It’s a strange thing that, as Mark Lanegan becomes more ubiquitous, his own material seems to be scarcer and scarcer. Since Lanegan’s last solo album, the fine “Bubblegum”, came out in 2004, his voice has been everywhere, but his substance has been hard to track down. I guess you can trace this to Josh Homme’s brilliant deployment of Lanegan’s gravity, his curdled threat, his staunch intimations of regret, on various Queens Of The Stone Age and Desert Sessions excursions. Lanegan’s effortless gifts, and his presumed reluctance to write his own songs, seem to have resulted in a career reinvention as hired man: with the mediocre Soulsavers; on the pretty decent first album with Isobel Campbell; on the supposed collaboration with Greg Dulli, The Gutter Twins, where only Lanegan’s two songs as sole writer avoided the overwrought dreariness of all Dulli’s projects since The Afghan Whigs' “Black Love”. This second album with Campbell doesn’t herald the return of Lanegan as an engaged songwriting contributor, exactly: everything on “Sunday At Devil Dirt” is written by Isobel Campbell, apart from one tune by a certain Jim McCulloch who, I must admit, is a new name to me. But it is an enormously entertaining record, and one in which Lanegan is by some distance the dominant voice; a voice fetishised, even, as some doomy signifier of Americana. More so than on its predecessor, “Ballad Of The Broken Seas”, Campbell goes absent for long stretches of “Sunday At Devil Dirt”, preferring to let Lanegan loiter darkly in the spotlight. In some ways, it’s a kind of pantomime of Americana, the language – “Shotgun Blues”, “Salvation”, “Trouble”, “Keep Me In Mind, Sweetheart” are a few of the titles – being so dustblown and full of butch western existentialism. Unlike the sort of stuff which deals in these clichés and purports to be “authentic” and “honest”, however, I get the impression that Campbell and Lanegan are revelling in a sense of high theatre, which is really engaging. The obvious comparison, of course, is with Lee Hazlewood and various female accomplices, who mastered this kind of almost-kitsch, hyper-real vision of the old, weird America. But Campbell’s erratic visits to the mic mean that, unlike “Ballad Of The Seven Seas”, this one can’t be categorised so easily as Lee'n'Nancy redux. Her focus on Lanegan makes “Sunday At Devil Dirt” (a suitably ridiculous title) a kind of close study of the American baritone. Lanegan, needless to say, has a voice thick with its own character: all he has to do is turn up, and a song gains the implied weight of a man who has seen terrible things and, somehow, survived. Campbell’s often string-laden settings, though (she produced this lovely-sounding record herself), draw very broad allusions to some of Lanegan’s antecedents. There’s Hazlewood, obviously (just check out “The Raven”, for a start), but also Leonard Cohen (the opening “Seafaring Song”), Johnny Cash (“Salvation”, “Sally, Don’t You Cry” and “Keep Me In Mind, Sweetheart”) and even Dr John (the lascivious gris gris of “Back Burner”). Lanegan sings brilliantly, and these are certainly better songs – fuller, meticulously crafted, occasionally with the swing of a standard - than I can recall Campbell having written before. In fact, there’s another way of looking at “Sunday At Devil Dirt”; as a Lanegan solo album that’s part of a performer’s tradition, rather than a singer-songwriter tradition. Consequently, you could see it as a sequel of sorts to Lanegan’s 1999 covers set, “I’ll Take Care Of You”. That album’s title track, an old Brook Benton song, is the clear inspiration behind Campbell’s “Come On Over (Turn Me On)” here, an outstanding vamp that transcends the lush rootsiness of “Devil Dirt”’s general vibe. Here’s Lanegan and Campbell come-hithering each other in traditionally seductive ways, a classic bit of low-lit roleplay; ersatz erotic melodrama, for sure, but maybe all the more enjoyable for its naked theatricality.

