From Lake Havasu City, AZ to Santa Monica, CA - Desert, some more desert, even more desert, and then the sea

I couldn't have scripted it any better. I'm rolling down Santa Monica Boulevard, the final bit of the final leg of the journey that started out eight days ago on a sweltering Friday in Chicago, and Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill comes on the radio.

As anyone who knows me will attest, it's one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite musicians. It's a song about freedom, and in many respects, more about Route 66 than even Bobby Troup's tribute.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Reaching the Pacific was the dream for many who drove Route 66 when it provided escape from poverty, from the Dust Bowl devastation, or simply from the moribundity of Midwestern life. Today, California is still the end of the line. It still welcomes the wannabes, the desperate hopefuls and the dreamers, or those who simply want to be left alone out in the searing heat of the Mojave Desert, surrounded by car junk, rattlesnakes and scorpions, and their own musings.

© Simon Poulter 2013

The irony of reaching the end of Route 66 is that this last 400 miles have been more arduous than any of the previous 2000.

To maintain some semblance of authenticity, I rejoined 66 on the Oatman Road, a stunning but nerve-wracking 42-mile "scenic" route that takes you into the Arizona desert, up over a high peak and down the other side and through Oatman, a once deserted mining town that 66 ran through.

Today it is home to a hippyish collection of tourist shops - the arts and crafts merchants I would normally go out of my way to avoid - and, for no apparent reason at all, staged cowboy gunfights and a strolling mariachi band. To add to the surrealism is a small herd (if that's the correct collective noun) of burros wandering aimlessly about the town.

The outside temperature gets up to 116 degrees. In the comfort of a modern, well air conditioned car, it is bearable. But it makes you wonder how people drove this section of 66 before cars were so luxuriated.

As a test, I switch off the AC (a sensible idea, in any case, to stop the drain on fuel) and wind down the windows to see if a little of Nature's own air conditioning will have the same effect. The Eagles may have felt a cool wind in their hair on the desert highway, but here it is like having a large hairdryer set to Kill in your face. And a very old, overheated hairdryer at that. Think Sir Alex Ferguson at full blast.

After allowing myself a small measure of much needed 21st Century modernity - and properly cool air - by rejoining I-40 near Yucca, I pick up Route 66 again just over the California stateline at Needles, and remain on it for what seems like the next several hours.

This is a part of the route I've driven before. It is, on the one hand, stupendously tedious - quite literally an epic, foot-to-the-floor bolt over almost 200 miles, with the scenery barely changing. On the other hand, it is unusually calming. The Indian tribes who populated the desert have long held beliefs about the desert being a living thing, despite its apparent lack of animal or plant life.

The Mohave Desert is the perfect antidote to Los Angeles when its sprawl and urban chaos becomes too much. There is something mystic about the place, which also explains why it has drawn weirdos, hippies, society dropouts, gun nuts and the Manson Family to it. But rarely do they congregate in the same place.

Ever since the western desert started to unfold on Route 66 in Arizona, the result of violent eruptions in the Earth's crust have been evident all around, the topography so dramatically different to the gentle, rolling hills of the Midwest earlier on the route.

Near Amboy - which, in the 2000 census, recorded a population of just four - is what looks like, from the road, a large pile of black soot. On closer inspection it is the Amboy Crater, an extinct volcano which also informs you you're in one of the most notorious areas of seismic activity on the planet. Indeed the entire desert plain along this part of Route 66 is an enormous lava field.

© Simon Poulter 2013

In the distance you catch sight of weird wind eddies in the dust, mini-tornadoes that look like tall thin wisps. Further in the distance you see the distinct dust trails of military vehicles out on exercise from the US Marine Corps training base at Twentynine Palms (another entry in the list of obscure places to be mentioned in song - in this case, one by Robert Plant).

Eventually I arrive in Ludlow. I have a particular fascination with this town (Population: 10) as I began my professional career in Ludlow, England. That Ludlow, though, is located in beautiful Shropshire countryside, with a castle, a reputation for being a foodie's paradise (it has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per head than anywhere else in the world) and it is where I lost my curry virginity on my first Saturday night in town, at the Shapla Tandoori.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Ludlow, California, is now particularly unremarkable, mainly a fuel stop along I-40 which Route 66 meets up with here. Originally a mining town that became a water stop for the railroad (which continues to come into view), today it offers the inevitable Route 66-themed cafe and a couple of convenient gas stations.

