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A snoozefest. Zzzzzzzzz. Pretty bloody boring – just a few of the predictions about Sigur Ros’s Latitude headline set from some of my colleagues and friends this afternoon. I have to admit that, after seeing Metronomy’s dancey geek-pop about half an hour before, the prospect of a bunch of deathly slow ethereal meanderings sung in a foreign language (or, of course, a completely made-up language) didn’t seem like the most appealing prospect.

Guy Garvey and co provide festival's most rousing show

While John seems to have found his Latitude highlight, I've got to say I've found mine, too. Nicholas Parsons, come on down. Oh, and Sheffield's finest enjoy a Man Balancing Ball On His Head race down at the lake.

As the clouds gather, we’re readying ourselves for a weekend at Latitude. One more reminder that an extensive Uncut team will be blogging there non-stop from tomorrow morning. I’ll be vacating Wild Mercury Sound for the duration, and working on our special Latitude blog, where I imagine I’ll be covering Joanna Newsom, Elbow, Julian Cope, Michael Nyman, Wild Beasts and the children’s play area, amongst other things. Should be fun.

The night before Pete Doherty plays a sold-out solo concert in the plush splendour of the Royal Albert Hall, we find his former Babyshambles bandmate, guitarist Patrick Walden, getting ready for a gig with his new band, Big Dave, in a small tacky room above a bar called Catch 22 in Shoreditch.

I got a great email the other week from Jon Dale, Uncut’s man in Australia and one of our most diligent hunters of the esoteric. Our subsequent correspondence turned into a bit of a squabble about cassette tapes, of all things: Jon is a fan, as you can see from his excellent blog; I think there’s something rather elitist about disseminating new music on a virtually obsolete format. But I have to let that one go.

The concert film as political statement

At first glance, it might seem strange to find Shane Meadows shooting a “legacy project” recording Eurostar’s move from Waterloo to St Pancras. Meadows, after all, is best known for a raft of movies that’ve chronicled suburban working class life in and around his native Nottingham. He’s hardly, you’d think, the obvious candidate to shoot a promo film intended to, ah, push the boundaries of brand communications. And for a company whose most memorable contribution to advertising featured Kylie skipping gaily round Paris.

Raconteurs frontman sets the record straight on his hometown

It begins with a flutter of guitar, a dusting of cymbals. Then a female, faintly ethereal vocal arrives, accompanied by bells. At first, it sounds like she might be distant kin to the acid folk scene which still percolates away in the US; there’s a very vague resemblance to Meg Baird and Espers, perhaps. But then again, she’s not singing in English, and there’s something discreetly exotic about the song, “Dawn Over The Clouds”.