Haul out the Vespa! Jimmy the Mod rides again on two and five CD reissues of Townshend’s 1973 opera. Plus demos, photos, posters, studio diaries… A prog-rock concept album about an R&B-obsessed sub-culture, an opera with only one character, the story of The Who’s first decade, a purging of Pete Townshend’s nervous breakdown, a record most of its creators hated, a production for a technology (‘quadrophonic sound’) that crashed and burned…Quadrophenia is such a contradictory, multi-tasked project it’s a small wonder it ever got off the ground. Almost 40 years after its inception, however, Pete Townshend’s tale of a moddy boy with a muddled head and an aching soul flies on. Following 2010’s theatrical productions and prior, perhaps, to a cinematic sequel, come two remastered, expanded versions, one a straight reissue with some bonus demos, the other a box set laden with even more demos, a 13,000 word essay from Pete and enough memorabilia to satisfy the most hardcore Who fan. As ever with such pumped-up re-issues, the original album is still where the value does or doesn’t lie. Most of Quadrophenia has stood the test of the decades better than might be expected for a record that Roger Daltrey complained buried his vocals and which John Entwhistle said "all sounded the same". Quadrophenia’s storyline is one reason why. Its libretto is less epic, less ambitious and more coherent than its operatic predecessors, Tommy and the aborted sci-fi Lifehouse. Presenting a coming of age drama set in working class London was way against the grain of early 1970s rock, an era besotted with excess and escapism – the grainy monochrome photographs in Quadrophenia’s cover book are the antithesis of glam rock’s feather boas, mascara and platform boots. A few years later, amid post-punk and a mod revival, Townshend’s paean to Shepherd’s Bush made perfect sense – enough sense to bankroll Franc Roddam’s gritty movie version of Quadrophenia. Songs like “Dirty Jobs” and “Punk and The Godfather”, an oddly prescient rumination on rock stardom, still resonate in today’s times. Musically, Quadrophenia has worn patchily. It always hit fewer high spots than Tommy or the Lifehouse numbers that made it onto Who’s Next. There is no blockbuster “Pinball Wizard”, no catchy “Tommy Can you hear me?” chant, no ground-breaking “Baba O Riley” or “Won’t Get Fooled Again”. Recorded in a half-built studio with a fragile Townshend producing (Lifehouse and management problems had taken their toll) its sonic qualities were often out of focus for a record intended to be ‘Quad’ i.e. today’s surround-sound. The remastered version only points up the shortcomings of Keith Moon’s rickety passes around his drum kit and asks again why a yarn of old London is delivered in Daltrey’s mid-Atlantic accent. Much of the music remains dense and fussy, operating on prog rock’s mistaken assumption that complication equals meaning. Eight wearisome minutes of “The Rock” suggest the contrary. Yet there are triumphs - “The Real Me” and “5.15” are chest-beating arena rock against which the the acoustic “I’m One” plays with country-tinged charm. “Love Reign Over Me” provides a closing moment of mysticism that leaves it uncertain whether cosmic mod Jimmy gets back to Blighty from his watery perch off Beachy Head, or drifts off to the ocean depths. Despite its stodgy musical interludes, in its embrace of heroism and transcendence Quadrophenia emerges as real opera. Townshend’s idea that the piece would also reflect the four-headed beast of The Who – Roger the scrapper, John the romantic (hah!), Keith the nutter and Pete the ‘beggar and hypocrite’ – looks more than ever like hooey. Jimmy is simply a dramatised Pete. The band were, as usual, spectators on Townshend’s interior drama. The 25 demos show how fully realised was his concept. Many are more seductive than The Who’s muscular finished items, their reedy vocals the vulnerable opposite of Daltrey’s cocksure delivery (though both ends of the axis are valid). Most intriguing are the songs that didn’t make the vinyl cut; teenage memories like “Get Inside” and ‘Joker James” that recall the earlier, pre-Tommy Who of “A Quick One”, the wistful piano ballad “Any More” and an expanded “Is It Me?” with lyrics like “Your kid may be in the Boy Scouts but he’s kicking queers at night”. The demos give a glimpse of an alternative Quadrophenia, a snappier affair with Jimmy’s alienation from his family made more explicit and a creature for which it would have surely been worth sacrificing a little bloated orchestral angst – but then that’s box set hindsight. Neil Spencer

