Very nice Club Uncut last night, headlined by Kurt Wagner. Allan will be blogging about Wagner’s lovely set later, I think, though I have to mention that: a) the “OH (Ohio)” songs that made up virtually the entire set stood up great to solo treatment; b) his guitar playing, all languid southern soul licks, seems much improved than I can recall from long-ago solo shows; and c) in the event that modesty prevents Allan from reporting this, he gave thanks and provoked applause for our editor. So he can come back. Good. Anyway, my beat last night concerned the two support acts, James Blackshaw and Cate Le Bon. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m concerned that my love of Blackshaw’s music might look a bit stalkerish from a distance. Still, it was great to have him play the club, and his brief set was terrific: just hunched over his 12-string acoustic, meticulously drawing affinities between folk, raga, classical composition and so on. As he burrowed deep into what I think may have been “Echo And Abyss” from “Litany Of Echoes”, it’s fascinating how such intricate and discreet music can hold a room. Watching and listening to Blackshaw, I’m conscious of a critical shortfall on my part, in that after a certain point, the impressionistic hyperbole runs out and my complete lack of technical knowledge means that I can’t really explain what it is about Blackshaw that makes his combination of virtuosity and compositional skill so graceful. Afterwards, our Production Ed was talking a lot about open tunings, which I didn’t entirely understand. Maybe next time, I should try and get him to pin down Blackshaw’s slippery excellence into more concrete terms. In the meantime, apologies for the plug, but you can hear James play on this month’s free Uncut CD. Cate Le Bon might be a new name to many of you, since her solo career thus far consists to my knowledge of just one rare EP, “Edrych Yn Ilygaid Ceffyl Benthyg”. Le Bon, though, is part of Gruff Rhys’ team, and consequently spent the other night at the Mercury Prize shindig performing as part of Neon Neon. I don’t want to make Laura Marling-bashing a constant part of this blog; as we’re constantly, slightly creepily reminded by her admirers, she’s VERY YOUNG. But God, how mediocre does Marling’s schtick look in comparison to Le Bon’s performance here? She only sings one song in Welsh tonight, and a good few of her songs seem to be about dead animals, but there’s a warmth and quiet potency throughout, which never slips into anything so banal as melodrama. Comparisons? Someone suggested she sounded like an owl, which isn’t bad. We were reminded a little of Sandy Denny, but the tunes weren’t quite like that – more in the vein of “After The Goldrush” maybe, or (though making comparisons to another Welsh act is a bit invidious) Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, perhaps what they were up to around the time of “The Blue Trees” in particular. That post-Gorky’s Richard James album, “The Seven Sleepers Den” (one that’s been neglected and is well worth checking out, by the way) might be another reference, to Le Bon’s solo live show at least. Let’s hear more.

Very nice Club Uncut last night, headlined by Kurt Wagner. Allan will be blogging about Wagner’s lovely set later, I think, though I have to mention that: a) the “OH (Ohio)” songs that made up virtually the entire set stood up great to solo treatment; b) his guitar playing, all languid southern soul licks, seems much improved than I can recall from long-ago solo shows; and c) in the event that modesty prevents Allan from reporting this, he gave thanks and provoked applause for our editor. So he can come back. The full review is over at our Wild Mercury Sound blog.

