I guess a lot of people have a John Peel epiphany, and mine definitely came at some point in the early ‘80s when, for no obvious reason, he dug out “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” by The Pop Group. Within a few seconds I was snared, and hit the ‘record’ button on my cassette player to tape the rest of the track. For over 20 years, due no doubt to some baffling personal incompetence, that taped version was my only copy of “She Is Beyond Good And Evil”: a cranky, next-level dub mix of sorts, with the sound dipping in and out as my recorder compensated for its failing batteries. It is to The Pop Group’s credit that, nearly three decades on, they still sound as volatile and exciting, at this first London show in a small clutch of reunion shows. Further dates and a new album are being promised, but it may be unwise to expect these things to roll out in a logical fashion: there are, after all, the small matters of Bristolian working practises and infinite layers of political and creative opinion to negotiate first. It’s a small surprise, too, that the clatter of Cecil Taylorish piano from Gareth Sager that opens the show soon resolves itself into an old song – the thought occurred, on the way to the gig, that The Pop Group’s fierce and enduring ideologies might mitigate against anything so formulaic and nostalgic as the act of playing 30 year old tunes. The song they’re playing, though, has always had its built-in, self-flagellating ironies, being “We Are All Prostitutes”, which Mark Stewart bellows while occasionally checking lyrics on a lectern and looking like a giant vampiric Morrissey. Stewart’s manic and compelling stage presence is something of a shock, too, for those of us who’ve never seen him before. I guess I’d expected someone stern and paranoid, not one who relentlessly shadowboxes, thrashes a towel around his head, and, during “She Is Beyond Good And Evil”, initiates a kind of carnivalesque breakdown with a whistle. Stewart appears to be having quite a time of it, or at least is significantly convulsed by his enthusiasms (this fairly remarkable interview gives an indication of where he is, more or less, right now). He is blessed, too, with a band – Sager, Dan Catsis, Bruce Smith (borrowed back from Public Image Ltd) and a new second guitarist – who are, well, slick would be the wrong word for such a skree of noise, but they’re certainly very tight and well-drilled. The idea that Pop Group shows might be a discourse between bandmembers of freeform ideas turns out to be wide of the mark: there’s always the imperative to be a funk band at the heart of what they do. And a dub band, after a fashion, so the mix has a critical role, too, in translating the playing into something yet more disorienting: a brilliant version of “Thief Of Fire” finds great caverns of echo opening up beneath Stewart, while Sager picks up a soprano sax and blasts wave after wave of tinnitus-inducing interference. Sager is terrific throughout, actually: there’s one wall-of-knives guitar solo in “Colour Blind” that pretty much throws virtually all of the post-punk/punk-funk/no-wave revivalism of the early 21st Century into very stark context. It’s typical, too, of how The Pop Group’s music is so open-ended that it can revive itself in ways that remain confrontational and imaginative, making for a reunion, and an ongoing interpretation of the notion of ‘punk’, much different to most of their contemporaries. Witness the encore: on one level a good, if not altogether revolutionary, funk jam, but one gradually assailed by obliterating noise and the bullish, oddly jovial presence of Stewart. For a while, he sings into a mic which seems to be turned off; the soundman, perhaps, is so intent on crafting the dub space that he doesn’t notice Stewart has stopped dancing and is trying to join in. Then the mic gets switched on, and it transpires Stewart is having another go at “We Are All Prostitutes”. Clearly, in spite of everything, here’s a man who loves his work.

