If ever a musical collective was an evenly-distributed fusion of different talents, The Doors were, but if I had to decide which brick in that formidable wall could be least easily disposed of, it would be Ray’s keyboard noodlings. Drawing equally on the classics, jazz and r’n’b, always hitting the spot, always knowing exactly when to stretch out or merely embroider, it didn’t hurt that the owner of those creative fingers was blessed with the taste to plagiarise the best. Watch the recent DVD documentary about the making of LA Woman and chuckle at his shamelessness.

Modesty, nevertheless, did not become him. He was the first organ player I’d heard outside the confines of a church. If I had to pick one exhibit it would be Riders On The Storm. I’ve still never heard anything so sheerly atmospheric. Ray framed it with painterly delicacy: the measured trills and light-fingered runs; the singular versatility; the unerring sense of light and shade; the utter command of touch, tone and tempo.

More? There’s always more. The exquisitely doomy textures underpinning The End. The rocksteady pulse of Break On Through. The Bach-infused break on Hyacinth House. The dainty psychedelic flurry on Universal Mind. The Victorian backstreet strains that decorate People Are Strange. The rinky-tinky honky-tonking on LA Woman. Those stately foundations beneath When The Music’s Over, such a rich if unassuming counterfoil to Robbie Krieger’s howling slide guitar and chirpy inflections. The adroit minimalism on Moonlight Drive. The orgasmic organ solo that booked Light My Fire’s berth on the ultimate doper’s soundtrack.

As official cheerleader, semi-official spokesman, standard-bearer-in-chief and most erudite defender of James Douglas Morrison/Jimbo/The Lizard King/Mr Mojo Risin, Ray also did more than anyone, not only to keep The Doors alive in the minds of successive generations, but to fly the withered flag of hippiedom. True, the cringeing occasionally matched the cheers, but how could you stay cynical for long when, as his occasionally otherworldly autobiography suggested, he remained so patently in love with the idea that love really is all you need?

Had he not been so open-minded, had he not been prepared to listen to Jim shyly recite one of his poems on Venice Beach in that long lost summer five decades ago, it is eminently possible that The Doors would never have opened for business. Then again, had Jim not decided to trade in his movie camera for a mike, trade would never have been so brisk, as Ray never shied clear of admitting.

“Adventure was his metier: his reason for being. His main purpose for being here,” he remarked admiringly. “And didn’t he bring that sense of adventure to us? All of us. God, he was fun to be with.”

So were you, Ray, so were you.

What the hell can David Bowie and Todd Rundgren, The Dame and The Runt, possibly have left to prove? That, like Macca and Mick and Keef, Bob and Van, Neil and Pete and even dear old Surfer Brian, it is entirely possible, even when you’ve attained your three score years and ten, that both fans and spotlight can still adore you? Old guns still going for it, eh? I don’t buy it, at least not in the case of The Dame and The Runt. Let’s move it up to another level of ambition.

Let’s be frank. Precious few members of the dwindling band of 60s survivors still pounding the road can claim that their best years, creatively speaking, aren’t long gone. Some might cite Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits; I wouldn’t put it past Randy Newman, chops further honed by all those Toy Story toons, finally serving up something that defines his unique contribution to modern songsmithery. Nor would I be astonished to find Messrs Fagen and Becker suddenly bestowing something state-of-the-planetish. For all our undying optimism, those of us who’ve stayed on this rockin’ rollercoaster for the past five decades or so know that the likes of Highway ’61, Blood On The Tracks, Exile On Main Street, On The Beach, Who’s Next and Pet Sounds are untoppable, irreplaceable, sacred cowish. You can bet their authors know it too. Perhaps that’s why Joni seems to have ground to a halt. She knows she has nothing left to prove, and maybe even to say, so why bother?

I’m not so sure about The Dame and The Runt. Both their albums strike me as the work of chaps anxious to make a point: not merely that they’re still alive, still kicking, still striving and still relevant, but that, well, you never know, do you? Maybe I’m still capable of laying something not only different on your asses but something special, unique and absolutely worthy of your time and adulation.

Up to now, I’ve never contemplated bracketing them, but the more I consider their commonalities, the more they strike me as transatlantic twins: The Dame is the British Runt, The Runt the American Dame. They’re both visionaries and astute plunderers (the habitually judicious Richard Williams once scoffed at my affection for The Dame, dismissing his work as that of a magpie without a soul; The Runt once claimed he was “The Beatles for the age group that missed The Beatles”). And both employed the Sales brothers rhythm section. They’re also both chameleons supreme, flamboyant provocateurs, connoisseurs of the finest mind-altering substances known to man and totally unpigeonholeable.

The main difference between them, of course, is financial success and global renown. When The Runt appeared on Midnight Special in 1973 to perform Hello It’s Me, he took The Dame’s androgyny and blew it up into the fully Monty: a multi-coloured peacock seemingly bent on alienating the mass audience that seemed his for the grabbing. Thus did he screw up his lone stab at the big time, big time. More or less intentionally, or so he once assured me.

True, he’s been pushing for promotion lately. Long extremely big in Japan, now the sharper whizzkids are name-checking him; hell, not only have Tame Impala hired him as a remixer but those taste-laden Aussies even do a passable live job on International Feel. The Dame, on the other hand, has spent four decades on the upper rungs of the Premier League. Not that that should stop us considering them as a spiritual double act.

Born 18 months apart, in 1947 and 1948 respectively, The Dame and The Runt are both butterfly-minded and multi-skilled; demanding of others but even more of self; natural leaders but not always patient with the limitations of others; restless of mind and spirit; rabid non-compromisers. Their attention has barely stayed in the same groove for successive albums. The Dame’s ethos can be boiled down to All you’ve got to do is win, The Runt’s to Give us just one victory.

At his peak, 1971-77, The Dame ran off a sequence of stunning diversity – Hunky Dory to Ziggy Stardust… to Aladdin Sane to Pin-Ups to Young Americans to Station To Station to Low to “Heroes”; during the same span, The Runt recorded his own eight-pack: The Ballad of Todd Rundgren, Something/Anything?, A Wizard, A True Star, Todd, Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, Initiation, Faithful and Hermit of Mink Hollow. Both recorded tributes to 60s gods (The Dame on Pin-Ups, The Runt on the first side of Faithful and the Wizard… soul medley).

