THE FIRST FESTIVE FIFTY! (AND ALSO THE TWENTY-FIFTH)

First drafts of history are never neat.

Take for example the first John Peel Festive Fifty. (Where listeners chose their favourite numbers.) Though ending the auspicious year of ’76, it contains not one single Punk track. Rather than ’Anarchy in the UK’ topping the list, its ’Stairway To Heaven’. It’s like one of those alt futures where we never escaped the servitude of the Roman Empire, except instead it’s listening to the guitar solo from ’Free Bird’. 

Peel himself seemed less than impressed. The following year he decided he was picking all the tracks himself.

Perhaps more unexpectedly, listeners took the all-time request seriously. So the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, Dylan and Hendrix all show up. (Tho’ nothing from before the Sixties.) And even when it does go Prog, the more bloated excesses (Rush, ELP) are happily absent. Yes creep in at No. 50 with ’And You And I’, probably one of their least proggy moments. (King Crimson may be the most curious absence.) For me, it was the more the AOR and classic rock stuff which was the obstacle. Jackson Browne and Poco were soon skipped.

But overall, as a snapshot of music up to ’76, it actually makes for a pretty good playlist. Sure its strange hearing ’No Woman No Cry’ segue into ’Supper’s Ready’. But not in a bad way.

Okay, British Punk was only just getting going at this point. The Pistols (for example) had released one single, ’Anarchy in the UK’. If it could conceivably have headered the list, there was no possibility of Punk packing it. But perhaps more conspicuous by their absence are the two biggest influences on British Punk.

You know the story of how, prior to forming the Buzzcocks, Shelley and Devoto took a trip to London to see the Pistols without having heard them? Because they played Stooges songs? And yet, you guessed it, no Stooges here. In fact American Punk appears only once, with Jonathan Richman’s ’Roadrunner’. 

And mid-Sixties Powerpop, that shows up not at all. (‘My Generation’ made the 1979 and 1980 lists, but nothing in ’76.) Those lies John Lydon liked to tell, about British Punk supposedly having no influences (despite playing Stooges songs)… it looks like, at the time, people swallowed them wholesale.

As you might expect, subsequent years saw a slow decline in votes for ’Stairway to Heaven’ and a growth in Punk and Post-Punk. 1982 saw both an all-time and a year-only list, everything went year-only from then on.

Then, as a one-off for the momentous year of 2000, the all-time list was brought back. And it looks back as far as the original, some tracks make it from the early Nineties - roughly the same time lag.

But this time out its much more Eurocentric; almost half of ’76 had been American, this time precisely five Yanks make the cut. Despite many American acts not just being played but getting sessions on the show. And that with the simultaneous disappearance of Prog, which had always been a highly Europeanscene.

Remarkably, a mere three tracks from ’76 reappear, with two falling down the list. Take Hendrix’s ’All Along the Watchtower’, once no. 5, now to be found at no. 37. Dylan’s ’Visons Of Johanna’ fares similarly. Only Beefheart’s ’Big Eyed Beans From Venus’ moves up. And the early Seventies disappears almost entirely. (The Beefheart track is from ’72, but he was more a Sixties artist.)

But perhaps more significantly, a number of older tracks which could have been on the ’76 list suddenly show up. Tim Buckley’s ’Song To The Siren’ can perhaps be explained by This Mortal Coil’s cover, scoring much higher. But the Velvet Underground and Nick Drake? While the Beatles, who had been represented by three tracks, now switch to a new entry - ’I Am The Walrus’. (Still, surprisingly, no Stooges.)

Of course, you never hear music from the past directly. It cannot do other than come through the filter of the present. Perhaps, had there been another Festive Fifty two or three years earlier than ‘76, ’Tarkus’ and ’Tales From Topographic Oceans’ would have proudly reared their gatefold heads. Perhaps ’Kashmir’ and ’Supper’s Ready’ did suddenly sound bad in the context of the late Seventies, only to reach today and get good all over again.

But more, some songs go up like a firework and leaves a stain in the sky, while others have a slow-burning fuse. It takes a while for people to catch on to them.

Slightly bizarrely, this even takes in the world’s best-selling band. ’Walrus’ was one of the most radical-sounding Beatles songs. (Alongside ’Tomorrow Never Knows’, which stays inexplicably absent.)

Stories about the Velvets being shunned in their day get a little mythologised. In their time, their sound got slowly less extreme and their audience correspondingly increased. Plus their resurgence happened sooner than this might imply. Post-Punk openly owed them a debt, and by the time I was getting into music (early Eighties) they were already on the must-hear list. Had the all-time lists continued past ’82, I’d guessed they’d have shown up pretty soon.

Curiously, it was the much sweeter-sounding Folk-hued Nick Drake who took the slower lane. A press release from his own label proudly announced his new release wouldn’t be shifting any units either, but they were putting it out anyway because they liked it. After playing the track, Peel speculated about how Drake might feel about the change in response to his music.

Given which, supposing another all-time list could somehow be compiled now? Another quarter-century down the road?

Certainly, some things seem to take longer still to take. Krautrock’s era was roughly ’68 to ’75. But, despite being so big an influence on Post-Punk, it shows up not once. That would doubtless be different now. Maybe even… finally… the Stooges.

The premise of Peel’s show was the present. All-time lists stand out because they were a slightly counter-intuitive thing to do. Today, music seems to have gone the other way, with the past raked over at the expense of the present. There can be little left now that needs digging up, but still the slew of re-releases. So I’d expect a lot more leaning into the past and - most of all - much less of a difference in sound between bands of then and now.

FROM PROG TO ANTI-PROG (IN THE WAKE OF KING CRIMSON)

(Being the third part of 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk, which starts here.)

”There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake.” 
- Robert Fripp

"I still can’t see why people listen instead of doing it themselves.” 
- Soft Machine,’Thank You Pierre Lunaire’

If Post-Punk was ready to plunder from Dub, it would borrow from many other places too. In fact, Dub’s reductive yet polyglot instincts positively encouraged this! So it stole from everywhere, from Seventies American Punk, from Funk and Disco, from contemporary electro-acoustic composers, from minimalists, from free improvisers and drone merchants and from a then-emerging ‘world’ music. (African tribal drummers was a particular favourite.) But their second biggest musical influence was closer to home.

Punk’s Year Zero rhetoric, highly effective as a sound-bite, was soon being regurgitated as gospel by gormless music journos. To the point where many simply took it as read that early Seventies music just divided into brainless Disco and bodiless Prog.

Yet this standard model omitted much. There was a music for which you could use the catch-all term ‘anti-Prog’. It wasn’t bombastic, technocratic and obsessed with proficiency, or with stuffing itself with quotations from Classical music. Instead it was left-field, askew and omniverously creative, more idiosyncratic than ostentatious. So eclectic was it that it was hard to see it as a distinct music scene, leaving it hidden in plain sight. Yet as we shall see it had something of a regular cast, everyone within at least one degree of separation from everyone else.

