It's been a couple of months since I wrote about Robert Wyatt's excellent "Comicopera", which still isn't out until October. In the meantime, one of Wyatt's old sparring partners has sneaked under the wire ahead of him. Kevin Ayers, of all people, has a new album out at the start of September, and it's rather good. Apparently, this is the first Ayers album for about 15 years, though I must admit I haven't followed his career very assiduously. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever heard anything by him beyond those first four lovely solo albums. Consequently, I guess this won't be the most informed, heavily contextualised preview I've ever written. From what I can tell, Ayers seems to have been mooching about the south of France for an extraordinarily long time, probably doing not much more than some fairly concerted wine-tasting. We spent a while yesterday trying to work out what he lives on - does he have independent means, maybe? But Ayers always comes across as one of those charming, insouciant wasters who sort of glide through life untroubled by the dreary realities that trouble the rest of us. In fact, listening to "The Unfairground", Ayers tackles angst, romantic mishaps and fear of ageing with a sort of rueful shrug. I've seen his voice compared to Nick Drake in the past, and while's there's a certain fruity Englishness which they both share, Ayers doesn't really do grief. On "Cold Shoulder" here, he ponders, "I don't understand anything any more as I grow older." But even then, he carries off something approaching depression with a peculiar jauntiness. I guess in the past, Ayers' main weapon against the black-eyed dog was whimsy. But on "The Unfairground", the quirks have mostly mellowed out into a more reflective archness. There are moments of oddness; the title track's skittish fairground music being the most obvious. Mostly, though, Ayers ambles through these gently beguiling songs like an old rogue who has fallen into the company of some indulgent new friends. A lot of the music here is provided by The Ladybug Transistor - a New York band whose gifts for indie-baroque have previously been undermined by some fairly weedy songwriting - and a staunch bunch of janglers corralled by Teenage Fanclub's redoubtable Norman Blake. I think it's Blake, Euros Childs and co adding distantly roistering harmonies to the great "Run Run Run". But elsewhere, Ayers calls on older friends. Robert Wyatt guests as The Wyattron, a heavily treated harmony on "Cold Shoulder" that recalls Eno's metamorphosis into the Enotron on Wyatt's own records. Phil Manzanera, another of Wyatt's crew, adds some faintly threatening freak-out in the background of "Brainstorm". By Ayers' standards, this one glowers intensely. But even when he sings, "Shout! Scream! Give me back my dreams," he sounds too amused to be angry. Best of all, the elusive Bridget St John duets on "Baby Come Home", a romantic gambol with the rich brass band trim that's a hallmark of this whole, immensely pleasant record. Corny fuck that I am, I'll be taking this on holiday to the South-West of France with me in a couple of weeks. A bientot. . .

It's just occurred to me that, for the past week or so, a lot of the stuff I've been writing about has been by either female singer/songwriters (PJ Harvey, Linda Thompson) or splattery noise/drone bands from the States (Cloudland Canyon, White Rainbow, Magik Markers). No change today, and torn between the new Sunburned Hand Of The Man/Four Tet album and "Judee Sill Live In London", I've opted for the latter. As I write, I'm skipping between the tracks to play the three versions of "The Kiss" on here. "Live In London" compiles three radio sessions for the BBC from '72 and '73. The first version of "The Kiss" dates from March 1972, and in her preamble, Sill notes that she had only written it eight days previously. "I can't decide whether this is a romantic song or a holy song," she continues. That dilemma, of course, was one of the fascinating things about Judee Sill; the way her music conflated the carnal and the divine. I say conflate, but Sill's spiel suggest it was less a calculated plan, more a confusion. "The Kiss" remains my favourite Sill song, and its hymnal tranquility is even more apparent in these solo piano versions, without the rich arrangement it would attain on "Heart Food". A year later, in February 1973, the song has been recorded formally for "Heart Food", but it doesn't appear to have changed materially. Sill, though, appears to have become reconciled to the song's dichotomy. "It's about the union of opposites that are in us all," she says. She also says, "Here's a song that will put you to sleep," giving us a glimpse of the insecurities that plagued Sill. As you probably know, Sill was the great lost Asylum artist, her life a tangle of scholarship and passion, religion, hard drugs, even prostitution. Besides the lovely music collected here, it's fascinating to hear Sill talk, to hear this mythologised and elusive woman revealed to be a serious, nervous but compelling character beyond the intensities and complexities of her songs. "The Donor" is on now, and it occurs to me that when I compared PJ Harvey's "White Chalk" to Sill's contemporary Laura Nyro in my blog the other day, you can divine a Sill influence in Harvey's new piano songs, too. "Live In London" makes that comparison easier, without the chamber arrangements of the two studio Sill albums. It's a different kind of austere emotional directness, perhaps. . . maybe I'll play "White Chalk" later this afternoon and think again.

