In February 1989, I find myself in Portland, Oregon, at the Pine Street Theatre, a venue that sounds somewhat grander than it actually is, which is not much fancier than a room above a bar where tonight I see Cowboy Junkies play for the first time. Their Trinity Session album – recorded in November 1987 at Toronto’s Church Of The Holy Trinity for 200 dollars – has become a Stateside phenomenon, selling 300,000 copies on its way into the US Top 30, amazing business at the time for a group no one’s really heard of before, whose music has been described as too morose for radio play. I’ve been besotted with the record for the last few months and I’m here to write a cover story for what used to be Melody Maker, the album finally coming out in the UK. At the time, it’s like not much I’ve ever heard, although now we can hear it as an important influence on what we have since called Americana, Cowboy Junkies playing in their preferred whispering hush almost full a decade before Lambchop turned down the volume and it became cool to name-check Hank Williams, Willie Nelson and Patsy Cline. The set that night in Portland mixes album tracks like “Misguided Angel” and “Blue Moon Revisited (Song For Elvis)” with startling versions of things like Robert Johnson’s “Me And The Devil”, Neil Young’s “Powderfinger”, the Stones’ “Dead Flowers” and, of course, their celebrated take on The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane”, whose spectral hush has inspired congratulatory comments Lou Reed, who I know from experience is not easily impressed by anything he hasn’t done himself. Nearly 20 years on, Cowboy Junkies have recently returned to the church where they recorded The Trinity Session for the Trinity Revisited album, recorded with guest appearances by Ryan Adams and Vic Chesnutt, which reworks the original template to quietly devastating effect. And that’s the version we get tonight at the Albert Hall, as part of ATP’s Don’t Look back series - the original Junkies quartet of vocalist Margo Timmins, her brothers Michael and Peter Timmins on guitar and drums, and bassist Alan Anton joined by longstanding collaborator Jeff Bird on harmonica, mandolin and percussion, Ryan on guitar and vocals and also on vocals, a revelatory Thea Gilmore. Amazingly, the group appear not to have changed much since I first saw them – although Margo’s mislaid her curls and Peter’s lost most of his hair – and what they play is wholly as astonishing now as it was two decades ago in Portland, Margo’s voice still uniquely spectral but with a hint more grain to it these days, here brilliantly supported by Ryan and Thea – the trio combining to especially thrilling effect on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Die” and a raw bluesy “Working On A Building”, which wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Robert plant and Alison Krauss’ raising Sand. Ryan, looking trim and dapper in a black suit, takes the lead on a terrific version of “200 More Miles”, looking pleased to be part of all this and relieved perhaps for once not to be the centre of unwelcome attention. He also combines brilliantly with Margo on a heartbreaking “Dreaming My Dreams With You” and Michael Timmins on the squall-heavy guitar outbursts of “Postcard Blues”. They close the show out with a brooding “Walking After Midnight”, Margo returning with Michael and Jeff Bird for a version of Ryan’s “In My Time Of Need”, from Heartbreaker, so startling in its stripped down beauty you could have heard a cat cough. Everbody’s comes back on, then, for “My Little Basquait” from last year’s At The End Of Paths Taken, and “Sun Comes Up, It’s Teusday Morning” and “Cos Cheap Is How I Feel”, two outstanding examples of Michael Timmins’ songwriting from The Caution Horses. A stunning evening.

It’s pretty embarrassing to have only finally got the point of Radiohead in 2007 but, 24 hours on, my “In Rainbows” epiphanies continue apace. Getting off the bus this morning on London Bridge, listening to the complex subtleties of “Reckoner” (a song I’d barely noticed this time yesterday), I was struck by the guns of HMS Belfast looming out of the mist on the Thames. I’d like to put this down to some kind of Yorke-induced paranoia, but I think it was actually one of those moments when listening to music on the move somehow enables you to notice things you hadn’t noticed before, to aestheticise or mysticise the everyday. I guess my iPod works best for me when it doesn’t block out the real world, it re-interprets it for me. “In Rainbows” works wonderfully at doing this, and the caveats about the band I expressed yesterday seem to be melting away with every play. I’m beginning to suspect even some of my problems with Thom Yorke’s voice were historical rather than quantifiable: that I associate it so much with a record I really disliked (“The Bends”) that it’s taken a long time to be able to appreciate its strengths in different contexts. Anyway, a bunch of things I’ve read have helped me crystallise my thoughts about the album. Pete Paphides at The Times filed this very good review, and I was especially taken with this bit: “[“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”’s] airless, bunker-bound anti-ambience recalls “Kid A” and “Amnesiac”, but the band themselves sound thrillingly alive, thrashing out a melody replicates on “real” instruments the gorgeous Cornish digi-folk of Aphex Twin’s “Richard D. James” – an album for which Radiohead have all been vocal in their affection.” I think that’s spot-on, a sense that this time their love of Warp electronica has been organically absorbed rather than merely appropriated. It ties in with a point that Jamesewan made on my blog, where he identifies “In Rainbows” as “generally more understated and less histrionic than some recent material. Yes, it's lush, a little jazzy, less self-consciously experimental and generally lighter, less contrived. I think it might become one of their best.” I still think it’s a fairly experimental album, but it definitely feels less self-conscious. That thing I wrote yesterday, superficially facile I know, about a sense of five men playing in a room: there’s a real easy confidence to the playing here, an effortlessness to the way they deploy ideas. For all the anxieties explicit in the lyrics, “In Rainbows” is a really warm and calm 42 minutes, never feeling as uptight and over-thought as some of Radiohead’s previous music. Good point, too, from Gwiz, whose conclusion is something that’s occurred to me too. “The real genius here is Phil Selway's chaotic rhythms,” they write. “Nothing is allowed to drop into straight 4/4 leaving tracks feeling jumpy and nervous only to be resolved by Yorke's sweeping melodies - lush.” Another bit of news from your comments – Ro speculates on the forthcoming Bad Seeds album: “I was talking to Martyn Casey just after they finished the Bad Seeds record- he said it was the most straightforward pop record they had done... Hmmm....” Also, in response to Poorly Sketched Chap, the “I’m Not There” soundtrack is out on October 29, I think. Worth picking up, I think.