King Crimson had been one of Prog’s founders. Yet, contrary to the core, once others rose in their wake they turned again. Their line-up rejigged, with only guitarist Robert Fripp remaining from the originating group, they went on to make a trilogy quite different in sound - ‘Lark’s Tongues in Aspic’ (1973), ‘Starless and Bible Black’ and ’Red’ (both 1974). Fripp was soon calling prog a “prison”, a King-turned-republican whose stance effectively pre-echoed Lydon by leaving the scene he’d done so much to spawn.

As a sign of changed priorities, on the track ’Trio’, drummer Bill Bruford figured there was nothing for him to add - so didn’t. For which he was credited for “admirable restraint”, not a phrase oft-heard in Prog circles. Musically, these albums influenced Metal’s frontiers more than Post-Punk. But their effect, at least for here, lay in their no longer sounding Prog. The seemingly automatic link between progressive music and Prog music was broken. And then…

Fripp went on to play on another slightly later trilogy, Eno’s first solo albums - ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’, ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’ (both ’74) and ‘Another Green World’ the next year. Despite that ‘solo’ tag they became a nexus point for this nameless scene, as well as Fripp bringing in members of Roxy Music, Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, plus Robert Wyatt and John Cale. (Plus Phil Collins. Nothing is ever perfect.)

In almost linear opposition to Prog’s cult of the virtuoso, Eno himself was keen to establish his status as a non-musician, proudly downplaying his own musical role on the sleeves. He was a classic case of the person whose Art School background precisely qualified him for a career in music. He’d played in the Portsmouth Symphonia, an orchestra anyone could join provided they had no proficiency in their chosen instrument. (They guested on one track.)

Sessions went ahead quite spontaneously, with Eno really only arranging encounters, which he’d afterwards treat to the point they’d became unrecognisable to the players. And often the results, on a track like ’Third Uncle’ sounds like Post-Punk arriving four years early. The albums became influential enough in Post-Punk circles for A Certain Ratio to take their name from a lyric.

Similarly another member of Eno’s musical pool, Robert Wyatt, had started out in Soft Machine. Who were in many way the missing link from the Sixties Underground to Prog. (Perhaps more so than Pink Floyd.) But his solo albums ‘Rock Bottom’ (1974) and 'Ruth is Stranger Than Richard’ (1975) were clear-cut anti-prog, perhaps above all through their playful attitude, somehow free-form and singalong simultaneously.

Against Prog’s fancifully airbrushed covers, these came with naive-art paintings by Wyatt’s wife Alfreda. The songs, often seemingly written from a child perspective, with Ivor Cutler bobbing up at unexpected moments, can feel like the soundtrack to a very, very strange children’s TV show. Eno inevitably appeared on the second, playing “direct inject anti-jazz ray gun.”

Meanwhile, across the water, the German music scene notoriously dubbed Krautrock by us gauche Brits was equally influential. It may be best summed up by this quote from Faust’s Jean-Herve Peron: ”We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock 'n' roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics. We had the urge of saying something completely different.” (For some speculation on how such a scene could arise there and then, this time taking David Stubbs as my spirit guide, see here.) Crucially for Post-Punk, it’s way of making music new was stripping it back down to its roots.

Bands like Can and Faust took to touring Britain frequently, finding the reception better than back home. Seeds were being sewn. Bowie’s influential Berlin trilogy (of course featuring Fripp and Eno) further cemented Anglo-German relations in alternative music circles. Robert Lloyd once said the break-up of the Prefects came from half the band wanting to be the Sex Pistols, and the other half Faust. And that was doubtless true of many a Punk band, save the Pistols themselves where part of the band wanted to be Can. (John Lydon’s original post-Pistols plan, prior to forming PIL, had been to become their singer.)

Yet the twist was all this was really over by the time Punk had arrived. King Crimson disbanded in ’74, Roxy in ’76. (In their case they later reunited, but as quite a different outfit who fall outside the scope of this tale.) Robert Wyatt’s last original-run album came in 1975, the same year Eno turned to ambient. So Post-Punk had the best of both worlds; pioneers to pick up from, yet at the same time a clear stage to straddle.

And yet by turn Post-Punk came to back-influence both anti-Prog and Krautrock, until the dividing lines often seemed dissolved. From 1979 Recommended Records started to re-release Faust, feeding but also reflecting a developing interest. In 1981 a recently reformed King Crimson released ’Discipline’, which sounded little like either their Prog or anti-Prog incarnations, but quite a lot like Post-Punk. Wyatt returned to release a series of singles from the late Seventies on, where the long free-form numbers became stripped-down songs, virtually miniatures, not just minimal but seemingly casually thrown-up. (Later collected on ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’, 1972.) He was no longer on Prog’s haven Virgin but the epicentre of indie - Rough Trade. And if Lydon never sang with Can, Jah Wobble got to record with ex-members, as Eno did with Cluster.

Up next! Mistakes...

THE PHYSICS HOUSE BAND (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

The Hope and Ruin, Brighton
Fri 9th Dec

’Star Trek’, it seems, was wrong. You can change the laws of physics. It just takes you five years. At least that’s the length of time it’s been since I last saw the Physics House Band, and they do now sound quite different. In the intervening time, they’ve lost a bass player. There’s literallya space mid-stage where he stood. Which has changed their chemistry…. No, wait, that ruins the metaphor.

The guitarist now goes in for more power riffs. Which is actually a pretty smart solution to losing a bass player. The traditional rock-sound distinction is that the bass will play the beat and the guitar the melody, while a riff just lumbers in and does away with all that.

They’ve also replaced the bass with more saxophone. I’m not sure how that works, but it has. As the guitar rips into riffs the sax plays squalls above it. Which sounds counter-intuitive but works well. Think of a ballerina pirouetting around atop a Howitzer tank. Or something like that, anyway. When they do this it works very, very well. However… 

They have often tended to peaks-and-valleys dynamics, something they npw do much more. And it was these sections which didn’t work for me. As the record shows I’ve been uneven in my response to this band. Which I suspect is more down to my subjective responses than their ability to do things right. And I found my response had become more uneven than it had been before.

A lot of music I like has no forward momentum, such as the minimalism of Reich or Glass. It can be fun to screw with time that way, to write numbers which effectively stop clocks. But if the music’s not moving, in any conventional sense, you have to like it where you are. And the view from these valleys simply didn’t do it for me.

Bands need to move on, and they’re not under any obligation to take you with them when they do. But I guess myself and the Physics House Band have now parted ways.

OZRIC TENTACLES/ GONG (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES GO ALL COSMIC)

Concorde 2, Brighton, Thurs 18th Nov

Shortly after the sad death of Nik Turner seemed just the right time to attend an Old Hippies Reunited party, and as luck would have it a double-barrelled one came along…

I’m not sure how many time I’ve seen Ozric Tentacles now. There was a fifteen to twenty year period where it seemed almost impossible not to see them. Attend anything remotely resembling a festival or gathering and there they’d be. And I’m equally unsure when I last saw them, except it was some while ago. They would play regular venues too, but it what when that festival environment was clamped down on that they went out of my sight, like an animal losing its habitat.

