Three weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be in New York interviewing Jack White for what will be Uncut’s next cover story. The trip took in White’s unveiling of his two new bands on Saturday Night Live (you can watch the performances here) and a couple of pretty intense one-on-ones, the first of which became a fairly epic grapple of sorts. The reason for all this, of course, is the reasonably imminent arrival of White’s first solo album, “Blunderbuss”; a record which, I think, fulfils most of our highest expectations for this next step in the story. It marks something of a bridgehead in his career, where the focus inevitably shifts onto White, rather than onto the concepts and confidence tricks with which he has habitually packaged his projects. Still, though, “Blunderbuss” is laden with brilliant topspin, signposted by a new colour code – pale blue – and those two exceptional all-male and all-female bands with which he is playing this new music. As “Love Interruption” and “Sixteen Saltines” may have hinted, plenty of “Blunderbuss” reads at least superficially like a document on battles and misunderstandings between the sexes: even the sole cover version, a roistering vamp through Rudolph Toomb’s “I’m Shakin’”, is consistent to the theme, with its jump-jive era retelling of the story of Samson and Delilah. The first three songs – “Missing Pieces”, “Sixteen Saltines” and “Freedom At 21” (the album’s biggest stylistic departure: a grid of sliding beats and spat lyrics that betrays an inventive recycling of hip-hop dynamics) –in isolation look suspiciously like invective against womankind. But “Blunderbuss” is a more complex and many-sided piece of work, with shifting narratives and perspectives, White voicing male and female parts in at least one song (the outstanding “Hypocritical Kiss”) and a male protagonist on his knees begging for absolution in the valedictory “Take Me With You When You Go”. White is predictably proud and defensive about his various work since the White Stripes’ “Icky Thump”, but there’s no doubt that “Blunderbuss” is the record that most of that band’s fans have been wanting him to make for the past few years: “Sixteen Saltines”, in particular, sounds more or less like a fleshed-out take on the “Elephant”-era sound, particularly “The Hardest Button To Button” (In case you hadn’t heard, White’s live bands are playing songs from throughout his career: no Year Zero absolutism here, pleasingly). Interestingly, though, if there’s one White Stripes album that “Blunderbuss” reminds me of, it’s “Get Behind Me Satan”, with its tricksy R&B piano songs, its playfulness and viciousness. Flourishing piano lines (often played by Brooke Waggoner rather than White. Keyboardists are central to the new live bands- hence the recruitment of Ikey Owens from The Mars Volta as her opposite number in the boy band) anchor a bunch of the best songs here, especially in a run through the middle of “Blunderbuss” that ranks as one of the best sequences White has ever recorded. It begins with the title track, a country-tinged story song that feels very much like a sequel to “Carolina Drama” (the best track, I think, on the Raconteurs’ underrated “Consolers Of The Lonely”), rich with the imagery and swagger of mid-‘70s Dylan. Then there are two extraordinary piano numbers, around which the whole album hinges: “Hypocritical Kiss” and “Weep Themselves To Sleep”, the latter a wonderfully bombastic examination/indictment of male vanity (“And men who fight the world and love the girls the girls that try to hold their hand behind them”) that’s also blessed with the album’s best and most indignant guitar solo. The piano that runs through these two is as much like that of Mike Garson as Nicky Hopkins, which made me think a fair bit of certain neglected congruencies between White and David Bowie. Those are moved on, anyhow, by the sensational “I’m Shakin’” cover and another piano shitkicker, “Trash Tongue Talker”, which features the guitarist from Jeff The Brotherhood among other excellent musicians, but recalls, variously, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell” and, as White himself is happy to point out, James Booker. After that, there’s “Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy”, a rackety New Orleans piano nursery rhyme that might just be the catchiest song on “Blunderbuss”, as well as a rant against hipster posturing and roleplay that reads more self-knowingly than White would probably admit; and a downhome old-time waltz, “I Guess I Should Go To Sleep”, assisted this time by Pokey Lafarge and his band. Waltzes recur throughout “Blunderbuss”, not least on the closing “Take Me With You When You Go”; a song which, along with the shimmering “On And On And On” which precedes it, provide a kind of dreamlike resolution. Among all its other pleasures, “Blunderbuss” has a neat narrative arc, which seems to leave White – or, let’s be scrupulous about this, his protagonist – possessed of a new, contemplative level of self-knowledge. A mature piece of work, you could say, and a terrific album. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

