Features

A fairly inhospitable place to be on a Sunday night: just on the edge of the City, near Old Street roundabout, in the cellar of what used to be an almost permanently empty Chinese restaurant. This is the venue for, I think, only the second London show by Emeralds, a night subtitled “A Brave New World In Sound”.

To the capital’s glamorous West End, then, and the Opening Night Gala of this year’s London Film Festival at the Odeon Leicester Square. Introducing this film adaptation of his novel Never Let Me Go, the author Kazuo Ishiguro hailed the film’s stars – Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield – as being at the forefront of a new generation of actors. Arguably, Ishiguro was whipping up a bit of hyperbole, but Never Let Me Go is part of a slow shift away from heritage Brit drama towards a more subversive and questioning style of movie-making.

Very taken by the Blackest Rainbow label at the moment, thanks to things like the Wooden Wand album I blogged about last week, the Beggin’ Your Pardon Miss Joan album and various Natural Snow Buildings projects.

Plenty new here, though that might not be the right word for the Dylan mono versions which turned up here on a USB stick last week.

The set-up of this piece is a bit out of date, since I wrote it a month ago for the current issue of Uncut. Nevertheless, worth running here I think, not least because I've subsequently discovered Forest Swords' "Dagger Paths" is getting a CD release in the UK on No Pain In Pop.

The arrival this week of a second new Wooden Wand album prompted me into finally getting round to “Death Seat”, James Jackson Toth’s terrific return after what, for him, seems to have been a relatively quiet stretch.

No Polish epiphanies this week, sadly: thanks, by the way, for all your Czeslaw Niemen guidance – you’re invaluable.

What's this, you say? The Coen brothers remaking a John Wayne classic? With the Dude, no less, as Rooster Cogburn? Is this just the latest curveball from the Coens, the kind of twisted joke they're often accused of playing on their audience? This was, roughly, the initial reception last year when news broke that the Coens were eyeing up True Grit. And, last week, the trailer finally arrived to prove they were serious.

I was reading over this interview with Robert Wyatt today, thinking about “The Ghosts Within”, and about how he flourishes as a collaborator with friends, but not as a bandmember. “The trouble with a band is I can’t take orders and I can’t give orders,” he said around the time of “Comicopera”. “So there’s no comfortable role for me in a band, whereas on a project I think, well, if they’ve asked me I shall try and do whatever it is they’ve imagined me doing. As close as possible. There’s no pressure on me. I try and do what they want.”

More sad news, I'm afraid, coming so soon after the passing of Arthur Penn. Tony Curtis' death, aged 85, feels like the last severing of our link to a golden age of movies. Andrew Sumner spoke to him in late 2006, when he was promoting the DVD release of The Persuaders, his 70s TV series with Roger Moore. Curtis was on typically entertaining form: "Talk to me about anything you want, my English chum!" So we did, chatting at length through his career highs - including Some Like It Hot and Spartacus.