This morning's sad news of John Martyn's death reminded me of a particularly colourful encounter I had with him, back in what they call the day, which I wrote about in my regular Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before column in Uncut in July 2004 and re-print below. Adios, John. John Martyn Leeds: February, 1975 A day of mayhem starts pleasantly with lunch at the Savoy with Billy Swan, who’s had a hit recently with a great record called “I Can Help”. Over generous portions from the most expensive menu I’ve ever seen, washed down with a couple of bottles of wine that each cost more than I earn for a week’s toil for what used to be Melody Maker, Billy tells me fantastic stories about growing up with rock’n’roll in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where he used to see Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich in local beer joints. By the time we get to coffee and brandies, Billy’s on an hilarious roll. He finishes with a flourish: a story about Phil Spector driving Billy, Kris Kristofferson and Carly Simon up to his Hollywood mansion and playing them rough mixes of John Lennon’s Imagine, which Spector had just produced. “I couldn’t believe it,” Billy says with a smile I can still remember. “I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” There’s still some brandy left in the bottle when I have to leave. I’m due in Leeds later today to interview John Martyn, who’s meant to be recording a live album that night at a show he’s playing at the university. We get to Leeds around seven in the evening, and drive onto the university campus, where someone helpful in a very short skirt shows us to Martyn’s dressing room. I knock on the door, provoking a great bellowing from inside. I push the door open and walk into the smallest dressing room I’ve ever seen, before or since. Martyn’s slumped in a corner, looking like he’s been drinking since the dawn of time, or slightly earlier. “Who the fuck are you?” he wants to know, bubbles of spit in the corner of his mouth. “I’m from Melody Maker,” is all I manage to say before the breath is knocked out of me when some fucking oaf blindsides me, smashing me into a wall before trying to hang me from a coat hook. “If you’re Chris Welch, I’m going to fucking kill you,” I am now being told. Turns out the bearded balding maniac I’m staring in the eye is virtuoso bassist Danny Thompson, now playing with Martyn after years with folk supergroup Pentangle. Danny’s about to introduce his fist to my face when Martyn gets unsteadily to his feet and punches the bass player in the region of his kidneys. This makes Danny grunt, but doesn’t put him down. “Let him the fuck go,” Martyn tells Thompson gruffly. “He’s not the one you want.” Danny lets me go and retreats to the other side of the small unpleasant room, which I now realise is stocked with so much booze it looks like an off-license store room or a bootlegger’s lock-up. “Sorry about that,” Martyn says then. “He thought you were someone else.” I can hear Thompson sort of growling, and decide on the spot that if the belligerent fucker comes at me again I’m going to stick a finger in one of his eyes – I’m not fussed which one – and we’ll see where we go from there. Martyn then claps me somewhat thunderously on the shoulder, offers me a drink, which I accept, no point holding grudges, and knock back quickly before accepting another one. I remind Martyn that I’m here to do an interview with him. He seems to have a problem processing this when the dressing room door flies open and this sort of scruffy fucking troll staggers in, swigging vigorously from a bottle of crème de menthe. This is former Free guitarist Paul Kossoff, who will apparently be playing tonight with Martyn, Thompson and drummer John Stevens. “Who’s this c***?” Kossoff asks Martyn, pointing at me. “He’s from Melody Maker,” Martyn tells Kossoff. “But he’s not Chris Welch.” Kossoff looks at Martyn like he’s being spoken to in a language he doesn’t understand and heads back out the door. I’m still trying to get Martyn to sit down and talk when about 15 minutes later, the dwarf-like Kossoff returns, bleeding from the nose and lip and wailing like the recently bereaved. “Fuck’s going on now?” Martyn ask, which provokes a tale of considerable woe, Kossoff now telling us he’s been set upon by homicidal students from whose clutches he has been lucky to escape with his life. Martyn’s on his feet in a flash, Danny Thompson, too. The bassist snaps an arm off a chair, brandishing it like a club. Martyn’s got a bottle he might break over someone’s head. “Show us these fuckers,” Martyn tells Kossoff, who leads us out of the building, into the student’s union bar. “That’s the one!” Kossoff now shouts, finger accusingly aimed at a skinny little twat, holding his girlfriend’s hand like she’s about to run off and looking at us fearfully as we approach like he thinks he’s about to be kidnapped by a death squad and driven off to a dank room in a remote location where terrible things will happen to him. “He’s the one that hit me,” Kossoff fairly shrieks. Martyn, moments ago ready for havoc, pauses now. “He’s not a fucking GANG,” he says of the trembling student. “What’s going on?” Turns out Kossoff’s drunkenly groped this bloke’s girlfriend and the bloke’s given Kossoff a shove that’s sent the guitarist tumbling down some steps. All talk