Washed up fighters make great movie characters. Think of Robert De Niro as Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, Marlon Brando’s “I coulda been a contender” speech in On the Waterfront, Clint Eastwood in Million Dollar Baby and Stacy Keach, pissing blood in John Huston’s underrated Fat City. Add to their ranks Randy “The Ram” Robinson, played here by Mickey Rourke in the role that's justifiably attracting much talk of an Oscar. Rourke, more than most actors, knows about the ring. Anyone who lost track of him in the 1990s (and frankly you’re not missing much if you did) might not be surprised to learn he dedicated more time to the gym than he did to reading scripts. He went undefeated in seven professional bouts between 1991 and 1994, when he retired from boxing. He kept on making movies, most of them trash, but occasionally found some of the old spark that made him such an exciting prospect in the early 80s, in films like Diner and Rumblefish. (He was terrific as Jan the Actress in Animal Factory, and of course as Marv in Sin City, but virtually unrecognizable in either.) Maybe that’s why Darren Aronofsky makes us wait before we can see his face in The Wrestler. First of all we get glimpses of The Ram’s glory days, press clippings from the late 80s when he was in his prime. Then we see him from the back, sitting on a stool in the corner of a nursery class – like a dunce. He’s reduced to fighting in school gyms now. His hair is long and rinsed blonde, reaching down below his shoulders; his arms and chest are bodybuilder pumped… But the face, when we do see it, is bloated and battle-scarred, his skin waxy, his eyes in retreat. Rourke’s once beautifully chiseled features seem to have lost all their definition. (He’s 51, 52 on Tuesday.) It’s enough to make you cry – or it would be, if Rourke didn’t imbue this guy with so much of the old charm and charisma. Randy is still fighting the good fight, still dreaming the dream despite everything that happens in a movie that’s structured as a long-delayed wake up call. Aronofsky’s The Wrestler arrived at the Toronto International Film Festival just a couple of days after winning the Golden Lion at Venice, and two years after Aronofsky’s The Fountain was laughed off the screen at both events. Maybe ridicule was good for the soul. There is something humble and back-to-basics about this flick – or maybe Arofonsky figured Dardenne brothers’ style naturalism was the path to critical redemption. Either way it pays off. The Ram learns the hard way that he can’t keep fighting forever (the movie casts a sympathetic light on sham wrestling bouts as just an extremely punishing branch of show business), but his options remain severely circumscribed in a country still hooked on its own fixation with youth and glory. (Not for nothing is Randy’s climactic bout a rematch with his old foe, The Ayatollah.) A subplot about Randy trying to reconnect with his angry daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) tastes pretty stale, and it doesn’t take long to see which direction this is spiraling, but The Wrestler is a poignant slice of barroom blues transported to a whole other level by Mickey Rourke, the right actor in the right place at the right time. This could prove to be his indelible performance, the role of a lifetime you might say. Tom Charity The Wrestler opens in the UK later in the year

I can’t off the top of my head think of another instance where you’ll find a former US President queuing up alongside the head of the Hell’s Angels to dispense hosannas on one man. But that, perhaps, says much about Hunter S Thompson’s influence on American culture – particularly during the late Sixties and early Seventies when, as Alex Gibney’s brilliant documentary rightly identifies, Thompson was, unbelievably, one of the most influential men in the country. Gibney’s film opens though with 9/11 and fast-tracks to Thompson’s suicide in 2005. Gibney draws parallels between George W Bush and Thompson’s bete noir, Richard Nixon. Several of Thompson’s best-known quotes, originally directed at Nixon, could easily be applied to Bush Jr: “He was a cheap crook and a merciless war criminal”, or “He speaks to the werewolf in us all.” You’d think that Bush would be just the person to get Thompson’s bile flowing, but, as many contributors to this film observe, by 9/11, Thompson was a spent force. It is, perhaps, Thompson’s awareness of his own diminished talent, that he could no longer make a difference, that drove him to suicide. “Hunter had lost his edge,” remarks one friend. The decline is swiftly dealt with by Gibney, who instead focuses on Thompson’s incredible peak. So we get Thompson and the Hell’s Angels, Thompson running for sherrif in Aspen, the lysergic road trip to Las Vegas and, forming the centre piece of Gibney’s film, Thompson’s antics covering the ’72 Presidential campaign. From today’s perspective, it’s extraordinary