Both spent the 80s in a fitful state of ADD-ish dabbling, fretting about the next shift, lacking direction. Both traded autocracy for democracy (Tin Machine, Utopia).Both had moments when they were ahead of the game, and too many behind, never quite finding anything worth developing, all too often driving chunks of their audience into the arms of the young and the hip. The loyalists held firm. In The Runt’s case rather more than The Dame’s, output remained high and quality rose, culminating in 2003’s majestic Liars.

Perhaps the strangest revelation about their newest elpees’ worth of toons, given The Dame’s immeasurably stronger nose/desire for hits, is that The Runt’s latest platter contains the likeliest smasheroonie. Boosting the bpms but still drawing on the electro-techno groove he began slotting into on 1994’s No World Order – having been one of the genre’s prime instigators more than 20 years earlier – Party Liquor is a more chucklesome, club-cultured twist on Bang On The Drum All Day, which in the early 80s became the closest he’s come to a chart-topper since Hello It’s Me. And yes, I did ask myself the key question the diehardest always avoid: would I like this if it was by somebody I’d never heard before? And the answer is a firm and unwavering yes.

First, The Runt does things with middle eights and harmonies and key changes that most mortals wouldn’t dream of; second, his voice, a sometime liability on stage these days when he strains for notes that are now beyond it, is as supple and strong and inimitable as ever – just as sweet if not as cool as his Philly pal Daryl Hall, less interested in creating sounds than conveying words and ideas.

The rest of State is patchy but ultimately rewarding, and certainly no disgrace to the canon. Smoke, Ping Me and In My Mouth maintain a career thread: throwbacks to the electronic doodling on Todd’s In And Out of the Chakras We Go and The Spark of Life but also a sonic step on from Truth and Future off Liars – all swirling synths and soaring, multitracked choruses enhanced by a spatial awareness that reminds me of The Orb. On Angry Bird there is a distinct impression, so rare for The Runt, of someone trying too hard to hunker down with the kids, but Lady Gaga herself would kill to have hatched Collide-o-Scope, a delicious slice of philosophical boppery. Something From Nothing is a soulful treat and Sir Reality rounds things off with a master punner’s grin, a stirring guitar solo and a quiet, dignified grandeur.

The Dame’s tonsils are also the best bit about The Next Day, easily the best album I’ve heard from him since Black Tie, White Noise. When Where Are We Now? began pinging across the globe, it gladdened so many hearts. Call it relief. A decade off and a heart attack later and, bloody hell, he still knows how to party like it’s 1975. OK, not exactly party, but listen to that voice: tender and wise, seasoned in experience and achingly sincere.

If nothing else on the album comes within a mile of such ineffable beauty, the sprightliness, nay playfulness, of the singing is a constant delight. The remaining tracks are an eclectic but mostly rocky mix – shades of Cat People (Putting Out Fires) here, a funky riff there, a nod or two to Tin Machine and, on Valentine’s Day, a wink to The Dame’s poppy pomp. Dancing Out In Space, better yet, is quite the liveliest foot-stomper he’s come up with since, well, Let’s Dance – and only marginally less irresistible than Party Liquor.

As fate would have it, I’ve also been imbibing the minor-chord splendours of Bloodsports, another surprisingly fine comeback CD, this time by Suede, who’ve been rescucitating, even reinvigorating, Ziggy and Aladdin with such taste and fervour since kickstarting Britpop. Their chief problem now is that we really don’t need all that miserygutsness, not right now. Brett Anderson has doubtless wallowed in The Next Day: so long as he’s been taking extra-special note of Valentine’s Day and I’d Rather Be High, both heavier on sweet than bitter, he’ll know where to head next: towards – as Ian Dury remarked admiringly of Steely Dan – the upful.

In short, then, The Dame and The Runt are still very much alive and kicking, still spreading the love and the joy and the fun of their craft, still relevant, still determined to have their say and, like Woody Allen, still searching for fresh ways to say it all over again. There’s always more insisted The Runt on Just One Victory 40 years ago – and so there is, from both of them. All hail pensioner pop!

Were my ears deceiving me? Here was the voice behind one of the most frequently heard-and-covered songs of all time, a voice that sometimes sounds like Bryan Ferry with a working soul, at others like Lowell George after a year off the sauce and needles, but mostly like nothing else. Now, naked and wintry, it was utterly Southend, and just a bit unsettling.

Buttonholing a hero is seldom the wisest move. Knowing you’ll probably be lucky to get in one line before an uneasy, twitching silence sets in is apt to send the brain into a right old tizzy. One question; one sentence: that’s all. Better make it a doozy. Thus it was, outside the National Film Theatre last November, that Gary Brooker, Mr Whiter Shade of Pale himself, was subjected to one of the more cringeworthy slices of fandom of his career.

He had been in the audience for a screening of a collection of Procol Harum videos, sitting at the back and taking a shy bow. When I spotted him outside the entrance afterwards I knew I had to shake his hand and, well, express something. In the end I plumped for gratitude. “I just wanted to thank you for A Rum Tale, which is one of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard.”

The answer was quick and soft: “It’s a tricky one to play.”

Cue another nervy spasm of flattery and thanks and the blinkingly brief encounter was over. Nothing like meeting a relic from one’s youth to make you feel 16 again.

************

A Rum Tale is the grievously neglected centrepiece of Grand Hotel, 40 years old this month. While no masterpiece (handicapped by a lineup in perpetual flux, the Proculs never quite pulled off the album they threatened to), the combination of r’n’b-infused baroque pop, Keith Reid’s poetic lyrics and Brooker’s huskily unique vocals (not to mention some extremely persuasive-but-tricky chords) made it the only challenger to Dark Side of the Moon for my affections in the spring of 1973.

How apt that these two records should have been released in the same month. The Procols and Pink Floyd, along with The Nice, had been prog rock’s trailblazers, and it was AWSOP, released a month before See Emily Play and just as The Nice embarked on their first gigs, that flung open the door. There’d been nothing remotely like it before: Bach, Chaucer and Dylan share an LSD trip serenaded by an Essex boy yearning to sing the blues, and succeeding.

