A morning for gentle music, this, after last night's Uncut birthday party where The Hold Steady played in our striking rooftop canteen. They were great, as you might imagine, barrelling through 30 minutes of songs (a fraught, euphoric "Stuck Between Stations" was my highlight) with all the gusto that, apparently, sent Glastonbury mad. Plenty of the assembled music biz illuminati kept mentioning to me how they wished their bands had the same kind of work ethic as The Hold Steady. Here they were in their full-blooded pomp, before dashing off to headline Shepherd's Bush Empire straight after. They're one of the most inspiring bands I've seen in years, I think, and one of the reasons why is that they charge through their gigs with such gripping exuberance. For all their workingman's charm, they have this entirely mystical power of making the familiar seem fresh and dynamic. In Craig Finn's hands, all those corny old cliches about the redemptive power of rock'n'roll are brought alive. I guess the celebration of our mag's tenth birthday is also a celebration of how music can have enduring significance in the lives of thousands of people. And consequently, we couldn't have wished for a better band to play our party. But enough schmaltz. Feeling pretty good myself right now, but I'm protecting some fragile heads with a few quiet music selections this morning. The new album from Euros Childs has just finished. It's called "The Miracle Inn", and it's by some distance the best thing he's done since Gorky's Zygotic Mynci split up. Basically, he's stopped mucking about and gone back to the frail, elegant folk that he and Richard James specialised in the latter years of Gorkys' career. Very nice. Now I've just put on, for the second time today, the first album by Baltimore's Beach House. A few of you may have picked this up when Uncut reviewed its American release last year, but it's now getting a proper UK push. Essentially, "Beach House" is this tiny, bejewelled-sounding trinket of dreampop, a bit like Mazzy Star if they dropped the goth drama and favoured kindergarten synths and drum machines. It's distinctly ethereal, unashamedly pretty, and no-one's telling me to turn it down. I'll save the Howlin' Rain album 'til after lunch, then.

One of the first festivals I covered not long after joining Melody Maker in 1974 was in Buxton, a bleak outpost on the Yorkshire Moors, headlined by Rod Stewart and The Faces, as they were increasingly billed after the departure of Ronnie Lane and not long before Rod himself legged it to LA and a subsequent solo career of great success if variable artistic merit. The weather then was every bit as bad as it has been recently, and a lot of bands simply pulled out – Captain Beefheart and The New York Dolls among them. Apparently Humble Pie were on the bill, but I have no memory of them, although I recall a storming set in appalling conditions by Mott The Hoople on the Saturday night. By the Sunday, the driving rain and gale force winds were so bad, it seemed unlikely The Faces would bother playing, cynics predicting a definite no show, Rod suddenly deemed too prissy to risk a soaking. In the event, they not only played – they were brilliant, rocking through a deluge of Biblical proportions, The Memphis Horns in splendid evidence, and Rod cheerfully disregarding the malevolent elements with a bravura display. Walking towards Twickenham Stadium last Saturday through an absolutely drenching downpour, I kept thinking of that earlier waterlogged fiasco. On early, the vast stadium filling slowly during their opening numbers, The Pretenders luckily avoided the worse of the rain that would quickly follow and it was great to hear Chrissie Hynde in such great voice on old favourites like “Back On The Chain Gang” (dedicated to Jimmy Honeyman-Scott and Pete Farndon), “Kid”, “Talk Of The Town”, “Day After Day”, “Brass In Pocket”, “Mystery Achievement” and “Precious”. The rain holds off during the interval that follows, but during the self-deprecating The Rodfather ‘mockumentary’ that affectionately sends up Rod’s career it’s coming down in proverbial buckets. With his tartan-suited band of slick session musos already drawing vast cheers from the crowd as they essay the beguiling opening to “You Wear It Well”, Rod appears in a puff of smoke, like a panto villain, from a trap door in the small stage at the end of a steep catwalk from the main stage. By the time he’s slithered up the walkway, he’s soaked, despite a rather pretty brolly he’s picked up from somewhere and expertly twirls as he makes his way gingerly to the stage, which is covered but offers little protection from the deluge. The audience by now is in full voice, as they will be for most of the two hours that follow, Rod