Bag

I was listening to some generally unfunny show on Radio 4 last week, when some comedian who should really remain nameless – but whose uselessness compels me to identify him as Mitch Benn – sang a song, notionally in the style of David Bowie, on the subject of, if memory serves, farting in space.

The first name is out of the bag for the most idyllic festival of the Summer

I have to admit to a certain amount of anxiety tonight. It’s not just the weather, which is, of course, rotten, the wind howling like it’s fit to tear chunks from rooftops from miles around.

The baggy boys join Muse and Paul Weller at Albert Hall

Neil Young Hammersmith Apollo Thursday, March 6 2008 The last time I saw Neil Young at the Apollo was in 2003, when he was touring to promote his ecological country rock opera, Greendale, still unreleased at the time, which meant no one had heard any of the songs. The unfamiliarity of what he then played provoked among the audience a certain restlessness that quickly gave way to collective dismay when it dawned on them that he wasn’t going to play merely a selection of songs from the record, but the album in what turned out to be its indigestible entirety.

Malta to see three-day music festival start this June

Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip go back to the future

"Good to see you up there Stevie" yells a fan from the crowd. "Well, it's better than the alternative" snarls Steve Earle back. This is how the great Americana survivor began his sold-out show in London Monday night. Singing stories about war, drug-taking and alcoholism, Earle has the look and tone of someone who has obviously stared oblivion in the face and lived to tell the tale. Albeit in a semi-cautionary, I've-been-married-seven-times and I still have to go to AA and NA, but I've bagged two Grammys and a bit-part on The Wire kinda way.

Here's the second report from this year's Berlin Film Festival by our man in the lederhosen, Stephen Dalton... It’s the end of a bitingly cold weekend here in Berlin, where the 2008 Berlinale Film Festival has just closed its doors for another year. Among the glittering gongs handed out at Saturday’s prize-giving ceremony was a special Silver Bear honouring Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood for his soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s THERE WILL BE BLOOD. A fitting finale to a film festival where rock stars have hogged the headlines.

Improbably, they find a way to get better than ever