Looking back, their sound was based on a kind of false memory. There wasn’t really a time when Psychedelic music overlapped with Prog, it was more than one waned as the other waxed. The bands who performed that transition, like Pink Floyd, tended to have a ‘mellow’ phase in-between. But that sound was why their best-known number came to be ’Kick Muck’, the guitar sounding less like a guitar and more like someone cranking furiously at a funnel which emits a ceaseless torrent of notes, so many and so fast they go by in a blur.

Guitarist Ed Wynne is the only survivor from back then. And the band’s become something of a family affair, featuring his ex-wife Brandi on bass, his son Silas Neptune on keyboards and a flautist and drummer whose names I failed to catch.

The standard thing to say about a longstanding band is what they’ve gained in ability they’ve lost in edge. Which sounds remarkably close to what music did when it morphed from Psychedelia to Prog. The greatest thing about Psychedelia being its abandon and derangement, and the worst thing about Prog being that it abandoned that abandon.

And for a band whose first-ever gig was a six-hour spontaneous jam at Stonehenge Free Festival in ’83, who often seemed to be jamming on stage, there seems little jam tonight. Wynne even introduced the tracks, something never done back in the day. The absence of ‘Jumping’ John Egan, who combined flute-plyaing with on-stage antics like a cosmic Bez, also changes the dynamic.

Nevertheless, if there’s now more smooth than rough, there was always some smooth. Unlike most festival circuit bands, they had (and have) the musical chops to work for those who stood to listen as well as those who waved their arms. There were points this set seemed to meander and my attention drifted, but overall it kept enough punch and was musically adventurous enough to take you with it.

The highlight, version of ’Kick Muck’ notwithstanding was the finale, also their most Dance-influenced number, where the abandanometer most definitely went into the red.

This was very much a double-headliner, with the auditorium packed and ready for Gong even at the un-rock & roll time of 8pm. In case there’s anyone left who doesn’t know who Gong are these days… Daevid Allen assembled a younger band around him (this time with no relatives) back in 2014, who released one album. After getting his no-hope diagnosis (the album was called ’Rejoice I’m Dead’), he suggested they carry on after he was gone, which they have.

But any debate about whether that makes them Proper Gong or a tribute band with validation is sidelined, when they play precisely one classic Gong track the whole set, even then segueing into it from somewhere else. Which was ’Master Builder’, my absolute favourite Gong track ever, so they made one Old Hippy happy.

How much the set drew on the one album made with Allen I don’t know, I’ve not heard it. Though at one point new new songs are announced. Pretty soon it became obvious that this was really only Gong in the sense of inheriting the family name, and you should look on them as a new band.

To which the verdict would be mixed. Some tracks did sound close to hippy music as described by its detractors, meanderingly pleasant music with ‘positive energy’-type lyrics. But, not just on ’Master Builder’, also elsewhere in their set, they proved that when they want to wig out they absolutely can.

Not from our fine shores, but more or less the right Ozrics line-up…

SHIRLEY COLLINS/ DAMO SUZUKI'S NETWORK/ PHYSICS HOUSE BAND (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

SHIRLEY COLLINS

Brighton Dome, Sun 14th May

Part of the Brighton Festival

I was there to see Shirley Collins' unannounced comeback gig three year ago, supporting Current 93 at the Union Chapel. Which, despite lasting precisely two songs, was considered significant enough an event to get it’s own Guardian write-up.

And at the time I confess to having felt like I was watching a different set to everybody else. To the point of wondering whether they were so furiously applauding a reputation rather than a performance.

Then 'Lodestar' came out to what a reliable source of gossip described as “widespread acclaim”, and I figured to give this gig a whirl.

Instead of a single support act, a succession of musicians did a couple of numbers each. Some of whom came back with the main ensemble. All of whom seemed to know Collins in some capacity. Though finding someone from the folk scene unconnected to her would seem the harder task. She's something of a lodestar, it seems.

And, as you might expect from that description, the results were something of a mixed bag. And yet when Collins and her retinue came on for the main set, the bag seemed to stay just as mixed.

Collins looks more like your Gran than your Gran does, and sounds similar. Which is probably a good sign. Folk singers need an ordinariness, an anti-flamboyance to them. Vocal theatrics are unwelcome in any music genre, but with folk music they're an absolute anathema. But they also need an underlying sense of strength to them. Think, for example, of June Tabor. While with Collins' voice I hear pretty much just the ordinariness. Collins the person seems quite a character. Her voice less so.

At one point, she tells an anecdote about visiting a lady in Arkansas to collect folk songs. (While accompanying Alan Lomax. Told you she knew everyone.) At one point nature called and they jointly visited the euphemistic 'outhouse'. At which point she became treated to the lady's “ugly” repertoire, unsuited to the house proper.

And it tends to be the outhouse songs which are more memorable here. The murder ballads and tales of women who run away to sea only to drown in it, all sung in Collins' straight-up, home-cooking tones. There are admittedly a fair few of these. In fact the Guardian review of the album commented the “songs’ body count would startle a Norwegian death metal band.”

Plus, strange as it is to say about a classic singer, I often took to the instrumental passages. (In opposition to most folk gigs, where I just try to sit through the finger-picking without fidgeting.) Which did feature Ossian Brown, in his time of both Current 93 and Coil, turning the lever on the hurdy gurdy. An instrument which is almost a microcosm of the gulf between the way people picture folk, and what it really is. The name couldn't be any more pewter tankard if it was called the Hey Nonny No. But the sound it emits is eerily unearthly. It was probably invented by some ancestor of Chris Carter.

Ultimately I guess I feel folk is great and possibly even vital, but that's no reason to get all traditional about the stuff. I'm less interested in music which reprises the past than music which questions the certainties of our connection to that past. And so I preferred the Flit gig to this.

DAMO SUZUKI'S NETWORK

West Hill Hall, Brighton, Sat 13th May

I have now officially lost count of the amount of times I have seen Damo Suzuki live. Perhaps the remarkable thing is that, with each gig being entirely improvised and with a new set of 'sound carriers' (as he terms them), they've been so consistent.

This time he's playing with Zoff (who I'm afraid to admit I don't know at all, despite being a local band), plus E-da (from the previous gig) on extra drums and percussion. One member seemed to have a veritable mad scientist's lab on stage, complete with green oscilloscope screen, which he'd crouch over and adjust while somehow avoiding crying out “it lives, it lives!”

One review I found described the set as passing “through sonic troughs and peaks”, and indeed it was like watching waves rolling and crashing against the shore. At points the two drummers would lock in together, rising to the fore to hammer away in fearless union, with even Suzuki going uncharacteristically quiet. It would then swell over into something more hauntingly ambient, before starting to stir again.

What might sound schematic on paper becomes mesmerising to experience. It's like when you watch the actual waves crash against the actual shore. Even if parameters exist, within them what's happening is constantly changing and at any one moment unique, and the more you watch the more mesmerising it becomes. Damo did it again.