to think that anyone, let alone someone as dissolute as Thompson, could get as close as he did to Richard Nixon and Democratic candidate George McGovern. One of the many high-ranking American politicians from that era who appear here, McGovern tells a story about having dinner with Thompson, who arrived at the restaurant and ordered three margueritas and six beers, for himself. To give you some indication of Thompson’s influence, we get the story of how he all but brought down Democratic nominee Edmund Muskie by suggesting in a Rolling Stone piece that the senator was addicted to Ibogaine, a drug Thompson made up; a story that the press happily ran with. It makes Chris Morris and “cake” look like a rag week prank. By the mid-Seventies, Thompson appeared less concerned with writing, more concerned with indulging himself in a rock star lifestyle. Covering the 1974 Ali-Fraser Rumble In The Jungle, he gave away his tickets to a drug dealer and spent one of the most important sporting events of all time lounging around in the hotel pool. Gibney’s film attempts to try and find some motivation for Thompson’s behaviour. We find a man capable of warmth and kindness, as well as great bursts of anger. “He was aware of both, but not sure he knew how to control them,” says his second wife, Anita. Various talking heads – from Rolling Stone founder Jaan Wenner (resembling a particularly prosperous real estate developer) to author Tom Wolfe and Thompson’s conspirator, illustrator Ralph Steadman – add anecdote and personal insight. Along side the archive footage, Johnny Depp, sitting at a bar in what looks like Thompson’s office, reads from the author’s books and articles. As a documentary, Gonzo is endlessly fascinating. Gibney, who was Oscar nominated for Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, marshals his extensive footage well, and despite a two hour running time, the film doesn’t drift. Partly, of course, that’s due to Thompson himself. Whether in his prime, discussing taking acid on the press corps plane in ’72, or later, his skin mottled and his speech slurring but still with a twinkle in his eye, he’s an extraordinary presence. Gonzo will screen in this year’s London Film Festival, and gets a nationwide release in the UK on December 19

As is always the way, I suppose, I finish one compilation of newish psych acts, then a load more records start turning up. For a good 30 minutes now, my new favourite band has been some shady punks from Long Beach who allegedly travel in “a vegetable oil-powered school bus”, and have a percussionist called, well, Sexual Chocolate. This is Crystal Antlers, and they sound to these ears like bratty young brothers of Comets On Fire – ie totally hotwired and fried psychedelic punks – only with a little of the noise removed for fractional extra clarity. From a quick trip round Google, Crystal Antlers seem to have a snarky, anarcho-hipster sense of humour – they claim to be chimney sweeps, quaintly - which is more in keeping with LA antecedents like The Icarus Line than the New Weird America/Underground Psych cabal. Or, perhaps, it aligns them to the droll likes of Mudhoney, whose molten garage drones also have some affinity with bits of this debut release. The “Crystal Antlers EP”, produced by Ikey Owens of The Mars Volta, seems to have been out a while in the States, but is getting a bigger push with a November reissue on Touch &Go. And, I think, it’s awesome. The “Crystal Antlers” EO begins with a squall of high-end feedback, a frantically overheated Farfisa (slight hints of Wooden Shjips here), and the singer rasping urgently. The speed of this song, “Until The Sun Dies (Part 2)”, accelerates and decelerates quixotically, so that you’re never sure whether you’re going to hit a hardcore thrash or a sequence of flotation-tank prog. There’s some furious psych shredding in there at the death, too, and a bit of atonal sax honk. “Vexation” has that hoarse surging energy of the Comets circa “Blue Cathedral”, minus several degrees of fuzz but plus some more prominent unhinged “Funhouse” sax. At this point, it’s hard not to be thrilled by what on earth Crystal Antlers must be like live. “A Thousand Eyes” and “Owl” then repeat the trick at slightly more considered gallops – Comets circa “Avatar” perhaps – with the latter especially being a kind of flaming, preposterous punk-prog ballad (that also maybe shows the faintest connection to The Mars Volta, without the algebraic time signatures, of course). “Parting Song For The Torn Sky” (oh yes), though, is possibly the best of the lot: a hollering, psychedelically deranged sludge trawl, hinged around a gargantuan freak-out solo, that really evokes the Mudhoney comparisons. It’s tremendous. But you should check them out for yourself, of course: here’s the Crystal Antlers Myspace, where “Owl”, “A Thousand Eyes” and “Until The Sun Dies” are all playing. Let me know what you think. . .

