If, at this late date, you still need proof Neil Young is not a man to be trusted, something akin to that arrives about two and a quarter hours into his show at London’s O2 Arena.
One of our longer playlists this week and, I think, the one with more embedded music than I’ve ever posted before: you can listen to 12 out of 25 entries here, if I’ve counted right…
Lou Reed was back in the news last week and for reasons other than his recent life-saving liver transplant. It turned out that some boorish actor, a self-styled hell-raiser, Rhys Ifans, by name, had thrown a bit of a strop during a newspaper interview and so one of the Saturday broadsheets, presumably stuck for anything else to fill its pages, canvassed some notable journalists about their most difficult celebrity interview.
The appearance of Werner Herzog as the icy criminal mastermind in Tom Cruise’s most recent film, Jack Reacher, may have come as a surprise to those who assumed that the German director wouldn’t have much interest in such conventional film making.
Television and Heartbreakers legend Richard Hell’s autobiography, I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, is reviewed by editor Allan Jones in the new issue of Uncut (dated July 2013 and out now) – in this piece from Uncut’s September 2009 issue (Take 148), Hell and his bandmates explain how they created “Blank Generation”, the nihilistic, coruscating punk anthem first written as a “My Generation” for the ’70s New York scene. Words: Damien Love
Back from a week’s holiday, so plenty of new things among this 21st office playlist, with lots of the best tracks - from Cian Nugent, Lace Curtain, Houndstooth and The Cairo Gang, among others – embedded. A hairy teaser for Crazy Horse’s imminent UK dates, too, and a serendipitous reissue for Samuel Purdey’s luxe late ‘90s evocation of Steely Dan and the Doobies; curious Daft Punk fans might be advised to check out “Only When I’m With You”, especially.
Checking emails over the weekend, I was more than passingly alarmed when I got a message from a friend asking if I’d heard the news about Lou Reed. This sounded somewhat ominous. Lou has looked decidedly frail at recent London shows and he is after all 71 and despite being sober for many years has not always led the kind of lifestyle that could be described as wholly healthy. For a long time, he seemed alongside Keith Richards the rock star most likely to become a casualty of what might euphemistically be described as reckless living. Could the excesses of his past finally have caught up with him?
Just before the release of 2007’s Era Vulgaris, Uncut’s Jaan Uhelzski headed out to California to see if head wrangler Josh Homme could keep the party going when the group’s hedonistic regulars had been barred…
A couple of months ago, I was staying with an old friend, whose teenage daughter was heading out to an ‘80s movie all-nighter. Before she went, she listed what they were going to watch; Pretty In Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off – the kind of John Hughes films that are now routinely used as exemplars of that decade. Her father and I were talking, and we realised we hadn’t actually seen any of them.
