Today, as you may have heard, is apparently the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones’ first gig.

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Following music on Twitter, it sometimes feels as if a hyped album or a track is listened to for, at best, six hours now before it becomes in some way obsolete: if it’s not trending, it must be passé.

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With the death of Ernest Borgnine, aged 95, it feels like yet another precious link back to a golden era of Hollywood film making has gone.

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There’s a batch number of high-profile music documentaries out this year – Kevin Macdonald’s Marley and Joe Berliner’s Paul Simon films have already arrived, with the Rolling Stones, the Stone Roses and Fillmore East projects yet to come. But truffle a little deeper and you’ll find some less well-known but equally rich stories deserving attention.

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I wrote a long review of the new Sun Kil Moon album, "Among The Leaves", in the latest edition of Uncut. This is the unedited version of the email interview I conducted with Mark Kozelek that runs alongside the piece. Pretty funny and revealing, I think, not unlike his new album.

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A lot of amazing reissues in the mix this week: alongside that big Laurie Spiegel I mentioned last week, there are fine records from Don Cherry, Nick Cave, ZZ Top and of course GZA, whose extraordinary solo debut now appears to be coming complete with a chess set.

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When Bob Dylan played Hop Farm in 2010, it was the hottest weekend of the year and there seemed to be more people at the festival than the site could hold. There were queues for everything and queues to join those queues were not uncommon. By early afternoon, you could barely move for the people already there and the constant stream of new arrivals who added to an already considerable mass.

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Do opera-goers have low boredom thresholds? It certainly seems that way watching the production of Damon Albarn’s “Dr Dee” at the English National Opera – or at least that director Rufus Norris assumes they do.

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Plenty of gold in this week’s haul, and not much better than the Duane Pitre album whose sleeve is posted above – a truly excellent record that I must admit I missed when it was released a few months back.

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Hi there,

I hope those of you who braved the abysmal weather last weekend to go to the Isle of Wight festival had a good time and made it back unscathed.

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