When these two Hyde Park shows were announced last December, we ran a piece in UNCUT celebrating the return to active service of Blur, where David Cavanagh quite reasonably asked the question: which Blur are coming back? After all, here was a band who had undergone many creative iterations during their recording lifetime; equally, so much had happened since the four of them last played together, in July 2000, it seemed appropriate to wonder what Blur would do with these shows. Could they really reconnect with the moptops who made the buoyant baggy pop of “There’s No Other Way”? Would they really revisit “Parklife”, a song intrinsically linked to an era and movement they’d subsequently gone to considerable lengths to distance themselves from? And what about the more abstract, edgier material from the later albums – what place would that have in Hyde Park? Well, tonight we have what you might call EveryBlur. By which I mean, they cover all bases. Here’s a band conspicuously at peace with themselves and with their back catalogue. As guitarist Graham Coxon flagged up in the NME last December, “I always think there are two routes to Blur. The high street route and this other route round the back.” So, of course we’d get “Girls And Boys” and of course we’d get “Trimm Trabb”. Both equally, incontrovertibly, Blur. And both, in their radically different ways, equally brilliant. The crowd in Hyde Park, sweltering in the hottest day of the year, resembles a Hackney flashmob, all skinny t-shirts and angular haircuts. They’re very young, too. One 16 year-old French student, who’s come over for the show, tells me he was “11 when Blur last played Reading Festival” and wants to hear “everything”. In the crowd, I spot, separately, Nigel Planer and Nikki from Big Brother. One girl has written in blue chalk up her right arm “Hooligan” and “Gorilla” on her left, lyrics from “On Your Own”. There’s a palpable air of excitement and energy that, mixed with the heat and alcohol, threatens to drift into something slightly more dangerous. We are, inevitably, a far cry from the crowd who were here for Neil Young or Bruce Springsteen last weekend. Walking into Hyde Park, one residual concern I’d had was – how much have these songs dated? “Tracy Jacks”, “Sunday Sunday” or quite literally “End Of The Century” feel so firmly located in a specific time and cultural headspace, and we are no longer 20th century boys and girls. So how much would this be an exercise in nostalgia, and if so how successful could it be? I realise these are, of course, music journalist questions, and clearly not the kind of issues that are particularly bothering anyone here. This is a communal moment of celebration for a band, their history and back catalogue. Entirely fittingly, too, for band who so assiduously documented a London living, it is held in one of the capital’s largest parks, with a huge map of London covering the left hand side of the stage wall and one of the UK on the right. The sun goes down, the moon comes up. It's a perfect setting. The band arrive at around 8.15 in what’s still pretty much full sunlight. Damon and drummer Dave Rowntree appear to be wearing identical Fred Perry tops, black with yellow trip round the collar and sleeves; Graham in a Breton t-shirt and bassist Alex James dressed in black and Silk Cut. If you’ve been following the set-lists over the band’s warm-up shows over the last few weeks, then there’s very few surprises. We are hits all the way. But there are sly and subtle treatments; “Girls And Boys” is amphetamined up, Damon sounding sociopathic, snarling his way through “Love in the 90s, it’s paranoid…”. Graham’s guitar on “There’s No Other Way” is angry and grungey, a long way from the skittering riffs of the record. Indeed, “Beetlebum” ends with him hunched over his amp, pulling dark, inchoate noises out of his guitar that leaves Damon walking shell-shocked round the stage scratching his head and reminds me, in fact, of Neil Young here last Saturday creating a similar seismic upheaval on Old Black. There are many similar Graham moments: on “Oily Water”, particularly, while Damon screams