Bag

This is London: Shane Meadows lightens up and heads down South

The watercooler moments of the Reading Festival. If there was a watercooler, and not just a lot of beer

As the Reading Festival moves into its second day, you wouldn't be wrong to expect a hint of nostalgia in the air. Yesterday, after all, there was heavy rock, and the return of old favourites Rage Against The Machine. On Sunday, there will be the return of the reassuringly sturdy Metallica, and with them, yet more heavy rock.

The planet’s drollest songwriter shakes hands with his twentysomething self

Second solo album is due on September 22

I received an email a while back from an Uncut writer who’d just played “Acid Tongue” for the first time. “I can reveal that on this Jenny Lewis,” they wrote, “her father gets it in the neck, in the way her mother got it in the neck last time... pretty good.”

Ladytron, Morcheeba and even breakfast in bed promised at inaugural festival

Latest findings from the pan-European pop boffins

Occasionally, I think we do records a bit of a disservice by striving so hard to contextualise them. This occurred to me again over the weekend, when I was listening to Stereolab’s 11th (or ninth, it’s hard to count for sure, as Stephen Troussé points out in his perceptive review in the current Uncut) album, “Chemical Chords”.

Welcome to Waitsville. A place where bad jokes are good, Vaudeville never died, and the talk is of smoking monkeys, weasels and the mating habits of the preying mantis.