But for all that song’s enduring allure, never mind that of soundalike follow-up Homburg and the gentle seafaring majesty of A Salty Dog, let alone the similarly serene beauty of Broken Barricades or the sheer glorious Englishness of Quite Rightly So, it’s A Rum Tale that defines the Procols for me.

It’s a waltz by any other name, propelled by Brooker’s jaunty piano and lifted orbitwards by Chris Copping’s organ solo (ripped off expertly by The dBs and June and The Exit Wounds in decades to come). Leavened as Reid’s words are with the barbed, self-mocking humour one all but expects of someone whose grandparents fell foul of the Holocaust, they nail lovestruckness as succinctly as one could possibly wish. As Brooker told Chris Welch in 2000, “I think Keith must have been going through a bad spell.”

She’s fuddled my fancy
She’s muddled me good
I’ve taken to drinking
And given up food

She’s swallowed my secrets
And taken my name
To follow my footsteps
And knobble me lame

Not the least intriguing aspect of all this is that A Rum Tale is preceded on Grand Hotel by Toujours L’Amour, its spiritual doppelganger and tonal opposite (not one but two screechingly exhilarating solos from a guitarist by the vaguely onomatopoeic name of Mick Grabham):

She took all the pleasure and none of the pain
All of the credit and none of the blame
I came home to an empty flat
She’d left me a note and taken the cat

Sounds like a bad year all round for Mr Reid: oh, how one person’s pain can so translate so effortlessly into musical gold. Brooker and Reid’s oeuvre may not quite match Bacharach and David’s, I grant you, but on occasion they swum in that same celestial cesspit of a romantic pool. And never more winningly than on A Rum Tale.

The waxing in question was A Period of Transition, one of the least beloved of all Van Morrison’s works and one I had not listened to in its entirety since its release in 1977. At the time, sure, I’d noted the exceedingly occasional less-than-weedy constituent – Heavy Connection, Cold Wind in August – but the overall sense of disappointment, after an interminable three-year wait since the superlative Veedon Fleece, had been overwhelming. No album had let my teenage self down with a bigger, more dispiriting bump.

Nor did it help that, after a painful promotional interview with Nicky Horne on Capital Radio, the Man Himself, having kindly signed my copy of Astral Weeks (now framed in gold and living large on the lounge wall), came across in person as the biggest grouch since The Grinch. How on earth, my sister and I wondered as we discussed this with his shortlived manager Harvey Goldsmith, could someone capable of such beauty be so…so…so…the opposite?

Four decades on, A Period of Transition sounded positively inspired. Maybe it was the fuller sound afforded by a combination of CD and iPod as compared with a wafer-thin slab of vinyl on a cheap record player, but here, in all its uncelebrated glory, is Van’s Stax album. Maybe, in this age of download and overload, the presence of a piffling seven songs, only one of them exceeding five minutes, now sounds refreshingly concise. Maybe, after a period during which he had dabbled with all sorts of unfulfilled projects that would have been eminently worth releasing officially by a less picky performer – plus some unreleased sessions with The Crusaders that at least in theory sound gobsmackingly mouthwatering – it was the shift from white musicians to black.

Gone were Jeff Labes, John Platania, David Shaar and Jack Schroer, instrumental heartbeat of the band that gave us the showstoppingly magnificent It’s Too Late To Stop Now, still my favourite live album; in their stead, alongside Dr John (keyboards and guitar), came Reggie McBride (bass), Ollie Brown (drums) and Jerry Jumonville (sax). From the opening You Gotta Make It Through The World, the result is mostly as funky as hell.

All this ultimately achieved, nonetheless, was to send me even further back, as ever, to Hard Nose the Highway, an album released 40 years ago this July and grudgingly granted a single star in my copy of the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide (ie. “poor”, a smidge above “worthless”).

If ever a record has been damned by received wisdom, Hard Nose has. How curious, then, to dig up the magazine’s original review by Stephen Holden, who not only characterised it as “psychologically complex, musically somewhat uneven and lyrically excellent” but praised the “cornucopia of understated, subtly-shaded and shifting instrumental textures that provide a sympathetic setting for Van’s vocal ruminations”. Then again, come the end of the Seventies, Van was about as hip as kaftans in Kansas.

In terms of the Morrison canon, Hard Nose stands as the ante-penultimate entry in an incredible sequence of recordings that saw him scale varying peaks of wonderment. True, Blowin’ Your Mind, His Band and the Street Choir and Tupelo Honey all had their duff passages, but no other musician’s first nine albums (including the live It’s Too Late…) have so delighted this heart and soul upon first discovery. According to the law of averages and the knee-jerk school of popular music criticism, Hard Nose was predestined to incur wrath.

It was the fifth follow-up to Astral Weeks, whose folky dreamscapes had become a distant memory. Never mind the experimentation of Almost Independence Day and Listen to the Lion on the preceding album, 1972’s St Dominic’s Preview: the critics were primed to dump on the Belfast Cowboy’s increasing predilection for smooth R&B. The contemporary critical reception was perhaps best encapsulated by Clive James’s review in Cream:

“The blues originated in the compulsion to reveal anguish, the distortions of the sung word transmitting the emotion from which it sprang. Morrison, who has mastered a formidable range of blues effects, uses distortion to furbish triteness. In concealing artlessness with art, Morrison merely follows the trend of most of the sophisticated rock in recent years. The result is technique deprived of expressive force, and a general pleasantness of effect which leaves you convinced that prettiness is the enemy of the beautiful. Hard Nose The Highway is a wonderfully accomplished album which will do everything for you except engage your mind.”

Me? As someone to whom the blues per se never held much appeal, I couldn’t get enough of it, still can’t. Perhaps it helped that my introduction to Van was a crash course. Guided primarily by the pages and sages of Let It Rock, between May 1973 and October 1974 I bought, in turn, Moondance, Astral Weeks, St Dominic’s, It’s Too Late…, Hard Nose and Veedon Fleece. Half a dozen well-nigh perfect albums, none sounding more than a whit like its predecessor. That’s why A Period of Transition – which contained nothing remotely as gorgeous as the title tracks of His Band… and Tupelo Honey, let alone the joyous uplift of the former’s Crazy Face or the latter’s (Straight To Your Heart) Like A Cannonball – was, initially, such a colossal letdown.