THE PHYSICS HOUSE BAND

The Haunt, Brighton, Thurs 11th May

The Physics House Band stop off in their home town mid European tour. (It must feel odd to be half-way through such a venture yet sleeping in your own bed.)

The first time I saw this trio I thought of them as musically on the cusp of the Seventies, the point spacey psychedelia grew noodly appendages and evolved into prog. (Partly this came through seeing them a few days apart from heavy riffers Mainliner.) (The second time they reminded me of a car from 'Wacky Races'. Let's not get into that again or it'll confuse things.) This time they seemed more of a cross between proggy fusion and the frenetic eclecticism of post-dance music, even if electric guitars are their primary weapon.

Truth to tell, there are points when their science class name becomes too telling and they become too muso-ish for me. (And we don't want too much music in our music. That just gets away from the point of the thing.) But at other times their porridge is just right. Through all the multi-note pile-ups these techy kids have the ability to lay down a killer tune. A tune often carried by the bass, for the drums main role seems to be to continually set off firecrackers under the set, lest things start slipping. Sometimes they'll bounce back and forth between straight riff and proggy polysllabery like a circus tumbler flipping forwards. They also give some tracks appealingly atmospheric ambient intros.

KING CRIMSON (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

Brighton Dome, Sat 5th Sept

If King Crimson are can sometimes be seen as the archetypal prog band... well, perhaps they were. Pink Floyd, Soft Machine and the rest had definite roots in blues, psychedelia and pop. (Prog fans tend to be most blind-slighted about that pop business.) Whereas with these boys its like they just showed up one day sounding like they did. So it might not be surprising that they were one of the few bands labouring under that often-desultory label to do what was promised on the lid.

Much of prog's aspiration was really delusion, it served up bog-standard rock music merely gift-wrapped in pseudo-classical ostentateon. Whereas Crimson, at their best, actually progressed things. I racked my mind for a musical analogy for guitarist and main man Robert Fripp, but simply couldn't come up with one. The nearest I could muster was “the English Frank Zappa”. But it only really works because the two could cover so much musical territory while still sounding like themselves. Part of which meant never sounding like one another. Perhaps he's most like Top Cat. You know, the one, the only, truly original.

No-one had much expected this reappearance, as Fripp had announced his retirement from a music industry he never cared for. It seems to have followed him winning a righetous yet protracted battle for creators' rights, which had left him in his own words “too happy. Time for a pointed stick.” When it was announced this would be a return to the sound of the first run of the band (there's been eight), people then wondered which era (there were three).

And while I confess to not being as familiar with their output as I'd like, I side with those who favour the final era. By the last album, 'Red', time on the road and general attrition had reduced them down to a trio. It was the hard centre which remained, the heaviest, most condensed, most riff-based incarnation. And what makes it is what's in the riffs themselves, sounding like something beyond standard rock fare. There are those who liken hard rock to the sturm und drang of classical music. King Crimson are one of the very few bands who can actually wear that comparison.

There's two things about the live line-up that immediately strike you. First, in his characteristically contrarian insistence he's not going to confirm to rockism, Fripp has taken to looking as much like a chartered accountant as he can. And as the band assemble on stage they're all bedecked in his customary uniform of shirt and tie. It's unusual attire for a drummer, yet the only concession to them is they're allowed black shirts instead of white.

Yes, “them”. There's not only three drummers, making up nearly half of the seven-piece group, but they line up at the front of the stage. It's bassist Tony Levin who takes pole position behind them, pushing Fripp himself to the edge. (From where I sat his head occassionally popped up atop a cymbal.) He has spoken with some glee over this swapping of conventional“backline” and “frontline”.

This must surely be the first time they’ve ever played precisely this setlist, even if you were to disregard the new tracks. By the time they were in their third phase they’d burnt their bridges to anything from their first. (The link claims they'd stopped playing 'Epitaph' before the end of the Sixties.)

But, happily for me, its mostly that later sound they take up tonight. There is, before you ask, the inevitable drum solo. But the lined-up solos so often associated with prog yield to ensemble playing. The drummers dominate, often both starting and finishing numbers like a unit in themselves. They can synchronise like reiterating the beats in triplicate, but spend most time shuffling elegantly around one another. Guitar lines often arrive not just quitely but distantly, like the approach of stealth bombers.

Its a sound which is perhaps reflected in the poster image. The figure has Fripp's favoured attire of button-down shirt and tie but is also, and perhaps more noticeably, single in his vision. While the band members are listed like chemicals in a compound. (An earlier symbol of the band had been knotwork.) It's all about how things come together.

There does sometimes seem a tension between their wanting to take this new line-up and run with it, and the need to serve up the classic tracks the audience will recognise. (You can tell when they go back to an earlier point because one of the drummers will have to shift onto keyboards.) This makes it almost impossible to ascertain whether this is a celebrity “lap of honour” tour or the start of a bold new era – the glass was almost exactly half-full and half-empty. And there are times when sheer cleverness does get in the way. Like coffee nerves, some tracks run through a whole slew of ideas without ever settling on any of them.

But then if I didn't like everything, I'm yet to hear a King Crimson album where I liked everything. They're just too idiosyncratic, too inscrutable for that. And the parts I liked... I reckon myself to have heard music I've not before, and most likely won't again unless I get another chance to see King Crimson.

They finish on what's perhaps their signature number, '21st Century Schizoid Man' Perhaps predictable, but then it remains strange in essence - no matter how many times you hear it. Arriving with their first album, it's perhaps the earliest example of their “heavy riffing from Mars” style. With its distorted sound and scratchy vocal, its too wired, too agitated, to fit in with prog or even hard rock. It almost looks forward to punk, but is too grand and terrible, too overpowering for that. It's a track that never really fitted signifying a band that never really fitted.

The gig starts with a recorded message from the band asking for people to watch the gig rather than film it. And it looks like their wishes have been obeyed for, bar a few rehearsal clips, there's little YouTube footage of this tour. You'll just have to take my word for it.

GOBLIN/ GODFLESH/ THE EX/ EMPTYSET AV (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

GOBLIN PERFORM 'SUSPIRIA'

St. Bartholomew's Church, Brighton, Sat Dec 6th

(Drill Festival Part the Second)

Disclaimer!Dario Argento's 1977 shocker 'Suspiria' may be genuinely deranged but its also literally depraved. It follows the standard slasher film conventions, which includes repeated scenes of semi-dressed women getting penetrated by knives and meeting other grisly deaths. If given this description you're not interested in being told such a film has other merits, or want to know about its soundtrack, please skip this section now.

If after Pere Ubu's 'Man With the X-Ray Eyes' I'd rushed to proclaim underscores as the way to create a film soundtrack, what should come along a couple of weeks later but a classic example of an overscore?

