It’s been a bit quiet on the blog for a while – apologies, but I’ve been embargoed from writing about a couple of films I’ve seen recently. Anyway, one film I have seen, which I am allowed to write about, is Wes Anderson’s latest, Fantastic Mr Fox. Fox is a marvellous stop-motion adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, and Anderson very much claims it for himself. Anyone expecting his to go way off-message will be, I hope, pleasantly surprised to learn that it is definitely a Wes Anderson film – except one with puppets, that is. I’m going to save my powder on this, as I’ve just reviewed it for a forthcoming issue of UNCUT. But it has made me think: with Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox and Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are due later in the year, are we on the cusp of a sea-change in the way children’s films are made? Of course, Pixar and DreamWorks have pretty much led the way in terms of how children’s films have been made over the last decade. That is to say, they’ve functioned on two levels: state of the art animation for the kids and A-list acting cast and jokes for the grow-d-ups. But as undeniably good fun as Shrek, Finding Nemo, Toy Story and the rest of them are, they all broadly suffer (perhaps inevitably) from the Disneyfication of childhood. It’s a condition that’s been around since the days of Bambi and Dumbo – even a film as complex and grim as WALL-E is ameliorated by the big-eyed cutesiness of WALL-E himself. So, you might wonder, what will Anderson and Jonze achieve with their respective films? I’d like to think they’re the kind of directors who’d be ready to tackle head on the traumas and complexities of growing up without covering it over with a bland, generic saccharine finish. Anderson’s film is full of typically droll one-liners and idiosyncratic characters; even the Fox’s cub, Ash, is far away from the usual portrayal of child characters in this kind of film. He is sarky, neurotic, and angry – rather like, you might think, a child of a certain age would be in real life. Meanwhile, the trailers for Jonze’s film hints at some kind of family dysfunction for the story’s boy hero, Max; and the subsequent liberation he experiences when cavorting among the Wild Things. “This is your world,” explains Wild Thing Carol (James Gandolfini) – and what young boy doesn’t dream of having a world all of his own to rule? You’d hope most kids probably wouldn’t have much of a problem with either film. Indeed, you’d hope they’d willingly embrace these strange new takes on their bedtime reading. It strikes me, the people most likely to be concerned about either film are the studios – who presumably can watch their third-party merchandise franchises go up in smoke the minute they hear, say, Gandolfini’s broad Noo Joisey accent voicing a potential soft toy hit. Equally, what must the studio have thought when Jonze suggested that the soundtrack for ...Wild Things be done by Karen O, singer with New York’s finest alt-disco punkers, Yeah Yeah Yeahs? But I’m not sure, on reflection, whether these films are even meant for children. They might be based on children’s books, sure – but I suspect there’s as many adults keen to see new films from Anderson and Jonze regardless of what subjects they cover.

There’s an interesting snippet in the next issue of Uncut, when the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne talks about Portishead’s “Third”. “It got under my skin,” he says. “From the standpoint of being in a band, they do some fun production things, it’s pretty inspiring. I liked how they embraced more stranger elements of prog-rock, and Silver Apples-influenced drum loops and things like that.” Re-reading this quote the other day, it helped crystallise a few ideas I’d been having about the new Flaming Lips album, “Embryonic”, and also about the self-titled debut album by Beak>, a new group featuring Portishead’s Geoff Barrow. Both “Beak>” and “Embryonic” are plainly rooted in a very loose, jamming aesthetic, and if “Third” betrayed a preoccupation with Krautrock and The Silver Apples, it has nothing on Barrow’s work here with Billy Fuller and Matt Williams (two more Bristol musicians, from Fuzz Against Junk and Team Brick respectively, acts in Barrow’s Invada stable who’ve never made much of an impact on me, to be honest). The stated design of “Beak>” seems to involve 12 days of writing and recording last January, with all tracks “recorded live in one room with no overdubs or repair”. The results involve lots of pleasantly skewed old synths, rackety beats much indebted to Can and early Kraftwerk (I’m thinking “Ruckzuck”, specifically), and an often dank atmosphere, increased by one of the band occasionally moaning in the distance and, consequently, recalling the stentorian misery of Ian Curtis; “I Know” does this especially effectively, while being a rich Silver Apples nod, too. Plenty more of the influences which threaded through “Third” are pushed right to the fore on “Beak>”, with Barrow clearly unencumbered by the vaguely orthodox songforms that Portishead still favour. “Ham Green” showcases his love of booming, staccato, stoner doom, while the uncharacteristically pretty “Battery Point” is reminiscent of someone like Mogwai’s more rippling, pastoral moments. The overall feel is very off-the-cuff, and consequently it can wander off on some slightly lost trajectories from time to time. But the spontaneity and rough-and-ready nature of the whole operation also feels like a necessary palliative to Portishead’s somewhat lengthier – tortured, perhaps – working practises. That’s a feeling which pervades the Flaming Lips’ “Embryonic”, too. If their