One of the projects we have just finished working on for the next issue of Uncut, on sale next week, was a special promotional feature we have produced in association with hmv, which is newly returned to robust high street health after recent rough times.
Later…Live with Jools Holland will return on April 9 with guests including Suede and Cat Power.
The long-running music show will start its 42nd series with the first in eight half-hour live shows on BBC 2 at 10PM on Tuesday, April 9. Suede will appear to perform songs from their new album 'Bloodsports' while Cat Power will make a rare live appearance in the UK, playing songs from her 2012 album 'Sun'.
The world and nearly everyone in it has been reduced to trembling excitement by the return of David Bowie, but for some of us there is another recent resurrection perhaps even more miraculous and just as unexpected, a comeback by The Replacements, who today release online the Songs For Slim EP, their first new recordings in more than 20 years.
The Rolling Stones played the final scheduled performance of their 50 And Counting run of gigs at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey on Saturday night (December 15).
The band kicked off with "Get Off Of My Cloud" and then played "The Last Time", "It's Only Rock 'N' Roll (But I Like It)" and "Paint It, Black" before introducing the first of the night's special guests, Lady Gaga, for "Gimme Shelter".
The banana’s back. Not before time. Late last year, Lou Reed’s reputation suffered a serious blow when his ill-fated collaboration with Metallica met with hostility not witnessed since Metal Machine Music. He even had death threats. This 45th anniversary edition of The Velvet Underground & Nico is a timely reminder (if one is needed) that Reed at his best had few peers and no equals, and that his writer’s eye – literate, probing, explicit – was unflinching right from the start. He was always hardcore.
When he first toured the UK with The Blasters, in 1981 or thereabouts, Dave Alvin was a swaggering young yahoo in rockabilly duds with a 50s quiff, attitude to spare and the unblemished good looks of someone still fairly new to what the rest of his life would become, the bulk of it since spent mostly on the road, playing whatever bar, club, juke joint, tavern, theatre, festival, hootenanny or hoe-down that would have him.