But then a conventional score would never have worked for a film such as 'Suspiria'. There's not so much a subtext that needs drawing out. Just like the supernatural events that take over the characters' lives, everything pretty much explodes over the surface of the film. Argento realised that the horror of horror films comes from the triumph of the irrational, and simply went with that. Mysteries stay unexplained, plot threads are dropped with impunity - your mind would break before it made any sense of this. 

Instead it lives in the mise-en-scene, the lurid colours and Art Nouveau flourishes of the Dance Academy (which must count as one of the main characters in its own right), and in the succession of dramatic set-piece events. Everything becomes suffused in the atmosphere of a lurid, surrealist dream. And it lives in the soundtrack which, rather than illustrating the film, was composed before shooting began. And music, inherently irrational in the way it runs a short-circuit to your brain, is vital in achieving this effect.

Watching sections of it performed during Goblin's solo gig earlier this year, I wrote “it just keeps going, permeating the whole film – marinading in its mood”. Yet, watching the whole thing through, rather than listening to live highlights or the soundtrack album you realise that however over-the-top it sounds its actually quite a skilled accomplishment. For an overscore, there's a whole lot of underscore to it – semi-subliminal embellishment of the events. And the grand themes have a habit of suddenly cutting straight out, leaving us hanging. The band are clearly aware how loud silence can sound.

And while its famous for being a rock score, repeating phrases and riffs until insanity takes hold, it uses quite a few classical devices. The main theme recurs again and again but in different variants, like motifs in a symphony. The psychological effect is of relentlessness, but without the ear ever getting the chance to become used to what its hearing.

Perhaps the most bizarre and effective thing about the soundtrack is that it sounds simultaneously so fitting for the film and like some alien force that is infecting it – like the sinister witch lurking at the heart of the Dance Academy orchestrating the deaths. The celebrated main theme, with those malevolently chanted vocals like a twisted lullaby, simultaneously sinister and seductive, fits superbly with Argento's directoral motifs – such as filming scenes from an elevated perspective, as if under the spying eye of evil spirits.

The 'rock' nature of the soundtrack is similarly bizarre and disruptive in the way it works. The film is at root a supernaturalised analogy for the generation gap – an ode to getting out of school and going your own way. The witch at the heart of it all, Helena Markos, is not just ancient but supposed to be dead - she has prolonged her life by supernatural means. (Whether she is sustained by the frequent blood sacrifices of the young, like Countess Dracula, is one of the many things which remain unexplained.) The heroine Suzy (played by Jessica Harper) can't trust anyone much over thirty and only seems to gain safe haven outside of the Academy - in more modern settings, such as the glass-and-steel citadel of the conference centre. The Academy often seems designed around infantalising it's young adult charges. (Argento designed the sets so, for example, door handles were raised to the height they would normally be for children.)

But the rock soundtrack, which would have sounded so modern to a contemporary audience at a time when they were only starting to move from classical instrumentation, isn't the stereotypical sound of youth or freedom. It very much belongs with the Dance Academy, like an aural iteration of the witch's spells. While, in a break with one of the more fundamental rules of soundtracks, Suzy isn't given her own theme. If anything it is playing with the notion more commonly held by older generations, that rock is the “devil's music”.

I also wrote after last time “the best way to experience their music is still through watching those Argento films”. And I was right. Cutting out the proggier solo-band stuff, and showing their music against the film it was always meant to accompany, this was Goblin in their element. And the grandeur of St. Barts church made for the perfect venue. “I hope God forgives us”, front-man Claudio Simonetti commented at the end. I reckon he will.

From their earlier performance in Islington:

GODFLESH

The Haunt, Brighton, Tues 9th Dec

After an eight-year break, it would almost be tempting to talk about Godflesh being resurrected. I loved the legendary Eighties noise band enough to name one of my old comic strips after them. (Though if anyone else remembers that I'll be astonished.) And now they're not just back but back the way they were – the classic two-man line-up of guitarist Justin Broadrick and bassist GC Green.

Though just looking at the musicians on stage perhaps overlooks the key ingredient to their distinctive sound. By then many bands employed a drum machine, but tended to use it as a click track. After all, if the drums are important then you invest in a real drummer, right? Whereas Godflesh took the drum machine and utilised it. At times it became the dominant instrument, providing an onslaught of inhumanly pounding beats, relentless as rows of space invaders, with guitar and bass throwing up dissonances.

It was a sound which gave the band the best of both worlds – the frenzied energy of punk combined with the pulverising force of metal. Plus, in an echo of something I once said about Wolf Eyes, the way you couldn't understand a word of those screamed or guttural vocals just added to the sense they were speaking to you. They seemed to tap into some feeling beyond words, something purely existential – the glossolalia of angst. (I manage to make out precisely three words all night long - “towers of emptiness.”)

As ever its more evocative to let the music do the talking, stirring moods and conjuring up images in your mind. Wikipedia tags the band with the terms 'industrial metal', 'experimental metal' and post-metal'. And taking that first suggestion it's music which could be taken to follow the industrial template – a response to the urban environment, to tower blocks, traffic jams and tasting smog for air. As Dom Lawson said in the Guardian of their sound: “monochrome riffs and dehumanised drums collide, conjuring a disorientating fog of urban desperation and fury… a cracked prism of post-Thatcher social alienation.”

But it also morphs readily into visions of some science fiction apocalypse. Early albums tended to credit the drums to the 'Terminator'-like tag “machines”. Bu they're less man vs. machine wars and more the cyborg-as-inner-conflict of 'Tetsuo' - man becoming machine even as he fights it, and vice versa. But the real appeal is the way one slips so easily into the other, as if the dystopian future is already here and just getting warmed up. (Think of that last 'Terminator' film taking place almost entirely inside some future apocalypse. What made it more epic also made it more removed, less involving. What's powerful is the sense of an elision between the two.)

In some ways they're the Black Flag of metal, and not just through being influential. There's the same sense of stripping down beyond the point a sane mind would stop, reducing music to a brutal and brutalising force. But there's the equal yet contradictory sense that it's all a brilliant art project, devised by some very smart people indeed. The slide show that accompanies the gig includes raging flames and venomous snakes, but also such arty fayre as Church carvings and details from Bosch paintings.

There's that wish fulfilment conceit common in comics, where the nerdy kid gains super powers and no-one can pick on him any more. With Godflesh there's the sense that their outsiderness is their superpower, the quality that enables them to unleash such sonic blasts, that everything that's pushing down on them is made into their weapon back against it. Ultimately, for all it's savagery, there's something not nihilistic but liberating about their music. It's like facing off the world and winning.

They only play for about an hour, which might seem on the short side. But the experience is of such an intensity you're not really sure if you could have taken much more. As it ends someone sticks on a Christmas jingle single, so we exit to the echoes of blistering beats and service-encounter session singers wishing us a merry festive season.

They really are just as good now as they were back in the day.

Their classic 'Streetcleaner' from Maryland...

THE EX

Sticky Mike's Frog Bar, Brighton, Wed 10th Dec

“I have satellite maps of near destinations

So why take a risk when you can take a vacation?”

Much like Swans, I've already written about Dutch post-punkers the Ex not once but twice (actually sort of three times) so will only add stuff here which I haven't said before.