White Denim, as their frenetic live shows would suggest, are not a band much given to idling. Last summer, while the master tapes of their scintillating third album D were withering on the reel, awaiting record company approval of a reworked song that the band never wanted on the album in the first place, the Texan crack shots decided to use their downtime productively. They retired for one last time to their fabled Silver Bullet trailer in the woods outside Austin and made a whole new album in four weeks, with a view to giving it away for free on the internet. At the time, the record company impasse was considered serious enough to place the future of the band in jeopardy. Yet although the recording of Last Day Of Summer was initially motivated by impatience and frustration, those emotions rarely seep through onto the record. Instead, it sounds like a band kicking back and enjoying themselves, free from external pressure or mediation. If White Denim genuinely believed that this might be their last hurrah, they were sure as hell going to go down blazing rather than whining. Made available as a free download from White Denim’s website last September, Last Day Of Summer achieved its aim of proving to the record company that the band were too good to let slip. Now, that very same record company is giving the album a physical reissue, backed by a full press and marketing campaign, acknowledging that it deserves to be heard by a wider audience. In fact, Last Day Of Summer is as good as anything White Denim have ever done, and for any listeners daunted by D’s proggier diversions, it might even prove to be a gentler introduction to this terrific band. The album hares off at a frightening pace with a hilarious seat-of-the-pants romp through “I’d Have It Just The Way We Were”, the breezy 6/8 jam from second album Fits (not for the first time, you will convince yourself that drummer Josh Block must have at least three arms). That’s swiftly followed by the infectious breakneck boogie of “Home Together” (Canned Heat on heat?) and probably the catchiest top-down driving rock song White Denim have ever written in the form of “Tony Fatti”, Petralli assuming the role of a washed-up ‘60s stuntman poignantly pleading for one last ride. Things calm down a little after that, but even an apparently straightforward Southern strut like “If You’re Changing” exists in three different time signatures, before giving way to the lithe, Soft Machine-style folk-jazz excursions of “Incaviglia” and “Light Light Light”. As always with White Denim though, the musicianship never overwhelms the songwriting, existing as a welcome bonus rather than an indulgent distraction. The astonishing guitar break at the end of “Our Get” – the work of fleet-fingered new guitarist Austin Jenkins, making an impressive debut here – is much more than mere decoration, lifting the song into an entirely new realm. Then there’s “Champ”, an enjoyable spot of a rough-and-tumble psych that harks back to the band’s antsy garage rock beginnings, and “Shy Billy”, which brilliantly chances its arm at lovesick ’80s funk. By the time you reach closing track “New Coat”, which nods towards at least three different soul classics, all you’re really conscious of is having been rigorously entertained. Whether they spend six months in a proper studio or four weeks in a caravan, White Denim are incapable of making a boring record. We should be very grateful that they’ve survived to make some more. Sam Richards Q&A: James Petralli Why did you decide to record a whole new album while you waited for D to progress? We were pretty uncomfortable with having to wait two years to follow up Fits, and we also had a ton of strong material that was essentially ready to go. We feared that the songs from Last Day would become less interesting to us as time went by, and that if we didn’t push them out they could be lost. We also figured that if the album generated excitement in our fans, then it might do the same with our business partners and encourage them to set a release date for . How did the circumstances influence the feel of the record? It was a typically scorching August in Texas and we were enjoying a summer off of the road, even though we were feeling increasingly nervous about our future as a band. We treated the process like a vacation, drinking and smoking in the afternoon, generally just enjoying one another's company, taking it easy. We knew we were going to be sharing the music immediately, so we wanted it to feel light and casual, but also to reflect the precarious state of the band. We ended up with a record that is by no means overworked. I think it is flawed in some really fun and interesting ways that are hopefully inviting to listeners. Were you sad to say goodbye to the caravan? It was certainly bittersweet. The trailer was really good to us, but it was becoming impractical. These days we are always camped out in a really great space in Austin called Lakeside. INTERVIEW: SAM RICHARDS

