing multitudes of meanings, attitudes, metaphors. Like a moth trapped in a warehouse full of light bulbs, his music never stood still for a second, flitting from style to style, restless beyond belief.

Just when we managed a brief pause and finally got a fix on him, we realised that Elvis Costello had won our heads but was never going to win our hearts. His music charmed and surprised, stimulated and provoked, but it never quite seemed to connect emotionally. Maybe because there was so much in front of it, so much of Elvis Costello to get past before we reached the heart of it, that we started to wonder whether this music actually possessed a heart at all.

Given all this, an extended holiday might have been in order after Armed Forces. But, less than a year later, he blazed back with Get Happy!! And, what do you know? It was his best yet. By a country mile. Twenty first-rate songs packed into 48 breathlessly claustrophobic minutes?driven by fear, disgust, self-disdain, frustration and romantic obsession from the blaring opening gusts of “Love For Tender” to the final torched regrets of “Riot Act” (with its guilt-ridden nods to Ohio and the morally superior shit storm that followed). More than two decades after its first release, there’s still so much to take in, so much to admire, that it leaves one dizzy.

When it first arrived, deadline-panicked reviewers were quick to pick up on Costello’s remark that the songs were written after a visit to a Camden Town record store, where he ordered up a large crate of obscure soul singles. Thus, in the white heat of its release, the album was widely described as little more than a pastiche of the Motown/Stax back catalogue (an idea enhanced by the release of the first single from the album, a rendition of Sam & Dave’s “I Can’t Stand Up [For Falling Down]”). On reflection, it’s as stylistically wide-reaching as any of his work, ranging from the high-energy waltz of “New Amsterdam” to ingenious supper club examinations of sexual mores like “Motel Matches”, via the blazing “King Horse”, one of Costello’s most brilliant songs.

In fact, it’s so wide-reaching that it’s difficult to know where to start explaining. Never fear. Because Costello’s sleevenotes explain everything. Absolutely everything. He was never one to follow John Wayne’s advice in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon when he said, “Never apologise and never explain.”At least the second part, anyway. But, in these voluminous notes, he explains each song away with such obsessive, completist zeal that your own instinctive responses are worn down to a frazzle by the time you come to actually listen to the music. As amusing as it is to learn that “the song ‘Possession’ was actually written in a Dutch taxi during a five-minute journey back to the studio after I had become drunkenly besotted with the waltress in a local cafe”, the muso revelation that “Black And White World” leans towards “the narrative style of a Ray Davies song while the final recording was based on a Pete Thomas drum pattern which owed something to the style that Richie Hayward of Little Feat employed on ‘Cold, Cold, Cold'”, adds nothing to the pure enjoyment of the song while taking plenty away.

Get Happy!! arrived in January 1980 as perfectly formed as any album of that decade (give or take a Dare! or a Too-Rye-Ay). So the thought of 30 bonus tracks is enough to turn molten the blood of any true believer. No worries, though. These extras amount to no throwaway car boot sale. This version of Get Happy!! is worth the price of admission alone for a frantically souped-up “Getting Mighty Crowded”, a tub-thumping “From A Whisper To A Scream”, a hymnal “Clowntime Is Over” and a gloriously raw-boned “Riot Act”. Get Happy!!, always a masterpiece, is now nothing less than a 50-track encyclopaedia of pop and soul.

Now Dougan has been f