Allah-las

As many of you will have seen by now, the current issue of Uncut features our Top 75 albums of 2012 and, as usual, there’s been a fair amount of comment online about the list. I’m going to try not to be too defensive about this, but as the person who compiled the list, I thought it might be useful to post a few notes that’ll hopefully clarify one or two issues that have been raised.

The new issue of Uncut, out today, features Bruce Springsteen, The Black Keys, Bryan Ferry and the Uncut review of 2012. Bruce Springsteen is on the cover, and inside we catch up with The Boss live in Pittsburgh and tell the story of his incredible year – including Wrecking Ball, his longest ever show and that cut-off Paul McCartney duet…

This is the last Uncut of 2012, rather unbelievably. It barely seems 12 months since I sat down to write the column that introduced our final issue of 2011. How much faster can time go by?

That pretending-not-to-be-annoyed-by-the-Mercurys morning of the year. But as way of distraction, here’s this week’s rather late office playlist.

Allan’s off today – something about a cat in the well, I think – so he’s asked me to write this week’s newsletter blog. It’s not an especially difficult task seeing as a new issue of Uncut goes on sale this week. You might have already caught some of our recent news stories on www.www.uncut.co.uk, in which case you’ll already know that our cover stars this month are the Rolling Stones.

The new issue of Uncut, out today (October 23), features The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, Donald Fagen and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. The Stones are on the cover, and inside, Mick Jagger talks to us about the band’s new film, Crossfire Hurricane, their two new songs, and the future of the band. The story of the group’s groundbreaking, debauched 1972 tour of the US in support of Exile On Main St is also told by the people who were there on the inside.

I’ve not always had much time for the cult of Brian Eno, and for a lot of the music he’s been involved with in the last 20 or 30 years (I used this piece about Blues Control & Laraaji’s wonderful record to take a few swipes).

A weirdly deserted Uncut office today, so it falls on me to break off from my usual arduous routine - tooling around on Twitter, listening to Hiss Golden Messenger bootlegs, wondering what time the cricket starts – and write this week’s newsletter blog.

Reading Twitter – as I do, too much – it seems as if most people I follow are in some way shocked and amused by the belated discovery that Bob Dylan has got a, yes, funny voice.

A good week, in that I wrote a couple of new blogs about the Allah-Las and Dan Deacon albums, finally tracked down a copy of “Meet “Mississippi” Charles Bevel”, and heard the Baird Sisters’ beautiful record (one of them is Meg Baird from Espers) and Four Tet’s “Pink” comp.