at times just leaving them to it. You would not in the circumstances have much blamed him for rattling through the set and splitting for somewhere out of the growing storm, but just as he did at Buxton, lo those many years ago, he just gets on with it, a trouper to the end. “Good evening my friends,” he says over great cheers at the end of “This Old Heart Of Mine”. “It’s raining, but it’s not cold. It’s Saturday night and we’re all in this together – so let’s make the most of it.” A raucous “Sweet Little Rock’N’Roller” follows, and as unfashionable as it might be to admit it, a lot of tonight is just brilliant. It’s unapologetically a greatest-hits set, rammed with crowd pleasers – no radical interpretations here of the Joanna Newsom songbook, for instance – and the crowd is duly pleased, Rod’s sheer chutzpah lifting their spirits and the music taking care of the rest. It’s a weird crowd, older on average I’d say than recent audiences at the same venue for the Stones – including coach parties of what appear to be alcoholic divorcees squeezed into clothes that wouldn’t fit their children who treat the entire evening as a mass karaoke session. More than a few of the men around me, meanwhile, look like dodgy lower league football managers or gangland killers with cleaned-up pasts. Things get a wee bit cheesier later on, but in the first half of the show there are great versions of “Reason To Believe”, Cat Stevens’ “Fathers And Sons” – just beautiful when I had expected something unilaterally mawkish – and a very moving “Dirty Old Town”, played against a filmed backdrop of clips from an apparently distant past of the recently-deceased Glasgow Celtic football legend Jimmy Johnstone. The first set ends with rowdy versions of “We’re Having A Party” and “Stay With Me”, replete with hilarious archive film of The Faces in all their misspent glory. The second half of the show is given over almost entirely to singalongs on “The First Cut is The Deepest”, “Tonight’s The Night”, “You’re In My Heart” and a rather egrettable “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”. There’s an inevitable outing for “Sailing” which might more correctly have been re-titled “Raining”, or even “Drowning”, but the second half honours go to the much-anticipated “Maggie May”, which is a bit rushed but eventually glorious, much to the soggy delight of a wet but ecstatic Twickenham.

I’ve mentioned here previously the time in 1979 I went to see Lou Reed at what was then still known as the Hammersmith Odeon when he reacted testily to requests from the crowd to play their favourite numbers by announcing that he would under no circumstances be playing anything else that night apart from his new album, The Bells, so there would, he repeated emphatically, no “Heroin”, “Sweet Jane”, “Walk On The Wild Side” or any of the other numbers so many people had obviously come to hear him perform. If anybody didn’t like this, he said, they could fuck off – which a large section of the increasingly disgruntled crowd did, what seemed like at least half the audience walking out in angry disgust, nosily vacating the premises in a collective huff that was quite hilarious. Lou waited until the very last of this disenchanted sullen mob had moodily departed and then with glorious perversity launched into what you’d probably call a greatest hits set that included with predictable cussedness a sublime version of “Heroin”. What you wondered turning up last Sunday, nearly 30 years later, might Lou have in store for us tonight. Since we had turned up to hear Lou play, as advertised, his 1973 song-cycle Berlin in its spectacularly maggoty entirety, might he similarly decide to thwart his audience’s feverish expectations by playing the whole of a completely different album -Transformer, perhaps, or Coney Island Baby. In the event, Lou played, exactly as promised, the version of Berlin that he and producer Bob Ezrin had intended all those years ago for release – until their original vision was compromised by a thoroughly rattled RCA, who demanded Ezrin cut what had been recorded as a double album down to a single disc. I remember drinking with Lou in a hotel bar in Stockholm in 1977 and listening to him for more than an hour bitterly denounce what had happened to the record he’d always thought of as his defining masterpiece, the savage dismissal of it by critics and an ensuing public indifference to the album that left him heartbroken and angry. “After that,” he said, “the shutters came down. I didn’t give a fuck about anything or anyone.” Nigh on 25 years after it came out, Berlin is most commonly regarded as the masterpiece Lou always thought it was, and it might be difficult now to appreciate fully why at the time it caused such a