An amazing vernal equinox morning here in London, and a fine walk through the city: down St John Street, into Smithfield, past St Paul’s and the rat-run of old streets down to the river, and over the Millennium Bridge. The perfect soundtrack for this, it transpired, was Damon Albarn’s “Dr Dee” album: not something I had previously expected much from, but which has turned out to be my favourite Albarn project, by a very long distance, since Blur’s “13”. Many things to be said about it, and I suspect this isn’t quite the time, but it does make me want to revisit The Good, The Bad & The Queen and give that a proper listen again. For a taste, anyhow, have a look at Albarn’s trailer for “Dr Dee”, with an extract from “Apple Carts” (nearly printed a typo there and called it “Dr Dre”, which would’ve been interesting). “The Moon Exalted” and “Cathedrals” especially lovely right now. In other news this morning, the Neil Young & Crazy Horse “Americana” album is scheduled for June 5, has an extraordinary cover, and appears to feature a version of “God Save The Queen”. Hard to envisage how these songs might fit into the kind of horizontal workouts that featured on the “Horse Back” jam, but we shall see. Here’s the tracklisting: "Oh Susannah" "Clementine
" "Tom Dooley" "Gallows Pole
" "Get A Job
" "Travel On
" "High Flyin’ Bird
" "She’ll Be Comin ’Round The Mountain" "This Land Is Your Land
" "Wayfarin’ Stranger
" "God Save The Queen" Particularly high hopes for “Wayfarin’ Stranger”, I think. Finally, a gentle nudge in the direction of our latest Uncut Ultimate Music Guide, which I believe is on sale now. The subject this time is REM which allowed us to dig out a bunch of things we all wrote a long time ago and reprint them, as well as enlisting the usual Uncut suspects to contribute lengthy new essays on every album. It’s a nice memorial to a band that have meant a lot to many of us, I think. But as ever, have a look and drop me a line. Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JohnRMulvey

The groaning noise behind me is coming from shelves that have recently started to buckle from the almost daily addition to them of new music books, the majority of them typified by their common bulk, a shared enormity of pages, as if no band’s career can be documented in less pages than might otherwise be devoted to the history of mankind itself, from the beginning, with footnotes, anecdotal asides and a brief biography of everyone who’s ever lived. Here’s a particularly voluminous example – Johnny Rogan's Johnny Rogan's The Byrds: Requiem For The Timeless, which has been threatening to put the aforementioned shelves into a terminal gasping sag since it arrived, presumably delivered by fork-lift truck, towards the end of last year. It’s said of some books that they are too good to put down. Requiem For The Timeless is on the other hand simply too heavy to pick up, whether it’s good or not quite besides the point. At nigh on 1200 pages and as weighty as a small headstone, it’s a wrist-breaker, impossible to read without propping it on a lectern, pulpit or some other free-standing device sturdy enough to support its considerable heft. I mean, if it fell on your head, you’d be driven into the ground up to your knees at least, like some critter in a cartoon being brained by a falling anvil. In times of so-called yore, I suppose it may have been possible to tip a rickety urchin tuppence to carry it around for me. In these more civilised times, this would be rightly frowned upon as unhappy exploitation, unthinkable child labour, like the reintroduction of chimney sweeps. And I suspect it would, anyway, probably cost rather more than the farthing or two that a pasty-faced waif would have happily accepted with a gap-tooth grin and tug of a wispy forelock to pay some sullen modern teen to lug the thing around morosely in my wake, ready for perusal whenever I felt like dipping into pages. Currently next to Rogan’s Byrds’ epic on the shelves behind me is a blessedly slimmer tome of a mere 400 pages, called Will Oldham On Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, a series of interviews with Oldham conducted by the musician and writer Alan Licht. I spent an uncomfortable couple of hours with Oldham in a Camden pub in, I think, 1994, trying to get him to talk in more than vague allusion about his song-writing and career to date. A growing suspicion that he would prefer to talk about just about anything more than himself and his music was illuminatingly borne out when I turned off the tape and after another couple of drinks he mentioned that near the hotel where he was staying a cinema was showing a double bill of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia, which if he hadn’t been booked to play the Camden Monarch that evening he would definitely have gone to see. As a fellow Peckinpah fan and of the opinion, to boot, that The Wild Bunch can lay claim to being the greatest American films ever made, I was quick to engage Oldham in further conversation about Peckinpah. For the hour or so before he was called away to sound-check that’s all we talked about. Where only a little earlier, Oldham had been buttoned-up and evasive, he became instead vastly effusive, no shutting him up now, not that I would have wanted to. When he was on such a garrulous roll, Oldham clearly could be fascinating and illuminating - as he is here in a series of wide-ranging chats I spent the weekend pretty engrossed in. Also lurking behind me are several more titles I have yet to tackle, including a Gregg Allman autobiography, My Cross To Bear, which looks like a suitably ripping read. It’s reasonably slim, too, although at 400 pages not exactly anorexic. Richard King's How Soon is Now? The Madmen And Mavericks Who Made Independent Music 1975-2005, meanwhile, is rather heftier at a solid 600 pages but at first glance looks like it’ll be worth a closer read. I’ve also just received Save What You Can: The Day Of The Triffids, 500 pages of closely typeset pages devoted to the great Australian band by the photographer and writer Bleddyn