recent albums have been, for the most part, over-wrought in a good way, “Embryonic”, according to Coyne, was conceived as a double album as a means of forcing the band to become more free and uninhibited. “I believe I was stuck thinking of us as being a group of reckless, sloppy freaks,” he says in some characteristically illuminating press notes, “and that, if we weren’t constantly trying to be more disciplined or more refined or more together, maybe our creative luck would elude us.” “Embryonic”, then, is a bunch of generally untethered jams, again much in thrall to Can, The Silver Apples and so on, as well as a fair bit of electric-period Miles Davis. Again, as with Beak>, it feels like something the band absolutely needed to do, to escape from a certain closed perspective. But while Beak> very much seems to be an end in itself, there’s something about “Embryonic” that doesn’t quite gel. As the title implies, it has an air of being a work in progress rather than a completed action. Of course, that can make for some very exciting and liberating music, and there are points amidst these 18 tracks where you sense the Lips have intuitively stumbled on something rather impressive: the glissandos and skronk of “Aquarius Sabotage”, say, where they manage to imbue general freeform chaos with the grandeur of their finest latterday records; the frail, stuttering guitar solo on “Powerless” that sounds like an attempt at Sonny Sharrock, possibly; the passage in “The Ego’s Last Stand” which drives rather than drifts, and the similarly pulsating “Silver Trembling Hands”. But then again, there are plenty of other points where the pieces sound less dynamic and exploratory, more straightforwardly unfinished (“Your Bats”, playing now, for instance). It’s frustrating, not least because it suggests that the Flaming Lips, nowadays, might be more effective if they erred on the side of conservatism: that perhaps their greatest strengths are being able to take semi-outré psychedelic ideas and transform into songs saturated with melody, ambitionn and accessibility. Though it galls me to admit it, I might like “Embryonic” more if they’d worked on these tracks more and made them more conventional. A lot to absorb, though, and it’s a record that demands to be played again and again, even when it’s not totally working.

There were so many people packed last night into the Scala to see Okkervil River that if I’d arrived any later, I probably would have had to watch the show from across the street, on the concourse of King’s Cross Station. As it is, by the time the band came on to a throaty roar from a rowdy crowd, I’m pinned by a press of bodies to a wall at the back for much of what follows, all of which is great. They get off to a surprisingly subdued start, though, I should tell you that. The sound’s a little too low, not the crisp wallop a song like “A Hand To Take Hold Of The Scene” surely demands. There are niggling technical problems on more than a few subsequent occasions, in fact, which Will Sheff copes with admirably, his exasperation showing through only in flashes when some people in his position may have thrown a complete hissy fit or been tempted to storm off in an attention-seeking strop. It’s unfortunate, though, that the one song that’s most effected is usually the show-stopping “John Allyn Smith Sails” with its now-famous – among Okkervil fans, anyway – appropriation of “Sloop John B”. It starts fantastically, with Sheff’s vivid spoken description, a kind of speed rap over frantically strummed guitar, of the song’s subject, the great American poet John Berryman, walking through a college campus to the bridge in Minneapolis from which he jumped to his death (Craig Finn tells the same story in The Hold Steady’s “Stuck Between Stations”). Unfortunately, the sight of guitarist Lauren Gurgiolo and a harassed technician trying to get Lauren’s guitar to work and in the process wrapping themselves up in endless lengths of leads and wires is, while a moment of high comedy, something of a distraction for both the rest of the band and at least one member of the audience, namely me. It’s quickly forgotten, though, in all the surrounding excitement and great music. Most of the set’s taken from the band’s last two albums, The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins and includes early on a very sharp version of the venomous “Singer Songwriter”, a lovely, drifting “Girl In Port” and a riotous “Pop Lie”. As it did last year at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, Will’s mostly solo version of “A Stone”, from Black Sheep Boy, that brings the place to an absolute standstill, everyone for a moment hushed, taking a moment to recover when finally, after what seems like at least 10 minutes, it’s over, some lovely playing by Gurgiolo taking it out. The next 30 minutes or so are a non-stop blast, with “Lost Coastlines” followed by “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe” and, inevitably, “Unless It’s Kicks”, which ends with Sheff doing his hillbilly preacher thing – “Show me your hands!” – and generally looking wild and transported. We’re by now at that point in the show where people are shouting out for songs they’re afraid won’t otherwise get played – a chap a few feet away from me makes me laugh out loud when after much nervous throat-clearing finally pipes up with a request for the cheerfully-titled “The War Criminal Rises And Speaks”. In the evnt, we get the witty “Plus Ones”, a beautiful “Last Love Song For Now”, from The Black Sheep Boy Appendix and the whole thing ends with the Appalachian hymnal of “Westfall” with Guglio on trilling mandolin and everyone coming on like one of The Carter Family.

