Liverpool Sound City has confirmed John Cale and Thurston Moore as keynote speakers.
The event, which takes place from May 1-2 at the Liverpool Hilton Hotel and Liverpool ONE will see Cale and Moore joined by a third keynote speaker, former Chief Executive of The Premier League and former CEO of Liverpool Football Club, Rick Parry.
The Neil Young Ultimate Music Guide that I wrote about here (along with a review of the forthcoming “Live At The Cellar Door” set) is on sale now, so I thought it might be useful to post a sampler of what you might expect in this Uncut special: namely, this piece by me on 1996’s underrated “Broken Arrow”. Every Neil album is reviewed in comparable detail – you can find details of where to buy the mag here…
Pavement frontman and solo artist Malkmus is releasing a new album, Wig Out At Jagbags, with his band, The Jicks, on January 6, 2014. Here, though, is a classic archive feature from our September 2011 issue (Take 172), in which the guitarist and songwriter answers questions from fans and celebrity admirers including Graham Coxon, Nigel Godrich, Avey Tare, Stewart Lee and Scrabble enthusiast Giles Brandreth. Prepare for confessions about ripping off The Fall, horse-racing and a pubic-hair-eating contest… Interview: John Lewis___________________
As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
I’m not, as a rule, the sort of person who reveres and memorises reviews from the notional golden age of rock journalism. But the other day, I was pondering something Nick Kent wrote in his original NME review of Television’s “Marquee Moon”. I found it online this morning, specifically this passage:
The National were joined onstage by Grateful Dead's Bob Weir at the Outside Lands Festival in San Francisco – you can watch footage below.
The band performed the track, which appeared on their High Violet album, with Weir on Friday (August 9). Last year, Weir covered Cass McCombs' "Love Thine Enemy" with members of the band during a 'Bridge Sessions webcast.
Age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his finite variety, though he does seem fractionally more concerned about his trousers falling down these days. The ungodly miracle of Iggy Pop, 66 years old, remains one of the most bizarre and compelling spectacles in rock’n’roll; more bizarre and compelling, perhaps, with every year that goes by.
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.
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.
