Over the summer, I got pretty hooked on a playlist/mixtape thing, "Wah Wah Cowboys", that turned up on a blog called The Old Straight Track. A triumph of early ‘70s crate-digging, "Wah Wah Cowboys" located a high place where country and country-rock found a groove, and packed a fair few revelations into 45 minutes. Who could tell that the good-time trucking opener, “Cross Country”, was the work of an inveterate pub-rocker from Southend, Mickey Jupp? Why hadn’t anyone told me before about “Scorpio Woman”, by Link Wray’s Mordicai Jones project? And where on earth was I going to find the first two solo albums by the man who produced Gene Clark’s "No Other", Thomas Jefferson Kaye? A mixtape can be immensely potent, sending you on an odyssey across the internet, via a few second-hand stores, and opening up arcane seams in rock history. That’s how "Wah Wah Cowboys" worked for me. New music, though, can also tap into deep scenes, and that goes for the records made by the curator of The Old Straight Track, Michael Taylor. Taylor is a folklorist, currently living somewhere beautiful in North Carolina, who used to front a San Francisco band, Court And Spark, that I can’t honestly remember too well. Over the past year or two, Taylor has quietly disseminated a couple of records by his new band, Hiss Golden Messenger, both of which have a strong insidious quality, and which come imbued with Taylor’s profound knowledge and understanding of vintage sounds. The first, from 2009, is a studio CD called "Country Hai East Cotton", heavy with Laurel Canyon vibes, which sits comfortably in between fellow travellers PG Six and Brightblack Morning Light. The second, from earlier this year, is a vinyl-only number called "Root Work", which revisits a bunch of "Country Hai" songs for a radio session, and gives them a looser, less tentative treatment. “Touchstones, as I see them, would be Traffic's "Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys", possibly some live Dead, some vintage-era Tubby/Jammy,” Michael wrote to me at the time, and he had a point. Those two records came out on Taylor’s Heaven & Earth Magic Recording Company, but for the forthcoming “Bad Debt” EP, Hiss Golden Messenger have stepped on to a UK label, Blackmaps, hired a publicist and begun moving slowly overground. With some perversity, "Bad Debt" is substantially rougher-sounding than its crafted predecessors: just Taylor and his guitar, at home over last winter, essaying nine folk-soul nuggets that recall at least one of the Sacred Tims; Hardin, probably. Even in the rawest state, though, these are powerful songs, not least because of their peculiar mix of fervid Christian visions and hardbitten outlaw country, “Jesus Shot Me In The Head” being the most extreme example of Taylor’s mighty engaging schtick. The blend reminds me a little of Wooden Wand, who coincidentally has two good albums out this month, "Death Seat" and "Wither Thou Goest, Cretin".

Sitting on stage at London’s BFI Southbank, Bruce Springsteen is reflecting on events 33 years ago, when he and the E Street Band entered New York’s Record Plant studios to record the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album. “It’s funny now,” he sighs. “We really didn’t know what we were doing. We really didn’t know how to make a record. We were adverse to professionalism.” Springsteen is in London, along with manager Jon Landau and film maker Thom Zimny, to unveil a new documentary, The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town – part of the capacious 3 CD/3 DVD reissue box set that also includes The Promise, an album of 21 unreleased outtakes from the Darkness…sessions. That Springsteen has chosen to focus the launch of this extraordinary archival package around the film perhaps indicates how important it is as a document of the Darkness… period. He premiered the material first at the Toronto Film Festival in September, where he was interviewed onstage by Ed Norton, and after this London showing he’s taking it straight off to the Rome Film Festival. Indeed, the film itself is tremendous. It’s a mixture of contemporary interviews with Springsteen, the E Street Band and others involved with the album, cut in with fascinating black and white archive footage from the studio, shot by a friend of Springsteen’s, Barry Rebo, on a hand-held video recorder. “He shot this stuff then sat on it for 30 years,” says Springsteen at the BFI. “Once in a while, I’d go over to his apartment and we’d look at it and laugh and wonder what to do with it.” Of course, Springsteen has done this kind of thing before – the 2005 reissue of Born To Run included a documentary, Wings For Wheels, assembled from footage of Rebo’s visits to those recording sessions. It caught the band at a pivotal period; they entered the studio lean and hungry, and came out with a major hit record. The Promise film, meanwhile, finds them in an equally critical period, but one characterised by much uncertainty. “I was so filled with doubt, the only way I knew to get something done was to slog away at it for hours and hours,” admits Springsteen from the stage of the Southbank. “The sense of purpose was desperation.” The cause of this seems to be two-fold. As Springsteen acknowledges in one of the contemporaneous interviews in Zimny’s film, “the success we had with Born To Run… brought me an audience, but it also frightened me.” Another problem was the legal dispute between Springsteen and his then-manager Mike Appel (who appears in the film, resembling a lost Osmond brother). The lawsuit prohibited the band from entering the studio for a year, the very time when they should have been capitalising on the success of Born To Run. Instead, the band regrouped at Springsteen’s house at Holmdel, New Jersey, for endless rehearsals. “These guys were my soldiers,” Springsteen says. “I thought I’d failed them in some way.” The mood: “deep despair and resilience.” But something quite profound happened to Springsteen during this period. As more than one person wryly comments in The Promise, Springsteen had only written nine songs for Born To Run, eight of which actually appeared on the record. Now, perhaps galvanised by the legal wrangles with Appel, he went into creative overdrive. When the band eventually made it to the Record Plant in New York to begin the Darkness… sessions, they recorded 70 songs. As Springsteen explains in the film’s present day footage, he had “multiversions” of songs, “a big junkyard of stuff” that he’d cannibalise