A packed Borderline gets suitably rowdy later on, when Port O’Brien turn in a surprisingly rocking set. For the moment, though, the crowd’s hushed. Walking in on Laura Gibson, mid-song, you could have heard the proverbial pin drop. People are hanging on her every word, their muted quiet close to something like reverence. It’s just as well they’re not making a noise. The slightest murmur from them would very likely have drowned her out completely. Gibson has a voice of such gossamer delicacy she makes Joanna Newsom sound like David Coverdale. “Sweet Deception”, from her 2009 album, Beast Of Seasons, is a particular highlight, enhanced by the discreet support of Sean Ogilvie and Micah Rabwin, from Portland band Musee Mecanique, who between them play drums and other percussive bits and bobs, saw, ukelin, melodica and banjo. Fans of Newsom’s folky exotica and the pared country of Gillian Welch, one of whose old little-house-on-the-prairie frocks Gibson seems to be wearing tonight, should investigate immediately. Port O’Brien hove into Uncut’s view with 2007’s All We Could Do Was Sing, an album inspired in part by the Alaskan sea-faring adventures of singer-songwriter Van Pierszalowski, whose father is a commercial fisherman with whom Pierszalowski spends his summers working on a salmon schooner in often remote locations and sometimes tough weather. The record, then, had its share of windswept moments and stirring, communal sea-shanty sing-a-longs that at times had the euphoric sweep of Arcade Fire, but was also notable for several wistful ballads, usually sung by Pierszalowski’s partner, Cambria Goodwin. The music on All We Could Do Was Sing and to a perhaps lesser extent on last year’s equally good Threadbare was inclined to the folky end of things, appealingly ramshackle in some instances, with a preference for loudly thrashed acoustic instruments, clattering drums and a generally wayfaring air. Elsewhere, there were more measured orchestrations, sombre string sections that hinted at the gravity of, say, The Decemberists or The Acorn, with whom on record at least they have more than a little in common. Tonight, we are faced with a hastily reconfigured Port O’Brien line-up. Goodwin, they knew, would be unavailable for their current run of European dates. Then, less than a week before the tour, the drummer and guitarist who had lately been playing with Pierszalowski also bailed out, for unspecified reasons that cause Pierszalowski to nevertheless seethe when he mentions all this. Talk about turning potential disaster to your advantage, though! The new line-up may have been thrown together in fairly calamitous circumstances, but the inevitable rough edges perfectly suit a lot of the band’s material and there’s a thrilling seat-of-the-pants excitement about their playing that may not have survived any more rehearsal time. With nothing, you imagine, to lose, the band tonight just cut loose noisily at every opportunity, sounding at times like Zuma-era Crazy Horse, country rock played with stinging intensity, uninhibited, frequently raucous and often quite grand. Opener “Don’t Take My Advice”, for instance, sounds here like an uncanny echo of “Don’t Cry No Tears”, a laconic stroll. More urgent are versions that follow of “Oslo Campfire”, “Fisherman’s Son” and the Dylanesque tumble of “Sour Milk/Salt Water”. Elsewhere, “Calm Me Down”, which sounds reasonably measured on Threadbare, is turned into an agitated epic, Pierszakowski sounding like a man at the end of his anguished tether, or somewhere close to it, drenched in torrential guitars. It gets the biggest cheers of the night so far, although the reception for “Stuck On A Boat”, “Pigeonhole” and “Will Has Gone” quickly run it close. Things don’t get much better, though, than the rousing late version of “I Woke Up Today”, with its exclamatory chorus, the kind of rousing noise associated with the best of Arcade Fire, inspiring a communal singsong and a fair amount of mayhem onstage, where Pierszakowski has worked himself into a state of considerable excitement. Another great night at Club uncut, in other words.

