Lou Reed at 70 arrives onstage at the Festival Hall to do his bit for Antony Hegarty’s Meltdown programme dressed like a stroppy teenager in a baggy black basketball vest, gold medallions around his neck and what looks like a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He looks frail these days, though tonight slightly less so than last year at the Hammersmith Apollo, and perhaps no wonder when you consider what he’s put his body through over the years before he embraced his current sobriety.
Elbow, Band Of Horses and Hot Chip are among the new additions to the line-up for London's iTunes Festival this year.
Elbow and Bat For Lashes will play together at London's Roundhouse on September 7, while Hot Chip will headline the venue themselves on September 29.
Band Of Horses will support Jack White on September 8.
A few cool things to play and/or download on the playlist this week, kicking off with a couple of free new tunes from the characteristically profligate White Denim, which come highly recommended.
Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan has layed into the way the music industry works, saying it "operates on a dumbing down principle".
The singer, whose band released their new studio album Oceania in June, has said that he believes few bands get to keep their intelligence if they want to be successful, but did name Radiohead as a notable exception.
The shouts begin in earnest around the first encore – most of them are calls for specific songs, accompanied by a smattering of “We love you”s, but the one that raises the biggest cheer is simply: “Where have you been?”
"Tubular Bells" composer Mike Oldfield has admitted he had never heard of Arctic Monkeys or Dizzee Rascal before he performed with them at the Opening Ceremony of the Olympic Games in London last week (July 27).
Speaking to NME, the musician, who performed 1973's "Tubular Bells" alongside a fantasy scene involving famous characters from cinema, confessed that he "doesn't know anything that's currently happening in the music scene".
John Murry first entered Uncut airspace in 2006 with World Without End, the bleakly brilliant album of country death songs he wrote and recorded with Bob Frank. Six years on, Murry has just released his first solo album, The Graceless Age, an album of almost symphonic emotional turmoil, co-produced by late American Music Club drummer Tim Mooney. The songs on the record deal sometimes explicitly with Murry’s heroin addiction, specifically the 10-minute ‘Little Coloured Balloons’, a harrowing account of a near-fatal OD. I reviewed The Graceless Age for the current issue of Uncut and emailed Murry some questions, to which he replied in detail and at illuminating length, as you will see from the fascinating transcript that follows.
I don’t have any more information on the new Bob Dylan album, Tempest, following last week’s newsletter and blog on Friday confirming the track listing, so apologies to all the readers who have written in, hungry for further details about the record. The absence of anything further I can tell you at the moment about Tempest gives me, however, the opportunity to briefly sing the praises of Lawless, the new movie from director John Hillcoat and Nick Cave, who’s written the screenplay, as he did for The Proposition, Hillcoat’s savage outback Western.
