When promos of the latest deluxe Pavement reissue – “Brighten The Corners: Nicene Creedence Ed”, no less – turned up last week, it struck me that perhaps, in 12 months’ time, we might just be talking about a Pavement comeback being one of the key reunions of 2009.
Bob Dylan is everywhere and nowhere here at the Viennale, Vienna’s annual film festival, where your Uncut reporter has spent another arduous week slurping free champagne and scoffing luxury cakes on your behalf. Dylan was invited as guest of honour but, of course, declined. All the same, hardcore fans have gorged on a wide selection of Dylan-themed films, photo exhibitions, talks and concerts. There is even a “Bob burger” on sale in one of the festival’s main cinemas.
OK so I might get sick of this one after a while, but we’re not blogging for posterity here. Chairlift are yet another band from Brooklyn (though originally from Boulder), and their debut album, “Does You Inspire You”, is another record that’s making me rethink my long-nurtured antipathy towards ‘80s revivalism.
A long time ago, one of my old NME colleagues described a pretty rackety record – approvingly, I should say – as sounding like “a flight of stairs falling down a flight of stairs.” That phrase came back to me this morning when I put on the debut Abe Vigoda album for the first time in a while.
When Klaus Dinger died a few months ago, I mentioned in an obit here that I had an unpublished interview with Dinger and Michael Rother, from when they briefly reunited to promote the Neu! reissues in 2000.
Not much time to muck about this morning (not least because the test match starts again in half an hour). So here’s the playlist of stuff that has graced the Uncut stereo over the past couple of days. One of those weeks, I should say, where a mention on the playlist really doesn’t automatically equate with an endorsement. . .
Back in 1996, the last time I saw Lou Reed, I remember making a mental note at the end of the show, to remember to never go and see him again. It wasn’t so much his legendary tetchiness, although that was well to the fore, as a glowering Lou shot irritated, grouchy-headmaster daggers at the band around him while they played, and maintained a stony silence between songs, cracked only for a brief tirade about something a journalist had said to annoy him earlier.
I was writing, not for the first time, about Howlin Rain the other week, and admitted that my preoccupation with the band had a certain stalkerish intensity. As I begin yet another blog about James Blackshaw, a London-based guitarist and so on, it strikes me that my prosletyzing on his behalf might be somehow detrimental to his career: a random google of his name would probably bring up this great weight of waffle from me, so hyperbolic that some might suspect we must be related.
