Welcome to our first report from this year's Cannes Film Festival, featuring Clint Eastwood, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski... Cannes, this year as ever, is about reputations. Some live up, others don't, but in 2008 the big directors are hanging onto their mantle while the arthouse darlings are slipping. Towering over the festival this year, Clint Eastwood is easily in the former camp, bringing a fantastic new film, Changeling (or is it The Exchange? The title keeps, ahem, changing), that proves that, at 78, Eastwood is effortlessly maintaining the rich twilight of an already magnificent career. Starring Angelina Jolie, it's a period drama set in LA, 1928, with Jolie as a telephone exchange manager bringing up her son alone. After unexpectedly called into the office, she leaves her son at home, returning later to find him gone. Five months later, the boy is traced by the police and the two are reunited, but the mother isn't so sure they're got the right kid. Nonsense, say the LAPD, and if that sentence makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, you're in for a treat. Riffing on issues of corruption and heavy-handed police procedures that have informed Chinatown and LA Confidential, Changeling is a modern Hollywood masterpiece, a stupendous compendium weaving all the classic genres – crime thriller, neo-noir, courtroom drama – that US cinema serves best, boasting an amazing lead performance by Jolie. John Malkovich is solid, too, as the anti-LAPD preacher who supports her one-woman crusade. But the best thing about Eastwood's latest is its constant ability to surprise. Oscars surely beckon, and it deserves them. After all, No Country For Old Men was here in competition last year and look what happened there. Another director getting his umpteenth wind is Woody Allen, who shocked the Croisette by following the dreadful Cassandra's Dream with the wonderful Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Scarlett Johannson and Rebecca Hall play two Americans on vacation in Spain, but their thunder is quickly stolen by Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz as a bohemian painter and his crazy ex-wife. It's not trad Woody, in terms of wit and irony, but it is wistful, heartfelt and dizzyingly sexy, culminating in a coy lesbian scene between Scarlett and Cruz that has already appeared in grainy frame-grabs in shady newspapers all over the world. But this festival hasn't simply been about the defending of good reps. Tyson, a wonderful doc by James Toback, shows the demonised boxer defending his media image as a vicious thug, rapist and jailbird. While these things are, to varying degrees, true, the former world heavyweight champion emerges as a sympathetic if not entirely likeable figure, plagued by demons and cursed with a frustrated intellect that punches way below the weight of his poetic soul. Another bad guy given the spotlight treatment is Roman Polanski in Wanted And Desired, a sometimes brilliant but, like its subject, sometimes maddeningly contradictory study of the diminutive Polish film maker. Using fabulous archive footage, it goes a little soft on Polanski's unrepentant attitude, but nevertheless reveals some startling truths about the legal madness that inspired him to skip town before sentencing after pleading guilty to statutory rape of a thirteen year old girl. Needless to say, Polanski isn't in the film or in town for its screening, but it's a measure of this fine, if low-key festival, that his presence isn't missed. We'll be back for a final report when the festival closes.