stir. These many years on, however, it remains a frightening, grim and wholly sad epic about love and violence, drugs and suicide – and as performed tonight with a red-hot band of Lou regulars, plus original Berlin and Rock’N’Roll Animal guitarist Steve Hunter, augmented by members of the New London Choir and the London Metropolitan Orchestra, it’s a signal moment in Lou’s career, a triumphant vindication of his original intentions. I don’t think I’ve seen him this good since – oh, at least, the 1978 Street Hassle tour. From the choir’s ghostly intro, anticipating the final refrains of the climactic “Sad Song”, the mood of the evening is grimly etched, the sense of ominous foreboding that builds through “Berlin”, “Lady Day” and “Men Of Good Fortune” reaching an early eerie peak with “Caroline Says” and “How Do You Think It Feels?”, things getting darker in a hurry with “Oh Jim” and “Caroline Says II”, an accumulation of unspoken woe, Lou and Hunter’s guitars combining brilliantly here to give voice to things words can’t say. The heart-wrenching centrepieces of the performance, however, are the harrowing “The Kids” and the jaw-droppingly moving “The Bed”, a thing of spectral beauty and hushed terror, which gives way eventually to the grand agonised climax of “Sad Song”, featuring the overwhelming combined weight of band, choir and orchestra, with Hunter’s guitar driving through the elegant turmoil like muted lightning, Lou imperious at its epic centre as the song goes on and on and the apparently endless refrain of grief and calamity and endless writhing sadness reaches a final moment of cathartic wounded splendour. Amazing. After a brief interlude, the whole ensemble returns for the welcome relief of wholly buoyant encores of timeless crowd-pleasers “Sweet Jane” – fantastically, the Rock’N’Roll Animal version, albeit with an abbreviated version of Hunter’s famous guitar intro - a storming “Satellite Of Love”, with lead vocals from bassist Fernando Saunders and a wittily delivered “Walk On The Wild Side”. Tremendous, unforgettable stuff and a sensational reminder of Lou’s enduring genius. No wonder by the end, we were treated to the rare sight of the famous curmudgeon smiling broadly in his moment of victory. Lou Reed played: Berlin Lady day Men Of Good Fortune Caroline Says How Do You Think It feels Oh Jim Caroline Says II The Kids The Bed Sad Song Encores: Sweet Jane Satellite Of Love Walk On The Wild Side

A lot of slightly anxious looking at the weather forecast this morning. It's Uncut's tenth birthday party this evening, and The Hold Steady are meant to be playing on the roof of our building. Looking forward to the band's show tonight reminded me, though, that I've been meaning to write about the Jason Isbell solo album for what seems like months now. Isbell, as you probably know, until recently figured in Alabama's mighty Drive-By Truckers, a band you could crudely describe as a kind of Southern Rock analogue to The Hold Steady. Of the three frontmen in the Truckers, it always seemed that Isbell - younger, intensely talented, rarely getting as many songs per record as Patterson Hood - would leave sooner or later. "Sirens Of The Ditch", his first solo album, is not, however, any kind of parting shot. In fact, I think it was pretty much recorded two or three years ago, and has sat on the shelf until now. As such, it might be a mistake to judge this as the best of Isbell, recorded as it was at a time when he'd give his best songs to the Truckers. Consequently there's nothing here that's quite the match of his very best songs like "Danko/Manuel". That said, it's still a pretty auspicious start. "Sirens Of The Ditch" tones down the grappling, hairy attack of the Truckers: the influence of Patterson Hood's father David, a noted Muscle Shoals session man, is maybe more pronounced than that of his son. "Hurricanes And Hand Grenades", in particular, has that sticky lope so familiar from local soul records, and you can imagine Isbell fancying himself as a boyish Dan Penn, perhaps. There is rock here - the opening "Brand New Kind Of Actress" has a certain Stonesy lash to it. But the double-barrelled Lynyrd Skynyrd raunch of the Truckers is largely absent. Instead, Isbell asserts himself as a confident if rueful singer-songwriter, operating in that peculiar southern hinterland between country, folk, soul and rock. Steve Earle is a vague reference point, but - a few corny moments of male angst notwithstanding - Isbell is a strong enough songwriter to stake out his own turf. "Dress Blues" and "Grown" are especially lovely, but the best thing about "Sirens Of The Ditch" is that I suspect he has a dozen better songs ready to go. We should keep an eye on him, for sure. Oh yeah, here's Jason's Myspace.