His many fans will no doubt wonder at the absence of anything by Wayne County from the list of Top 50 American punk albums we've compiled as part of this month's cover story on the Ramones. After all, Wayne – who by 1980 was Jayne County, following the necessary surgery – was with his band Queen Elizabeth part of the same Max's Kansas City, Mercer Arts Center and Club 82 scene that nurtured the early New York Dolls.
It has been confirmed that Neil Young's forthcoming album A Letter Home will be released on the Third Man Records label owned by Jack White.
A message posted on the Third Man and Neil Young websites confirmed the news.
Credited to 'Homer Grosvenor', the message reads: "Third Man Records unearths Neil Young's A Letter Home.
A week of revelations here, I suppose, since a bunch of albums that I’ve had to strategically redact from recent lists, until they’re formally announced, can now be identified and previewed.
Please note, then, the appearance of new albums by Damon Albarn, Elbow and Real Estate among the 20-odd things below. The Real Estate is especially fantastic – more like Felt and The Feelies than ever, maybe – and I’ll try and write something more extensive about it in the next week or so.
Quickly today, as there’s an issue to be flung together, but a plug in passing for our latest Ultimate Music Guide, on sale today and dedicated to Lou Reed. More on that later.
Twelve years after he was pulling pints in a pub in London Bridge, Brian Burton is perhaps busier than ever – he has a new Broken Bells album out on Monday (January 13), he’s been working with U2 and is rumoured to be producing the next Black Keys record. It’s been a whirlwind decade for the writer and producer better known as Danger Mouse: after making his name by daring to cross-breed The Beatles with Jay-Z, he’s gone on to work with everyone from Damon Albarn to David Lynch.
A "definitive" biography of Lou Reed is in the works, it has been confirmed.
Titled Lou: A New York Life, the biography will be written by Rolling Stone writer Will Hermes, who has promised the book will tell the "full, definitive" story of the former Velvet Underground frontman's life. The book will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and has no current release date.
After last week’s Best Albums Of 2014 roundup/provocation, here’s the first proper playlist of the year; with, as you’ll see, a few auspicious new arrivals.
Sometime last autumn, maybe, an EP called “Artorius Revisited” by Michael Head & The Red Elastic Band was quietly released in limited quantities. Last time he surfaced around 2006/2007, in a quixotic, thwarted and mostly transcendent musical career that now stretches back some three decades, Head and his longest-lasting configuration, Shack, were signed to Noel Gallagher’s Sour Mash label. It didn’t last.