"Is Michael Bay the Devil?" Screams the headline on a 1998 Entertainment Weekly article that's currently posted on Michael Bay's website. Certainly, there's a large number of film critics out there who seem to hold the director personally responsible for pretty much everything that's Wrong in movies. As it goes, I like Michael Bay. I like the fact that his films -- principally, Armaggedon, The Rock and Bad Boys 1 and 2 -- are straight-down-the-line action movies, in which Shit gets Blown Up truly, brilliantly, specactularly. He seems a remarkably honest film maker to me -- he knows what he does, he knows what he's capable of, and he's happy to follow that path, regardless of whether it's what you might call credible. The Rock and Armageddon are arguably his best films. With The Rock, Sean Connery and Nic Cage have fantastic on-screen chemistry, aided I'm sure by Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais' uncredited script work that brought echoes of Fletch and Godber to their characters. Armageddon works so well because Bruce Willis is one of the great testosterone-swigging leads, and Steve Buscemi, Billy Bob Thornton and Peter Stormare add the kind of texture to the proceedings you'd expect from actors of their stature. That's not to dimish the Really Important Stuff that Bay excels at -- you know, the bits where asteroids collide in deep space, or massive firefights break out in Alcatraz. One way of looking at Bay is that he's the first director who, perhaps accidentally, is ideally suited to DVD. You can just skip chapters through all the boring exposition -- never his strongest hand. Here's a thing: I've got a 2 disc set of Pearl Harbour, right? I don't bother watching the first disc. Slam the second one in the DVD player and you've got Alec Baldwin's General Doolittle readying his men to bomb Tokyo. What follows is one of the most breathless sequences I've seen outside a Walter Hill film -- the speed and precision with which he cuts action is astonishing. It's a long while since I've seen Bad Boys, but I do have fond memories of the sequel, where Will Smith and Martin Lawrence demolish what seems like half of Miami in pursuit of the bad guys, before heading on to Cuba, where I thought for a minute they were going to go all the way and take down Castro. That, possibly, might have been a step too far -- even for the Devil. His latest, Transformers, seems to be the perfect Michael Bay movie. After all, it's Giant Robots Beating Each Other Up. No pesky exposition, minimum human characters... just Things Exploding. Brilliant, really. And if I'm going to go and see a film where Things Explode, I don't want anyone else but Michael Bay to direct it. In much the same way that I'm looking forward to seeing Wes Anderson's new film, The Darjeeling Limited, because no one does quirky relationship tragi-comedies like Wes Anderson. The thing, I think, that rankles some people about Michael Bay is that he's not some auteur, talking about Truffaut and Godard and redefining envelopes and cutting edge lenses. I doubt Michael Bay has the patience to sit through a Godard movie, except perhaps Week End, because it's got a body count. He's not an action director with an agenda -- like Ridley Scott, for instance, who basically makes high art action movies. Michael Bay is unabashedly popcorn, totally low art, and excellent at it. Critics who thought Peter Jackson made modern movie history with a film about funny, pointy-eared elves should be ashamed of themselves. Tolkien is a rotten, tedious writer who nicked most of his ideas from Northern European myths. Peter Jackson probably used as many FX shots as Bay did in Pearl Harbour, but he's considered an Artist. Nonsense. If Michael Bay is the Devil, then I'm clearly bound for Hell -- 7th tier, next to Judas, watching Will Smith Blow Shit Up.

A surprising lack of indignation over at yesterday's Bob Dylan vs Mark Ronson blog, where everyone seems to have responded to the "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)" remix with commendable restraint. "It could've been worse," notes Stuart, accurately, and compares Dylan's slightly lost vocal to the way Lennon was overwhelmed on the Lynnification of "Free As A Bird". "It's not the end of the world," agrees Dick Ikin. "In fact I quite like it." The anticipated flood of vitriol seems to have been replaced by a kind of philosophical acceptance, not least because the idea of Dylan being a pop star again clearly has a distinct frisson. Over at my Mog page, Kate is a fraction grouchier. "Ronson basicallly Dap-Kinged Dylan," she writes. "It’s okay. I am kind of a purist when it comes to Dylan. If something works in its original form why mess with it? I am not outraged, just kind of yawn…. bored." Good point about the Dap-Kings - that's the horn section Ronson increasingly overuses on his records. And another interesting observation comes by email from Nigel Williamson, who responds to my characterisation of Ronson as "this decade's Dave Stewart, providing Dylan with an ephemeral, radio-friendly glaze." ". . . 