Trans am

Graham Coxon’s new album A+E is reviewed in the latest Uncut (May 2012, Take 180), out now – so we thought we’d revisit the last time the guitarist featured in our pages. In 2009, John Robinson met the guitarist at his Camden home to find out about his folk-infused solo album The Spinning Top, and hear all about the little matter of his old band’s reunion… Picture: Essy Syad

Neil Young has penned brief historical details about each of the songs on Americana, his forthcoming album with Crazy Horse. Comprised on classic American folk songs including “Clementine”, “She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain” and “Gallow’s Pole”, it features some arrangements originally made by The Squires, the band Neil Young formed in 1963 while at High School in Winnepeg.

An amazing vernal equinox morning here in London, and a fine walk through the city: down St John Street, into Smithfield, past St Paul’s and the rat-run of old streets down to the river, and over the Millennium Bridge.

For various reasons. I found myself in New York the other week, and in a resiliently unhip part of Williamsburg at a bar called Don Pedro. The opportunity had come up to see one of my favourite artists of the past couple of years, a firebrand piano man called Hans Chew, whose debut solo album, “Tennessee And Other Stories”, was a surprise entry at the sharp end of Uncut’s 2010 Top 50 (Lots more on that here).

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in his guise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescent world.

LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy, Beck, Devendra Banhart, No Age and more are set to provide the soundtrack to a new artwork by Doug Aitken in Washington, DC.

On the generally acclaimed Let England Shake, Harvey gave her music a bony, volkish edge, flaying it back to strummed autoharp, electric guitar and crude drums, mongrelising it with awkwardy intrusive sampling of Middle Eastern singers, dub interjections and huntsmen’s horns. Seamus Murphy’s cinematography complements this approach perfectly: not storyboarded, but collaged from various journeys around the island made during 2011, from the remotest hedgerows to the heart of London.

Hot Chip will headline this year's Camp Bestival festival in Dorset.

Iggy Pop has been named ambassador of Record Store Day 2012.

Among the multitude of underground micro-genres that have grown like bacilli these past few years, one of the most refined is ‘Modern Classical’. Ostensibly, much of the music that is sold under this pretext is a kind of evolved ambience, with compositional pretensions: a tidy hybrid of Gavin Bryars, Brian Eno and Erik Satie that is almost invariably pleasant, but which often seems to affect substance without actually delivering it.