Volume all star

Watching Spiritualized headline the UNCUT Arena at the end of Latitude day two, with an astonishing set of heavy, psychedelic noise, I’m reminded of the first and the last time I saw Jason Pierce play live.

Predictably, perhaps, the afternoon’s biggest draw – so far, at least – is for Simon Armitage. At 2pm, the Poetry Tent is rammed, with the crowd extending about 20 people deep around the perimeter. One curious passer-by asks my neighbour who’s on. “Simon Armitage,” says the guy standing next to me. “Sorry,” says the passer-by, “I don’t know who he is.” “He’s only the most important poet since Andrew Motion.” “You’ve lost me. Who’s Andrew Motion?” “Obviously,” comes the withering reply, “you never studied GSCE English at the start of the Noughties…”

Wise heads are out in force at Latitude, as always, and we've been eavesdropping on their conversations...

As you can see, plenty of interesting new things have turned up since I last posted a playlist, not least new albums from Jim O’Rourke and, amazingly, Os Mutantes. This week’s problem, though, is the immense distraction of two wonderful-sounding new boxsets from Rhino; one dedicated to Big Star, the other a four-CD set called “LA Nuggets”.

Michael Jackson, Rolling Stones, Beatles, Arctic Monkeys, Latitude

George Harrison, Paul Weller, Gossip, CSN and more!

Epic, inspiring, awkward – the first volume of Young’s multimedia autobiography proves a mirror image of its creator

Plenty of discussion on last week’s Neil Young blog, and also, more fractiously, over at Thrasher’s Wheat, about the value/usefulness/etc of “Archives”.

Driving home from the Leonard Cohen show on Friday night, I looked in my bag for something suitable to put on the car stereo, and settled fairly quickly on the new Fennesz album, “Black Sea”.

So... Was it worth the wait?