Not exactly a Great Lost Column or anything, but here, as promised, is the piece on Sir Richard Bishop that fell out of the current issue of Uncut to make room for David Cavanagh's superb piece on Alex Chilton. Talking of the issue, by the way, thanks for your Great Lost Albums suggestions here; please keep them coming, and we'll feature as many as we can in a forthcoming issue of the mag. Most interesting musicians, perhaps understandably, tend to avoid defining themselves and what they do. Julian Cope, though, is one who has made a lucrative side career out of parsing genres for himself and others, coining a bunch of variously absurd-to-useful terms in the process. One came to mind the other week at Club Uncut, during an engrossing set by the guitarist Sir Richard Bishop. Cope has talked up an idea of gnostic rock’n’roll – an exploration of zones where esoteric beliefs and musics intersect, very roughly – which seems a lot more apposite to Bishop’s work rather than Cope’s own current protozoic jams, his spiritual quests notwithstanding. For a good 20 or 30 years now, for a long time as one-third of the Sun City Girls and latterly solo, Bishop – from Phoenix, but now based in Seattle - has pursued an idea of music which is fearless and adventurous, which collapses the boundaries between musics, cultures and faiths. His guitar playing betrays an astonishing virtuosity, whether he’s channelling Sandy Bull, Django Rheinhardt, the Egyptian maestro Omar Khorshid, or Dick Dale. With every unostentatious flourish, Bishop betrays a vast knowledge, but he carries it lightly. Maybe think of him as a repository of occultist thought, with a pranksterish approach to serious study. Between songs, Bishop will occasionally trigger a muffled loop of Tibetan monks he recorded himself in Dharamsala, India. “In case you didn’t get the message the first time,” he says, “I think they’ve just purified all your ritual objects.” This follows a song he describes as a Black-Eyed Peas cover, which is actually his own “Black Eyed Blue” (from 2006’s "Fingering The Devil". If you’re looking for a way in, 2007’s "Polytheistic Fragments" is a pretty great primer). He does, though, conjure up a ravishing improvisation out of The Beatles’ “She Loves You”, and twice advises Uncut, “If you run out of rock’n’roll icons, put me on the cover.” Bishop’s claims on rock posterity, albeit of an underground kind, are generally rather strong. Sun City Girls emerged out of a distinctly eccentric punk milieu in the early ‘80s, embarking on a haphazard career – 60 or 70 albums, many self-released on cassette – that’s offered potent inspiration to a scad of DIY, avant-rock and free folk artists. Their investigations of world music, meanwhile, had a lively irreverence, manifested not just in their own ethnological forgeries (of which a current favourite new band, Sheffield’s Harappian Night Recordings, are clearly keen scholars), but in the Sublime Frequencies label run by Bishop’s brother and Sun City bandmate, Alan (Check out Group Doueh, from the western Sahara, or something like the "Streets Of Lhasa" field recordings). Richard Bishop, meanwhile, also has a new band, Rangda, with Ben Chasny (Six Organs Of Admittance) and the many-tentacled free jazz drummer, Chris Corsano. Rangda release their first album, "False Flag", in May, and it’s a belter: a mix of, oh, boggle-eyed jazznik surf-hardcore, terrifying fire music jams, and some immensely lyrical passages (the epic raga of “Plain Of Jars”, say) that present the band as one not quite a million miles from orthodox rock tradition. And one, we should also note, named after a Balinese demon queen purported to eat children.