I’m not sure what I was expecting from Murray Lerner’s The Other Side Of The Mirror – Bob Dylan At The Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965, which I went to see last night at the BFI Southbank last night. It was going to be fascinating, for sure. That much would have been evident from the clips we’ve seen down the years, most recently in Martin Scorsese’s No Direction Home. In the event, Lerner’s film, the content of which has been dormant in the vaults for fully 40 years, turns out to be an absolute revelation, one of the best concert movies I’ve ever seen and possibly the best footage of Dylan in performance ever shot. The film documents Dylan’s three consecutive appearances at the Newport Folk Festival, climaxing with the 1965 electric set that so stunned festival traditionalists, who were appalled by what they saw as Dylan’s betrayal of everything they held most dear and cherished and responded to Bob plugging in with howls of bitter outrage and a lot of loud booing. Earlier, of course, a lot of these same people were at Dylan’s feet and you can clearly see their adoration on screen as the impossibly young Bob, playing an afternoon workshop, reduces them to admiring awe with a sparklingly playful “All I Really Want To Do” and a grave “With God On Our Side”, on which he’s joined by a fearsomely shrill Joan Baez, unambiguously besotted. By the end of the song, her caterwauling grim beyond words, you’re actually surprised that Dylan’s been able to stop himself from elbowing the hapless woman in the throat to shut her the fuck up. There’s an absolutely fantastic version from 1963 of “Who Killed Davey Moore?”, whose latent ferocity seems to anticipate the later “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and a dignified “Only A Pawn In Their Game”, both of which are lapped up hungrily by the Newport crowd. The change a year later in Dylan’s appearance and relationship with the same crowd is dramatic – the bashful shirt-sleeved boy genius of 1964 has already given way to a sharply-dressed nascent hipster, immediately bantering with the audience, a buzzing livewire. Great footage in this section, too, of Johnny Cash, looking totally fucked on a version of “Don’t Think Twice”. “Who needs him? He’s sold out,” a belligerent young fuck, full of himself in front of the cameras, announces boldly early in the final section, giving voice to the hostility that later greets Dylan when, fronting an electric band, he unleashes “Maggie’s Farm” and “Like A Rolling Stone”, with Mike Bloomfield astonishing on lead guitar. Filmed in sumptuous black and white, The Other Side Of The Mirror looks spectacular, and the music is of course great. But what makes Lerner’s film so brilliant is its basic simplicity – it’s mostly just Bob and his songs, with occasional conversational asides. Mercifully, Lerner doesn’t feel obliged to drag in a procession of so-called experts to explain the significance of what we’re watching - and by God, what a relief it is not to have to sit through another pontificating parade of talking heads. Lerner lets the music speak for itself, which it does eloquently and unforgettably. Don’t miss this when it airs as part of an Arena special this coming Sunday on BBC4, starting at 9.00pm. If you miss that, the DVD’s released on October 29.