Over the weekend, I watched one of the best music documentaries I’ve seen in an age. “Wild Combination” is subtitled “A Portrait Of Arthur Russell”, and I can only defer to The New Yorker for a start, who noted about the film, “This story begins, as many good ones do, with a gay man from Oskaloosa, Iowa, playing cello in a closet in a Buddhist seminary.” It’s a lovely film, and a rare one in that it manages to precisely but subtly analyse both the music and the personality of Russell – understanding that both are obviously interdependent – through a bunch of very intimately-handled interviews. The director, Matt Wolf, resorts to that old trick of wavering landscape shots to complement the archive clips of Russell. But even the tracking shots of Midwestern cornfields, or of generic “solitary man on the Staten Island ferry in headphones” are executed with a grace that’s much more evocative than these sort of things usually are. Cornfields apart, anyway, Russell emerges from the movie as a fascinating figure, consumed by music to such a degree that he seems in part too paralysed to be able to finish and release much of it. Wolf doesn’t fixate on one of Russell’s myriad styles in particular, but discreetly makes connections between the different strands he pursued: the avant-garde compositions; the plaintive voice-and-cello experiments; the kinetic disco tracks he pursued; the tentative forays into singer-songwriter territory. As sundry auspicious talking heads – including Allen Ginsberg (archival, obviously) and Philip Glass - make clear, Russell’s constant and dogged blurring of the margins between pop and the avant-garde were one of his greatest strengths. David Toop (the only journo featured, mercifully) points out at one stage something like, if you listen to your music in a certain way, the noises start displaying affinities that transcend apparently oppositional genres. If that’s overly theoretical, even a cursory listen to Russell’s music – or a listen in the movie to the powerful testimonies of his parents and his lover, Tom Lee (Russell died in 1992) – should make clear that what he did was actually immensely humane. That warmth and vulnerability comes across very strongly on “Love Is Overtaking Me”, the latest batch of Russell’s unreleased material (there’s something like 800 reels of the stuff) to see the light of day. This lot privileges Russell’s most accessible side, ostensibly rooted in a tradition of singer-songwriting that one suspects must have been anathema to some of his stricter leftfield cohorts. “Love Is Overtaking Me” apparently draws on material from the early ‘70s right up to his death, and involves a bunch of his rapidly-aborted “band” projects (The Flying Hearts, plus some I’ve never heard of; The Sailboats, Bright & Early, the excellently-named Turbo Sporty). Some of the stuff was purportedly recorded by John Hammond, of all people, but I don’t have the details on which is which. No matter. Everything kind of fits together here, from the tiny, beautiful country-folk sketches where Russell sounds a little like James Taylor, through to marginally sturdier band pieces, where his connections with The Modern Lovers are fairly apparent. Occasionally, he sounds unnervingly like Jose Gonzales, which can be a bit disconcerting, but unlike Gonzales, these songs don’t feel like rote exercises in heart-on-sleeve folksy songwriting. And constantly, there’s that blurring of genres: the way “Goodbye Old Paint” begins like one of his “Instrumentals” fragments (as collected on “First Thought, Best Thought”, my favourite Russell music), then evolves into a perfect little country song; or how “What It’s Like” has a languidly soulful undertow, as a horn section artfully manoeuvres into the space between the electric guitar, the organ and Russell’s wry, semi-spoken vocal about loving a preacher in the tall grass (someone’s just said it sounds like “Wonderful Tonight”, actually). There are songs which recall some of “Calling Out Of Context”, maybe, like “Planted A Thought” where his voice and cello are tentatively tracked by dance machine beats. And then there’s "Eli", which features his frail high voice and cello, and appears to be about a dog. This one’s in “Wild Combination”, and it’s extraordinary.