Farmer In The City

"Boobs A Lot", by The Fugs. From "The Fugs First Album". Not all mid-sixties post-Beat "performance art" falls into the category of "You had to be there".

"They're big and round / They're all around."

"You Never Know", by Wilco. On the weekend I bought the new Wilco album, "Wilco (the album)" (thanks for that). I have only just begun giving it a good listen. It hasn't grabbed me as strongly, or as early, as "Sky Blue Sky", but then the new one seems more a collection of songs as such, and so will quite possibly reveal its real strengths, the way songs do, through repetition. But I can say a couple of things. The first is that this album is, I think, the first Wilco album (at least since the first two, which I don't really know so can't really comment on) in which they don't so much change direction as consolidate recent gains. It could, on that basis, be considered as something of a let-down, but that would be unfair, and would amount to criticising Jeff Tweedy for being, for the first time in a long while, in what they call a "good place".

The second thing I could say is that I am picking up a lot of influences and/or references. As these are to a few of my favourite things, I am of necessity going to be predisposed to like what they do. The opening knees-up, "Wilco (the song)" (thanks again for that), kicks with a 70s-era platform boot. "Deeper Down" is permeated by a distinctly REM turn. Early favourite "Bull Black Nova" is almost, in its first half, an unexpected convergence between my two favourite albums of 2007, "Sky Blue Sky" and Spoon's "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". But today I want to give a shout-out to "You Never Know". There is, I suspect, a nod to Talking Heads buried in here somewhere, but more significantly this song contains so much George Harrison that you'll believe in life after death. Coming at a time when, by way of Marcello Carlin's having reached, in his run-down of UK number one albums, the Beatle Years, I have been reabsorbing myself in what made the Fab Four so marvellous and Important, a song like "You Never Know" is exactly what the doctor, unexpectedly, ordered. And I know that last sentence is a bit convoluted but, trust me, it works.

I'm glad that there exists in this world a band called The Duckworth Lewis Method. It's a pity, though, that the name doesn't belong to some ramshackle bunch of young upstarts, but just a few Old Farts At Play. Still, it's a great name, redolent as it is (when shorn of its cricketing context) of Carnaby Street circa 1966 (like I would know).

"Inspiration Information (Kaoru Inoue Remix Beatless)", by Spikewave. You know how it is, you wake up a bit fragile, you get to work and everything rapidly goes to hell in a handbasket, and you find yourself desperate to listen to some Manuel Gottsching. Well, I wasn't able to get my hands on any Gottsching, but this proves to be a more than adequate substitute. It floats along on its own pillow of breathless air, you can entirely lose yourself in it, and all pain is taken away, as if you had swallowed a giant, fluffy Disprin Forte. It may not extend towards infinity like, say, "E2-E4", but you can put it on repeat and bask in its golden glow for just as long as you need to.

"Mystery Train", by Elvis Presley. Are you meaning to tell me that this never got into the UK top 40? A remarkable failure of record company savvy, if true. Or were there copyright issues?

So, if the lineage of music-related megastardom goes, Frank Sinatra -> Elvis Presley -> Michael Jackson, and we are living in a megastar-devoid moment, who, assuming nature's usual abhorrence of vacuums, could possibly fill that hole? (And, on the evidence of the latter two, (why) would anyone want to?)

"The Minotaur", by The Drones. Let's big up some Australian content. We don't get to do that very often. (Not because there's nothing that's any good, only, and sadly, that we don't get to hear very much of it.) There is something very physical about this song. Brutal, perhaps, but it's a vulnerable brutality: there is life, hope and optimism sitting somewhere within the several walls of guitars. (And I love those guitars. There is something thrilling about them that I haven't been getting from "guitar rock" in many a long year.)

Three in one day. Blimey. In relation to the third of them, in particular, the world actually does feel a little emptier today.

1. Sky "Sunlight" Saxon, erstwhile singer of The Seeds, one of the better of the "Nuggets"-era bands, responsible in particular for "Can't Seem To Make You Mine", one of the best songs of that or any other age. Saxon, like many others of a similar time and place (that place being, of course, a garage somewhere), underwent a second moment in the spotlight during the garage-rock revival of the latter half of the eighties, but it was not to last.

2. Steven Wells. I always read whatever Wellsy wrote. I didn't always, or perhaps almost ever, find myself in agreement with its content, but Wells had a style all his own, and he was an integral part of the coarsely (very coarsely in Wells's case) woven fabric that was the Golden Age of the New Musical Express.

3. Which leaves the big one, the genuinely unfillable hole. The King of Pop is dead. Long live the King of Pop. I can't believe how churned up I am about Michael Jackson's death. (In fact I am writing this through an unexpected veil of tears.) It's not that it was a shock (c.f. Grant McLennan) so much as that it feels so appallingly inevitable. It is as if, from the moment he was born, Michael Jackson's life was going to end this way - fundamentally alone, lost, his life controlled by people other than himself, and yet he has continued to be a part of the lives of so many people, from the media, who kept falling over themselves to portray him as crazy, wacko, a figure of fun, to people like our own eleven-year-old, who self-evidently has only discovered Michael Jackson long after Jackson's best musical days were behind him, but who will undoubtedly have been devastated upon hearing the news (I think a part of my own devastation is about feeling his pain). The parallels between Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley can now be accurately measured. I suspect they are many. Now that Michael has left the building, all we have is his legacy. And that, as we all now know, is greater than any one man could bear.