A brief dispatch, since I'm fending off hordes of enraged Smashing Pumpkins fans, some of them Argentinian. My crimes are many, but involve bad grammar, liking Zwan and, OK, disrespecting the the untouchable genius of Billy Corgan. Obviously, I don't want to get in a pissing war about "Zeitgeist", and it seems churlish to mention again here that I actually rather like the record. But I must admit this comment riled me, from Hyperstar: "NME and its by-products always put a guy that hates a band to comment on their album so he/she can rip it to shreds in disregards of us the fans." Well, Uncut isn't a by-product of NME, it's a magazine that occupies the office next door. Neither magazine wastes much space on slagging off bands, and this blog is specifically about records I like. But Hyperstar is right in one respect: I'm not a fan of the Smashing Pumpkins, but then I like too much music to be that kind of obsessive fan of any one band. Anyway, here's a report by our corporate chums about the Smashing Pumpkins' live show in Paris last night. Looks like it was very good, and very long. In more tranquil news, I had a chat to Robert Forster on the phone yesterday, mainly about the forthcoming "Intermission" comp that collects the work he and Grant McLennan did solo when The Go-Betweens went on hiatus in the '90s. Forster told me that he's now working as a journalist in Australia, and so I had a mooch about online and found this interesting piece by him on Bob Dylan's "Modern Times". This point is especially provocative, I think: "A typical Dylan-produced song, in the studio or on stage, consists of all the musicians starting together, playing together and finishing when Dylan gives them the nod. No one sits out. No one comes in just for a chorus. It’s all pretty flat, and that’s fine when the songs are top-notch and we listen to Bob sing. But as soon as they slip – as they surprisingly do on much of this album – you realise that someone else is needed to push Dylan on his material and the way it might sound." I don't quite agree - I'd rather Dylan never went near Daniel Lanois again, for a start - but I do know what he means.

It may not be the most wholly misunderstood album since Bob Dylan's Planet Waves, but as John pointed out in his Wild Mercury Sound blog yesterday, Wilco's new Sky Blue Sky has split their traditionally loyal critical fanbase. Planet Waves was famously dismissed on release - like New Morning - as a largely vapid celebration of Dylan's Woodstock domesticity, Bob on the old homestead with the missus, bringing up the kids. Which, when you think about it, is a baffling response to an album with songs as terrifyingly dark as "Dirge" and "Wedding Song". Blue Sky Blue has been seen by some of its critics as a retreat from Wilco's recent sonic experiments, much as Dylan after John Wesley Harding was thought at the time to have abandoned the reckless creativity of Blonde On Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited. It's true Sky Blue Sky sounds more conservative on initial listenings than A Ghost Is Born or Yankee Hotel Foxtrot- and in places sounds passably like '70s country rock, impeccably played but not quite as earth-shattering as you might have wanted. This all all camouflage. Listen more closely and the emotional restlessness of Tweedy's songwriting is amply present, as is the musical invention that ran through the previous couple of albums. As John pointed out, the new songs fit brilliantly alongside the more familiar highlights and Monday's show at Shepherd's Bush Empire was every bit as good as the Sunday night John wrote about yesterday. I may take issue with Jeff Tweedy's truculent opinions on Babyshambles and whether it is acceptable at a certain age to be listening to them and singing the praises of the delinquent Doherty, but I've no arguement with him as a songwriter and performer and this was probably the best I've ever seen Wilco. There was no sign of Bill Fay, however. You might have thought that after appearing on stage for the first time 30 years, his brief cameo with Tweedy on the Sunday night would have given him a taste for the limelight. Sadly, he couldn't make it. He was visiting his brother in Dorset, Tweedy told us, sounding slightly baffled. It was the only disappointment of a blindingly good gig. Don't miss them when they come back to play at the Latitude festival in July.

