As I am giving out about older bands in today’s paper let me point you towards the trailer for upcoming Netflix documentary The Other One: The Long Strange Trip of Bob Weir. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people who like the Grateful Dead in the Old World. Indeed, I can recall some of them trying to get me interested in a ghastly five-disc (or something) Grateful Dead LP that was actually called Live in Europe. The version of Truckin’ was, as I recall, four weeks long and never located a memorable lick.

For all that, The Grateful Dead never established the cult following in the UK or Ireland that they enjoyed in their home country. Even Frank Zappa — very much a US deal — has more fans on the right-hand side of the pond. When rock magazines put together lists of the top 100 LPs, American Beauty or Workingsman’s Dead troubles us not. Yet millions of Deadheads spend their spare hours poring over ancient cassette recordings of the never-ending tour the Dead have been inflicting on enthusiasts for the last 50 years. Oddly, there remains an affection for the notion of the band here. When Jerry Garcia died people felt sad without quite knowing why? He seemed like a good thing. But must we listen to the awful records?

The total lack of angles in the music has something to do with it. This is a very Californian way of chilling out. Also, whereas hippies were about the place in these islands, the hippie cult was never a movement the way punk was a decade later. And the Dead really were an in-house band for that set. If you hadn’t been indoctrinated then it just sounded like tedious noodling without the traces of passion you get from even the most free-form jazz.

Anyway, don’t let me put you off this film on one of (apparently) the less celebrated member of this band. I doubt it will open here theatrically. But it will emerge on the Netflix machine eventually. You can then put it on repeat and smoke the weed until you reach nirvana. Where’s that Magazine record?