It felt somewhat apt that, in the process of transferring some 11,000 songs from iTunes to iPod late last year, The Great Deception, the worst track on Hard Nose by a mile, fell between the virtual cracks. Even then, the depth of anger and the lyrical message, a template for all those anti-rockbiz diatribes that would form such a self-indulgent thread to Van’s outpourings over the next three decades, rendered redundant all that followed.

The rest, to these ears, remains the epitome of the guilty pleasure (guilty only because so many of those I otherwise respect detest it). Pick a moment, any moment. The stonking, surging horns that take Snow in San Anselmo in the very opposite direction to the one you anticipate; the chirping flute and none-sweeter ache of Warm Love; Van referencing These Dreams of You on the title track as he wails inimitably through the closing bars; the combination of Platania’s echoey featherlight guitar, Labes’s delicate tinkling and that heartbreakingly tender vocal on Wild Children; and, to top all that, the gently understated three-punch majesty of the entire second side.

Unbelievers may regard the trinity of Green, Autumn Song and Purple Heather as Van’s first and worst foray into MOR – the first a take on Kermit the Frog’s Sesame Street lament, the last based on Wild Mountain Tyme, a 19th Century Scottish poem-turned-blues-folk standard, the second courtesy of the Man’s inner Sinatra. For me, they constitute my favourite side of vinyl. Better than side 4 of Tales from Topographic Oceans; better than side 3 of Quadrophenia; better than side 2 of Hejira or Low; better than Side 1 of Something/Anything? or even (sacrilege!) Astral Weeks Itself.

If I was confronted by the business end of a double-barrelled blunderbuss, I might just be persuaded to nominate a single slice of sorcery. It comes during the final third of the 11-minute spell cast by the sumptuously atmospheric Autumn Song, where the rhythm slows, almost imperceptibly at first, and Van’s voice, accompanied sympathetically and telepathically by bass, lead guitar, soft brushes, piano and vibes, gradually scales back to a stream-of-consciousness whisper. The following, none of which appears in lyrics printed within the album sleeve, is an extremely rough approximation of the utterings of his maestro’s voice:

Da da da, da da da, dah da-da – break out…you get what I’m saying…way out in the distance…way out in the distance… da da da, da da da, dah da-da…way over in the corrrr-nerrr…way out in the distance…a cable car…and I hear the church bells chime…and I hear the church bells chime…way out in the distance…hmmmmm a-mmmmmmmmm a-mmmmm a-mmmmm…annnnnnnnnnnn…infintessimal…beauty of your eyes…and just me in my starlight, gazin’…gazin’…bracing something…turn around…hand on my shoulder…it’s so peaceful…it’s so peaceful…inside…inside…inside…I believe I’ll…I believe I’ll…consider myself a child…consider myself a child…consider myself a child…da-da da-dow, da da da-da…dah..oww.

Amid this showcase for the most purely expressive voice in the business, a voice unbounded by the constraints of dictionary or sense, comes The Moment. Or, rather, The Moments. There are, after all, two of them. As his boss finishes the word “chimes”, Labes presses a single note, on what sounds suspiciously like an electric piano, with a clarity too exquisitely delicate and yes, too damned perfect to be adequately described. So I’ll stop right there – bar, that is, submitting the view that no song title – not Alan Hull’s Winter Song, not Robert Wyatt’s Sea Song, not The Who’s My Generation nor even Zeppelin’s Rock ‘n’ Roll – has ever done a finer job in anticipating its contents.

You were quite right, Clive, my dear old Antipodean thing: there isn’t much here for the mind – unless, that is, one counts an uncanny capacity to ease a troubled one at the end of the most trying of days. For this fiftysomething’s heart, soul and toes too, it still does the trick every time. I strongly suspect it always will.

Bronze goes to Randy Newman’s Christmas in Cape Town, a blackly comic snapshot of life at the sharp end while apartheid still had the vast majority of South Africans in its relentless grip. As ever, it’s tricky deciding where, if anywhere, Randy the Singer’s persona coincides with Randy the Writer. The following may or may not confirm your suspicions:

This English girl from the North somewhere
Is stayin’ with me at my place
Drinkin’ up all my beer
Talkin’ about the poor niggers all the time
It’s a real disgrace, she says
I tell her, Darling, don’t talk about things
you don’t understand
I tell her, Darling, don’t talk about something
you don’t know anything about
I tell her, Darling, if you don’t like it here
Go back to your own miserable country

Then there’s Laura Nyro’s Christmas In My Soul, a lament from the gut combining quiet rage and incurable optimism. Nature, the Black Panthers and the Chicago 7 check in as the Bronx Bronte urges the world to, well, spread the love a bit more. OK, a lot more.

Red and silver on the leaves
Fallen white snow runs softly through the trees
Madonnas weep for wars of hell
They blow out the candles and haunt Noel
The missing love that rings through the world
On Christmas

But head and shoulders above the lot, for me, stands Alan Hull’s Winter Song, the finest song that grossly neglected Geordie ever penned but more, much more, than that.

I’m not sure when he wrote it. It may have been while he was working as a nurse in mental health at St Nicholas Hospital in Newcastle. He may even have drawn inspiration from Christmas In My Soul. The sentiments certainly spring from the same pod. The keystone of Lindisfarne’s first and best album, 1971′s Nicely Out Of Tune, it is a cri de coeur with knobs on, yet infused with a delicate beauty, thanks in good part to the exquisite acoustic guitar that guides and drives, a perfect accompaniment to Hull’s plaintive, wistful rasp. Before Lindisfarne formed he ran a folk club, and it shows here more than anywhere else in his canon. At times you can hear John Martyn, at others Lennon, but to these ears neither was ever quite as poetic or humane as this:

When winter’s shadowy fingers first pursue you down the street
And your boots no longer lie about the cold around your feet
Do you spare a thought for summer, whose passage is complete
Whose memories lie in ruins and whose ruins lie in heat
When winter…comes howling in.

When winter’s shadowy fingers first pursue you down the street
And your boots no longer lie about the cold around your feet
Do you spare a thought for summer whose passage is complete
Whose memories lie in ruins and whose ruins lie in heat
When winter…comes howling in?