It didn’t require a telescope to spot Craig Finn’s first solo record glinting on the horizon. The most recent Hold Steady album, last year’s Heaven Is Whenever, hinted at creative restlessness within the ranks. The band carved out a little more space and Finn scaled down his narratives to something less obviously cinematic, yet it seemed clear there was ample room for further exploration. With the group currently on a recording hiatus until 2012, Finn has duly wriggled free from their tightly-wound signature sound to embrace a rootsy intimacy. Recorded in Austin with Spoon producer Mike McCarthy and a band which includes White Denim drummer Josh Block, Clear Heart Full Eyes aims for what Finn calls “pure songwriting” and offers the strongest evidence yet that the distance between writer and subject matter is rapidly closing. Appropriately for a debut solo outing, these songs are primarily concerned with solitude: people walk into every conceivable kind of wilderness and are either stranded or simply disappear; lovers leave yet still hang around cheap rooms like phantoms. The music matches the mood, drawing heavily on a broad sweep of Americana. The emotional and sonic terrain of many of these songs will be familiar to anyone who’s ever visited American Music Club’s California, REM’s “Country Feedback”, or the darker edges of Whiskeytown’s Pneumonia. Opener “Apollo Bay” is soaked in the same slow, swampy blues vibe as “Can’t Wait” from Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind. Rickie Ray Jackson’s pedal steel makes an evocative scene-setter throughout, whether descending like sea mist over mournful minor chords on the bleakly beautiful “Western Pier”, or sending hot little licks scudding over the train-track rhythm of “New Friend Jesus”, a mordant mix of cutting irony and ragged country-rock which finds Finn flirting with a Texas twang. Finn does occasionally return to the comforting embrace of beer, bar-room rock and Jesus. “When No One’s Watching”, the tale of a “weak man living off of weaker women” told over a twitchy back-and-forth riff, is pretty much business as usual. “No Future”, a terrific chugging rocker that calls in Johnny Rotten and Freddie Mercury as spiritual advisors, is similarly archetypal. Elsewhere, however, the familiar falls slightly flat. “Jackson” has some weird three-way thing going on between an actor, his depressive girlfriend and the protagonist, but it’s all a bit drab and disjointed. The stomping “Honolulu Blues” is a blast but feels similarly peripheral, partly because it comes directly before a strikingly beautiful troika of heartbreakers, a closing suite as affecting as anything Finn has done. “Rented Room” – sparse, desperate, quietly anthemic – obsesses over a departed lover from a strip-lit box “above a saloon”, while “Balcony” flips back to the moment it all ended, culminating in a parting shot full of blackly comic bravado: “I hope that dude don’t break his nails when he tries to help you carry all your stuff”, sung over a gorgeous, deceptively breezy descending melody. The slow, sad waltz of “Not Much Left Of Us” is made of far darker stuff: weeping pedal steel, drawling fiddle and Finn’s ragged voice, at once urgent and exhausted. The lyric is one long night sweat, spilling out memories, regrets and a series of unforgettable images, none more remarkable than: “The part that remains is rotten and bruised, the soft spot on a passion fruit”. Yet it’s all he has left, and he’s holding on tight. Fact or fiction? Does it matter? Finn’s been playing this game too long to suddenly turn confessional, but there’s no ambiguity about the quality of the music. It won’t soundtrack any turbo-charged nights on the tiles, but Clear Heart Full Eyes is a low-key triumph, containing some of the most emotionally satisfying work Finn has yet produced. Graeme Thomson Q&A: CRAIG FINN Why a solo album? We decided to take time off and I wanted something to do. I also wanted out of my comfort zone. A lot of these songs were quiet and just didn’t seen right for the band, and they were all supportive. I don’t think they’d have wanted to make the record I’ve made. How did it come together? Mike [McCarthy] picked the musicians. I first met them on the Monday morning in the studio. We shook hands, got to work, and by Friday night we had 14 songs recorded. They jumped right in. It was exciting and validated what I wanted to do. The record feels much closer, more personal.. It’s that warm Americana thing. I’ve been listening to Townes Van Zandt, Warren Zevon, Neil Young, and the pedal steel is so nice, it lilts and makes everything a little sadder. And yes, I think there’s a little more of myself on the line. I turned 40 in August and wanted to reflect the quieter moments, those softer fears and anxieties. A lot of the songs are about this idea of being displaced and alone, whether geographically or through the end of a relationship. Finding yourself by yourself – that’s a big theme. INTERVIEW: GRAEME THOMSON