One cool thing about this gig, a warm-up for a two-night residency in London's Cafe Oto, was that it featured such a wealth of support acts it almost became a mini-festival. These included (and I may well have missed something)...

• A Dutch singer-songwriter who gave us precisely one song in English
• Afework Nigussie, a traditional Ethiopian musician playing what appeared to be a bedpost with a single string attached (and later joined the band for a few numbers)
• Terrie from the Ex playing freeform impro guitar (which alas only really got good towards the end)
• Trash Kit, a Slits-style girl group playing offbeat in about every available sense of the word. When I say girl group they looked like their collective ages might have got them served at the bar. The singer dedicates one song to her mum, who turns out to be in the audience.

As befits a band not knowing for resting on their laurels, the Ex provide several new tracks which would bode well for the future. Katherina's skittering drumming provided a fine contrasts to Godflesh's machine beats a few nights before, in that it couldn't sound any more human. While the guitars are taunt and sharp, she provides rolling polyrhthms which, as I've said before “rarely march in the lockstep of punk orthodoxy.”

Gigs, even good gigs, fall too easily into a formula. While this was a night which felt full of of possibility. The main set ended with a version of ‘That’s Not A Virus’ which reached such an intensity, de Boers spitting doggerel number codes like they were the most important information ever imparted, that I expected cracks to start appearing in the walls and ceiling and Sticky Mike's Frog Bar to be no more. After which the band were clapped back on for no less than three encores.

The Ex are neither stuck in some fundamentalist punk furrow, struggling to retain the way everything sounded in 1979, nor have they bought into music biz shenanigans. They simply play the music it occurs to them to play. They're stuck to their roots, but they've also grown from them. If they didn't exist we'd probably have to make them up.

'Four Billion Tulip Bulbs',a subject close to every Dutch person's heart, from Copenhagen...

EMPTYSET A/V

Dome Studio Theatre, Brighton, Sat 13th Dec

Part of Earsthetic

Emptyset, it says here, “examine the physical properties of sound through electromagnetism, architecture and process-based image-making in a live event that encompasses performance, installation work and audio-visuals.”

People often perceive electronica as a remote, austere and and cerebral affair. But Emptyset are a long way from Morton Subotnik's 'music of the spheres', their spectral sounds are actually quite rooted in the earth. I once commented how psychedelia “worked best when stuffed inside actual songs. It's the way it then fights to get out, makes the song strange, misshapen and unpredictable. Like one of those giant bubbles which stop being perfectly round but undulate weirdly and throw up loads of odd reflections.”

And Emptyset do a similar thing with the rhythms of dance music. As the visuals play with geometric shapes and with distortions, so their music plays with the even-ness of beats. And strange, distorted beats are still beats, dance music from Mars is still dance music. There were sections the audience could easily have danced to, were we not so chinstrokey. And in fact I read later they “have backgrounds within Bristol's club music scene.”

The A/V in their name and in their performance suggests the appeal of synaesthesia. See a live band and you may enjoy the interplay between, say, the bassist and the drummer. But when that jumps across media barriers it becomes environmental. It was reminiscent less of other gigs that I've been to than Lis Rhodes' Tate installation 'Light Music'. At times the bass notes rumbled so low they made the floor vibrate and tickle my feet.

Both electronica and dance music become more immersive the longer they continue, and the same was true here. Not because things developed. Though they performed one long piece, it was pretty much neatly divided into sections. But because its immersive. You settle into it like a bath.

From Paris:

Coming soon! Short of Led Zeppelin staging a surprise reunion on the seafront on Xmas Day, no more gig-going adventures for a little while. Still, it's been a good year for it...

THE SIXTIES UNDERGROUND IN FRANCE... YES, FRANCE!

A sequel of sorts to these posts on the scenes in Germany, the UK and the USA.

Never heard of the radical underground music scene going on in Sixties France? Well that's probably because there wasn't much of one. If, as I keep suggesting, the music was tied with the social and political upheavals of the time, then France should have been a contender of Brandoesque proportions – it had more upheavals than any other developed nation. Yet, while these did tie in to artistic movements, such as New Wave cinema, music made for something of an exception to the rule. (Check out Italy from the same era and you might come away with a similar story.)

Opinion remains divided whether France produces popular music which simply doesn't export, or whether it simply doesn't bother with the stuff at all. But that matters little here, for both point us in the same direction.

On the other hand, of course, there never was a rule that wasn't made to break. So let's home in on a couple of notable exceptions...

Gong

Reader, please indluge a personal digression...

When you're young, you can be very sure of yourself. The two or three things you know line up neatly in your head, free of tangles. So, to my mid-teen mind, music was a pretty clear-cut affair. Hawkwind were quite clearly the highpoint of everything which had happened since the onset of recorded sound. Which left Gong (pictured up top) to pick up the silver. Simples.

Not that my schoolmates were always easy to convince of this, and sometimes pearls fell before swine. I remember showing the colourful, handwritten cover from 'Live Floating Anarchy' (below) to one of my few remaining associates. He stood looking at it in some bemusement, before finally handing it back. “Is it music?” he asked hesitantly, “or is it just messing about?” “I'm really not sure,” I beamed back. But he seemed unaware that this was actually an advantage.

Yet, while I love Hawkwind to this day, over time I lost a lot of interest in Gong. It was partly hearing the later albums (from 'Shamal'), after instigators Daveid Allen and Gilli Smyth had left, which were quite definitely music without the messing about. While the old Gong had been the soundtrack to patching your jeans, things had turned to swish Euro-prog. They even had... I can barely manage to type the words... proper covers. Ugh!

But somehow, like capillary action, such sheer competent awfulness seemed creep back into the earlier stuff. Concept album trilogies on the theme of hippies getting stoned? It stopped sounded appealing. With Hawkwind aiming squarely for the systematic derangement of the senses, Gong seemed by comparison mere blissed-out whimsey.

Yet, as this clip demonstrates so perfectly, sometimes they really could go off. It makes an advantage of the very thing that would later rip apart Gong, that the French never really took to being hippies. Allen and Smyth blow in among those neat beards and button-up shirts like foreign weeds. But here the two sides blend so perfectly and effortlessly it creates a whole new thing – for which I'm not sure we even have a name yet.

Their “just messing about” is grounded and given shape by the more skilful and disciplined playing of the musicians; while the free-form zaniness gives the players a focus and an edge which keeps them away from their more noodly tendencies. It's really not so far away from how the Magic Band worked with the Captain. Plus I also love the way the backdrop isn't some lava-lamp effect but Vertov-style silhouettes of the band setting up. C'est superbe!

Magma

These young people of today. With their I-pods, their apps and that Spotify business on their mobiles. Just try telling them this, and they won't believe you...

...but in my school library there were precisely two books on rock music. Given the absence of anything similar on the shelves at home, they represented the sum total of knowledge on the subject in my world. There was the one with words in it and the one with pictures in it. Ever the English whizz, I went for the one with words in, the 'NME Book of Rock'. Then, in what seemed the logical next move, I read it.