As you might have noticed, I’ve been banging on about this one a lot over the last couple of weeks, and it seems to be shaping up, alongside maybe Joanna Newsom and Magic Lantern and so on, as one of my favourites of 2010. Hans Chew, to make things a little clearer, first came to at least my attention with his rollicking piano playing on the last couple of Jack Rose albums. Through Jack’s posthumous “Ragged And Right” EP, it also became clear that Chew figured in a rowdy cosmic Americana outfit from Brooklyn called D Charles Speer And The Helix: typical of musicians in Rose’s orbit, The Helix mix rootsy good times with parallel lives as practitioners of hardcore psych-out music, in The No-Neck Blues Band, Sunburned Hand Of The Man and the like (check out their “Distillation”, incidentally, for some heady Dead/"Europe ’72" vibes). Chew’s piano work on all this – loose and groovy, lascivious, honky-tonking – is great, but his contribution to this summer’s “Honest Strings”, the vast and cherishable album compiled by Three-Lobed Recordings in honour of Jack Rose, was still quite a shock. “The Heart Is Deceitful” revealed Chew as not just an able sideman, but a terrific and full-blooded singer-songwriter, too. That promise is borne out by “Tennessee And Other Stories”, nine originals and one cover made in the company of various fellow travellers from the Helix family, and housed in one of the loveliest sleeves I’ve seen in a while. The cover is of Tim Rose’s “Long Time Man”, or at least Nick Cave’s version of the same, and showcases Chew’s impressively soulful and weathered pipes, though it isn’t quite typical of the rest of “Tennessee…” Much of the album actually resembles an easy-going, if occasionally fatalistic, roadtrip through the southern states: “Long Time Man” is preceded by a fervid boogie-woogie (“New Cypress Grove Boogie”) and followed by “Forever Again”, which mostly matches the stride of early ‘70s Dr John. You could easily fill up a review of “Tennessee…” with sepia reference points: Leon Russell, Nicky Hopkins,Hargus ‘Pig’ Robbins, The Band, maybe something in the orbit of Delaney And Bonnie. The closing “Only Son” is even faintly reminiscent of Elton John – circa “Tumbleweed Connection”, I should hastily add. Usefully, though, Chew has a swing and feel for his material which makes him sound anything but an academic tourist.. Consequently, “Tennessee…” doesn’t come across like a pastiche of its influences, but a spirited and open-hearted, craftsmanlike work that could easily have been mislaid for the best part of the last 35 or 40 years. A lost classic from 2010, perhaps: Tennessee… is limited to 500 vinyl copies but, fortunately, apparently infinite downloads.

What is it about Simone Felice and hushed and sacred places that make your voice drop to a whisper as soon as you walk into them? A month ago, in Woodstock, where I was interviewing The Duke & The King, Simone took me to the Church Of The Holy Transfiguration Of Christ, way up there on top of Mead Mountain, where it had been since 1891, and a favourite retreat of Simone’s when he was growing up. Tonight, he’s at St Pancras Old Church, which to the extent that it’s apparently one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in England is clearly not flippantly named. It’s a fabulous setting for the last date of his recent UK solo tour, candles flickering behind him, shadows looming around an altar, darkness clinging to high vaulted spaces, murmuring ancient voices, if you’re listening, in the joists, eaves and roof beams, a certain hallowed spookiness about the premises, from top to bottom. “Wow,” Simone says, looking around him as he settles down in a high back chair, the kind of thing you might find in the parlour of a witch. “There are ghosts in here,” he goes on, nodding knowingly, people in the front rows looking around now, too, trying to see what he can see or thinks he can, the congregation, for that’s what we as much as anything are, quite rapt, more than a little spellbound. You wouldn’t be surprised to hear a moaning wind about now, followed by some creaking of timbers untold ages old, a beckoning voice, the sort of thing, generally, the kind of vague creepiness, in other words, that will eventually freak you out if you dwell overlong on it. Simone gets a lot of laughs from all this all night, especially when a technical hitch during a lovely version of “Summer Morning Rain” makes it sound like one of his monitors is speaking to him and he does an extended and very funny riff on The Exorcist, which people around me laugh heartily at even as they seem at the same time a tad unsettled, which makes it even funnier. Even Simone jumps, though, when, later on in the proceedings he’s reading an extract from his new novel, Black Jesus, out