MC Taylor, a songwriter and a student of folklore, is not a declamatory man. His songs are compressed and poetic, with nary a syllable out of place. You will hear echoes of familiar things – a bit of Van Morrison’s mystical warmth, or John Martyn’s angst, and the language will be unfussy, and derived from the folk tradition. Poor Moon does not sound especially like a record from 2011, but Taylor has a way of explaining the distinction between timelessness and revivalism. Hiss Golden Messenger are not, he says, “civil-war re-enactors”. So, while Taylor can talk about his ambition to follow the lead of The Band and Fairport Convention by adapting and re-tooling traditional forms, there is nothing precious about the way the music unfurls. The impact is emotional, not intellectual, because (i)Poor Moon(i) is the sound of a man grappling with matters which go beyond cold reason. It is a record about faith, in which the most startling song is also the least typical. That song is called “Jesus Shot Me In The Head” (and you are permitted to laugh). A bit of context may be required, as Hiss Golden Messenger operate in a way that seems designed to cultivate obscurity. (i)Poor Moon(i), for example, is not available on CD. For now, it exists in a limited edition of 500 hand-tooled copies. (The North Carolina boutique label, Paradise Of Bachelors, is not fond of CDs, believing them to be technologically obsolete, and – with only a slight acknowledgment of the contradiction – a poor substitute for a beautiful vinyl artefact.) Hiss Golden Messenger is the collective name for Taylor, the principal songwriter, and his long-time cohort, Scott Hirsch. In a previous life, they both toiled in the San Francisco-based country-rock group, The Court and Spark. Taylor relocated to the rural Piedmont mill town of Pittsboro, North Carolina, to further his studies, and Hirsch moved to Brooklyn, where he works on film music. Musically, Taylor seems to have been inspired by the move. Living in a rural environment where old-time music is not an affectation has broadened his horizons, but purists should be aware that Taylor’s lyrics are as inspired by Japanese haiku as they are by hillbilly tropes. This is no costume drama, remember. On a rough count, (i)Poor Moon(i) is the fifth HGM album, though digital EPs and bonus releases make the tally unreliable. Two LPs (2010’s (i)Bad Debt(i), and 2009’s (i)Country Hai East Cotton(i)) were given a broader release on the Blackmaps label), and – to muddy things further - several of the songs from (i)Bad Debt(i) are reworked on (i)Poor Moon(i). Confusing? Yes. But perhaps that the price you pay for single-minded songcraft. (i)Poor Moon(i) is a beautiful, accomplished record. The songs are autumnal, and linked by swampy sound-effects; rain here, cicadas there. In the bloody-mindedness of its vision, I was reminded of that other faith-seeking mongrel, Mike Scott, particularly in the use of gothic language: see the beautifully mellow “Drummer Down”, with its archaic talk of hexes, or “Under All The Land”, a pained strum, evoking the Israelites and Canaan-land, played out beneath a super-blue crescent moon. “Dreamwood” is a sweet, wiry instrumental, channelling John Fahey, and “A Working Man Can’t Make It No Way” is a straight-up overalls-on country shuffle about the travails of a hard-workin’ family which deserves to be covered by Merle Haggard. Taylor mentions two albums as being a direct influence: Ronnie Laine’s (i)Anymore For Anymore(i) (for its deep humility) and Richard & Linda Thompson’s (i)I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight(i), not least because it was recorded in a few days. ((i)Poor Moon(i) took a week.) He talks earnestly about pursuing “an organic aesthetic”, incorporating traditional sounds within a contemporary framework. If that makes the record sound like a yoga workshop, it isn’t. (i)Poor Moon(i) is gospel, played with blue notes. It is the sound of a sweet soul contemplating deliverance; as mellow and fierce and fearful as that. Alastair Mc Kay Q&A: MC TAYLOR What was your plan for the album? “There are some touchstones musically, but we’re resigned to the fact that we’re never going to sound like anyone except for ourselves. So we’re just trying to refine what it is that we do. We reference records, and we always think we’re being clever about it, but if we got down to it, I think we’d realise that we are referencing the same records time and time again." What are they? “A lot of my work is framed by American country and