As a singer, Hull was better on tenderness and wit than rage, though he found a suitable balance for his most overtly political compositions, All Fall Down and Poor Old Ireland, magnificent strokes both. He was never tenderer than here, the anger serving the humanity. In extending the final line of each verse a notch more each time, he accentuates the despair, deepens the empathy.

For a long time, Van Morrison was driven by the quest to capture the spirit of Yeats, the lion, the “yaargh”; he would have found common ground with Hull as the latter prolongs the last two words for all they’re worth, fusing them and tugging them and stretching them and plucking them but never quite snapping them…howwwwwww-aaaa-linnnnnggggggggggggg iiiinnnnnnn. He doesn’t quite hit those heights on the live Back To Basics, recorded a year before his horribly early death in 1995, but he goes pretty damn close. If you don’t shiver at that, you might want to look under the bonnet and check whether you still have a fully-functioning soul.

Mark Knopfler, Jimmy Nail and Malcolm “Supermac” McDonald were among the Geordie heroes who supported a proposal to honour Hull with a plaque outside Newcastle City Hall, which was approved in February. “Lindisfarne were to Newcastle what the Beatles were to Liverpool,” claimed councillor Henri Murison: initially at least, that probably pissed off Eric Burdon and Alan Price royally, but I suspect they knew what he was getting at. Either way, the words “time”, “about” and “bleedin’” spring to mind, if not quite in that order.

So here’s a few precious moments where, for yours truly, the fusion hits the spot time after time…

I Saw The Light – Todd Rundgren (Kingpin, directed by the Farrelly Brothers)

Those cheeky Farrellys may do bipolar cops, conjoined twins, semen hair gel and zipped-up penises but they sure as hell don’t do sentiment – with one marvellous exception. In a scene featuring such unedifying sights as tenpin has-been Woody Harrelson flexing a hook on his right hand and sporting the world’s worst comb-over (and even climaxing between the legs of a plastic doll), the song that introduced the world to the genius of the Godd Otherwise Known As Todd supplies an improbable counterpoint. Celebrating both a brewing romance with Mrs Ringo Starr, Barbara Bach, and a touching bromance with Amish oaf Randy Quaid, how could it not inspire Sofia Coppola to use Hello It’s Me to similar if vastly more downbeat effect in The Virgin Suicides?

You Belong To Me – Bernadette Peters and Steve Martin (The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner)

Boy meets girl. Boy licks girl’s face. They stroll along a twilit beach. He strums a ukele as she sings an old song, then they merge in a gorgeous two-part harmony. Saccharin-sweet, way too yucky for the stony of heart but utterly irresistible to anyone in possession of a working soul.

Come Go With Me – The Del-Vikings (Joe vs The Volcano, directed by John Patrick Shanley)

So there’s Tommy Hanks, the young, funny Tommy Hanks, stranded in the middle of the sea on a raft, dying of something incurable and bent on ending it all. Company is confined to a tranny. The radio sort. As he twiddles and tunes it in, the strains of a ditty familiar, presumably, from a less taxing youth, bring respite and the beginnings of a soft, serene smile. He starts moving to its bouncy beat, jerky, ungainly motions that would have been sneered at among the writhing bodies in Studio 54, yet somehow in sync, and totally joyous. He knows it won’t last long but, for now, he’s alive.

Beyond The Sea – Bobby Darin (Diner, directed by Barry Levinson)

Baltimore at the fag-end of the 50s. A gang of boyhood pals wrestle with nostalgia, longtime grudges, OCD, violent bookies, premature alcoholism and, most dastardly of all, women. As morning dawns, a lane-wide, wing-tipped mansion of a car cruises towards us, accompanied by Bobby Darin’s immaculate croon. In the front seat, serenity and optimism displace angst, fear and loss of innocence. For a few precious moments, they can convince themselves that the world is theirs, for the asking and the grasping.

My Father’s Gun – Elton John (Elizabethtown, directed by Cameron Crowe)

Poor, poor, pitiful Orlando Bloom. About to be exposed and shamed as the designer of a training shoe that lost his company $1bn, dumped by the girlfriend who was only in it for his money, unable (he thinks) to capture the heart of the new lass in his life, Elt and Bernie’s most resonant six minutes find him driving across country to scatter his father’s ashes and, finally, letting the tears flow. I know it doesn’t sound promising but honestly…shelve that scepticism and wallow.

Why Do Fools Fall In Love – Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers (American Graffiti, directed by George Lucas)

A white Thunderbird pulls up at the traffic lights. Richard Dreyfuss, all dimples and idealism, glances across from the back seat of his sister’s car to see a blonde princess eyeing him up. We see her mouth the ultimate come-hither: “I love you.” He couldn’t be more chuffed. “I just saw a vision! I saw a goddess…the most perfect, dazzling creature I’ve ever seen…She spoke to me, she spoke to me. I think she said ‘I love you’. This means nothing to you people…you have no romance, no soul. Someone wants me!”

Good Thing – Fine Young Cannibals (Tin Men, directed by Barry Levinson)

More Levinson, more Baltimore, more Tricky Dickie Dreyfuss and even more losers. This time it’s 1963 and Roland and the guys appear more than a tad incongruous pepping up a scene in a crowded bar where rival aluminium salesmen – Dreyfuss and Danny De Vito – stalk each other, yet the sheer joie de vivre of that pounding piano and those “hey-hey-heys” quells all qualms about anachronism. Plus, it’s funky as hell.   

TB Sheets – Van Morrison (Bringing Out The Dead, directed by Martin Scorsese)

No bout a’doubt it. Nobody has exploited Mick ‘n’ Keef’s back catalogue remotely like Marty, most lovingly and thrillingly in Casino with Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’. Even so, it was the agony of the Belfast Cowboy’s Ladbroke Grove period that supplied the hardest evidence of the ultimate celluloid rocker’s winningly unique way with matching drama to crotchets and quavers and aural textures. While Van laments his girlfriend’s tubercular plight, Nic Cage’s druggy, near-dead eyes dare us to look away as he drives his ambulance through the streets of NYC, every death, every failure, writ agonisingly large. We can’t. Helplessness was never more vivid. Nor painful.

