Went to Willy Mason’s Rough Trade in-store. It was a new experience for me, both the in-store thing, and the being surrounded by teenagers thing.

Robin just interviewed Willy Mason for this site, after being charmed by him at the Ben Kweller show. I was sceptical. The guy was so young, and his fans even younger. But that’s my job, I reasoned, and was charmed in spite of myself, because Mason, despite singing about university and high school and stuff that I cared not to remember, at times hit his guitar with the pure loveliness and bell-like surety of a young Anne Briggs. And that’s not something I say lightly. Of course, we rate Anne Briggs’ The Time Has Come album because it’s so preserved and lovely; we love the shy girl on the cover and her naive lyrics (oh my baby, don’t you know/ the time has come for me to go) because they’re from the past as much as because they’re lovely. She was young when she made that record, as young as Willy Mason, but because it was made in 1973 we’re not confronted by her youngness in the flesh, in Rough Trade and we don’t get sceptical. Those were my thoughts, as I watched this pretty guy with his metal fingerpicks and sincere face, singing about jazz clubs and New York and homeless people and how young people were going to make a difference in this horrible world. I liked the immediacy with which people reacted to him, and the earnest young boys to the side, who I could tell were watching his nimble fingers and figuring out their own songs.

Afterwards I sloped around the shop and noticed that there was a release of a David Hemmings record, as in David Hemmings the actor from Profondo Rosso and Blow Up. He’d been pissing about with some hip Californian musicians in the late 60s and recorded his pissings about, as rich actors are wont to do. And now, in the trawl for detritus and glimmers of gold, it’s been re-released. Although I love David Hemmings, and spent a summer of my teenage life trying as hard as possible to look and act like a female version of his Blow Up character (getting all my prettiest friends to pose for photos in the multi-storey carpark behind Budgens), and I love late 60s Californian psych, I had no desire to hear the record. In fact, it kind of pissed me off to even see it. It was the equivalent - 40 years hence - of someone digging up a demo of Vincent Gallo jamming with the guy from the Chilli Peppers, and - oh, hang on…well, the equivalent of someone digging up a demo of Uma Thurman and Bjork and seeing fit to put it on the market. Of course, it might be really good, but who the fuck cares? Really. Seeing that CD made me glad for Willy Mason and his following of kids full of meaning and hope.

Robin’s friend turned up too late to take live pics, but we said, well, why not take some of him talking to his fans. It seemed so much a part of what Willy was about, this communication with others, and it didn’t seem lame at all, despite what it sounds like. While he did that, I caught sight of a CD reissue of Worldfood by Ramon Sender, which I was keen to listen to. I read the sleevenotes and Sender himself seemed a little unenthusiastic, but that’s the avant-garde for you, I thought, putting it on the headphones anyway. Sender was right, it was purely of interest in a historical way, and not much else. The second track (there were two and they were both long enough for a mini-tripout) was fantastically burbly and far-out in the way that only 1965 tape-loop stuff can be, but still it wasn’t enough to make me buy it. It was actually quite amazing, but it was fossilized, petrified. It was of its time. Yet I knew it was as radical as any song about homeless people. It was radical in the sense that it tore at the roots of what we thought of as music; what we thought of as a ’statement.’ It was part of that revolution in the ear that resulted in the electronic music of today and it was part of the future even as it clunked and whoooed away like purple-turquoise mandala-styled automata. Music. It confuses me sometimes.

I looked over at Willy Mason with his young fans and friends all talking and excited in the stuffy little shop and while my aesthetic leanings took me to the Ramon Sender and, if we’re gonna talk singing and songing, to the more esoteric fields of PG Six et al., and the historical safety net of Anne Briggs and Bert Jansch, my soul was glad for his presence. Not content to just trawl through romantic alienation and self-loathing like most of his peers, Mason had sung songs about the world and our place in it. He’d tried to reach out, and by the looks of the people around him, had succeeded somewhat. He hadn’t been oblique in any way at all. He had no desire to mystify. He actually seemed to believe in the power of a song in G major to make a little difference to the world. For me, that made uncomfortable listening, but his ‘hit’ song, Oxygen, couldn’t help but touch your heart. Unless you’re a complete hipster asshole, in which case good luck to you.

All traditional ‘protest’ music makes uncomfortable listening; that’s its conundrum. And more so when it projects from someone who appears to be so balanced, so not an outsider. I’m intrigued to hear what he has to say, and intrigued to see what Robin writes about him. Sometimes coming to music from the most straight-ahead sincere place can unsettle much more than it ever intends to.