The first thing I heard this morning when I got into the office was the news that Lux Interior of The Cramps had died. As a tip of the hat in fond farewell, here's another entry from my regular Stop Me. . . column, from 1980, when The Cramps supported The Police on the Italian leg of their first world tour. Who: The Police and The Cramps Where: Italy, March 1980 The day before the tear-gas and gunfire in Reggio Emilia, scary Cramps guitarist Bryan Gregory, a sinister stick insect in black leather and peroxide quiff, walks up to me outside the Hotel Principe E Savoia, which The Police have commandeered as their Milan HQ, puts his mouth very close to my ear and whispers with husky intimacy: “Growl for me, Tiger.” Words, frankly, fail me. I head at a brisk pace towards the coach for the Palalido sports centre, where The Police are playing tonight, supported by The Cramps. Bryan follows me onto the bus, sits next to me. “Can I interest you,” he asks, “in a conversation about necromancy?” Hours go by, and I guess at some point I nod off. Anyway, the next time I see Bryan he’s onstage with The Cramps and 10,000 hysterical Police fans are jeering them very loudly and throwing things at them. An orange bounces off Lux Interior’s forehead and the Cramps’ singer dives into the crowd. Someone bites a chunk out of his shoulder, hands claw at his naked back. He’s thrown back on stage, covered in blood. The audience want nothing to do with him. More fruit flies at the stage, splattering against the equipment. Andy Summers isn’t amused. The Cramps are using The Police’s expensive new PA. “This is absolutely marvellous,” Andy says, seething. “We pay a fucking fortune for the best PA we can assemble, hand it over to this shower and watch it reduced to ashes before we even get to use it. Fine. I’ve got absolutely no problem with that.” Lux, meanwhile, has gone down beneath a barrage of missiles. “It’s like the damned playing for the doomed,” Sting says gloomily, turning away. The next night, in Reggie Emilia, it gets worse. The trouble starts in the afternoon. The Copeland brothers – Police drummer Stewart and manager Miles – are strolling through the streets around the Palasport stadium when they hear the sharp bark of orders, the ominous pounding of bootheels. Turning a corner, the Palasport is in front of them and they can’t believe what they see. Thousands of fans have forced open fire doors along one side of the building and are swarming into the arena, pursued by flying phalanx of riot police armed with batons and shields, who lay into the rioters with venom. Meanwhile, Sting and I are standing by the side of the stage inside the Palasport. We’re talking about Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which Sting typically thinks only he’s read, when there’s a massive fucking bang and the plate glass doors at the back of the stadium just sort of explode, glass flying everywhere. Then the doors along the side of the stadium burst open, frames splintering and buckling. Hundreds of rock’n’roll shock troops stream into the cavernous hall, pursued by the baton-wielding riot police Stewart and Miles had seen charging through the town. We retire to the band’s dressing room, where the next thing we know we’re all hitting the deck as a volley of gunfire blasts through the night. “Fuck me,” Sting cries, incredulous. “They’re shooting people now.” We can hear screams, the sound of running feet, a crowd advancing or retreating, another bloody riot. And now we’re all coughing like coal miners, tear gas pouring into the dressing room from the battleground outside, the whole gang of us fleeing the dressing room, choking and spluttering. “”This is what I really like about Italy,” Andy Summers says, leaning against a wall, trying to catch his breath. “They really try to make you feel at home.” “We’ll get T-shirts made,” Miles Copeland blusters. “I SURVIVED THE BATTLE OF REGGIO EMILIA!” “Great,” Sting says. “There’s just one thing. . .” “What’s that?” “We haven’t survived it yet.” Another tear-gas canister goes off inside the stadium, there’s more gunfire from outside. “Just remember,” Miles grins, looking for the BBC film crew who are touring with The Police. “This is all great for the movie.” “I will remember that,” Sting says, “when they rush the stage and start tearing us to pieces.” “I don’t know why you’re so worried,” Miles laughs. “I’m worried,” Sting says angrily, “because I’ve got to go out there to face that mob, while you sit in here and count the money.” Ten minutes later The Police are on stage and Sting is in an even greater strop. “If you spit at me again,” he’s shouting at the crowd, “I’ll come down there and break your fucking legs.” He wipes the phlegm from his face. “It’s feeble,” he announces. “You spend all your energy rioting, and you’ve none left to dance. You people should get your priorities right.” What follows is fraught, ugly, hysterical, the crowd charging the barriers at the front of the stage, bodies being passed unconscious over the barricades, fights breaking out with security men, the police apparently having beaten a retreat in the face of the swelling mayhem. Sting comes off stage and kicks open the door of the band’s dressing room. “What the fuck was going on?” he wants to know. “What’s the matter with these people? Last night was bad. But that was ludicrous. People being crushed. Tear gas. Riot police. What the fuck are riot police doing at a gig?” “They certainly weren’t dancing,” Andy Summers says. “At least they weren’t cracking heads,” Miles offers. “Not in here, they weren’t,” Sting says. “But what the fuck was happening outside? Outside, it sounded like World War-fucking-Three.” On the coach back to Milan, Sting is calmer. “Some times I think this is the best job in the world,” he tells me. “Then I start wondering whether it’s all worth it. I know I’ll make a lot of money out of it, see the world. It’s certainly more exotic than teaching in Newcastle. But tonight, you know, it makes it all seem so worthless. I don’t mind being jeered, as long as I’m not ignored. I don’t mind what an audience does, but rioting - leave it out. I don’t want to be the focus for a fucking riot. It’s nonsense. It doesn’t even make great headlines – except for him,” he says with a hoarse laugh. Miles has his Sony headset on, couldn’t have heard Sting but must have sensed someone talking about him. “What’s up now?” he asks. “Nothing,” Sting says, walking towards the back of the coach, where through the window you can see the moon hanging over the Alps. “Nothing at all.”

