The new issue of Uncut will be on sale from Friday. Subscribers, of course, those sensibly organised people who plan ahead and have their lives in probably perfect order, may already have started receiving their copies. Lucky them! We’re actually still waiting for ours, but not yet fretting that they’ve been re-routed, sent via some staging post on a distant tundra where passing yaks may end up feasting upon them, the chomp-chomp-chomp of their distracted munching the only sound in that vast space, the hairy ruminants quite indifferent, of course, to what’s actually in the issue. Which is a lot, and includes in the grand annual tradition of these things, our review of the year, a 30-page special, featuring our Top 75 Albums Of 2012, plus the best reissues and box sets, films, DVDs and books, as voted for by over 40 Uncut contributors.

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I've given up pretending I'm not interested in watching a new Stars Wars movie.

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“Why so glum?” asks Roger Waters with a smile as he strides into a conference room in an elegant Mayfair hotel.

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Just finishing the Ultimate Music Guide on The Kinks while listening to Gurdjieff’s harmonium improvisations from 1949. There are, though, a bunch of interesting newer things here as well. Have a listen to the new Mark Kozelek song, for a start (he played a really compelling gig in London last Friday, incidentally, which I haven’t had a chance to write about).

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Hunter Davies, who in 1968 wrote the first authorised biography of The Beatles and now more than 50 years on has compiled and edited The John Lennon Letters, admits in his introduction that he has for the purposes of the book ‘rather expanded the definition of the word letter’, which immediately sounds bit slippery, especially when he also describes some of the material he has unearthed as ‘notes and lists and scraps’. This sounds rather unpromising, as if Davies is preparing the reader for disappointments to come.

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As part of our current Rolling Stones cover story, I interviewed director Brett Morgen about his Stones' film, Crossfire Hurricane.

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Ben Affleck. Who'd have thought..? I remember going to a sparsely attended screening of Jersey Girl, Kevin Smith's laugh-free 2004 romcom with Affleck cast alongside his then girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, and wondering what had happened to derail such a promising career.

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Quite tempting yesterday to play nothing but “Signed Sealed Delivered I’m Yours”, but here’s this week’s playlist, with quite a few new clips (Broadcast, Jessica Pratt, Hiss, Ty!), links and new entries.

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You catch us on a pretty busy day, deadlines fast approaching for our last issue of 2012. That’s the one, of course, that traditionally carries our end-of-year lists of best albums, reissues, films, DVDs and books. This means we’ve all been recently asked to nominate our personal Top 20s, from which John has been compiling the definitive countdown, the full list to be published when he’s finished his painstaking calculations in the Uncut that comes out at the end of November.

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As you might expect of a book about Leonard Cohen, Sylvie Simmons spends a fair proportion of I’m Your Man writing about love, faith, depression, finance, and the demands and consolations of poetry and women. Mostly, though, the focus of this hefty and thorough book is Leonard Cohen’s charm: about how an exceptionally gifted artist has seduced most everyone who has come into contact with him, through the course of an uncommonly eventful life.

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