Humble pie

Thanks for all your responses to the Raconteurs and REM blogs yesterday. I'm glad I wasn't the only one to feel underwhelmed by the REM Albert Hall show.

I’ve just got off the phone with BBC Radio Kent who, in the preamble to this Sunday’s Academy Awards, were asking me, among other things, for my thoughts on who might win in the Best Song category.

One of the first festivals I covered not long after joining Melody Maker in 1974 was in Buxton, a bleak outpost on the Yorkshire Moors, headlined by Rod Stewart and The Faces, as they were increasingly billed after the departure of Ronnie Lane and not long before Rod himself legged it to LA and a subsequent solo career of great success if variable artistic merit.

“Are you all sitting comftybold two square on your botty?” The acid cockney odyssey on 3 CDs – stereo, mono and a documentary. In a tin, of course.

Slung-together bargain-priced selection

The beginning of a purple patch for country’s pioneering outlaw

A new tribute album underlines the ever-increasing influence of Haruomi Hosono’s 1973 folk-rock outlier Hosono House

To Paris, for a rare meeting with the pioneering chanteuse

Sprawl, swagger, poetry and epics

The Stranglers bassman picks his peachiest tunes: “It's the nearest thing to an orgasm in music”