Fans of BBC’s Sherlock will know that the legendary detective has what he calls a Memory Palace, in which he is given to roam around, looking usually for clues to mysteries galore. My own equivalent is a sort of Memory Shed, where I am inclined to potter, most recently after reading Peter Watts’ excellent cover story on The Ramones in the current Uncut.

I can’t now remember what coincidence of planetary alignment in May, 1977 might have been responsible for the appearance over the same weekend in Glasgow of the four most celebrated bands of the so-called CBGB generation. Whatever: it’s announced that on Saturday night in Glasgow, The Ramones will be playing at Strathclyde University, supported by Talking Heads. On Sunday, at the fabled Glasgow Apollo, Television will be making their UK debut, with Blondie opening.

The next thing you know, I’m on a plane north from London to write the whole thing up for a cover story – GLASGOW’S BURNING! – for what used to be Melody Maker, said piece the first in what turns out to be a series of reports from the city on the local response to the musical insurrection of punk.

To which end, early on Saturday morning I’m out in the city centre, looking for someone who might give me a clue to what’s happening here. Coming out of a record shop, I bump into 17-year old Tim Niblock, blond hair cropped like Paul Simonon and despite his Grateful Dead T-shirt clearly someone who may have seized upon punk with the desperate vigour of a drowning man clutching at random flotsam. This indeed turns out to be the case, Tim, just out of school in nearby Newton Mearns, with no immediate prospects of unemployment, finding in punk, as he tells me, loud echoes of his own frustrated ambitions.

“The music’s given me hope,” he says, adding that if he is quoted in the feature I am going to write he would like to be identified by his punk alias. Which is what, Tim?

“Er,” he says, clearly making this up as he goes along. “Scat Rabies!” he says and I give him a look that tells him this doesn’t sound too cool.

“Er, OK. . .” he grimaces. “What about Terry Singer?”

Terry Singer?

“Aye,” he says. “Same principle really as Joe Strummer, that’s what I’m thinking.”

We decide there’s nothing wrong as a name with Tim, and now he’s telling me about the previous weekend when he’d hitched to Edinburgh to see The Clash – “magic band!” – and had no complaints about having to sleep rough that night because after the show he’d met Joe Strummer. Like The Sex Pistols before them, The Clash had been prevented from playing Glasgow by the city’s Lord Provost, who had also tried to ban The Ramones.

“Glasgow has enough yobs of its own,” he had bellowed from the pages of the local paper. “We don’t need to import them.”

Tim is loud in defence of punk, which is being blamed for a lot of local violence. It’s not the punks who are causing the trouble, he insists. It’s superannuated old hairies, belligerent Glasgow hippies, if you can believe it. Which I don’t until we fetch up in a bar called The Blenheim – “a hippie stronghold,” according to Tim – and we are accosted by a tattooed alky longhair with dismal teeth who gives us a right bollocking, shouting like a wino and threatening to thrash us senseless because it has taken root in his festering imagination that all punks are derelict scum with a taste for the flesh of small children.

Not long after this, we are at Stratchclyde University watching Talking Heads play through an entire set by way of a soundcheck, watched by a small crowd of Glasgow’s self-appointed punk elite. There’s great excitement when The Ramones lurch into view for their soundcheck and alarm when after about two number played at a volume slightly less deafening than a nuclear explosion blow out half the PA.

Their tour manager makes a series of hasty phone calls and rushes of to the Apollo to borrow some gear from, of all people, American singer-songwriter Dory Previn, an unlikely saviour. The gig that night, by the way, is fantastic and I feel duly contrite about the scathing review I’d written of The Ramones London debut at The Roundhouse a year before, a gig I vividly remember attending in an apocalyptically bad mood.

The next night, at a sadly half-full Apollo, you see a lot of the same punk faces who’d blagged their way into the Ramones show. Blondie take the stage, clearly pissed off about something, a mood that makes them quickly tiresome. They’re about to play “X Offender” when Debbie Harry calls a halt to the proceedings. “WAITAMINUTE!” she shrieks, the band screeching to a halt, confused at her outburst. There’s a hasty conflab, a bit of swearing – “AWWWW, FUCK!” Harry howls – and they complete a miserable set, Chris Stein flinging his guitar at drummer Clem Burke as he stalks off in a huff.

“For the first time anywhere in Britain,” announces DJ Andy Dunkley at approximately 9.30, “please welcome TELEVISION!”

