Fairly curious listening day in the Uncut office, even by our standards, I think, which reached a pinnacle of sorts with a new Dead Kennedys 'Best Of' (how poppy they sound now) rubbing up next to a Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick reissue from 1966, I think.
I've been spending the past hour or so working my way through this soundtrack to Todd Haynes' Dylan movie, I'm Not There. I must admit to a bit of scepticism about the film, having actively despised Haynes' Velvet Goldmine, and been faintly terrified by the convoluted plotting and detail that was reported here.
Settling down into my seat at last night's press screening for Planet Terror, I overheard the chap sitting next to me giving his friend a crash course in the film's back story. "You know Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof was originally part of a double-feature called Grindhouse? Well, this is the other bit." Quite how Robert Rodriguez would respond to having his film referred to as the "other bit", I don't care to imagine, the Mexican temprament being notoriously fiery. It's a stroke of luck, then, that his name appears 7 times on the opening credits, just to reinforce the fact that there's more to Grindhouse than just Tarantino's movie.
In fact, Planet Terror is far and away the better of the two movies, Rodriquez cannily remembering to include some of those elements in his film Tarantino left out -- plot, character, humour, simple things like that. Though, thankfully, Planet Terror conspicuously lacks the rather nasty, misogynistic streak that made Death Proof such an uneasy viewing experience for me.
After a week off, holed up in the Cotswolds since you ask, it's been a busy time for film screenings. I went to see The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford on Tuesday, this time on a proper 35mm print rather than the beta tape I saw a few months back, and tonight there's Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited that I'll hopefully blog about tomorrow.
Last night, though, our album reviews editor John Robinson and I went to see American Gangster, at close to three hours as epic as it gets, with Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington manfully chewing chunks out of the scenery in late Sixties/early Seventies' New York.
A while back, someone at Uncut pointed out to me that one of the words I overused when writing about music was “feral”. He was right, too: I’d got into a habit of using the term whenever the psychedelia and crypto-primitive folk jams that I listen to so much got a little wilder and smellier, became a bit more instinctual, or at least convincingly pretended to be instinctual.
While End of the Road has definitely got bigger since last year, the stages are still so close together that you can fall into a band without even realising it. If you were the band in devil outfits playing thrash metal at the Bimble Inn at 1am this morning, our photographer is dying to reach you.
One of 10 unsigned(ish) bands to win a slot on The Local stage, Fortuna Pop signings My Sad Captains' almost implausible summeriness was a gift on an afternoon as baking hot as this one. 'Here and Elsewhere' and the title track from June's 'Bad Decisions' EP showed off slacker indie pop sensibilities that singlehandedly steal back the "doo-ron-ron" from McDonalds and herald an inevitable radio takeover in the next year.