western music, folk music, gospel music – American roots music, for want of a better word. I tend to use those kinds of music as a rubric when I’m writing; obviously I depart pretty significantly, but I think that there are certain lyrical motifs that exist in traditional American music, that I carry into what I do." Which artists do you keep returning to? "There’s all kinds of other stuff that we like and grew up together listening to. We’re always referencing John Martyn records, we’re always referencing Fairport Convention records – Full House is a really big one for both Scott and I, we’re always referencing the first couple records by The Band. A lot of this stuff comes from a time period in Western popular music when people seemed to be searching for their roots." INTERVIEW: ALASTAIR MCKAY

It is a sad fact of life that a man from any walk of life – even the often preposterous world of music – will struggle to be taken seriously if he wanders about wearing a beard the size of Gibraltar, decorating his face with white stars and red war paint, growing his hair down to his waist, then dying it yellow on one side of the parting and blue on the other. So it is with Roy Wood, still best remembered for his terrifying dayglo clan chief appearance than the succession of superb pop songs he wrote for The Move, ELO, Wizzard and – perhaps most impressively - as a solo performer. This retrospective – hand-picked and remastered by Wood himself – attempts to right that wrong, showcasing 36 of Wood’s songs over two CDs. Wood formed The Move in Birmingham in 1966 and the band had their first big hit in 1967 with “Night Of Fear” (absent from this set, along with much before 1970 bar "Fire Brigade" and a rearranged version of 1969’s Beatles-esque “Blackberry Way”). Although deeply attached to Motown and 1950s rock and roll, Wood was an inventive arranger and composer from the start, incorporating classical elements to his songs that produced crackers like 1971’s wonderfully weird, Kinks-like “Chinatown” or the semi-metal stompathon “Brontosaurus”. When his pop side and his experimental side gelled, the results were fascinating but sometimes the differences were irreconcilable. It was his desire for more flexibility than he could get with The Move that led to the formation of ELO (represented here by the instrumental “First Movement”), but Wood soon left them to form Wizzard, while continuing to record as a solo artist. It’s the latter – all from the early 1970s - that form the most revelatory aspect of this collection: “Forever” is a beautiful Motown ballad; “Dear Elaine” an experimental semi-classical pop song that recalls Pink Floyd and Queen; “Oh What A Shame” a delightful collision of The Beach Boys and Neil Sedaka; “Look Thru The Eyes Of A Fool” oozes girl band brilliance; while “Why Does Such A Pretty Girl (Sing These Sad Songs)” is a harmonic gem. These are all gorgeous examples of the three-minute pop song, but there’s also experimentalism in the form of the Monty Python does Fairport Convention distorted oddity “Miss Clarke And The Computer”. The bulk of these are culled from Wood’s two solo albums, Bounders (1973) and Mustard (1975), the twin high points of his career: surprisingly Music Box has no space for other classics of this era like “You Sure Got It Now” and “Songs Of Praise”. Wood’s gifts as a songwriter were now noted by others – covers of The Move’s “I Can Hear The Grass Grow” and “Flowers In The Rain” are featured here, by Status Quo and Nancy Sinatra respectively. Alongside these gems, Wood was becoming better know for the hard-edged good-time rock and roll he recorded with Wizzard, epitomised by rabble-rousing singles like the Slade-influenced bagpipe-rocker “R U Red E 2 Rock” and the belting glam rock of “See My Baby Jive” and “Ball Park Incident”, as well as the smash hit “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”. But even with Wizzard, Wood was pushing boundaries. In 1974, he recorded what was intended to be a double album – one album of rock, the other of jazz-rock. The label, Jet Records, balked and the jazz-rock album was only released in 1999 as the bizarre but fascinating Main Street. There are two tracks from it on here - “French Perfume” and “Main Street” – both splendid. If the album had been released as planned, Wood feels his career would have taken a different route and it was at this point that the desire for invention began to fade. Exhausted, his career began to wind down, although he continued to pound the pop-rock circuit and recorded more than decent synth-heavy 80s wannabe anthems like “Down To Zero”, “Lion’s Heart” and “Green Glass Windows”. And he can always be seen on a TV screen at least once a year, dressed like Braveheart and bellowing about Christmas. Peter Watts