of a gang attack is pathetic bollocks. “You c***,” Martyn shouts at Kossoff, smacking him extremely hard in the face. The short-arsed former guitar hero is further surprised when Danny Thompson fetches him what I’m delighted to describe as a pretty painful thwack to the side of the head with the arm of the chair he’d snapped off in the dressing room. This makes Kossoff cry like a girl, at which point Martyn and Thompson stalk off, laughing like people who are mad. The next thing you know, these people are all on stage and for an hour and more the music they play is incredible – but, hell, you can hear that for yourselves on Live At Leeds, the ‘official bootleg’ album that Martyn first makes available only by mail order before Island finally release it properly. Back in the band’s dressing room, after the show, I’m sitting with Martyn, finally getting around to the interview, when Paul Kossoff walks up to Martyn and breaks a beer bottle over his head, glass shattering everywhere. “Everybody OUT,” Martyn screams, grabbing Kossoff in what looks like a near-fatal head-lock. “I’m going to give this c*** the kicking he’s been asking for.” The room clears pretty sharpish at this point, and several of us stand in the corridor listening to Martyn and Kossoff go at it like rutting elks, the most alarming sounds of destruction and violent combat coming from the other side of the door - a symphony of bone-cracking, head-banging, furniture-breaking, glass-shattering detonations. This goes on for a while, then Martyn opens the door, blood all over the front of his shirt, holding Kossoff like laundry, which he then drops to the floor and kicks. “Shall we finish that fucking interview now?” Martyn asks me, and minutes later he was waxing lyrical about the influence of Davy Graham on his music, as if this sort of thing happens every night when he’s on tour. Which it probably does. Allan Jones

“You sound like a fucking Nazi Julie Andrews!” Considering the grim fate that traditionally awaits many British sitcoms when they transfer to the big screen, you might be pleased to learn that In The Loop – essentially, The Thick Of It: The Movie – has successfully dodged a bullet. More, the cast of Machiavellian spin doctors, useless government ministers and their equally hopeless advisors have successfully been transplanted across the Atlantic, where they come face to face with what amounts to their American counterparts. But, of course, some things remain reassuringly familiar: the swearing is top notch. In fact, it might be disingenuous of me to call this The Thick Of It: The Movie. Certainly, you’ll recognise Peter Capaldi as Glaswegian spin-lizard Malcolm Tucker, and Paul Higgins as Jamie, his feral lieutenant. You’ll also recognise Chris Addison, James Smith, Joanna Scanlan and Alex MacQueen in the cast; but not as Ollie, Glenn, Terri and Julius, who they play in The Thick Of It. In some weird reality shift, these actors are essentially playing the same characters, but here with different names. You wonder whether the show’s creator, Armando Iannucci, is tacitly suggesting that there’s something interchangeable about Whitehall cannon fodder; the names can be altered, but the shit mountain is still the same. In The Loop is about the build up to war in the Middle East (presumably Iraq, though it’s never specified). British Minister for International Development Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, in essentially the Chris Langham role) inadvertently announces that war is “unforeseeable” in a radio interview, and so sets off a predictably farcical chain of events that leads from the offices of Malcolm Tucker to the US State Department and, finally, the United Nations. There are, of course, many laughs to be had watching Malcolm unleash baroque degrees of swearing at Foster’s puppyish new advisor, Toby (Addison), or Jamie stamping a fax machine to death. But these are familiar, if highly enjoyable, pleasures. Where In The Loop stands or falls is how successfully it integrates the American material. Here, Iannucci’s blessed with a particularly fantastic cast, including James Gandolfini as a three-star US general who seems against the march to war, Mimi Kennedy as an equally dove-like Assistant Secretary for Diplomacy and David Rasche (TV’s Sledge Hammer!, for those who remember such things) as her hawk-like opposite number. These are all welcome additions to Iannucci’s world, and, strangely, the third act showdown between Gandolfini’s General Miller and Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker reminded me of the face-off between De Niro and Pacino in Heat. In the wake of the success of the US version of The Office, which similarly deploys hand-held cameras, you’d think all this would translate very well. But it’s interesting that a pilot for an American version of The Thick Of It (directed by Christopher Guest) never made it to a full series. Also, I can’t help wondering quite how something so cynical and bilious as this will play in the States, currently basking in the warm glow of Obama’s election. All the same, In The Loop is brilliant, deliriously funny stuff. Now, if only they’d put out the Specials on DVD, I’d be happy. In The Loop opens in the UK on April 17

A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers. For the full review, please shoot over to our Wild Mercury Sound blog. Thanks!

