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?

Yep, I guess it's that Ecstatic Peace time of the week again. Today's offering from Thurston Moore's imprint - maybe my favourite label of 2007, certainly the one I've written about most - is the jamming new album by Connecticut's Magik Markers. I have one other Magik Markers album, whose name eludes me. It's a pretty prickly old racket, if memory serves, being cranked-up free noise from the scarier extremes of the new American underground scene. Great live, I bet, but a bit tricky to live with. "Boss", though, is, well, not exactly a sell-out, but certainly what we could call a focusing of their powers. It reminds me a bit of how Royal Trux drifted into focus around the time of "Thank You", with a take on blues-rock that's at once divine and rancorous, primal and avant-garde. Magik Markers are a boy-girl duo, too: Pete Nolan on drums and stuff, the extraordinary Elisa Ambrogio on vocals and lead guitar. It's easy, and I guess a bit lazy, to slot Ambrogio into a certain lineage that includes Kim Gordon (the incantatory clang of "Axis Mundi") and also Patti Smith. The superb "Last Of The Lemach Line" finds her chanting, "I am the secular Pentecost, Squeezing out the blue snake," while hitting some really profound chords. This is beautiful and intense stuff, and I'm drawn to quote some excellent notes (that read like they were written by Thurston or Byron Coley, maybe), which describe Ambrosio's guitar playing as "with a mix of blues simplicity, an almost Sonny Sharrock wailing and a janky Americana punk reminiscent of Pat Place and Roky Erickson, Ambrosio avoids preciousness like a rash." Good writing, and "Boss" deserves it. Even when she's less imperious, on a sweet and diffident piano ballad like "Empty Bottles", Ambrosio sounds like a great force of nature, rich with character and poetry. I'm sure I read somewhere that she figures on the forthcoming Six Organs Of Admittance album, which sounds intriguing: a good person for Chasny to make mischief with. I don't seem to be terribly lucid today, so I'll stop soon, after noting that Nolan is a limber and inventive foil, that Lee Ranaldo produces brilliantly, and that trying to find Magik Markers on Myspace involves a visit to this place, where we learn, "THIS IS NOT A MAGIK MARKERS MYSPAC,THEY DONT HAVE ONE. THIS WAS DONE BY SOME IDIOT," and ends up at this confusing spot. Very cool band.

Since I first wrote about the new Babyshambles album, there’s been a huge amount of on-line traffic about both the initial preview and what some correspondents have been concerned is guarded praise on my part for the record. The various Babyshambles forums have been particularly lively, with much continued speculation about the album’s merit – or potential lack of it – with more than a few people inclined to think that without both Mick Jones and Pat Walden, the spirit of DIA will be entirely absent and the forthcoming Stephen Sweet-produced album no more than a crass sell-out. These are hardcore fans, clearly, and pretty unforgiving. To make my own position clear, again, I think DIA’s a fantastic record, cruelly maligned by people for whom all the static surrounding Pete is a convenient excuse for not actually listening to it. The thing about DIA, though, is that it’s just not the kind of record you could make again – not that anyone involved has since sounded eager to go through what from all accounts were traumatic and exasperating sessions. And you can’t at the same time imagine EMI, who’ve bankrolled the new album, signing Babyshambles to re-make a record that not too many people got the first time around. No, what they wanted I think is what they’ve got – unapologetically a much poppier album, full of great tunes that’ll sound great live with the full-throated assistance of the band’s fanatical following. I think it’s great, and I’m listening to it more than anything else that’s come my way since the Hold Steady’s Boys And Girls In America. And in eventual response to the many requests I’ve had, here’s a more detailed track by track description of the album. If I’m out when you get back to me with your own comments, I’ve probably been hauled off by representatives of EMI and various grim associates and will probably be paying an unreasonable price for going prematurely public with what follows. CARRY ON UP THE MORNING Opens with a squall of splintery guitar that slyly hints at the scratchy, desiccated sound of Down In Albion, before what becomes this album’s signature sound takes over – guitars as bright as searchlights, really big tumbling drums, punchy up-front bass, a busy vocal mix and a huge chorus. The lyric is wry going on paranoid, anticipating the album’s recurring themes of loyalty, trust, betrayal, weary explanation, self-recrimination. “I know you used to be into me/Now you’ve got it in for me,” Pete sings, flirting with self-pity. DELIVERY There were echoes of Ray Davies all over DIA, but nothing as explicit as the Kinks’ riff that fuels this pop gem, the first single from the album and as insanely catchy as “Fuck Forever” or “Killamangiro”. You can only imagine where Pat Walden might have taken the song during the instrumental break – sonic lift off inevitable, surely – but Mick Whitnall, Pat’s oft-criticised replacement, brings a bruised sweetness to another anthemic chorus. YOU TALK This sounded at first a bit of a throwaway, but after repeated plays its mordant swagger becomes irresistible. “I never ever said it was clever,” Pete sings with mischievous gusto in a final twist to the chorus. “I just like getting leathered.” UNBILOTITLED The kind of smouldering guitars that suggest someone’s been listening recently with more than a passing interest to Neil Young’s Zuma introduce a song that finds Pete foregoing contrition for unapologetic defiance. “The more that you follow me, the more I get lost,” Pete sings, turning on who knows quite who. “You think that you know me, you’re pissing me off,” he goes on. “Yeah, you said that you love me, why don’t you fuck off. . .” And, later: “Messed my head, messed my head/ How happy I would be, just to shine fire on everyone and no one. . .” SIDE OF THE ROAD Raucous punk thrash, and a noisy take on a song that first surfaced as part of The Libertines’ repertoire (they did a version during their 2003 New York sessions). Not exactly “8 Dead Boys”, but it errs towards the ramshackle at a timely moment here. CRUMB BEGGING Fantastic version of one of the highlights of the Bumfest sessions, here driven by shuddering guitar riffs and an inspired outro featuring scalding full-throttle Hammond and serrated rhythm licks – not quite John Cale and Lou Reed biting chunks out of each on “Sister Ray”, but feral enough to make your palms sweat. “I’m a crumb-begging baghead, baby,” Pete fairly yowls, something looking for a full moon to get noisy beneath. “I bet you say that to all of the girls,” he adds with a wonderful slurred flourish. UNSTOOKIETITLED Achingly pretty reworking and fleshing out of another great song from the Bumfest tapes, partly inspired by a guitar riff from “Fuck Forever”, from which it actually quotes the “one and the same, one and the same” refrain. Mass singalongs to this on the forthcoming stadium tour are as inevitable as the track is irresistible. FRENCH DOG BLUES At the time of writing possibly my favourite track, even catchier than “Delivery” and “Unstookietitled”. The guitars by turn wash, swirl and ebb, cut and slash, the chorus swells and swaggers and gives glorious way towards the end to an instrumental peak inspired by The Who. Named after the drawing of a dog by Pete on the cover of DIA. THERE SHE GOES Full band version of a song performed solo and acoustic on the Bumfest demos, given a jazzy little arrangement, passingly reminiscent of “La Belle Et La Bete” from DIA. Cool enough, but perhaps just a tad heavy handed. BADDIES BOOGIE Chiming guitars and wheezy harmonica brightly introduce a song that perversely is one of the darkest tracks on the album – a song about the descent of a once relationship into “It’s a lousy life for a washed-up wife with a permanently plastered pissed-up bastard DEFT LEFT HAND Where The Kinks inspired “Delivery”, so the Stones provide the musical template for the opening guitar salvo here, which borrows heavily from the rifftastic openings to “Soul Survivor”/”All Down The Line” from Exile on Main St. The “golden years” section is magical. Since you ask, I think it’s just surpassed “French Dog Blues” as my favourite track on the album. THE LOST ART OF MURDER Sixties folk guitar legend Bert Jansch was a guest at the recent An Evening With Pete Doherty at Hackney Empire, where the pair duetted on a beautiful version of Jansch’s classic heroin song, “Needle Of Death”. The pair are reunited on this sombre, quietly chilling album closer, with Jansch on stunning acoustic lead and Pete on electric guitar. “You call yourself a killer boy,” Pete sings, “but all you’re killing is your time. . .”