through a megaphone, he blasts sheets of woozy, rhapsodic feedback from his guitar that outdo anything I’ve heard from, say, Kevin Shields. Even “Parklife”, bless it, with Phil Daniels walking on to deliver a speech from Quadrophenia – “You can take that mail, and that franking machine, and all that other rubbish I have to deal with and shove it right up your arse!” – before it begins, gets reconfigured as something more than a bouncy, blokey, comedy hit. Daniels’ narrator isn’t the jokey bloke down the pub talking about feeding the pigeons, but closer to the sinister, wired persona he inhabited on “Me White Noise”. Ridiculously, perhaps, a line like “It’s got nothing to do with your Vorsprung Durch Technic, you know,” feels loaded with menace. Aside from “Parklife”, the big singalongs are “Tender”, “End Of The Century” and “For Tomorrow”. “Tender” – a pretty bleak relationship breakdown song – is reincarnated as a positive, heartfelt message of love. “We feel really privileged to do nothing for so many years, then come back to this,” says Albarn humbly before “Popscene”. Highlights? Everything, really. “This Is A Low” contains some of the most beautiful guitar soloing from Graham I’ve ever heard, nimble and expansive. “The Universal” is just beautiful. Gig of the year, then. Blur's Hyde Park set list (July 2) was: 'She's So High' 'Girls & Boys' 'Tracy Jacks' 'There's No Other Way' 'Jubilee' 'Badhead' 'Beetlebum' 'Out Of Time' 'Trimm Trabb' 'Coffee & TV' 'Tender' 'Country House' 'Oily Water' 'Chemical World' 'Sunday Sunday' 'Parklife' 'End Of A Century' 'To The End' 'This Is A Low' [encore] 'Popscene' 'Advert' 'Song 2' 'Death Of A Party' 'For Tomorrow' 'The Universal' Pic credit: PA Photos

Very pleased to see the love is spreading for Sun Araw, judging by the comments here when I mentioned “Heavy Deeds” the other day. A few days on, I’m still feeling it’s one of my favourite albums of the year so far. Thanks in no little part to Cameron Stallones’ determined productivity, I’m now suspecting that I blog about the poor guy (here and here, for example) as much as I do about James Blackshaw. The thing is, Stallones’ music as Sun Araw is so immersive and compelling. It’s rich with psychedelic ambiences, but also, increasingly, has a sort of stoned, head-nodding groove which could feasibly cross over to a world which was summed up by those early Mo’Wax comps. “Heavy Deeds” is Stallones’ third Sun Araw album. Ghost images of Stevie Wonder and Bo Diddley adorn the cover, and there’s a distinctly heavier, funkier vibe to his music: it may still be obscured by the heathaze – and Lord, this is sweaty music – but things are definitely coming into focus. Consequently, the snaking, wah-wah freak-out guitar is a lot higher up in the multi-layered mix, along with a stinging R&B organ vamp (check out the swinging title track, in particular) and Stallones’ still-muffled tribal chants, and the general drifting ambience which epitomised much of “Beach Head” has been sacrificed in favour of more rhythmic, upfront, cumulatively hypnotic tunes. Someone mentioned Spiritualized on one of the earlier blogs, and that influence (accidental, quite possibly) comes to the fore on “Hustle And Bustle”, which reverberates with a comparably languid fervour. The second side of the vinyl is especially wonderful, with the potent, explosive “Get Low” – his most accessible moment yet, maybe – leading into the vivid, low-slung dirge-funk of “All Night Long”. Stallones lets his tunes roll on for about ten minutes at a time on average, but he could let them evolve for a good time longer if he was so inclined. In the past, I’ve mentioned New Kingdom and Sunburned Hand Of The Man circa “Jaybird”, and those reference points seem more apposite than ever on “Heavy Deeds”. I’m reminded, too, this time, of Funkadelic’s cosmic slop, and particularly of Brightblack Morning Light: sticky, horizontal, hot night music. It’s fantastic, and I should also mention that the CD (which I don’t have yet) also features “Hey Mandala”, which came out a while back as a split with Predator Vision, another incarnation of the guy from Ducktails.

