end of the road

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.

How to tell whether Jack White has brought his male or his female band along to a show? As the suited roadcrew prepare the stage at the Forum, one suspects the answer might be in the drumkit, sheathed until the very last moment; something about the positioning of Daru Jones’ bass drum, perhaps?

A couple of years ago when I was in Woodstock to interview Simone Felice and his band, The Duke & The King, Simone drove me around the mountains where he’d grown up, pointing out places of local and historical interest. These included Big Pink, the house on Parnassus Lane in West Saugerties, where Dylan and The Band recorded The Basement Tapes.

Blur are set to celebrate the 21st anniversary will a comprehensive reissue campaign. All seven of the band's studio albums are to be re-released on July 30 in expanded Special Edition formats, each featuring a bonus disc of previously unreleased material, booklets, and more.

Five vintage guitars stolen from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers have been recovered by the police. The gear, which included Petty's 1967 12-string blonde Rickenbacker 360 and his 1965 Gibson SGTV Junior, as well as a Fender Broadcaster belonging to bassist Ron Blair, and guitars belonging to Scott Thurston and Mike Campbell, was stolen from the band's rehearsal space in Los Angeles last week. One man has now been arrested in conjunction with the robbery, reports TMZ, who add that the guitars have yet to be returned to the band.

On March 20, the spring equinox, Jimmy Page finally made available his soundtrack to “Lucifer Rising”, at least to order, on vinyl.

Paolo Sorrentino’s This Must Be The Place muses on the existence of a fictional rock star. This is Cheyenne, who’s spent 20 years out of the spotlight, living in a mansion outside Dublin. Played by Sean Penn and modeled physically on Robert Smith – the crows’ nest of black hair, lipstick, eyeliner, fondness for black – Cheyenne spends his days watching Jamie Oliver programmes on television, debating whether or not to sell his shares in Tesco and pondering, “Why is Lady Gaga?” Fully Gothed up, he goes shopping in a nearby mall to buy pizza.

Graham Coxon’s new album A+E is reviewed in the latest Uncut (May 2012, Take 180), out now – so we thought we’d revisit the last time the guitarist featured in our pages. In 2009, John Robinson met the guitarist at his Camden home to find out about his folk-infused solo album The Spinning Top, and hear all about the little matter of his old band’s reunion… Picture: Essy Syad

The Rolling Stones' Ronnie Wood has revealed that the band will start recording new material this month. Speaking to the Daily Mirror, the guitarist said he and his bandmates would be hitting the studio to "throw some ideas around" in preparation for their 50th anniversary celebrations. Wood, who said the band were eager "to get the feel again", added: It's like working out for the Olympics or something. You've got to go into training. So we're going to go into training.

I had lunch with Harvey Weinstein once. This was during the Cannes Film Festival, and I was among a group of film journalists invited to one of the swelegant hotels on the Croisette to nibble canapés and listen dutifully while Weinstein unveiled the forthcoming slate for his company, Miramax.