“NEW HARMONY ON AN AWESOME SCALE,” announces Will Oldham on “Missing One”. Somewhere in the shadows, there’s a singer called Ashley Webber playing a discreet Emmylou to his Gram, the latest harmonious foil chosen to track his tremulous voice. Oldham’s voice is much less wayward than it was on the Palace and early Bonnie “Prince” Billy records, of course, but it’s strange how he’s recently found it useful to match his voice against another: on “The Letting Go”, Dawn McCarthy from Faun Fables; on last year’s overlooked covers set, “Ask Forgiveness”, Meg Baird from Espers. Ashley Webber is an interesting recruit, though, because I can’t recall hearing much of her singing previously. Webber figures as part of the extended line-up – on keyboards, if memory serves? - of the Pink Mountaintops, Stephen McBean’s Velvetsy spin-off from Black Mountain. It transpires, though, that Webber’s voice – stirring, fulsome, warmly forlorn – is uncannily similar to that of her sister, Amber, who sings with Black Mountain and yet another of that band’s multiple worthwhile offshoots, Lightning Dust. “So Everyone”, the third song on “Lie Down In The Light”, begins strikingly like a Lightning Dust song, Ashley Webber’s voice so starkly exposed and windswept. In general, though, the album represents a further humanising, it seems, of the Bonnie Billy character. Where once it was easier to stereotype Oldham’s stage persona, however much it seemed in constant flux, as something of a hillbilly visionary, possibly with blood on his hands, now he seems a much more reliable and approachable figure, preoccupied with the kinder possibilities of human experience. The temptation, of course, is to assume that this soft-singing man who, in the wonderful “Other’s Gain”, counsels, “Keep your loved ones near” is somehow the ‘real’ Will Oldham. But the realities of this actor, singer-cinematographer, ever-evasive game-player are so obfuscated, it seems unlikely to be so straightforward. After all, 15-odd years of Oldham’s absorbing music have taught us, perhaps better than any other artist of that period, that authenticity has nothing to do with the emotional potency of a song. So here we are, with Oldham following the lighter path that he hinted at on “I’m Lovin’ The Street”, the sole original song on “Ask Forgiveness”. Only the opening track here, “Easy Does It”, approaches that song for actual jauntiness There’s a playful spring in his step as he picks his way through the fiddle and harmonies, past a rollicking Nashville piano part from Tony Crow (Lambchop, Silver Jews and so on) that echoes the work done by Hargus Robbins on “Greatest Palace Music”. The Oldham album it reminds me most of, however, is “Ease Down The Road”, one of the first times he showed a warmth and adopted a more leisurely gait. “Lie Down In The Light” is not an immediate album: I received it a week ago (I think it’s actually on sale now), and it’s only this morning, really, that the strength of songs like “Other’s Gain” and “Willow Trees Bend” have become apparent. After so long, I feel I sometimes take Oldham’s stunning consistency, a consistency that endures even while he shuffles his collaborators so frequently and quests for new challenges, for granted. But this is a lovely record, and one I’ll revisit.

To the Vortex at midnight. Considering it’s still only March, I’ve seen some pretty remarkable gigs this year: Portishead, Vampire Weekend and the mighty Raconteurs last week; Peter Walker’s flamenco/raga masterclass; Neil Young soloing endlessly into the full glare of a Klieg light, and so on. The full story is at my daily blog over here.

To the Vortex at midnight. Considering it’s still only May, I’ve seen some pretty remarkable gigs this year: Portishead, Vampire Weekend and the mighty Raconteurs last week; Peter Walker’s flamenco/raga masterclass; Neil Young soloing endlessly into the full glare of a Klieg light, and so on. Last night, though, was one of the best yet. The Necks, as I’ve mentioned before, are a piano/double bass/drums trio from Australia. Apparently, their music is completely improvised: they arrive onstage, start playing, and work their way to some kind of conclusion about an hour later. Here, they’re playing the Vortex jazz club in Dalston. One show, in the evening, features two sets, and was sold out ages ago. This one begins at midnight, and features just one traditionally elongated, utterly absorbing piece. It begins, not atypically, with a genteel, romantic solo flurry from the pianist, Chris Abrahams, a player who hovers delicately somewhere between, very roughly, Alice Coltrane and Steve Reich. Gradually – well, comparatively rapidly by their measured standards – the Necks pick up speed and intensity. Tony Buck has a cosmic cluster of bells out of sight behind his drumkit, and is meticulously working at his snare with a scrubbing brush. Lloyd Swanton stands with his eyes closed, seemingly meditating on every nuance of the music, waiting to make his discreet entry. When he