David Johansen and the Harry Smiths

Consider the contrast. AD 2001, and Jagger, Tyler et al are still parading around like post-menopausal roosters, old men's heads on skinny boys' bodies. David Johansen on the other hand, one-time front man with the New York Dolls (a moment's silence please), stays perfectly still and croaks his blues truths with all the grizzled gravitas of a fellow who has seen the three days.

And if the name of the record label suggests some commie roots imprint, then the Harry Smith tag is instructive in feel rather than fact. Only a couple of these tunes actually appeared on the Anthology Of American Folk Music, but the rest might as well have, coming from the likes of Lightnin' Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, and that old stalwart Unknown, presumably a close relative of Anon.

So, check your Peter Pan complex at the door. It takes a man, not a mannish boy, to fill Dock Boggs' hobnail boots and take on heavyweight titles like 'Poor Boy Blues' or 'James Alley Blues' ("Sometimes I think that you're too sweet to die/And then other times I think you oughta be buried alive") over backing tracks only slightly less skeletal than the originals.

In fact, the first thing you notice is that the voice sounds like it weighs a stone. If, in folk astrology, Tom Waits was born under the sign of the mule, then Johansen is a billy goat gruff. Sonny Boy Williamson's 'Don't Start Me Talking' is a fair measure of how far he's come. When The Dolls tackled this on Too Much Too Soon, it was with the rambunctiousness of a bunch of bowery brats on the bum. Revisiting the scene some 26 years later, the singer has aged into an old coot shooting pearls of hard-earned wisdom into a brass spittoon.

The band meanwhile, have the good sense to do what any pros would when confronted with a music as old and ornery as this - they get the fuck out of its way. A true test of their chops is the semi-slow blues of Muddy Waters' 'Little Geneva', which in the wrong hands could sound like a shite night at Bad Bob's. Here, it's cocksure and bad-tempered in equal measure, while Oscar Brown Jr's 'Somebody Buy Me A Drink' is flophouse jazz rendered deft and deadly.

But the blackest wine is saved for the close of business, when the ensemble tackle the creeping Jesus heebie-jeebies of 'Oh Death', Johansen milking the lyric like a man who has experienced more than the one house call from the old bastard in the last couple of decades.

"O death, can't you sparrr me over for another year."

I second that emotion.