COACHELLA FESTIVAL – DAY ONE - The Verve, Les Savy Fav, The Raconteurs! It’s 97 degrees, 50,000 music tattooed fans are surrounded by palm trees and padding cowboy-hatted and barefoot across the lush polo fields of Indio, California while trucks spray water ON the site to keep the swirling dust down. Read it and weep Mr Eavis! It can only be COACHELLA. This is the ninth COACHELLA VALLEY MUSIC & ARTS FESTIVAL and this is how Uncut saw Friday 25 April, day one: BEST SHOW THE VERVE (Main Stage) Their first US show for 10 years and they climax with a song they’ve never played before! Richard Ashcroft – newly mod shorn but assuredly still the space commander – leads the amassed faithful through the psychedelic dusk with a majestic ‘Lucky Man’ and ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ which he dedicates to Hunter S Thompson because the band stop off at Vegas next. Then he takes us higher with this new cosmic thing that even the band don’t have a name for yet! The band slope off triumphant and the crowd disperse leaving headliner JACK JOHNSON to pick up the pieces. BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY LES SAVY FAV Weird beard Tom Harrington stripped down to his undies, (ugh!) microwaving lobster pink (double ugh!) on the sizzling open-topped, mid-afternoon Outdoor Theatre decides to proposition the crowd, kiss a guy then ascend 30 feet to the top of the lighting rig where he hovers precariously, leading us cheerleader style through set closer ‘We Rock The Party’. CELEBRITY SPOTS: We’re a mere three hours from Hollywood so the stars all rock up: ALICIA SILVERSTONE, ROSANNA ARQUETTE, AGYNESS DEYN, who dances on stage with Black Kids, STEVEN TYLER and PINK all show. Pink digs The Breeders. Tyler digs Raconteurs. ROCK GODS IN WAITING THE RACONTEURS Jack does his best Jimmy Page impersonation, hair fresh cut and cool sideys, soloing like his life depends on it as the band hunker down to some heavy blues work-outs. Some of this stuff is on the recently out and already bypassed ‘Consolers Of The Lonely’. ‘Steady As She Goes’ is the day’s big Fest anthem. WIN SOME, LOSE SOME… VAMPIRE WEEKEND Big, big crowd for the latest East Coast nonchalants and much screaming along to party anthem ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ but the sartorials are a Benneton nightmare, singer Ezra Koenig jittering around in pressed pink shorts for Chrissakes! HEIGHT OF FASHION: A draw between DATAROCK, who manfully sweat through the entire day in their matching blood red track suits, and SANTI WHITE of SANTOGOLD who performs a stunning set from her debut album in the Gobi tent dressed in a crazy-ass jumpsuit and red fishnet tights. KEEPING IT OLD SCHOOL THE BREEDERS Still can’t keep it together, the Deal sisters bitch about their mother’s Alzeimers, tune and detune, false start a lot and eventually bludgeon their way through a ragged collection of newies from their ‘Moutain Battles’ album (‘Walk It Off’ achieves some kind of stand-out) plus main stage set savers ‘One Divine Hammer’ and ‘Cannonball’. SONG OF THE DAY BLACK KIDS’ ‘I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You’. Not just a brilliant title, the Jacksonville outfit tore up the Mojave tent, singer Reggie Young in fine rabble-rousing form. STEVE SUTHERLAND

I am the proud owner of my late grandmother's radio. It's a Ferranti, bought, so my mother tells me, around 1950/1, from an electrical shop in Tattenham Corner in Surrey, where my grandparents lived at the time. Radio enthusiasts note, it's a 215 model, with a walnut-finish cabinet and, according to a quick Google, would have cost £27 back in the day, very expensive in a post war world of rationing. It carries Long, Medium and Short Wave and, sometimes, there's a rather eerie whistle running underneath the programme when it's on, like the ghost of electricity moping around in the ether. I have other radios in the house -- from a swish, cream-coloured digital replica Roberts in the bedroom to a battered old plasterer's transistor in the kitchen -- but my grandmother's old radio, which sits in my living room, is the one that I love listening to the most. The ghosting aside, the sound has an incredible warmth to it, particularly noticeable on speech radio, that comes, I guess, from the plucky valves and transistors who've manfully converted electrical signals into sound for 60 years now, and have never, to the best of either mine or my mother's knowledge, needed to be serviced. Magnificent craftsmanship, I'm sure you'll agree. but the real reason it means so much to me, of course, is that it once belonged to my grandmother, who's long since departed this life. My grandmother used to have the radio in the dining room of her flat in Epsom, which is where I remember it from originally. It would have been, I like to think, on that radio that my mother first heard Radio 4, and developed a lifelong relationship with the station that I have since inherited, along with the radio. It’s entirely possible, too, that it was on that Ferranti set my grandmother