Don’t spread it about, but, yes, I’ve heard the new Dylan album. And four or five tracks in, what I was thinking was: how much better is this thing going to get?
A lot of good things this week, and I should quickly mention that the new Uncut is now in the shops (in the UK at least). This link here has all the details of the issue contents, plus there’s a piece/interview by me about Bill Fay’s impending comeback.
Pricktease time here, I’m afraid. A truly amazing album arrived this week which I’m absolutely certain will be among my favourites of 2010, but due to various covert record company operations and so on, I’m not at liberty to reveal what it is just yet. Negotiations continue: I’ll write more – lots more – as soon as I can. Hold off on trying to post speculation, if you can, so I can keep this under wraps for a few more days.
After a slight lull last week, another clutch of good new 2010 things here, overshadowed slightly by the news at the Durtro website that Bill Fay’s new album – and featuring his first released recordings from the past three decades, more or less – is just about ready to go.
It may not be the most wholly misunderstood album since Bob Dylan's Planet Waves, but as John pointed out in his Wild Mercury Sound blog yesterday, Wilco's new Sky Blue Sky has split their traditionally loyal critical fanbase.
Still waiting for that Phil Collins fan to post a defence of his hero. But in the meantime, Paul Holmes has joined in bashing "Tory Frog Prince Collins". "One half-decent Genesis tune, some so-so work on a John Martyn record and a clutch of Sunny D Motown rip-offs doth not a canon make," he writes. Fair point. Thanks also to Chads, who responded to our talk of Bill Fay the other day by mentioning Simon Finn, another neglected, quasi-mystic British singer-songwriter from the early '70s who, like Fay, was redicovered by Current 93's David Tibet. I must dig out his "Pass The Distance" album, which I haven't played in ages, though I seem to remember some of it being a bit quirky for my taste.
Thanks for your latest bunch of messages, especially the people who said kind things about my David Ackles blog the other day. Good to see more love for Bill Fay, too: we were playing his first album the other day. "Everyone should love David Ackles - just like everyone shoud love Bill Fay," writes Baptiste. "It takes time for writers like them to get some kind of public acknowledgement. I mean: why? Is Bill Fay's "Be Not So Fearful" such a difficult song? Is "Down River" a 30 minutes white noise jam?
In Arthur Penn's 1958 film The Left-Handed Gun, Billy The Kid (Paul Newman) was portrayed as a neurotic, self-destructive teen rebel who behaved like James Dean with a six-gun. Penn threw in the framing device of having a journalist follow Billy through his career of crime. Little Big Man (1970) also features a journalist looking to embroider the facts, but this time the writer meets his match in the shape of the wizened, 121-year-old Jack Crabb (Dustin Hoffman hidden behind several layers of make-up).
