end of the road

Click on the link for Part One of the interview. You recorded with Syd Barrett. Well he asked us. I was really surprised, but we [Soft Machine and The Pink Floyd] were two bands that played in the same places that weren’t playing “In The Midnight Hour” and stuff – because neither of us could play it very well, probably.

Click on the links for Part One and Part Two of the interview. That “Rock Bottom” was partially written before accident is fascinating, because it’s so often stereotyped as a post-traumatic record. It’s a funny thing, I always feel embarrassed to say this, but I don’t mind being in a wheelchair.

Click on the links for Part One, Part Two and Part Three of the interview. Is it fair to see the last three LPs of a piece? They seem to sit together as a sequence. Yeah I think what I found, funnily enough, is sometimes you get what you want when you stop trying to get it.

Bee Gees Robin Gibb also set to collaborate with Sam Sparro

Slowing the tempos, the Followills speed their ascent to the rock pantheon

Rocking against all odds - the story of Acrassicauda

Ben Stiller's hysterical war movie send-up takes aim at Hollywood

To Leicester Square this morning, and the launch of this year’s London Film Festival. There’s always something of a guessing game, prior to the announcement of the line-up, about what’ll be showing. This year, for instance, I’d been hoping we might get John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Mickey Rourke’s apparently astonishing comeback in The Wrestler and Sam Mendes’ film of Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates' novel I recently read and thought was incredible. No such luck as at least two of them aren't finished yet, but still – the line-up is pretty strong. There’s an artful of choice of marquee name movies mixed with some excellent left-field selections, a fantastic looking documentary about one of the great 60s folk singers and a film which, despite having the most unwieldy name in film history, will be one of the biggest hits of the year.

I can’t off the top of my head think of another instance where you’ll find a former US President queuing up alongside the head of the Hell’s Angels to dispense hosannas on one man. But that, perhaps, says much about Hunter S Thompson’s influence on American culture – particularly during the late Sixties and early Seventies when, as Alex Gibney’s brilliant documentary rightly identifies, Thompson was, unbelievably, one of the most influential men in the country.

After a mystifying diversion, Arizona duo return (in part) to familiar, dusty territory