Everyone – Van Morrison (The Royal Tenenbaums, directed by Wes Anderson)

More Van, this time in cheerful rather than miserable bugger mode. Along with Cameron Crowe, Anderson has breathed fresh life into 60s and 70s music: think obscure Kinks and neglected Stones and even Bowie in Portuguese. He outdid himself on the credits for his third, name-making dissection of dysfunctional family dynamics, quite the happiest graveyard scene ever shot.

I’ll Never Fall In Love Again – Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello (Austin Powers 2, directed by Mike Myers)

The context is ludicrous but the beauty is undeniable. Amid all the zany if side-splitting silliness, an oasis of exquisite tenderness. Burt looks astonishingly handsome for a septuagenarian. Not since Alison has Elvis sounded so…so…vincible.

The End – The Doors (Apocalypse Now, directed by Francis Coppola)

Well, you knew this would be in there somewhere. Had to be. Perish the thought, but was this where the notion of inventing a non-genre and calling it “classic rock” came from? It scarcely deserved such a vile fate. Still, Coppola liked it so much he used it twice in the same movie, as bookends. Much as the drunken cavorting of Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard to Jimbo’s hauntingly graceful baritone build-up remains one of the silver screen’s more endlessly repeatable scenes, it is the way Francis deploys this stately Oedipal romp at the climax of the criminally maligned Redux version that really grabs you by the rollocks. Six minutes of silent explosions and blazing fires and wanton destruction. So who, exactly, were the good guys?

It’s For You – Pat Metheny (Fandango, directed by Kevin Reynolds)

Boy meets girl. Love reigns o’er all. Jealously guarding his freedom, boy dumps girl, whereupon, after a decent passage of time, girl falls for boy’s best mate. Cue wincing agony: bound for Vietnam, boy does the best man thing as girl weds best mate (also bound for ‘Nam). Kevin Costner has never looked more natural nor achingly vulnerable than he does as he watches them dance to the sublime combination of Lyle Mays’ swirling synth and the Pat-Man’s gentle strumming. But tradition and duty insist he must dance with her too. Best mate is adamant. Reluctantly, she consents. Kev pulls out a bandana; she recognises it instantly, and melts. “Hey,” he calls to the band, “how about a fandango?” They oblige. And so the rhythm perks up and they trip down memory lane, spring-heeled and light of heart, serenaded by the Pat-Man at his nimblest and prettiest. The vocals may be wordless but it still gets me whimpering every time.

Such has been the question buzzing in the unfrazzled fragments of my brain while listening to Donald Fagen‘s latest elpee, Sunken Condos. Not for the first time, of course, but more intensely than hitherto. More than any other of his solo recordings, even The Nightfly, this one sounds as if it coulda been, even shoulda been, a Steely Dan platter. Or, rather, a post-Gaucho Steely Dan platter. Familiarity breeds the very opposite of contempt as you luxuriate in that unique fusion of jazz, funk and rock, underpinned by honking horns and Jon Herrington’s wondrous versatility (Larry Carlton and the sorely-missed, grievously unsung Denny Dias aside, no Dan axeman has had such juicy chops). The words aren’t too shabby either.

Four studio albums in, The Don has yet to make an offer I’ve been able to refuse.  Neither of Walter Becker‘s solo sallies, conversely, have had remotely the same impact, even though, musically, they have been almost as intriguing, if not terribly memorable. The obvious difference is his voice. Not a bad one by any means, but when the competition is the “dry white whine” (thankyou kindly, Mr Kent), the chances of cracking open the victory bubbly are not especially good.

By the same token, Don without Walt still feels akin to Don without Phil, Dastardly without Muttley. Sure, the principal musicians on Sunken Condos, Walt aside, are pretty much the same as they were on 2003′s Everything Must Go, their most recent collaboration, and the sound is every bit as perfect as we have come to expect, nay demand – as sharp as a titanium needle; as deep and crisp and even as the snow in Wenceslas Square; as meaty, beaty, big and bouncy as one could reasonably expect of a duo to whom 33 chords will always be preferable to three. But there’s something missing. Call it mischief, call it edge, call it ingenuity, call it pretzel logic. OK, call it Walt.

Part of it’s that grating clavinet. Had Walt been at the console, one likes to imagine he’d have done a Harry Enfield: “Fagen, no! Don’t you know that Stevie Wonder is the only musician on the planet who has ever not made the clavinet sound like the Mighty Larry Adler tripping on bad acid.” Mostly, though, it’s the sense that the intangibles that bond Don and Walt leave a tiny but crucial hole when loosened. It is hard, for instance, to imagine that the latter would have countenanced covering a decent-but-unmagical Isaac Hayes track, Out Of The Ghetto, even though the band (how often have you ever seen that word crop up in a review of any Dan product post-Countdown to Ecstasy?) more than compensate with a rousing workout capped by Antoine Silverman’s klezmer-esque violining.

At its peak, nonetheless, Sunken Condos is up there, way up there. Right now, probably for all the wrong reasons, I can’t get past Miss Marlene, a slab of supremely bodacious Dannishsness, capped by Don’s unusually breathy vocal, that simultaneously, almost miraculously, recalls I.G.Y, Glamour Profession, Night By Night and Jack of Speed while still being sufficiently different to be completely gorgeous, wholly irresistible and utterly original.

Not bad for a 64-year-old.  

David Bowie – The Secret Life of Arabia

It may well have anticipated that unpindownable creature we refer to as “world music”. At a conservative estimate, with the not inconsiderable aid of Stevie Wonder’s The Secret Life of Plants, it probably spawned a zillion crap TV “documentaries”. It certainly doesn’t tell us much about Arabia. It’s also a song of understated magnificence elevated to minor genius by handclaps. The end starts about a third of the way through – ie. after about a minute, as befits what is still a Thoroughly Modern Millie of a floor-filler. Thereafter, The Dame chants “Aray-be-yar” in his best Anthony Newley voice alongside (never over, never diminishing) a dose of disco rifferama for which the only uninvented genre I can summon, I’m afraid, is Berlin-Bedouin Rock. Then suddenly, roughly 20 seconds from time, we get a delicious snatch of the instruments unadorned. Proportionally, codas don’t get much longer; they definitely don’t get any funkier.