Some years ago it was also the epicentre of a large earthquake that shook the entire southland. I was 300 miles away in Mammoth Lakes when it happened, and felt it there.

In Las Vegas, 150 miles away, all hotels on The Strip were evacuated as precaution. When the all-clear was sounded, many of the hotels' guests returned, not to their rooms, but the hotel casinos at 5am.

Seeing TV news footage of people in their bathrobes desperately playing one more hand of poker, or another spin of the slotswas an amusing snapshot of what Vegas was, at least then, all about.

Amazingly, I am still only at the halfway point of this final leg. There are still more than 200 miles between me and sea air. Not that the next two waypoints warrant much lingering: Barstow is a relatively large (for the region) town and key transportation hub, having been founded by a railroad magnate. More recently it has become the meeting point of the I-40 and I-15 freeways, and another huge US Marine Corps depot. That, and a much needed fill-up of fuel, is all there is to say about this dry, ugly town.

Victorville, further down Route 66, is no better. Another large transportation hub, it is a city beset by crime, unemployment and homelessness. There isn't much of a plus-side to it, except that, with the sun starting to set in the West, and the final 100 miles still to cover through the enormous Los Angeles hinterland at rush-hour, I reluctantly join the freeway to make some progress to the end of the line.

LA, as you probably already know, is a region in its own right. Famously and perfectly described by Alexander Woollcott as "Seven suburbs in search of a city", it is an interwoven patchwork of urban sprawl. As I enter what is technically 'Greater Los Angeles' at San Bernardino, I know there is a tough grind ahead, negotiating LA's aggressively driven freeways at heading-home time on a Friday night.

Most of the traffic is heading out of the area - off to weekend destinations - but not having experienced a multi-lane city freeway system since Oklahoma City (and that was a relatively small one), it's a shock. Bacharach really hit the money when he wrote "LA is a great big freeway" on Do You Know The Way To San Jose? (and, yes, I do: take the 101 or I-5 or, for the ambitious, Highway 1, north).

© Simon Poulter 2013

Route 66 - as a historical experience - gets going again in pretty Pasadena, the town nestling in the eastern foothills above Los Angeles. Coming off the 210 freeway here is only to be recommended for Route 66 completists. And if you do, do it during daylight when you can actually see how picturesque this famous old town is.

From Pasadena on into LA, Route 66 is, like many other cities on the road, occasionally signposted. With a little homework, I know that I need to get myself onto Sunset Boulevard, then Santa Monica Boulevard.

Which means driving right the way through LA. This is not a city you can pass from one side to the other in 30 minutes. Driving through LA means start-stop-start braking as traffic lights perpetually disrupt your momentum.

Following 66 through LA does, though, bring you through some of the neighbourhoods that make La-La Land the draw it is.

Route 66 as Sunset Boulevard commences in Echo Park, the district being raved about as Los Angeles' most up-and-coming. It is a bustling area, but crawling with 'hipsters'. Hordes of them, with beards longer than Abraham Lincoln's, smugly organic, free-thinking lifestyles and skinny jeans, cramming sidewalks in search of a macrobiotic cafe in which to drone on about Mumford & Sons. Counter culture is, thankfully, still alive and kicking in California.

Route 66 leaves Sunset Boulevard for Santa Monica Boulevard, cutting through West Hollywood - which is essentially one long restaurant - before reaching Beverly Hills, at which you can't help allowing yourself an Axel Foley chuckle as you roll past the famous police headquarters.

As you might be able to tell,  there is a note of tedium creeping in here. Over the last 21 years I've been in and around LA, and have driven down these very streets, so many times I've lost count. However, they have always been part of the LA experience. I've never experienced them as the end of a journey.

And so, as I enter the seaside familiarity of Santa Monica, Solsbury Hill on the radio, I know that at the very end of Santa Monica Boulevard will be the pier and the end. I should, as I arrive, be cracking a bottle of champagne. Instead, I just want to take my pictures and get to the hotel for the night.

