Arctic Monkeys, Arcade Fire and The Clash are among the artists releasing new records as part of this year's Record Store Day.

The new April issue of Uncut, out now, features David Bowie peering from the cover in his guise as sleazy space-star Ziggy Stardust. To celebrate this look at Bowie’s greatest creation 40 years on, here’s a fantastic piece from Uncut’s 18th issue, in November 1998, in which Chris Roberts looks back at the glammed-up, transgressive superstars who changed his adolescent world.

An angry Boss attacks big business on his grim but brilliant 17th studio album...

Very much feeling the first two on the list this week. And also Number 16, last week’s mystery record, now revealed…

Rocker isn't happy with Michele Bachmann using 'American Girl' without his permission

Hit the Norse! Latest comic book adapation, about a man and his hammer.

A nice list again this week, with a terrific new White Denim album arriving late yesterday afternoon.

After whingeing about the last couple of playlists, I think there’s a lot more good stuff arrived for this week’s effort.

I don’t mean to suggest “Let England Shake” is anything other than excellent, but I can’t help thinking that one supplementary reason why PJ Harvey’s latest album has had such laudatory reviews (better, mostly, than the equally good “White Chalk”) is that offers journalists so much to write about. “Let England Shake” is so full of imagery, content, allusion, it offers up boundless possibilities of meaning. Reductively, it has been called a protest album. Expansively, you can parse (or, maybe, project on) it for all manner of ideas about war and nationality.

The past few days I’ve been reading, on Rob Young’s recommendation, Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns, an excellent survey of how British artists and writers in the mid-20th Century tried to reconcile a modernist impulse with the residual lure of English cultural traditions.