First, a couple of housekeeping things. Thanks for all your comments on the Smashing Pumpkins review from last week. In response to TROY, yes, I have definitely heard the album and, yes, I guess I have bad taste according to your criteria. Sorry! If I can just point out again, though, that if I leaked my copy of "Zeitgeist", the iron fist of Warner Brothers would crush this blog instantly. So no go, guys. Secondly, after my Wilco blog yesterday, I discovered an MP3 of their "Be Not So Fearful" encore with Bill Fay. Let me know what you think. OK, last night I went to see Ghost play at 93 Feet East in the East End. I guess regular readers will know all about this lot, since they prominently featured on Uncut’s "Comets, Ghosts & Sunburned Hands" CD which we compiled at the end of last year. For newcomers, though, they’re a venerable Japanese band who used to live in a ruined temple and who are now seen by bands like Comets On Fire as godfathers of the new psych scene that I drone on about so much. It was good, as you might imagine. Masaki Batoh started off playing the hurdy gurdy for about ten minutes, there were some pretty transporting recorder solos (yes I know, bear with me) and the lead guitarist Michio Kurihara was awesome; a really sensitive, artful kind of axe hero. The problem was, they didn’t play anywhere near long enough. Ghost don’t rush things. Their shows are – or should be – authentically long trips. So when they finished after about an hour of measured, gradually building psych, it felt as if they were only just moving into the higher gears. Batoh made an impressive leap off his amp, and Kurihara started slashing away with more urgency. But it felt like they could have spent another hour properly freaking out. It meant that the martial psych that dominated their terrific last album, "In Stormy Nights", was absent. As if Ghost were more interested in showing their sensitive sides rather than unleashing the outraged howling racket against warmongering governments that fired up the highlights of "In Stormy Nights". This is a band, remember, who’ve refused to tour America until George Bush leaves office. And one, for all their magic, who are definitely better when they’re prepared for war.

Keef, comedy monkeys and Keira’s chin. Keith Richards, when he finally appears, close to the two hour mark, the first thing he does is shoot someone in the head. It’s a pretty impressive way to grab my attention, admittedly. Dressed in a slightly faded, full-length frock coat, plumes of feathers spooling out of a large hat perched raffishly on his head, Keith Richards’ appearance in third Pirates Of The Caribbean movie is one of UNCUT’s most anticipated movie moment of 2007. And does Keith live up to our expectations? Well… It’s hard to tell if this is Keith himself, or Keith *playing* Keith, riffing on the public myth of him as a rogueish, rock’n’roll pirate. He even gets to strum a guitar, made, we're told, from a sea turtle's shell, during his 5 minutes' screen time. There’s something very metatextual about all this. Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow is a fictional character based on a real person – Keith Richards – who now himself appears in the movie as a fictional character. In fact, Keith’s most substantial line of dialogue is as self-referential as it gets: “It’s not about living forever, Jackie boy, it’s about living with yourself forever.” I’m reminded of a great moment in The Sopranos once, when Michael Imperioli's Christopher quoted a line from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run” at fellow New Jersey Mobster Silvio Dante, played by The Boss’ guitarist Steve Van Zandt. Anyway, Keith growls rather magnificently through his appearance, giving a good account of a slightly elderly, if no less deadly lion, who could take your arm off without too much by way of effort. It's not exactly one of the great movie debuts, though it's kinda fun. But, I wonder, is it really necessary? One of the great nuggets we gleaned from Depp, when on promotional duty for the first Pirates movie, was that he'd based Jack's character on Keef. It's a brilliant little anecdote, but did we really need to see Keef, all done up here with crucifixes in his hair, all manner of eldritch rings on his fingers, and bad voodoo gleaming in his eyes? It spoils the fun rather; sometimes an idea is best just left as that. It's part of the wider problem with Pirates: it doesn't know when to stop. It's big on spectacle, and rather little else -- and, after a while, even the spectacle begins to wane. The mistake the screenwriters make is that we care particularly about anyone in these movies apart from Jack Sparrow. There's tiers and tiers of supporting characters who the writers appear to think are worth their own narrative arcs. It's exhaustive, trying to keep up with the various doings of this heaving multitude of characters. Here's Orlando Bloom's Will Turner trying to save his dad, here's lantern-jawed Keira Knightley's Elizabeth Swann elected Pirate King, there's Geoffrey Rush's brilliant Captain Barbossa out to regain control of the Black Pearl, Cap'n Jack out for immortality. And that's just the principal cast. It goes on, all the way down to Captain Barbossa's comedy monkey, all with different missions, quests, desires and allegiances. A lesson could have been learned from the Indiana Jones movies. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg realised their audience cared only for Indiana himself, so each successive sequel simply booted Indy on five years and introduced a new quest and a fresh supporting cast. I'd be hard pushed, frankly, to relate much in the way of plot detail to you. A lot of it is confusing, conflicting and often ill-explained. There's plenty of shouting, too, much of bellowed into squalling winds and driving rain as pirate ships battling East India Trading Company frigates. I think I hear Keira shout "Prepare to broadside!" at one point, but she could be asking for a wine list for all I can tell. Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End opens in the UK this Thursday