Sorry for the spoiler in the title, but Yo La Tengo’s temporary reinvention as a bunch of garage rockers from New London, Connecticut is pretty easy to unpick. The press release suggests that the fragrantly-named “Fuckbook” is the Condo Fucks’ sixth album (the previous five all appear to have been given Matador catalogue numbers). So far, so meticulous. The subterfuge collapses, however, when they list the personnel. Ira Kaplan becomes Kid Condo, which is efficiently mysterious. But Georgia Hubley is renamed Georgia Condo, and James McNew appears to have taken a somewhat idiosyncratic approach to the scam by using the pseudonym of, well, James McNew. It’s a Yo La Tengo record, then, but one that’s not much like the more reflective collections of recent years. Instead of a follow-up to “Straight Outta Connecticut” or “Condo Fucks City Rockers”, “Fuckbook”’s direct antecedent is the 1990 Yo La covers set, “Fakebook”. Where “Fakebook” was, if memory serves, genteel and mainly acoustic, however, “Fuckbook” is an enterprisingly tossed-off, scuzzy set. Yo La have been playing shows where they take requests for any song annually for years, and “Fuckbook” seems to capture the rowdy, haphazard spontaneity of those sets. The material touches on familiar obsessions of these rock scholars: there’s plenty of Britbeat from The Kinks and The Troggs; The Flaming Groovies (“Dog Meat”); some US proto-punk from Electric Eels and Richard Hell and so on; the obligatory early Beach Boys nod (“Shut Down” and “Shut Down Part Two” actually, much in the tradition of “Little Honda”). The sound, though, is wildly distorted and cranked up. The rawness of it all, the rehearsal space fidelity, the crackly intimacy of Kaplan’s voice, the biscuit tin rattle of Hubley’s drums and so on is so pronounced, it makes much of “Nuggets” sound polished. One of Yo La Tengo’s many charms has always been aclattery vivaciousness, but here they seem aligned more closely to a labelmate like Jay Reatard or something from the Goner label – super-snotty lo-fi. Much fun, anyhow, not least when they rip all the glam out of Slade’s “Gudbuy T’Jane”. Most of all, it shows that a vast knowledge of rock history can sometimes be best expressed with love and energy, rather than with a forensic idea of respect. Also, they’re called Condo Fucks!

Something of an adventure getting into work today, and I appear to be alone at Uncut for the moment. Helping me on the yomp through the snow, however, were a couple of quietly magical records on Time-Lag that I’ve got hold of recently. One is by Joshua Burkett, who I mentioned a few weeks ago in a blog about the new Six Organs Of Admittance comp. Burkett appears to be a pet cause of Ben Chasny and his friends: I first came across him on a CD compiled for Ethan Miller (from Comets On Fire and Howlin Rain), then again on a mixtape from Chasny. Thanks to Ben Chasny’s shuttle diplomacy, Joshua sent me a care package recently with a bunch of his excellent and precious records, some of them home-cooked CD-Rs. Although “Gold Cosmos” is, by a squeak, the best, the most recent and most attainable seems to be “Where’s My Hat?”; 14 tracks of lovely music from that hotbed of free folk, New England. Listening to “Where’s My Hat?”, it’s not hard to spot the affinities with Six Organs. But if anything, Burkett’s music is more frail and unmediated. The sound is cloaked in field hiss, and his ungated fingerpicking often slips and stumbles. There are clear ties with the whole Tower Recordings scene that I think he was a part of in the 1990s, and the way his playing and singing seems more influenced by, say, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham rather than the Takoma school makes this a blood relative of the first two albums by another Tower Recordings alumnus, PG Six. Talking of that, isn’t it strange how there’s such a fertile new tradition of American Primitive guitar players, but nothing much in the shape of a British Primitive movement (apart from James Blackshaw and Rick Tomlinson, off the top of my head, though they often seem closer in style to the American strand rather than the British one)? I think I heard somewhere over the weekend that Jim Moray was up for a bunch of awards at the Radio 2 Folk thing tonight, and while it’s hardly a fair and even comparison to draw, it seems a shame that America is thronging with all these people artfully reimagining tradition, while Britain seems dubiously blessed with naff modernisers, for want of a better word, like him and Seth Lakeman. But anyway, Joshua Burkett is great, and so is Ilyas Ahmed, judging by “The Vertigo Of Dawn”. Again, this is pretty underground stuff, but from the Cthulthan call to prayer that begins “Golden Universe”, Ahmed’s mystical strain is denser than Burkett’s spare études, with a brackish psychedelic depth that puts him closer in sound to Hush Arbors and Six Organs. There’s a sense I have at the moment of being on the threshold of more and more exciting music coming out of this secret world, with a new Sun Araw album due this week and plenty more interesting-looking things on the Not Not Fun label. While I remember, Ilyas Ahmed is also on a CD that comes with the newish edition of the nice Yeti mag/book, which also features Sun City Girls, Eat Skull, Times New Viking, Devendra’s Megapuss and some stuff like Crystal Stilts. Check it out, and enjoy the snow.