This may sound downbeat and anti-climactic, but it isn't. The drive down Route 66 was to see an America I've not seen before, to glimpse parts of its past I know only from American culture. In that, it has delivered in spades: Chicago's friendly ambience and blues music; the summery fields of Illinois, the Midwestern heartland charm of St. Louis; the wide open agricultural enormity of the prairies of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas; the appearance of the West in New Mexico and the desert heat of Arizona and the Mojave Desert.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Driving from Chicago to LA in the insane mid-August heat that cooks up the American heartland might have been a long, sticky ride. But it hasn't. It has been a fascinating journey through varying physical and economic topographies, from city sophistication through rural simplicity to city sophistication again.

Thus, to close, let me reveal something unimportant to you but significant for me: for the most part, dear reader, I have been wearing shorts. Chicago was blistering when I left it, and the temperature has remained between the mid-70s to oppressively north of 100 for much of the 2,524.1 miles I've driven. As I reach the sea, however, it is a distinctly frigid 67F. I am going to have to wear jeans.

Welcome to LA.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Desperate times call for desperate measures: Primal Scream's More Light

These are bleak and desperate times, people. We know this because we keep being told they are. As if the sight of increasingly vacant high streets, lengthening dole queues, a largely old Etonian government in Britain (run by “a pair of gay antique dealers”, according to Rich Hall) and Daft Punk recreating 1980s disco (and coming soon to WWDBD?) do not remind us.

Back in the 1980s, when things were last so bleak and desperate (increasingly vacant high streets, dole queues, old Etonian government run by a greengrocer’s daughter, Georgio Moroder blasting out of discos, as "clubs" were known, etc, etc) there were few truly erudite examples of the social and political zeitgeist captured, despite the actual agit-prop spirit of the times.

I would argue – but then I would  - that The Specials’ Ghost Town, White Riot by The Clash or Weller’s Town Called Malice nailed it as good as any, though I still hold a candle for Robert Wyatt’s Shipbuilding (more about the Falklands than Thatcherite blight). There were well meaning protest organizations like Red Wedge, and Live Aid came along in the midst of the decade to shame us into giving up either what money we had, or the grotesque piles of it we were spending on pastel-shaded clothing.

And so it remains today. Thanks to the blandification of entertainment in general, no one is making a stand anymore. Now, this can be viewed as both bad and good. On the bad side, it seems that people seem to be accepting their fate and carrying on watching tripe reality shows featuring fame-hungry charlatans. On the good side, Sting has stopped writing curdled songs about Russian parents and Argentinian victims of human rights abuses, and trying to convince us that he actually gives a damn about coal mines being shut down.

When Bowie's The Next Day came out of the blue to declare that a) The Dame was alive and b) He's been reading the papers a lot, we were presented with his view of an imagined - but increasingly likely - dystopian future. Primal Scream have come along to something similar with their new album More Light, which shines a follow-spot on the dystopia of the present.

However, as with all Primal Scream records, don't expect anything too deep. The lyrical legacies of Dylan and Woody Guthrie, even Springsteen's take on the modern condition, are not under any recognisable threat. As we have grown used to with this band, More Light must be enjoyed at a relatively superficial level, i.e. whatever section of Bobby Gillespie's vinyl record collection he has chosen to plunder this time. The result, by the way, is never bad. You just don't want to get too involved in what he's singing about.

As a lyricist, Gillespie has always been a great ex-drummer. The case for the prosecution stops with Exhibit 1A, m’lud, Rocks: “Dealers keep dealin’/Thieves keep thievin’/Whores keep whorin’/Junkies keep scorin’/Trade is on the meat rack/Strip joints full of hunchbacks/Bitches keep bitchin’/Clap keeps itchin’.”

Things haven't improved much in ten years, if the nine-minute vibeout 2013 which kicks off More Light is anything to go by. It lays into modern Britain with well meaning, if slightly misappropriated venom, though it does make prescient references to the children of Thatcher's heritage: "21st century slaves! A peasant underclass!". Not exactly Shelley, but you get the point.

Removing 2013's lyrical content from the equation, and letting the vocal simply become another instrument, it's an impressive track, spread over an ambitious grandeur that mixes Middle Eastern brass with the chainsaw guitar of My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields. By its end you are left lacking any doubt that you have landed back on Planet Gillespie, in all that entails.