There have been a couple of comments on my last post, written in response to Jeff Tweedy’s comments about Babyshambles in the current issue of Uncut. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Quba72Xli8o

A small bit of history, last night, that I was honoured to witness. Wilco played at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in West London, the scene of some pretty fractious shows by Jeff Tweedy - a fact which made him both self-conscious and extremely funny when he found the courage to open his mouth. Wilco were great, of course. I'm currently going through an intense Grateful Dead phase, and so consequently a lot of music reminds me of them. But when Wilco started with "Side With The Seeds", I'm fairly sure the comparison is valid here. It's a kinship with early '70s Dead, I think: that rootsy, soulful feel; the way the band play with such a relaxed and intricate swagger; the easygoing virtuosity, focused on the astonishing lead guitarist, Nels Cline. The new Wilco album, "Sky Blue Sky", has been accorded some rather middling reviews over here, with a bunch of critics bemoaning that Tweedy has abandoned the experimental imperative (wrongly, I'd argue, and did here). But the new songs fit in just fine alongside great workouts like "Handshake Drugs" and "Via Chicago". Pat Sansone now seems to be playing more guitar than keyboards, and there's a fantastic passage towards the end of "Impossible Germany" when he and Tweedy play twin lead while Cline, a lanky and juddering eccentric in waistcoat and half-mast trousers, steps up for a scrabbling, high-frequency solo. If I have a criticism, though (and it seems churlish, given the general excellence of the gig), it's that Wilco are a little bit too tight and economical. They might have the feel of the Dead, but they rarely really let themselves go. Occasionally, I want these songs to loosen up and stretch out, to move in ways unpredictable even to the band. "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" remains the highlight, because it shows how this superlative band can combine great, tight songwriting with a little more improvisational risk. Petty gripes aside, I should get to the most important thing. After nearly two hours, Tweedy called on a special guest, and a slightly sheepish looking greybeard came on. This, amazingly, was Bill Fay - a big hero of mine, as regular readers of Wild Mercury Sound will know. Fay's three albums are incredible treasures of British music, which I could vaguely describe as a cross between Syd Barrett and Scott Walker, though such simplification does them a gross disservice. I think we have a track from his first album on the next free Uncut CD. Anyway, Fay hasn't been on a stage for over 30 years, though an ongoing mutual appreciation between him and Wilco meant they almost talked him into a duet at Hammersmith Apollo on the "Ghost Is Born" tour. Both Tweedy and Fay have talked to me about all this, and I feared that their anxious desire not to disturb each other might mean they would never get it together. But they do. Fay duets on a version of his own, gorgeous "Be Not So Fearful", his warm and quavering vocals buried a little behind those of Tweedy - I suspect because Fay was too nervous to sing on his own. It's a wonderful moment, though. Let's hope that one of our greatest and most neglected singer-songwriters can be gently eased back into the spotlight now - like another auspicious recluse, Vashti Bunyan, was a couple of years ago. I wonder if Fay will turn up again tonight? Allan is going along, so I'm sure he'll file something if he does. I'll be elsewhere, watching the mighty Ghost. See you tomorrow.