This is pretty much what I’ve been waiting for the whole weekend, Marquee Moon an album of which I am in utterly besotted awe, and for the next 75 minutes Television are truly transcendent. They play “See No Evil” and “Venus” and “Elevation” from the album, “Foxhole” and “Adventure” from what will be its follow-up, a long, long version of their first single, “Little Johnny Jewel”, and then – what’s this? Good Christ, it’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”! “Friction” follows, then Tom Verlaine, pale as an angel, speaks softly to us, possibly his first words tonight.

“It goes like this,” he says, “and it’s called ‘Marquee Moon’.” Cue jaw-dropping astonishment as about 20 minutes later Verlaine and co-guitarist Richard Lloydreach a pitch of screaming intensity, Verlaine suddenly hit from all sides by spotlights. They split, return for one encore – another huge surprise, a storming version of “Satisfaction”, no less.

Thirty years on, the thrill of it all comes back to me with a shuddering clarity. If you were at either or both of these shows in Glasgow that momentous weekend, I’d love to hear from you, and if you see Tim Niblock, last heard of in Australia, say hi for me.

If you were looking for a unifying thread running through HBO’s excellent new series, True Detective, then it might well be to do with faith: those who have it, those who don’t and those who may well be exploiting it for their own ends.

True Detective is set in the American South where the spiritual needs of the community is paramount, tent revivals are commonplace and where the governor’s cousin is in the process of setting up a ‘religious crimes task force’. As one character learns early on, it does no good to air more progressive views regarding religion in front of work colleagues. Elsewhere, a burned out church might act as the base for an altogether different kind of worship. Dismal homemade shrines to the departed sit on shelves in the many trailers and shacks we visit during the series. A man is so burned by traumatic events in his past that he has no faith left in people and views the universe as essentially meaningless. Another man might use his faith and his status to conceal other, less desirable impulses.

Although set in 2012, the bulk of True Detective takes place in flashback during an investigation in 1995 by homicide detectives Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson) and Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) into the murder of a prostitute in Erath, Louisiana. The high profile pairing of McConaughey and Harrelson – long standing friends in real life – is clearly a major coup even for a network of HBO’s stature, even if it is just for this first season (future series will focus on different cops, locations and stories). McConaughey is arguably the hottest actor on the planet right now, while Harrelson is always a reliably intense guy who’s done some excellent work recently in Out Of The Furnace, Rampart and Seven Psychopaths. As we discover from the events taking place in 1995, Hart and Cohle and very different men: as Hart says in one of the series’ first lines of dialogue, “You don’t pick your parents and you don’t pick your partner.” Hart is a well-respected family man, a conservative, a frequent church-goer, who is hitting middle age and the attendant worries regards hair loss and waistline gain – just “a regular dude… with a big ass dick.” His partner, meanwhile, lives in a sparely furnished apartment with only a crucifix and a box of criminology books for company. He walks slowly and rigidly; a self-contained, guarded presence who suffers from “chemical flashbacks”. Much to the annoyance of Hart, he is prone to lengthy, misanthropic monologues. As the action unfolds in 1995, it seems our first impressions of Hart and Cohle might not be entirely correct: both men have their private crises, both men are concealing truths from themselves and from one another. And as we can see from their appearance in 2012, the intervening years have not been especially kind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXwCoNwBSkQ

Such is the crowded market place for TV cop shows, you might think that in order to make an impression you need a gimmick – A Thing – to differentiate your cop from all the other cops running around out there. This isn’t strictly true: a good story, well told, will carry the day more often than not. But True Detective writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Fukunaga are working hard to make this a deeper and more considered exploration of the standard police procedural. Across the show’s eight episode run, True Detective – ripe Southern Gothic – is not as much about the murder as it is about the two investigators in charge of solving it. Splitting the narrative across two time periods, we see how Cohle and Hunt have changed, both physically and emotionally. We discover that their relationship has deteriorated, how their memories (both are unreliable narrators) are framed by prejudices as much as the passing of time, and that the original murder case is somehow relevant 17 years on. In 2012, Cohle and Hart are separately providing videotaped accounts of the murder case after the original files were – so we’re told – destroyed in a hurricane. In this later setting, Hart’s bluff, good-old-boy demeanor has become more reserved. Cohle, on the other hand, has changed beyond all recognition: chain smoking, chugging beers, ponytailed and moustached, he looks like he’s just come down from the hills.