first heard I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, Radio 4’s cheery “antidote to panel games” that began life on April 11, 1972, presented by the avuncular Humphrey Lyttelton who gave the teams “silly things to do” for the duration of its 50 series. Lyttelton died last night. I must admit, I don’t really know much about his career as a jazz trumpeter, only that when marshalling the two ISIHAC teams – invariably consisting of Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor alongside guest panelists like Jeremy Hardy or Jack Dee – he was very, very funny. He had a dry wit, and a likable way with put downs. His references to the sexual exploits of non-existent scorer Samantha, for instance, were usually hysterical, despite being singularly out of step in our more politically correct era: "In her spare time, Samantha likes nothing more than to peruse old record shops. She particularly enjoys a rewarding poke in the country section.” It was all harmless, seaside postcard sauce. I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, of course, gave us Mornington Crescent, a game with no clear rules that’s somehow based on the London Underground map and where the winner is the first person to mention that station (following the death of one of the show’s original players, Willie Rushton, London Transport erected a blue plaque at Mornington Crescent in his honour). There are strange and arcane rules Lyttelton used to introduce before the round began – “the Trumpington’s Variations” or “Tudor Court rules” that, frankly, only made the whole thing even more surreal. There are, perhaps unsurprisingly, plently of Internet sites devoted to Mornington Crescent, where fans and such like attempt to try and fathom the game's eldritchian rules (one online poster to a site pleads: “Please can you explain the Hammersmith jink, especially when played after Broad Green?”) I guess Lyttelton himself was one of those figures like Nicholas Parsons, the host of Just A Minute, another wonderful Radio 4 panel show, who belonged to a different generation, his voice coming through my grandmother’s radio on Sunday lunchtimes like it was being beamed from back in time, when men read the news on the radio while wearing suits and smoking a pipe. But unlike Parsons, who remains the epitome of the straight man as, you might argue, any good chairperson on a comedy panel show should, Lyttelton wasn't afraid to impose his wry, artful wit onto the show, frequently at the expense of anyone within earshot. And he made three generations of my family laugh, and for that – thanks, Humph.

I got an email from someone the other day about a new band helmed by Richard Fearless, the sometime leader of Death In Vegas. Of Black Acid, they said, “Half of it sounds like a Japanese sixth form band doing Mary Chain covers. Half of it sounds like Bobby Gillespie telling you about records he likes while trying to play them. The first song is ten minutes of backwards noise.” Incredibly, these all turn out to be good things. I can’t pretend I was ever much of a fan of Death In Vegas, finding Fearless’ theoretically rock’n’roll take on techno to be excruciatingly self-conscious (apart from their enjoyably motorik-heavy last album, “Satan’s Circus”, that is) and nowhere near as dangerous as he made out in interviews. There seemed to be a general pursuit of sleaze – or at least the vague signifiers of sleaze – over substance, and the substance – even when it featured Iggy Pop – still managed to sound oddly bland. Black Acid, it’s fair to say, does not represent a brave escape from those tawdry preoccupations. Fearless now resides in New York (rather than just round the corner from me in Dalston), and has recruited a bunch of musicians from bands I’ve never heard of (NYMPH, Place To Bury Strangers, Dirty On Purpose) to help him live out a bunch of absurd gutter fantasies. The titles are hilarious: “I Hate You”, “Donna Distortion”, “Glitter In The Gutter”, “Flatlining” and so on. At times, the band sound like they have spent four hours practising their sneers in the bathroom mirror, then managed to put their leather trousers on their heads. And yet, and yet, there’s something quite exhilarating about it all – though unless I’m doing Fearless a disservice, I suspect I’m not taking it quite as seriously as he’d hoped. “Black Acid” begins, fantastically, with "Lucifer's Disguise", a great skree of noise that lasts somewhere over ten minutes, and is maybe the first time Fearless has sounded as radical and uncompromising as he’s always claimed. I’m reminded vaguely of something like Popul Vuh, though there’s a faint echo of Suicide’s panto menace there, too and, subliminally, a sense of the ritual doom of The Stooges’ “We Will Fall”. Then track two barrels in, “I Hate You”, there’s some mention of Jesus, huge levels of distortion, rudimentary garage band dynamics, assiduously studied Mary Chain and Primal Scream records (especially the second album) littering the studio floor. And, against all the odds, a tremendously rousing