Always nice to discover your personal enthusiasms are shared by people you respect. The new Trembling Bells album promo comes with a longish encomium from Joe Boyd. Among many wise things, he notes that they, “Incorporate in their music the essence of ‘folk’ without the form that can annoy many listeners. That means that their melodies and lyrics have a sense of history and Britishness that most contemporary bands lack, but without any of the ‘heritage’ atmosphere that clings to even the best revivalists in the folk world.” “Abandoned Love”, happily, lives up to Boyd’s well-considered hype, a bold advance on last year’s already excellent “Carbeth”. The same elements remain – though perhaps less String Bandish whimsy – but this time, Trembling Bells are gutsier, more forthright, glowing with confidence as they pile through their rickety hybrids of folk, rock, Early Music and so on. The jazz influence is less overt, too, and there are times when many of the band’s improv backgrounds somehow coalesce into a more orthodox Scottish indie sound (no coincidence, perhaps, that Belle & Sebastian’s Stevie Jackson seems to have handled production this time out). That said, the strongest innovation on “Abandoned Love” is a sense that Trembling Bells can rock, pretty boisterously, even when grappling it out with what may well be sackbutts. “Love Made An Outlaw Of My Heart” may, for a brief second, sound like it’s setting off on a “Matty Groves”-like trajectory. But almost immediately it resolves into a distinctly Creedence-ish choogle, which picks up fuzz guitar, pedal steel, trombone and some ‘50s rock’n’roll vamping as it goes along, and pivots on a melodic duel between Lavinia Blackwall and Alex Neilson that often resembles a jaunty take on Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through The Night”. If that sounds odd, it sounds even odder when it’s preceded by “September Is The Month Of Death”, a superbly precarious melodrama which, with its druidic invocations and air of a medieval processional, anchors on Blackwall’s ripe, scholarly emoting. The thing is, it all works tremendously well, with a palpable eclectic freedom to the playing and conceptualising; an unusually joyous, roistering take on psychogeography, perhaps. It’s tough to get through this one without invoking Fairport Convention, and there are certainly again plenty of echoes buried in “Abandoned Love”. Curiously, though, parts feel like the Fairports working backwards, from a founding in British tradition towards an idiosyncratic adoption of American folk-rock. “Baby, Lay Your Burden Down” and “All Good Men Come Last”, among others, are reminiscent of those earlyish, full-blooded assaults on the Bob Dylan songbook like “Percy’s Song” and “I’ll Keep It With Mine”. Lovely record, anyhow, and I’m thrilled Trembling Bells will be playing the Uncut stage at The Great Escape next month.

A bit of a plug today for the new issue, not least for the CD that Allan’s compiled to go with our excellent Stooges interview. The CD’s called “Search And Destroy”, and brings together 15 tracks from The MC5, The Stooges, The New York Dolls, The 13th Floor Elevators, The Monks and so on. A particular thrill, personally, to see Death and Simply Saucer on an Uncut CD, but this is one of our best comps in a while, I think. Have a look at the tracklisting and give us some feedback when you’ve had a listen: 1 The MC5 - Sister Anne 2 James Williamson With The Careless Hearts - 1970 3 Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers - Born To Lose 4 Death - Keep On Knocking 5 Simply Saucer - Here Come The Cyborgs Pt 2 6 The New York Dolls - Pills [Demo] 7 Sonic’s Rendezvous Band - Slow Down (Take A Look) 8 Figures Of Light - Seething Psychosexual Conflict Blues 9 The Monks - Oh, How To Do Now 10 The Flamin’ Groovies - Slow Death 11 The Red Krayola - Wives In Orbit 12 The Scenics - Do The Wait 13 The 13th Floor Elevators - Fire Engine 14 Ducks Deluxe - I Fought The Law 15 Iggy & The Stooges - Search And Destroy Besides The Stooges interview, our main feature in the new issue is an exhaustively-compiled list of 50 Great Lost Albums: ‘lost albums’ in this case being ones that aren’t legally available to buy new in 2010. Fairly predictably, we’re also soliciting your suggestions for Great Lost Albums we’ve forgotten. The golden rule is that if you can buy the album new in any format – including MP3s – then it doesn’t count. Feel free to bombard me with your suggestions, of course. To give you an idea of the sort of thing, here’s my entry for the first Kraftwerk album: One of 2009’s more disingenuous reissues was "The Catalogue", a thorough-sounding Kraftwerk boxset which actually failed to include their first three albums. Perhaps that early work was deemed too idiosyncratically human, with the mensch-maschine not yet fully operational and a certain freestyling hippy fallibility taking precedence. They remain, however, fascinating records, not least the 1970 debut, where Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter embarked on four capricious avant-jams. The heavyweight electronics were at a putative stage: Klaus Dinger, soon to form Neu!, contributed live drums; Schneider led, jauntily, with a flute (cf the outstanding opener, “Ruckzuck”). “I’m working on the album tapes,” Hütter told Uncut last year. “It will be Kraftwerk 1 and 2, Ralf & Florian, and maybe one or two live ambient situations, whatever we find in the archive… It needs some more work, redusting and remastering.” One more thing about the issue: apologies that we’ve trailed an apparently invisible Roky Erickson feature on the cover. The piece was spiked at the very last moment, along with my Wild Mercury Sound column, to make room for David Cavanagh’s brilliant obituary of Alex Chilton. We’ll try and squeeze it in the next one, all being well.