The IMDB lists Noah Baumbach’s credits since 2010’s Greenberg as a TV adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections and a co-write on Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.

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Three weeks and a few hours ago, I found myself on a small plane from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington DC. Most of the other passengers were members of the Harvard baseball team, who had spent the past three hours being harassed by schoolgirls making innumerable Harlem Shake videos. I, though, was sat next to a woman from Colorado, who was studying the use of horses in Gestalt therapy.

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Plenty to listen to here again this week, and less dubious content than there was in the 11th playlist. One off-the-scale stinker, though…

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Towards the end of the V&A’s terrific David Bowie Is… exhibition, tucked away on a wall next to the handwritten lyrics for “Heroes” and a postcard from Christopher Isherwood, are a set of door keys that have evidently seen better days.

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On their fine "Light Up Gold" album from the end of last year, Parquet Courts often come across like a kind of self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipster band, allbeit one who are, of course, a) disdainful of the term 'hipster'; b) focused on a rather old-fashioned hipster sound that, until they became hip, was probably too hip, or not hip enough, for hipsters; c) snarky about self-mythologising, self-effacing Brooklynish hipsters; d) probably reflexively quite snarky about themselves.

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Reading about the South By Southwest festival tends to produce, in me at least, a mix of empathetic fatigue and terrible envy, and last week’s bombardment of tweets, blogs, news stories was no different.

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I suppose Alan Partridge is the, uh, albatross round Steve Coogan’s neck.

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The distraction of a Laura Marling blog yesterday has had the knock-on effect of making this week’s playlist longer than usual: 27 tracks/albums in all.

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It’s easy – and probably useful, sometimes – to lambast major labels for what looks from the outside like chronic short-termism. The climate is, understandably I guess, a neurotic one, and those days are long gone when labels would work long-term with a select group of trophy artists, whose usefulness to the company was more silvery and nebulous, more about cachet than quick profit.

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Shameless plug coming your way! This Thursday, March 14, the next in our ongoing series of Ultimate Music Guides hits the shops. This one is dedicated to The Smiths.

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