Fucked up

A bit of a Wilco binge in the last couple of days, since I’ve been trying to write a review of “Wilco (the album)” for the next issue of Uncut. Auspicious arrivals, too, from Wild Beasts and from Ben Reynolds, who’s the guitarist of Trembling Bells and who seems to have slotted rather gracefully into the space left by James Blackshaw on the Tompkins Square roster.

Golden Globe winner for The Wrestler talks to Uncut!

With blogging, of course, you publish and be damned, then, once damned, you publish again. So it is with the Top 75 I unleashed on an unsuspecting world on Tuesday, only to soon realise that it was, basically, a bit of a cock-up.

To try and express how much new music I’ve enjoyed in 2008, I’ve gone overboard and come up with a Top 75 albums.

Click on the links for Part One, Part Two and Part Three of the interview. Is it fair to see the last three LPs of a piece? They seem to sit together as a sequence. Yeah I think what I found, funnily enough, is sometimes you get what you want when you stop trying to get it.

A bit of a sketchy bunch this week, as you’ll see. But the TV On The Radio album is getting played daily at least once, and there’s an auspicious new Mystery Record for me to be all cagey about.

Just before I get down to the business of this week’s office playlist, can I draw your attention to this news story over at NME? I’m aware that, since the story is ostensibly about Babyshambles, there’s a fair few of you who won’t have bothered following this one, but bear with me; the potential repercussions might be pretty alarming.

A couple of interesting posts to draw your attention to, before we get into the business of this week’s playlist. First, Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes called in at the Department Of Eagles blog to tell us about the two bands having vague joint plans. And on last week’s playlist blog, liamdog7 posted something interesting about how much money Columbia are charging for Bob Dylan’s “Tell Tale Signs”. “As a completist fan I'm being taken advantage of,” he writes. “It's actions like these from record companies that actually promotes illegal downloading.”

Bono looks tired. There are creases round his eyes when he removes his tinted glasses, creases that weren't there three decades ago. Tonight is an auspicious anniversary in the U2 camp. On May 18, 1978, Paul McGuinness became U2's manager and de facto fifth member, laying a crucial foundation for U2's - and indeed Bono's - world domination plans.

I found myself in the centre of a mild media hurricane yesterday, thanks to the musical map of Britain published in this month's Uncut becoming something of a hot topic. If you heard me trying to explain the principle of beats per minute on a local radio station, or trying to convince all of Scotland that they only listened to Runrig, I can only apologise.