Apologies for the crass plug, but if you’ve seen the new issue of Uncut, you’ll have seen an amazing picture of Tim Buckley, playing solo to a 35-strong audience at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in New York. The year is 1967, and Buckley is somewhere between the relatively orthodox folk-rock of his debut, and the extraordinary, personal music that would fill “Goodbye And Hello”, and act as a jump-off for the potent explorations that would soon follow. It’s a pretty fascinating period, very short, and one that’s never really been revisited; up until now, the earliest Buckley live material that’s officially surfaced comes from his John Peel session in April 1968, a full year later. Much respect, then, to Josh at Tompkins Square (one of the most consistently interesting labels of the past few years, in truth), who is putting out “Live At The Folklore Center, NYC – March 6, 1967”. It’s a remarkable recording, not least for its clarity: as pack leader of a generation of folklorists keen to capture traditional songs in the field before they died out, Young had some very decent recording equipment to hand in his club. The result is this crisp, intimate and generous set, with Buckley tackling 16 songs. The material splits between songs from the debut (most notably a fervid “Aren’t You The Girl”) and stuff in development for “Goodbye & Hello”, most notably wonderful versions of two of his finest songs, “I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain” and “No Man Can Find The War”. It’s unquestionably great music, but a fascinating insight into a songwriter’s development, too. As Buckley expands the parameters of his music (“I’m always trying to stretch myself, explore; I love to see change,” he told Young at the time), you can virtually detect the speed of his development. “Live At The Folklore Center” is blessed with half a dozen songs that have never surfaced anywhere else, in any form (seven that never saw studio versions, if you add “Troubador”). They’re all mostly excellent, but you sense that, by the time, Buckley arrived at the “Goodbye & Hello” sessions, his ideas had already superseded this batch. “Just Please Leave Me”, for instance, is quite brilliant, a giddy and impassioned piece that stands comparison with “Aren’t You The Girl”, but perhaps too frenzied and poppy for the more baked terrain Buckley was approaching. It’s harder, though, to account for why he ditched “What Do You Do (He Never Saw You)”, “Cripples Cry” and, especially, the plaintive, unravelling visions of “If The Rain Comes”. One relative constant, though, is Buckley’s admiration for Fred Neil. Perhaps predictably, an elegaic version of “Dolphins” is here, and outstanding. But “Country Boy” takes as its springboard Neil’s song of the same name, before Buckley heads off into untethered, extemporised space. It feels like a night when one of the great singer-songwriters began his journey in earnest.

“It’s hot as a witch's tit in this room,” says Club UNCUT headliner Jesca Hoop. “I’m going to have to retune my guitar real quick… cos it sounds like a witch's tit. So if you’ve ever wondered what a witch's tit sounds like, then this is it.” Today has been the hottest day of the year so far in the capital. Despite the welcoming evening cool outside, temperatures in the newly-refurbished Upstairs At The Garage in north London are unforgivingly high. But in some respects, you couldn’t have wished for a better line-up at Club UNCUT in heat like this. White – the daughter of a folk singer and sculptor who spent some of her childhood on a hippie commune in Northern California – brings a breezy, ‘60s coffee-house vibe to her songs, while Hoop, as perhaps befits the former babysitter of Tom Waits’ children, can be a little more leftfield with her melodies. But both of them have a beguiling charm that goes some way to soothing the otherwise punishing heat in here tonight. Simone White, opening for Jesca, at least has the foresight to wear a light summer dress, as opposed to Hoop’s long-sleeve lace number and a knee-length skirt. All the same, she still finds the time to reflect on the differences between American and European air-con systems (the result? We loose). “I’m melting up here,” she gasps, before shrugging: “It’s OK. It’s good for the vocal chords.” It’s possible you caught White live on last year’s Honest Jons Revue, performing on the same bill as label boss Damon Albarn, Tony Allen, Candi Staton and Victoria Williams, or heard her “Beep Beep Song” on the soundtrack to an Audi car commercial. Tonight, just her and a guitar, her voice reminds me sometimes of the smoky softness of Suzanne Vega or Cat Power; she sings very quietly, yet with incredibly precise annunciation. Although the songs themselves appear gentle and graceful enough, you sense they address more significant issues. She introduces “Great Imperialist State”, from her 2007 album I Am The Man, as being about “the disconnect between the things we consume and where they come from”. There’s songs, too, about her grandmother “a singer and dancer in the 50s” (“Mary Jane”), the shocking antics perpetrated at a teen party “dropping white pills into pink lemonade” in “Candy Bar Killer", and an 80 year-old woman she knew who wanted to die (“A Girl You Never Met”). White and Hoop, it turns out, are old friends. Hoop explains they “spent a lot of time living in a French-style house with a big oaktree in Tapanga Canyon.” Hoop is joined on stage for parts of her set by a second guitarist Johny Lexus and a backing singer Amy May. They’re playing their first gig together, Hoop tells us, before opening with a new song, “Whispering Light”. Tom Waits himself has described Hoop’s music as “like going swimming in a lake at night”; for my part, I think there’s something both theatrical and elemental to Hoop’s songs that remind me, fleetingly, of Kate Bush or Bjork. Her voice shifts into different registers, while the lyrics frequently mention skies, rivers, storms and winds’ or enchanted places where the boundaries shift and the dead might come back to life or animals talk. But, please, there’s nothing twee or precious here. She’s a great between-song raconteur, bantering about the collective nouns for birds with the audience, or how she lost her dress and car keys at Glastonbury, or opening “Intelligentactile 101” with “This is a children’s story. I heard it from my nephew. When my sister was pregnant. Except he turned out to be a girl. So I had some explaining to do.” We’re treated to five new songs, presumably destined for her forthcoming album Hunting My Dress (nothing to do with her Glastonbury experience, so claims), before returning to sing one final song, “Storms”, a cappella. Then it’s out into the night, and the fresh air. We'll be back for more Club UNCUT, at the Lexington on Pentonville Road, N1, on July 27. And that'll be Arbouretum's delayed show from March. Should be good. Before then, though, UNCUT will be covering Blur's Hyde Park show on Thursday this week.

