“I can’t for the life of me understand how 50-year-old rock critics can pretend to like Babyshambles,” thunders Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy in the current issue of Uncut.
It's a very risky manoeuvre to pull off successfully -- that is, graduating from TV to the movies, from the relatively parochial world of the Channel 4 sitcom to the bright and shiny universe of multiplexes, ancilliary revenue streams and premiers at Leicester Square.
HAPPENINGS TEN YEARS TIME AGO
May 14 to 20, 1997
Crosby, Stills & Nash are inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame. Neil Young also gets the call, as part of Buffalo Springfield, while other inductees are Joni Mitchell, The Bee Gees, The Jackson Five, Parliament/Funkadelic, and The Young Rascals.
Stumbling onto site today someone told me that it was 107 degrees yesterday but it’s only 105 today. So that’s alright then. What’s that sound, floating across the polo grounds? Lush, harmonised, laid back, Californian… yes, it must be The Feeling from, er, Lowestoft or wherever the heck. Anyway, they do Buggles’ ‘Video Killed The Radio Star’ as I order my first beer of the day so it can’t all be bad.
A few nice things arrived in the Uncut office today. One was a big compilation of Finnish psychedelic music from the late '60s and early '70s, which I can't wait to investigate properly. The second was another lavish raid on the Elektra catalogue, this time a 2CD set called "There Is A River" which collects the first three albums (plus outtakes) of David Ackles.
As I mentioned, signing off yesterday’s blog, I was just off to an industrial estate somewhere in Acton, west London, for what had been described to me as a ‘public rehearsal’ by Carbon/Silicon, the ‘band’ formed by The Clash’s Mick Jones and Tony James, formerly of Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. I had almost cried off going, but thankfully thought better of what would have been a calamitous decision I would subsequently regretted. It turned out to be a brilliant evening.