But of course the school library was expecting that book back. In fact, from previous experience they were likely to show a strange vociferousness on that sort of subject. And another of the many things lacking in my world was a photocopier. But, in an unusual modernist gesture, I had been permitted access to my Mum's manual typewriter. So if I came across an interesting-sounding entry, I'd preserve it for posterity by copying it out verbatim.

I kept the resultant sheets of A4 in a battered red binder. My typewriter permissions didn't extend as far as being allowed to change the ribbon, a piece of maintenance now some years overdue. But provided you squinted hard at the increasingly greying text from under bright light, you could make out most of the words. Well, most of most of them.

That red binder was like my lo-fi, Babbage engine version of Wikipedia. Only with less sound files and edit wars.

It was a bit like a hungry man copying out menus from restaurants he couldn't get to. Or afford to eat there even if he could. I dreamt... I dreamt of the day when I would track down the musical sources of those sacred entries. Those strange and enthralling names – Captain Beefheart, King Crimson, the Velvet Underground – so different to the day-world of school, where things had names like Dr. Neville, Mr. Murgatroyd and Further Maths. That voyage of discovery, it would be my mission, even if it took me a lifetime.

Which is pretty much the way it worked out.

Now one of the most enticing names contained in that red folder was Magma. They were French. Which was pretty strange to start off with. Music was English. Or American. Except for the Germans who liked heavy metal. But French?

For some reason the book didn't even mention what's normally considered Magma's killer app, singing in an imaginary language that supposedly came from another planet. But it did say this:

“Formed to perform enormous, megalomaniac oratorios concerning Earth's future... Magma fall by their humourless and irredeemably pretentious concept.”

Well, naturally I was desperate to hear more.

Which required some exertion of patience. In time I'd come to hear Captain Beefheart, I'd come to hear King Crimson, I'd come to hear the Velvet Underground - and yet Magma remained elusive. Of course I'd continue to hear their name, scattered like breadcrumbs along a young music aficionado's path. The people who liked the maddest stuff, who got interested in a band just at the point everybody else was giving up on them, they always seemed to rate them. John Lydon was rumoured a fan. There was a brief rush of excitement when they played London some years ago. But all the while without my ears ever striking pay-dirt.

Today of course the instant hit of the interweb means I can hear them any time I want, without having to get up out of this chair. And of course it's correspondingly harder to find that time. So I've pretty much just dabbled in the odd YouTube link.

Added to which, they're not particularly YouTubeable. Listening to Magma clearly isn't an instant hit. You're supposed to get into them the old way, the way I got into Captain Beefheart or Pere Ubu, slowly and piecemeal, gradual acclimatisation. It's like the way LPs had a natural pause between sides, where they'd wait for you to come and turn them over. While CDs just run.

Their videos can look like you'd stumbled across the rituals of some strange cult, with no clue what it all means to initiates. For which I suppose the word is “apt”. It's not like Frank Zappa in any particular, but it is like Frank Zappa in terms of breadth and scope. Dip into two bits of Zappa from two different eras and you'd have no idea how those dots joined up – it's like that. In terms of what they do, what sort of music they make, it seems bewildering. In, you know, a good way.

Their whole other-language schtick, however grandiosely absurd, is actually kind of fitting. Discovering a new band like thisis like hearing a strange new language. At first all you could hear was the sheer otherness of it. But after a while you could pick out phrases, and even start putting them together...

But one thing I have found and do enjoy is the way they'll blend rock and classical styles so unselfconsciously, unlike the self-important look-at-me ostentation that so beset their era. And the way they don't use classical elements for ornamentation, sporting string sections like bling, but instead take up the power and force of classical music. Their name, I would guess, was chosen to combine monumentality with fluidity. And just like the magma layer oozes on with no heed paid to time and tide, they remain active to this day!

If anyone reading this is an initiate, who can speak that other-world language and could suggest a good starting point for full-album immersion, I'd be grateful for any pointers. Which wouldn't necessarily have to come on typewritten sheets in battered red binders. Just preferably.

Coming soon! The Sixties underground in Luxembourg. (Only kidding…)

GOBLIN/ALTERNATIVE TV/BLYTH POWER (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES CONTD.)

GOBLIN

Concorde 2, Brighton, Mon 24th Feb

It's not an exaggeration to say that Goblin were for Dario Argento what Ennio Morricone was for Sergio Leone. Even if their film soundtracks worked in quite different ways. Leone's films were almost operas without the singing, with the grand sweep of the music doing more talking than the characters. In, for example, 'Once Upon A Time in the West', Harmonica's character is filled in more through his musical theme than anything he tersely utters.

But Argento's lurid and surreal horror films were more interested in atmosphere than character. So the soundtrack isn't something slapped on top, audio cues to let us know how to respond to what's happening on the screen. Instead it just keeps going, permeating the whole film - marinading it in its mood. It would be virtually impossible to imagine those films without the soundtracks, they'd no longer be the same thing. (It may even be true each needed the other. Though I love the film, their soundtrack to Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead' (1978) isn't all that memorable.)

But of course, unlike Morricone, Goblin were a rock band. A band who had already produced an album before they fell into working with Argento, almost by chance. (They were due to contribute to 'Deep Red' (1975), when the existing composer walked out - leaving the job to them.) Which is significant. This was the era where the sound of a recording, rather than just the beat or melody, came to matter. Which pushed popular music and soundtracks together. Popol Vuh, for example, had a similar relationship with director Wim Wenders Werner Herzog on films such as 'Aguirre Wrath of God' (1972). And while Black Sabbath never produced soundtracks, it's notable they were inspired in both their sound and their name by the eponymous horror film.

And yet almost no band produces so split a reaction in me than Goblin. They're like chalk cut with cheese. They were first inspired by English prog bands Genesis and King Crimson. Who to my mind mark the stranger and more interesting side of prog, even if both could also have their moments of empty ostentation. There also seemed something of a Kosmische influence on them, such as the afore-mentioned Popol Vuh. (For example on the track 'Markos'. Though who can say if German underground music was even known in Italy at the time?) Plus, formally, the different nature of soundtracks could have a liberating effect. While much prog promised a breakaway from the norm, then served up standard rock tracks just with longer solos, soundtracks were a route out of such limitations.

Yet the failings of prog were always reappearing in Goblin just as they seemed transcended, with haunting sections of the most mesmeric power all-too-soon souring into regular Seventies rock-outs. And this was particularly true of their non-soundtrack albums, like they'd grown wings only to fold them away again. Though even the 'Suspira' soundtrack, surely their finest work, manages to span the sublime and the frankly cheesy.

I went to see them through the conviction that such rare opportunities should be seized. (In the original line-up, even!) But also to see if such a split could resolve itself. Which it couldn't, really. It's evident that they truly were a band first, for they provide a tight rhythm section - which could even get convincingly funky when it chose. But there were several trebly guitar outbreaks and other sections I simply waited to be over. There was, before you ask, even a drum solo.

