To get to the Clyde Auditorium - the 3,000-seat venue crouched on the riverbank beside the SECC, which Glaswegians only ever refer to as The Armadillo - you have to traverse a long, wormy, weather-beaten covered walkway that bridges a motorway.
A lot of things can happen when you watch The Necks, the magnificent Australian improvising trio, play live. Sometimes, you can become fixated on prosaic details: how does Tony Buck’s left hand keep vibrating that shaker onto his drumkit at such an ecstatic velocity for so long, for instance? Do they have hidden clocks that allow them to move so elegantly to a conclusion without appearing to even acknowledge each other’s presence, let alone look at one another? Will unzipping my coat be an unacceptably noisy intervention?
As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
With Kings Of Leon’s sixth album, Mechanical Bull, set for release on September 23, we thought it would be time to take a trip through the archives into November 2010 (Take 162), when we joined the Followill clan on the road in America – we hear of uncanny robberies, an army of Kings lookalikes, whiskey-fuelled anxieties and a new power struggle within this most volatile of bands. Do they want to be rootsy outlaws or modern rock superstars? Words: Jaan Uhelszki
I spent a chunk of the weekend reading Bad Monkey, the new novel by Carl Hiaasen - one America's great crime writers. After a rather fallow period recently, the book feels very much like Hiaasen is back to full strength.
The cover image of Promised Land Sound’s debut album, an old Nashville street map, clearly asserts the geographic and aesthetic loyalties of Sean Thompson, Joey Scala, Evan Scala and Ricardo Alesio, and their press biog has the requisite classy endorsement from local grandee Jack White's Third Man Records.
