Whereas, of course, last time round we were into December before the Supreme Court pulled stumps - a step that now strikes many as the sinister start of the new fascist state (soft or not), and which could be affected this time by the illness of Chief Justice Rehnquist. In communications theory, American elections are now believed to be television events - old-fashioned campaigning is on the way out, TV advertising and the critical debates are what matter. Network television has the same spirit: it would cheerfully carry the poll returns for a couple of days, but then, please, a result. And because they are now afraid of alienating Bush.) The point about baseball is in order. The fans of that game rejoice in the fact that there must be a result - cricket, in contrast, strikes most Americans as effete in not insisting on a result So baseball plays extra innings until a winner emerges. (It will be delicate because they made such fools of themselves last time. Just as a fantastically high turn-out is being predicted, so the fierce level of interest (with people talking of leaving the country, whatever the result) guarantees an enormous living-room audience as the various news networks play the delicate game of declaring the results and predicting a winner.

Now that the Boston Red Sox have won the World Series, the evening of Tuesday 2 November (and Wednesday morning) will be one of the great concentrated occasions in the history of American television. Eventually, however, he does dedicate a song - "Static in the Cities" - to Peel. They leave the stage to the projected message, "All Of It For John Peel - You'll Never Walk Alone" Seconded.Do Me Bad Things tour the UK in late November. Hope of the States: Cockpit, Leeds (0113 244 3446), tonight; Yales Central Station, Wrexham (01978 311857), Tue; University of Wales (01792 602060), Thur; University of Glamorgan (029 2023 0451), Fri; tour continuess.price independent.co.uk. But with the violins, they sound like an existential Pogues, or an Eastern European folk troupe tackling the later works of Radiohead (the projections of barrage balloons over the Severn Bridge are very OK Computer).

It's music I can admire rather than engage with, like an Ordnance Survey relief map of a country I never plan to visit.There's a collective intake of breath when singer Sam Herlihy asks us to offer our appreciation to.. their tour manager. Hope of the States' biggest London show to date happens to fall on an unhappy day for music. (When they need a break, up steps Ad Lick, who sounds - and it must be said, looks - like Tom Waits or Captain Beefheart on the brink of mutating into a werewolf.) The Darkness, who have invited DMBT to support them on their upcoming tour in the full knowledge that they may well blast them offstage, must have big balls indeed.No such worries for Manic Street Preachers, whose support act on their winter jaunt is somewhat less of a sonic slap in the face, but a decent auditory experience nonetheless. These people are maximalists to the bone: they operate under the assumption that, while less may be more, more is even morer. then it might come close to the glorious celebratory rock'n'soul freakshow that is Do Me Bad Things.In their own words, the DMBT sound is "like sex when you try every position".

If Nirvana were not a power trio but a power nonet, if Zeppelin hotwired The Brian Setzer Orchestra (DMBT don't actually have a horn section, but you keep imagining that they do, or should), if Queens of the Stone Age's tour bus crashed into a full gospel choir, if - bear with me here - the parade in Dumbo was led by Dali's long-legged elephants... Von Otter's Octavia was thrillingly vicious, wild and expressive, her account of Addio Roma electrifying. The minor roles too were, for the most part, impressively sung; with Dominique Visse's Nutrice, Tom Allen's Arnalta, and Amel Brahmin-Djelloul's Valleto among the highlights. Only Antonio Abete's stiff Seneca disappointed, though whether this was down to his throat infection or not was hard to tell How I wish we'd been able to see the full production. But how glad I am to have seen the absolute involvement of Jacobs's orchestra.Long regarded as the poor relations of the British early music scene, The Hanover Band are currently undergoing an extreme makeover.

Their formerly lacklustre strings are gleaming and engaged, their woodwind sublime, their brass bright and flexible, their percussion alert. Is it something in the waters of Brighton? Or have they finally found the right conductor?In the first of a three programme series - called Mozart's World - for St John's, Smith Square and The Old Market, Hove, The Hanover Band achieved what is if not downright impossible, then certainly improbable: a dramatic, vital, illuminating and properly surprising performance of Mozart's Prague Symphony (K.504) and Haydn's Surprise (No 94). Under Paul Brough, the orchestra tilted these familiar scores in new directions; teasing different colours and nuances and textures out of repertoire that listeners and players alike have taken for granted, and marrying the lightness of original instruments with a grand symphonic arc. Hey hey mama, said the way you move, gonna make you sweat, gonna make you groove...