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Wow, I haven’t been so moved by something so mainstream in quite some time, and this guy — northern-English working-class heir to Springsteen with chiming guitars, meat-and-potato rhythms and occasional soaring sax solo for backing — is soulful in a way I don’t think I’ve heard before. It’s the way he just throws words at the music, I think: sometimes they rhyme, more often they don’t, and if the rhythms are constant then I haven’t fathomed them, yet meanwhile the melodies are accessible as can be. They say Fender grew up musical and it makes sense: I don’t know how you write or sing like this if it isn’t in the blood. I’m caught between envy and deepest gratitude that anyone is singing for kids like the ones he’s singing about. I can’t say I was ever one of them — his is more a man’s world than mine was — but when he sings about his alcoholic father, like he does here, I feel it to my bones. I’ve heard this three times today, cried like a baby each time. Watch the film-clip, starring the incomparable Stephen Graham as the father; I know that man, that situation. Oh, and yeah, I’ve heard the album too. I liked it, even sat reading the lyrics while it played (to combat Fender’s Geordie accent), but I wouldn’t know how to rate it yet. But this song, this is gold. What a guitar sound! And that voice! A small but significant event.

I'm pretty much obsessed with this song lately, despite that it only has two chords and he seems to be making it up as he goes. At about 1:45 I swear he improvises the central lead-guitar riff, and like a kid with a new discovery he can't help showing it off for the next minute. Then comes a surely freeform and seriously strange solo with a mistake in the first ten seconds. But he doesn't care; like he says, he loves to wander. And by 3:30 he's discovered a new riff and proceeds to hammer us with it, faster and faster, before the breakdown and the simple-beautiful backing vocals. "And so it came to pass / That is, once upon a time..." And as we fade he's off soloing again. Who cares if it sounds like a Velvets outtake? To me Tom Verlaine is God's guitarist: I can hear all my eighties postpunk heroes in his style. And he's free! Unfettered! An abstract expressionist. The band rocks too. Weirdest singing style ever of course, but I'm even warming to that a little. Forget "Marquee Moon", this is Verlaine gold.