Radiohead

It's a rapid download-only thing from Kele and chums

A few weeks back, while grappling with the earthshattering business of a new Coldplay album, I kicked off a discussion about Brian Eno’s recent track record. I was confounded by his taste for generally working with giant and, to my ears, fundamentally quite conservative bands. After literally decades of hitching his wagon to the likes of Coldplay, U2 and, lest we forget, James, I found it fascinating that Eno still retained a profound avant-garde cachet. Have we been letting him get away with a lot of mediocre music, just because he talks cleverly about it?

Just back from the Mercury Prize shortlist announcement which, as you might imagine, was a hotbed of hype and low-level grumbling about the 12 nominations. I was doing some media-slag punditry, a lot of which revolved around the high-profile absentees: Coldplay, Duffy, The Ting Tings, Kate Nash and the one which actually annoyed me, Portishead. But before I start ranting, here’s the shortlist if you haven’t seen it yet:

Plus Radiohead, Elbow and Plant and Krauss make the 2008 shortlist

I remember seeing dEUS at their UK 'comeback' show at London's ICA around the time of the excellent 'Pocket Revolution' album, the band's four year hiatus having not dented the furious, urgent, wonderfully fuzzy live experience that Belgium's biggest musical export can create. Tom Barman and Klaas Janzoons' group are certainly one of the more exciting 'underground' bands to be playing on Latitude's main stage this year.

See the video - Plus WIN the chance to live the ‘Rock Band’ dream in Ibiza!

It’s easy to lose track of actual release dates up here in the ivory tower, but I believe tomorrow is the day that Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” finally comes out. Hence, I guess, the exponential ramping-up of all the furrowed-brow pontificating that seems to be going on about the band all over the internet today, provoked in many places by Andy Gill’s 2,000-word assassination of the band in this morning’s copy of The Independent.

So this is what we’ve played thus far this week: a glut of hip-hop; a few selections from the private collections of John Robinson and Mark Bentley; a Walter Becker solo album that doesn’t quite cut it next to all those wonderful Steely Dan and Donald Fagen records; and a Radiohead cover of Portishead, which makes this an uncharacteristically prophetic blog.

Brian Eno adds sheen to swooning fourth

Squeeze gents win Outstanding Contribution To British Music at Ivor Novello Awards