A couple of different music media joints reported this week that Jandek, the most mysterious man in rock (check this and this), played an actual live show last weekend in Scotland.

Here's the original story from the (Glasgow?) Sunday Herald by story's breaker.

Last weekend’s world-beating line-up saw performers drawn from the margins of genres such as jazz, improvisation, folk and rock, with saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe welding Noh theatre, Fluxus art-action and wild free-jazz blurt during a staggering solo set, and the avant-rock group Vajra – featuring Japanese underground veterans Keiji Haino and Kan Mikami – working two guitars and a set of drums into what sounded like the end credits on the story of your life. But it was an unannounced performance by one of the most revered and reclusive outsider artists of the past three decades that really set the whole event on fire.

The man known only as Jandek, a Texan singer-songwriter who plays internally explosive blues and wails with a voice that’s as void and haunted as Robert Johnson, has never before appeared in public. Indeed, only one journalist has ever even met him, and in his absence a cult of rumours has sprung up, spawning a speculative mini-industry that reached its apo theosis last year with the release of the film Jandek On Corwood, a documentary in which Jandek himself never actually appears. The emotionally wounded nature of his lyrics and his idiosyncratic, self-taught guitar style have led commentators to speculate that his many privately-pressed rec ordings were actually part of a long-term recovery programme, or perhaps a form of self-therapy. Whatever the story, his back catalogue remains one of the most personally revelatory and deeply human bodies of work of any artist of the modern era.

As soon as he walks on stage at The Arches, wearing a black wide-brimmed hat, black shirt and smart grey/black slacks, it’s clear that he’s the same person as has appeared on most of his cryptic record sleeves, only now older and a little more emaciated, with a glassy stare that could penetrate concrete. For his backing band he has recruited a pair of local musicians, with revered folk spirit Richard Youngs standing in on bass and Scatter percussionist Alex Neilson on drums. With the accumulated weight of a lifetime of myth and rumour hanging over the performance the stakes were perilously high, but the group more than rose to the challenge, navigating the weight of Jandek’s free blues with pulsing, Can-styled bass parts and locomotive percussion. Jandek himself moved through skeletal slow-motion postures, digging deep into his guitar and resurfacing with barbed, overtone-heavy drones and slicing chords that punctuated his black-snake moan. Although he never spoke, at several points he actually cracked a smile, raising hopes that this might not be the only performance of his career.

For Jandek-watchers worldwide, this is all simply earth-shattering news.

If you're not familiar with Jandek's oeuvre, perhaps you should hop on to your file-share method of choice and download some songs. They're very accessible.