They're coming to take us away

Remember William Hague’s schoolboy oration at an early eighties Tory Party conference? Well Gomez always reminded me of that.

Here, in both cases, were young Northern lads who had no apparent interest in the kind of things that occupied their peers and who, instead, seemed determined to explore avenues falling outside the remit of their generational A to Z. For Hague this meant free market capitalism, punitive law and order measures and the dismantling of the Welfare State. For Gomez, well, it was worse – banjo solos, extended blues jams and songs about Tijuana ladies.

The blue rinse repatriators soon took little William to their hearts, and, likewise, Gomez found favour (and the Mercury Music Prize) amongst a constituency suspicious of the modern mood (or Keith Flint) and only too eager for some youthful confirmation of their dusty old assumptions.

But the rest of the public remained suspicious and, while Hague went on to suffer the kind of electoral trouncing only normally found in rigged single party states, Gomez released a second L.P that stiffed.

Since then, Hague has resigned himself to his fate as zeitgeist-leper, banished to the drylands of the Tory back-benches, but Gomez, it seems, have decided they’re not going to be sent to meet Cast and Shed Seven in the indie deadzone without putting up a bit of a fight. Their make-or-break new album In Our Gun gives the impression that they’ve been listening to rather a lot of Kid A. It also shows that they are still worryingly fond of awful mouth organ breaks and comically deep vocals. They arrive in Belfast on April 11 for a show at The Mandela Hall – wanting to cross the floor of the House, but aware they’re one false move away from having their whip withdrawn. Should make for dramatic viewing.

It is difficult to think of a political figure that compares to Julian Cope. Not unless you go all the way back to the kind of old-style Borgia or Hapsburg moon-howler who was kept locked away in case they frightened their subjects. Ley-lines, runes, unbecoming lycra – when it comes to belly-crawling, tortoise-shell-wearing, mushroom-munching, krautrock-loving pagans, Cope is very much in a class of his own. The turn of the decade has also seen him emerge as a top-notch man of letters. His two autobiographies Head On and Repossessed are hilarious, drug-addled accounts of his part in the Scouse punk scene (and if Tony Wilson deserves a film, what about Bill Drummond?), his time with Teardrop Explodes, and the strange paths he’s followed on his own. He plays The Empire on April 21 and much in the way of merry dementia is expected.

It’ll be an altogether different story at the same venue on May 15 when Kurt Wagner brings along his rugby team of band-mates for Lambchop’s first gig in the North. Their new album Is A Woman does for the squeak of guitar strings and the echo of piano keys, what MBV’s Loveless did for feedback. It’s the kind of record that makes you want to crawl into the speakers – such is its concern with the sonics of near silence and the poetry of the mundane. On its release, there was much comment made on how the album sounded like one long, uneventful song.

A month or so along the line and it’s actually difficult to imagine another record coming along this year that’s as wise, mysterious and beautiful.

And forget politicians, if Wagner calls anyone to mind, it’s the novelists of sad, small-town America. He’s a William Maxwell with a love of John Prine, a Richard Ford who’s listened to too much Stax. If REM had stayed in Athens, stayed together, and stayed obsessed with Deep South oddballs like Old Man Kinsey and Howard Fincher, right now they might well be making records just like it.

As it is, the sprawling Lambchop collective, made up of erstwhile teachers, college students, handy men and part-time musicians, looks at this moment to be the American band most worthy of our love. Which, as the song says, really flips me out. Wonder what it’s all about.