Crackles, bumps and blips make it

A friend in Alaska sent me a 45 recently, a copy of Sam & Bill's For Your Love, released on the Joda label in the mid-1960s. "I figured this was something that you had to have because the song is great no matter what, but to play it on a vinyl 45 is damn near ethereal," he wrote in the accompanying letter. "I still get shivers when I hear that needle drop on to the record and hear the first notes ... Damn, it is an amazing song - blows me away every time."

The record has a maroon label and silver writing, a B-side named Beautiful Baby, and an arrangement credited to the singer Johnny Nash. As songs go, it is structurally pretty simple - a prime example of the soul duo recording of the period, opening with a collision of piano, drums and bass, and a clamour of voices, the basic refrain running: "For your love, oh, I would do anything/ I would do anything, for your love." For all the smooth harmonies, there's an unshaven quality to their voices. Sometimes they sound huffy, like the keys on an old upright piano; sometimes they sound ragged and desperate and floundering. But what really makes it is the crackles.

The crackles on a record always make me think of Carol Ann Duffy's poem Words Wide Night: "Somewhere on the other side of this wide night and the distance between us, I am thinking of you," it begins, and then a few lines later: "La la la la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross to reach you." The crackles seem to me to be the things you cannot articulate, neither lyrics nor music; they are the wide night and the distance, the dark hills to cross, the bits in between.

With recordings, these bits in between, the imperfections, the frailties, help make the music seem human. On the compilation tapes of old, it was the clunk as you pressed stop, the snippets of John Peel's or Bruno Brookes's voice rushing in at the end of a track you had filched off the radio. On a live recording of an Elvis Presley concert I have, it's the way he starts to laugh halfway through Suspicious Minds. It's the way you can hear the Moldy Peaches smiling at each other as they play. On Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse's version of Valerie, it's her hoarse apology before she starts singing: "I'm sorry, Charlie Murphy, I was just having too much fun."

They are flaws that can easily be ironed out by production, of course, but sometimes I wish they'd leave the creases and the crumples and the stains. If it's broken, please don't fix it.

A friend of mine was recently bemoaning the over-polishing of the Babyshambles track Albion: "I have got the best version of Doherty singing it on his own," he wrote to me. "It's broken, fragile, hardly even there sometimes, with the best lyrics he's written - I don't think anyone's written about what it is to be English like that since, I don't know, Elvis Costello. Then the Babyshambles version is all bells and twinkles and fey pomp. It just wrecks it."

Similarly, I remember feeling enormous delight upon hearing that Lee Mavers of the La's once refused to use a mixing desk because it didn't have original 60s dust on it, and that the only track he was ever satisfied with was a B-side, Over, which was recorded in a stable. You can hear the same dusty feeling on Dylan's Nashville Skyline: the sound of someone drinking water amid the opening notes of Girl from the North Country, or Dylan asking the producer, Bob Johnston, "Is it rolling Bob?" at the start of To Be Alone With You.

More recently, on the Felice Brothers' Revolver, there is a sudden jolt to the song when lightning strikes the building where they are recording - the hiccup left in to make its own musical contribution, calling across the wide night, in a language of dust and slurps and crackles.