In the new edition of the always interesting Yeti magazine, there’s a good and provocative piece about Jack Rose and the Black Twig Pickers, in which the author Justin Farrar calls out “All the shaggy indie hippies and underground freakers out there dabbling in Appalachian folk, country music and roots rock.” Rose, who Farrar honourably exempts from his rant, joins in, too. “We’re not dabbling with folk forms trying to make them contemporary or psychedelic,” he says. “We can actually play our instruments without the ‘free folk’ label, which I think lots of other musicians use to cover up their lack of musical skill. Plus, we swing like a motherfucker.” Well, speaking as an expert on “shaggy indie hippies and underground freakers”, and as a bit of a dabbler in “proper” American folk, I’m probably not altogether qualified to comment on the new “Jack Rose And The Blag Twig Pickers” album. But I can say unequivocally, Rose is right: they swing like motherfuckers. Rose you’ve probably come across before, as the doyen of the new school of American Primitive guitarists. The Black Twig Pickers are a pugnacious old-time collective from Richmond, Virginia, centred around a banjo player and fiddler called Mike Gangloff, who used to play with Rose in the wonderfully ominous freestyle explorers Pelt (I remember reviewing 2001’s “Ayahuasca” for The Wire, and being amazed and a bit out of my depth). “Jack Rose And The Blag Twig Pickers” actually revamps one “Ayahuasca” tune, “Bright Sunny South”, but the prevailing vibes here are very different. As Farrar describes in his Yeti piece, the group are fundamentally committed to making good-time old-time dance music. There’s none of the mysticism so often deployed by notionally ‘free folk’: essentially, Gangloff and Rose are intent on revisiting the Old Weird America, but not bothering too much about the weird bit. As far as I can see, that quest for ‘weirdness’, however self-conscious, is what often makes contemporary folk music achieve a sort of transcendence – though of course I suppose I’m approaching it from an indie-rock perspective, at heart. The pursuit of authenticity, or at the very least a kind of traditional orthodoxy, can sometimes, to my mind, end up as rather hokey; rough-hewn Appalachian kitsch, if you like. Parts of “Jack Rose And The Blag Twig Pickers” skirt a little close to that, not least when Gangloff lets rip with his parched holler. But the unshowy richness and vigour of their playing, and the evident joy which underpins it, make these 11 tracks transcendent in their own easy-going way. Much here is wonderful, from the unself-conscious flow of “Sail Away Ladies” into “I Shall Not Be Moved” onwards. By “Soft Steel Piston” they’re flying, Gangloff’s fervently sawed fiddle and Rose’s spirited picking sitting tight but comfortable over the locomotive clack of Nate Bowles’ washboard. “Kensington Blues”, an old Rose solo tune that resembled a sweet John Fahey piece in its original guise, is brilliantly fleshed out, its original concentrated solipsism socialised and transformed. And “Revolt” has a depth, intensity and virtuosity which borders on the cosmic, without ever betraying its resolutely earthy principles.