It’s still a few days before the next issue of Uncut comes out, but I think I can let slip that REM’s “Accelerate”, while being included in our writers’ Top 50 Albums Of 2008 chart, didn’t actually make it into the Top 40. A disappointing showing for such a hyped “return to form”, maybe.
I found this morning a decent MP3 stream of the Dead’s Obama benefit show from last month, which has just started playing as I write. The tracklisting looks great – including “Slipknot”, “Help On The Way”, “Franklin’s Tower”, “Dark Star”, “St Stephen” and, fantastically, “Unbroken Chain”.And the starting “Truckin’”, which has been going for a good while now, sounds pretty healthy. Maybe some of the more experienced Deadheads among you could hunt it down and let me know what you think.
Driving home from the Leonard Cohen show on Friday night, I looked in my bag for something suitable to put on the car stereo, and settled fairly quickly on the new Fennesz album, “Black Sea”.
Day Five, and we get to Fleet Foxes, and the judges' conversation which resulted in them winning the first Uncut Music Award. Tomorrow, by the way, The Raconteurs.
I must admit a line in the press release reeled me into this one. Jesca Hoop, originally from California, worked “for five years as nanny to the children of Tom Waits and his wife, Kathleen Brennan. ‘Her music is like going swimming in a lake at night,’ Waits reckons.
A strange moment, on Friday night. Sitting somewhere quite close to the roof of the O2 Arena, it seems to me as if several thousand people are singing, simultaneously, in a scarcely-audible whisper. Onstage, Leonard Cohen and his extraordinary band are playing “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye”, with a softness, precision and clarity that I can rarely recall hearing at an arena show.