River Of Pain continues in the same dystopic vain, depicting a less than rosy domestic scene in which the drunken 'Johnny' (Gillespie's stock character, you may have noticed...) who treats his lady 'Susan' like a punchbag, with a distinctly trippy sequence midway through the seven minute piece clearly representing a narcotic escape for one of them (replete with Beatle-esque psychedelia, a looped string sequence that reminds me of the intro to the Six Million Dollar Man theme music) before returning to a vibey Delta blues guitar riff and a sultry - and highly addictive - creeping undertrack.

If 2013 risks going down the route of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire by featuring a long list of cultural references, Culturecide walks even more awkwardly towards an attempted drive-by rapping that  includes mention of the neutron bomb.

Perhaps it's simply that "neutron bomb" scans well and has so many potential rhyming partners, but no two words annoy me more as a lyrical prop. In songs from artists as varied as Pearl Jam and UB40 (who managed to rhyme it with "Pentagon"), it's lyrical inclusion has always made as much sense as anyone in a TV show feverishly hacking away at a computer keyboard when there is a perfectly serviceable mouse on the very same desk.

Anyway, back to the record, and a return to the Mount Florida estates of Gillespie's native Glasgow with Tenement Kid, a bass-driven jazz-dub that paints a non-too-subtle picture of disaffected youth in the urban jungle of 21st century Britain. On Invisible City there's a touch of latter day Bowie, with its grinding guitar intro and brassy chorus, while Sideman could easily have appeared on The Next Day. Indeed, the two albums share many common themes, though, sadly not the same degree of wordsmith dexterity as mastered by Bowie on his release.

If there's one thing about More Light that sets it apart from almost anything else out there it's the disparate directions Primal Scream move about the record in. Goodbye Johnny (yep, him again) bops along with a noirish swing before introducing a delightfully retro-King Curtis saxophone lead.

That the Primals have access to well-thumbed collections of vintage vinyl has never been in doubt, as the obvious Stones nods of Rocks and Country Girl generously demonstrated. More Light does open up the record cabinet a little wider, with Elimination Blues - featuring no less than Robert Plant and black-chick backing vocals - actually sounding like a song Plant might have easily recorded in his exploration of American roots. It's also one of the most satisfying tracks on the album, with its pumping, looping bass and sweaty late night blues.

Be warned, however, when you reach the final track of the 'regular' version of More Light (the deluxe version contains an extra six songs). Because, if you're British, you may be alarmed by the title It's Alright It's OK. Thankfully it is not the theme song to TV's 'light hearted' crime series New Tricks, the one for  which Dennis Waterman "writes da feem toon and sings da feem toon", as Little Britain helpfully pointed out he does tend to do.

Thankfully, too, Primal Scream's It's Alright It's OK is not in the same vein as its chirpy, postman-friendly counterpart. Instead, it is a truly uplifting return to the happy-clappy gospel vibe of Movin' On Up, filching The Faces' "Ooh-la-la" hook in the process to produce a song as reassuringly 'up' as the lyrical premise of 2013 was a dour reminder of just how bleak these times are.

Lyrics aside, More Light is a return to strength for the Primals after their disappointing Beautiful Future five years ago. Produced by David Holmes, the northern Irish DJ responsible for one of my favourite film soundtracks, Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight, there is a warm intimacy to this album than anything Primal Scream have ever produced before. Thanks to Holmes, it is less of a basement recording and more of an upmarket loft apartment of a record. The edge is there (and Shields' guitar plays a large part in that), but so is a more measured cocktail of the band's obvious love of vintage sounds, and a newer, more innovative approach to making music. Just don't listen too deeply to the words...

Remembering Mr. Pitiful

Early one May morning in 1965, Keith Richards woke up in his St. John's Wood flat with a three-note riff in his head. He grabbed a cassette recorder and an acoustic guitar and quickly committed the riff to tape before going back to sleep. Or so he thought.

"Thank God for that little Philips cassette player," Richards recalled in his autobiography, Life. He knew he'd put a brand new tape in the night before, but on inspection, saw that the tape was at its end. "Then I pushed rewind and there was [I Can't Get No] Satisfaction," and, he explains, 45 minutes of snoring.

"It was just a rough idea," Richards remembered, "the bare bones of the song, and it didn't have that noise." That noise being the demonic Gibson fuzzbox-fed sequence of notes that would become the Rolling Stones' signature song.

