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Countdown to Latitude: dEUS

dEUS I remember seeing dEUS at their UK 'comeback' show at London's ICA around the time of the excellent 'Pocket Revolution' album, the band's four year hiatus having not dented the furious, urgent, wonderfully fuzzy live experience that Belgium's biggest musical export can create. Tom Barman and Klaas Janzoons' group are certainly one of the more exciting 'underground' bands to be playing on Latitude's main stage this year.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band – Emirates Stadium, London, May 30, 2008

A FEW years ago, Elvis Costello declared an ongoing fondness for U2. By way of explanation, Costello outlined his admiration for U2’s ability to forge intimacy and emotional connection even in the Enormo-Domes and Mega-Bowls that constitute their tour schedules. At stadium level now, Costello observed, “everything else is bullshit, or a trip to the circus.”

The Felice Brothers At The 100 Club

They look, famously, on the cover of last year’s Tonight At The Arizona album, like the wayward off-spring of The Band, with whose songs and music their own colourful excursions into the hinterlands of ‘the old, weird America’, as essayed by Bob and The Band on The Basement Tapes, are frequently compared.

Sydney Pollack, 1934 – 2008

It’s not immediately clear quite where Sydney Pollack fits into the scheme of things. As one of the generation of film-makers who flourished in the Sixties and Seventies, there’s nothing on his CV as canonical as, say, Taxi Driver or The Godfather, no real sense of him breaking the same kind of ground as his peers. Even the Evening Standard’s film critic Derek Malcolm, interviewed this morning on Radio 4’s Today programme, admitted the movies which most people would associate with Pollack – Out Of Africa and Tootsie – were ultimately rather “bland”.

Club UNCUT: Okkervil River and AA Bondy

“This is an old song,” says AA Bondy, introducing the next number in his opening set at the third Club UNCUT night at the Borderline. He’s not kidding, either. What I had presumed would be some lost early gem from his back catalogue turns out to be a dark and powerfully brooding version of Blind Willie Johnson’s apocalyptic “John The Revelator”, originally recorded in 1930, which is going back some.
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