Butcher, for which I am sure the words ‘labour of love’ must surely be appropriate. Also waiting to be read is a memoir by Ed Sanders, the former Fug, political activist and author of The Family, about the Manson Murders. Also just in: a new book about Townes Van Zandt to add to the two good recent Townes biographies, John Kruth’s To Live Is To Fly and A Deeper Blue by Robert Earl Hardy. This one’s called I’ll Be Here In The Morning: The Songwriting Legacy Of Townes Van Zandt by Brian T Atkinson, which collects anecdote and opinion on Townes’s songs from, among others, Guy Clark, Kris Kristofferson, Lucinda Williams, Dave Alvin, Josh Ritter and Michael Timmins of Cowboy Junkies, who toured with Townes in his later years. That’s a pile of words to get through, then, some of them with a bit of luck in time for the next Uncut book page. Finally, a couple of days after the last newsletter went out with reference in it to Dr Feelgood, I got an email alerting me to an online petition to have a 300 foot gold-plated statue of Lee Brilleaux erected on the seafront in Southend, near the Kursaal, where the Feelgoods often played. I had to scan the original email a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t misreading it – but, yep, sure enough, that’s what it said: a 300 foot high statue. Can’t imagine there’d be any issues over planning permission for something like that. If you’d like to sign the petition, here’s the address to go to: http://focalpoint.org.uk/e-petition Have a good week. Allan Byrds pic: Getty Images

The announcement came at the very end of last week that the novelist Alan Garner has written the third instalment of a story he began in 1960 with The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen. To anyone raised in the Seventies like me, the news might have prompted a sudden, sharp reconnection with their childhood; The Weirdstone, and its 1963 sequel The Moon Of Gomrath, were touchstones of my adolescent reading. Drawn from local legends, Garner’s two books follow the adventures of brother and sister Colin and Susan Whisterfield as they battle svarts, warlocks and shape shifting witches among the caves and crags of Alderley Edge in Cheshire. Along with The Owl Service, another of Garner’s books, the two Brisingamen books are part of a rich seam of literature, TV and film running through the 1960s and Seventies that tap into England’s folkloric history, what I guess we could call ‘folk-fi’. Interestingly, I picked this up with Rob Young at the end of last week, who tells me his next book is a kind of Electric Eden history of British television and film, provisionally titled The Magic Box. The Sixties and Seventies is a great period for this kind of stuff. Cinema audiences encountered the pagan horrors of Witchfinder General (1968), Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973), while television shows like The Stone Tape (1972), The Changes (1975), Children Of The Stones [pictured], King Of The Castle and Raven (all 1977) delved into Arthurian magic, gaia myths and the occult history of Britain. Woody strands of folk-fi even insinuated themselves into more robustly science fiction shows. The 1971 Doctor Who story The Daemons found The Doctor’s arch foe, The Master, masquerading as the vicar of a sleepy rural village, summoning devilish forces from out of a Bronze Age burial mound; a 1978 serial, The Stones Of Blood, was set at a megalith site in Cornwall. Like the Brisingamen books, Susan Cooper’s series of novels known collectively as The Dark Is Rising also draw from the creation myths of Albion. At their most effective – and this seems especially true of Garner’s books – the settings were real places. The events in Brisingamen and Gomrath take place at Stormy Point, Castle Rock and The Wizard pub, all still there to this day (though The Wizard appears to have been upgraded to a gastro pub, whose website advertises “solid, hearty dishes with a contemporary twist”). Rummaging through the barrows and hedgerows of England’s ancient fables during that specific period of the Sixties and Seventies might be seen to be a direct reaction to the sci-fi and gadgetry of the Gerry Anderson shows, Doctor Who or The Tomorrow People, series that looked outwards and to the future for their inspiration. The shows like Children Of The Stones took their power instead from peering inwards at the myths and pre-history of Britain. But perhaps they were also reflective of wider cultural concerns: the old pagan spirit embraced by the radical folk musicians of the Sixties and Seventies, or the enchanted Avalon that the psychedelic movement searched for as far afield as Glastonbury and Strawberry Fields. I don't want to bang on too much about this, as I'm sure Rob will do a far more thorough and authoritative job exploring much of this material in The Magic Box. I would finish, though, with the news that Garner’s book, due in autumn, is called Boneland, according to his publisher HarperCollins. The author, who's 78, picks up the story in the present day, where Colin, now a professor of astrophysics, remembers nothing of his life before he was 13. It's an intriguing idea, certainly, and hopefully its publication will draw a new generation of readers to the Brisingamen books. One thing that has been pinging away in the back of my head is – how fortunate it is no one’s tried to make a film of these books. I remember the dire movie adaption of The Dark Is Rising a few years ago, and I just hope they don’t make the mistake of trying to film Garner's books now. Now, a Sunday afternoon series on the BBC would just about do it, though...