It's notable how the soundtracks have defined them, even as a live band. They're called Goblin for one thing, despite that originally being intended as a one-off nomme-de-plume for 'Deep Red'. They perform before film clips. (Though they also served up several tracks from the non-soundtrack 'Roller'.) And, though they don't save it for the finale, its the theme to 'Suspira' which won the biggest audience cheer.

Designed as soundtracks, the pieces don't necessarily work the same way live. What can seem boundless during a film, where you're used to music appearing as a series of short excerpts, seems almost curtailed live - like a greatest hits set. And there's a textuality to the studio recordings, a seemingly endless accumulation of musical layers, that can't really be reproduced live. To see them live and up close is an opportunity. But the best way to experience their music is still through watching those Argento films.

But let's finish on a broader question. When they are good, what is it that makes them so good? Well, of course they're good at being bad. All that Satan-bothering bollocks from the likes of Venom forgets the basic rule that the Devil is supposed to have the best tunes. With it's music box element the 'Suspira' theme is seductive, like a siren call. Listening to it is like taking a soporific drug, seducing you to sleep even as you feel your alarm systems trying desperately to kick in.

You wouldn't need to undertake much research into Seventies cinema to conclude it was a decade with the taste for the supernatural. Which makes it interesting that prog is so roundly condemned as cluelessly utopian. True, the convoluted, equipment-heavy music can seem inherently techno-fixxy. And of course bands such as Yes did indulge in terrible New Age babblings.

But there was also a more sinister side to the music. As recounted, Goblin's biggest influences were Genesis (think of the twisted nursery story of 'Music Box') and King Crimson. (Have you ever heard anything more dystopian than '21st Century Schizoid Man'?) This is probably another example of history being rewritten by turncoat music journalists after punk's victory. Prog had to be seen as blissed-out to contrast it against punk's tales of dole queues. (A kind of angst the best punk rarely went in for anyway.) Goblin are sidelined from this by being portrayed as film composers rather than a band who wrote for films.

Nowadays it seems every style of music has its own dark derivative, including Dark ambient, dark cabaret, dark folk and dark easy listening. (Okay, I suppose I may have made the last one up.) Maybe a music which genuinely had it's share of darkness, back in it's original era, should get it's place in the light. (Um, maybe that should be unlight.) After all, it doesn't get much more join-the-dark-side than Goblin...

Sampled highlights. You can probably guess which track kicks off...

ALTERNATIVE TV

Green Door Store, Brighton, Fri 21st Feb

Alternative TV are, as if we needed one, another example of an original British punk band who weren't the regressive and unimaginative force of popular caricature. (File alongside fellow recent sightings The Cravats, TV Smith and Subway Sect.)

Front man Mark Perry looked to have his official place in punk history assured, producing what's commonly regarded as the first British punk fanzine - 'Sniffin' Glue'. (Though I dare say some spiky headed trainspotter is naming some earlier effort even now.) It was punk-template enough to write it's headlines in felt pen and be named after a Ramones song. But (in his own words) “as I saw the initial punk explosion subside into a succession of third rate copyists, I wanted to have a go myself.” So he jacked the stapling in to form Alternative TV – with a sound “closer to Can and reggae-type rhythms”. The band's first release was a flexi attached to the fanzine's last issue. They've continued intermittently since, with frequent changes in personnel and even bigger nine-point turns in direction, a zig-zag of break-ups and reforms.

In their current live incarnation they offered up no short supply of classic punk - short, sharp numbers with the grabbiest of hooks. But other tracks stretched longer than the three-minute diktat, driven by metronomic riffs and frequently breaking out into instrumental sections – twin guitars clashing. Such tracks sounded like something from a long-gone free festival of the era, unhinged wig-outs accompanied by apparent stream-of-consciousness lyrics, a bizarre hybrid of declammatory recital and self-doubting inner voice. At one point Perry cheerily joined in on the recorder, not the most Ramones-like of instruments. (Back in the day they apparently had a fondness for full-on free impro, about the one direction they don't follow up on now.)

Perhaps the musical variety on show could have come from the set spanning several of their eras. But with the multi-directional approach, the best thing about it was all of it. It had both the driving force of punk and the elusive, amorphous feeling of post-punk – as if music was just to be played with, like plasticine. They played their classic track 'Splitting In Two' (“I'm splitting in two, and so are you!”), yet seemed perpetually pitched at the point the different sounds could still stay conjoined. As if they could never quite be pinned to anything, but in any second take off in other directions.

Was there ever really a time before punk being a marketing term? When it actually had something to do with imagination and freedom? It seems there was.

Not from Brighton. (You're probably getting used to that...)

BLYTH POWER

Ropetackle Centre, Shoreham, Sat 22nd Feb

This marks the third time I've seen Blyth Power within four years, which now eclipses the sightings I managed in those days of yore. I expect that proves something or other, but I'm buggered if I know what.

It is of course always a pleasure to hear their unique blend of folk, rock and English songwriting. With nary an undertaste of their original punk roots. Harmonies can sound so sweet as to be almost poppy. And front-man Joseph Porter's patented puckish erudition was to the fore as always.

Despite the longevity (now over thirty years), they're no spent force or nostalgia act. We were treated to tracks from their as-yet-unreleased new album, 'Women and Horses, Power and War', which Porter cheerily told us at the merch stall will be their best yet. Even on the second time of hearing, I remain taken by 'Down With Alice', a riff on Crass's 'Berkertex Bride' which looks back somewhat sardonically on our armband-sporting youth. (“Man made plans for social change/ And fraudulent social security claims.” It's funny because it's true...) Porter jokingly dedicated it to anyone who secretly wanted to do the conga at a Crass gig. The next time I try to describe Blyth Power's sound I may even use that...

Performing at Shoreham Beer Festival, they brought compere Attila the Stockbroker on stage for a few numbers. (As ramshackle as ever, this involved a band member rummaging backstage to scout out an extra lead.) And his viola added so rich an extra element you wished he could become a regular member.

I have been slowly and haphazardly working my way through the band's back catalogue. (You have to say haphazardly, for alas they have more missing episodes than Patrick Troughton.) So one day I may even write a proper, fulsome, grown-up thing about Blyth Power. It might even make amends for the last thing I did write. Which in many ways I still like, but it was something of an indulgence - chiefly bending one song to my own purpose.

This, however, is not that moment. For now, let's just link to a potted history.

Nothing on YouTube from this gig, it seems. But there is now a video not only of their Hector's House showing, but of the very track I wrote about - 'Stitching In Time'. Go figure. This version sounds like the Velvets' 'Sunday Morning', somehow. (Audience ambience at no extra charge.)

...but as this is Blyth Power we're talking about, here's a second helping. This one from back in the day, where it was actually against the law to take to the dancefloor if you weren't wearing combats or a Crass T-shirt. Posted for no better reason than this track also made it into their Ropetackle set - 'Paradise Sold'. A song about the North/South divide, what better place to play it than the South coast?