I mentioned yesterday’s that I was just off to see The Hold Steady at the Islington Academy and I duly went and they were, as ever, duly brilliant – urgent, incendiary, delirious, a symphonic juggernaut, a hurtling thing, a wholly rousing noise. This was where a few years ago, they made their London debut, to a room Craig Finn remembers was so empty he’s able to refer to members of that sparse audience by name. Tonight, the Academy’s small space is crammed, a heaving howling mob in boisterous mood waiting impatiently for the band when I get there, getting rowdier by the moment. This is a warm-up show for their headlining appearance this weekend at the End Of The Road festival, a rare chance these days to see The Hold Steady in the kind of ‘intimate’ environment where for years they toiled, honing their musical craft to its current perfection. Everyone I speak to feels lucky to be here, as do the band themselves, their career over the last couple of years taking off in ways they seem still surprised by. You might think by now that Finn’s inclination towards public humility, his much-expressed gratitude to people for buying the band’s records, turning up in numbers to their shows, would have worn a bit thin, become something of a performance in itself. It hasn’t, because he’s one of those people who seem incapable of playing the crowd with any hint of cynicism. If he tells us that what The Hold Steady have become rescued him from the dead-end his life was looking at, the dream he had that has come riotously true, we believe him, unquestioningly. He can be hammy, no doubt about it, but cheerfully so. And it’s something that will probably always make you want to take his side and cheer him on. He seems, no less than the rest of the band, to be so happy to be where he is you’re just glad for him, pleased for them. It’s a kind of shared euphoria that makes everyone feel good going on great, a collective experience it’s a thrill, generally, to be part of. Any thought that tonight would be the equivalent of someone doing cautious warm-up exercises before a big race, or a light sparring session before a big fight, nothing too strenuous, in other words, the real work to come this weekend in Dorset, is made to seem ridiculous from the off. They start, explosively, with “Constructive Summer”, “Hot Soft Light” and “Magazines”, one detonation after another, with more to come, the Academy’s roof already blown off, Tad Kubler’s guitar solos doing most of the damage. What else do they play? “Sequestered In Memphis” arrives early, about five songs in, and its syncopated mayhem segues breathlessly into “The Swish”, “Massive Nights” coming up on the rail behind it. “Party Pit”, “Same Kooks”, “Stevie Nix”, “You Can Make Him Like You”, “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” aren’t far behind, “Stay Positive” and “Slapped Actress”, the audience hoarse from singing by then, taking the set across the finishing line at a furious gallop. Along the way, there are four new numbers, still being worked up, you suspect, but already sounding in great shape, hearing them for the first time stirring an eager anticipation for the next album. Working titles are “Heaven Is Whenever”, “Going On A Hike”, “Separate Vacations”, “Our Whole Lives” and there are hints in them, here and there, of things from the last album like “Navy Sheets” and “Yeah Sapphire”, also on “Our Whole Lives” moments that make me think of the dark drift of something like “Both Crosses”. It’s played tonight as the second of three encores, book-ended by an incandescent “First Night” and a tumultuous “Killer Parties”. “We’re The Hold Steady and we fucking love you,” Finn fairly yells at the end and he can tell by the cheers that come back at him and all the stomping and yelling and so on that the feeling’s more than mutual.

As our recent Uncut playlists probably make clear, we’ve been happily overwhelmed by a glut of Big Star-related material over the past few weeks, beginning of course with the hefty “Keep An Eye On The Sky” boxset. On top of that, there seem to be separately released new versions of the first two albums plus, imminently, an expanded edition of Chris Bell’s “I Am The Cosmos”. My lengthy mag review of the Big Star boxset has just appeared on the Uncut website and, since I’m a bit rushed finishing the next issue to file a proper blog today, can I offer this up as something to read instead? Sorry to cheat with this one. I don’t seem to have written that much about Bell in the review, and from his solo album only “You And Your Sister” and “I Am The Cosmos” itself make the tracklisting for “Keep An Eye On The Sky”. Revisiting it the other day got me thinking, though, about how it arguably might be ageing better than “Third/Sister Lovers”, and how the traditional focus on those two aforementioned tracks sometimes obscures the strength of the whole album; “Better Save Yourself”, for instance, is a pretty extraordinary thing.