accordingly. “It’s like a car. You pull stuff out of one car and put it in another car to make that car work.” In one of the film’s most telling archival clips, we see co-producer Jon Landau point at one of Springsteen’s notebooks in the studio and say, “Close that book, Bruce. The only thing that can come out of that book is more work.” The volume of songs he eventually discarded was astonishing. “It took an enormous amount of disciple,” says Steve Van Zandt. Patti Smith pops up to tell a sweet story about the first time she heard one of those jettisoned songs, “Because The Night” – that she eventually recorded with great success – while waiting for a phone call from her future husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. In the film, Springsteen admits to creative tensions driven by conflicting musical influences: his love of the Brill Building aesthetic, a discovery of country music (in particular, Hank Williams), the nascent punk scene, and curious love/fear relationship with pop music. “I was 27 and the product of FM pop radio,” he says early on. Later, he talks enthusiastically about the thrill of pop’s “never-ending now” – only to can potential hits like “Fire” and “Because The Night”. As Van Zandt ruefully observes, “It’s a bit tragic, in a way. He would have been one of the great pop songwriters of all time.” Springsteen eventually settled on a more thematic approach for Darkness…, inspired as he reveals on stage at the BFI by “James M Cain novels, Jim Thompson novels, and film noir. Gun Crazy, Out Of The Past, they were big pictures for me. Film noir was adult. It felt very close to my own psychology. I wanted my characters to have their own existential complexities.” All of this bubbles away to make pretty compelling viewing in The Promise, but what makes is such a significant release is Rebo’s archive footage. It gives what could otherwise be a simple, if admittedly high-end, Making Of… doc texture and warmth. The E Street Band circa 1977 resembles undercover narcotics officers in an Al Pacino movie, all shabby Hawaiian shirts and outsized sunglasses. One of the film’s most striking moments finds Springsteen bashing out an early version of “Sherry Darling” on a piano, while Steve Van Zandt, in an Adidas top and bandana, drums away on a carpet that’s been stuffed on top of it improvising backing vocals. It’s interesting to wonder how Springsteen views his own back catalogue, and indeed what future plans there are for similar such projects. In light of Dylan and Neil Young’s successful presentation of their own archives – will Springsteen follow, too? And if, so how? Springsteen admits at the BFI that there is no similar studio film from after The River sessions until he reconvened the E Street Band in 2002 for The Rising, which sadly means we’d be unlikely to see anything quite as puissant as Rebo’s archival materials beyond a possible River reissue. But as it stands, The Promise film powerfully captures Springsteen at what Max Weinberg describes as “the defining moment of his young career.” “We wanted to refine the narrative,” explains Springsteen simply, dressed in black jeans, a black leather jacket, boots and a grey T -shirt, from the stage of NFT1 at the Southbank. “We wanted to go back and fill in the story we’d been working on for most of our working life.” MICHAEL BONNER The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town is available as part of The Promise box set, which is released on November 15. For our full review of the box set, check out the new issue on UNCUT, on sale now

Spent a sizeable part of yesterday afternoon grappling again with “The Age Of Adz”, with little progress. It made me think, beyond the Sufjan Stevens album, there have been a good few albums this year, eagerly anticipated by me, that I’ve ended up delicately avoiding talking about here. Big personal disappointments, in other words: The Hold Steady’s “Heaven Is Whenever” and the Black Mountain album, whose title I’ve momentarily forgotten, spring to mind. I’d also, I think, end up filing “Shadows” by Teenage Fanclub in there: not a crushing disappointment, as such, more a mild, wearying one. It’d be churlish – and hopefully out of character – to criticise a band for growing older and reflecting changes of pace and perspective in their music. But struggling to articulate the frustration, I wish TFC had stuck at trying to be a rock band, rather than settling for being an indie one. That Raymond’s aesthetic hadn’t seemed to triumph over that of Norman and Gerry. Jonny, it must be said, are an indie band – or rather an indie project of sorts, featuring the Fanclub’s Norman Blake and Euros Childs, a tremendously gifted singer-songwriter who seems to have been bumbling along mostly below the radar since Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci split up. Their album, “Jonny”, is nothing like a return to the crunch of “Bandwagonesque”; if anything, it’s Childs’ musical history that’s referenced much more closely. It does, though, have a sprightliness, an ease and playfulness about it which comes as a relief after “Shadows”. Childs mostly takes the lead, but while Blake-fronted songs like the folk-rockish “You Was Me” and, especially, the lovely “Circling The Sun” would have fitted onto “Shadows” neatly enough, they seem to have a propulsion and lightness of touch which is, to me at least, much more pleasurable. “Candyfloss”, meanwhile, is an inspired coupling of the two talents – a Gorkys-style verse and a TFC chorus – which works just fine. Nevertheless, it’s Childs’ voice and vision which dominates “Jonny”, revisiting the stylistic highpoints of his old band as if guided by the gentle encouragement of Blake to do what he does best. Hence there are slightly dazed country songs – “I’ll Make Her My Best Friend”, “English Lady” – which recapture the somewhat autumnal whimsy of late Gorkys. There are daft glam songs which sound like the themes to ‘70s children’s programmes: “Wich Is Wich” and “Cave Dance”, the latter running off into a long and burbling drone-out which imbalances the whole album in a likeably perverse way. Best of all, the surging “Goldmine” and the prancing falsetto piano piece, “Bread”, sound like they could have been made around the same time as “The Game Of Eyes” and “Miss Trudy”. A very comforting album, really, and even the “Rubber Soul” pastiche, “Waiting Around For You” works perfectly, to the extent I keep expecting them to sing “Beep beep yeah” at any moment.