A busy night at Club Uncut, with Banjo Or Freakout, The Delta Spirit and Crystal Antlers, though annoyingly I managed to miss the first band (I was held up at a screening of Armando Iannucci’s Thick Of It movie, In The Loop, if that’s a good enough excuse). If anyone caught Banjo Or Freakout and fancies filing us a quick review at the bottom of this blog, that’d be great. I did arrive in time for The Delta Spirit, a decent college rock band from Califonia with some mildly subversive uses for a dustbin lid and a bunch of beaty, nagging songs – notably “Trashcan”, their first single over here – that’ll do alright if, as I imagine, they get a ride on the festival circuit this summer. Worth checking out, perhaps, if stuff like The Spinto Band is your bag. Stuff like Comets On Fire is much more my bag, of course, which makes Long Beach’s Crystal Antlers so alluring. I first wrote about this lot last autumn, when their debut EP reached us, and the anticipation for these first UK shows seems, this morning, to have been pretty justified. Crystal Antlers don’t quite have the deranged, virtuoso brutality of the Comets at full tilt, though this is still pretty hairy and charged psychedelic punk. They do have, though, an arsenal of songs that repeatedly surge and lunge intricately, and a singer, Jonny Bell, whose hoarsely bellowed imprecations are directly comparable to the shredded larynx of Ethan Miller. There’s a fair bit of prog-blues in all this, and a lineage stretching back to bands like Vanilla Fudge, thanks in part to the constant heavy organ swirl. First impressions of the album, “Tentacles”, which turned up yesterday, suggest that maybe the organ sometimes gets foregrounded at the expense of Andrew King’s frantic soloing, and that can be the case live, too. King is awesome, but he sometimes gets a bit lost in the clatter of percussion (there’s a drummer and a percussionist as well, who seems to be using his real name rather than calling himself Sexual Chocolate these days) and that overwhelming blanket of hum. It’s a small whinge, though, when the overall effect, especially on the monolithic likes of "Until the Sun Dies (Part Two)", is so impressive. Too short a set, perhaps, when you could get lost in these sci-fi freak-outs for days. But epics can wait ‘til next time, I guess.

You might assume that Encounters At The End Of The World could be an agreeably apposite subtitle for many of Werner Herzog’s best known films. You could think, for instance, of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald taking Verdi’s music to the Peruvian jungles in Fitzcarraldo; the Conquistadors lost in the Andes in Aguirre: The Wrath Of God; Grizzly Man’s activist Timothy Treadwell and his bears in the wilds of Alaska. With this in mind, it seems perfectly natural for the 67 year-old Herzog to pitch up at the McMurdo Research Center in Antarctica. Here, summer is accompanied by five months of uninterrupted sunlight; where “you wake up in the night it’s so quiet” and the chatter of seals underwater “sound like Pink Floyd.” It’s a place of such incomporable isolation that even penguins can go mad, let alone the 1,000 strong community of scientists and researchers who come here to study the ice and the ocean beneath it. There's always something anthropological about how Herzog is drawn to document people in extraordinary circumstance. And, arguably, you can’t get much more extraordinary than living at the South Pole. Typically, Herzog finds McMurdo to be a repository for strangeness, drawing to the bottom of the world a community of travelers, scientists, weirdoes and drop-outs. Herzog finds a journeyman plumber who claims to be descended from an Aztec royal family; a biologist who’s been living in isolation among the penguins for so long he can barely hold a conversation; a cell biologist with a taste for science fiction who describes the ocean’s microscopic life forms as if they were monsters in a Cronenberg movie and who regularly shows his interns doomsday B-movies from the 1950s. As one character they meet, in the small hours of the morning in McMurdo’s hydroponic green house explains, “this place is full of PHDs washing dishes, linguists on a continent without languages.” But crucially, Herzog never mocks, and the film is more than just a study of these benign eccentrics. In Grizzly Man, Herzog famously claimed: “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.” It’s perhaps strange, then, that Herzog finds beauty in the Oscar-nominated Encounters…, particularly the breathtaking underwater film shot by musician-cum-diver Henry Kaiser. All manner of eldritch sea creatures move gracefully below the