Laura Nyro – The Descent of Luna Rosa 

Let’s not beat about the bush. It’s a song about periods. Period. Nobody but Laura could make it even half-work. That it concludes on a Gary Katz-produced riff that sees Nile Rogers meet Geno Washington and his Ram Jammers underpinned by the crispest skin-flicking imaginable is nigh-on miraculous. There’s certainly no nigh-on about the fact that the very next track, Art of Love, boasts a coda of almost equally ineffable magic, all surging strings and Wes Montgomery-meets-Pat Metheny geetaring.

Steely Dan – Pixeleen

I can think of roughly 53 Dan ditties I prefer to this. Don and Walt go clubbing with Kid Creole but stay off the potent cocktails. The climax is part-Benny Goodman on acid, part-Memphis Horns with a drunk Chuck Berry on plectrum and a woozy Herbie Hancock on keys, and entirely irresistible. Then it cuts dead after four-and-a-half seconds. Coitus was never more interruptus.

Led Zeppelin – The Song Remains The Same

Jimmy Page has spent five minutes blazing away like a virtuoso possessed. Double-tracking, triple-tracking, stealing and reeling: one bar country-fried, the next rockabilly, the next Diddleyesque, the next Claptonesque, the next Dave Davies’s defter other brother. And it all ends on a perversely yet exquisitely wistful sigh from his pal Percy. WTF? But why? To set us up for the next track, the improbably tender Rain Song. Video may have killed a few radio stars but CD killed the art of structuring and pacing an album.

Stevie Wonder – Superwoman

Bit of a cheat, this one. Like Oh Well and Layla, if not officially, this track is a two-parter, the first vastly chirpier than the other. On the other hand, unlike Peter Green’s pleasant Spanish plucking or Duane Allman’s graceful bottlenecking, Stevie continues singing, sending this soulfelt salute to love and womankind into unexpected areas of desperate longing. Never, to these ears, has that Swiss army knife of a voice sounded more lost. Given that he was barely out of his teens – and, well, y’know, Stevie – you wouldn’t have thought he had had enough experience of romantic rejection to make it convincing. Then again, if you’re going to live by the name Wonder you’ve got to be fairly special.
Steely Dan – King of the World

More from the Oddest Couple. Sorry. Well, Don is on the verge of sneaking out a new CD, so why not celebrate? Even during their early, funny, rocky phase, The Dan were never big on Mr Moog, but they went big and whiny here to dazzling effect. It helps, of course, that the extended climax to this tale of post-H-bomb angst is driven along by the duelling guitars of Jeff Baxter and Denny Dias, who fuse rock and jazz with an effortless panache even Miles might have envied.

Todd Rundgren – Healing Pt.3

Todd has never been shy about philosophising but he outdid himself on 1981’s Healing. It remains a long and bumpy but beautiful and eminently worthwhile journey – even without the supplementary presence of the upful MTV-staple Time Heals and the none-more-haunting Tiny Demons. The excellent recent patchwork of a live recording confirms as much (specific venues and/or dates, tellingly, are conspicuous by their absence). You’ve plumbed the depths of human fallibility, briefly tasted hope then been plunged right back into the same pit. Then comes the payoff, a spirit-hoisting slab of prototype electronica that contrives to leave you wholly optimistic. Todd claims to have heard from therapists who have used the album as a therapeutic tool. To his credit, he acknowledges the downside: “The scientific part of me wonders whether it’s actually the music or the placebo effect…numbing is not healing.” He really shouldn’t fret so.

The Who – Love Reign O’er Me

Could there possibly be a more head-slamming, bone-crushing, resistance-sapping, monster-mashing final chord to any piece of music evah than Uncle Pete’s discordant fullstop to Quadrophenia? This is a strictly rhetorical question.

In 2000, Andy Partridge and the other talented chaps in his lightly-stocked Swindon pear tree released Wasp Star, the second volume of their Apple Venus duology. Not their best, granted (ie. not quite up to the psychedelic-bucolic majesty of Nonsuch, Oranges and Lemons and Skylarking or even Volume 1), but still a country mile or three ahead of 99% of the pack. After all, any album housing Stupidly Happy – recently lifted, with astonishingly colossal good taste, for a sofa ad – can hardly be less than intriguing.

Even more gobsmackingly, thank-someone-I’m-alive wondrous than the deliriously batty and utterly irresistible Stupidly Happy was We’re All Light, to these tinnitus-free ears the jauntiest and bubbliest of Andy’s deathless sequence of damned-fine ditties. Not that there’s any shortage of contenders for such a singular rave – King For A Day and four from Nonsuch alone, The Disappointed, Wrapped In Grey, The Ugly Underneath and Then She Appeared, all spring turbo-instantly to mind – but I’m sticking with my original thesis.

After I enthused about all this a year or two later on The TR Connection – a website/forum devoted to the producer of Skylarking, Todd “Godd” Rundgren – a fellow Todd-er messaged back. We’re All Light, she said, had got her through cancer. I’d heard plenty of twaddle about the power of song before, but here, at last, was evidence.

I never asked her, but I should have: what was it that got her through – music or lyrics? It could have been both. Try on the alliterative earthly delights of the following, note the maybe-unique use of “illion” as a rhyming mechanism, and I defy you to nod without grinning:

Don’t you know
’bout a zillion years ago
Some star sneezed, now they’re paging you in reception
Don’t you know
Jack and Jill-ion years ago
Some dinosaur dropped the pail when it saw our reflection

Don’t you know
We’re all light
Yeah, I read that someplace
Don’t you know
We’re all light
Yeah, I read that someplace
So you won’t mind if I kiss you now
Before indecision can bite
Don’t you know in this new Dark Age
We’re all light

“I’m very proud of the lyrics,” Partridge freely and justly confessed. “They just started off as gibberish, but I worked them through, and tweaked them, and I think it’s actually one of my better lyrics. Because of the alliteration — and because they’re kind of truthful, you know? In a blink, in terms of the universe, you’re stuff that was in a star, and now you work for some corporation, and you’re in some posh building, and they’re paging you, and you’re in reception. Yet five minutes ago, in the universe’s life span, you were a piece of star cough.”

