As you come up the escalator at Leicester Square underground station, you might notice the posters lining the walls advertising Mamma Mia!, Viva Forever! and We Will Rock You. You could be forgiven for wondering what place Dexys have in the heart of West End theatreland, especially here among these big karaoke musicals.

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It’s Record Store Day on Saturday; a kind of weird, but necessary I guess, annual event that’s become a critical point in release schedules. I’ve been going through the lists of releases at recordstoreday.com and thought it might be worth picking out a few things that are worth looking out for.

Increasingly, a fair amount of the day’s business is built on canny catalogue management aimed at collectors (especially vinyl fetishists), and there are a bunch of things here that fall roughly into that sector:

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Just a quick blog today, as I really just wanted to flag up the line-up for this year's Cannes Film Festival, which got announced this morning.

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Strange juxtapositions and all that, but please have a listen to the Date Palms track and, in the unlikely event you haven’t been near the internet for the past few days, the Daft Punk clip. Nile Rodgers’ expression is a thing of joy, among other things.

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The full line-up for this year’s Great Escape festival in Brighton was announced today and along with it the line-up for the Uncut Stage at the Pavilion Theatre, where we’ll be hosting three nights of great music from May 16-May 18, with four bands each night. It’s probably our strongest-ever Great Escape bill and includes several of my own current favourites, among them Phosphorescent, Allah-Las, Lord Huron and Mikal Cronin, although there’s no one I’d really want to miss.

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For the next issue of Uncut, I've reviewed Season 1 of Veep. In case you're not familiar with the show, it's basically Armando Iannucci's attempt to relocate The Thick Of It to the White House.

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A momentous week, one way or another, though I can’t help wishing the resonant and thought-through fury of “Tramp The Dirt Down” was heading into the Top Ten instead of “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead”.

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John Dwyer has the sort of discography so deep and complicated that one suspects even he must have trouble keeping up with himself. As a consequence, it might be a mistake to try and divine paths and trends in career which his encompassed Coachwhips, Pink and Brown, Landed, Yikes, Burmese, The Hospitals, Zeigenbock Kopf and Sword + Sandals (according to Wikipedia, anyway, if I can emphasise my spotty knowledge any more) as well as Thee Oh Sees.

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“To make true political music,” the great American critic Greil Marcus wrote nearly 25 years ago, “you have to say what decent people don’t want to hear; that’s something that people fit for satellite benefit concerts will never understand, and that Elvis Costello understood before anyone heard his name.”

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Hopefully, you'll have seen the new edition of Uncut by now. Among many, many good things in this month's issue, there's Nick Hasted's interview with Ginger Baker.

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