frozen surface that itself resembles an alien landscape, the footage soundtracked by mournful chamber music. Above ground, the lingering shots of the frozen Antarctic wastes are imbued with a glacial elegance; elsewhere, footage of the Polar volcanoes echo some Blakean idea of the terrible beauty of nature. There is an ongoing theme here, too, of mankind’s own destruction. Herzog uses Frank Hurley’s footage of Shackleton’s 1914 Trans-Antarctic expedition, and particularly the sequence of the ship, Endurance, trapped in an ice floe, finally crushed by the pressure of the ice. With a kind of Teutonic pragmatism, Herzog predicts that nature will one day reclaim the planet. And then there’s the penguins. Herzog, who claims from the outset he doesn’t want to make a film about “fluffy penguins” eventually finds himself in the company of a colony of them, where he meets scientist David Ainley. Herzog endeavours to engage in conversation Ainley, who’s been out there with the fluffy little chaps for so long his grasp of language is beginning to falter. There is what initially appears to be amusing talk about whether penguins can turn gay, before Herzog asks: “Is there such a thing as… insanity among penguins?” You might think this borders on self-parody – until you see footage of one bird suddenly peeling off from its fellows and waddling off towards the mountains, a suicidal journey that will bring about certain death. Are we, too, Herzog implies, on a suicidal journey of our own..? The film ends with Herzog entering a manmade subterranean chamber. His voiceover wonders what, in the future when humans are extinct, alien scientists might make of the place. I’m briefly reminded of the end of Spielberg’s AI, where extraterrestrials find the android child David frozen below what was once Manhattan in the far future. In Herzog’s Polar tomb, there’s pictures of flowers surrounded by wreathes of popcorn and, curiously, a frozen sturgeon. That these strange, surreal souvenirs might outlive humanity provides a sombre comment on the frailty of all of us. Encounters At The End Of The World opens in the UK on April 24. You can watch the trailer here

First off, a quick plug, since we have Crystal Antlers playing Club Uncut tonight (Tuesday January 27) in London. Tickets still available, apparently, and the supports (The Delta Spirit and Banjo Or Freakout) are worth a look, too. Secondly, we’ve just announced that March’s headliners (after Richard Swift next month) will be Baltimore’s excellent Arbouretum, so it’s high time I wrote something about their “Song Of The Pearl” album that we’ve been playing a fair bit for the past few weeks. There’s something in the ever-handy press-release that talks about “The expository yet emotionally resonant lyrics of [Arbouretum frontman] Dave Heumann at times recall songwriters such as Richard Thompson, Fred Neil and even Bob Dylan.” I can’t pretend to have studied the lyrics in depth, but there’s something of Thompson’s meticulously fraught melodic sensibility in a bunch of these songs, not least the opening “False Spring” and “Down By The Fall Line”. But while Heumann and Steve Strohmeier’s guitars sometimes have a spittly vigour to them which faintly recalls Thompson circa “A Sailor’s Life” (or, indeed, that song’s obvious fans, Television), much of the playing here is more smudged and grungy. “ “Another Hiding Place” reminds me, I think, of the last Arbouretum album, “Rites Of Uncovering”, and how it harnessed Crazy Horse’s chug and clang so much more effectively than similar-minded contemporaries like the irretrievably doleful Jason Molina’s Magnolia Electric Company. Arbouretum churn, for sure, but there’s a nuanced virtusosity to plenty of their playing, no little vigour and some fine tunes (all theirs, save Bob Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”) to keep them going. One thing we talked about the other day, playing “Song Of The Pearl”, was how much they sounded like Bob Mould; a mix, perhaps, of his fabulous “Workbook” solo debut with the first two Sugar albums. At that time, Mould, of course, was forcefully adept at taking wandering, Thompson-esque melodies, rooted in the cadences of British folk, and giving them the muscle and sonics of American rock. Heumann and Arbouretum seem to be doing something hearteningly similar: check out how rolling toms and raga fuzz bulk out a frail and lovely folk melody on “Thin Dominion” without ever smothering it, for instance. It’s a neat trick. And one which, I suspect, should work pretty awesomely live, if the staticky solos and incantations of “Infinite Corridors” is anything to go by. March 18 at Club Uncut, to recap.