Then there’s the middle-eight, the ethos:

And I won’t take from you what you can’t take from me
And I’ll leave nothing here that you can’t use upon your trip
And I won’t take from you what you can’t take from me
And I’ll leave nothing here but love and milk a’ plenty for your tea

“It’s wrong to take from somebody else more than they take from you,” the poet-scribbler reasoned. “Because then you end up exploiting them, and it’s not a balanced relationship. The older I get, I’m not interested in right-wing or left-wing – gimme that middle of the road! That’s the safest place, in the middle. It’s a balanced view of things – I try to see the balance in everything now. I think that’s a kind of a healthy Yin Yang thing.”

In terms of chords and keys, the genius lies in Partridge’s delicious and possibly quite potty fusion of two-part choral harmonies, George Formbyan scrubbed guitar, screeching Crazy Horses-type keyboards and, surging cheekily and noisily from the mix, the sort of skittering drums last heard on Hold That Tiger and other dancehall gems from the Roaring Twenties. “I wanted something that was really kind of jolly and dancey,” he explained on MySpace in 2007, “and I wanted the rhythm to be somewhere between a syncopated ’20s rhythm and a kind of hip-hop rhythm…almost like a big-band syncopated thing…1920s music makes me really happy.”

The brief he gave hired drum gun Chuck Sabo was crisp and reasonably clear: “Think of a disco propulsion, and any little pushes or pulls in there, think like The Wailers.” The climax, best and unlikeliest of all, finds Sabo duelling with the most hypnotic theremin solo imaginable. Think Rick Wakeman’s solo on Close To The Edge meets Macca’s synth trills on Band On The Run and multiply by 200bpm.

Miserablism may be the pure pop for today’s now people, but I can just about only do joy. Almost impossible as it was in the 20th Century for me to conceive of anything more neck-hair-rousing than LA Woman, Born To Run, Bodhisattva, Pyjamarama, Good Times, All The Young Dudes or American Girl, my 21st-Century mood elevator of choice has now been enthroned alone for 12 years. Long live the King of Joybringers.

Comprising 70 tracks of outtakes and live recordings, it showcases a magpie so remarkable he can even persuade you he has added something fresh to the familiar even though he goes more for gentle tweaking than reinterpretation. The other day I went to my local record store (look who’s the lucky one) and exchanged raves with the owner, a musical soul brother with whom I must confess, shamefully, I have never even shared names. He’d never given the original more than a cursory listen and I’d always adored it, but neither of us could get our strictly metaphorical needle off the grooves of Fixing A Hole. Takes on Cry Baby Cry, Happiness Is A Warm Gun and Dear Prudence stand further testimony to both the source of Karl’s inspiration and the Wallinger family vinyl collection, a lean creature that during his boyhood amounted to approximately 40 singles and 15 LPs.

Then there’s that US No.1 That Wasn’t But Bloody Well Shoulda Bin, What Is Love All About? According to the skimpy details, the only difference between this 1992 version than the one that wound up on Bang! is a different drum mix, the handiwork of David Bowie’s former skinsman Andy Newmark. It’s longer, zestier and bouncier, Karl’s jaunty pianistics in particular kindling memories of Monkberry Moon Delight, my very favourite Macca confection. He’s even enough of a slave to all things Macca to resurrect Man We Was Lonely, though one reviewer had got so confused by this juncture he thought it was a Wallinger original, describing it as “Wings-like”. Which must have tickled old Karl.

Not that our Karl is exclusively a Moptop man. While making distinctiveness elusive, having a chameleon for a voice has its plus points. Kuwait City from the same sessions is Beach Boys-meets-Saddam-Hussain; Paisley Park’s chief ranger is aped miraculously on It Ain’t Gonna Work; the live-in-LA version of Like A Rolling Stone is angrier than Bobby Z’s; Who Are You is a skiffly Subterranean Homesick Blues pumped up to No.11:

Maybe sunstops caused the blindness
Maybe someone crept up behind us
Maybe something deep inside us wants the opposite of best

“I looked for a rubbish bit,” admitted Word magazine’s Rob Fitzpatrick, “but couldn’t find it, sorry.” To say I know how he feels is, of course, to lay myself wide-leggedly open to allegations of the most grievous of crimes against commercialkind: an insistence on living in even the recent past. Guilty, m’lud. Horribly guilty. But that’s not the only reason I’m currently, hopelessly, irredeemably in lurve with Arkaeology.

There’s only so many notes you can perm, only so many instruments and sound effects you can pile on to mask that innate, unavoidable restriction. What floats this boat about Wallingerland, what floated it from the opening chords of Ship of Fools from that maiden post-Waterboys outing, Private Revolution, through to 2000’s pre-aneurysim Dumbing Up, is that fusion of passion, wisdom, reverence, nudge-wink knowingness, wittily indignant wrath, exemplary taste, unbridled enthusiasm, humanitarian warmth and sheer unadulterated tunefulness. A rare package in any language.

Try the live blast of Call Me Up for Johnny Walker’s GLR show featuring that estimable Blockhead string-plucker John Turnbull: part-Lady Madonna, part-Day In The Life, utterly uncynical, wholly Wallingeresque. Then check out the diary, especially the entries for July 25 (“Doo Wah Diddy Diddy Dum Diddy Do Day”) and October 19 (“Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Day”), not to mention the quotes from Luis Bunuel (“I am an atheist still, thank God”), Bertrand Russell (“I’ve become a Bertrand Russell salesman,” he tells one crowd, “he doesn’t talk bullshit unlike anyone who controls anything”) and Willie the Shake. The last of these seems most pertinent to an appreciation of the Wallinger schtick: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so…”

“Have you ever been to Love Street, and tried on all the shoes?” he wonders on the ditty celebrating the same address. Recorded at Tennessee’s 2006 Bonaroo Festival (so accustomed does one become to the author’s musical hinterland, you half-expect him to call it the Desitively Dr John Mix), it’s a swoonsomely tender goosebumper of a song recast, reinvented and enriched by David Duffy’s sweetly sombre violin. The only word for it is beautiful.

Karl Wallinger has tried on all the shoes, worn out most of his socks and pounded the streets from Memphis to Maesteg. Is it too late for him to broaden his audience, to reap the recognition he deserves? Probably. Then again, I can find more Todd Rundgren and Laura Nyro CDs at HMV these days than at any time in their careers, so anything is possible. Here’s to Karl’s larks ascending.
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