bit of Rolling-Stones-in-a-dishwasher rock’n’roll. Occasionally, some synths will drift through the mix, and there’s a suspicion that Fearless is just roughing up his old Death In Vegas schtick with a raw, dumb, street gang band. “F.U.R.” amps up the electronics and reverts to the Krautrock pulse, reminding me of something from, well, the Scream’s “Evil Heat”. But the thing is, it all works. The balance between machines and scuzzy lo-fi is extremely clever, as if those DIV records were mere preparation for Black Acid. I’m reminded of how he was originally slated to produce an Oasis record, and how funny it would’ve been if he’d made Oasis sound like this. “Here She Comes”, for instance, is a spectacularly crude take on the Velvet Underground’s protean chug. God it’s preposterous. And also, fun. The crowning glory is “Don't Stop”, another ten minutes of sucked-in-cheek, satan-worshipping Popul Vuh ritual organ doodle, point-of-death muttering, dissolute strum-and-tambourine-jangle, supremely fried ghosts of the Scream’s “I’m Losing More Than I’ll Ever Have” and “Higher Than The Sun”, “Loveless”-era My Bloody Valentine. And so on. Yesterday, I whinged on about my disappointments of 2008, My Morning Jacket and Spiritualized. Here, though, is one of the year’s most unexpected triumphs. Visit the dungeon of amusing iniquity that is “Official Black Acid”’s myspace, and find out for yourself. . .

Amidst all the presumptuous sniping at Coldplay on yesterday’s playlist blog, someone asked me whether the debut Fleet Foxes album had turned up yet. As it happened, I was just working on a review of that record for the issue of Uncut out at the end of May. It is, you’ll be relieved to hear, pretty fine. Fleet Foxes, if you’ve missed earlier hyperbole surrounding them like this and all the post-SXSW frothing, are a bunch of youngish, hairy types from Seattle who’ve rapidly perfected a folkish, spiritual take on a kind of cosmic American music once typified by the work of My Morning Jacket. Around the time of “At Dawn”’s UK release, I became rather obsessed with My Morning Jacket, so I’ve been avoiding writing about their forthcoming “Evil Urges” for the past month, since I’ve found it so hugely disappointing (a rival, in fact, to Spiritualized’s “Songs In A&E” as my biggest personal disappointment of 2008 thus far). Perhaps it’s churlish to suggest that Jim James and his band should play out their entire career in a Louisville grain silo; certainly, James has long talked of ambitions that stretched much further than that transcendant strain of southernish rock. But still, “Evil Urges” comes as something of a shock, as the band attempt some kind of silvery digital pop, and an appallingly clumsy funk number called “Highly Suspicious” which our office has variously compared to Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole”, Robert Palmer’s “Addicted To Love” and, God help us, The Electric Six. Perhaps more disappointing, though, are the more conventional songs, which follow the template of old-model MMJ, but seem blander, more polished, less spooked – less coated in reverb and, instead, properly recorded, some may argue. Those defenders of “Evil Urges” are already pushing it hard in the States and, certainly, the band seem poised for some sort of crossover success, whatever that means. I’m sure the live shows will still be terrific – at the Hop Farm festival supporting Neil Young, for a start. For the time being, though, “Fleet Foxes” is a much more satisfying record. As I said last time, there’s something a little bit hokey about the band, with the constant poetic referencing of an American wilderness and the appropriation of Sacred Harp-style harmonies (on the fantastic “White Winter Hymnal”, especially). But it works tremendously well here, another fine example of a new strain of Americana – alongside Bon Iver, Phosphorescent and maybe Samamidon – that aims for a kind of backwoods etherealism rather than earthy authenticity. I’m not going to write too much about the specifics of the album here, because I don’t want to be repeat myself in the review for the magazine. But my initial fears that Fleet Foxes had stretched themselves a bit too thinly, given the consistent excellence of the six songs on the imminent “Sun Giant” EP, have proved unfounded. The band are certainly operating in a very narrow musical channel, that sometimes can feel a bit repetitive: delicate acoustics, celestial harmonies, a mild tumble of drums, some stuff about mountains and frozen rivers and so on. But after a few close listens, two thoughts occur: one, that Robin Pecknold’s songcraft is actually very strong, exploiting endless subtle, delicate twists on his formula; and two, that his formula is so seductive, Fleet Foxes might as well play “White Winter Hymnal” for 40 minutes, and I’d still be hooked. Very interested to see them live, too, when I suspect there’s scope to grow some of these songs a bit more rock muscle – without, hopefully, obscuring their striking charm. Touring the UK in June, I believe. . .