0r more like Arthur Baker's mix/production on 'Empire Burlesque'," he writes, "trying to make 'contemporary' an art form that doesn't require modernisation in the first place because it's timeless in the genuine sense of the word." I think this is dangerous territory, because it assumes that there is some kind of platonic ideal of music, which is timeless. I don't agree with this at all, not least because it implies that we can objectively say what 'good, timeless music' is. Some music is less endowed with fashionable production techniques, which make them easier to listen to out of context, but no matter how objective we pretend to be, we can't be entirely empirical about anything. Even Dylan. Of course you should still trust my hunches. Today I've been playing the new White Rainbow album, a morning regular here for the past week and one which our long-suffering neighbours in marketing have described as "angry whale music". Sounds good to me: White Rainbow is a guy from Portland, Oregon called Adam Faulkner who's also recorded in the past with the lovely Jackie-O Motherfucker and Devendra Banhart (I'll write something about his fine new LP any day now, I promise). "Prism Of Eternal Now" is packaged a bit like an old Lamonte Young/Dream Syndicate record, and features a slogan on the back, slightly tongue-in-cheek, which reads, "MORE ADVANCED THAN MEDITATION!! FASTER THAN MEDITATION ABOVE AND BEYOND MEDITATION." Again, this works for me. When Faulkner gets down to it, he's operating around that drone/ambient/Krautrock interface which I love so much, especially this week it seems, following on from the other day's Harmonia and Cloudland Canyon blog. Listening to this one, I can pick up a good working knowledge of Terry Riley's "Rainbow In Curved Air" from the organ flurries; plenty of ultra-minimalism like the aforementioned Lamonte Young; Neu!, especially, those keening guitar lines; and maybe some early Popol Vuh, too (sorry, I can't remember which album). As this excellent and enveloping record goes on, it also feels like Faulkner knows his way round the glitchy, minimalist electronica that was everywhere (in my world, OK) a few years ago; stuff like those first two Pole albums. Here's the White Rainbow Myspace. How about booking Adam to bring his "WHITE RAINBOW FULL SPECTRUM VIBRATIONAL HEALING CENTER AKA PSYCHEDELIC VIBE-HUT" to your house? I think it's just him playing in a tent for a very long time.

Apologies, first, that this isn't my usual film blog, but I was pretty shocked to read in a tabloid newspaper this morning that self-confessed "technophobe" Elton John would like to see the Internet shut down for five years -- "to see what sort of art is produced over that span." Elton, you see, is worried that Cyberspace is killing music. "The internet has stopped people from going out and... creating stuff," he grumps, suggesting that people don't spend enough time embracing the kind of social interactivity that stimulates thought and ideas. "Instead, they sit at home and make their own records... [which] doesn't bode well for creative stuff." Which is kinda rubbish, really. Firstly, how do you actually shut down the Internet? Do you practically disable every computer in the world so it can no longer access the Internet, or do you dismantle the web completely? And how do you police this? Regardless of its cultural value, the Internet has been pivotal in the disemination of free speech and ideas round the world. It's opened up whole new ways of conveying information that's helped improve the lives of millions and millions of people round the planet. You can communicate on a global scale. You can MSN with someone in real time on the other side of the planet. With the flick of a mouse, you've got access to an almost endless information resource. And if Elton wants to shut that down for five years, then he's clearly mad. The other -- perhaps more significant -- point Elton seems to be making is part of a wider problem that the music industry clearly has with the Internet. "In the early Seventies," says Elton, "there were at least 10 albums released every week that were fantastic." This nostalgia for times gone by roughly equates with a fear of the future. I suspect Elton and record companies don't perhaps understand, and therefore don't particularly trust, the Internet. As businesses, major labels perceive it as a threat to traditional revenue streams. To me, the ideal of someone illegally downloading music, say, is no different from when I was younger and my friends and I used to record our albums onto cassettes for one another. I remember having a fantastic music collection -- all of it on tape, none of which I'd paid for. "Home taping is killing music," I believe the slogan ran. No, it wasn't: it meant that when I was 13 and didn't have the werewithal to buy albums myself I still had access to brilliant, life-changing music I could listen to over and over again, very loudly, because my friends were good enough to tape their elder brothers' David Bowie albums onto C90 cassettes for me. And no one died. Major labels are finding themselves ignored by new bands, and of course that worries them. Myspace has revolutionised the way young, unsigned bands get their music heard. When I started out at Melody Maker, in the late Eighties, I remember we used to get sent piles of tapes from unsigned bands. Imagine the cost of buying a pile of tapes -- say, 100 or so to send round to MM, NME and Sounds, as it was back then -- and add to that the cost of postage. That's quite a few bob. Now, all you need to do is email a link to your Myspace site, where the music's already uploaded, and you're laughing. The idea of people sitting at home, staring like Matrix-drones at their computers, leading virtual lives creating virtual music, is pretty daft. Art evolves as we evolve and the tools we create our art with change. The creative urge adapts. And for Elton to suggest there's no good new music out there is just a witless statement. Read John's blog, and it seems like every day he's writing about something brilliant -- whether it be Konono No 1, the Boredoms or LCD Soundsystem. More importantly, if Elton's wish to shut down the Internet miraculously came true, then all the debate and discourse the comments on Wild Mercury Sound generate would be lost. And that opportunity for people to be turned onto new music, and discuss it, would cease. Which is a sad thing, right?