Mick Jagger recalls that his Glimmer Twin's original sounded more country on the original acoustic guitar-played tape. "It didn't sound like rock. But [Keith] didn't really like it, he thought it was a joke... He really didn't think it was single material, and we all said 'You're off your head.' Which he was, of course."

Richards' dissatisfaction with Satisfaction was that he felt the riff should, in fact, have been performed by horns rather than a guitar. Two months after a horns-free Satisfaction was recorded for posterity - and acclaim as one of the greatest pop songs ever - Georgia-born soul and blues singer Otis Redding walked into Stax Studios in Memphis to record, over the weekend of July 9, 1965, his third album, Otis Blue.

Amongst the songs - and at the suggestion of Booker T & The MGs guitarist Steve Cropper - Redding took a stab at Satisfaction Richards' guitar riff was replaced by a more upbeat brass fusillade by Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns. The song, dreamed up thousands of miles away in a North-West London apartment, was finally recorded as Keith Richards had imagined it.

With a collection of Redding originals like Respect and I've Been Loving You Too Long and covers like Satisfaction, Sam Cooke's Change Gonna Come, Solomon Burke's Down in the Valley, and B.B. King's Rock Me Baby, Otis Blue established Redding as the undisputed King of Soul.

It was, however, a throne he would continue to occupy for just two more years before - until December 10, 1967 - 45 years ago this week - when he tragically joined Buddy Holly, Jim Reeves, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens in a tragic line-up of early pop stars to die in plane crashes.

Redding's Beechcraft Twin Beech plane - which he often co-piloted - was a symbol of his rapidly acquired business acumen.

Unlike many of his blues and R'n'B contemporaries, who invariably had found themselves ripped off contractually and perpetually touring to pay off divorces and paternity suits, Redding had, by the time he died at just 26, built a portfolio of good investments, such as the plane and his beloved 'Big-O' ranch in Round Oak, Georgia.

Born in the small Georgia town of Dawson (Pop. 5500) on September 9, 1941, the Redding family moved to the 'big' city of Macon, 100 miles away. At school, Otis discovered a talent for music, repeatedly entering a local talent show, winning its five-dollar prize 15 times before being barred from entering the contest further.

By the age of 21, Redding had become a member of a local Macon band, Johnny Jenkins and the Pinetoppers. When they landed a recording session at Stax Records in Memphis, the tall, striking Redding managed to secure a solo recording for himself - which produced the ballad These Arms of Mine.

Like the hits that followed - Try A Little Tenderness, My Girl, Mr Pitiful and I Can't Turn You Loose (later adopted by The Blues Brothers) - These Arms of Mine instantly captured Redding's strength: a formidable voice, seeped in the South's gospel, blues and even country music, that was both hopelessly romantic and rebelliously sexual at the same time.

Satisfaction and Otis Blue catapulted Redding into another level of superstardom, notably a black performer challenging the pop charts at a time of continued segregation in America.

As the '60s progressed - in all meanings of the word - so did Redding's career as he established his leadership of the soul movement, leading packaged tours of Stax artists throughout North America and Europe, touring along with protogées like Eddie Floyd, Carla Thomas and Arthur Conley.

Redding made worshippers out of young British blues performers, like Eric Burdon of The Animals who became a close friend, and Pete Townshend of The Who, whose 'maximum R'n'B' maxim fitted perfectly with the sweaty soul that the elegant Redding had crafted in Memphis and exported across the northern hemisphere. Another disciple was schoolboy Peter Gabriel who, in 1967, travelled up from his outrageously exclusive public school, Charterhouse in deepest Surrey, to see Redding play in London.

"I was extremely lucky, when I was 17 years old, to go and see Otis Redding perform at the Ram Jam Club in Brixton," Gabriel told ABC's Nightline in 2010. "When he came on, it was like the sun coming out. It was just this amazing voice, totally in command, great band, great grooves and passion that permeated everything." 19 years later, Gabriel repaid the impact Redding had had on him by releasing Sledgehammer, an unexpurgated tribute that even included Wayne Jackson and the Memphis Horns on the track.

