And the "friends" include Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Eric Clapton. Recorded in front of a studio audience in London in 1985, Perkins never needed six guitarists back at Sun Studios in the '50s, and producer Dave Edmunds should have booted out half of them. But Perkins is in vigorous voice, a quiffed-up George turns out to be a total rockabilly king, and when the Teds start jiving in the aisles, it's irresistible.
The greatest living rock performer? It's hard to think of any of her peers who've managed to keep their live shows both physically thrilling and smart. Or of any rising combo who wouldn't pale beside her. When other legends (say, Lou Reed) recite poetry mid-set, it's embarrassing and hubristic. When Patti does it, it's as electric as the best guitar riff. Others spout ideological platitudes, Patti makes you volunteer to assassinate Bush right now.
Nobody wants a painfully slow death: do you want to watch one, even if it's set against the crumbling beauty of Venice? Visconti's '71 adaptation of Thomas Mann's novel is a classic no one dares question, but its study of ageing composer Dirk Bogarde falling in unrequited love with a golden, fey young boy is stately and overwrought, and so enamoured of itself it forgets the audience. Perilously sluggish.
This fictitious backstory to the creation of Vermeer's best-known painting looks so impressive, and so precisely mimics the colours the 17th-century Dutchman used, it's a while before you realise it's just a prissy costume drama starring Colin Firth and pouty Scarlett Johansson. A dainty tale of repressed lust, perfectly pitched at its middlebrow audience.
This belated sequel to 2002's triple-album retrospective Love God Murder features 18 songs that might easily have fitted under one or another of that set's individual headings. Not, perhaps, "Murder"—the only death here is that of the Native American hero of Peter LaFarge's "Ballad Of Ira Hayes", a war hero allowed to fall into alcoholism and ignominy after he'd helped raise that iconic flag at Iwo Jima—but certainly "Love" and "God".