Up at six this morning, as usual, though the Radiohead album didn't arrive to download until, I think, about ten to seven. I played "In Rainbows" for the first time on the bus coming in to the office, and it was one of those records that seems dramatically suited to sitting in traffic on the A10, watching the commuters. Oh, the alienation! Funny, then, that I found this quote by Thom Yorke about the album: "It's about that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking, 'I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something else'." I'm not sure the fear hit me, exactly, but I get the gist. I should make clear at this point that I'm not historically a big fan of the band, never really enjoying much of the first few albums. Since "Kid A", though - since they started actively drawing on a lot of records I like, frankly - I've liked them more and more, especially "Kid A" itself, large portions of "Hail To The Thief" and Thom Yorke's solo album. Still, I can't pretend I'm an expert here, so forgive the vagueness and inaccuracies about some of this. "In Rainbows", as you're probably aware yourself by now, is a more stripped-down record (record? There's an error from me for a start) than some of its predecessors. Yorke's voice still has plenty of reverb on it at times, but there's generally less of what Stephen Malkmus once described to me as the "Nigel Godrich swoosh", less of a general blurry ambience. The instruments sound clearer and more definable, from Jonny Greenwood's lovely guitar playing (seemingly through a distorted practice amp on "Bodysnatchers") to the nimble breaks that Phil Selway plays frequently. It begins with a red herring, of sorts. "15 Steps" starts with a programmed beat that recalls Radiohead's dystopian comrades on the dubstep scene, like Burial. But soon the band creep in, and the song takes a jazzy, urgent new direction. It feels like a conscious band set, actually. There’s not much electronica here, more a sense of men playing in a room – unlike “The Eraser”, of course. The outstanding “Weird Fishes/ Arpeggi” is a wonderful atmospheric piece with Greenwood recalling Robin Guthrie, I think, and seeming to layer his riffs with a sample delay pedal. It’s simple, but expansive. I suppose the consequence of less electronica is that plenty of people who’ve been appalled by Radiohead’s post-“OK Computer” experiments will be claiming this as a return to rock orthodoxy, which isn’t really the case. “Bodysnatchers” is certainly a rock song – someone here has just suggested the cranking riff echoes George Harrison circa “Revolver” – but it’s still a peculiar, awkward, mildly deranged piece of music, and all the better for it, obviously. The dominant mode is balladry, with tricksy rhythms; “House Of Cards” and “Nude”, I imagine, will be ones that people gravitate to, immediate but still endearingly off-kilter. “Faust Arp” promises a Krautrock meltdown by its title, but cunningly turns out to be a discreetly lush piece in thrall to Nick Drake, especially the “River Man”/Robert Kirby-style string flurries. I still find some of the lyrics a bit alienation-by-numbers, all the “I’m an animal trapped in your hot car” business and various doomy references to the “21st Century”. There are, too, a couple of stumbling blocks that I’ve come across on previous Radiohead albums: an occasional vocal melody that continues to remind me of U2; and Thom Yorke’s voice. I have no critical grounds to dislike Yorke’s singing – in fact, plenty of singers I like – Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright and so on – occupy a pretty similar tonal space. But I find that the hardest part of being a music critic is articulating why you don’t get on with a specific voice; often it’s just a gut reaction that defies logic. This is a band whose later work I should unequivocally love, it strikes me, and I guess dealing with Yorke’s sighs – technically exquisite, to be sure – remains something of a hurdle. But then I’m playing “In Rainbows” now for the fourth time, I think, and I’m feeling faintly guilty that I haven’t listened to its predecessors so assiduously. It really is time I caught up. My colleague John Robinson just astutely suggested that the band are almost running their career like REM in reverse, becoming more silvery and mysterious as they get older, and I definitely warm to that. I love, too, the idea of Radiohead now: as a viral presence in the mainstream, as a device to bring leftfield musical ideas, conscientious political thought, an intelligence, dignity and personal discretion at odds with corny rock tradition to a mass audience. And I love how I received this music at exactly the same time as you. It played havoc with Uncut’s production schedules, but as a radical – and extremely commercially clever – manoeuvre I have nothing but admiration. Today feels like an event, Radiohead Day. And there’s the tantalising prospect of another albumful of songs from these sessions next month, when the discbox arrives. I can’t wait.

I was talking the other day to an Uncut writer, a hip-hop expert actually, about what a disappointing year it had been for rap in general. I suppose I'm a bit of a dilettante in this area, but looking back over the year's blogs, I can find scant reference to much hip-hop at all; certainly nothing to match the Clipse and Ghostface Killah albums from last year. Maybe, though, the traditional end-of-year rap arrivals might change that. There's purportedly a new Jay-Z record on the way; after last year's fairly lame "Kingdom Come", I guess we have to hope that his recent good one/bad one pattern continues. And then, intriguingly, there's the long-awaited Wu-Tang Clan reunion. With the obvious exception of Ol' Dirty Bastard, the Clan are rumoured to be at full strength on "8 Diagrams", unlike so many tours of the past few years when you'd be lucky if a couple of the core members actually turned up. The Clan's reputation seems to have faltered of late, with only the mighty Ghostface continuing to make records that bear comparison with their mid/late '90s pomp; I'd say "Fishscale" is up there with GZA's "Liquid Swords" (which he's going to perform live at a Don't Look Back gig next year, incidentally) as the best Wu solo album (I nearly wrote "solo joint" there, in that inexorable slide into hip-hop vernacular that can afflict normally sensible writers when they operate outside their comfort zone). But anyway, to get to the matter in hand, a tune has leaked, Ghostface is all over it, and you can listen to it here. "The Heart Gently Weeps" is slouchy, dense and pretty fucking great; the sample-spotters in the office are claiming it's built around Ramsey Lewis' version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". If anything, it reminds me of solo Ghostface tracks more than peak Wu: a massive soul sample, some slightly wonky remapping of the melody; a curious sense of romance that surfaced on "All That I Got Is You", for one. There isn't that menacing trudge that defined so many great Wu tracks, a vague hypnotic quality. But it's still got a lot more edge and richness than pretty much any rap record I've heard this year. In the unlikely event the album turns up, I'll let you know how the rest measures up. In other news, John Robinson has just put "Skunk (Sonically Speaking)" on. I don't think music actually gets any better than this.