When The Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, on June 1, 1967, barely five years had lapsed since them recording the sugary I Wanna Hold Your Hand. And yet here they were with an opus of free-thinking psychedelia, that opened up and expanded people's minds in a way few recordings had done before. Otis Redding listened to it constantly as he took temporary accomodation on a houseboat on the other side of the San Francisco Bay in the hippy commune of Sausalito while playing a week's residency at the Fillmore West. Inspired by Sgt. Pepper and the body of water between him and San Francisco, he wrote his own signature song, (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay.

Compared with the energetic oomph of much of his other songs, Dock Of The Bay was a gentle, simple song, musically and lyrically. A strummed guitar motif, which seemed to copy the gentle lapping of the cold bay's water against the houseboat, was married to the down-home story of Otis's life so far - "I left my home in Georgia, Headed for the 'Frisco bay". It became his biggest hit. And the last song he ever recorded.

On the night of Sunday, December 10, 1967, while at the pinnacle of his career, Otis Redding's Beechcraft crashed into a lake in Madison, Wisconsin, while attempting to land at the nearby municipal airport. The crash killed Redding and four members of the Bar-Kays, his backing band. He was just 26-years-old and left behind his wife, Zelma and their three children Dexter, Carla and Otis III.

"The irony of Otis Redding was his personal ambition to fill the gap left in the soul world by the shooting in 1964 of Sam Cooke," wrote Soul Music Monthly magazine in a tribute published soon after Redding's death. "In an all-too-short career he achieved that ambition — and achieved it so decisively that in the last four years no one has filled the even larger gap left by his own death."

"His loss was all the greater because he was the man who turned soul from a minority interest in Britain into a major explosion," SMM added.

There have been plenty of soul singers since - singers cut from the same southern traditions, white singers like Janis Joplin who have channeled the same vocal passion. But not even contemporaries like Wilson Pickett, James Brown, Eddie Floyd, Isaac Hayes, Ike and Tina Turner, Al Green, Marvin Gaye or Sly Stone came close to the lethal cocktail that Otis Redding perfected for the five short years of his career.

"His death was a loss to the whole world," said Steve Cropper at the time, reflecting the sentiment of the entire 'Memphis Brotherhood'. "Nobody will ever know what he had in store for them. He was just starting to get into something. He was starting to get out of hard rhythm and blues. He went beyond that. He was hitting everybody all over the world."

Redding's influence found its way far and wide: Peter Gabriel may have been hiding it while performing Supper's Ready in Genesis, but as a former drummer stimulated by 'groove', there was a frustrated soul boy fighting to get out of that prog rock titan. You could say much the same about Robert Plant - a blues singer performing heavy rock - he, too, was channeling the boy from Macon, Georgia.


Otis Redding may have been a soul performer, but the southern blues were within him. The irony, however, of him covering the Rolling Stones' most famous song is that he helped turn them into an even bigger R'n'B band, still going 45 years after that fateful night in 1967.

Kicking The Tyres: The Risks Of Buying Retreads

What does a rock star do when he's run out of ideas? When writer's block or contractual obligations hinder creativity, your average legend falls back on the dreaded covers album, explained blandly as: "It's been something I've been wanting to do for ages, but never found the time." This is a statement hewn from the same block as "It's part of a musical trilogy I'm working on in D-minor, which is the saddest of all keys", which, all fans of 'ver Tap' will know, is Nigel Tufnel's pre-amble to announcing Lick My Love Pump.




Covers have been with us since Moses was in short trousers: who hasn't started out in a garage trying to navigate stubby fingers around someone else's chords? Even The Beatles were ripping off Chuck Berry when they began. Some bring something new - Otis Redding's cover of Satisfaction, or the totally different approach of Joe Cocker's A Little Help From My Friends. Then there are the novelties: Rolf Harris covering Stairway To Heaven was a clear nadir in a litany of atrocities, although David Lee Roth's California Girls comes close. Entire albums of cover versions, on the other hand, have more nefarious connotations.


No matter how much justice is done, covers albums are rarely a good thing. Most are exercises in laziness, others, outlets for vanity. This month we get two contrasting examples of the genre: Phil Collins' Going Back - a retread of soul classics - and Robert Plant's Band of Joy, a compilation of obscurities drawn not so much from the American Songbook, as brought down from a dusty attic and hand-written on parchment.

