As you may have seen, this week’s NME features the 2013 edition of their 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time. For this one, they also accepted votes from a bunch of the mag’s alumni, including me, so I thought it’d be an easy, albeit self-indulgent, blog to reproduce my Top 50 albums here.
To Hammersmith, and the launch of The Who’s super deluxe edition of Tommy at Riverside Studios. Tonight, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey are attending a special screening of Sensation – The Story Of The Who’s Tommy, a new documentary about the album due for broadcast this Friday [October 25].
Arctic Monkeys kicked off the first night of their UK tour last night at Newcastle's Metro Radio Arena.
Supported by The Strypes, the band played to a sellout crowd, kicking off with the first single from their fifth and most recent studio album, 'AM', 'Do I Wanna Know?', before a set which mixed new tracks such as 'Why’d You Only Call Me When You're High?' with classic hits from their repertoire including 'Fluorescent Adolescent', 'Mardy Bum' and 'Dancing Shoes'.
In his excellent Uncut review of the Morrissey “Autobiography”, Michael alludes to the get-out clause afforded rock memoirists post-“Chronicles”: why bother obfuscating certain awkward details when you can, by being capricious with time and chronology, just skip the difficult stuff?
Playing spot-the-reference isn’t, I guess, the most elevated game for critics to indulge in. White Denim’s music, however, suggests that the Austin quartet are conceivably America’s most exciting record store nerds. Last time they put an album out (“D”, in 2011), I wrote a review in the mag that included this paragraph:
There are two attempts early on to get the audience to sing along: one works, one doesn’t. During “Military Madness”, Graham Nash tries unsuccessfully to encourage the audience to join in on his chant of “No more war”. A little while later, however, he’s got the entire Albert Hall singing cheerfully with him on “Our House”, which even leads to the first standing ovation of the night.
Lloyd Cole is set to answer your questions in Uncut as part of our regular Audience With… feature.
So is there anything you’ve always wanted to ask the legendary singer songwriter?
Does he still favour cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin?
How on earth did he end up recording an album with Krautrock supremo, Hans-Joaquim Roedelius?
What's his current golf handicap?
Thom Yorke has attacked Spotify again, labelling the music streaming service "the last desperate fart of a dying corpse".
The comments follow Yorke's decision, alongside producer Nigel Godrich, to remove the Atoms For Peace album they made together from the service while Yorke's solo album 'The Eraser' was also removed. Godrich went on to explain his position criticising the low royalty rates paid to artists – who he said received "f*ck all" from the service.
“We weren’t concerned with reputation then, and I’m not concerned with it now,” writes Ian McLagan in the introduction to our new Ultimate Music Guide. “If you’re thinking seriously about your career, you’re not having any fun, and that transfers to the audience.”
With Arcade Fire’s new album, Reflektor, due for release on October 28, this week’s archive feature looks back to December 2005, when Uncut awards Album Of The Year to Arcade Fire’s debut, Funeral. Adored by everyone from David Bowie and David Byrne to Chris Martin and Bono, Funeral is a spectacular word-of-mouth success, and suggests whole new futures for rock music. Stephen Troussé meets the band on the eve of their Riviera Theatre set in Chicago…