As a general rule, music doesn’t have that much of a nostalgic function for me. Without sounding too bloodless, I’m only interested in a record if it sounds good to me right now; the fact that it might have soundtracked various epiphanies/crises/whatevers in my life is, by and large, irrelevant. If I were ever to end up, God forbid, on some “Desert Island Discs” thing, I’d maybe choose something from “On The Beach” (a review of Neil's first Manchester show is over at the Reviews Blog, incidentally), even though I might have actually spent 1974 listening to Mud. I’m not ashamed of my musical past, I just don’t like those records any more. I’d like to think that this fairly ruthless and unsentimental approach has kept me going as a critic for so long, but occasionally I hear something which reminds me of the past before even I can start calculating whether it’s stood the test of time. This has happened a couple of times in the last week or so, thanks to the arrival of a couple of early ‘90s reissues. Sebadoh’s “Bubble And Scrape” and the Lemonheads’ “It’s A Shame About Ray” were critical records to me, both personally and professionally, as I was just starting my career at NME. Last week, of course, I mentioned in a blog about Carl Wilson’s excellent book, “Let’s Talk About Love”, that I had a general aversion to personal narrative taking a prominent part in record reviews. So I’ll stop the moist-eyed, long-haired reminiscing and get to my point: how reassuring it is to discover that these two albums still sound wonderful today. They do, though, sound slightly different from how I remember them. “It’s A Shame About Ray” remains a zippy, exhilarating hybrid of punk, powerpop, country, indie and a little grunge, but its lyrical punch seems greater now. Listened to a certain way, Evan Dando’s perfectly constructed little songs contain masses of foreshadowing, plenty of hints that Dando was far from the dippy lightweight he was often portrayed as. It’s not just the dazed Juliana Hatfield duet, “My Drug Buddy”, it’s all that talk of being a “ship without a rudder” and being – if only it had been true – “tired of getting high”. The deluxe version augments the original album with that accursed version of “Mrs Robinson” but, more interestingly, a bunch of solo demos which reveal these bright, sparky songs to have been originally much darker and more introverted in tone. Still a great record, either way. As is Sebadoh’s “Bubble And Scrape”, happily. Hindsight doesn’t make this one any darker in tone – how could it, when Lou Barlow had laid out the details of his personal life with such unexpurgated zeal on “Soul And Fire”, “Two Years Two Days”, “Happily Divided” and so on? What is a surprise, though, is that this album – once memorialised as quintessentially indie and lo-fi – now sounds so chunky and satisfying, a relatively orthodox rock classic. Perhaps it’s the generally spindly, fey tone of so much American college indie over the past few years, but the substantive fuzz of these rueful, frequently harrowing ballads gives them musical as well as emotional heft. The virtue of “lo-fi”, or whatever, is that the production of albums like “Bubble And Scrape” doesn’t date like bigger budget endeavours. So these fantastic songs still sound crisp and direct, but classicist now, too. Even Eric Gaffney’s wayward, nervy skronk-outs sound less disruptive. Maybe it’s the sheer weight of leftfield music I’ve listened to in the intervening 15 years, but, far from jarring and atonal, they seem relatively melodic to me now. And they make sense in the volatile, impressionistic and ultimately still moving sprawl of “Bubble And Scrape” (now up to 32 tracks, with added tape hiss, demos and so on). Like “It’s A Shame About Ray”, this one’s worth holding on to for posterity.

I have to admit to a certain amount of anxiety tonight. It’s not just the weather, which is, of course, rotten, the wind howling like it’s fit to tear chunks from rooftops from miles around. Nor is it the small matter of my beloved Liverpool’s tricky Champions League fixture at Inter Milan, made all the more potentially hazardous by Rafa’s selection of Martin Skrtel at centre-back. The last time I saw him, he was hopelessly fluffing his way through an FA Cup tie against Havant & Waterlooville, playing for all the world like someone who’d popped into Anfield to deliver half-time oranges, only to be mistaken for a ‘real’ footballer, handed a shirt and told “Here, put this on and get out there”. Perhaps it’s more to do with the fact that, last time Neil Young played the Apollo here, it was 2003’s Greendale tour. Allan has already filled you in on the brain-sapping details of punters being forced to endure an entire album of utterly forgettable songs in grim procession, in the vain hope he might play something good later. So I’ll leave it there. But these things live in the memory. So far, reports of these latest shows have been excellent, seeming to indicate a Neil Young revitalised, refocused and