Some good neu-Krautrock this morning, coming from an American/German duo called, evocatively, Cloudland Canyon. I first came across them last year, I think, with an album called "Requiems der Natur 2002-2004" which fitted in with the ambient-cosmic end of the new psych stuff I listen to a lot. There's a new EP, now, called "Silver Tongued Sisyphus", which features two tracks of gravitational, smudged motorik, more propulsive than what I remember of the album, and consequently fairly heavily indebted to Neu!, as you might imagine. It's pretty heavy, too; most of the people who claim to be influenced by Neu! at the moment turn out to be straight-sounding indie-boy shoegazers with a half-decent drummer. Cloudland Canyon, though, sound appealingly further out, with "Dambala" especially pulling off that trick of being at once exploratory and meditative that you find in some of the best vintage German gear. Which brings us to a new Harmonia release, amazingly. There's been some assiduous foraging of the Krautrock archives these past few years, that's fetched up the "Harmonia 76" sessions with Eno already. This one, "Live 1974", is a gig recording that appears to capture Rother, Moebius and Roedelius jamming with that typical impassive euphoria to an entirely empty room. In fact, Michael Rother claims in the press release that the show (in a former railway station in Griessem) was attended by a good 50 or so people, who were too stoned to even applaud, or who couldn't work out where the songs ended. That makes sense: the five lengthy tracks here stretch out to between nine and 17 minutes each, but have an enveloping momentum that makes them feel like they are - or at least should - go on forever. I must admit I haven't played the two studio Harmonia albums for a year or two, but from memory "Live 1974" is more in the vein of the first one, "Musik Von Harmonia". If you're familiar with the work of Harmonia's constituent bands, Neu! and Cluster, but not Harmonia themselves, imagine the humming seascape pieces from "Neu! 75" augmented by the gently chattering rhythm patterns of Cluster's "Zuckerzeit". Perhaps Cluster are fractionally more dominant; Rother's always subtle guitar strafe is, if anything, more discreet than ever, though he does have a mild freak-out on "Arabesque". Anyway, it all makes a very soothing start to the week. Couple more things today. Here's the Myspace link for Cloudland Canyon. And here are some contrasting views about Sly Stone's Bournemouth show from over at the Uncut Festivals blog. "Easily, the worst 'performance' I've ever seen by anyone," writes Paul. "It will take a while for the mental scars to heal and I can play his music again without this farce flooding back." Blimey.