Lately, Louisiana has become a favourite setting for HBO shows – Treme and True Blood. Certainly there’s something deeply photogenic about the great expanses of water-logged flatland that spool past Hart and Cohle’s car window, or the oil refineries way off in the distance pumping clouds of white smoke into the blue skies; the truck stops, bars and churches, titty bars and meth labs. Incidentally, the show was originally set in the Ozarks: another inhospitable landscape, similarly populated by small, ruined communities out there on the very edge of things. The story meanders along like the Mississippi itself, slow and leisurely, taking its time. The details emerge incrementally, though. Has this murder happened in isolation? Who or what is “the King in Yellow”? Why is the investigation being examined all these years later? “The world needs bad men,” says Cohle. “We keep the other bad men from the door.”

Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner.

True Detective begins on February 22 on Sky Atlantic

I was struck by a couple of tweets this morning from Peter Watts (@peter_watts and the author of this month’s Ramones cover story in Uncut). The first ran, “I read the word ‘liminal’ in the Standard the other day. I think that’s psychogeography’s ‘hippie wigs in Woolworths’ moment.”

The second linked to a graph showing the radical increase in literary use of ‘liminal’ in the past 20 years. It’s indicative, perhaps, of a certain crepuscular aesthetic gaining serious cultural traction: of the preoccupations of goth informing narratives of place (I just finished reading, with reservations, Gareth Rees’ “Marshlands”, a study of my favourite part of London, Walthamstow and Hackney Marshes) and migrating into more critically acceptable areas; like, say, hauntology.

It was a timely reference, since there are a couple of records redolent of all this that I’ve been playing a lot for the last fortnight, in spite of my residual suspicions of the whole schtick. Pye Corner Audio, for a start, has strong affiliations with the Ghost Box label, nexus of hauntology and a scene that, while producing some fine music (notably the Broadcast & The Focus Group collaboration) often feels like a bunch of ‘70s TV theorists and Bagpuss fetishists finding academically justifiable ways of saying that “Children Of The Stones” was kind of scary.

A degree of subterfuge and whimsy surrounds British producer Martin Jenkins, not least his generally anonymous role as “The Head Technician” of Pye Corner Audio. “Black Mill Tapes Volumes 3&4”, however, is very pleasing because it indulges in another kind of nostalgia: as a throwback to the point 20-odd years ago when Warp artists started appropriating German kosmische and Detroit techno for their own uncanny ends.

Jenkins’ track titles are a pretty useful indication of what he’s up to here, redolent as they are less of radiophonic phantasy and more of IDM’s crypto-scientific utilitarianism (though he doesn’t go quite as far as Autechre’s deranged chemical neologising). Seven of them are labelled “Electronic Rhythm”, while the album’s high point has a name as well as a sound that could have been lifted from The Aphex Twin’s “Selected Ambient Works Volume One”; ““Dystopian Vector Part One”.

There is, of course, plenty of the requisite creepy ambience in the mix, though Jenkins on this occasion seems, again, to be working closer to the artful murk of Boards Of Canada rather than the cut’n’paste ‘70s nightmares of some of his contemporaries. It’s an elegant reboot all round.

Writing a review of the new Bohren & Der Club Of Gore album the other day, I must confess I almost slipped in the word “liminal”, for my sins. In this case, the aesthetic is in now way hauntological, but a kind of finessing of the bohemian art-goth business epitomised by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds in their Berlin phase, and the avant-garde, “respectable” redeployment of black metal by Sunn 0))) and their salon of doom.

Bohren & Der Club Of Gore – Piano Nights (Album Teaser) from PIASGermany on Vimeo.

Again, this is a scene that I have finite time for (age-old anti-goth feelings will linger, it seems). But, again, this German quartet’s records consistently transcend those misgivings. Essentially, Bohren’s big idea – heard to best effect on 2008’s “Dolores”, though most of their albums of the past 20 years are nearly as good – is to apply the melodically slothful heaviness of Sunn 0))) (and the tradition from which it derives, from Black Sabbath through Earth) to cocktail jazz.

It sounds like a ridiculous idea on paper but, as “Piano Nights” proves, it genuinely works. The trappings can be strained – not least the shots which accompanied a recent Pitchfork stream of the album, which focused repeatedly on candles being burned in beer bottles – but the music is substantially prettier and more restful than the blackened aesthetic might suggest, in much the same way as Angelo Badalamenti’s music for “Twin Peaks” and “Blue Velvet” operated shorn of its context.

Sustained Mellotron notes (they appear very keen on the choral setting) imbue the spare sax, piano and brushed cymbal manoeuvres with a fetching grandeur. And while “Fahr Zur Hölle” (“Driving To Hell”) is a predictable track name, the outstanding “Segeln Ohne Wind” (“Sailing Without Wind”) is a more serendipitous one.

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