eager to rock out with abandon. As it turns out, I don’t have much to grumble about after all, omens or not. He saunters on for the acoustic set first, baggy-suited and surrounded by a phalanx of guitars. Someone has hoisted up a huge ‘N’ stage left, just in case we’re not sure. Bathed in a curious kind of fireside glow, he settles into “From Hank To Hendrix”, before the captivating “Ambulance Blues”. As you probably know by now, it’s become the surprise staple of this tour, and it really is wonderful. A great, urgent, labyrinthine thing, it feels like Young is crawling somewhere within it, unsure of where he’s going to take it at any given moment. In an odd way too, it seems to set a certain mood for this acoustic half. He hardly utters a word to the crowd, seems a little tetchy. He plays “Sad Movies”, another rarity finally dusted down for this tour, then stands up and does that slow bumbling about that I’ve been reading about, like an ageing college lecturer who’s forgotten where his glasses are. Mild performance art maybe, but it does all seem pretty unnecessary and painfully self-conscious. “A Man Needs A Maid”, at piano and synth, is just beautiful, little shivers of notes shooting into the air. Then comes tonight’s first surprise: “Stringman”, originally written in 1976, but unreleased until Unplugged in the early ‘90s. A lovely, almost meditative rendition at piano, it’s followed by “Try”, a sunny piano rag from the "Homegrown" sessions that’s also been stretching its limbs on these dates. In between “Harvest” and “Love In Mind”, Neil dispenses with a stray heckler, but it’s all starting to feel a little grumpy. Digging out the banjo, he ignores the calls for “Old King” and almost attacks “Mellow In Mind”, plucking hard at the strings, suddenly animated, keening for the high notes. It’s a sinewy, unexpectedly powerful version that gives you a jolt. The timeworn classics are brought out to finish, with “Don’t Let It Bring You Down” getting the biggest roar of the night so far. Interval over (during which time I’ve squeezed past a bunch of people from Emmerdale, spotted the bald dome of TV chef Simon Rimmer and overheard Mani talking to someone about working with Bjorn from Peter, Bjorn & John) and it’s a wholly different Neil. With Rick Rosas on bass, Ben Keith on rhythm guitar and Ralph Molina on drums, he tears into “Mr Soul” like it’s an itch he’s been desperate to address all evening. Springing up and down, bouncing from foot to foot, screwing his face up into the mic, he’s now clearly having fun. Silhouetted against the glaring crimson lights of the now-familiar “junk-shop-memory” stage set, “Dirty Old Man” looks, and sounds, brilliantly hellish, full of the impish glee of old men who know they should really be doing something more sedentary on a weekday night. Much has been made of “No Hidden Path” this tour, and rightly so. It’s an immense, spectacular thing. But for pure rock’n’roll dementia, head-buckling riffs and roaring solos, “Spirit Road” is its equal tonight. Huddling up to Keith and Rosas, riding the exchange like a tempestuous bull, Young is cutting loose. “Down By The River” is colossal too, Young turning his back, hunkering down and rocking so wildly you fear he’s going to topple into Molina’s lap. It’s a huge ball of knotted noise. At one point during a similarly frenzied “Hey Hey My My”, it sounds like it could easily smash the place to pieces. Brief respite arrives with Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me”, prefaced with Young’s introduction: “When I was 20, I wrote another melody for this. It wasn’t a good idea, I should have left it alone.” Needless to say, the song, with Keith on organ, Anthony Crawford at the piano and Young wheezing into harmonica, sounds just gorgeous. Then comes “Winterlong”, first aired on 1977 retrospective "Decade", and dedicated to his late friend Danny Whitten. It stands alone in this electric set as a rolling, graceful country song, albeit with a kick. “Powderfinger” is extraordinary too. After “No Hidden Path” and much audience wailing, the band return for “Roll Another Number”, which, after all that, sounds like a gentle rubdown. Is this Young, on the other side of 60, giving us all his last hurrah? Reminding us, on the back of "Living With War" and "Chrome Dreams II", that "Are You Passionate?" and "Greendale" didn’t signal the beginning of a long slow fade into mediocrity? Or is Neil just doing what the hell Neil wants and having fun in the process? My guess is the latter. Oh, and by the way, Skrtel did alright tonight. We won 1-0. ROB HUGHES ACOUSTIC SET From Hank To Hendrix Ambulance Blues Sad Movies A Man Needs A Maid Stringman Try Harvest Love In Mind Mellow My Mind Love Art Blues Don’t Let It Bring You Down Helpless The Needle And The Damage Done Heart Of Gold ELECTRIC SET Mr Soul Dirty Old Man Spirit Road Down By The River Hey Hey, My My Too Far Gone Oh, Lonesome Me Winterlong Powderfinger No Hidden Path Roll Another Number (For The Road) ROB HUGHES