does, he sways along with his double bass, holding it like a sailor clinging to the mast in a storm. Soon – after maybe ten minutes, though I’m not looking at my watch to verify –the music has become full and intense, with great pointillist clusters of piano notes and a relentless flutter of cymbal and snare and bells which remind me of the Boredoms circa “Seadrum”. My sketchy knowledge of jazz means the rock references come easier to me, so there’s something of Can here, too, and Swanton’s frantic bowing at his bass adds a thickness that’s oddly reminiscent of Sonic Youth, something like “Cross The Breeze”, perhaps. What they create here – without ever looking at each other, weirdly – isn’t something spacious and near-ambient like “Townsville” or “Mosquito”, but instead a kind of sombre rapture. It’s extraordinary, and so compelling that I find myself, a gauche non-musician, wondering how the hell they do it. Do they use rehearsed themes as a springboard? Do they try and surprise each other – I suspect not, since unlike some other free music, what the Necks do is distinctly harmonious rather than competitive. And how does this piece – a relatively pithy 45 minutes, it turns out – fit in with the two they played earlier? One of the many joys of The Necks is learning their minute, exquisite variations, while not being entirely aware of the full picture. What is the full extent of their range? How do they evolve and fluctuate? And how tired must they be at the end of the evening? Walking to the bus stop, a fox crosses my path and walks slowly across Kingsland Road, stops, looks, cocks its leg against a lamp-post, and pads elegantly down Sandringham Road. I wonder if it does that every night, two or three times, too?

A strange moment of the stars aligning, possibly by accident, towards the end of last week, when the remastered My Bloody Valentine reissues turned up in the Uncut office in the same post as Kevin Shields’ collaboration with Patti Smith, “The Coral Sea”. You wait x amount of years for one dreamrock charabanc to arrive, then three arrive, and so on. . . I can’t comment on the MBV remasters yet, since my attempts to parse the nuances of the two different versions of “Loveless” took place at distortion and speed on the A1, and involved my wife and I saying, “I think that bit’s different”, and “there’s a bit more high end” as if we knew what we were talking about. I have, though, given “The Coral Sea” a couple of listens now. It’s a 2CD set, featuring two live recordings of the same spoken-word piece plus accompaniment. The first dates from June 22, 2005, the second from September 12, 2006. Both took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, just down the river from here. Forgetting the auspicious return of Shields for a moment, it strikes me immediately that this is the best record that Patti Smith has been involved in since 1996’s “Gone Again”, certainly hugely preferable to “Twelve”, last year’s creaky set of cover versions. “The Coral Sea” showcases Smith the poet, privileging Rimbaud rather than Dylan or Keith, reading her epic elegy for Robert Mapplethorpe in that stern, declamatory style that has given her best records such romantic gravity. Of course, you may find Smith in this mode, unrelentingly, for an hour at a time, something of a stretch. And sure, there are some weaker, over-wrought passages – understandable, I guess, in such a lengthy piece. But for anyone who’s ever been seduced by the fierce, noble rhythm of her voice, “The Coral Sea” is compelling, not least because her resolve and focus gels so gracefully with Shields’ innately vague, impressionistic musical approach. For someone who mythically spends so long finessing his music, Shields proves to be a superb improviser here, tracking the minute shifts in Smith’s tone and mood. On the first version, Smith takes the poem fairly slowly, with a mystical, incantatory roll. At first, Shields is so discreet as to be virtually elusive, adding hints of his trademark glide, even something that actively resembles the sound of a conventional guitar. It’s beautifully subtle, slowly peaking and fading back into the background as the poem unravels. Towards the end, Smith reaches a climax, demanding “What is the point?” over and over again, and Shields responds accordingly, with great clangorous intensity. On the second version, this point in the poem is much less pronounced. The overall mood, seemingly dictated by Smith, is more urgent and strident, with a near-constant suggestion of anger in her tone. Shields’ playing is correspondingly more propulsive, consisting chiefly of looming loops, somewhat more threatening than the transporting textures of version one. I suspect that first version will be the one I return to most often. Sacreligious it may be to admit it, though, but I wish there were two further CDs in the set, with just Shields’ music detached from the context of Smith’s performance. Maybe those will turn up in 2025, if Shields can get the mix right. . .