Trans am

I don’t have any more information on the new Bob Dylan album, Tempest, following last week’s newsletter and blog on Friday confirming the track listing, so apologies to all the readers who have written in, hungry for further details about the record. The absence of anything further I can tell you at the moment about Tempest gives me, however, the opportunity to briefly sing the praises of Lawless, the new movie from director John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, who’s written the screenplay, as he did for The Proposition, Hillcoat’s savage outback Western.

Bruce Springsteen has disclosed he's been seeing a therapist since 1982. Speaking to David Remnick for an interview in The New Yorker magazine, Springsteen admitted, "You cannot underestimate the fine power of self-loathing in all of this." Springsteen reportedly began attending counsellling sessions while he was working on his Nebraska album.

Happy Mondays are planning a new album, they have confirmed. The Manchester band's management told NME that they are working on a new record, which will be the first time all the original line-up of the band recorded new material album of new material since 1992's Yes Please!.

Coming into work on the bus this morning, it occurred to me that the Christopher Nolan film I most wanted to watch again was Insomnia. I remember it being the least tricksy of Nolan’s films; a sharp, intelligent thriller, heavy on style and atmosphere, which seemed less concerned with the kind of ingenious puzzles and narrative twists that the director deployed in Memento, The Prestige and Inception.

Brooklyn brainiacs go back to basics? Not quite...

Another issue in the bag, and these are the records that have got us through the last couple of days of production. Mostly very good, with a few probably glaring exceptions.

There was exciting news this morning about the release on September 10 of a new Bob Dylan album, which if you haven’t seen the official announcement is called Tempest. There was much talk of the record a few weeks ago, backstage at the Hop Farm Festival, where one or two people rather teasingly inferred they had heard it, or knew someone who had.

Last night [July 16], the BBC pulled a documentary about last summer’s riots just hours before transmission after a court ruling prevented it from being broadcast. It’s foolish, of course, to speculate who initiated proceedings and for what purpose - although at the risk of sounding paranoid, you suspect there’s plenty of people who’d rather not have such pesky reminders of the riots on our screens in the run up to the Olympics.

We don't need no education...

Today, as you may have heard, is apparently the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first gig.