Taking pot-shots at Collins has been something of a media spectator sport over the last 30 years. I admit (puts reputation on the line here) to being something of an apologist for the bloke who rarely gets credit for being a unique drummer. Rather than a unique singer. Despite the wry giggle we had when he took You Can't Hurry Love to No.1 with its ironic video (multiple Phils wearing bum-freezer suits and Wayfarers), the prospect of a 60-year-old from Hounslow recreating the 40-year-old Motown sound for, apparently, his own indulgence is, as vanity projects go, dangerously close to pub band territory. Let's leave it there before I say something I'll regret.


The covers album, however, doesn't have to represent a complete abandonment of credibility: Robert Plant has, since his multi-Grammy-winning Raising Sand with Alison Krauss, and his brief return to Led Zeppellin, cemented himself as the elder statesman who can do no wrong (we'll forget Now And Zen...). In teaming up with a collective of Nashville musicians, Plant builds on Raising Sand with a rich, varied and intriguing trek through Americana. From blues (Lightnin' Hopkins' Central Two-O-Nine) to Appalachian folk, Plant immerses himself into a love of backwoods music which belies his West Bromwich origins and, disappointing for some, takes him even further away from the lucrative lure of a full Zep reunion.

One man's loving homage is another's rank laziness. Paul Weller lost serious cred with his knocked-out-in-an-hour-so-he-could-hit-the-coffee-shops-of-Amsterdam covers album Studio 150. Writer's block offers little real excuse.  Doffing a cap to heritage is, in Plant's case, it would appear, OK.

Eric Clapton has made it his stock-in-trade in recent years, returning repeatedly to the Robert Johnson/Delta Blues oeuvre in deference to doing anything new. But when you've reached your sixties as a fabulously wealthy rock star, there's probably not much point discussing retiring to a cottage by the sea. Plant and Clapton, to their credit, don't make any bones about doing what they do for artistic progression. It's about celebrating the music they love, while growing old with some degree of grace.

Which brings me to, arguably, one of the most innovative covers albums, from someone who never fails to immerse himself with such iconoclastic zeal each time he knocks on the studio door. Peter Gabriel's Scratch My Back epitomises his relentless approach to Doing Things Differently Ans Awkwardly.

On his third album, he instructed his drummers (including Collins) to abandon cymbals, ridding his rhythm section of the punctuation of a crash after every phrase. In the process, Gabriel inadvertently helped create a You Tube gorilla phenomenon and a generation of bar room air drummers. On his fourth album, Gabriel applied more and more of the world music he has consistently championed, in his own work and in helping establish WOMAD, introducing Middle Eastern and Asian instrumentation and rhythmic influences to the 'western' notion of rock music.

Scratch My Back is, unashamedly, a covers album. Typically, it has the Gabriel twist: a collection of covers, performed orchestrally, of some of Gabriel's personal favourites - an eclectic mix spanning the likes of Arcade Fire, Paul Simon, Radiohead, Elbow, David Bowie, Lou Reed and Neil Young. The twist, in case you were still wondering, is that each of the covered artists will reciprocate with an equally different cover of one of Gabriel's canon (well, some of them - rumour has it that Radiohead got snippy about the reworking of Street Spirit). For all its novel approach, Scratch My Back and its eventual mirror, I'll Scratch Yours, is simply another way of avoiding writing anything new. But given Gabriel's legendary gestation of new material (10 years between his Us and Up albums), it might be overdoing it to expect the now sexagenarian Gabriel to repeat his relatively herculean effort in recording Us a mere six years after the hit-spawning So in 1986).

Gabriel has proven that, when bereft of any genuine originality, creativity doesn't have to be completely abandoned. Retreading the back catalogues of others can be a refreshing experience, especially when - as Gabriel has done - he removes any well-lit pathways to comfortable recognition. His painfully sparse version of Paul Simon's Boy In The Bubble, and his string-heavy interpretation of Heroes - it's chugging spine removed - are almost unnerving, challenging the listener by taking away all but the scantest traces of the familiarity bred by countless Top 40 radio plays.

But alas. Christmas is a-coming. And that means that, inevitably, record company press offices (not sure if they even still exist) will be drafting a new batch of press releases bearing the words "...his own, personal interpretation of classic songs...", a phrase which conjures all the dread and fear of an afternoon toasting marshmallows with Beelzebub himself. Which means, kids, when choosing this year's stocking fillers, you have choices. Real choices. Choose wisely.