early next year (the publishers are a company, he takes some relish in mentioning, are called To Hell). “What happened to the 20th century?” he reads in declamatory fashion from the pages of his manuscript, and on queue, a clock begins to chime ominously at the top of the hour, a droll knelling reply that inspires an hilarious version of “In The Air Tonight”, the audience, surprisingly word-perfect, joining keenly in. The songs Simone sings elsewhere are from more predictable sources, principally from the repertoire of The Felice Brothers (“Don’t Wake The Scarecrow”, “Radio Song”, “Your Belly In My Arms”, “The Devil Is Real”, “Mercy”) and The Duke & The King (“If You Ever Get famous”, “One More American Song”, “The Morning I Get To Hell”, “Union Street”, all from last year’s Nothing Gold Can Stay album; “Gloria” and “Shaky” from their forthcoming second album, Long Live The Duke & The King). There are some inspired covers, too, including a fine version of Tom Waits’ “Old 55” and a spectacular take on Neil Young’s “Helpless”, with the congregation now a choir and someone in the audience down front who I can’t see testifying like Aretha – “London, you got soul!” Simone yells, laughing, head flung back like a revivalist preacher, the crowd taking over entirely on the chorus, as Simone on his knees facing them starts in on a bit of “Amazing Grace”, before returning to the final verse and chorus of “Helpless”, his voice rising from hush to howl, a cresting moment. There’s also a new song, “The New York Times”, among the best things he’s written. He comes back for four encores – the two songs from the new Duke & The King album, a beautiful version of “Waterspider” from their debut and, finally, a gorgeous take on another Neil Young favourite, “Long May You Run”, with some cool lap steel from Mat Boulter, hi-jacked by Simone for these solo shows from UK Americana band The Lucky Strikes. Simone will be back in October with the full Duke & The King line-up. No one who was here tonight will want to miss them.

Yesterday, Michael posted a review of Robert Plant’s secret London show on Wednesday. Heading back from holiday in France, I missed that one – luckily, it turns out, since Plant only played seven songs then, and the show I caught last night at the Forum stretched to 20-odd. Those 20 include a good deal of covers from the excellent “Band Of Joy” album (hit the link for my preview of that one), a closing a capella rendering of the trad Grateful Dead standby, “I Bid You Goodnight”, and a clutch of, yep, Led Zeppelin songs. Of late, a fair bit seems to have been written about Plant’s retreat from rock: about the restraint of his singing, his immersion in American roots music, and his resilient desire not to do this again. Certainly, Plant and his group – a brilliant, faintly psychedelic bar band, of sorts, who seem at once good-timey and uncanny – artfully muck about with the old Led Zep songs so that “Over The Hills And Far Away”, in particular, reveal their identity with a slyness that would impress even a curmudgeonly re-inventer like Dylan. But still, as he coyly kicks his mic stand up behind him, Plant doesn’t seem like a man who’s rejected his heavy rock past, but one who’s merely decided to keep it on a leash. If anything, he and his bandmates appear to be ostensibly de-Paging the Zep songs, with “Rock And Roll” stripped back to, well, vintage rock’n’roll, fit and ready for Memphis juke joints and with a searing pedal steel solo from Darrell Scott. Scott gets a solo (more often on banjo, mandolin or acoustic) pretty much every time the musical director, Buddy Miller, takes one on his electric, and during a terrific “Misty Mountain Hop”, it seems as if the latter, especially, is taking fluent but assiduous care to make sure he sounds nothing like Jimmy Page. Miller, in fact, plays densely and psychedelically for much of the night, so that “Misty Mountain Hop” is as close to West Coast acid stomp – an enduring Plant obsession, of course – as anything else. The show’s pivot, and the Band Of Joy’s key song, perhaps, turns out to be “Gallows Pole”: a long, incantatory version that gradually accumulates intensity, harmonies and solos, and sits halfway between the downhome and the mystical – the former epitomised by Scott’s picking, the latter by Miller’s atmospheric strafe, a little like the better work of Daniel Lanois (which reminds me: we need to talk about some of Lanois’ recent business soon, too…). For a supposed roots musician, Miller is highly skilled at adding an ominous, ethereal glaze to the overall sound – on something like Low’s “Monkey”, predictably enough, but also on notionally gutsier revivals like “Rich Woman”. For much of the show, the sound is much heavier than you’d expect from listening to “Band Of Joy” and “Raising Sand”: even the five-part harmonies, led by Plant and Patti Griffin, on Richard Thompson’s “House Of Cards” come couched in a certain brooding fuzz. The six-piece swing, though, and a section through the middle of the show, where Miller, Scott and Griffin take leads, has a great roadhouse feel to it, especially when Griffin cracks open “Wade In The Water”. There’s a lot of gospel in the mix, though Plant is careful to give it an uncanny undertow, not least on a showstopping gothic take on “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down”. Ultimately, though, the image is of a rock star on a spectacularly rewarding trip through his own history and the history of the music he loves. Los Lobos’ “Angel Dance” sounds like it comes from “Led Zeppelin III”. “Houses Of The Holy” sounds like it comes from “Raising Sand”. Valhalla he is coming back, circuitously, with a washboard. 1. Down to the sea 2. Monkey 3. House of cards 4. Please read the letter 5. Misty mountain hop 6. Rich woman 7. Trouble (Buddy Miller) 8. 12 gates to the city/ Wade In The Water 9. All the King’s horses 10. Satisfied mind (Darrell Scott) 11. Move up (Patty Griffin) 12. Satan 13. Central two o nine 14. Angel dance 15. Houses of the holy 16. Tall cool one 17. Over the hills 18. Gallows pole # 19. Harm’s swift way 20. Rock and roll 21. Goodnight

“This,” says Robert Plant, gesturing round the former church that he’s chosen as the venue for tonight’s gig, “used be a house of the holy, now it’s obsolete. But it’s available for wedding receptions…” It’s funny the way Plant puts a slight tremble in his voice when he says “house of the holy”, the only reference he makes all night to his other band. Zepwatchers might also chose to read plenty into Plant’s use of “obsolete”, especially after his comment in The Independent last week – “I feel so far away from heavy rock” – further reiterated his position that more Zeppelin activity is about as likely as a Beatles reunion. But, in truth, Plant doesn’t really need Zeppelin any more. It’s a rare – and brave – thing to find a musician of Plant’s stature stepping away almost completely from the band that made his reputation. But with the Raising Sand and now Band Of Joy albums, Plant has clearly discovered new, equally fruitful pursuits. And certainly, he cuts a very relaxed figure, dressed in a long sleeved black shirt and blue jeans, running the Band Of Joy – singer Patty Griffin, guitarists Buddy Miller and Darrell Scott, bassist Byron House and drummer Marco Giovino – through a seven song set. It’s interesting how comfortable Plant seems playing to a 200-strong crowd (this is a secret gig, the audience made up mostly of competition winners, and one star spot: Jonathan Rhys Meyers). In many ways, Plant's a conspicuously unassuming presence. Consider the Lear jets, the Hyatts, the life well lived – tonight, we find him supping from a mug of tea or strumming a washboard. He does some funny dance moves - nothing more than little shuffles, really - that seem strangely bashful. The only rock star move you can spot is how he holds his microphone, with the stand slightly behind his right leg as he leans forward with it: the same stance he used in Zep. But for all Plant’s Deuchars-drinking, Wolves-supporting, down-home persona, he is a fantastically engaging performer. As an interpreter of other musician’s material – tonight there’s songs by Low, Townes Van Zandt and Richard Thompson – he appears tremendously sympathetic. His voice is warm and honeyed, only really unleashing the Valhalla howl as “Cindy I’ll Marry You Someday” reaches its climax. If there is one person here tonight who does look the part, it’s Buddy Miller, the Nashville-based singer/songwriter cast here as the Band Of Joy’s musical director. Wearing a red velvet jacket and a with a battered brown hat pulled down tightly over his grey hair, grizzled to an inch of his life, he appears somewhere between Neil Young and Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who, with a touch of Worzel Gummidge thrown in. He does things with his guitar during set opener “Monkey” that almost out-Shields Kevin Shields. Elsewhere, Patty Griffin is a game foil for Plant, especially trading verses with him and Darrell Scott on the a capella introduction to “I Bid You Goodnight”. There’s a sense of democracy apparent here – and it reinforces the notion than this is a real band, not simply Plant with a bunch of hired hands along for the ride. It’s over, really, too soon. Robert Plant and the Band Of Joy set list: Monkey House Of Cards Cindy I'll Marry You Someday Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down Central Two-o-nine Angel Dance I Bid You Goodnight The Robert Plant & the Band Of Joy European tour begins tonight at the Forum, London.